by Marc Eliot
Broken Arrow (1950), which shot for nine weeks in northern Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon, was a real departure for Jimmy, the first real Western he had ever been in (not counting the jocular Destry Rides Again). His wedding to Gloria was scheduled to take place at the completion of the principal photography.
Had Jimmy not been so caught up in real-life romance, it is likely he never would have agreed to appear in the film at all, especially not one as artificially romantic, idealistic, and blatantly liberal as this one (as opposed to the unabashedly patriotic The Stratton Story). Broken Arrow’s script and leading role were, in truth, far more suited to the rough-hewn looks, talents, and sensibilities of a Henry Fonda. The brainstorm of Selznick executive Julian Blaustein, the film tells the story of a relationship between an Apache chief, Cochise (Jeff Chandler), and Tom Jeffords (Stewart), based on the novel Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold. It was the first postwar, post-Holocaust picture in Hollywood to deal with the nineteenth-century plight of the Indians, from their point of view, a film in which they spoke educated “American” English. Because the chosen screenwriter, Albert Maltz, had by now made it to the blacklist as part of the notorious Hollywood Ten, a particularly vociferous group that refused to cooperate with the committee, he was forced to use a “front.” In this instance, it was Michael Blankfort who was given screenwriter credit, for a payoff, for the movie.1
The whole project was another specially bundled deal from Wasserman, who represented not only Jimmy but also Blaustein, Daves, and secretly, Maltz, and sold them together as a “package” to 20th Century Fox.
To play the part of (white) Jeffords’s Apache love interest (a mixed pairing that pleased no one, from the studio heads to the FBI to the Apache tribe to mainstream audiences), a young, white contract player by the name of Debra Paget was chosen. She was only sixteen years old, twenty-five years younger than her toupeed leading man.
On the last day of two weeks of additional filming on Fox’s back-lot in Los Angeles, in anticipation of their upcoming nuptials, Jimmy and Gloria were surprised by a shower of wedding gifts consisting of fifty-two Indian blankets, forty pairs of beaded moccasins, thirteen turquoise necklaces, eleven deerskin blouses, thirty-seven hand-woven baskets, and one papoose carrier. All of it had come from the three hundred native Apaches Blaustein had hired to give the film an added sense of authenticity; it was a gesture that deeply moved Jimmy, who had come to know and admire the culture of the Native American tribe.
Their first night alone back in Los Angeles, Jimmy presented Gloria with a solid gold compact he had had custom made to match a similar cigarette case he had previously given to her. The next morning he took his bride-to-be to get their marriage license.
No one could have been happier than Jimmy, who proudly proclaimed to anyone within earshot, reporters included, that he had found his “perfect” bride, “the right girl,” “an absolutely beautiful girl,” “a funny girl,” one with a “great sense of humor” who was “devoted,” and “just about everything you could think of.” This mountain of public praise was lovely and heartfelt, but the parts he left out told the truer tale. By finding someone suitable to marry, he was finally ready to take his place alongside, rather than below, Alexander in the hierarchy of Stewarts. And what was it he loved most about her? In 1970, for an interview with Modern Maturity magazine, Stewart described Gloria this way: “She’s a little like my mother, who was somewhat domineering but always got what she wanted in a very kindly way.”
Gloria, in fact, had been the aggressor, one of the reasons the marriage had a chance of working. “When I first met Jimmy at Gary Cooper’s dinner party, I wasn’t divorced yet, just separated, so I was in no hurry to get married,” she told one reporter. “And all my friends told me I was making a large mistake marrying a bachelor; they’re too hard to train!” Privately, Gloria had been disillusioned by the events of her first marriage. Her husband, a trust-fund brat, was an inveterate womanizer and a bad alcoholic, whose skirt-chasing and drinking both increased after they were wed. The marriage didn’t last long but the heartbreak did, and while love may have been the motivating force the first time around, this time Gloria was more realistic. She told friends, including the Coopers, that she was looking for a decent man with a strong character, a proper father who could help raise her sons, and someone with enough money to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed. The extremely trainable, naturally domestic, wealthy, and never-married Stewart perfectly fit her bill as much as she did his.2
Their relationship was not considered as perfect by Jimmy’s family. For all her good qualities, Gloria was also a divorcée, a Maitland-Stewart no-no. The unspoken family credo was you got married and stayed married. She smoked, which to Alexander signaled a certain type of woman in which Hollywood specialized. And she was not a particularly good cook, housekeeper, or a regular churchgoer. The fact that she seemed capable of actually making Jimmy happy registered low on the scale of the Stewart family’s initial evaluation of his chosen bride.
