Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  Despite Beckhard’s reputation as a money-loser, because of his hit, the University Players were eager to forge an economic alliance with him, even if it meant removing the last vestige of the company’s original goal of “pure,” Russian-influenced, college-bred theatrics. The deal that turned the company, or what was left of it, into the strictly commercial, profit-oriented business none of its founders had ever wanted it to become was a simple one. Beckhard would invest in the University Players, produce shows on the Cape in the summers, and if anything seemed promising, he would take it to Broadway in partnership with Logan, Windust, and Leatherbee.

  The first Beckhard/University Players production was Frank McGrath’s Carry Nation, an epic biography of the primal feminist/ Prohibitionist that required a cast of fifty, typical of the ever-impractical nature of Beckhard’s usually failed visions. Beckhard had happened to see Jimmy in the University Players’ production of Goodbye Again doing his chauffeur bit, and insisted he be offered a role in Carry Nation. Logan and the others were a bit miffed with what they considered to be Beckhard’s rather arrogant demand. They had understood their deal to mean that Beckhard was the money man, but that all artistic decisions would be left to them. However, to keep a harmonious relationship, they agreed, and Jimmy found himself back among the company’s regular roster of leading actors.

  But before Carry Nation could open, Beckhard pulled another power play, telling Logan, Windust, and Leatherbee that he wanted a new, outside director, Broadway veteran Blanche Yurka, to be brought in to handle the production. Logan was outraged. It had always been understood between him and the others that he would have first choice to direct anything the University Players put on, that he reserved that right, and he had just assumed he would be at the helm of Carry Nation. Even more unacceptable to Logan was Beckhard’s insistence that his wife, Esther Dale, play Carry. Logan had envisioned his new bride, actress Barbara O’Neil, in the title role. The standoff threatened to turn ugly, which sent Windust and Leatherbee into a panic. While neither thought much of Dale as an actress, they feared that if they didn’t use her, there likely would not be a show at all.

  Esther Dale got the role.

  The big surprise to Logan was not how well Dale did, but how funny Jimmy turned out to be playing one of the hordes of police who seemed to be forever crawling all over the stage throughout the show. For the first time, he thought that Jimmy might actually have the kind of acting chops necessary to carry the University Players. As Logan later recalled, “Perhaps [Jimmy] could carry us all on his shoulders, as Fonda and Sullavan could have done…for a short time we thought our Broadway connection would help our beloved company. We even began to dream of moving [the University Players] to New York and having a permanent repertoire. But then came the ax blow.”

  Beckhard decided to move Carry Nation to Broadway, and take the University Players along with it.

  Carry Nation opened at the West Forty-seventh Street Biltmore Theater on October 29, 1932, to high expectations, a packed house, and, the following day, loathsome notices by the critics. It closed after seventeen performances. “The reviews were lugubrious,” Logan remembered. “I read them in the flickering light of a subway car, crumbling them into the corner before getting off.” It was at that moment that Logan knew the University Players were finished.

  Jimmy and the other actors and actresses knew it, too.

  Jimmy had been paid thirty-five dollars a week for his role in Carry Nation, but had gotten something far more valuable from the University Players than the cash; he had found the beginning of a genuine approach to acting, with all the hand, voice, and facial gesture–and–tic stylistics that would one day be familiar to movie-goers around the world.

  Bitten by the bug, he decided to stay in the city for a little while longer, and moved into an apartment that Logan and Myron McCormick had rented, keeping his bags always half-packed, ready to move out and back home on a day’s notice. The place was a small cold-water flat on West Sixty-third Street just off Central Park West, two floors below a thriving local whorehouse, and consisting of what Logan would later describe as a soot-colored bedroom with twin beds, a living room with two sprung studio couches, a bathroom with a mildewed shower, and a huge kitchen stove out in the hall. The apartment was affectionately referred to as “Casa Gangrene” by Fonda when he moved in with them. He, too, had decided to remain in New York after the divorce; he was out of work and starving, and embittered over Sullavan’s success—she had recently signed on as the lead in the Broadway production of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (based on Allen’s own novel). The others, including Jimmy, welcomed him and his contribution to the rent.

