Jimmy Stewart
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The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther summed up the critical and popular reception of The Glenn Miller Story this way: “Mr. Stewart and Miss Allyson in their roles—the gentle ease, the solid form of their strong acting—puts the living throb into the film. It is they who make genuine the tender sentiments that are worked in behind the songs. This is a wonderful achievement, of which they and their associates may be proud…. Not since [Michael Curtiz’s] Yankee Doodle Dandy, the film about George M. Cohan, have we seen as appealing and melodic a musical biography as this charmer…and not since Jimmy Cagney’s spirited playing of Mr. Cohan have we seen as likeable and respectable a portrait of a show-world personage as James Stewart’s genial performance in this picture’s title role.”
The film proved so popular with audiences that Jimmy agreed to go on what was a relatively rare national live tour to local movie theaters for standing-room-only in-person promotional purposes. He had a significant financial stake in the picture, and knew that he could make a big difference in attendance just by showing up in person at certain key theaters around the country. In an era before television and radio talk shows revolutionized the way a film was promoted by its star, he tirelessly pursued the public appearance route, taking his wife and father along with him—Gloria for company, Alexander to attempt to raise the old man’s spirits, or at least keep him busy so that he wouldn’t swallow himself in grief and loneliness following the death of beloved Bessie.
When the tour passed through Coral Gables, Florida, Jimmy’s sixth-grade teacher, retired, showed up to congratulate him on all his success. It was a gesture that touched Jimmy deeply. However, it was Alexander’s brief appearances that always stole the show when he would tell audiences “I used to keep Jimmy’s Oscar [for The Philadelphia Story] in the window of my hardware store. But it’s no longer a conversation piece. So I moved it to one of my knife case counters. It’s out of balance and needs another Oscar for the other end of the counter.” This always got a big laugh while Jimmy would smile and pretend to look sheepishly at his dad.
Nevertheless, by the time he hit the road, Stewart had relatively little remaining interest in the movie, Glenn Miller, or Anthony Mann. Even before its release, he had quietly decided to take his career in yet another direction, surprising everyone (except Wasserman) by accepting an offer to work again with Alfred Hitchcock, despite Rope’s having been an unhappy and unsatisfying experience that nearly ended the actor’s career.
The reteaming of Stewart and Hitchcock would result in the most inspired, moving, darkly mysterious and beautiful trio of films of the decade, surpassing in sum even the four the great director would make over the course of his career with Cary Grant. As with the suave, urbane, British sophisticate in whom Hitchcock used to project his own dark side on-screen, the director saw something similar within Jimmy that he felt had not yet been sufficiently brought to the surface of the screen by any other director.
While previously Capra had played upon Jimmy’s easily identifiable idealism, and Mann brought out his repressed wartime fear and rage, in Hitchcock’s view neither had come close to revealing the true greatness of Jimmy’s talent: his ability to act out the profound inner, emotional tragedy of unrequited love. That was the side of Jimmy that Hitchcock was after, and, in classic fashion, the side of Jimmy he got, in the three movies in the fifties that chronicled, in loose sequential progression, the devastating emotional consequences of the risks, the dangers, and the disappointments of love, marriage, and loss. All three featured iceberg Madonnas unrelentingly beautiful and ultimately unattainable.
Hitchcock’s greatness may be defined as his ability to bring to the surface of the screen, i.e., the world, whatever it was his characters felt on the inside, to visualize both the implications and the consequences of their internal hopes, desires, wishes, and dreams. When, in most instances, someone might think in a moment of anger, “I’d like to kill my wife,” Hitchcock’s characters more often than not find a way to externalize, or act out those impulses. This surfacing of a character’s psychological subtext, of their inner, often subconscious feelings shown on-screen as if they were ordinary, everyday actions, placed Hitchcock’s best movies in a world of hard and deep moral consequence, not to mention intensely exciting cinematic action. As the director, he presented a moral view of the world that was as universal as it was Hitch-specific. In it no one is completely innocent, and therefore no one ever truly escapes the fate of the guilty. Villains are sympathetic, and heroes are imperfect.