To stay on good terms with them, Gloria had no objections when Jimmy insisted, at Alexander’s urging, that he and Gloria go before a committee on marriage and divorce at the Presbytery of Los Angeles. After a careful review of all the “facts,” it was decided by the powers that be that a Presbyterian minister would not be guilty of any impropriety in officiating at the ceremony.
The decision held meaning and importance only to his parents. Jimmy had not been a regular churchgoer since leaving Princeton. As far as he was concerned, they could be married at City Hall. But to keep peace in the family he and Gloria agreed to this ritual of consent and tried to look pleased when the committee gave them its blessing.
The date of the wedding was set for August 9, at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church, to be followed by a reception at the Brentwood home of Peggy and Jack Bolton, Bolton being one of Wasserman’s assistants and a good friend of Jimmy’s. Three days before, Alexander and Bessie arrived in Pasadena by train from Pennsylvania (Gloria’s parents were unable to attend the wedding because her mother was hospitalized in New York. Her father, also ill and living in Colorado Springs, died a month after the ceremony).
A raucous, good-natured “stag,” or bachelor, party was thrown by John Swope and Myron McCormick at Chasen’s, where a FAREWELL sign hung over the front door and two midgets appeared dressed in diapers. Several, but by no means all, of Jimmy’s friends turned out for the occasion, and they drank until they were plastered to the walls. Everyone except Jimmy, that is, who had a few that caused his already flipflopping stomach to churn like a nervous volcano.
He arrived at the church dressed in a blue suit, looking a bit pallid, and, as one witness recalled, “rather bewildered.” His best man was Billy Grady, a choice that surprised some and shocked others who had been in his close circle for years. Grady was certainly a friend, but everyone asked why it wasn’t Henry Fonda. For that matter, where was Fonda? Not at the wedding, that was for sure. Nor was Dore Schary. Nor was Guthrie McClintic. If the bachelor party had been meant as a farewell, Jimmy apparently took it literally and attempted to leave single life, and those still living it, behind.
The bride, dressed in a ballerina-length gray satin dress with push-up sleeves and a square neckline, had a band of flowers that looked like a halo on her curled brown locks. Her sister, Ruth Draddy, was the matron of honor, and her brother-in-law, Gregg, gave her away. Those who did attend from Jimmy’s world were the Coopers, Frank Morgan, the David Nivens, the George Murphys, an unaccompanied (separated) Spencer Tracy, Ann Sothern, Mary Livingston, Mrs. Van Johnson, Dorothy McGuire, Johnny Swope, and Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward, who traveled to Hollywood especially for the ceremony and headed directly back east the next day. The ceremony took twelve minutes, after which Jimmy kissed his bride, then they walked through the doors of the church into the bright Southern California sunshine where he kissed her again for the photographers, press, and the thousand fans who had gathered behind the b
arricades to catch a glimpse of their favorite star.
Two days later, the couple left for Akron, Ohio, where Stewart was the grand marshal of the National Soap Box Derby, after which they traveled on to Cleveland to attend the convention of the Disabled American Veterans as personal guests of Gen. Jonathan Wainwright. Their next stop was a brief one, in Indiana, to visit some relatives and say a quick hello/goodbye to his parents. They then visited Gloria’s mother in New York City, followed, at last, by a two-week honeymoon in Honolulu.
Upon their return to Los Angeles, Gloria convinced Jimmy to move into her spacious house up on Coldwater Canyon, rather than she into his smaller place, mainly because of the boys. There simply wasn’t enough room in Jimmy’s one-bedroom pad in Brentwood for everyone. Having settled in at Gloria’s, and happily assuming the role of father as well as husband, Jimmy was, at last, ready to get back to making movies.
