Maria Cooper Janis Reflects on Coop’s Spirit
& The Essence of the West

With all his sophistication and being totally comfortable in his own skin no matter the situation, my father Gary Cooper always remained unspoiled, unflappable, down to earth and true to his own code of behavior and his own nature. Professionally he always said he tried to choose his roles in movies to portray the best a man can be and to display, as he liked to quote his close friend Hemingway, “Grace under pressure.”

Somehow many people today seem to display a longing for or identification with a way of being which we might call “being a Westerner.”

It carries with it a mystique, a mystery and a vague goal that telegraphs “good.” Of course, there are bums in every corner of life as we pass through it but the West seems to have taken on an Eden type identification.

Through his Native American boyhood friends, the cowboys and his father Judge Cooper of the Montana State Supreme Court, he was strongly influenced and found his personal identification with the life he wanted to and did live. There were fun times, glamorous times, lots of hard work and escape into nature’s quiet and solitude.

He loved the English poets, Wordsworth, Keats and British-Canadian bard Robert W. Service, known as the poet of the Yukon, whose verse he would sometimes recite in his gunroom/workshop. A couple of his favorite Service poems were The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. If he felt in a jovial mood he might shock the lady on his left at a dinner party with a bit of Western doggerel such as, “The mountaineers have hairy ears, the hardy sons of bitches, they wipe their ass with broken glass and pee through leather britches.”

But my father’s deep affection for what the West was, is beautifully narrated by him in the very last piece of film Gary Cooper made – a documentary called The Real West produced by NBC Project 20 and Donald Hyatt. It is the West my father knew, admired and loved.

CONTINUE EXPLORING THE GARY COOPER CENTENNIAL