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"Little Jackie Cooper": Jackie Cooper on Typecasting
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
From The Little Rascals in the 1930s to Superman in the 1970s and '80s, Jackie Cooper grew from a child star into an accomplished actor, director and producer. But his transformation wasn't easy, and roles were sometimes tough to find. In this interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Cooper talks about the trouble he had with typecasting throughout his career. |
Jackie Cooper talks about his difficulties with typecasting.
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Question: Were you being typecast? |
 Jackie Cooper: Oh, always! There was never any effort made out there to improve the artist. People like Spencer Tracy held up because they had the background originally, but to this day they never have changed Mr. Gable's role, or most of them. The fact that Cary Grant has come out as such a versatile actor I think is only really due to Mr. Grant (1) never tying himself up with one studio for a long time, and (2) just his own desire to improve himself and develop his talents. Well, maybe he hasn't learned to sing and dance, but he is all kinds of a wonderful actor, this guy, besides being an extremely handsome man, and probably the youngest-looking man of his age in the whole world. |
No, I was typecast all the time. They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph. They had to start shaving my chin when I was 12 years old because light started to pick it up. They kept me a juvenile as long as they could, it was "Little Jackie Cooper," and "How can we keep Little Jackie Cooper as little as possible. There he is, getting to be five foot seven, eight, nine ..." |
They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it. And when it wore out, then they just dropped you. I didn't try to do anything about that, because nobody taught me anything about the profession. I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was. |
Q: Were you a special type of little boy? |
Cooper: Well, I wasn't the bratty type. I was a terrible little do-gooder, saccharine, most unreal kind of a character--except once in a while a director or script or combination of the two came along where I began to look like something else and sound like something else. Then I'd begin to be stimulated by this and discover I was doing something else, as when I was working with Mr. Goulding in White Banners. That was the first time anybody said to me, "Stop whining. Let's grow it up a little bit, let's look a little older than you are." Actually, I was 15 in that picture. He wanted me to be about 17. |
I was thrilled, naturally, at that age, if somebody wanted me to look and act a couple of years older than I was. Also, I was very excited about somebody considering I had a talent they could develop a little bit, and very anxious to please. But there again, I was never put with an instructor that could improve my work, you know--teach me the way that I learned, many years later, back here after the war. (I guess my mother never knew she wasn't an actress, either.) |
Q: Are you faced with typecasting problems now? |
Cooper: No, not at all. Well, one--just one came along--and this was with the series that I had on the network for three years, "The People's Choice." The main reason I didn't want to do a series, when television came along, is just that. I had avoided doing a series for a number of years. |
To me, the series was the end of the actor, when the series ended. When "The People's Choice" came along, one of the reasons I did it was that, in New York, television consisted in a lot of freelancing for me--guest spots, we call it--and I went from "Robert Montgomery Presents" to "Studio One" to "Armstrong Theatre," one right after another. One year--I think it was the end of '52, or '53-'54, between the plays "Remains to Be Seen" and "King of Hearts" on Broadway, I did 54 television shows in about 15 months, and most of them were hour shows. You can't do more than two one-hour shows in a month. You might, in that same month, sneak in another half-hour show, if everything scheduled itself properly. A lot of the guys knew me back here, Fred Cole and different producers, and if there were an overlap or conflict, they would let me miss the first few days of rehearsal, as they knew I could be depended upon. There was only so much television you could do. Along would come a movie star, beginning to make himself available for TV, and those of us who'd been back here, Eddie Albert and myself and the ones who'd been discovered in TV, or Broadway actors--suddenly the agents didn't want us in the shows. They could get Wendell Corey--Holy gee gosh, here came a movie actor who wanted to come on! They would pay them three or four times what they would pay us, and we'd miss out on a part. |
So after a few years of this, and after "King of Hearts" closed, I said to myself, Well, I can't go on like this, there's only so many shows you can do. Also, I think I wanted to get a little further ahead than just being an actor in other people's properties all the time. I had directed a little in summer theater, and I liked it, and I started getting interested in directing, in live television. I got schooled over at NBC on a soap opera, and I had a Sunday-afternoon show, an hour show sponsored by the Ford Foundation, a documentary, half live with film integration. I directed that. |
