Seldom is there heard a discouraging word about Alan Alda. A vast majority of the people who have worked with the actor/writer/director have only glowing praise to speak of him. From M*A*S*H through to The West Wing and even 30 Rock, his collaborators have all come forth with positive takeaways from their time spent with Alan Alda. It's rare to find an actor with this level of near-universal likability, but that's Alda. Everybody seemingly gets along with him, even the people who left M*A*S*H because he was such a star. 

However, in his 1982 autobiography, Please Don't Shoot My Dog, director and former child star Jackie Cooper recounts a few heated moments on the set of M*A*S*H. As Cooper claims, he may have seen a side of Alda that few others ever did. This wasn't the first time the two creatives worked together; Alda came close to starring in Jackie Cooper's directorial debut, Stand Up and Be Counted. Alda agreed to star in the movie if, and only if, a few changes were made to the script. However, producers interfered, the changes weren't made, and Alda stepped away from the project. Regardless, though, Alda left a good impression, one that was consistent with what Cooper had seen from the actor onscreen.

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Alan Alda disagreed with the media's perception of him

Cooper would later write about how those first impressions were upended years later on the set of CBS's M*A*S*H:

"On the surface, he was the man I had expected — very conscientious, very serious about his work, thoroughly professional about being on time, with his lines learned. However, beneath that serene surface, things were different."

Whether Cooper was unconsciously holding some animosity toward Alda or not, he continued to describe the tense mood he perceived while making the hit show. Rather than establish any precise wrongdoings in Alda's actions, Cooper paints a picture of an unmanaged set, writing about M*A*S*H productions that lacked the directorial governance of a strong leader. 

"Stevenson, Burghoff, and Loretta Swit were terrors," Cooper writes without specifying how or why. "So I asked Alda to intervene with them, for the good of the morale of the entire ensemble. After all, he was there every week and I wasn't. He refused. If any problem arose, he'd stalk off to his dressing room and sit there until the clouds had blown over."

While Alda would certainly find success as a director, he was on M*A*S*H strictly as an actor until well after Cooper stopped working on the show. To ask an actor to intervene in the people management duties of a director isn't just unprofessional, it also risks subverting the important on-set hierarchies necessary in a big television production.

Cooper includes one costly slip-up and tries to pass the blame onto Alda for reacting to a perceived slight.

"I said, 'If the producers had only wanted a funny person, they would have hired a Carl Reiner. But they wanted good actors, so they hired you.'"

For whatever reason, Cooper felt the statement would restore his rapport with the cast, but obviously, it didn't. To their credit, everyone involved in the cast remained professional until the episode wrapped filming. Alda, however, shortly thereafter confronted Cooper about the insult.

Cooper wrote, "'I want to tell you something,' he [Alda] began. 'You have no idea what kind of people we are. How dare you say the producers should have gotten a funny man like Carl Reiner in the show?'"

Cooper then spends the next two pages attempting to cast Alda as jealous and irrational in his "outburst." The truth though, comes through, even as Cooper tries to distort it. Alda was standing up for and protecting the other actors on M*A*S*H. It's clear even in Cooper's autobiography that his attempts to smear Alan Alda fall short, and that Alda did nothing wrong.

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