by Marc Eliot
True to his word, the next day the director spent several hours on the phone with Alexander persuading him to let Jimmy join his company for the summer. He went so far as to remind Alexander that in these hard Depression times, studying architecture, even on the scholarship that Stewart had been offered, might not be the most practical direction the boy should take. Who was going to be able to afford to build houses in this economy? Don’t worry, Alexander had said, he’s going to join me in running the hardware store. Sure, Logan replied, that’s fine, so why not let him have a few weeks of harmless fun before facing a life selling nails?
Oh all right, Alexander finally said, but he had his terms as well. He insisted the boy had to act like a man and tell him to his face.
Years later, Jimmy recalled what happened next. “I went home to Indiana, and one night I told my father what was on my mind—that I was thinking of trying my luck as an actor. There was a moment of stunned Presbyterian silence. Presbyterians don’t actually feel that theater-going, card playing and dancing are instruments of the devil; still my father couldn’t help thinking that the practice of Architecture was more respectable than becoming an ‘actor fellow.’ ‘If that’s the way you want it, Jim,’ he said, ‘then okay.’
“Dad was upset. My father didn’t like it at all—till the day he died he didn’t like it…he kept shaking his head, saying, ‘No Stewart has ever gone into show business!’ Then he lowered his voice and whispered, ‘Except one who ran off with a circus. And you know what happened to him? He wound up in jail!’”7
The same day he received his degree, Jimmy caught a train for West Falmouth Harbor at Dennis on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Logan had told him to look for a reception committee that would be at the station waiting to greet the newest member of the 1932 University Players.
He wondered if Miss Sullavan would be among them.
3
“If I hadn’t become an actor, I think I’d been mixed up in flying…. Acting was like getting bit by a malaria mosquito.”
—JIMMY STEWART
Even before Jimmy’s arrival, the University Players had already run through most of its operating budget for the entire season and lost a lot of the company’s resident talent. Starting a new theater is always difficult, but in those economic hard times it was impossible. The stock market crash of October 1929 had come less than a year after Logan, Windust, and Leatherbee had first decided to work together. Moreover, the competition was tougher than they expected. Another regional organization had been formed. The extremely popular Group Theater had also taken its inspiration from the techniques of the Russians, but, unlike the University Players, pledged allegiance to the Communist flag. Created by Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, the group saw itself as the conscience of the American left.
The University Players, on the other hand, was strictly theater-for-theater’s sake, commercialism rather than politics its primary driving force. Because of this, an internal struggle over the company’s direction and leadership had begun almost as soon as it was formed, dividing the three founding members and its highly talented original cast of actors into various political factions. Many of the University Players’ core performers would go on to distinguished careers, including resident character man and Princeton alumnus Myron McCormick, perhaps best remembered today by filmgoers as Paul Newman’s manager in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961); leading man Kent Smith, a Harvard alumnus, who would have a successful film career starring in a number of memorable, if off-beat, movies, most notably Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942); Barbara O’Neil, who would go on to portray Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939) and whom Logan would marry (for companionship) during her residency at the University Players; utility actor Johnny Swope, who would become a successful photographer before marrying actress Dorothy McGuire; and Bart Quigley, out of Harvard premed, who worked in the theater for several years (and whose daughter, Jane Alexander, would become an acclaimed Broadway and film actress, best remembered for her award-winning portrayals both on stage and screen as the ill-fated wife in the Jack Johnson story, The Great White Hope, 1969 on Broadway, 1970 on film).
Even before Jimmy’s arrival, several other new performers had also joined the company, including Mildred Natwick, Arlene Francis, and Martin Gabel, the latter two aspiring young actors who would shortly marry, after which Francis would go on to a successful television game-and talk-show career, while Gabel would become an enduring classical stage actor, with occasional forays into live television drama.
