Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ.

Cooper’s rise to childhood stardom was all-too typical — born in 1922, the unhappy progeny of a broken home, he was first dragged to the studios by his grandmother. “For most of the ladies in that poor neighborhood,” Cooper wrote in his autobiography, “it became common practice to walk to the studio gate in the morning and see if any of the directors needed extras. . .if you were picked, you got $2 and a box lunch. . . [my grandmother] was picked often because she had a little towheaded kid with her — me.”

A host of small roles eventually led to a job as one of Hal Roach’s Little Rascals, which after a few years resulted in a breakout, Oscar-nominated role playing the titular moppet in the Hollywood adaptation of the famous comic strip Skippy. Directed by his uncle (who won a Best Directing Oscar for the film), it made a name for Cooper as the movie kid who could cry better than any other (Cooper claims that his uncle once got him to cry on cue by threatening to shoot his dog), and its popularity quickly led to a lucrative M-G-M contract and the chance to star in The Champ.

Then as now, child stars were held in something akin to contempt by many filmgoers. The New York Herald-Tribune said in its review of The Champ that “This department, it is only right to tell you, has little sympathy for the child performers. Ordinarily they play with the clumsiness you might expect of their youth, while invariably providing in their personal qualities all of the more deplorable instincts of maturity. In a word, they act like children while seeming immature adults.” That description sounds like Dakota Fanning and any number of modern child actors. But Jackie Cooper, according to the same review,

proves by one of the finest and knowingly sensitive portrayals of the recent cinema that he is an actor of genuine distinction: a child who performs with all of the intelligence and mature emotional power supposed to belong to an adult, without losing anything of the youthful appeal to be expected of his years.

Time magazine was much less charitable to Cooper’s Champ performance, chortling that, “every time Beery gets drunk, gambles away the racehorse which he has presented to his son, or is taken to jail for disturbing the peace, there is a shot of little Cooper sticking out his underlip and wrinkling his eyes.” That pat criticism, simplistic and snide, fails to account for any number of great scenes where Cooper isn’t sniffling in close-up.

Cooper played the role not just with amazing naturalness, but also with an eye toward the dramatic arc of his character. Like in his real life, in The Champ he’s a kid forced to leave behind his innocence and become an adult before his time.

The studio put out press releases saying how wonderfully Beery and eight-year-old Cooper got along, and anecdotal evidence contemporary to the period supports that assertion, despite the barrage of negative things Cooper said about Beery fifty years after the fact in his autobiography. News reporters visiting M-G-M claimed that, far from being afraid or angry at Beery, Cooper called him “Uncle Wally,” and happily followed him around the set. Beery himself recounted in an interview how he would help the director talk the eight-year-old through the emotional spectrum of each scene until he figured out how to play it. (One breakthrough came when little Dink undresses his drunk Dad and puts him to bed — after having it explained to him several times, Cooper suddenly brightened and exclaimed to the crew, “I get it! I’m the father and Wally’s the kid!”)

Later in life, Beery would say that “. . .[one of the few times] in my life I felt that maybe I was a pretty decent guy. . .was when little Jackie Cooper said he liked Wally Beery better than any other man he knew.” Cooper would star in several more movies with Beery, most notably Treasure Island (1934) and together they became one of Hollywood’s most popular screen pairs of the 1930s.

The tone of his autobiography hints that the real thing Cooper was missing was a father figure, and when someone like Beery failed to assume that role for him off-screen it hurt. The truth was that he was a lonely, friendless kid caught in the vast machinery of Hollywood, seeming to have everything in the world but empty and directionless inside. Judging from all of the extant pictures from that era, as well as newspaper accounts of press junkets, public appearances, and other films, Cooper’s childhood was one long series of meetings, movies, and promotions. For instance, in the month following the November 1931 release of The Champ, period newspapers tell of Cooper coming to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a joint promotion with Santa Claus, first pressing his hands and feet into the cement forecourt and then introducing The Champ to 2000 kids in the theater. He was (in the words of Sid Grauman) “America’s Boy,” and a countrywide superstar. And he fulfilled that role at the expense of his childhood.

