by Marc Eliot
By then, Hitchcock and Jimmy had their eyes on their next project together, something the director wanted to call Vertigo. In the interim, for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with contracts and money, Hitchcock went off to make The Wrong Man, a depressing neonoir nightmare based on a true story of a musician wrongly accused of a series of neighborhood robberies, starring, of all people, Henry Fonda in a film about a good man wrongly identified as an evil one.
Jimmy, meanwhile, thirty days after The Man Who Knew Too Much wrapped, flew to New York to attend a meeting with Billy Wilder arranged by Leland Hayward about that Charles Lindbergh film that Hayward was going to co-write and produce, and Wilder was set to direct.
Hitchcock’s and Stewart’s interim ventures would prove problematic, but in the end it wouldn’t matter. When they finally did get together one last time, the dizzying heights of cinematic transcendence would once more revisit both their houses, higher and brighter than it ever had before.
22
“Leading my list of leading men is most definitely James Stewart. For me, he encompasses all the things I appreciate in a man. He always has been—and always will be—my ideal. Setting him apart is his endearing shyness, an innocence that I found irresistible. He was the sexiest man who played opposite me in thirty years.”
—KIM NOVAK
In subsequent talks with Billy Wilder, without Jimmy’s knowledge, Leland Hayward had dangled the notion of casting Jimmy in a role half his age, where youth was the key to the character, as something daring, original and…doable. The more Hayward had thought about it, the more he believed the film called for an experienced actor who could play youthful, rather than a youthful actor who might not be able to project sufficiently Lindbergh’s depth of courage and derring-do. As much of the film was going to be shot in a cockpit, with a leather helmet and goggles, Jimmy might actually be able to pull the thing off. He was so unnerved when he got the word from Hayward that he called Gloria and asked her to fly in for moral support; in case his legs gave way, she could grab him under one arm and keep him on his feet. Gloria laughed and made arrangements to catch the next flight east.
During the next dinner, which Margaret Sullavan and Mrs. Lindbergh also attended, Jimmy and Lindbergh talked at great length about their mutual lifelong passion for flying, until eventually, guided by Lindbergh, the discussion came around to Jimmy’s heroic war record. That was when Jimmy first believed the part was going to be his, that Hayward and Wilder had agreed that, despite the huge gap in ages, he could play it. As the dinner ended, Jimmy turned to Lindbergh and said, “I hope I can do a good job for you,” to which Lindbergh replied, in the shy, quiet manner that had so endeared him to the imagination of the American public, “I hope so too.” With that, good-byes were made and the Stewarts left.
What Jimmy did not know was that the battle had already taken place, behind the scenes, between Wilder, whose other casting choices had all fallen through, either because he couldn’t convince the actors he’d wanted to do it or Lindbergh had vetoed them. Nonetheless, Jack Warner, always prone to hyperbole, was furious at Wilder’s decision to go with Jimmy (he had no way of contractually overruling it) and predicted that if the film were made with him, it would result in the greatest disaster in Warner Bros.’ history.
This is how Hedda Hopper, writing in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1955, officially announced the project: “James Stewart will forever consider March 22, 1955, as the luckiest day of his life, for on that day he got his heart’s desire—the role of Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis.”
Filming began in September 1956 in a Santa Maria, California, airplane hangar reconfigured to pass for the ground site at Long Island, New York’s original Roosevelt Field landing strip. Interiors were shot on the Los Angeles Warner Bros. backlot and at Platt Ranch, a facility the studio often used for exteriors. Problems with the shooting script became apparent early on, but because Lindbergh had approval over everything, from the smallest dialogue change to the shifting of a preset camera angle, Wilder wound up beating his head against a cement wall when anything he or Wendell Mayes, his screenwriter, suggested wasn’t literally in the original book, and was therefore immediately rejected by the aviator. This posed special problems when it came to the thirty-three-hour solo flight, forcing Wilder to rely on excessive character voice-overs and flashbacks. And Wilder came up against that cement wall once more when he tried to include a reference to what had long been rumored, that Lindbergh had dallied with a local waitress in the hours before his historic takeoff. None of that made it into the movie.