Hitchcock’s two favorite on-screen projections of his own inner and idealized self were Cary Grant, whose physical beauty served as an ironic, transparent cover (for both his and Hitch’s real-life darkness as much as the darkness of the characters Grant portrayed), in Suspicion(1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959); and Jimmy, whose ordinary, medium-cool down-home looks masked a faulty nuclear reactor of repression, of unexplored desires and of staring-into-the-face-of-death fear. The first intimations of Hitchcock’s Jimmy are glimped in Rope. Phillip and Brandon have acted out their inner desire to murder, but have not directly, or consciously, seen it as an extension of their homosexual desires for each other (they are gay, but do not “see” that erotic connection to the motivation of killing together for the sake of killing). Caddell (Stewart), the teacher, serves as their moral guide as he eventually discovers the truth behind their actions (but not their feelings). Thus, what links Caddell to the students, a link that allows him to “solve” the case, is also what separates him from them. He is consciously repulsed by their actions, but subconsciously drawn to their homosexuality, the link to his deeper wish to have participated, at some thrillingly dark level, in the crime itself. That Caddell never makes that connection, or even suspects (or senses) it, is what limits the film’s Hitchcockian-style power of suggestion. Jimmy’s characters in Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and most disturbingly in Vertigo (1958) have no such blind spots. It is, in fact, their awareness, at varying levels of recognition, of the effects of their own repressed desires (usually coming full blown during the climax of the movie), that makes the characters and the films so dramatically compelling.
Rear Window was the first picture Hitchcock made under a new nine-picture deal with Paramount, put together by Lew Wasserman, with five to be directed and produced by Hitchcock and four to be produced by the studio, with Hitchcock only directing. He was to earn $150,000 per picture, plus 10 percent of the profits (adjusted for prearranged, agreed-upon budgetary limits), and given eventual outright negative ownership of the five pictures he produced and directed, among them the three that starred Jimmy, Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955), and Vertigo (1958).1
The film was based on a short story titled “It Had to Be Murder,” which first appeared in the February 1942 edition of Dime Detective magazine, written by William Irish, a pseudonym (one among many he used) for the great Cornell Woolrich. Dime Detective’s pulpy stories had long supplied Hollywood with noirish material for B-movie thrillers. Woolrich happened to be one of Hitchcock’s favorite writers. The screen rights to “Murder” had originally been sold to producer Buddy DeSylva, and then to Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan, both of whom immediately saw it as the perfect vehicle for Jimmy. Both would remain with the picture as noncredited but well-paid coproducers, a stipulation Jimmy insisted on when Hitchcock offered him the part.
To adapt the story to film, Hitchcock called upon the talents of the brilliant John Michael Hayes (another Wasserman client), whom he had met at Warner while the director was filming Dial M for Murder. One of the key ingredients Hitchcock wanted Hayes to add to the story was a girlfriend for L. B. Jeffries, or “Jeff” (whose character was loosely based on the Life magazine photographer Robert Capa), confined to a wheelchair while nursing a broken leg, the result of his having gotten too close to the action of a race-car crash, which has left him in a toe-to-hip plaster cast.2 Grace Kelly was the only actress Hitchcock wo
uld consider for the girlfriend role, Lisa, a high-fashion model desperate to marry the seemingly confirmed bachelor she has fallen in love with. Jeffries’s reluctance to marry, or to “settle down,” is a clear sign of his emotional unavailability. To Hitchcock, the broken leg signals at once Jeffries’s immobility (impotence, really, a symbol of his fear of commitment), keeping him confined to a wheelchair (that happens to resemble a director’s chair), and at the same time a state of constant erection (a sign of sexual energy without accompanying intimacy). The notions sexual fear and arousal are underscored several times in the film, by the binoculars and huge telephoto lens Jeffries uses to spy on his neighbors’ lives during his convalescence, his excitement heightened whenever he zooms in for a round or two of sexual voyeurism that will lead to mayhem, murder, and more—and eventually his own rescue of and subsequent marriage to Lisa.