  Despite Jimmy’s lack of steady work, he enjoyed the freewheeling boho atmosphere of Depression-era life in New York City. It fueled his appetite for living (as well as for food, including Fonda’s specialty, a dish he’d learned as a boy from his mother: Mexican rice and Swedish meatballs, made from ground veal, beef, and milk-soaked bread crusts. Jimmy was known to down eighteen in one sitting, killing the house budget as well as the lining of his stomach).

  “I’ll never forget our Thursday Night Beer Club,” Jimmy told one interviewer years later. “The charter members included Hank Fonda, Buzz [actor Burgess] Meredith, Josh Logan, Myron McCormick and me.” A membership fee of $1 each covered the cost of beers and “hobo” steak sandwiches. Fonda and Johnny Morris, another ex–University Player and weekly regular, would take thick slabs of raw meat dipped heavily in kosher salt and put them under a broiler. Once cooked, Morris would lift the salt off the pieces of meat like plaster from a wet wall. Fonda would then slice the steaks, cover them with butter, and put chunks on bread. “We met in an old basement spot on West Fortieth Street. It was a heady atmosphere, with Broadway players dropping by constantly to take advantage of the all-you-can-eat-for-a-buck deal the proprietor allowed us to offer anyone in show business.” The deal attracted a lot of the current Broadway crowd, including Meredith, Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, players from the nearby NBC radio studios, and established musical stars such as Benny Goodman, who at the time was a member of the network’s house orchestra that accompanied all the live national broadcasts. Mildred Natwick, another of the regulars, took pity on Fonda and Jimmy and covered their bill because they seemed so broke she feared they might actually starve to death.

  One night Jimmy decided to go out and explore his new neighborhood. He passed one of the expensive high-rises and struck up a conversation with the doorman, who told him, quite casually, that the notorious gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond had lived two doors down the street until the day he was murdered in December 1931. Jimmy rushed back to tell Fonda, who seemed unaffected by the news. “Oh yeah, this whole street’s full of gangsters, whores and pimps,” Fonda said. “But there’s a nice clean YMCA across the street with a free gym. We could get in shape and fight ’em off.”

  More imminent was the ongoing battle with their landlord whenever they couldn’t come up with the $35 rent. Every month they’d come home to find the apartment door padlocked and have to go scrounging for money to get back in. Fonda got the bright idea that he and Jimmy could pick up some change if he sang and Jimmy played his accordion on a busy street corner in Times Square. Jimmy went along with the idea, and their first night, after four hours of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” “Dinah,” “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines Nellie,” and something vaguely resembling Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (transposed from piano to accordion, with a highly original vocal added), they had earned a total of 37¢. Fonda blamed it on Jimmy’s singing; Jimmy insisted the problem was Fonda’s flattened Midwestern twang. The patrol cop who passed by at four in the morning blamed both of them. A low slap with his nightstick behind Jimmy’s knee put an end to their musical experiment.

  Gradually, the two became closer to each other than the rest of the fellows in the apartment. They were, after all, younger than McCormick, and felt a professional distance from Logan, who had been their direc
tor at the University Players and, due to his accomplishments and confident manner, seemed at least ten years older, although they were approximately the same age. Jimmy and Fonda also looked a little alike; both had the tall, lean builds that attracted girls, a fact that the much more experienced Fonda encouraged his still virginal friend to take advantage of. This was a big deal to Jimmy, who never forgot for a moment that Fonda had actually been married to Sullavan, his own secret love. If he had harbored a kind of mother/sister fondness for Sullavan (a good way to disguise his darker and more lustful feelings for her), then Fonda surely had to represent in some fashion the brother Jimmy never had, or, more likely, a friendlier version of his own father. Because of it, he could never truly resent Fonda for having “taken” Sullavan, or ever be put off by his “icy” manners and sullen, intense moodiness, what Jane Fonda would later describe as his “cold, shut-you-down, hard-to-come-back-from Protestant rages.” They became so close, in fact, that he and Fonda shared a single mattress, simply because there was no room for another bed in the already crowded apartment, and the heat from their two bodies helped keep each of them warm during the long winter months.

