This article was adapted from different chapters of The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of Classic, which was published last year and was recently released in paperback. It also contains new information about a film being developed about Gehrig.

By the late spring of 1941, Lou Gehrig's ravaged body had been under siege from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for at least two years. His breathing was slow. He was losing weight. And he was likely paralyzed to a significant degree.
Confined to the first floor of his house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he was at the loving mercy of his doting wife, Eleanor, her mother, Nell Twitchell, and two servants.

About a week before his death, his teammates Bill Dickey and Tommy Henrich visited before the team set off on a 15-game road trip. A few days later, a Saturday, Yankees president Ed Barrow stopped by and kissed him on the head.
"Keep your chin up, old boy," Barrow told him.

"Never mind me, boss," said Lou, in a voice that might have been a whisper or a croak. "You keep those Yankees up there. I'm going to lick this thing."

Two days later - June 2 - the end came.

In the morning, Lou looked up from his bed. Eleanor, Nell and one of his doctors surrounded him. "My three pals," he said, according to Luckiest Man, Jonathan Eig's biography of Gehrig.

Soon after, Lou slipped into a coma. He died that evening.

"The most beatified expression instantly spread over Lou's face and I knew the precise moment he had gone," Eleanor wrote in My Luke and I, the 1976 memoir she wrote with Joseph Durso of The New York Times. "His expression of peace was beyond description. A thing of ecstatic beauty, and seeing it, we were awestricken and even reassured. We didn't cry. We seemed stronger and not one of us left that room without feeling: There is a better place than this."

Rain fell steadily two days later for Lou's funeral at Christ Church in Riverdale. Inside, the Reverend Gerald V. Barry led the honorary pallbearers, among them Dickey, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy; tap dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson; Andy Coakley, Lou's baseball coach at Columbia University; Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, his physician, and Lou's colleagues on New York City's parole commission, where he worked after ALS forced him to retire from baseball.

Eleanor followed, with her mother, and her brother, Frank Twitchell Jr.

They sat with Lou's parents, Christina and Heinrich.

The funeral lasted only seven or eight minutes.

After reading the Episcopal service for the dead, Rev. Barry told the mourners: "Frequently, it is the custom to deliver an address at a funeral, but it is the wish of the bereaved that this not be done. I am requested to say simply that there will be no eulogy because you all knew him."

Mom Gehrig wept. So did Dickey and Giants manager Bill Terry.

When it was over, a hearse took Lou's coffin to a crematory in Queens.

Lou would have turned 38 in another 15 days.

Months later, Eleanor considered how Lou - by nature an optimist who frequently buoyed his visitors' spirits with vows that he would regain some of his lost mobility - must have suffered.

"Maybe, if one day, he had pulled up a little and he got a little hope out of it, it mightn't have been so hard for him," she told The Sporting News in an article published in early 1942. "But he never gained, just died away by inches, every day a little bit more, and if you saw him at the end of a week you couldn't remember what he had looked like at the beginning of the week."

Little of Lou's suffering was portrayed in The Pride of the Yankees, the film about Gehrig that was released in the summer of 1942. The producer Samuel Goldwyn, who knew nothing about baseball, had ordained that Pride focus on Gehrig's decency, his courage in the face of a disease that went name-less in the film, and his love for Eleanor.

Baseball, to Goldwyn, was box office poison. If you wanted to see baseball, he said, go to a ballpark.

So the movie shied from showing the severe impact of ALS on Lou.

Gary Cooper clutched his shoulder in pain while playfully wrestling with Eleanor (Teresa Wright) - the first sign that something was physically wrong.

Then, he meekly stumbled backward from a fastball in spring training.

And, as if to demonstrate Gehrig's diminished dexterity, Cooper was unable to tie his bow tie as he dressed for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, where he would deliver the "luckiest man" speech.

The final image of Cooper in Pride shows him walking off the field at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles (standing in for Yankee Stadium) after delivering the speech and disappearing gradually into the darkness of the dugout - a cinematic substitute for a deathbed scene.

Pride was not the last Gehrig film although it is so far the best one.

In 1956, The Lou Gehrig Story debuted on a CBS anthology series called Climax! An awful film, it bluntly showed Lou (Wendell Corey) flopping on his face and pouring coffee on his hand, but not feeling its scalding heat.

A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story - based on Eleanor's memoir - followed 22 years later on NBC. In this movie Edward Herrmann played Lou and conveyed the effects of ALS in scenes where he slips and falls while teaching Eleanor (Blythe Danner) to play baseball, drops things and is unable to open a bottle of ketchup. But the film brings Lou to his deathbed - Herrmann is immobile, his voice weakening.

"Don't go away," Danner whispers as he dies.

At Eleanor's urging, Danner portrayed Eleanor with more toughness than Wright did in Pride. Recalling her meeting with Eleanor before filming began, Danner told me: "She was quite a presence. She scared me a little. She said, 'Listen, kid, I wasn't a sweet young thing so don't play me like Teresa Wright.' "

Another Gehrig film, based on Eig's book, is being developed. It has a script, by Dan Kay, but no star. The actor who plays Gehrig will almost certainly have to play baseball better than Cooper whose six weeks of tutoring by the former National League batting champion Lefty O'Doul turned him, remarkably, into a mediocre player, although not Gehrig-like. But the story did not require him to do much with a bat or a glove - and sometimes he was replaced in scenes by Babe Herman, the former Brooklyn Dodger.

The new Gehrig movie is being produced by Mark Ciardi (Million Dollar Arm and The Rookie), an ex-pitcher who spent time in the Milwaukee Brewers system in the 1980s, who got into a few games for the major league team in 1987.
By email, he suggested that the physical deterioration that Pride did not show would be dealt with straightforwardly in the new film.

"While Pride of the Yankees shied away from showing Lou Gehrig's final days, we intend to make Lou's battle with ALS an important part of our film," Ciardi told me. "Gehrig was never more heroic than in his final days."

He added: "Neither Lou nor anyone else knew what course ALS would take. Lou lived like he thought he could beat it. When it was clear that ALS would continue to weaken and eventually kill him, he showed his greatest strength of all."

Richard Sandomir is the author of The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic. A former sportswriter for The New York Times, he currently writes obituaries for the newspaper.