by Marc Eliot
Audiences were shocked at the James Stewart they saw in Winchester ’73, a film that pushed back the noir of the forties to another century to better (and more safely) examine the paranoia that had split Hollywood brother against brother in the crackling fury of the blacklist. In every way this was a political, psychological, emotional, adventuresome, and wholly satisfying thriller.
Shooting on Winchester ’73 began on February 14, 1950, one day after Stewart received the Photoplay Magazine Gold Medal for being the screen’s most popular male performer of 1949, in acknowledgment of his portrayal of Monty Stratton.3 Similarly, The Stratton Story won for Best Picture, with medals going to producer Jack Cummings, coauthors Douglas Morrow and Guy Trosper, and, posthumously, to director Sam Wood, who had died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five the previous September. Appearing in person at the ceremonial dinner and adding a touch of genuine emotion was the real Monty Stratton.
The film opened in June to spectacular reviews, with critics noting the emergence of this James Stewart, a tough, strong, hard killer without a conscience who, at one point, pounds bad guy Dan Duryea’s head to a near pulp on the hard wood of a saloon bar, a scene that anyone who sees it for the first time is not likely to forget. According to screenwriter Borden Chase, “When the picture was given a sneak preview, there had been some titters in the audience at seeing Stewart’s name in the opening titles of a western. This was before Broken Arrow was released. But once he smashed Duryea in the bar, there was no more snickering.” The New York Herald Tribune said that “Stewart takes to horses and fast shooting as though he had been doing nothing else throughout his illustrious career.”
Indeed, this was the first film to showcase the so-called “mature” Stewart, although hints at his deeper and darker side could be found as early as Mr. Smith and throughout It’s a Wonderful Life. However, whereas Frank Capra had used those qualities in neoreligious fantasies of sacrifice and resurrection, Mann put them into a far more complex psychological context that, as critic Richard Jameson wrote, “was not only a rock-ribbed Western revenge saga—Stewart on the trail of brother Stephen McNally, who had murdered their father—but an amazingly encyclopedic cross-section of a genre Mann was about to set his own brand to.” Without strain, Winchester ’73 manages to incorporate a talismanic weapon, an epic marksmanship contest, a cavalry-and-Indians battle, a shady lady on a stagecoach (Shelley Winters), a stalwart sidekick for the hero (the great Millard Mitchell), a crazy outlaw (Dan Duryea in excelsis), a tin-horn gambler-gunrunner (John McIntire), a bank holdup, a poker game at a halfway house, miscellaneous chases and contretemps, and Wyatt Earp (Will Geer). Stewart and McNally’s sibling rivalry is a study in controlled frenzy from the moment they sight each other and slap empty holders (they’re in Earp’s domain) to a cliffside climax wherein Mann’s direction notes call for the “screaming trajectory of every ricochet.” Critic Elliott Stein went even further, highlighting the link between Stewart’s postwar desires (and combat traumas) to the kind of movies he chose throughout much of the new decade, when he declared that “Mann’s reputation rests principally on the series of classic westerns he made in the 1950s, five of them starring James Stewart…one of the great actor-director partnerships, with few precedents in American movies…with Stewart’s characters nearly always haunted by the past and the action triggered by a reaction to a traumatic incident that took place before the story begins.” Critic Terence Rafferty echoes this interpretation: “The Westerners played by Stewart in Winchester ’73 [and the other Mann Westerns he starred in] are, like noir heroes, mighty ambiguous characters, motivated either by ignoble emotions like the desire for revenge or by the urge to distance themselves from an unsavory, violent past.”
In every way, Winchester ’73 was a triumph and a turning point for Stewart. Overlapping with his new life as a married man, it signaled the emergence, the reinvention really, of a more steely maturity and an emotionally complex, edgier Jimmy Stewart, whose vulnerabilities in real life and on the screen became the basis for many of the twenty-four films he would make in the fifties. The depth of range, emotional upheaval, romantic exploration, and compulsive dramatics in that remarkable run remains unequaled in the history of modern movies.4
Jimmy had already displayed his toughness to the world in wartime, even as he proved to himself, beyond any doubt, that he was once and forever a Maitland and a Stewart. The challenge for him now was to find a way to reconcile the emotional toll hard combat had taken on him with the image of the youthful innocent the American public (and Hollywood) still thought he was.
