Gary Cooper

Bisexual American Screen Idol

1901-1961

For three years during the late 1920s über-rich Howard Hughes maintained a sexual relationship with a young, unknown but upcoming actor named Gary Cooper, buying him cars, watches, clothes and other lavish gifts along the way. At the time, Cooper, while playing only bit parts in silent films, was being supported financially by handsome silent film actor Rod La Rocque, who refused to buy him a car. Hughes to the rescue! 

La Rocque later entered into a marriage of convenience with Hungarian actress Vilma Banky, who had strong lesbian tendencies, and during their marriage both La Rocque and Banky continued to dally in same-sex relations. Freshly arrived from Helena, Montana, Cooper was tall (6’3”), devastatingly handsome and possessed of a legendary endowment, using his physical assets to acquire material goods from older, much wealthier men and women. Hughes was also bisexual, also well-endowed, and possessed of an obsession for bedding the most beautiful and glamorous people, regardless of their sex. For Cooper (b. 1901), his arrangement with Hughes was unusual in that Hughes (b. 1904) was actually a few years younger than he.

At the tender age of 26, Cooper’s two-minute appearance as Cadet White (above) in the silent film masterpiece Wings (1927) became his breakthrough role, leading to his career-making star turn in the talking film The Virginian (1929).

Hughes’s attention span was notoriously short, however, and his infatuation with Cooper cooled as he next set his sights on the dashing William Boyd, later known to millions as Hopalong Cassidy. Boyd’s costar Louis Wolheim once mentioned that the dazzlingly handsome Boyd, although basically heterosexual, wasn’t averse to letting a man service him if he felt it would advance his career. On this point Boyd and Cooper had a lot in common. Both Boyd and Cooper would attend the all-nude male beach parties on Catalina Island hosted by bisexual actor Richard Arlen, and a member of the Hollywood paparazzi once snapped a picture of the naked Hughes and Boyd sharing an intimate kiss in a secluded cove on the island. Hughes had to pay $10,000 to secure the negatives, thus preventing their publication. The man had enough money to make trouble disappear. Serious money. He received $10,000 PER DAY from a trust fund.

Cooper photographed in 1932 by Cecil Beaton

Cooper had entered Hollywood as a hungry film extra in 1925. Later, on the cusp of stardom in 1929, Cooper met the Paramount contract actor Andy Lawler, a popular and flamboyant homosexual who became his closest friend. They even lived together until mid-1930. Lawler, born in Alabama, coached  Cooper's southern accent for the film, The Virginian. He also introduced Cooper to a wider, more sophisticated social circle that included openly gay actor Billy Haines and gay director George Cukor, whom Lawler had followed out to Hollywood.

After Cooper became an American film icon, however, references to his relationships with Hughes and Lawler were whitewashed from his back story, a common practice by actors and actresses during the era dominated by the moral strictures of the 1930s Hays Code. Joan Crawford is a prime example. No more photos of Cooper and Lawler “out on the town” appeared in the press, and Cooper stopped attending Cukor’s notoriously gay social gatherings.

City Streets 1931

Most all of Cooper’s biographers mention the relationship between Lawler and Cooper, but few describe the relationship as sexual. At the most they report that aspect as “rumor”. However, E. J. Fleming, in his book The Fixers, accurately labeled Cooper “bisexual”. But the most reliable witness was William Kizer, Lawler’s cousin, who insisted that Gary Cooper was enmeshed in a serious relationship with Andy Lawler. They took cozy weekend trips and even moved in together in 1929/30, while Cooper was also dating the volatile Mexican actress Lupe Velez. “Volatile” is understatement; she once stabbed him and later fired a shot at Cooper as he was boarding a train in LA in 1931. Velez tolerated Cooper’s dalliances with men, so long as she could participate as well (!). Cooper confessed to Hughes that he had slept with both La Rocque and Velez.

Gary Cooper on Paramount Lot, 1933

According to Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann, Gary Cooper suffered a devastating breakdown after the studio-engineered split from Lawler. Nevertheless, after an initial distancing, Cooper and Lawler reunited as lifelong friends. Their special relationship is referenced in both Jeffrey Meyer's biography Gary Cooper: American Hero and Larry Sidwell's The Last Hero: A Biography of Gary Cooper. 

Cooper's subsequent career as a major film star is well documented, so your blogger refers younger readers to his Wikipedia page, for starters.

Sources (other than those mentioned above):

Patrick McGilligan -- George Cukor: A Double Life (2013)

Darwin Porter – Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel (2005)

The following glamor shots, mostly from the 1930s, further reveal Cooper's legendary good looks, a far cry from his later somewhat weathered "lonesome cowboy" persona.

