by Marc Eliot
By the mid-thirties, the Academy was floundering in the wake of the industry-wide pro-union movement, and to its many mogul members, the lovable eccentrics in the Vanderhof mansion looked a bit too uncomfortably like themselves—with the decision by them at the end of the movie to “give everything away” seemingly a little too closely to some on the management side like Capra’s hoped-for capitulation by the Academy to the unions. And the fact that the whole family was Looney Tunes did nothing to assuage their feelings.
In that sense, the character of Stewart’s young Kirby, who begins as a schemer to marry Alice as a way of acquiring her family’s property for his own father, then realizes he truly loves her, was a projected self-idealization (and justification) of Capra himself, as was Kirby’s political duality. He is the only “sane” one in an otherwise crazy, if privileged, populace (industry) who manages to happily reconcile the two opposing sides (similar to the role that Cary Grant would play later in Arsenic and Old Lace, yet another of Capra’s adaptations of Broadway plays that focused on an isolated, lunatic family—in this instance the perception of evil being relative, and the hero being the great bridge between the two opposing worlds, reality and unreality, the comic equivalents of moral and immoral).
What made Jimmy so perfect a choice for Capra was how well he projected the character’s surface while missing, or ignoring, any of the intrinsic politics or deeper, perhaps darker morality of either Tony or the movie. To him, like most viewers, it was just another Depression movie, the soothing message being that wealth makes you a prisoner of the craziness it produces, while poverty keeps you sane and happy. Apparently, none of the movie’s darker undertones resonated with Jimmy.
A month after the film’s release on September 1, 1938, awash in rave reviews and surging box-office receipts, Capra was devastated when his son suddenly and unexpectedly died following a simple surgical procedure to remove his tonsils. In the wake of that tragedy, the emotional and artistic bonds between the director and his leading man grew noticeably tighter and substantially more entwined. Like an about-to-be lit fuse, they were now set to explode into the stratosphere of cinematic super-starlight.
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“My father first thought of Gary Cooper for Mr. Smith, but decided that Jimmy had everything Cooper did, with one thing more—he projected an Ivy League intelligence that was crucial to the character of Jefferson Smith, and it was something Cooper did not have. Stewart was the perfect garden variety of citizen with just the right touch of Phi Beta Kappa.”
—FRANK CAPRA JR.
Although You Can’t Take It With You made James Stewart a top-of-the-line star, he was not considered for an Oscar for his performance (except for Spring Byington in the Supporting Actress category, no one else in the cast was even nominated). Robert Riskin was nominated for Best Screenplay, but did not win; nor did Joseph Walker, also nominated, for Cinematography. It is all the more surprising then that the movie itself managed to win Best Picture and brought Capra his third Academy Award for directing.1
By the night of the Awards banquet, held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 23, 1939, Capra was hoping to use the occasion to bring together the unions and studio heads. Somehow, each side hoped to benefit from having him as their leader.
In 1935, to reward Capra for all the success he’d had in keeping the fragile industrial peace between management and the still-unorganized workers, the Academy had elected him their president, even as he was secretly rallying the directors to declare their independence by forming their own guild, which they did in November 1938. As a result, the night of the awards, he found himself ever more entangled in the worsening situation, as both Academy peacemaker and union instigator, when a day before, the guild sent a behind-the-scenes threat to the Academy, notifying it that every guild director at the banquet was prepared to walk out during the presentations if their organization was not finally, fully, and formally acknowledged right then and there as a legal guild. As he had done so successfully before, most recently after Mr. Deeds had been nominated, Capra managed to broker a temporary peace by convincing each side to give in a little. The result was a begrudging industry acceptance of the guild, an uninterrupted ceremony, and, perhaps most astonishingly, feelings of gratitude on both sides for Capra’s ongoing leadership (although some in the industry felt that Capra had used his influence to play one side off the other in order to make himself look like a hero when the situation was resolved). Whatever the truth, the result that night was yet another big industry win for him: an Oscar for Best Director. For now, at least, it appeared Capra could do no wrong. Somehow his canny machinations had made him the most popular operator in Hollywood, with the most popular rising actor at his beck and call.
