“Casting the film star is, in many respects, a compromise,” Alfred Hitchcock said to me. “Now, Stewart can play all the scenes, and in character, but what I mean is epitomized in those film reviews—you read the résumé they give of an adventure story: ‘Well,’ they say, ‘Jimmy Stewart rides in on a horse and comes face to face with a hundred Indians. But Stewart is very clever and he outwits them …’ You see, it’s always ‘Stewart,’ never the name of the character he’s playing.” Hitchcock first cast Stewart in 1948 as the professor in Rope, and they did four films together (three in financial partnership), including his devastating performance as a guilt-and love-haunted ex–police detective in Vertigo. “But the enormous advantage in casting the star is because of familiarity,” Hitch concluded. “His face is familiar….”
“I’ve always felt, from people, that it was a friendly attitude,” Stewart commented, “which has been very nice. ‘Geez, I know that fellow.’ … They’re … you can feel the concern—the friendliness—they come up an’ say, ‘I feel like I know you.’ Some of it has resulted from the kind of parts I’ve been in. But the important thing is that they should be concerned for your welfare up there on the screen. ’Cause I’ve always felt, through the years, although they’re … they’re always sure everything’s going to come out all right—they’re nawt quite sure in my case….”
“You see, the moment he gets into jeopardy,” Hitchcock explained, “the audience reaction is much stronger than it would be if the actor were a character man, who might be more right for the part. So your story is helped enormously.”
“People used to ask Spencer Tracy,” said Stewart, “‘Don’t you ever get tired of playing Spencer Tracy?’ An’ he’d say, ‘Who the hell do you want me to play!?’ I’m against people who yell the star system is dead. I’ve never agreed with that—ya talk to people an’ they can’t put it into words—but a star is just someone to root for….”
“Stewart is a perfect Hitchcock hero,” the director concluded, “because he is Everyman in bizarre situations. I mean, let’s look at his private life—Princeton, Air Force colonel—he’s not an uneducated oaf, you can believe him as a professor, a doctor, family man …”
“I always wanted to live on a hill—I don’t know why,” Jimmy reminisced. “An’ I used to. But when I gawt married … and the kids …” The family of six lived in a large Tudor house on Roxbury Drive at the foot of the Beverly Hills. One of Gloria’s sons, whom Jimmy raised, was killed in Vietnam in 1970 and buried at Arlington National Cemetery, to which Jimmy and Gloria made regular pilgrimages. “I thought m’by it’d be good to go back to the old way, where there was a sidewalk an’ you could go ’round the corner to the grocery store. And the twins … I think now that if they have pills to stawp babies, they oughta be able to have pills that make twins! Because … I think it’s … the most wonderful … They’re never lonely … they’re … and they have a bond between them that’s … They … they hold secret meetings in the cellar … and I can’t go—no one’s allowed down there—no one … but the dog! The only thing I wish … is … I think they’ve gawt too much work in cawllege … the boys are in cawllege and I never coulda gawtten through the stuff they’ve gawtta do. They … I guess the teachers would kill me, but I wish they were given a little more time to dream….”
Coming out of a restaurant one evening, Stewart was approached by a man and his wife. “I don’t guess it means anything to you,” the man said, “but I just wanted to say we’ve seen your pictures many times and have enjoyed you very much.” Stewart, holding on to the man’s hand, said warmly, pointedly, “Why, it means everything to me.” Afterward, I asked how he really felt about being a star.
“I take it as a sort of respawnsibility,” he answered. “Ted Healy once told me, long time ago, he said, ‘Treat the audience as a partner, nawt as a customer.’ Good advice. You know, I gawt an awful lawtta letters after Anatomy of a Murder: ‘Ya let us down, I’m nawt goin’ t’ your pictures anymore—I took m’family to see a Jimmy Stewart picture an’ you’re up there in court talkin’ dirty and holdin’ up women’s panties …’ An’ … I have to take these things into consideration. Now, I didn’t think Anatomy was offensive—or in bad taste. An’ if anything like it came along again, I’d have to take it—parts like that just don’t come along every day …” he said firmly. The New York Film Critics Circle agreed and gave him their Best Actor Award for his superbly personal, definitively archetypal performance in Anatomy.
