Dangerous opposites: why Lupe Vélez fired a gun at Gary Cooper
Love can often be as dangerous as it is exciting, and even though they weren’t together for a particularly long time, all things considered, Gary Cooper met his match when he fell for Lupe Vélez, an actor who more than earned her media-appointed nickname of ‘The Mexican Spitfire’.
The pair first crossed paths on the set of 1929’s western Wolf Song, where Cooper’s character falls hard for Vélez’s Mexican woman. It was pretty much life imitating art, then, with the sole exception being the two protagonists ended up married by the time the credits rolled.
Cooper was instantly besotted by the fiery star, describing how “she flashed, stormed, and sparked, and on the set, she was apt to throw things if she thought it would do any good.” With his heart fluttering away, he must have thought he’d stumbled upon the love of his life, but the sparks continued flying to such an extent they came mightily close to bursting into flames.
According to Michelle Vogel’s The Life and Career of Hollywood’s Mexican Spitfire, an argument got so heated that Vélez stabbed him during a flight, and she once said in public, “I think I will kill my Gary.” She may or may not have been joking, but that’s an indicator of how stormy things regularly were between the star-crossed pairing.
The relationship ended in two years later, with Cooper’s mother said to be at the forefront of that decision. The matriarch allegedly referred to Vélez as “low-class, vulgar, and tasteless,” but she was of a different – and more elaborate – opinion. ‘The Mexican Spitfire’ told the press how “I turned Cooper down because his parents didn’t want me to marry him and because the studio thought I would injure his career.”
The relationship had been so draining on Cooper that he ended up losing so much weight studio Paramount told him to take a vacation so he could return to his day job as a movie star at full health. Taking that advice on board, he decided to set off on a holiday, only for Vélez to show up at the train station right before his departure with intentions that were far from admirable.
She wasn’t there to wave him off, though, instead deciding to whip out a pistol and take aim. Fortunately, Vélez didn’t manage to gun down her former flame, but that underlines just how passionate their affair was. It looked like they were on course to get married for a while, but when that was taken off the table, ‘The Mexican Spitfire’ instead did what any reasonable Hollywood professional with a burgeoning reputation would do and decided to track him down with a loaded pistol and place him right in the crosshairs.