After filming You Can’t Take It With You, before its release and his subsequent rise to the top of the box office, Jimmy had been anxiously waiting for MGM to find a new project for him. When none materialized, he did some work in radio, broadcast versions of his own and other stars’ movies. While many performers refused to lower themselves and appear on the crackling (and free) medium, Jimmy proved an immediate hit; his distinctive voice was instantly recognizable to audiences everywhere. He appeared regularly on the Lux Radio Theater, the Silver Theater, Good News, and the Screen Guild Theater. In the ultimate form of flattery, comedians and impersonators began exaggerating his drawl and the already slow pace of his talking.
Leland eventually received an offer for Jimmy from independent producer David Selznick, who had been in charge of production at MGM for a short time following Thalberg’s death. He then left to form his own production company. With America’s isolationist era about to come to an end and the world approaching a new international conflict, Selznick wanted to reflect the country’s changing mood with a “serious” picture for Carole Lombard, who had made her name in thirties screwball comedies, such as Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936), and William Wellman’s Nothing Sacred (1937). This type of grin-producing comedy had already started to fade in popularity as the humor could no longer keep away the frown of reality. To extend Lombard’s career, in 1939 Selznick wanted her to “go dramatic” by showcasing the actress’s hitherto little-seen dramatic side.
To ensure the focus would stay on Lombard, Selznick wanted to avoid any of the three hottest romantic leads of the day, Gable, Cooper, and Grant, even if any of them had been available, which, for various reasons, they weren’t. Instead he chose Stewart, who he felt would be the perfect nonintrusive foil for a dramatic Lombard in Made for Each Other. His only worry was that she might so overwhelm the young actor on-screen that audiences would find it difficult to believe such a callow fellow (as Selznick believed he was) could actually win the affections of a lioness like Lombard (as he believed she was).
To direct, Selznick hired John Cromwell, a journeyman body-mover hired to work the soapy script built around the everyday lives of a young Manhattan lawyer (Stewart) who goes against his mother’s wishes and, instead of pursuing the wealthy boss’s daughter, marries for love (Lombard), and then struggles with her to make it in the big city. The first part of the film is fast-paced, light domestic comedy; the second, strictly soapsuds as the sudden illness of the couple’s newborn moves Stewart to confront his stingy boss (Charles Coburn) to finance a desperate last-minute delivery of a life-saving serum. In the final scenes—the serum is delivered, the baby lives, and Stewart, for showing the courage to stand up to his boss, is promoted to the law firm’s vice presidency.
The film opened in February 1939, the same month that the Academy Awards had crowned Capra as Hollywood royalty, but, unlike You Can’t Take It With You, it was not a box-office hit. In a year crowded with costume classics—William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, John Ford’s Stagecoach, and Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind—towering performances by Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, and Clark Gable, respectively; the top-drawer comedy of Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka) with Greta Garbo and the intense melodrama by Edmund Gouldi
ng (Dark Victory) that showcased the red-hot Bette Davis, Made for Each Other quickly fell behind and faded.
Lombard was devastated by the film’s failure. Life magazine put the final nails in its coffin when, later that year, it proclaimed that screwball comedy, the most popular form of screen humor in the thirties that had begun in 1934 with a slick, fearless, and screamingly funny Lombard in Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, had ended the moment Lombard began sobbing seriously in the climactic hospital scene of Made for Each Other.
Jimmy was disappointed as well. He blamed its shortcomings on the absence of a strong director like Capra and a solid screenwriter like Riskin (Jo Swerling did the screenplay). In one scene, in which he had to cry, when Cromwell was unable to talk him through it, Stewart took a break, slipped outside the studio, lit a cigarette and, as he had with Margaret Sullavan, held it close to his face to allow the smoke to burn his eyes. Unfortunately, he feared there might be far more cigarettes available than great dramatic roles for him to use them in.