Beginning with It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy’s characters took on a dimension that had not been evident in any of the prewar characters he had portrayed. Even in Capra’s 1946 throw-back glorification with-cracks of small-town Americana, these differences began to show. In simpler times, as Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy’s heroism had been less complex because it was purely external, the hoarse throat a metaphor for democracy’s struggle to be heard, while the character simultaneously (and quite predictably, in formulaic Hollywood fare) falls in a goofy swoon-love with his secretary. In Life, it’s a different story. George Bailey never even gets as far as the edge of town before his character drops into a despair that turns hauntingly inward; it is the emotional suffering more than the social injustice that pumps the blood through the temples of this movie.
With Mann, Jimmy found something Capra could no longer supply for him, a suitable mise-en-scène, a dynamic correlative to the real horrors of war, a physical turf that extended the mental terrain. Whatever it was that Mann tapped in to, Jimmy’s performances in these films come across as less acting than acting out, less sentimental than psychosomatic, less intellectually plotted than emotionally scarred. Making Winchester ’73, Jimmy found a fitting outlet for his shell-shocked sensibilities, and in it and the rest of the Mann Westerns he would set the stage for his grand emotional leap into Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which Jimmy, as Scottie Ferguson, does not merely react to the nightmarish circumstances in which he finds himself ensnared, he remains trapped within them, unable to escape, the haunting no longer distinguishable from the haunted.
Broken Arrow opened three months after Winchester ’73, due at least in part to the problem of Albert Maltz (if word got out that he had actually written the film, it might suffer at the box office), and also because Fox had recently released several films that could be classified as “liberal” (Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit, Elia Kazan’s Pinky and Gentleman’s Agreement) in an atmosphere of committee hearings and witch hunts. However, it benefited from the success of Winchester ’73 and the crest of a wave of Stewart popularity.
The “gurrrlll,” meanwhile, as Jimmy liked to refer to Gloria in private (“my wife” in public, almost never referring to her by name), was eager to get away with him as soon as possible to take a vacation. Prior to the opening of the two films and the start of production on Harvey, she persuaded her husband to take her and the two boys to England. While there, Jimmy took her around to the places he remembered from his wartime days, and the press, at his request, let them alone as much as possible. It was a fun trip, one he would remember fondly, coming as it did at a time when he had managed to resurrect his career and felt he was once more flying high.
Back in time for the premieres of his two Westerns, he was ready to resume work, and the first order of business was the second part of the Wasserman-conceived Winchester ’73 deal, the shooting of the film Harvey.
Jimmy brought his rabbit act to the big screen under the creative auspices of Henry Koster, in charge of transforming the stage play into a film. The plot of Harvey is light as the head of the foam at the top of a beer, if not quite as frothy or substantial. Elwood P. Dowd (Stewart), a gentle, always inebriated philosopher of life, who enjoys bringing happiness to others, spends most of his days down at the local pub engaged in conversation with his favorite drinking buddy, an invisible rabbit he calls Harvey. A bachelor at forty, hi
s sister Veta (Josephine Hull) and niece Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne) are concerned their well-to-do brother and uncle, despite his all his money, will never find a wife. When Veta decides to have her brother committed, Elwood manages to get her taken away while he walks out scot-free. Not only that, but the admissions director of the hospital begins to believe that “Harvey” is real, as do several other staff members, all of whom undergo a transformation into much nicer people. Eventually people come to accept Elwood and Harvey and decide the world is a better place when both the man and his six-foot rabbit are in it.
