Ten North Frederick {aka The Gary Cooper Story}

Cooper as Joe Chapin with Diane Varsi, fresh from Peyton Place, as his daughter Ann

In 1973 my movie education began in earnest. I can't say the exact moment it began, however, I do know it started sometime while I was toiling away in Junior High. One of the electives was a theatre/acting class. Intrigued, I chose it. Subsequently thrown to the wolves of show-offs and outcasts of all shapes, sizes, colors and creeds, I found myself exposed to all things theatrical. Consequently, I would occasionally hear of a play or movie someone would reference and not know the first thing about it. I remember the local summer theater group announcing auditions for My Fair Lady, the Lerner & Lowe musical that became a great big movie in 1964 with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. It's a show I had heard about, but I had never seen it, either live or on film, nor, I suspect, had I ever heard of but maybe 1 or 2 of the songs. But I could not even hum those. So when a fellow student/thespian said she thought I might want to try out for the part of "Freddie", I had no clue as to who she was referring. I think that may have been the moment I decided to get my house in order, that, to be able to take part in this wicked profession {at least, as wicked as a thirteen year old in 1972 could get},  I would have to get cracking on my theatre and, by extension, my film history. How was I to know it would change my life?

Cooper in his prime. In William Wyler's The Westerner, 1940.

A big part of my film education was finding books on actors, directors and the cinema itself. In a way I guess I was in the right place at the right time as there had begun, a few years earlier, a whole industry of books that catered to these interests. One of these books, or rather series of books, was The Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies by Pyramid Publications. This series, written by leading critics of the day, featured mostly actors from the "Golden Period" of movie making with magical names like Bogart, Tracy, Cagney, Hepburn, Garland, Gable, Astaire, Flynn, Grant, Crawford, Davis and so on. One of the first books I ever bought regarding this endlessly fascinating subject was on Gary Cooper. It was by reading this book that Cooper became an early favorite of mine. This book told me about what his best movies were, what underrated or forgotten performances to look for; it also provided a general biography as well. In other words, this book and many others like it, laid the ground work for my introduction and education into the world of classic Hollywood movies.

Lobby card. With Suzy Parker, Coop's love interest in the film.

From that book I learned of his professional and personal highs and lows. One such low point in his personal life was the love affair with Patricia Neal in the late 40's and early 50's. It nearly ruined his life and threatened to bring down his career as well. The movie that best reflected that time in Cooper's life, more than any other, was Ten North Frederick. A story about a man of both substance and breeding, Ten North Frederick opens with the funeral of Joe Chapin {Cooper}, then flashes back five years to his 50th birthday. Chapin, a political hopeful, has a wife and two children, Ann and Joby. Geraldine Fitzgerald plays the wife, Edith, a shrewish, selfish woman whose only ambition in life is for her husband's political success. Once any chance of that success has vanished, due to Ann's unwanted pregnancy out of wedlock, she no longer has any use for him and tells him so, in no uncertain terms, that she has wasted her life on a failure. Chapin doesn't disagree with her on his being a failure, but to Chapin his failure was not political but parental, as his beloved daughter suffers a miscarriage and leaves for New York City to forget, estranged from her family. In The Big Apple, Ann gets a job in a bookstore and rooms with Kate, daughter of one of her father's old college pals. It is while visiting New York that Joe, stopping by Ann's to surprise her, meets Kate for the first time. Instantly smitten, Joe and Kate plunge into an affair, though Joe is old enough to be her father. Happy together, Joe and Kate are not destined to stay together. Joe, realizing life with Kate would be impossible, returns to his wife and leads a life of quiet desperation and alcoholism. In it's plot and theme, Ten North Frederick is incredibly familiar to Cooper's life, post-1949. Some wags of the day dubbed the movie, The Gary Cooper Story. An all but forgotten film {never released on VHS or DVD}, to fans of Gary Cooper and his screen work, it is a movie to savor as it contains one of his best portraits, with strong ties to his own life. No one is saying that Cooper's real-wife, Rocky, was the bitch his movie-wife, Edith is in this film and Coop's daughter Maria is not quite his movie-daughter, Ann, but the similarities are there and couldn't have been lost to Coop. 

Cooper and Suzy Parker, as Kate. Ten North Frederick, 1958.

Unlike Joe Chapin in Ten North Frederick, Cooper did not immediately run back his wife and daughter. Post 1952, whether by choice or necessity, Cooper was rootless and restless, something of a nomad, wandering the world on various movie locations. Mexico for 1953's Blowing Wild {the movie he was making when he won the Oscar for High Noon}, Vera Cruz and Garden of Evil; the south seas for Return to Paradise. Separated from Patricia Neal and estranged from his family, Cooper sought refuge and solace wherever he could, mostly in the arms of other women. Finally, in 1954 at age 53, Cooper returned home to Rocky and Maria. Though he had the occasional fling {one with Anita Ekberg caught the eye of gossip rag Confidential magazine, and threatened his new found family life of bliss}, Cooper for the main part, once reunited with family, was on his best behavior. Then the illnesses came. Cooper, who suffered from a bad hip for years, developed an ulcer from the Pat Neal years of indecision and regret. Co-star Rod Steiger pointed out that people who are happy don't develop ulcers and felt that family life at the Cooper house was strained. In 1957, just before Ten North Frederick went before the cameras, Cooper had a face lift that didn't take. After the face job, he actually looked older than he was.

When it came to the movies Cooper appeared in at the time, ambiguity was the order of the day. The protagonists of such films as Love in the Afternoon; The Hanging Tree; The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell; The Hanging Tree and Man of the West were all flawed men with a past life they would like to forget but cannot.  It almost seemed like Cooper didn't care what the public thought of him as a man, as long as they acknowledged that as an actor Cooper had grown. Cooper made 14 films after 1952's High Noon and the most significant of these is Ten North Frederick. His work as Joe Chapin is the best of those 14 and stands the test of time, a highly personal work from an actor who was the hero of so many films. This was the one time he dropped the facade and let the public in on the private torment of being Gary Cooper.


Sources : Gary Cooper, The Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies by Rene Jordan
               Gary Cooper: American Hero by Jeffrey Meyers
               InternetMovieDataBase page on Ten North Frederick
               Wikipedia page on Gary Cooper