Frederick the Great (1712-1786)

Frederick II (in German: Friedrich II), the Hohenzollern King of Prussia, went on to become known as Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Große). His governess and mother spoke French around him, and they reminded Frederick that French was the language of culture, while German was used by inferior people. They included his father in that category. So Frederick spoke French as his mother tongue and spoke German with difficulty all his life, in spite of the fact that he eventually ruled over a German-speaking realm.

Interested primarily in music and philosophy during his youth, Frederick unsuccessfully attempted to flee from his authoritarian father. He and his gay lover, Hans Hermann von Katte (portrait at right), were caught and imprisoned, and Frederick was then forced to watch his lover's decapitation. This was his father’s way of teaching him a lesson about his “unmanly, lascivious, female pursuits highly unsuitable for a man.” Frederick’s father whipped and caned him to humiliate him in front of servants and officers in an attempt to break his will. Frederick held out, refusing his father’s desire that he give up his right to succession in favor of his younger brother. As is turned out, the father was no match for his exceptionally intelligent and able son.

Later forced to enter into a marriage arranged by his father, Frederick mostly ignored his wife (they had no children), preferring the company of his sister on the rare occasions when female company was desired. Frederick had told his sister that he found his fiancé “repugnant; we have neither friendship nor compatibility, and she dances like a goose.” He gave his wife her own palace, refusing her entry to his other residences, and visited her only a few days a year at Christmas.

The conversation of the inner court circle around him was peppered with homoerotic banter. Voltaire, whom Frederick had invited to come live with him at Sans-Souci, a rococo summer palace he built in Potsdam, was accused of anonymously publishing “The Private Life of the King of Prussia”, exposing Frederick's homosexuality and parade of male lovers. After Voltaire had left Prussia, Frederick neither admitted nor denied the contents of the book. Regardless, Frederick was a gay man surrounded by an all-male society at Sans-Souci in which he judged people on their intelligence and skills, not royal or noble privilege. He wrote poetry, played a mean flute (see painting below), entertained by throwing lavish balls, and staged plays, avoiding the hunting, drinking, gambling and womanizing as practiced by his father. Frederick wrote and performed music and had his own personal orchestra. When his father died, Frederick was 28, and Prussia found itself with a gay king.

Frederick concentrated on becoming the best monarch possible. He soon managed to transform Prussia from a European backwater to an economically strong and politically reformed state. Although he loathed his father’s militarism, he went on to conquer neighboring lands to unify his scattered holdings, each time improving the economy, infrastructure, government, education, agriculture and industry of his acquisitions. He abolished torture and corporal punishment. The icing on the cake was his long-held policy of religious tolerance of both Catholics and Protestants, thus becoming one of the great reformers of Europe. He encouraged Jews along the border with Poland to perform trade, affording them all protections and support given to other Prussian citizens in an effort to integrate them into his realm. 

Frederick frequently led his military forces personally and had six horses shot from under him during battle. Frederick is often admired as one of the greatest military tactical geniuses of all time, especially for his usage of the oblique order of battle. Even more important were his operational successes, especially preventing the unification of numerically superior opposing armies and being at the right place at the right time to keep enemy armies out of Prussian core territory.

An example of the place that Frederick holds in history as a ruler was evidenced in Napoleon Bonaparte*, who regarded the Prussian king as a great military strategist. After Napoleon's victory of the Fourth Coalition in 1807, he visited Frederick's tomb in Potsdam and remarked to his officers, "Gentlemen, if this man were still alive, I would not be here." Frederick and Napoleon are perhaps the most admiringly quoted military leaders in history. Frederick is praised particularly for the quick and skillful movement of his troops.

*Napoleon Bonaparte also had a sexual taste for men, especially his own soldiers. See entry in sidebar.

Upon his death in 1786 (peacefully at age 74 in an armchair in his library at Sans-Souci) Frederick had wished to be buried next to his beloved 11 greyhounds on the vineyard terrace on the side of the palace’s court of honor. It took more than 200 years to grant his request, since his brother had him buried next to their father. Hitler had his coffin moved to an underground bunker, then to a salt mine to protect it from destruction. US Army soldiers subsequently discovered it and relocated it twice. After German reunification in 1989, Frederick’s casket, covered by a Prussian flag, lay in state at Sans-Souci on August 17, 1991, the 205th anniversary of his death. After nightfall, Frederick’s body was at last laid to rest according to his request in his 1757 will: “without pomp and at night” (“ohne Prunk, ohne Pomp und bei Nacht”).

Sources: Wikipedia, N.  Mitford's Frederick the Great, J. D. Steakley's Sodomy in Enlightened Prussia, Susan Henderson's Frederick the Great of Prussia

David Hockney

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