To prepare for the role, Jimmy had spent much of his time watching newsreels of Lindbergh, and decided that in order to get the part he’d better lose five pounds: “I wanted to watch that newsreel because while it would be impossible for my face to look exactly like Lindbergh’s, I wanted to catch his mannerisms. For instance, I noticed he has a very distinctive walk. He has a habit of swinging his left arm in front of him, even when he only takes three steps; I tried to imitate that. Then I went through the horrible ordeal of having my eyebrows dyed reddish-blond, like Lindbergh’s, and my hair colored the same.”
Every Sunday morning Jimmy and Gloria would join the children for an early breakfast, then drive them to the Presbyterian church in Beverly Hills where Gloria taught Sunday school and both her boys sang in the choir. Late in the afternoon, Jimmy liked to fly a duplicate of the Spirit of St. Louis, the small monoplane in which Lindbergh had flown nonstop across the Atlantic to Paris, one he and Hayward had completely refurbished. “Like Lindbergh, I couldn’t see straight ahead because the whole front of the plane, where the pilot would normally sit with fine vision, was used for fuel storage. Lindbergh had sat way back in the plane, in a wicker chair. When he wanted to see where he was going he had to lean out the window or look through the periscope he’d rigged up. It was a strange experience to fly that old plane. But having done it I felt I had a better knowledge of how he felt, and moved, and flew.”
The film was released on May 20, 1957, Jimmy’s forty-ninth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the start of Lindbergh’s historic flight. There was the usual self-generated excitement of dual-coast klieg light premieres, one in Hollywood and one in New York City, but despite all the advance publicity, the natural tie-in with the flight’s anniversary, and Stewart’s seemingly invincible box-office clout, the film proved a financial dud. Its grueling nine-month shoot had caused its budget to balloon to triple its original $2 million, and it grossed just over $2 million in its initial domestic release.1 As Jack Warner had predicted, it was an unqualified financial disaster for Warner Bros., and Jimmy’s first out-and-out flop after a run of ten straight moneymakers.
Despite its poor reviews and indifferent audiences, Jimmy continued to champion the film, calling it one of the best of his career. While the privilege of playing Lindbergh had been, he said many times, the chance of a lifetime, the hard truth was, the age factor mattered. It was difficult for audiences to understand the youthful exuberance of a character who looked as if he was approaching forty (makeup managed to knock off ten years). The film had other problems as well. Most of the drama took place in a small cockpit with no dialogue and what seemed like an endless series of Lindbergh leaning into swirling clouds to see where he was going, which never appeared to be anywhere so much as deeper into those Hollywood manufactured “skies.” And it was long—two hours and eighteen minutes, which effectively cut down the play schedule by one showing per day. Wilder, whose direction in this film lacked the dry, wry wit and sophistication of his best work, said later that he should have made the picture bigger (meaning scope, not length), and included Lindbergh’s courtship, wedding, the infamous kidnapping, the resultant reclusiveness and swerve to the conservative right. Jack Warner thought Sam Wood or William Wellman or, ideally, Michael Curtiz, could have made a better picture in their sleep.
However, the biggest personal disappointment remained Stewart’s. After his spec
tacular comeback with Winchester ’73 and Rear Window, he now began to sense that Hayward and Wilder had been right all along, that he had made something of a laughingstock of himself by attempting, at his age, to play a world-famous character barely out of his teens. (He had been able to pull off this kind of stretch once before, in the early scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life, but he was nearly ten years younger when he made that film.) Later on, critic Andrew Sarris would describe the miscasting as an embarrassment.
Following the failure of The Spirit of St. Louis, Jimmy felt every day of his forty-seven years etched onto his face, behind his eyes, in his knees. For the next several months, he retreated from filmmaking and concentrated on family and fatherhood, taking the children to school, puttering around the house, making phone calls, and watching his old movies on TV. The closest he came to doing business was his daily monitoring of his various financial investments. It all added up to a lot of nothing.
