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At home their social life consists largely of tennis, bridge or backgammon with cinema people including such special friends as Tyrone Power & Annabella, the Fred MacMurrays, the Robert Taylors, the Joel McCreas. Coop eats enormously, smokes and drinks very little, gets into old clothes whenever possible, sleeps a great deal at home and naps constantly and at will on the lot. Stripped of his Hollywood appurtenances and fan-magazine mysticism, this national phenomenon is what he has been for years—an extremely good-natured Montana sportsman. He is daft about guns (his favorite: a .22 Hornet with a German telescope sight). His mind is encyclopedic as to velocities, trajectories. He and "Rocky"—Mrs. Cooper—hunt coyotes and bobcats together in the mountains near Malibu. In 1939 she won the California Women's Skeet Shooting Championship.
Coop has recently also become a noteworthy family man. Maria Veronica Balfe Cooper was born three years ago. Some time later Mrs. Cooper took the baby to Phoenix, Ariz., when Coop was going on location for the desert picture Beau Geste in the sandy wastes of Arizona's Buttercup Valley, 19 miles east of Yuma. In Phoenix the baby got sick. After working a while, Coop wanted to phone Phoenix about her, but the nearest phone was in Yuma and a wild sandstorm was blocking the wooden road that led out of the Valley to the State road. Coop knew he could hitchhike to Yuma if he could reach the State road. The cowboy reached it on a camel.
* This week on TIME'S 18th anniversary, succeeding (among 938 others) Uncle Joe Cannon, Queen Mary, Charles Lindbergh, Albert Einstein, Al Capone and a bird dog, Gary Cooper as John Doe does appear on TIME'S cover.