Harvey opened on October 13, 1950, to less than spectacular reviews. The film left critics and audiences alike scratching their heads, wondering what all the fuss was about (a few who had seen Fay in the Broadway show lamented his absence), and the film was quickly pulled from release. While he never liked to respond directly to critics, Stewart admitted to friends that the film had been a mistake, that he shouldn’t have done it, especially after Winchester ’73. Nonetheless, if Harvey proved a financial and/or popular success (Harvey’s eventual acceptance, like that of It’s a Wonderful Life, came much later, due mostly to repeated showings on television), the trajectory of his career might have taken a different turn. Because it was Winchester ’73 that proved the big film of the three, Stewart wanted to continue to work with Mann, and to discard the slow, drawling comedies that once made him seem purist and altruistic, but now, as a grown man in his forties, something like brain-damaged. For much of the rest of the fifties, he would appear in offbeat, darker films, culminating in the most offbeat, darkest film of the decade, perhaps of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But that was still a long way off.
Despite Harvey’s financial failure, it was part of a film deal that finally gained Stewart entrance into the millionaires’ club, thanks in large part to Lew Wasserman’s adjusted gross clause. After the studio recouped its original production costs, Stewart received 50 percent of the two films’ profits with net limited to 25 percent for distribution and studio overhead. While this may not seem like much today, it was revolutionary at the time. For a film that cost a little over $900,000 to make—the so-called negative cost of Winchester ’73, Stewart eventually earned more than $600,000, a figure that would have been inconceivable as a prefigured salary on a film with that kind of budget. With the added $200,000 plus percentage he earned for Harvey, the two-picture deal for the first time put him over the magical million-dollar figure in earnings for a single year.5
Shortly after completing Harvey, Stewart shot another quickie, Walter Lang’s The Jackpot, a goof-ball comedy without laughs about the woes of sudden inheritance. He did it for Fox, and for the money.
To make his final film of the year, Jimmy went to Great Britain where, on September 25, at the Fox affiliate Denham Studios, he began filming Henry Koster’s No Highway in the Sky (aka No Highway), written by acclaimed novelist Nevil Shute, whose novel On the Beach would thrust him into the front ranks of popular fiction writers. The film is an airplane drama about a plane in danger of exploding due to structural defects, paranoia a popular theme in fifties films when commercial flying increased dramatically. Stewart did it for his love for flying and a chance to return yet again to England with his wife and sons.
His co-stars were Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich, who made it clear she was unhappy to be co-starring with the much younger Glynis Johns, or to be reunited with her former co-star and one-time lover Stewart, with whom she had made Destry Rides Again. This time around, Dietrich was relegated to a character role, while the much younger, sexier Glynis Johns got all the attention. On top of that, the happily married Stewart was not at all interested in the aging German movie star.
As a result, the tension between the two stars was palpable, and the production was not at all aided by the fact that during filming on November 15, Stewart had to be rushed to the hospital, doubled over in pain. His emergency appendectomy and week-long stay in the hospital added to the problems of getting the film delivered on time. Production was completed on December 29, and that same day Stewart and the family flew back to America.
One other significant and much happier event took place at the end of 1950. Just before they left for England, Gloria found out she was pregnant. On November 11, Hedda Hopper broke the story in the Los Angeles Times that Jimmy Stewart and his wife, Gloria, were expecting a baby.
Two weeks later, Louella O. Parsons, writing for the L.A. Times’s chief rival, the Hearst-owned L.A. Examiner, scooped Hopper and everyone else when she revealed that Gloria Stewart was going to have twins.
“It’s the best Christmas present either of us could have,” she told the reporter over the phone, just before Jimmy’s emergency surgery.
“That’s my gurrrrrl,” Jimmy told friends back in the States, with the biggest grin they’d ever seen riding side-saddle atop his gently rounded jaw.
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“I played Jimmy Stewart’s wife so often that Dick Powell once rose at a banquet and introduced him as ‘My wife’s husband.’”
The first order of business for Jimmy and Gloria Stewart was to find a new home large enough for a family of six. Jimmy’s first choice was to build a place from the ground up on a little piece of property he had had his eye on for some time, just off the coast of Pacific Palisades above Malibu, but Gloria rejected that idea because she felt the steep cliffs, endless beaches, and the warm waters of the inviting ocean were too dangerous for small children.
She favored a two-story, ivy-covered Tudor house on North Roxbury Drive in the heart of Beverly Hills that she initially described as looking more like a dormitory than a home, something that made Jimmy laugh, before realizing that a dormitory might be exactly what they were going to need.