Lew Wasserman was waiting for him with welcome arms and a new deal, one he felt was “perfect” for the actor, a movie called Winchester ’73. The film would change the direction of his career. The deal behind it would change his life.
The seeds of the negotiations for Winchester ’73 lay in Wasserman’s early forties “million-dollar contract” with Warner Bros. for their second-tier player Ronald Reagan, the “Errol Flynn of the B’s,” as he was then known in the industry. Wasserman had managed to secure for Reagan $758,000 from the studio for forty weeks of guaranteed work a year, for seven years. During this time Reagan appeared in twenty-nine films, including William Keighley’s Brother Rat (1938) and Lloyd Bacon’s Knute Rockne, All American (1940—in which he said the immortal line, “Win one for the Gipper!”), before giving what is generally considered his best on-screen performance, in Sam Wood’s Kings Row(1942), which was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Black and White Cinematography (James Wong Howe). After the critical and commercial success of Kings Row, Jack Warner believed Reagan was at last ready to make the leap to A-list stardom. To prevent him from signing with another studio, as Wasserman implied was about to happen, Warner bumped up Reagan’s contract to a cool million a year, breaking that glass ceiling for contract players.
Wasserman was now looking to make the same kind of spectacular money jump for Stewart at Universal, only not as a long-term deal, but within the limits of per picture framework. Wasserman set up a gross-percentage deal for Jimmy to appear in Winchester ’73. While not unprecedented, only a handful of stars had ever been awarded this golden goose. Most of those who bargained for back-end money usually wound up settling for the illusory promise but not the money of net profits.3
The key to making the deal happen was Jimmy’s phenomenal success on Broadway in the title role of Harvey at a time when his film career had been at a low. Although the show had already been a hit before he filled in for Frank Fay, it was nothing like the smash it became with Jimmy.
During the run, Wasserman quietly negotiated a series of well-planned moves to ensure that Jimmy would be offered the title role in the screen version. First he brokered the sale of Harvey’s film rights to William Goetz, the head of production at Universal, in what today might look like a suspiciously inside deal, as every other studio had wanted a chance to get their hands on the property. Goetz (who happened to be Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law), paid the playwright Mary C. Chase, also represented by Wasserman, $150,000 for the rights to her play. Once he had the rights, Goetz offered Jimmy $200,000 plus a share of the film’s net profits if he agreed to star in it. To get him, Goetz had to make the offer through Wasserman, who wanted a second movie for Jimmy built in to the deal, with terms that sounded irresistible to Goetz on every level. Wasserman offered Jimmy no salary, but, sight unseen (meaning the property), half the gross profits. Starring in the film version of Harvey, a role Jimmy very much wanted (despite Frank Fay’s spirited effort to get it), was the part of the deal that helped Wasserman convince him to take it.4
Wasserman also insisted that, since he was, in a way, subsidizing it, Jimmy have considerable control over the making of that second film, which was Winchester ’73. No other cast member (including his popular co-star Shelley Winters) could have the same-size star billing; Jimmy’s name had to come first in the credits. He also had to have director approval and approval of the rest of the cast.
The deal so angered Mayer, who was already far along the process of being eased out at MGM by Schary but still quite vocal in his opinions on how the film business was now run, that he declared James Stewart and Lew Wasserman the two men most responsible for destroying what was left of the crumbling studio system. And he cut Goetz out of his will.5
The last and most important business at hand for Jimmy (and Wasserman) was finding the right director for the second film, and after finally getting around to reading the script, Jimmy realized for the first time just how important that choice was.
Because, for a change, this one was a genuine work of art.
18
“Winchester ’73 was a desperation move that proved a lifesaver.”
—JIMMY STEWART
Anthony Mann was a Jewish-American careerist loner who vicariously experienced the horrors of the Holocaust while trying to assimilate himself into the great American dream, a cultural and artistic conflict that cast a long shadow on his life and work. He was born Emil Bundsmann, a name he eventually abandoned, some claimed because it sounded too Nazi-Germanic, while others believed he thought it was “too Jewish,” and was more than willing to leave the bund and keep the man in order to pass into the mainstream of the all-American WASP ideal.