“But, ya see, I think our business is to tell stories—that involve people emotionally—and if the story gets so far away from what people can understand, then you’re nawt … you’ve lost your audience … Now, I’ve seen actors ‘n’ actresses who do a realistic, technically beautiful jawb in a scene of, say, withdrawal from heroin addiction—it’s frightening, very effective. Later on, the same person comes in an’ says, ‘Hello, were there any messages for me?’ an’ you don’t believe it … That’s it … that’s … believability! The withdrawal thing is a sort of an exercise in acting realism, but as far as believability is concerned, the audience doesn’t know what the symptoms of withdrawal are—he could stand on his head—that … that might just as well be the way you do it. But every body knows about ‘Hello, were there any messages.’ Believability—so the audience can understand—so they can believe what you’re doin’ up there.”
The whole world believed James Stewart. They never caught him acting. He was a very particular American—though his accent and intonations were undetectable geographically—therefore all the more uniquely himself. He was also eighty movies, eighty different views of him, millions of magnified images combined to create one image called—whether you were from the Midwest or Europe (and despite his James billing)—“Jimmy” Stewart: at whatever age, the name for a boy.
“Funny how that caught on. There w’d no pattern to it—my mom called me Jimsy! And with my fawther it was Jimbo, and my teacher called me Jamie …”
“People just like him,” Ford had said.
Stewart himself summed it up best: “This is the great thing that the movies have … the potential to really press things home visually—they come closer than anything else, the people can see your eyes … they can—I remember we were up in Canada, in 1954, in the mountains shooting a picture called The Far Country. We were havin’ a bawx lunch—the usual terrible bawx lunch—and this old guy came into the camp … and looked around … he looked … and he came over t’me … nawdded at me. ‘You Stewart?’ ‘Yeah …’ ‘You did a thing in a picture once,’ he said. ‘Can’t ’member the name of it—but you were in a room—and you said a poem or something ’bout fireflies … That was good!’ I knew right away what he meant—that’s all he said—he was talking about a scene in a picture called Come Live with Me that came out in 1941—and he couldn’t remember the title, but that little … tiny thing—didn’t last even a minute—he’d remembered all those years … An’ that’s the thing—that’s the great thing about the movies … After you learn—and if you’re good and Gawd helps ya and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across—then what you’re doing is … you’re giving people little … little, tiny pieces of time … that they never forget.”
Although I never saw Stewart working on a picture, I did actually direct him one afternoon when we shot an interview in his Beverly Hills backyard for Directed by John Ford (1971), a feature-length documentary I made for the American Film Institute. We had audio-taped a long conversation about Ford in October 1968; this was transcribed, and then I pulled out the sections I wanted Stewart to tell me on camera, and gave those pages to him on the day we shot, about a month later. Since I filmed Wayne and Fonda for this work, too, the major differences between the three actors were noticeable, all having to talk spontaneously—though knowing which stories they would be telling—but without any set script. Both Wayne and Fonda stumbled here and there, lost or flubbed their words a bit, repeated themselves, but Stewart was absolut
ely flawless.
In the one most extended take, the lens was over my shoulder onto Jimmy, fairly tight so that you couldn’t see my arm or hand. The camera was on a dolly track, and at a certain moment I was going to signal the cameraman and the dolly would slowly bring the camera into a single close-up of Stewart, excluding me in the process. Overall, Jimmy talks for several minutes without a break, the camera moving in during this, and he finishes perfectly. Seeing the film over the years with various audiences, the one certain reaction is to this speech of Stewart’s, during which he gets about twenty huge laughs.
James Stewart and Kim Novak in the first of their two pictures together, Alfred Hitchcock’s tragic love story, Vertigo (1958); the nearly palpable chemistry between them was real. Long after his death, friends said that Kim would still speak lovingly of Jimmy Stewart.
