Five years later, Stewart and I met, when I interviewed him in his suite at New York’s St. Regis Hotel while working on a profile of John Ford for Esquire. Less than two years later I did a long piece on Stewart himself for the same magazine. We spent a week or so together in Los Angeles—where I first met Gloria—and after the article came out in 1966, he wrote me a lovely letter of thanks on behalf of himself and his family. I had begun it with a parody of John Dos Passos’ biographical portraits in his U.S.A. trilogy, to introduce the mythic persona Stewart had already long ago achieved (all references are from actual Stewart movies):
William Smith Jefferson Smith Ben McKenna Jeff McNeal was bornandraised
in LansingMichigan Muncie MiddletownOhio FortDodge
grew to sixfootfour but had a way (which wasn’t easy) of keeping his head down and looking up at you; stuttered, stammered; was great at basketball, better at baseball; a Boy Scout leader; wore his hair slicked down (“Jus’ like a kid goin’ t’Sund’y School”); hemmed, hawed; had a nasal stuffed-jaw voice that shook when he whispered, that you could tell a block away (“I don’t s’pose you’d … m’by … shlow down on your way through Fort Dawdge an’ m’by … drawp by?”); took his hat off coming into your house.
Reticent (“Never been much of a talker”), bashful (“Always took a team just to drag him to a dance”), innocent (“Jus’ a country boy”), easily hurt (“Ya gotta put some pants on that guy”), awkward (kept his fingers together when holding a girl, as though if he opened them, she might slip away), he
became a lawyer, doctor, reporter, shop clerk, flier, sheriff, teacher, was appointed to the Senate, never left the hometown.
His Dad used to tell him: “The only causes worth fighting for are lost causes …”
That sank in—deep.
But the bigguys—fat pokerplaying moneygrubbing graft-taking guys with bigcigars—they didn’t think he looked like much: “The simpleton of all time—a big-eyed patriot—knows Washington and Lincoln by heart … collects stray boys and cats …”
“This boy’s honest, not stupid.”
“Dreamer!”
“He’ll be good—when his voice stops changing.” “Don Quixote!”
“He wants to go it alone—but we’ll get him.”
Thought because he was too shy to look at the marriage bed, this sap was a pushover, a twentyfourkarat sucker.
They didn’t know Willie Johnny Scottie Jeff. Didn’t know you could fool him just so long. Didn’t know what his Dad used to tell him.
“Dope!”
“Idealist!”
That he could go from: “Who! Miss—! Is that—? Why didn’t you—? Holy smoke. H-hello … Yes, Miss Paine … How—how are you, Miss Paine …? What … Escort you—gee—I mean—sure—yes! I’d be—Reception for a princess! Gawsh!”
to a twentyfourhour filibuster culminating in: “You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked and I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies like these.”
At his lowest ebb, he wished he’d never been born till a fellow showed him what his town’d be like if that were so—all those people he’d helped, all those lives he’d saved. Always fairandsquare never belowthebelt where the bigguys hit.
The kids knew about him—no matter what anyone said or what lies they printed. Not fooled. Knew about this dreamer-dope. Knew what his Dad had told him.
Then the war came.
And it changed Slim Mac Joe Skinny. No longer the wide-eyed boy in the bigcity, shocked by corruption, outraged by deceit. Knows now that the world stinks; what men are capable of; that fighting fair doesn’t always win. Had seen his fellows fall with the flag; knows it takes more than ideals and a stoutheart to win.
No more the simplesucker the easytouch the fallguy; tough now, skeptical, worldly, cynical (“I’m only a reporter—I just write the story”).
“The only causes worth fighting for—”
“That an’ a dime’ll buy me a cup of coffee!”
But the kids know, can see beneath the hard shell. Just convince him. Make him believe. Show ’im it ain’t phony. The kids know, without knowing …
“… are lost causes.”
that the toughness hides a view of the way the world oughta be but never is but—oughta be.
Better fighter now, stronger, can tell the fatguy’s move, more stubborn, knows about bending the rules of the game; would use his fists now (though he still looks even in the midst of fury saddened at the violence sick because of it); let them kick his insides up, drag him through the fire, shoot him in the hand—they could not equal what he’d seen before he
fought this battle.