Offscreen, meanwhile, Jimmy continued to enjoy an ever-expanding roster of willing and available women. At least some of his “dates” during this period were created, arranged, and controlled by the studio, such as MGM’s leaked “rumor” in 1939 that Jimmy was “seriously” dating Olivia de Havilland. Always eager to keep their bachelors bathed in women, especially the men thirty and over (Stewart had just turned thirty-one) and living with male roommates (Swope, McCormick, and Logan were all still revolving semiregulars at the house in Brentwood), the studio came up with the idea to have de Havilland accompany Jimmy to the December 1939 New York premiere of her new and highly anticipated movie, Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, independently produced by David O. Selznick and distributed by MGM, a lavish, publicity-soaked affair that helped intensify the planted rumors of a Stewart/de Havilland romance.
De Havilland, who played Melanie in Wind, just happened to be represented by Leland Hayward, who was also good friends with Irene Selznick, David O.’s wife, and it was her idea, one with which Hayward enthusiastically agreed, to bring the couple together for the premiere. Although their “passion for each other” burned up the gossip columns, de Havilland later confessed, “At the New York premiere, Irene Selznick arranged for Jimmy to be my escort. At the time, I didn’t even know him, just about him.”
Next came a highly publicized “double-date” with Stewart, de Havilland, John Swope, and Elsie West Duval, a local southern girl from Newport News, Virginia. Duval happened to be best friends with actress and model Kay Aldridge, at the time one of the ten most photographed women in the world. When Duval sent a friendly letter to Aldridge via MGM and included an old high school photo she had come across, the letter and the photo somehow both wound up in Life magazine. Immediately after, MGM brought Duval to Hollywood. When a “double-date” between de Havilland and her “current beau,” Jimmy Stewart, his part-time roommate Swope, and Aldridge fell though at the last minute because Aldridge “couldn’t make it,” the studio asked Duval to accompany Swope in her place. Forty years later, Duval still remembered quite vividly the show the studio put on for her, and the one they did together for the world. “It was a great picnic. Olivia brought a delicious catered lunch with matching paper plates and napkins. After, Jimmy played the piano at his home and sang silly ditties before we went to the MGM studio for a private movie showing. What I recall most of all is that Jimmy, whether playing piano or flying model airplanes on the desert, seemed just like he was in the movies!”
With de Havilland running hotter than ever because of Gone With the Wind, and Jimmy sizzling off the collective heat of You Can’t Take It With You, they were a couple literally and figuratively made in studio heaven. MGM even insisted that de Havilland take flying lessons so she could indulge in Stewart’s favorite hobby. Less than six months later, in May of 1940, Motion Picture magazine, the People of its day, wondered aloud on its front cover, “WHAT KIND OF HUSBAND WILL JIMMY STEWART BE?” and inside leaked the “scoop” that the couple had told their respective families they were seriously in love and planning to wed.
If MGM was working the PR mills overtime for Stewart, it was at least in part because they still didn’t know exactly what to do with him next, and hoped that keeping him in the public eye would buy them some time. If they couldn’t show him off in a movie, they could keep him around in the gossips. He remained, as far as MGM was concerned, despite his success in You Can’t Take It With You, too tall, too thin, too gawky, and too lukewarm for long-term stardom. Mayer told cohorts that in his opinion James Stewart was no Gary Cooper, Paramount’s extraordinarily hot young leading man (and another Capra star).2 Mayer had a million ideas of what to do with Cooper if he could only get his hands on Hollywood’s number one male star.
If Jimmy was concerned about Mayer’s lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t show it in public. Instead, he played the good soldier, keeping busy doing interviews regarding his impending “marriage,” which he deftly managed to sidestep with his requisite politeness while he was secretly carrying on a real and top-secret affair with actress Loretta Young. Known in Hollywood’s whisper circles as a charter member of the clique of leading ladies who sexually devoured their co-stars, Young was in the front rank of “manizers,” beaten out for the top crown only by Marlene Dietrich, who, as one close to the scene recalls, “man or woman or both, fucked anything and everything that moved.”