Like most prepubescent stars, his fame largely disappeared when he grew up. Cooper would later dismiss his entire childhood as a bad nightmare, aghast at the pressures he was put under when so young and lamenting the normal life he lost in the process. By the end of his teens he had slept with stars as varied as Judy Garland and Joan Crawford (the latter when he was seventeen and Crawford thirty-four), smoked dope and taken pills while hanging out with big-band musicians like Gene Krupa (Cooper learned the drums and often sat in with them), and spent virtually all the money he had made in Hollywood on fancy clothes, cars and women.

He credits the service with finally shaping him up and making a man out of him. When World War II hit, his handlers were ready and willing to pull the strings necessary to keep him out, but he bucked their advice and insisted on joining the Navy. He was twenty years old, and his childhood career was already just a memory. Although he says he was mercilessly hazed by fellow servicemen who held his movie-star status against him, Cooper maintained that, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be anyplace else. It would have been worse outside, getting the sneers from women wondering why you weren’t in uniform. Besides, there was that patriotic consideration — my country was in a desperate war, and I wanted to do my part, corny as that might sound, so we would win.”

Jackie Cooper spent the war playing the drums in a USO band, and after he was discharged had some tough years. He went through three marriages — with the last wife, twenty-five years into the marriage he had an affair with a younger woman and briefly left the house, only to come to his senses and patch things up before it was too late (the incident forms a moving chapter of his autobiography). He found work wherever he could, first in New York on the stage, then on ’50s TV shows, then as a studio executive in the ’60s, and finally as a Emmy Award-winning director of television throughout the ’70s, most notably on the now-classic show M*A*S*H.

Over the decades he remained active in the Navy Reserve, which eventually caused a problem on the M*A*S*H set. As Captain William S. Graves relates in Cooper’s book:

I came over to the set because I wanted to make some Christmas tapes [to send to the troops in Vietnam]. . . Some were thirty seconds, some were twenty seconds. . .and they’d say, “It’s Christmas, and we miss all you guys, and you’re doing a good job for your country, and we appreciate what you’re doing, and come home safe and Merry Christmas.”

. . . when I got there, Alan Alda had said he would make no Christmas greetings for the armed forces. So, of course, people sort of followed his lead, and Loretta Swit wouldn’t do it, Gary whatever-his-name wouldn’t do it. . .

Jack had done his best to try to get these guys all to do it because he believed in it, and he was doing it. . . the only people that did it were Wayne Rogers, who was a Navy lieutenant at one point in his life, and McLean Stevenson, who was a Navy pharmacist’s mate during the Korean War. And they did a nice job. But nobody else on that show would do it.

Imagine that: a group of Hollywood people, who had made their fortunes playing in arguably the most beloved military-themed TV show of all time, refusing to offer a kind word for the troops fighting in Vietnam. Jackie Cooper had a lot of problems throughout his life, and he regretted his movie-star childhood. But at least he got into the Navy, and came out with a lifelong dedication to our armed forces that does him credit.

Cooper regularly derides his childhood acting as shallow, but at the time of The Champ hordes of moviegoers disagreed with him. The review for Variety on November 11, 1931 was typical of the euphoric reaction Cooper got from most critics and audiences:

A good picture, almost entirely by virtue of an inspired performance by a boy, Jackie Cooper. There is none of the usual hammy quality of the average child actor in this kid. He goes beyond, simply acting natural in natural situations. He has the power to square the broadest plot exaggerations that a Hollywood scenarist can devise, merely with wistful boyishness and a manner that never gets scrambled with thespian mechanics. . . The director and his meg are not mirrored in Jackie Cooper’s phiz. There is no suggestion of orders from and training under an anxious parent or tutor in a single gesture, expression, or intonation. Here is the perfect child player, chiefly because he isn’t typical.

