BIOGRAPHY OF GARY COOPER - Part 1Frank James Cooper was born on May 7, 1901 in Helena Montana to British immigrant parents, Alice Brazier and Charles Cooper. Charles Cooper was an apprentice in a law firm. He learned the trade of being a lawyer and later served as Supreme Court Judge in Montana. When Frank was 5 his father bought a ranch called the 7 Bar 9. This is where Frank spent most of his growing up years. He played and learned to ride with little Indian children that lived near by. He spent a lot of time with the cowboys on the ranch and when he started coming home with some language that was not too appealing for a young man, his mother decided to send he and his brother, Arthur, to England to school to learn to be gentlemen. Frank hated his time at Dunstable school. He hated the Latin. He was not very happy there most of the time and sometimes got into trouble. After 3 years he and Arthur came home and by then Arthur were old enough to go into the army and Judge Cooper was away so it was left up to him and his mother to tend the ranch. It was hard work and later Coop remarked that it was hard to believe now how hard his mother worked back then. When Cooper was 15 he was in an automobile accident. Many stories have been told about this accident from being in the car with his friend Harvey Markam, who had been crippled by polio and had special controls on his car to Cooper’s accounts of the accident which he told the same at 3 different times. He said he was driving and alone when something hit him and turned the car over. So whichever the true story he had a broken leg and other complications. The Doctor did not take X-rays or realize that Coop’s hip was broken. He recommended horse back riding to help cure his aches and pains. Coop showed his endurance to pain even then by riding with a broken hip. This hip would be painful and cause him to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. He found out that the hip had been broken when he fell off a horse after taking a small job in the movie world. He got his high school education in bits and pieces because of working on the ranch. He was about 3 years behind all of his class mates as well as growing about a foot to be 6 ft 3in.before he was seventeen. Charles Cooper lost his shirt on the Ranch. He resigned from the Montana Supreme Court and moved to Hollywood to take care of an estate for some relative that needed him and the pay was better. He set up a Law office in town and practiced there until retirement. Cooper attended WesleyanCollege while he was still in high school and then he decided to go to Grinnell which was in Iowa. He thought he had gone east at that time. It seemed so far from Montana. His greatest desire was to be an artist and he studied art. He did not graduate from Grinnell but while he was there he studied some foreign languages but never learned to speak one. During the summers, he worked as a tour bus driver at Yellowstone National Park, Montana. After College he went to visit his parents in California and walked and looked for work as a commercial artist but to no avail so he had a couple of odd jobs and happened to meet up with one of his old buddies who told him that he could make 5 dollars a day riding horses in the movies. He could make 10 dollars a day if he would fall off them. Off he went to be in the movies. |
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