by Marc Eliot
As the first cool winds of late autumn hinted at the coldness to follow, Fonda struck stage gold, a hundred and four performances worth of pure glitter in the Broadway production of The Farmer Takes a Wife. It wasn’t that the show was so great—it wasn’t—but it did result in Fonda’s being screen-tested by 20th Century Fox. The studio had bought the film rights and wanted him for the lead opposite Janet Gaynor in the movie to be directed by Victor Fleming when the play’s Broadway run ended. Jimmy, meanwhile, once more began to think about packing it in. In response, Fonda, free during the days (except for Wednesday and Saturday matinees), suggested that instead of moping around, Jimmy should occupy his time by working with him on something useful, like assembling model airplanes.
The kid in both of them responded instantly to the notion. They began to buy parts and plans and quickly became so obsessed with their newest hobby, they locked themselves inside their hotel room and wouldn’t allow anyone in, not even the chambermaids, while they buried themselves up to their ankles in balsa wood shavings. They worked especially hard on a replica of a United States Army Air Corps Martin bomber. “We finished the framework and covered it in silk,” Fonda later recalled, “and the instructions called for us to paint it. The paint came with the kit, but when Farmer folded and Hollywood wanted me, I left the decorating job to Stewart.”
Fonda’s departure left Jimmy feeling more alone than ever, genuinely happy for his friend but sad that he was gone. He was about to start packing for home, when, once again, as if on cue, Arthur Beckhard reappeared, and again offered him a role, this time in his new production of Nene Belmonte’s English adaptation of Gregoria Martínez Sierra’s Spanish play Spring in Autumn, about a temperamental opera singer who takes charge of the arrangements for her daughter’s upcoming wedding with the aid of the girl’s father from whom she has been long estranged. (Whatever humor there may have been in the Spanish original is entirely lost in the translation.) Beckhard’s offer had some strings: Jimmy had to agree to help out with some of the stage-managing, and, in the climactic wedding scene, play the accordion. After a not particularly successful out-of-town tryout, the play opened on October 24, 1933, at the Henry Miller Theater, and closed twenty-six performances later.
Three weeks after Spring in Autumn folded, Jimmy found himself back on the boards, this time as Johnny Chadwick, one of the so-called lost-generation Depression-era young men living in Paris in All Good Americans, a satire by S. J. Perelman and his wife, Laura. In this one, he not only played the accordion, but at one point had to throw it out the window. Early on, during rehearsals, to save his accordion—he had to supply his own to get the part—Jimmy convinced the director to let him substitute a cheap banjo instead.
The play opened at the Henry Miller Theater and closed after thirty-nine performances.
“I played the accordion at the party following the play’s last performance,” Jimmy recalled later on.
Not very long after, still another play came Jimmy’s way, Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack. Based on the book The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, it chronicled Walter Reed’s involvement in the aftermath of the outbreak of yellow fever in Cuba at the turn of the century. This time, Jimmy was cast as the lead, Private O’Hara, a character based on Reed. The original director of the production was the notorious (to Fonda) Jed Harris, Sullavan’s former lover. When he was replaced mid-rehearsals by Guthrie McClintic, married at the time to the already legendary Katharine Cornell, Jimmy managed to hold on to his own part. The show’s single, elegant set was designed by the great Jo Mielziner.
Yellow Jack opened on March 6, 1934, at the Martin Beck Theater, and for the first time, the critics were unanimous in their praise for all its component parts: the production, the writing, the direction, and its principal player, James Stewart. Brooks Atkinson, the dean of Broadway critics at the time, writing for the all-powerful New York Times, called Stewart’s performance “excellent.” Robert Garland of the New York World Telegram singled him out for special praise, noting, “Especially [how] I admire the Private O’Hara of James Stewart…here is a performance that is simple, sensitive and true. And replete with poetic underbeat.”