The boy, as is customary with boys in pictures, says some strange things for a boy his age; his thinking has far more scope and depth than is good for a boy his age. There are many chances for character to become unbelievable and lose its grip, but this boy doesn’t let it get away from him.

Instead of waiting to grow up and tell his grandchildren about it, the Cooper boy can tell his grandfather right now that this is his picture. Youth isn’t wasted on children when there are kids like this. It will be talkers’ heavy loss when Jackie Cooper grows up.

And it was — to this day, Cooper is the youngest actor ever to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The early superstar career ended all too soon, but then there was the Navy, and some classic M*A*S*H episodes, and of course even that wonderful late-career turn in Superman. Most other child actors turned out far worse, that’s for sure. In an age category normally dominated by Lindsay Lohans, Jackie Cooper stands out as something special.

Cooper is eighty-seven years old now, and retired from the business. His wife just died last year after over fifty years of marriage. He has several grown children (two daughters have predeceased him) and a whole bunch of memories. I hope that he’s mellowed since writing his autobiography, and that these days he’s a lot more proud of his accomplishments. He certainly deserves to be.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the gifted director of The Champ, and how he brought script, camera, and actors together to make an instant classic.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Please Don’t Shoot My Dog: The Autobiography of Jackie Cooper. An honest attempt by Cooper to evaluate his life as a Hollywood star, faults and all. He often comes across as whiny and ungrateful, but he also doesn’t pull any punches, going so far as to let his detractors tell their side of the story whenever possible in their own words.

Hordes of internet websites, including Wikipedia, make the claim that in this book Cooper calls Wallace Beery, “the most sadistic person I have ever known,” and says he was a “violent, foul-mouthed drunkard,” among other things. Actually Cooper says nothing of the sort. Beery is described, fairly mildly as these things go, as a sort of Little Napoleon petty tyrant on the set: making people wait inordinately for him, demanding little favors of special treatment from directors and producers, whining over small things, and trying to upstage his fellow actors whenever possible. Among Cooper’s charges against Beery are that he didn’t tip at the commissary, never gave Cooper a ride on his speedboat, and (my personal favorite) never bought poor lil’ Coop an ice cream cone. Hardly the stuff of sadism, despite what the Internet gossips would have you believe. In the final analysis Cooper says: “I never did actually hate him, although I never liked him. . . I really don’t think he was a swell guy at all. When I first started with him, I wanted him to be. He was a big disappointment.” Not a glowing endorsement by any means, but a far cry from “the most sadistic person I have ever known.”

“Jackie Cooper Has All Aversions of the Average Youngster For Studies” by Wood Soanes. This is a reprint of a magazine exposé from 1932, soon after The Champ was released. Like many other articles, it shows Cooper at the time getting along fine with Beery. Although one might chalk that up to studio propaganda, the variety and number of sources all telling the same tale makes me think that Cooper’s opinion of Beery might have been higher as a child, only to deteriorate over the course of fifty years as an adult. (Fifty years, it should be remembered, of people constantly asking, “So what was it like working with Wallace Beery?” long after his own stardom had dimmed.)

Jackie Cooper on The Milton Berle Show (1953): A clip from this classic show showing an adult Cooper showing off his drumming skills in a musical number with sexy 1950s singer Dagmar.

Jackie Cooper’s Birthday Party and Jackie Cooper’s Christmas Party (both 1931): These M-G-M shorts are a lot of fun, showing Jackie Cooper in his Champ heyday, having massive parties with legions of kids while being feted by all the studio’s great stars of the era, including Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Durante, and of course Wallace Beery. Keep your eyes peeled for these on TCM, where they sometimes appear.

“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.”

The masterpiece of which he speaks is a 1945 war film called They Were Expendable, and if you are a conservative who has never seen it, then you have denied yourself one of the most moving and achingly poetic expressions of your worldview ever put to celluloid.

