‘Maestro’ of love: Read Bradley Cooper’s high school opinion about best friends hooking up
Bradley Cooper was writing the script on besties becoming boos.The Cooper Opinion — in a 1993 column titled “When best friends cross the line” — was published in the “Fresh Ink” teen section of the Philadelphia Daily News when the actor was a high school senior at Germantown Academy in the Philly suburbs of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.I know this because I was the young editor, barely out of college myself, who helped Cooper find his pen game when he was a lovesick lacrosse player.“Can best friends who are of the opposite sex hook up with each other without destroying their friendship?” he wrote.Then — with an appropriate paragraphic pause for dramatic effect — he added, “In my case, yes … so far.”As if he was already ready to write his own personal “When Harry Met Sally” about his relationship plot twist with his senior prom date Deborah Landes, Cooper got real about how “suddenly you start to hate that guy she always told you was hot” and about how “once college hits, our relationship will definitely return to a ‘best friendship.’”Long before Cooper, 48, started working his baby blues on the the leading lady likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Lady Gaga and, currently, Carey Mulligan — in “Maestro” his Leonard Bernstein biopic that began streaming on Netflix this week — the baby heartthrob was already in his romantic feelings.“There has always been an underlying attraction between the two of us,” he wrote.But then he continued to get into the conflicted heart of it all: “Before, we could never fathom the idea of being more than just friends, especially because she was involved in a relationship with a friend of mine.