Though settleddown with wifeandkids; sourly ridingtherange; bitterly coveringthestory arguingthecase drawingfaster—aging—the old words and the hometown come back to haunt him still
THEmuncieONLYdodgeCAUSESlansingWORTHmiddletownFIGHTING …
Still wears his hair slicked down; still stammers near the girl; still takes his hat off in the house;
Still the American.
“That’s just the way Jimmy was,” Henry Fonda told me. “It was all part of his character—his way of talking, everything.” They met in 1932—Fonda was doing stock on Cape Cod—and Stewart, just out of Princeton, came up for the summer to do bits and play the accordion. They became friends—for life. “You know, he just kinda fell into acting,” Fonda went on. “When we got back to New York, he took the part in Carry Nation just for a lark. An’ when that was over he was set to go home but something else came along—he took that—an’ then when it was over he was goin’ home—an’ something just kept happening. Till, finally, it started dawning on him that he was getting good at this. An’ he was. He’d had no training, no background. I’d been at it ten years an’ … I saw him in Divided by Three with Judith Anderson, 1934, and as far as I was concerned—this punk! this sonofabitch! what right did he have to be so good! And he just fell into it really….”
“‘S true,” Stewart said. “’Cause if I hadn’t become an actor, I think I’d a been mixed up in flying … I took my B.S. in architecture, but I was always wrapped up in flying. It was … acting was getting bit by a malaria mosquito—but flying … When I was about nine or ten, right after World War I, I was working in my fawther’s store, just … just savin’ up so’s I could take a ride in one of those barnstorming planes used to come around. Fifteen dawllars for fifteen minutes. That was a hellova lawta money…. It was…. But I saved it up and finally … finally, I talked my fawther into it. Dad was good about things like that … he was … and we gawt in the car … but on the way we stawpped so’s he could pick up the family dawctor! I thought it was nice—the tremendous faith my dad had in this new invention.”
“He’s one of the great guys I’ve ever known,” Fonda said. When the two came to Hollywood they shared a house for a time. “He was such fun company to be with—life was just too much—laughing all the time.”
“We were both too skinny,” said Stewart. “An’ one time we d’cided to … to gain a little weight … a little … so a fella told us for breakfast every morning we should drink an eggnawg with brandy. But the thing was … we noticed that the eggnawg kept getting darker an’ darker—and by eleven a.m. we were both pissed! So we … we said, There’s … there’s gawta be a better way … I was always a big fan of Garbo’s, you know—we were at the same studio—at M-G-M—and I never saw her … never … Then she … she moved in next door to us and I thought, Waall, now I’ll … now m’by I’ll—but she moved in and she built this eight-foot stone wall around the place! Waaall, noow, we … gawt pretty sore about that—and one night, we … one night, we gawt drunk and we d’cided to … that if we dug a hole under the wall … we could just … just dig right up into her front yard! And we gawt just far ’nough down to hit a water main … and …”
“Seems to me we got drunk and talked about digging a hole,” said Fonda.
&n
bsp; “And then … we had cats! When we moved into the house there was a mother cat there and she’d just had a litter. We said … waall, that’s … that’s fine. But they … these weren’t ordinary cats—they were wild! And they started to attract other wild cats in the neighborhood until … we had cats all … all around … in the trees, under the house, on the … you’d hear them at night walking on the tile roof. You’d come home in the dark and … and you’d go up the walk to the front door … fumbling for the key … you’d hear this noise—right under your feet … it was … hhhrrrrrrr!! sssssss! One time I came home … and I found Fawnda in the front yard with a … he had a bow an’ arrow! He was … he said if he could just shoot an arrow through the cat sideways—it would get stuck goin’ through a narrow place and he could catch it! He could … Didn’t work. We called the ASPCA. They said, ’Sure, sure, we’d love to take your cats. Just … just put ’em in a bawx and we’ll take ’em …’ Waaall, then, I had a cousin of mine—senior at Princeton—came to visit one summer, and I said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you, I’ll … thirty dawllars to get rid of the cats.’ Nooow, he had an idea—it was a fine Princetonian idea—he caught one of the cats and painted it purple! The idea was—that when the other cats saw it, they’d all say, ‘Look at that—purple—let’s get outta here!’ Didn’t work … didn’t … We just had a purple cat around the place, that’s all!”
