Relationship With General MacArthur
Cooper met American General Douglas MacArthur, then commander of all U.S. troops in the Philippines, in 1930, five months before he returned to the United States. She subsequently became his mistress in Manila, a fact the fifty-plus MacArthur hid from his 80 year-old mother.
She eventually ended up ensconced in an apartment in Washington, D.C. when General MacArthur was appointed Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and was transferred there, a situation which did not best suit Cooper's lively personality. According to one biographer of MacArthur, William Manchester, MacArthur "showered with presents and bought her many lacy tea gowns, but no raincoat. She didn't need one, he told her; her duty lay in bed."
When the secret affair threatened to become public, MacArthur brought it to an end and gave Cooper a ticket back to the Philippines which she did not use; she never returned to the Philippines. Instead Cooper moved to the Midwest, where she owned a hairdressing salon, before moving to Los Angeles some years later.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Cooper
Famous quotes containing the words relationship, general and/or macarthur:
“When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.”
—Mary Catherine Bateson (20th century)
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)