ii
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1886, the son of Baltimore Thomas Cooper and Catherine (Grenolds) Cooper. He is a descendant of the Calverts, Lords of Baltimore, and of other settlers of Maryland and Virginia. He ran away from school in Kansas City to become water-boy and clown in a circus. He also became an actor, bill distributor, property man and song and dance artist with bad repertory companies playing “East Lynne,” “In Old Kentucky,” “The James Boys in Missouri” and other classics of the road.
He has been a newsboy, a trucker, a glove salesman, a monologist in vaudeville, a circus press agent, a newspaper man, and general manager of the world’s second largest circus.
He began writing at 24, a play, “the world’s worst play,” he says. It was produced in Kansas City “and I had to sit and watch the darned thing for two weeks.” Then he began to write magazine stories. So great has been his output that at least five pen names have been necessary. They are Barney Furey, William O. Grenolds, Jack Harlow, Frederick Tierney and Leonard B. Hollister. He has written as much as 45,000 words of fiction in three days—or days and nights. As a newspaper man he has written eight columns (1,200 words to the column) in two hours. For such excesses he naturally pays in an inability to walk, eat or sleep for some immediate time afterward. It might be supposed that the work so turned out would be mere machine-made stuff, but this is not true. However, the ability to write at such speed has necessitated a small staff to gather the writer’s material.
There are several reasons why Mr. Cooper could never gather it all himself. He married, in 1916, Genevieve R. Furey, of Los Angeles, and they have a pleasant home in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Mr. Cooper gets his recreation in the mountains round about. But the stuff for the hundreds of stories he has written of circus life and jungle animal life cannot be renewed except from elsewhere. It cannot be renewed and added to sufficiently except—almost literally—from everywhere. After all, Mr. Cooper has contributed stories to more than half a hundred magazines. And if he were to stop writing to gather material——!
“I have a little circus all my own,” he explains. He knows nearly everything that is happening in all the big shows. He keeps up an uninterrupted correspondence with circus people and he has five persons on his payroll at all times. One is a man who makes a specialty of circus pictures. Another is a lion trainer who has trained as many as thirty lions in one den. Whenever he has some unusual incident of animal behavior to report, he writes to Cooper. A third member of the little staff is an all-round animal man, menagerie superintendent and “bullman.” A fourth is a highly educated woman with ten years’ experience in training lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Mr. Cooper pays her a salary and she takes “assignments,” just as if she were a reporter—which, in fact, she is in this work. She is a reporter on animals, their training, and their characteristics. The fifth employee is a circus clown who sends a regular monthly letter reporting things that happen under the big top.
There is, besides, a large number of volunteer correspondents, friends of long standing.
Mr. Cooper has used his material both directly, in the form of articles, and in stories. While he was on his way from clown to general manager of the circus, he became deeply interested in jungle animals and discovered a great many human traits (or traits parallel, if you prefer) in them. He himself, it must be remembered, has been in the training dens with leopards, lions, tigers and pumas; and he has been in with as many as six lions and tigers at one time.
He looks, in certain poses, remarkably like Eric von Stroheim, and the camera sometimes brings out the multitude of his freckles. He is bald and enjoys baldness. Better company is not to be had, and this is only partly due to the innumerable anecdotes at his command. Many of these grow out of his association with Buffalo Bill, whose personal secretary he was for a while and whose biographer (with Buffalo Bill’s widow, Mrs. W. F. Cody) he became. There is, for example, the story of the time when Cooper contracted with a clipping bureau for newspaper notices. They were to be ten cents each. They arrived—a bale—and with them a bill for $134.90. With a single exception, they consisted of 1,348 clippings about the Buffalo baseball team, which was much to the fore owing to the temporary existence of the Federal League.