“And the fleas they had,” Fonda said.
“Yeah … Wonderful days.”
When I asked how he had felt at the start about being in pictures, Stewart said, “I loved it. Right away—didn’t miss the stage at all. Loved it. All that stuff ya hear ’bout how the big studio was nothing but an enormous factory—this just isn’t true … it’s nawt … It was wonderful—you were doing something all the time—if you weren’t shootin’ a picture, you were working out in the gym or doing a test with someone or taking singing lessons or … Picture-making was … it was more exciting in the old days … it was more fun. And the big studios had a lawt to do with generating that excitement … An’ this stuff ‘bout no freedom! Nobody told [Ernst] Lubitsch what to do, or Frank Borzage, or John Stahl. An’ you could … you could bargain about parts—you didn’t have to take everything they offered—you could make deals.”
“Well, Jim had it pretty good at M-G-M,” Fonda said. “His experience was quite different from mine at Fox. He really enjoyed it.”
“When I first gawt out there,” Jimmy remembered, “one o’ the things they tested me for was a part in The Good Earth … it was … as a Chinaman! They gawt me all made up—took all morning—an’ gawt me together with Paul Muni and … there was just … just one thing … wrong … I was too tall! So they dug a trench and I walked in it and Muni walked alongside … an’ I … I didn’t get the part. I didn’t … They gave the part to a Chinaman!”
“Jimmy had a kind of specific inarticulation,” said George Stevens. “This film we did was about inarticulation …” It was Stewart’s fourteenth picture—and his first of any distinction—a 1938 comedy called Vivacious Lady, which Stevens directed, and in which Jimmy played a timid college professor who disrupts the staid atmosphere of the institution by getting engaged to a nifty nightclub singer acted by Ginger Rogers. Stevens was an unhurried, thoughtful man, who sounded as though he had gone to an Eastern prep school, and who directed such memorable pictures as Alice Adams, Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, and others more famous, like A Place in the Sun, Shane and Giant. “The boy and the girl had no business getting together—so the movie was really about the pleasant frustration of non-communication. This was very close to Jimmy Stewart’s vein of expression—this struggle to get anything said. Now, to overcome disbelief is the most difficult thing to do in films. And Jimmy, with this extraordinary earnestness he had, just walked in and extinguished disbelief.”
“He had some of the same qualities that Gary Cooper had,” Frank Capra said to me. “That indefinable personal integrity—awfully hard to make Jimmy look bad.” Capra—a small, sad-eyed man who spoke in a clipped yet hesitant manner and seemed most at ease when he was laughing, which he did with abandon—first directed Stewart in a supporting part in You Can’t Take It with You, which they made in 1938. The next year, Capra gave him the title role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and in 1946, the lead in It’s a Wonderful Life, which always remained Stewart’s favorite among all his own films. The Capra hero, of course—from his silent Harry Langdon comedies to such great successes as Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe—was an innocent dreamer who came up against hard reality, yet managed not only to keep his illusions but to triumph with them. Because that was the way Capra wanted it to be. “When Mr. Smith came along, it was either Gary Cooper or Stewart, and Jim was younger and I knew he would make a hell of a Mr. Smith—he looked like the country kid, the idealist—it was very close to him. I think there’s no question but that this picture shaped the public image of him, of the real Jimmy Stewart.”
“Yeah, that was a good picture,” Jimmy agreed, “that was the first time I felt I was really getting across.”
“Cyclically speaking,” Cary Grant explained to me, “Jimmy Stewart had the same effect on pictures that Marlon Brando had some years later. We did one picture together in 1940 called The Philadelphia Story …’”
James Stewart and Donna Reed are small-town newlyweds who have to change their honeymoon plans when Stewart’s father’s building and loan company gets into trouble in Frank Capra’s now perennial (originally unsuccessful) comedy-drama-fantasy, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
“I never thought that much of my work in The Philadelphia Story,” Stewart mentioned once. But the Academy awarded him an Oscar for this performance, though it’s probably true, as the story goes, that they gave it to him mainly because they had passed him up the year before on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
“Jimmy had the ability to talk naturally,” Grant said. “He knew that in conversations people do often interrupt one another and that it’s not always so easy to get a thought out. It took a lit-tle while for the sound men to get used to him, but he had an enormous impact. And then, some years la-ter, Marlon came out and did the same thing all over again—but what people forget is that Jimmy did it first. And he affected all of us really.”