Lisa at first vehemently disapproves of Jeffries’s spying, implying her dislike for what she sees is a perverse form of nothing less than masturbation (looking at other people’s most sexually private moments), until she too, is “turned on” by the forbidden nature of it, discovers her own capacity for perversity, and becomes an all-too eager player in the grim psychosexual murder follies that ensue. Jeffries has defined the players in the various panorama of rear windows morally, as either good and bad, victim or killer, lover or loser. They all share one thing in common, one aspect or another of his own fantasies and fears of marriage, including murder, his own darkest, unrealized fantasy of how to get rid of Lisa for good. Or bad.
At one point during the film, after he has turned her on to what he believes has been taking place in an apartment across the courtyard, Lisa leaves Jeffries, climbs up the fire escape, and literally enters the room of the suspected killer (all seen from Jeffries’s point of view, meaning ours—we watch him as he watches her, making us just as projection perverse as both he and Lisa and, for that matter, Hitchcock). It is as if she has entered one of the eroticized sexual fantasies that has been playing on the screens of Jeffries’s imagination.
This stylistic touch was not invented by Hitchcock; Buster Keaton did the same thing, ostensibly for laughs, in his altogether brilliant Sherlock Jr. (1924) when a projectionist falls asleep and imagines that he has walked down the theater’s aisle and taken a literal leap of faith—into the movie he is showing.3 What makes Hitchcock’s use of it so terrifying is when, later on, during the film’s climax, the killer, Thorwald (Raymond Burr), played with a devastating mixture of vicious menace and pathetic self-mockery, after discovering that he is being spied on by Jeffries and realizing Jeffries has uncovered the matricide, travels back across the yard to Jeffries’s apartment. He has, in effect, left the movie in Jeffries’s mind and entered his real world—to kill him.4
Ultimately, Rear Window is less about murder than it is about movies, and the ability they have to draw in the viewer, the profound sense of identity they invoke in us for the heroes in which we invest our emotions, and the power they have to reach into our very soul. As Rear Window so beautifully reminds us, life truly passes in the shutterlike blink of an eye, often hangs by a thread (in this case a bedsheet), and is best redeemed by the power of belief in one’s own ability to survive, endure, and hopefully, if unrealistically, to love.
Jimmy Stewart was perfectly suited for the role of Jeffries, one of the reasons he initially signed on to work again with Hitchcock. Another was that he had fallen hopelessly in love with Grace Kelly. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this surge of romantic feelings for his co-star came not long after the death of his mother. It signaled an emotional return to form for Stewart, whose chaste infatuations for his co-stars had somewhat diminished with his postwar marriage and return to the screen in films that were, for the most part, male-dominated action features. It is safe to say that the maternal June Allyson did not set off any emotional or erotic sparks in Jimmy from within. Grace Kelly, however, was a whole other story.5
The closest he ever came to admitting that he was attracted to Kelly came years later, in 1987, when he told her biographer, James Spada, “A lot of things impressed me about her. She seemed to have a complete understanding of the way motion picture acting is carried out. And she was so pleasant on the set; she was completely cooperative. She was really in a class by herself as far as cooperation and friendliness are concerned. In filming that movie with her I got the feeling that they were real scenes. She was very, very special.” That same year he told USA Today, “I was absolutely smitten by Grace Kelly, a wonderful, wonderful girl.” In Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Hitchcock, he quotes Jimmy as saying, “We were all so crazy about Grace Kelly. Everybody just sat around and waited for her to come in the morning, so we could just look at her. She was kind to everybody, so considerate, just great, and so beautiful.” And, according to assistant director Herbert Coleman (also quoted in McGilligan), “Every man who ever was lucky enough to work with Grace Kelly fell in love with her, me included. Even Hitchcock.”