“Appearing in ‘Yellow Jack’ convinced me that I really wanted to follow acting as a career,” he said later on. “Before, I had been only playing at it. But the role of Sergeant [sic] O’Hara was so powerful, the experience such a tremendous one, that my mind was made up, for the first time the thought of eventually turning to an architect’s desk was totally erased from my mind.”
Jimmy invited his parents to the opening, but only his mother came; Alexander refused to make the trip to see his son all dandied up as a fake soldier on a New York stage. However, after Bessie returned to Indiana and wouldn’t stop raving about how great Jimmy was in the show, Alexander decided he would, after all, see it for himself. He attended a Friday-night performance, and when the show concluded, sent word he was coming backstage to see his son. Not knowing what to expect, but hoping for the best, Jimmy stood in the dressing room as Alexander entered. Jimmy stuck out his hand and tried to read his father’s eyes as they greeted each other. After an awkward silence, Alexander finally spoke. “Your soldiers are wearing their hats wrong.” Jimmy nodded his head slowly up and down. “Here’s the way they should be worn.” With that, he picked up one of Jimmy’s costume hats and put it on his own head. That was as much as an encouraging word as he would get from his father that night.1
Jimmy’s reviews were so good that even when the show closed that June after only seventy-nine performances—it proved ultimately too downbeat to attract the kind of upscale audiences needed to keep a play afloat during those hard times—the director, McClintic, immediately signed Jimmy for a leading part in his highly anticipated fall production of the new Judith Anderson vehicle Divided by Three.
Before he left the city for the summer to do a few weeks of summer stock at Long Island’s prestigious Red Barn Theater, Jimmy was offered a small part in a movie being shot by Vitaphone. The New York–based film company had flourished during the silent era before being bought by Warner Bros., after which it had relocated most of its production facilities to Hollywood, maintaining only a small “Vitaphone” shooting operation in the city.
The film was called Art Trouble, a comic twenty-minute two-reeler intended to fill out the rest of a double bill. This one starred comics Harry Gribbon and Shemp Howard (the latter one of the future Three Stooges) as a couple of house painters who somehow get mixed up with two rich boys, one of whom was to be played by Jimmy. He had no real interest in the role, and the existing film demonstrates how awkward and stiff he felt making it. Considerations for sound recording had severely limited his movements and forced him to throw his voice toward the microphone. He always claimed it was just another job, and that he took it only because he needed the extra fifty dollars per day it paid.2
While at the Red Barn, he appeared in two plays, John Stuart Twist and Catherine Henry’s We Die Exquisitely, a drama set aboard a commercial airline and the communal suicide plot that has been made among several of the passengers, and Alfred Savoir’s All Paris Knows (which, according to the reviews, wasn’t very much). Then it was back to New York for the 1934–35 season, where, that fall, he was set to star in Divided by Three.
Opening night was October 2, 1934, a glittering social affair with a packed house that included Joseph P. Kennedy, Irving Berlin, Moss Hart, and Bernard Baruch, among dozens of other luminaries from New York’s social, cultural, theatrical, and literary circles. Also in the audience, seated in the same row as Henry Fonda (who had flown in for the occasion), was MGM scout Bill Grady, the recipient of a coveted opening-night ticket, compliments of a young actress in a small role in the show by the name of Hedda Hopper. (Before she was to become one of Hollywood’s most powerful gossip columnists, Hopper had aspired to a career as a performer, having already made numerous appearances in New York–produced “B” movies that had earned her the unwanted sobriquet of “Queen of
the Quickies.” Unfortunately for Miss Hopper, the nickname lent itself all too easily to numerous variations of the same obvious joke from everyone on the Great White Way. Everyone, that is, except Jimmy, who saw nothing funny in the joke, which immediately endeared him to Hopper.) Grady appreciated the invitation from the hopeful actress, but was more interested in seeing the performance of James Stewart, the actor he had first noticed that night, three years earlier, when Cohan’s New Jersey performance had been canceled and Grady had gone to see the Triangle Club 1931 production of Spanish Blades instead.