Young had been married for a short time in her teens to actor Grant Withers, before divorcing him in 1930 and subsequently going on a sexual tear through Hollywood’s best men; whether they were married or single made no difference to her. At various times she had been linked romantically to Clark Gable (with whom she had an illegitimate child), Spencer Tracy (he was married at the time), George Brent, Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Cortez, Wayne Morris, Joe Mankiewicz, Robert Riskin, Jock Whitney, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, David Niven, and…Jimmy Stewart. Years later, Young told Parade magazine that when neither was married and they were “dating,” she “prayed like mad that Jimmy Stewart would ask me to marry him. And he didn’t! Jimmy took me out many times, but he just wasn’t sending the same signals I was.”
Indeed. Stewart, who was not at all in love with Young, was, rather, fearful of, a bit confused by, and more than a little tinged with guilt about her strong sexual advances, believing she would “pollute” him, his parents’ favorite biblically tinged word for what unmarried sex did to the soul. At the same time, Alexander had been regularly writing Jimmy letters, admonishing him for having not as yet found the right woman and settling down, never failing to add, in what seemed like the supreme contradiction, that he didn’t see how it was possible in a place like Hollywood for any man to find a decent woman. Translation: Come home, find a Christian wife, and take over the family business. His mother, on the other hand, quietly encouraged him to stay in Hollywood, take his time and choose carefully, to play the field and wait until the right woman came along: “Save your clean manly body for the right woman—bring it to her as an undefiled, unpolluted temple.” Well, that was a bit too little and a lot too late for anyone to ask of him. Besides, if he listened to his father, he was, in a way, disobeying his mother. And if he listened to Mother, he was disobeying his father.
Jimmy spent many evenings talking late into the night with Fonda about his problem. Although he was remarried, Fonda found time to help his friend through these difficult emotional times and went so far as to confess that he, too, continued to have problems with women and suggested to Jimmy that maybe he’d be better off getting out of the starlet sweepstakes altogether, at least for a while.
Jimmy’s next movie, The Ice Follies of 1939, directed by Reinhold Schünzel, featured the real International Ice Follies, a spectacle act and the raison d’etre for the film. In it, Larry Hall (Stewart) is part of an ice-skating team, along with his wife, Mary McKay (Joan Crawford), and his “best friend,” Eddie Burgess (Lew Ayres). When the act fails to catch fire, Mary decides to try her luck as a solo, and
lands a contract with “Monarch Studios,” with the understanding that she is single, both as a performer and in real life. She lies about her marriage and goes on to become a huge movie star. After a long separation, during which Stewart is struggling to put on an ice show in New York City, they meet up, reconcile, and Crawford decides to give up her career and return to being a full-time wife. To save the day (and, presumably, the movie), Monarch decides to hire Stewart to produce his wife’s next movie and even hires Lew Ayres to be in it. The films ends with a “spectacular” ice ballet in glorious Technicolor (the rest was shot in black and white).
The film may best be summed up by Crawford’s description of it: “Everyone was out of their creative minds when we made Ice Follies. Me, Jimmy Stewart and Lew Ayres as skaters…preposterous! A dancer I am, a skater I’m not…It was a catastrophe.”
The director was not one of the studio’s brighter talents, and the producer, Harry Rapf, was usually consigned to B-movie projects. These were sure signs of how Mayer regarded not just the film, but the status of his three stars. Ayres, coasting for a decade on the crest of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), had begun to look passé on-screen, and Crawford hoped the film would reinvent her as a singer to broaden her filmmaking options. That five of the seven songs she recorded for the movie ended up on the cutting room floor—this despite the film’s original (and unused) campaign slogan, “Crawford Sings!”—indicates how her vocals were received by the studio. Even the supposed “romance” between the newly divorced Crawford (from Franchot Tone) and her single, equally billed co-star barely received any play in the gossips, and the film quickly faded.