It gives a hint of his brilliance one-on-one as a raconteur. He was hilariously funny, with his slowest, driest delivery. None of his television appearances, even on the Johnny Carson show, quite duplicate the devastating humor Stewart had in private conversation. Because he felt no time-pressure, as there always is on radio or TV, he could relax and take as long as he wanted. This slow timing was actually funnier than any sped-up version, because Stewart could get laughs from pauses, hesitations, half-finished thoughts. His sense of humor was prodigious, very much in the American country grain, and often complemented beautifully by Gloria’s more urbane personality, and her quick Rosalind Russell–Eve Arden delivery, which invariably amused the hell out of Jimmy.
That documentary we did was the only time I got him into a film, though I tried on at least three other occasions. After seeing On Golden Pond on Broadway in the late seventies, I called Jimmy, who was then in his early seventies, and asked if he’d seen the play. Yes, he had, he said, and thought it was very good. Enthusiastically, I said I thought it would make a terrific little movie or television special and that he would be perfect for the part. “Thanks a lot,” he said, somewhat irritated, “the guy’s eighty years old!” The irony was that a year or two later, his best pal Fonda did the role as a feature film when he was seventy-five and won an Oscar for it just before his death.
Other times I tried to cast Jimmy: for a comedy with Ava Gardner in the mid-eighties just before Ava had a stroke, and then the producer finally preferred not to pay for any names; as a degenerate gambler for a comedy-drama set in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra, but the deal fell apart (see Sinatra chapter); and a large-scale elegiac Western that Larry McMurtry and I conceived at Warner Bros. in 1972, for Wayne, Fonda and Stewart to co-star, featuring a large supporting cast including Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Cybill Shepherd, the Clancy Brothers, and Ellen Burstyn. At the time it was titled Streets of Laredo. Both Fonda and Stewart agreed to do it, but Jimmy was somewhat less enthusiastic. “Waall, there’s one big thing I just … I don’t understand,” he complained to me. “Why do I let the horses go!?” A key climactic sequence was precipitated by Stewart’s character (Augustus Clay) deciding to free the horses they’ve all been herding northward for months. I told Stewart that the motivations would be shored up and clarified in the subsequent draft, this still being only a first pass. When Wayne was strongly discouraged from doing the film by Ford and backed out, Jimmy did, too. “Waall, if Duke’s not gonna do it …,” he paused, “and besides,” he went on, grouchily, “why do I let the horses go!?” After McMurtry broadened and hugely enlarged the 150-page screenplay into his epic 850-page (best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning) novel, Lonesome Dove, the work was dramatized into an enormously popular mini-series, with lots of sequels and prequels.
In the original series, Tommy Lee Jones played Jimmy’s part, Robert Duvall played Wayne’s, and they were both terrific, but, of course, in my head Jimmy and Duke had to be better. McMurtry had captured their cadences perfectly and the fit of the words was tailor-made. I’ve done impressions of Stewart and Wayne since I was a teenager, and would occasionally read Larry’s dialogue back to him in their voices to considerable amusement for us. One time I “did” Jimmy on the Carson show in the course of telling a Stewart anecdote and called him the next day to ask if he’d seen it. All he said—sounding amused by my moxie—was: “Pratty gud, Payter …”
Stewart had been fascinating and incisive in his taped remarks about Ford, and although we spoke briefly of certain other directors, for some reason I never really had a chance to ask in detail all the questions I would have wanted to pose about so many of the other memorable pictures he made with such classic masters as Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Capra, Preminger, Stevens or Mann. He once compared Hitchcock to Ford: “I think they’re a lot the same. Two entirely different personalities, but they’re very similar in their emphasis on the visual, and in their actual sort of dislike for words and long scenes. Hitch really doesn’t listen to scenes. I’ve always felt that you could get up and read the phone directory, and if Hitch sort of liked the way it moved, and liked the way you looked and reacted and everything, he would say …” and Stewart nodded as if saying “that’s fine,” shook his head and grinned.