Although the play received mostly negative reviews, Jimmy not only escaped the critics’ razor blades, but actually received excellent notices. When Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called his performance “a masterpiece of characterization,” it became clear to everyone on The Street that Jimmy had stolen the thunder from the magisterial Judith Anderson. Grady was impressed, enough to put a call in to his boss, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, urging him to sign the young actor before another studio got its hands on him. Mayer then instructed Al Altman, the studio’s top East Coast talent scout, to go see the play and check this Jimmy out. He did, and as Grady knew he would, he liked what he saw.
Everyone from Arthur Beckhard to Guthrie McClintic to Hedda Hopper was excited by Stewart’s big break (and for the rest of their lives would all try to take the credit for it).3 Stewart, however, despite Grady’s and Altman’s enthusiasm, told anyone who bothered to ask him how he felt about it that he had no interest in making any more movies.
It was Fonda who stayed up all night with Jimmy and finally talked him into at least taking MGM’s screen test. Fonda was scheduled to leave the next day to return to Hollywood and promised Jimmy he would personally be there to pick him up if and when he decided to come out. But when nobody called from MGM, Jimmy thought the whole thing had been a bad joke.
Then, a few weeks later, Grady telephoned to say that MGM was prepared to fly him out and test him, and, if all went well, which he was sure it would, to offer him $350 per week to sign on as a contract player for up to seven years, at their option.
Which is why, on a dark, cloudy, humid night in June of 1935, twenty-seven-year-old Jimmy Stewart, with one suitcase, a wooden case, and his accordion, and a hat on his head tilted forward and to the side, took a taxi to Grand Central Station and boarded a train for Chicago. There, the luxe Twentieth Century would take him all the way to the West Coast, to Hollywood, to the gorgeous, high-heeled, beautifully made-up, fabulously fake but hopelessly irresistible promised land.
And Margaret Sullavan.
PART TWO
Learning to Carioca
An early MGM publicity shot of James Stewart.
REBEL ROAD ARCHIVES
5
[Stewart] has a different kind of appeal than that of Valentino or Garbo or Robert Taylor. He has an alert, kiddish, eagle-beaked appearance and everybody likes him. He is the kid from Elm Street who rents his tux to go to the junior prom…. The audiences seem to like him and the movie lasses draw straws to see who will be the next lady of the evening. One noted Hollywood person could see no mystery in his appeal. It’s simple enough. A big, good-natured kid like that, they like to mother him.
—COLLIER’S MAGAZINE
On Saturday, June 8, 1935, a typically warm Southern California spring night, Henry Fonda stood waiting at the platform for the Chief to come to a stop. When Jimmy emerged, Fonda threw his arms around him and welcomed him to Los Angeles. As they got into the waiting taxi, Fonda told Stewart he should take off his stylish (and socially obligatory East Coast) hat because sunny California was the kind of place where nobody cared about any of that. Jimmy smiled as he threw his bag, the wooden case, and squeeze-box, then his hat, into the back seat. He laughed out loud when Fonda asked if he’d also brought “the bomber,” meaning the model plane they’d worked on so feverishly.
Fonda took him to his faux Mexican farmhouse on Evanston Street that 20th Century Fox had rented for him (everything in Hollywood was faux; it was part of the charm and style of the community built by an industry whose only viable product was the selling of make-believe). Most impressive to Jimmy was the fact that Fonda’s next-door neighbor was screen legend Greta Garbo. To Jimmy’s amazement, Fonda was living like a crowned king compared to everybody he knew in New York City, where actors, even successful ones, lived like drain rats. Good living seemed to agree with Fonda; his usually pale skin looked healthy, his teeth were whiter than Stewart remembered them, and, if possible, he was even more trim and tightly wound.