They Were Expendable was made in the Fall of 1944, while most of the people portrayed in the story were still rotting in Japanese POW camps, if indeed they weren’t already dead. Just like our modern foes, the Japanese mocked the Geneva Conventions throughout World War II, and by the end some 40% of the POWs in their care had been executed, starved, or died of disease in their camps. This is compared to Europe, where only 1% of American POWs in German camps died. The events the film depicts took place in early 1942 when, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of Americans found themselves trapped in the Philippines and facing a fearsome Japanese invasion. The enemy bombed them with impunity, destroying their bases and leaving them with only four planes and an assortment of tiny boats. Supplies and morale dwindled into oblivion as, rather than be evacuated, they were ordered to hold their positions as long as possible against — and eventually be killed or captured by — an overwhelming enemy who was infamous for torturing and murdering prisoners.

How these Americans (and Filipinos) comported themselves as they were gobbled up by the Japanese war machine, buying time with their lives so that General MacArthur could escape the clutches of the enemy and prepare a counter-assault, is the focus of the film. And yet it is like no other war film ever made. Its long running time (two hours, sixteen minutes) allows us to linger on scene after scene of doomed men and women slowly losing their grip on their homes, their jobs, their culture, and each other. Under Ford’s direction, the movie rises above mere plot — battles, strategies — to become something much greater: the cinematic ennobling of an entire people, their way of life, their code of honor, and their selfless sacrifice. Lindsay Anderson would later declare it his single favorite film from his single favorite director, noting the presence of “image after image of conscious dignity” depicting a “love of brotherhood, loyalty,” and “the spirit of endurance that can wring victory from defeat.”

What prompts someone to make a movie like this? To throw away all of the Hollywood clichés, to indeed ignore the enemy entirely (the Japanese are only seen from afar via their planes and ships) and instead reach for something more vital: the very bedrock of our connection with country and culture? It’s so personal a picture that any essay has to be as much about the life and times of its maker as about the film itself — the two are intertwined too deeply to ignore. We thus turn away from They Were Expendable for a spell, and drift backward in time to the life of the director many call the greatest in motion picture history.

For John Ford (1894–1973), serving with the Navy during World War II was much more than boilerplate Hollywood patriotism. He was no green recruit, hastily enlisting in the wake of Pearl Harbor to toss on a uniform for the very first time. Growing up on the coast of Maine where he met many sailors, from an early age he was entranced by the discipline, hard ways, and exaltation of duty inherent in military life. During High School he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and was devastated when he failed the entrance exam. In 1918, as a twenty-three-year-old fledgling director in Hollywood, he again tried to serve, this time volunteering as an aerial combat photographer. Bad eyesight ensured he flunked the physical, and numerous attempts to circumvent that ruling came to naught.

Despite these failures, he never gave up, making many military films throughout the ’20s and ’30s and taking every opportunity to schmooze with the Navy brass brought on as technical advisers. Finally, as a forty-year-old in 1934, and despite bad eyes once again causing him to fail the physical, enough strings were pulled by his Navy buddies to get him into the U.S. Naval Reserve. Given the rank of Lieutenant Commander, he was charged with creating “a course in naval photography; its uses, tactical, historical, and propaganda,” studying “infra-red and other super-sensitive films and complimentary filters as to their efficacy on sea and in the air, particularly in tropical waters” and “working intensely in an effort to collect photographic and camouflage information likely to be of value to the Navy.”

He also began spying for the Navy on a semi-formal basis during frequent trips of drunken carousing down the western coast of Mexico on his yacht, the Araner. With friends like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond in tow, Ford made observations of the coastline and filed detailed reports on Japanese ships and suspicious “sailors” in the area. These made their way to Navy intelligence, netting him several citations.

