LOS ANGELES — Jackie Cooper, whose tousled blond hair, pouty lower lip and ability to cry on camera helped make him one of the top child stars of the 1930s in films such as “Skippy” and “The Champ,” has died. He was 88.
Cooper, who grew up to become a successful TV star in the 1950s, a top TV studio executive in the ’60s and an Emmy Award-winning director in the ’70s, died Tuesday in a Los Angeles area hospital after a brief illness, said his longtime agent, Ronnie Leif. Further details were not immediately available.
A former “Our Gang” cast member who began his Hollywood career as an extra in silent movies at age 3, Cooper shot to stardom at 8 playing the title role in “Skippy,” the 1931 film based on a popular comic strip about a health inspector’s son and his ragamuffin pal, Sooky.
The film, in which Cooper had three signature crying scenes, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor in a leading role.
Films with Beery
Cast four times with crusty Wallace Beery, Cooper most memorably played the loyal son of fallen boxer Beery in “The Champ” (1931) and young Jim Hawkins, opposite Beery’s Long John Silver, in “Treasure Island” (1934).
“He was everybody’s little kid, and there was just something about him you wanted to go ‘Ohh’ and help him,” Ann Rutherford, who was under contact at MGM in the 1930s and ’40s, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. Off screen, she said, “he was wonderful, and he became a very good television producer.”
Known as “America’s Boy” during his MGM heyday, Cooper received the full star treatment. He had a fan club, a namesake newspaper and someone to answer his fan mail.
He met President Franklin D. Roosevelt and aviator Charles Lindbergh. Clara Bow was a frequent guest at his home in Beverly Hills, and George Gershwin once stopped by to play the family’s grand piano. At 13, he dated a teenage Judy Garland. And at 17, he revealed decades later, he had a secret, six-month fling with an older MGM colleague: Joan Crawford.
Cooper chronicled the highs and lows of his career in his candid 1981 autobiography, “Please Don’t Shoot My Dog.”
The book’s title refers to a traumatic incident on the set of “Skippy,” which was directed by Cooper’s uncle, Norman Taurog. When young Cooper was unable to summon tears for a big crying scene, Taurog threatened to remove the boy’s small dog from the set and take it to the pound. The incident ended with Cooper believing his dog had been shot by a guard.
“I could visualize my dog, bloody from that one awful shot,” Cooper wrote. “I began sobbing, so hysterically that it was almost too much for the scene. (Taurog) had to quiet me down by saying perhaps my dog had survived the shot, that if I hurried and calmed down a little and did the scene the way he wanted, we would go see if my dog was still alive.”
Only after doing the scene as best he could did Cooper learn that his dog was unharmed. He also saw Taurog, the guard and Cooper’s grandmother grinning over their deception.
“What I lost”
“Later, people tried to rationalize to me that I had gained more than I lost by being a child star,” Cooper wrote. “. . . But no amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses — what I lost — when a normal childhood is abandoned for an early movie career.”
He was born John Cooper Jr. in Los Angeles on Sept. 15, 1922. His mother, Mabel, was a piano accompanist who had worked in vaudeville. His father, a piano player and songwriter, walked out on his wife and son before Jackie was 2.
Cooper’s contract at MGM ended when he was 14. He joined the Navy during World War II, then began a stage career and moved to TV.
In 1964, he became vice president in charge of West Coast operations of Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures’ TV arm.
He also kept his hand in acting, making occasional TV guest shots. Cooper also played Clark Kent’s newspaper editor, Perry White, in four “Superman” movies.
But mostly he devoted his professional life to directing in the ’70s and ’80s. He won his first Emmy in 1974 for directing an episode of “M*A*S*H” and his second Emmy in 1979 for directing the pilot episode of “The White Shadow.”
He admitted that he was “a lousy director of children.”
“I can’t wring out of a kid what I should for the good of my films because I won’t lie to them or deceive them or shake the bejeezus out of them,” he said. “I suffer enough because I think they should be out playing, and so I find ways not to make them unhappy.”