One thing that hadn’t changed was the communal nature of actors helping other actors. Also living at Fonda’s house were, at various times, former Trianglers Josh Logan, whose stage career had stalled and who had since come west to work as a dialogue director for David Selznick; and Johnny Swope, who had taken Fonda’s strong advice and relocated to L.A. to find work, eventually landing a job as an assistant director). As far as Fonda was concerned, what was his was theirs. (Logan, as it turned out, was both envious and jealous of Fonda and Jimmy. He had been the big enchilada at the Triangle, and now he was living off the good graces of Fonda, who was already making movies, and Jimmy, who was about to.)
The interior of the place was decorated with what looked like props from the studio’s ample supply house, which in fact they were—chairs; sofas; patio furniture for a patio; thick, multicolored, and artificially aromatic foliage everywhere. And cats, lots of cats, wild ones from the hills that regularly came down to be fed, which Fonda did on a regular basis.
After Jimmy unpacked, he and Fonda had a drink in the living room, and Stewart handed his friend the box that contained the wooden replica of the bomber, the unfinished totem to their as-yet-still-unshaped careers.
“Well, [on my way to California] I went home first to Indiana, Pennsylvania, and I held it in my hands the whole way,” Jimmy later recalled. “And then I got a helper at the hardware store to build a case for it. The only trouble was the case looked like a machine gun carrier. I painted it black. It looked exactly like a machine gun. It was quite a trick, sleeping with it in the upper berth of a Pullman. The conductors kept saying, ‘What do you have in that thing?’ Everyone was trying to figure it out. ‘It’s a model airplane with the wings folded back,’ I told them and they’d say, ‘That’s too good an answer for us, so we’ll let it go.’”
When Fonda first left for Hollywood, Jimmy had spent a lot of his free time thinking about how one day he might actually get into one of those things and let it fly him directly to his dreams. The trains had taken a little longer, but here he was, finally, strapped into the cockpit and ready to take off.
Fonda had already finished shooting The Farmer Takes a Wife, and signed a contract with Fox to be their third-tier leading man, behind Tyrone Power and Don Ameche, both of whom were hot on the studio’s hierarchy of movie stars. That same year Will Rogers had died in a plane crash, creating an opening for a rural wisdom-in-his-manner, charm-in-his-bite type of leading man, and Joseph M. Schenck, the head of the studio, thought Fonda could perfectly fill that hole. Unfortunately, The Farmer Takes a Wife proved to be Schenck’s swan song as head of the studio. While his movies did well enough after the stock market crash and subsequent Depression, the studio, founded by William Fox in 1915, was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. That it survived as long as it had was primarily due to the series of Shirley Temple movies it cranked out until Temple got a little too old to be called baby-cute. Her entry into adolescence marked the beginning of the end of her superstardom. The studio was saved from bankruptcy when Darryl F. Zanuck agreed to merge his 20th Century studio with Schenck’s, to create 20th Century Fox. Zanuck set about to recast the image of his studio with younger, more broadly appealing stars. He particularly liked what he saw in Fonda and determined to make him the studio’s newest savior.
Stewart, on the other hand, was not so fortunate. MGM, the studio he had signed with, was making lots of money and riding high. It was
the Rolls-Royce of studios, swathed in a mystique promoted by its own glittery self-congratulatory slogan: More stars than there are in heaven! With sky diamonds like Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Wallace Beery, Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, the Barrymore clan, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Mickey Rooney, Louis B. Mayer and his young executive protégé, the dynamic Irving G. Thalberg, were not looking for a skinny Broadway unknown whose legs were too long, whose pants were too short, whose jaw was too soft, and whose speech was too slow.
Within days after his arrival, Jimmy was put to work—not on a film, but as male wallpaper opposite the numberless starlets who had managed to get past the obligatory casting couch and onto the next stage of their hoped-for careers, the screen test. So as not to be distracted by anything but the faces and figures of the young and pretty dreamers as they searched for the next Garbo, Dietrich, or Harlow, the producers used the neutral Stewart opposite the young women they tested.