In 1940, with friends in the military telling him that America’s eventual entry into the war was all but assured, Ford attempted to establish an official Naval photographic unit that could not only use their skills to directly aid the front-line troops in the fight ahead (in the form of reconnaissance, mapping terrain, et cetera) but also help fight the nasty propaganda war that was already brewing between patriotic Americans and growing cells of anti-American Leftists who were becoming increasingly vocal in the media and Hollywood. The proposal he sent to his superiors reads today as if it was clipped from Big Hollywood’s own mission statement:

Radio, newspapers, motion pictures blast contrary ideas back and forth. . . A series of films which show factually the power of the American Navy is bound to give a psychological lift to the whole nation. Let them see the rigors of training; the skill of execution in maneuvers. . . our morale purpose is to show that a Democracy can and must create a greater fighting machine, in spirit and being, than a dictator power.

Unfortunately, Ford was pressing up against a lumbering, asleep-at-the-wheel Navy, the same one that would allow the Japanese to surprise its fleet at Pearl the very next year. With numerous agencies like the Signal Corps protecting their film-making/photographic turf against the interloper, Ford watched his proposals vanish into the gaping maws of military bureaucracy. The sense that namby-pamby Hollywood civilians would have little to contribute to an honest war effort might have played a part as well. As much as Ford liked being a Navy man, the endless red tape and politics were sources of constant aggravation, and he often lashed out at his superiors to a degree that would have landed anyone else in the brig. An oft-told story has it that, when asked by an officer what Hollywood landlubbers liked to do for amusement after making a movie, Ford cheerfully replied, “We all get on a bus and go down to San Diego and f*** Navy wives.”

Undeterred by being ignored, Ford decided to proceed unofficially, confident that someday soon the talent of Hollywood would be called upon, and that he would be ready. He began enlisting men from the rank-and-file of Hollywood film crews — cinematographers, grips, editors. He borrowed prop guns and uniforms from the Fox costume department, and set up impromptu military film classes on unused soundstages. There his Hollywood recruits learned from experts like the Oscar-winning cinematographer Gregg Toland (The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, et al.) about cameras they would use during a war, how to shoot in all lighting conditions, and how to develop film in the field if need be. They also were drilled in the basics of military life by Jack Pennick, a member of Ford’s regular acting troupe who happened to be an expert on military history and rules.

The rest of Tinseltown, and the skeptical Navy brass, began jokingly referring to this motley crew as “John Ford’s Navy.” And yet, by the time he was through, over a hundred of his Hollywood trainees had joined the active service or reserves, ready for a war they knew was coming.

After Pearl Harbor, with the Navy in shock and disarray, Ford finally found his long-sought benefactor. William “Wild Bill” Donovan was in the process of setting up the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today’s CIA — and Ford’s moxie, skills, and penchant for skirting the bureaucracy was just what he was looking for. Soon the director had brought his Hollywood gang under the official auspices of the OSS as “The Field Photographic Branch,” and it wasn’t long before they were filming reconnaissance, troop movements, and full-on battles all over the world.

At forty-seven years of age, after three decades of trying, John Ford was finally a soldier.

Ford served without pay, traveling across the globe and dodging enemy bombers and U-Boats to fulfill his duties as head of Field Photo. Iceland… Panama… North Africa… West Africa… Cuba… Australia… Ceylon… China… India…. Burma…. Saudi Arabia… Brazil… France. Ford filmed potential base locations, assessed the security of existing sites, captured now-historic battles on film, often in color, and coordinated the movements and missions of his men, thirteen of whom were killed in action. For these efforts, he was promoted to Captain on April 3, 1944. In later years he would state that — although he was the recipient of many of the highest awards in the film industry, including several Oscars — he was most proud of having earned his Small Arms Expert’s medal in the Navy.

John Ford had a knack for showing up in interesting places. He was on the deck of the USS Hornet, deep in enemy waters, when the famous Doolittle raid lifted off for Japan, his camera recording the historic moment for posterity. He was at Normandy on June 6, 1944, capturing rare footage of D-Day as it unfolded. He first (and last!) parachute jump occurred behind enemy lines in Burma on a secret OSS mission, with Ford terrified and murmuring Hail Marys all the way down because, a mere few days before, he had filmed a cargo drop and watched as chute after chute failed to open and the boxes smashed into the unforgiving earth.