Up until this time, Stewart had been very careful not to discuss his feelings for his leading ladies in any but the most objective terms, if for no other reason than to spare his wife from any embarrassment he imagined that might result from some unintended private revelation. For her part, Gloria understood the nature of Stewart’s work, and behaved more like a political wife than an actor’s spouse. In public, she took all the gossip column implications in stride, understanding that her husband had been a bachelor until his forties and that his work called for him to interact with some of the most beautiful women in the world.
But, in 1977, she gave a rare interview to Clive Hirschorn in which, after twenty-seven years of marriage to Jimmy, she talked about her difficulties dealing with the emotional complexity of her husband. Not being one to act upon his emotions and attractions often made her rivals far more important than they might have been if he had gone with them and gotten them out of his system. “It gave me a lot of cause for anxiety, because during [the early years of our marriage] Jimmy was working with some of the most glamorous women in the world, women such as Kim Novak, Joan Fontaine, Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly. And, of course, my constant fear was that he would find them more attractive than me and have an affair with one of them. A lot of men in Hollywood constantly became involved with their leading ladies—and as Jimmy was a red-blooded American male, naturally I thought it could happen to him too. I was convinced that it would only be a matter of time before the phone would ring and it would be James telling me he had to work hard at the studio, or that he would be out playing poker with the boys. Well, no such phone call ever came. And I can honestly say that, in all the years we’ve been married, Jimmy never once gave me cause for anxiety or jealousy. The more glamorous the leading lady he was starring opposite, the more attentive he’d be to me! He knew the insecurities I was going through, and made quite sure that they were totally unfounded. His consideration was incredible and one of the reasons why our marriage has lasted so long and is still so good.”
At the time of Rear Window, then, Gloria obviously chose to look the other way as her forty-six-year-old husband remained for weeks in close proximity to the gorgeous twenty-five-year-old Kelly, more alluring for him than any other actress he had worked with since Margaret Sullavan. To make matters worse, at least for Gloria, Kelly had a reputation in Hollywood for sleeping with every one of her leading men, without regard for their age (Crosby, Cooper) or marital status (Frank Sinatra, William Holden) or anything but her own desires. As for Jimmy, all he would say on the matter at the time was that while he appreciated Grace’s attributes, he was a happily married man. Contrary to all rumors and reports, Jimmy did not succumb to Kelly’s considerable charms. If he had, he likely would have told Gloria, or Kelly surely would have, as she and Mrs. Stewart, who met during the filming of Rear Window, became close friends for the rest of Kelly’s life.
One of the things that made Stewart such a great actor, and the quintessential Hitchcock antihero, was that in Rear Windo
w he came across a bit diffident but in the end morally unshakable. And what makes Jimmy’s performance so gratifying is that he manages to combine all of Hitchcock’s subrosa sadistic, obsessive, voyeuristic fantasies and still make Jeffries someone the audience strongly identifies with, and deeply roots for.
Jimmy always credited the quality of his acting in the film to Hitchcock’s direction. “When you think about Rear Window,” he told Roger Ebert years later, “you’ll remember my role largely consisted of reacting. First Hitchcock would show what I was seeing through my binoculars. Then he’d show my face, and I’d reflect what I saw. I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, curious, embarrassed, bored, the works.”
A poll taken in 1955 by the Motion Picture Herald, an influential trade magazine that reflected the previous year’s total box office, named Jimmy Stewart the “king” of Hollywood, for having earned the most money of any single actor in 1954.6 The list also included Grace Kelly (number two), William Holden, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, Clark Gable, and John Wayne. It is noteworthy that Allyson and Kelly, the only two women on the list, had both co-starred with Jimmy, in, respectively, The Glenn Miller Story and Rear Window.
That same year, Look magazine named forty-seven-year-old Jimmy Stewart the most popular Hollywood movie star in the world, putting him for the first time on the top of their immensely popular list, moving John Wayne, the holder of the crown the previous three years, to second place.7