Despite the new influx of talent, deep political divisions among the surviving members of the original company remained. Some felt that theater didn’t operate in a vacuum and should reflect at least some of what was happening in the country. Others expressed their disappointment that this was a group established by college professors who weren’t serious about anything in the real world, least of all politics. As one of these original and now departed players, one of the first to be signed and one of the first to leave, later recalled, “The [founders of] the University Players were in it strictly for the fun, only a step above a college lark. How could it not have been, when they were mostly together for summers, like some kind of extended, organized vacation, hardly the atmosphere for considering serious political and social goals, like the Group was doing.” His name was Henry Fonda.
Born in 1905 in Nebraska, where he spent his childhood, Fonda had completed two years at the University of Minnesota majoring in journalism before flunking out, returning home, and joining a local theater group, the Omaha Community Playhouse run by Dorothy “Doe” Brando, perhaps better remembered for her other contribution to the American theater and film world, her son Marlon.
Fonda studied at the playhouse for three years, then took off across America to live the imagined romantic life of an itinerant actor. In the summer of 1931, he found himself working at the Cape Cod Playhouse when he heard that the nearby University Players had just signed a new actress to the company. He had known Margaret Sullavan from a brief walk-on appearance he had done with the Harvard Dramatic Society earlier that year, in April, in which he had had the dubious pleasure of being slapped across the face by her. He’d been angered by both the ferocity and enthusiasm of her slap. When Fonda complained to Leatherbee, who was directing the show, he said, in weary response, Don’t worry, you’ll soon come under her spell; which the actor did. So much so that Sullavan broke up with Leatherbee and set herself loose on Fonda.
When he picked up from the regional actors’ grapevine that the struggling University Players were still assembling their cast for that summer’s season, and that Sullavan had agreed to join the company, he called Leatherbee and told him he wanted in. The director wasn’t particularly happy to hear from Fonda, hoping that somehow he, Leatherbee, might be able to salvage his relationship with Sullavan, but Fonda was an actor, a good actor, and the company was bleeding good actors. The pay wasn’t much, Leatherbee told him, five dollars a week, which was fine with Fonda. And he would have to help out with the sets. No problem there. Why would it be? He was making nothing at the Cape Cod theater and building their sets as well.
Sullavan had, indeed, agreed to join the company. She had gone from the Triangle Players to rip her way through Harvard’s stage and Leatherbee’s heart before she quickly and effortlessly landed on Broadway, and found herself in a national tour on the Shubert circuit with then stage director and writer Preston Sturges’s 1931 hit comedy, Strictly Dishonorable. Logan had wanted Sullavan to join the company from the very beginning, and it was this decision that began what would be a long-simmering dispute, due partly to company direction and partly to jealousy, between him and Leatherbee, so loaded that it would eventually end their personal and professional associations.
The situation came to a head shortly after Fonda arrived that summer of ’31, exacerbating an all-out three-way war between Windust, Leatherbee, and Logan, each of whom differed as to the necessary academic qualifications of
their company members. Their name was, after all, the University Players. Logan, never big on the academic angle, insisted Fonda was eligible because of his two years at the University of Minnesota. Windust agreed. Leatherbee, however, was vehemently opposed, for reasons having less to do with academics than with Fonda’s affair with Sullavan.
Logan accepted Fonda’s credentials, but was, like Leatherbee, bothered by the actor’s heavy-handed, heated courtship of the equally eager, “highly sexed Sullavan,” as Logan would later describe her in his memoirs. However, for the sake of the company, he tried to overlook it. This was, after all, a professional acting company made up of free-willed professionals, not a college campus. Shortly after an erotically charged University Players production of Lysistrata saved the company from going out of business, with a run that was extended through the late fall of 1931 and again over the Christmas holidays, Fonda and Sullavan surprised everyone and no one when they tied the knot. As Logan recalled, “It was through a newspaper item that we first learned that Fonda and Sullavan had applied for a marriage license. And Sullavan even denied it at first. But on Christmas Day, 1931, at eleven in the morning, the company gathered in the dining room and witnessed the marriage, performed by Horace Donegan.”