“Isn’t that interesting!” Stevens said in response to this. “Of course, it’s true. Jimmy did it with a kind of emphasis and Brando did it with a kind of reticence.”
“We did a scene together,” Grant said, “in which he was drunk … and I got absolutely fascinated with him—watching him—you can see it in the film—he was so good!”
“He was good in anything,” John Ford told me. “Played himself but he played the character…. People just liked him.”
Then the war came. And Stewart, who had had over four hundred hours of civilian flying time, joined the Air Force. He moved from second lieutenant to colonel, commanded twenty bombing missions over Germany, was awarded the Air Force Medal, the Croix de Guerre, the D.F.C. with Oak Leaf Cluster, came home when the war was over. His experience of World War II was something he didn’t talk about. But once, in a conversation about the tragic, disastrous low-level bombing raids on the Ploesti oil fields—in which he himself did not take part—Stewart remarked to me, “Everything’s planned … it’s all set … it’s all—and then you’re over the target—and it’s … nothing’s the way … it’s all different! everything’s different from the way you’d planned—everything’s wrong. And you’re nawt supposed to—but everybody gets on the radio and starts yelling!”
“After flying those B-29s,” Capra remembered, “Jimmy didn’t feel quite right being back in pictures. In the middle of It’s a Wonderful Life, which was his first film after the war, he told me—he said he thought maybe being an actor was not for decent people. That acting had become silly, unimportant next to what he’d seen. Said he thought he’d do this picture and then quit. Lionel Barrymore was in the film, and he felt, you know, that ac
ting was one of the greatest professions ever invented—very outspoken about it, too. One day he said to me, ‘That Jimmy Stewart is good.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but he’s thinking of quitting.’ ‘Really? Why?’ So I told him what Jimmy’d said. A few days later, Lionel Barrymore talked to Jimmy. ‘I understand you don’t think acting is a worthy enough profession,’ he said, and then he gave Jimmy a pitch on acting as I’ve never heard. ‘Don’t you realize, ’ he said, ‘you’re moving millions of people, shaping their lives, giving them a sense of exaltation … What other profession has that power or can be so important? A bad actor is a bad actor. But acting is among the oldest and noblest professions in the world, young man.’ Jimmy never said anything to me about it, but I think it must’ve had an effect on him. He never said it, but I think Jimmy decided if he was going to be an actor, he was going to be the best there was.”
“I realized after the war that I wasn’t going across anymore,” Stewart recalled, “after a couple of pictures. I remember on Magic Town, one critic wrote, ‘If we have to sit through another picture while that beanpole stumbles around, taking forever to get things out….’ The New York Times sent a guy out here to do an article on me, and he said, ‘Now, I’ll tell ya right off, the title of this thing is gonna be “The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Stewart!” I realized I’d better do something—I couldn’t just go on hemming and hawing—which I sometimes overdid too … I looked at an old picture a mine—Born to Dance—I wanted to vawmit! I had t’ … toughen it up …”
“When he’s doing those tough characters,” Frank Capra said, “he’s not playing himself—fundamentally, Jimmy is an idealist.”
“I gawt … tougher—and I found that in Westerns I could do it an’ still retain what I was. People would accept it.”
People did. “You can’t knock a Western,” John Ford used to say as late as the sixties, “they have kept the industry going.” A look at the (now defunct publication) Fame annual exhibitors’ poll of the Top Ten Money-Making Stars confirms this remark: on the list for eighteen years, predominantly Western star Gary Cooper; for sixteen years, John Wayne; for ten years, James Stewart. His initial appearance (fifth place) was in 1950, the year his first two postwar Westerns were released. He remained in the Top Ten throughout the fifties—hitting first place in 1955; of the score of pictures he made in those ten years, a third were Westerns. Three extremely popular non-Western fifties films—Hitchcock’s Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder—did not exactly hurt his standing either. In 1960–64, Stewart dropped out of the Top Ten but was back in eighth place in 1965: the picture that did it was Shenandoah, a Western. (Besides the westerners, in that decade Stewart also played two other distinctly American heroes: Glenn Miller and Charles Lindbergh.)
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