Mann was born in 1906 in San Diego, California, where both his parents taught philosophy at the university. Early on, his family moved to the more culturally diverse boundaries of New York City where, when young Emil was ten, he developed an intense interest in stage performing. He frequented a Manhattan branch of the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) and while still in high school acted and directed plays for it. He dropped out at the age of sixteen to earn money, lying his way into a night watchman’s job at Westinghouse Electric in order to be free to spend his days looking for acting work. When he found none, he quit his $35-a-week job for one that paid $10, serving as a messenger boy for the Stagers acting troupe. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Triangle Theater in Greenwich Village, then worked his way through a number of theatrical groups until he formed his own stock company, the Red Barn Playhouse, which traveled the Northeast corridor, before taking up permanent residence in Long Island.1 Eventually he landed a leading role in the Broadway production The Squall (in which he did double duty as the assistant stage manager) and made his directorial debut helming Christopher Morley’s Thunder on the Left, which was followed by a series of successful Broadway shows he directed as the newly anglicized “Anthony Mann.”
He was introduced to film while serving as a New York auditions runner for David O. Selznick, and eventually helped cast many of the supporting roles in Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, Gregory Ratoff’s Intermezzo (1939), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, because Selznick wanted his films fleshed out with Broadway caliber talent. From Selznick, Mann moved on to Paramount, where he became an assistant to the great Preston Sturges. When the studio felt he was ready, it gave Mann a chance to direct a movie of his own, Dr. Broadway(1942), which is where the public caught its first glimpse of what was to become, in a series of distinctive films, the Mann-ish style of forties noir. As the decade drew to a close, Mann caught a career break when Austrian-born Fritz Lang, another noiree, and Jimmy’s first choice, dropped out as director of Winchester ’73 after concluding that the forty-two-year-old slim-Jim actor was just not strong enough to handle the part of tough-guy totem Lin McAdam.
In the winter of 1950, Jimmy screened movies and Mann’s body of work, and was especially impressed by Devil’s Doorway (1950).2 He thought the not-yet-released film was a darker, rougher, and altogether more period-specific Western than his own Broken Arrow and that it had exactly the atmospher
ics that Winchester ’73 needed. By choosing Mann, Jimmy began what was to become one of the most dynamic, if darkest, creative partnerships to emerge in postwar Hollywood.
Winchester ’73, a delirium of auteurist vision, is a Freudian nightmare played out in the time code of adolescent America, wherein one brother, Lin McAdam, is in a rage of revenge against the other, “Dutch” Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), for the killing of their father, although we do not learn of this aspect of their sibling relationship until the end of the film. Undoubtedly, the idea of “avenging his father’s death” was a notion that appealed to the newly married Stewart, perhaps feeling for the first time able to compete with Alexander on every level. The idea of playing his rescuer slipped along the curvy edge of their longstanding, if unacknowledged Oedipal rivalry, doubled in the film by a brother Jimmy did not have in real life.
Added to the story is a layer that at first glance teeters dangerously close to gimmickry, the passing along of a rifle, the eponymous Winchester ’73, a talisman that here actually serves as an astonishingly bold phallic symbol. Its long barrel, fiery ejaculations of bullets, and blood-battles for ownership are pure Mann, nuanced in a stylishly explosive way. He made Jimmy, for the first time in films, walk tall, ride hard, and act tough, and indeed he did. He shot to kill and seemed quite at home doing it.
The film, budgeted at a modest $850,000 for a thirty-day shooting schedule, escalated to $918,000 before production was completed. Most of it was shot in Tucson, Arizona, with the opening sequence—the contest for the rifle—taking a full four days before Mann was satisfied that he had captured on film what he wanted, and the final dizzying, dazzling dialogue-thick shootout between brothers on location as well. To appear skillful as a sharpshooter, Stewart spent hours every day for weeks, until his knuckles were red sore, on the firing range taking lessons from Herb Parsons, an expert dispatched from the Winchester movie (and who did most of the trick shots performed by Stewart in the film).