Nobody was angrier than Charlie Leatherbee, or happier when, even before the last of the wedding day rice had been swept out of their hair, bliss turned to nightmare. When the long University Players season finally ended that December, Fonda and Sullavan moved to a small garden apartment behind a big house in New York’s Greenwich Village. As Fonda later told his biographer, “Living with Sullavan was like living with lightning. Her tantrums struck at any hour and on any subject. Scenes are what actors play best and Sullavan created them over everything. The weather, the food we ate, the clothes she wore, the plays we tried out for, anything. I began to match her, argument for argument.” Fonda would later insist, “I never knew I had a temper until I got married. It got to the point where we didn’t live on love. We were at each other constantly, screaming, arguing, fighting. It’s all a blur now. I don’t know whether I stamped out in a rage or whether Sullavan threw me out.”
According to University player Kent Smith, “She was too fiery to handle.”
And Logan: “She delighted in kicking over the traces. Henry Fonda, husband number one, later recalled his abject humiliation.”
In February, when Fonda found out that Sullavan was having a hot and heavy affair with Broadway producer Jed Harris, he went out of his mind. Overnight he followed them—back to his and Sullavan’s place—watched them go up, and waited for Harris to come down so he could pummel him. Only Harris never came down. An infuriated Fonda barged in while they were having passionate sex. It was enough of an emotional blow to make him think about quitting acting altogether. Before the month was over, Sullavan filed for and was officially granted a divorce from Fonda. Their marriage had lasted less than sixty days.
The formal end of the Fonda-Sullavan marriage threw the University Players into even further disarray, as the plays for the upcoming 1932 season had been picked to match the talents of its two “stars.” In the weeks that followed word of Fonda and Sullavan’s split-up, both Kent Smith and Johnny Swope, believing it was too late to rethink the new season, quit the troupe and most of the remaining original members soon followed. Logan was devastated, although less surprised than Windust and Leatherbee. He had warned them about being too closely aligned with educational theater. Aspiring actors would always see the University Players as a stepping-stone to a real professional career, he had told them, rather than part of the career itself.
With their roster decimated, the company faced still more problems. The owners of their Cape Cod performance space, the Elizabeth, decided renting to the University Players wasn’t profitable enough and canceled its lease. Desperate to find a new home, Logan and the others tried to rent an abandoned power plant, but even after promising to fix it up, they were turned down. With no money left and no new projects scheduled, it appeared the group was finished until, at the last minute, Leatherbee came up with a $20,000 loan from his grandfather, enough to take over an old 395-seat movie theater adjacent to Old Silver Beach, one of the loveliest sections of the Cape, complete with a tearoom for refreshments before curtain, during intermission, and after the last act. Logan immediately made arrangements to move whatever was left of the company to its new site for the upcoming summer season.
Logan now needed to find a new young leading man for the company, and fast. After rifling through the hundreds of eight-by-tens he had on file, he came upon one of young Jimmy Stewart, the accordion player from Princeton.
Logan then set up the meeting with Jimmy where he pointed his finger at him and declared, “You’re my new leading man!”
And so it was that summer of 1932, upon his arrival into the wake of chaos and confusion, that Jimmy Stewart arrived, suitcase in one hand, his mother’s accordion in the other, to begin what he believed was to be his last summer of fun and frolic before the show closed and real life took over.
A month later he made his debut in the University Players’ production of Booth Tarkington’s Magnolia, an old-style southern costume comedy that had been one of the big hits of the 1923 Broadway season and was now a staple of summer stock. He followed that in quick succession with a brief appearance in an original University Players production of a comedy by Allan Scott and George Haight called Goodbye Again.
In the third act of the play, a novelist is asked by a wealthy woman to sign a copy of his book. She sends one up to his hotel room with her chauffeur, played by Jimmy in his only appearance of the night, and is refused. In response, the chauffeur says, “Mrs. Belle Irving is going to be sore as hell.” He managed to wring a laugh out of it with his slow delivery and raised hands, a laugh that impressed Logan, Leatherbee, and Windust. One of the few things the three ever agreed about was Jimmy’s sense of comic timing.
