Clara Bow helped Cooper get a leading role in Children of Divorce which she felt would give him a more romantic aura and enhance their public image. "We'll go places and do things together," she told him. "We'll become an 'item.' " But the still-inexperienced Cooper, who had played tiny parts as a cowboy and war hero, was not ready to abandon his own character and become a New York smoothie -- a witty and spoiled society boy, serious about love but reluctant to marry. Horribly miscast, agonizing shyness. Unlike most creative people, who work in solitude and silence, actors have to perform in front of a crowd. "I couldn't make love to a girl with a camera snooping at me," he rather naively said. "It just didn't seem decent, especially with a girl I hardly knew."
Hedda Hopper, who was then an actress and appeared in the film, remembered the first day of shooting as the most painful performance she had ever witnessed: "the set was my swank Park Avenue apartment . The characters were super-sophisticated Manhattan youths merrily going to hell. The scene was a cocktail party and Gary's job, of all things, was to breeze into the room and make the rounds from one flapper to another, sipping champagne out of their glasses, cadging a nonchalant puff from their cigarettes, and tossing sophisticated wisecracks as he strolled along.... He was a New York man about town, the script read, yet only a few months before he'd been riding the range in Montana. " Completely unnerved, Cooper spilled champagne on Clara for twenty-three straight takes. He turned the sophisticated drama into a slapstick debacle and almost finished his film career.
Esther Ralston, the other leading lady, spent an entire day filming her love scenes with Cooper and had to re-shoot them because he seemed to amateur. As he lost confidence, became nervous, hesitated and forgot his lines, the director, Frank Lloyd, said he couldn't work with him any longer. Cooper was taken off the picture and replaced with a new leading man. Deeply distressed by his own ineptitude, by the trouble he was causing on the set and by the hostility of the director, Cooper suddenly disappeared on a "solitary walk" in the wilds. Three days later he was found, unshaven and exhausted, in a Hollywood restaurant.
When the replacement didn't work out, B.P. Schulberg rehired Cooper -- who'd been ready to leave Hollywood but was willing to finish the picture -- and asked Ralston to give him as much help as possible. " 'I know he can't act now,' said Mr. Schulberg. 'But I am sure he's got a face -- something unusual. He just needs experience. If you'd just work with him, Ester, be nice to him, make a friend of him.' Conscious of my newlywed status, I said hesitatingly, 'Just what did you have in mind?' Miss Loring [the scenarist] spoke up. 'You see, dear, Gary is so stiff in the love scenes, as though he was afraid to touch you for fear you'd break. Take him to lunch, Esther, talk to him. I'm sure you can make him feel more at ease.' "
His confidence restored by his rehiring, Cooper made significant improvement. This time round the director was replaced by the eminent Josef von Sternberg. He remade Lloyd's version at night, in order to accommodate the actors who had moved to their next picture, and Lloyd got screen credit for the work von Sternberg had done. Cooper was saved not only by the superior artistry of von Sternberg, but also by the perception of Schulberg, who recognized his talent and saw a way to use it.
Cooper -- in the midst of his affair with Bow -- appears in only one brief scene of Wings. Wearing a pilot's cap and goggles, a long leather coat and high polished boots, he plays an experienced flier. He shares a training camp tent with two new cadets, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, the stars of the film. Combining boyish charm with manly swagger (he doesn't carry a good luck charm), and looping his fingers in his belt as he speaks, Cooper says: "Guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other." He's a hero to the two recruits, who give him a candy bar in a childish gesture of admiration. Taking a quick bite of the chocolate, he throws it aside and says he has to "do a flock of figure eights before chow." In a striking close-up, he stares at the two cadets with intense beacon-like eyes and nonchalantly utters his last words: "Luck or no luck, when your time comes, you're going to get it." As he takes off on a routine test flight, his plane throws a shadow on the ground. After his unseen crash and the rush of the ambulance, the camera focuses on the half-eaten chocolate and on the faces that reflect the drama of his death. It's astonishing that Cooper -- without speaking a word and in less than two minutes -- would, by his mere physical presence, his charm, charisma and devil-may-care attitude, make such a powerful impact. At that crucial moment a major film star was born.
Wings clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR1qw9Yr_6I
The director William Wellman, like the scriptwriter John Monk Saunders and the actor Richard Arlen, had been a flier during the war. After rehearsing Cooper in his hotel suite the night before shooting, he printed the first take and thanked him for his impressive performance. Cooper, unaware of the effect he had achieved, and more concerned about controlling every gesture, asked if he could play the scene again. Wellman said: " 'You don't know what you're doing. I do. I see it. I know it was good. It was great, or I wouldn't have printed it.' He said, "Well, in the middle of the scene I picked (i.e., touched) my nose.' I said, 'Listen, you son of a [blank], you keep right on picking your nose and you'll pick your nose right into a fortune.' "
During the filming of Wings Cooper stayed in San Antonio to be with Bow and formed close friendships with Rogers and Arlen. Rogers, soon to be surpassed by Cooper, emphasized that he was "super quiet" and later said: "We didn't consider him a great actor, but his strong personality made him a star." He also recalled that the three companions, anxious about the nerve-racking transition to talkies, "made a pact to protect the one of us that we figured would turn out not to have a voice; the other two would give him a certain segment of our salaries until he could find something else to do." Errol Flynn, another companion, gave a lively account of their boyish adventures at sea: "Dick Arlen took Gary Cooper and Jack Oakie for a fishing trip on the Joby R. and Oakie arrived in what might be the Esquire's idea of Patagonian Rear Admirals Coronation uniform.... The two enraged, dungareed players dumped him overside and towed him around the harbor.... Jack Moss, Gary's three-hundred-pound manager, fell in after a yellow-tail and, despite his indignant denials, had to be hauled back aboard with the power winch."
Excerpt from "Gary Cooper - American Hero."
I'm finally going to sit down and read this; I'll take what I can from it and leave the other junk alone.