Ben Gazzara had told me that on Anatomy of a Murder, the main thing he remembered about Stewart was that he always wanted to rehearse. When I had brought up the subject to Jimmy in regard to Preminger’s rehearsing, he said, “The one I did with him … nobody rehearsed. I couldn’t go to Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara … I couldn’t get any of them to rehearse. They said they had all this Actors Studio stuff … and I don’t know much about ’em, but I must say that they’re damn good …” He shook his head. “God, I had a helluva lotta lines in that thing, you know. I would say: ‘Would you just go over that …?’ Waall, they’d sit and they’d sort of go over it, and I’d get closer and closer to them and try to hear the cues and then I found myself doin’ …” and he mumbled something as though following their lead. “And they’d say, ‘OK?’ And I’d say, ‘Waall … ’ and they were gone. But this gets you on your toes. This gets the sweat in the hands.” I asked him how he had liked Preminger’s technique of shooting long, uninterrupted takes of entire scenes, and he said, “I never minded that too much. There again it gives you a chance to sort of go through the whole thing and get it, and fool around with it …”
Stewart’s memory for specific scenes and sequences from his movies dimmed over the years, but that last time I saw him, when he was eighty-six, he remembered vividly the difficulties he had with the café scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime The Shop Around the Corner (1940). The complicated and crucial dialogue with Margaret Sullavan evidently gave him a lot of trouble, and took quite a few takes to get it right. Lubitsch, he said, “told you exactly how he wanted the thing played, but of course you had to make that work for you, and I had a devil of a time with that scene. Isn’t it funny, I can remember that, and I can’t remember half the other stuff I ever shot.”
Now, the word was that he had been in love with Margaret Sullavan—perhaps she was for Stewart “the gal that got away.” They did three other pictures together, remaining good friends until her tragic early death, not long after he married Gloria. His friendship with Fonda even endured the fact that Fonda and Sullavan were married for a time, not too happily.
Stewart with Margaret Sullavan in the café scene that, he remembered, had given him a lot of trouble in Ernst Lubitsch’s most memorable human comedy, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), among the movies’ finest treasures.
The relationship with Fonda was a teasing kind, a lot of kidding each other, which extended to the way Jimmy spoke of Hank when they weren’t together. I never became that friendly with Fonda, but I usually asked Stewart how his pal was doing. One time he answered with mock irritation that “Fawnda” was in Europe doing a picture (Ash Wednesday) in which he was playing Elizabeth Taylor’s husband. “Waall,” he summed up, “that’s a lawta shit!” This was meant to signify a kind of jealous envy, but of course there was the joke, because Jimmy didn’t feel that way at all, he was happy for Hank to be working. Everything was in the nua
nces of how he made the comments, the subtle intonations of which naturally Stewart was an absolute master.
And he could do this, not just in the relatively short pieces films are generally made up of, but for a two-and-a-half-hour stage production. In the second half of the seventies, when Jimmy was in his late sixties, I saw him do Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey in London’s West End and he was entirely remarkable. Stewart always felt he could improve on the performance he’d given in the lackluster 1950 movie of the famous stage comedy about a man whose best friend is a large invisible rabbit, and so returned to the play a number of times in his career, doing it first on the New York stage (replacing the original Elwood, Broadway’s Frank Fay), then later for a not very good television production with Helen Hayes. The London version came in-between, and Stewart always felt it was the best he had done the role. He was right.
The supporting cast and staging were of a typically high London quality, but Jimmy bestrode the show like a colossus. I told him afterward in his dressing room, and repeated it when we had dinner another night at the Connaught Hotel’s restaurant, that his size on the screen had been undiminished by the stage, that he still seemed bigger than life, yet as real as ever. The performance had been perfectly modulated for the dimensions of the house, and retained both his usual amazing intimacy and his brightly spontaneous freshness. There were bits he obviously had developed which got big laughs, laughs only Jimmy Stewart could have gotten because they played into the audience’s familiarity with him. When asked how tall the invisible pooka Harvey is, Stewart got a stream of laughs by tentatively holding his hand up to indicate Harvey’s height, altering this approximate measurement several times until he felt it was exact. Another time, he topped a series of laughs by taking a terrific pratfall, slipping right off a bench to the floor. The audience screamed. Certainly it is among the handful of great star performances I’ve seen on the stage.
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