  If Jimmy could last that long. Since the November closing of Carry Nation, despite the occasional part and all the “good times” he was having with Fonda, the hard truth was that having come from a big warm house with lots of homemade food and the privileged life of Depression-protected Princeton, roughing it was not something he was particularly good at. In truth, he missed his three squares a day, the old house in Indiana, and the familiar comfort of being around his mother and father, his sisters, even his grandfather. As his options dwindled, he began once more to prepare himself to make the march of the defeated back to Indiana, and then on to Princeton grad.

  He was saved from having to do that, by, of all people, Arthur Beckhard, who had somehow managed, after legally separating himself from any remaining ties with Logan and the rest of the University Players, to raise enough money to open what he considered his best, if last, shot at making it as a producer on Broadway—a revival of the summer production he had first seen in Cape Cod that past summer, Goodbye Again. With everything in place for a “go,” he called Jimmy and invited him to repeat his third-act, one-line chauffeur laugh-getter.

  On December 28, 1932, Goodbye Again opened at the Theatre Masque on West Forty-fifth Street to out-and-out raves. Every major publication applauded the farce as a welcome addition to an already bustling Broadway season packed with the newest offerings of Philip Barry, Clifford Odets (by the Group Theater), Noel Coward, Kaufman and Hart, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. When The New Yorker singled out Jimmy’s performance, noting how “Mr. James Stewart’s chauffeur…comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause,” it created a loud buzz along Broadway about the hot new comic actor in town.

  The play settled in for a long run that would take it through the winter. In the spring it moved to a still-larger theater, the Plymouth, where it stayed for another two months before going on a national summer tour. During the show’s run, Jimmy went from being a hanger-on at the Thursday Night Beer Club to one of its resident celebrities, easily (and finally) able to mix with some of the most attractive women on Broadway. Gradually he began to warm to them, and they to him, including Katharine Cornell and Helen Hayes, as well as the endless line of pretty and easy chorus girls Fonda could somehow always manage to round up to bring to the party.

  Until he was stopped dead one night after his performance in Goodbye Again when a sparkling, giggling, altogether radiant Margaret Sullavan came through the front door of the saloon. Jimmy was stunned when she ignored Fonda, who was glowering in the far corner of the room, and came right over and kissed him on the cheek, as if they had gone to the college dance the night before.

  She was there, she said, because she had “big news” for everyone. Universal Pictures had signed her to a film contract and she was leaving Broadway immediately for Hollywood to star in John Stahl’s production of Only Yesterday, a melodrama about a young, pretty girl who has a one-night fling with a soldier during World War One, becomes pregnant, has the baby, and raises it herself. As she looked around the room, still avoiding Fonda’s hard gaze, her eyes came back to Jimmy, who had not been able to take his off her. She giggled, turned to Buzz Meredith, pointed to Jimmy, and said, “That boy is going to be a major Hollywood star!”

  Jimmy swallowed hard and tried not to look like what and how he felt inside, a gurgling combination of desperation, fear, and irresistible longing for this fabulous, if forbidden fruit.

  4

  “It was a very exciting time. It was at the very bottom of the Depression…people wanted to go out and go into a theater and be lifted up a little. There were parts, big parts, small parts, but you had to go out and hustle for them. Actually, it was a great time to get into the business.”

  —JIMMY STEWART

  Despite his great reviews and the talk on the street that followed Goodbye Again, once it closed, Stewart had trouble finding another acting job. The Depression was in full throttle and the theater was one of the industries hardest hit. Much cheaper talking pictures had taken away a lot of paying customers. By 1934, most of Broadway’s live venues had been refitted with projectors and converted to movie houses.

