Perry White Meets Great Caesar’s Ghost

Jackie Cooper, who learned how to cry on screen the hard way, has died at the age of 88. Coming up as a child star in the 1930s when most children were polishing moving gears, washing the inside of engines and being used as depth finders, the abuses of the film industry were small potatoes. He was filming 27 Our Gang shorts a week, then tear-jerking dramas on weekends as the son a drunken Wallace Beery was ever at risk of losing. In the 1931 film Skippy, directed by his uncle Norman Taurog, he was supposed to cry. Unable to get him to do it, Taurog had Cooper’s dog taken off the set and “shot,” using a prop gun. Tears flowed, and the performance made Cooper the youngest Oscar nominee ever at the age of 9, as well as giving him the title for his autobiography “Please Don’t Shoot my Dog.” A wash up by the time he was a teenager, he became an Emmy-winning TV director of M*A*S*H and other shows, and made a brief comeback as Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s sputtering boss Perry White in Superman, et seq. after original choice Keenan Wynn suffered a heart attack.