Someone else who was scared was Ford’s wife, Mary, who only saw her husband on several brief occasions during the years he was off to war. She was from a Navy family herself and understood the sacrifices involved, but that didn’t make it any easier. One extant letter has Ford gently chiding her, “Ma, you can’t call up long distance just when you’re blue and lonesome. It’s just too damned expensive. We’ve really got to adjust — not financially necessarily, but mentally.” Lonely and bored, she wrote back to her husband that she felt guilty for not doing anything herself for the war effort while he was away fighting. One stateside friend wrote to Ford that his wife was, “pretty miserable just sitting on a hilltop worrying about you and waiting for you to come home.”

Eventually, Mary found some solace in volunteering her time at the now-legendary Hollywood Canteen, the star-studded entertainment hangout for servicemen passing through Los Angeles, where GIs could be served dinner by movie stars and dance the night away with popular starlets to the tunes of world-famous big bands. Mary threw herself into kitchen work there, and quickly became Vice President of the Canteen’s board. Her letters during this time reveal that she helped stars like Bob Hope and Bette Davis fight off a coven of Hollywood Commies, who were trying to get the military MPs (charged with keeping order in the Canteen) booted out, so they could then begin using the venue for staging and promoting leftist propaganda unimpeded.

Ford’s relationship with his wife wasn’t perfect — he was a notorious alcoholic, and one who had flirted with his share of Hollywood actresses during the early years, most notably Katharine Hepburn. But his wife had closed her ears to the gossip and never wavered from his side, vowing to remain “Mrs. John Ford until I die.” They had been married almost twenty-five years, raised two kids, and had overcome problems that would have doomed a lesser marriage. “I pray to God it will soon be over,” he wrote to her in another letter, “so we can live our life together with our children and grandchildren. . . God bless and love you Mary darling — I’m tough to live with — heaven knows & Hollywood didn’t help — Irish & genius don’t mix well but you know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

By the end of John Ford’s life, he had been married for fifty-three years.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we continue our look at John Ford’s war years, and address his Oscar-winning WWII documentary The Battle of Midway (1942).

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Searching for John Ford: A Life by Joseph McBride: Without question the bible for John Ford fans. Ford is lucky in that most of the biographies written about him have been pretty good. But McBride’s masterwork — the culmination of three decades of intense research — towers above them all. Heavily drawn upon whenever I write or think about Ford, it is a must-read for all conservative film fans.

John Ford’s Sex Hygiene (1940): A footnote to Ford’s war career, mentioned here solely for the benefit of the morbidly curious. Only for the strong of stomach (and not safe for work). Actor Charles Trowbridge (later to play Admiral Blackwell in They Were Expendable) narrates and stars in this still-ghastly training film, which fully accomplished its goal of scaring the hell out of millions of randy enlisted men. In graphic, venereal diseased detail, young recruits are shown the perils of fooling around with ’dem dirty wemmins in their off-hours. At one point during the production of this little documentary Daryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth-Century Fox, burst in on Ford interviewing a guy glistening with disgusting sores and declared, “He don’t scare me — send him to makeup!” When asked to comment on the film years later, Ford quipped, “I looked at it and threw up.”

Sex Hygiene Part I at YouTube | Sex Hygiene Part II at YouTube (again, it’s thoroughly gross, and there’s lots of medical full-frontal male nudity — you have been warned.)

The Hollywood Canteen is an idea that could and should be resurrected today, but do you dare take a peek at the modern incarnation of The Hollywood Canteen? One featuring not patriotic movie stars serving our troops, but pampered, puerile celebrities like Paris Hilton and Marilyn Manson being feted by armies of vapid Hollywood wannabes? Steel yourself against massive disappointment and check it out.