“The rest of the time,” Jimmy later recalled, “I just watched [actor Osgood] Perkins and learned a lot that way.” Despite the third-act laugh, Jimmy’s part was by no means memorable. “When I joined the curtain call at the end, I’d see people in the audience pointing at me wondering what I was doing there.”
He had taken a liking to Osgood Perkins and was fascinated by Perkins’s understated but effective style of acting. A veteran of the Broadway stage, Perkins had acquired the reputation of a “fixer,” as in if the play’s broken in tryouts, get Osgood and he’ll fix it for you. He studied the physical detail in the way Perkins lit a cigarette, poured a cup of coffee, took a drink. He began to break down the mechanics of acting, observing how a simple physical act, if it was the right one, could move an audience to laughter or to tears. Surprise, he realized, could be expressed as easily as taking a half-step back. Emotional pain could be illustrated by grabbing his stomach and bending over. Fear was cupping one hand under his chin (as Perkins often did) and half-covering his mouth with the other. Pathos was the outstretch of those same hands, and love, perhaps for Jimmy the hardest of all to emote, could be shown by a simple tilt of his head and a bodily lurch, a reach for love.
Playwright George Haight, who was in residence that summer, later reflected upon Jimmy’s fascination with Perkins: “He’d watch his every move, his every mannerism. It got to be a joke the way Jimmy idolized that man. If Osgood nodded his head in one direction, you could be sure that Jimmy would soon do the same. If Osgood waved his hands, Jimmy would adopt the gesture. I remember once during rehearsal this caused a bit of a stir. Osgood raised his hand the way kids do at school. He merely wanted to take a brief recess to relieve himself. Sure enough, Jimmy’s hand shot up, too. He hid his face when Osgood headed for the bathroom.” (Osgood Perkins was the father of future actor Anthony Perkins, the tall, lanky, quiet, thoughtful actor best remembered for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a role whose vocal and physical mannerisms in the first third of the film easily bring a young Jimmy Stewart to mind.)
Despi
te Logan’s remembrance of Jimmy’s performance in Goodbye Again as “howlingly funny as a lanky Southern slob,” it had become painfully clear to everyone that Jimmy was not going to be able to bring the kind of presence and impact that Fonda had to the company, the dark, burning intensity, the leonine body movements, the soft, deep, handsome face of a poet. Or the inner rage. Where Fonda had electrified, Jimmy tickled. Soon enough he was reduced to playing his accordion in the tearoom to entertain audiences between the shows in which the real actors appeared, while Logan and the others brought in various actors to play the remaining leading-man roles.
There was something else missing as well, and it could be summed up in two words: Margaret Sullavan. She had decided at the last minute not to come back, or at least that was the version Logan told his actor when he asked when she was scheduled to appear. Jimmy was crushed but kept it all inside. Logan, of course, knew the truth, but kept it from Jimmy: that she had never signed on at all. It had all been nothing more than a lure to get him to come to Cape Cod.
By August, while Jimmy began to prepare for his inevitable, if reluctant, return to Indiana, a series of events was unfolding that would change everything for him.
If Logan’s trickery had worked in getting Jimmy to join the company for the summer, it had backfired in the way Jimmy had failed to spark much interest or excitement as a leading man. As the summer slogged on, the University Players were once more hovering on the brink of bankruptcy. Desperate for an influx of fresh operating capital, Logan, Windust, and Leatherbee took a meeting in New York City with producer Arthur Beckhard, whose Another Language by Rose Franken had unexpectedly turned into a Broadway smash. Beckhard, a decade older than Logan and the others, overweight, overwrought, mustachioed, and a chronic sweater, had been around the Great White block too many times, producing failure after failure, following a losing streak of concert promotions and summer-theater ventures in Woodstock, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut. He was the classic example of the producer who lived for one hit in the hopes that it would not only redeem his professional career but also bail him out of an ever-deepening hole of theatrical debt, which is precisely what Another Language had done.