They bought the Tudor in January 1951 and moved in later that month. The interior was plain and spacious, with non–show business furnishings more likely to be found in Indiana than Beverly Hills. Gloria was in charge of the décor, and she chose a combination of muted beige and green tones as her basic color scheme. She had the living room built around a large fireplace at one end, and put Jimmy’s grand piano on the other. Several family-oriented oil paintings were hung, including their collection of Rouaults alongside paintings by disabled veterans that Jimmy was especially fond of. Upstairs were five bedrooms, one for each child and one for the Stewarts, with two rooms ready and waiting for the expected twins. The lower level of the house was finished with a TV/family room, a kitchen, a breakfast room (where most of the meals were eaten), and a formal dining room, used mostly for entertaining guests.
Gloria gave birth on May 7, 1951, at Cedars of Lebanon in Beverly Hills to twins, Kelly and Judy. “Where Gloria and I got so fortunate was that we got girl twins to go with the two boys. We had decided, when we expected just one child, that it would be named Kelly. We wanted to use a family name, and Kelly was a name for either sex, and this represented my father’s side of the family. Kelly Jackson Stewart, that’s her name, Jackson being a name from my mother’s side.” They named the other girl Judy. “Judy Powell Stewart was what we named her. The Powell part was for Gloria’s family. But the Judy—well, that was plain sentimentality on both our parts. Hoagy [Carmichael] wrote a song years ago that I could play on the piano and sing, and Gloria remembered that I used to play it to her before we got married.”
The actual birth had been an unexpectedly difficult cesarean because of the size of the twins, further complicated by what was believed to have been an unrelated intestinal condition discovered during the operation that grew progressively worse in the hours immediately following delivery. The girls were perfectly healthy—Kelly weighed in at 5 pounds 14 ounces, Judy at 6 pounds 2 ounces—but that same day Gloria underwent first minor, then what was described by her doctor, Mark Rabwin, as major surgery.
The next few days were tense, punctuated by a series of improvements and relapses, then more surgery, before Gloria was suddenly rushed to intensive care and Jimmy was told she was gravely ill. He remained
at her side as much as the doctors would allow, and when he wasn’t, he either paced nervously outside her room, chain-smoking, or sat on a bench in the hallway, his head buried in his hands or his fingers bent under his chin as he looked up and silently prayed to God.
Two days later, Gloria was declared officially out of danger. After that, she made a rapid recovery and on June 6 was released from the hospital. What happened next was something Jimmy could never completely explain, other than to attribute it to what he liked to call his absent-mindedness, perhaps understandable after all the drama of the past several weeks. “I remember painfully the day I was to bring her home from the hospital after giving birth to our twin girls. I had gone there to help her gather her things and said to her, ‘I’ll get the car and bring it around to the ambulance entrance. Take the elevator and I’ll meet you there.’ Well, I went down, but somehow I forget and went by a photographer’s to pick up some pictures. He asked how Mrs. Stewart was, the light turned on in my head and I dashed back to the hospital. I never lived that one down.”
After Gloria’s release, Stewart spent several days with her at home assisting his wife’s long-time governess, a well-trained French-Canadian by the name of Irene Des Lierres who had cared first for the boys and was now assigned the task of minding the twins. Only when he felt that Gloria was safely on the road to recovery did Jimmy go back to work, to join the production of his newest film, The Greatest Show on Earth. Directed by Hollywood pioneer Cecil B. DeMille, this was an old-fashioned action-adventure-mystery spectacle, the kind DeMille could do in his sleep (some thought he actually did) in which Jimmy played Buttons, a warm and friendly troupe clown who is secretly a fugitive doctor, speaks as little as possible, and never takes off his white-face makeup, because, we finally learn, he is, in fact, a murderer on the run. To hide from the law, he has somehow gotten himself hired onto a traveling circus where, predictably, tragedies like fires, high-wire mishaps, and train derailments strike as often and as regularly as the cymbals in the house band, and where the clichés of melodrama pile up like fresh-popped corn in a tub full of fake butter. This film had a lot of artificial flavor.