  “I was having a rough year,” Jimmy recalled later on. “From 1932 through 1934 I’d only worked three months. Every play I got into folded, so I took a job with the Shuberts in a play called Journey at Night, in which I played an Austrian hussar with an accent I hoped sounded Austrian. We got such bad notices out of town, and the play had such constant re-writing and re-rehearsals, we thought it would never get to Broadway. We finally did open in New York, and during the opening night’s performance, I had a scene in which I opened a door. The door wouldn’t open. I tugged at it so hard, I lifted the whole scenery wall and it crashed down on my head. Having heard of ‘the show must go on’ adage, and not knowing what else to do, I lifted the scenery back into place. When the wall came down on me, the audience howled, and I lifted it back in place. They had hysterics. As for me, I got so flustered I forgot my accent. Next night, the door opened on cue, but the play folded.”

  During this period, to keep himself in food and lodging, Jimmy took a job as a stage manager for a Boston-based production of Camille, a position he didn’t really want and found hard to focus on. The star of the production was Jane Cowl, known in those years for her ability to chew scenes into emotional sawdust, who worked Camille audiences into a pin-drop, tissued frenzy with her final-act death scene.

  In the years before cueing a show was largely a computerized push of a button, a stage manager’s job was complicated and busy; one mistake all that was necessary to ruin an evening’s performance. One particularly warm night, while running down the cue-book, Stewart heard what he later described as “unusual noises” coming from the side alley. He went out to take a quick look and discovered a drunk throwing stones against the side of the theater. Jimmy shooed him away and returned to his backstage perch, only to discover that he had missed cueing the final curtain to drop just as Camille expires. Afterward, Cowl was so furious she pointed a finger at Jimmy, screamed that he had ruined her entire performance, and had him fired before many of the patrons had even left the house. The next morning, suitcase in hand, he found himself back in New York City.

  A few days later, Fonda returned from Mount Kisco, having completed a season of summer stock at the behest of the company’s star performer, none other than Margaret Sullavan, who had agreed to do a few weeks of promotional live theater between pictures. Whether or not she felt pity for her ex-husband, wanted him around for recreational activities, or simply just to torture him, Fonda had reluctantly taken the job.

  Back in New York City, Fonda filled Jimmy in on the sorry details, how he had to watch his ex-wife play to cheering, packed houses while he was relegated to the status of lowly servant, both on and off stage. Stewart told Fond
a how awful life had been at the hands of Jane Cowl. They spent the first night crying in each other’s beers, until, with neither of them having a decent place to stay (the West Sixties apartment long gone), they decided to chip in and share a room. The few dollars they had bought a drab and dusty, ruby-and-gray flat at the rundown Twenty-third Street Madison Square Hotel.

  They also resumed the weekly steak-and-beer parties. “I’m afraid Jim and I overdid it a bit at one of those,” Fonda remembered. “The slogan might have been ‘Eat as much as you want and drink as much as you can,’ but that particular night, we did a helluva lot more drinking than eating. We drank beer by the pitcher instead of the mug. We finally decided to go home, and we went outside. There had been a snowstorm during the evening, and it already had been shoveled into high banks along the curbs and against the buildings. We caught a subway train and we were sitting there and I said to Stewart, ‘I can’t straighten up. My bladder’s so tight from beer.’ And he said, ‘That’s how I feel.’ When we left the subway, we had about four blocks to reach the Madison Square Hotel. Stewart said, ‘Hank, I don’t think I can make it to the hotel. There’s no place open, and there’s no people on the street. Let’s do it here.’ I said, ‘It’s a good idea. Let’s have a contest. We’ll see who can piss the longest continual line in the snowdrift. If a car passes, it’ll just look like we’re walking along, admiring the snow.’ ‘It’s a deal,’ Stewart replied. Then I had a better plan. ‘Say, let’s write our names in the snow.’ We must have been pretty pie-eyed because he agreed. Now, I walked two blocks going real slow, and Stewart walked about three blocks. He complained later that my name was shorter than his, but I had broken the rules anyhow, I only printed my initials. He wrote his whole name in those drifts. Come to think of it, Stewart must have had a helluva lot more to drink that night than I did.”