So I was settling down to signing a contract with NBC, an actor-director thing, where I was guaranteed more money than I'd made in a long time, as an actor-director. Well, my lawyers showed me that any properties I brought into there, or anything that I created, the network would own. I would get my salary, and there would be no residual effect of this thing--as there would be if I had been in film. |
So then you have to say to yourself: Do I want to be rich, or do I want to do good work? That kind of a future was so insecure. Let's say the network gives you five or six bad properties in a row, then they're going to drop you. Then, even though possibly it's not your fault, you've been dropped and the other networks don't want you, and then what do you do? Summer theater, where there's no money at all? Or struggle to make your life just on Broadway, where the competition is the greatest and life is the shortest? There's only just so much money in that business. What do you want to do? |
So I felt, well, I'll make the money and, with the money, do what I want to do. I justified going into the filmmaking this way. So I did this series, "The People's Choice." It was back to a kind of typecasting. It was a kind of part that I could have played when I was 18 years old. I never say too much about that in public interviews, because it disappoints the public to tell them you're not that crazy about a property you did that possibly they liked. Some of them must have liked it, because we stayed on the air for three years, but I didn't like it. But I was determined to learn. I was a partner in the venture, with the producers. I wanted to learn that end of the business, so I started directing it, and directed that show for two and a half of its three years. This kept me from going too far out of my mind, playing the same part over again. |
From that, I became very anxious to produce something of my own. So my lawyers and I got together, and I bought the rights to Skippy, which had been dormant for a number of years. The cartoon ran to sometime in the middle of the war. Mr. Crosby had become very ill, and has been in a sanitarium, I believe, ever since--Percy Crosby, who created the strip and wrote several books with this character and this cast of characters that he had created in the strip over the years. It was a very famous, very special strip--in my hometown, L.A., it ran on the front page of the paper, clear across the bottom of the front page. |
Q: I've heard actresses say, "If I'm not working, I'm not living." |
Cooper: Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me. Not directing it simultaneously, necessarily. I would love to have a good director working with me and going through the early stages of putting a play together with me. I would also like to act, once in a while, but not get up every morning at 5:30 or six o'clock and pound into the studio and get home at 7:30 or eight o'clock at night, or act over and over and over every night on Broadway, either. Certainly not more than a few months, six months at the outside. |
It gets boring. If it's boring, then it's tiring. A lot of people like to run in plays because it's a nice, steady job. A nice, steady job I don't need that bad. I'm not that satisfied with it. I need a steady job like running in this new series, because we own the negative to every show that goes on the air, my partner and I. There are only two of us in this venture. We own the whole show. And when we sell that, there'll be a great deal of money to split up, and on that and the money I got from "The People's Choice," I can live with my family very comfortably the rest of my life. So if I keep making mistakes on Broadway or tape or film, producing, directing or acting, I can go along and do it--so long as I'm not investing too much capital in these things. |
But the working I would always want to do. I wouldn't just want to retire. But I want to do good work, after this series. I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. An effort such as is done on "Omnibus," or on Dupont hour-and-a-half shows once in a while, or even on "Playhouse 90" (that's a terribly commercial program, but they make quite an artistic effort now and then)--this doesn't grab the audience. They'll look at "Maverick" or some Western before they'll look at that. The hour-and-a-half things I've done--they're for Ford people or Dupont people. They pay for them because they just want a good show on the air. It's what we call an institutional. But they don't get any rating like the little half-hour show. |
So I'm in that half-hour business where the most money is, so that eventually I feel like the people that put on the Dupont show, like maybe my artistic effort is going to be a little different. Maybe it will also be commercial for somebody. If it isn't, then I'll have to get out of that business. |
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