The hard truth was, he might have returned much earlier if someone had offered him a decent role. Unfortunately for Jimmy, parts had grown increasingly lean, and there was little for him to do except wait for word from Hitchcock that production was to begin on Vertigo. He was ready, but it had already been postponed once from the spring of 1957, due to Hitchcock having taken ill.
One day during lunch, Hitch’s face suddenly went pale as he grabbed his big stomach with both hands. He had suffered from a navel hernia for years that doctors warned could strangulate without warning. After having put off the surgery numerous times, due to his morbid fear of operations, this attack made him finally agree to have it done. During it, the doctors discovered Hitchcock was also suffering from colitis. His recovery from that necessitated an even longer delay, into September.
In the meantime, Hitchcock had his second unit do some background shooting and begin wardrobe tests for Vera Miles, cast in the dual role of Madeleine/Judy. When she became pregnant soon after marrying Gordon Scott, a former movie Tarzan, the start of principal photography was once again delayed.2
The young and lovely Vera Miles—whom Hitchcock had previously used in an episode of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series and in the feature film The Wrong Man (1956) as Rose, the wife of Emmanuel Christopher Balestrero (Henry Fonda), who ultimately loses her mind over the injustice done to her husband—was not, in fact, the director’s first choice for the part. He had originally wanted Grace Kelly, the favorite of all his leading ladies, for Rose, but her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco had put a halt to her film career with a royal finality.
While Jimmy impatiently waited for production to begin, Gloria thought it best that they get away for a while, out of the country, as far from the press and pressures of Hollywood as possible. She set up a trip to Africa with close friends Fran Kirk and Bess Johnson. Kirk was a businessman from Fort Worth whom Jimmy had first met regarding the family cemetery plot, which Johnson’s investment firm handled (along with other related Stewart estate matters). Jimmy and Kirk had since become partners in several successful real-estate business ventures; the two couples became an inseparable social foursome and eventually a regular traveling unit. It was the Johnsons who taught the Stewarts how to travel in style and introduced them to the pleasures of an African safari. The continent, with its rich history, landscapes, climate, and wildlife, would eventually become Gloria and Jimmy’s favorite vacation spot.
That summer, still waiting for Vertigo to get the green light, at the request of Lew Wasserman, Jimmy returned to work in yet another Anthony Mann Western, Night Passage. While he was antsy to get in front of a camera again, Jimmy looked upon the assignment with dread, as it became apparent to him the first day of shooting that Mann was going to be more contentious than ever.
Upon his initial arrival, Jimmy had come upon Mann in a heated verbal battle with longtime collaborator Gordon Chase over the shooting script. This time, Mann insisted to Chase, he wanted to push the violence envelope further than he ever had before. Jimmy said nothing, but agreed with Chase. He would have preferred a softer Western, one in which his character might even get to play the accordion.
Eventually, after a series of physically exhausting and often dangerous action shots that Mann insisted his increasingly exhausted and aching star do, Jimmy told Wasserman he wanted Mann off the film. Wasserman reluctantly complied, and Mann was fired. (He left the production and immediately signed on to direct The Tin Star, a vehicle he had long wanted to make—with Henry Fonda.)
After Mann’s departure from Night Passage, Jimmy felt set adrift by the uncertain guidance of the director’s replacement, first-timer James Neilson, who had gained a solid reputation as a war photographer, and had worked for a while as an assistant director on live-action features at the Disney studio. On the brighter side, for Jimmy, his character got to play the accordion, accompanied by a score by the inspired musical genius Dimitri Tiomkin, but nothing was enough to salvage this orphaned mess of a film, Jimmy’s second outright disaster in a row. The unwritten rule in Hollywood (then as now) is three strikes and you’re out. Jimmy, now more than ever, wanted Hitchcock to start production on Vertigo as soon as possible, hoping the rotund director could save his career from falling off the ledge.
During this time, a series of bizarre events ensnared Jimmy in public partisan politics, the one place he had carefully avoiding going. It began in February, when President Eisenhower decided to promote Jimmy, now a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, to the rank of brigadier general and deputy operations chief of the Strategic Air Command. The news was initially met with what might be described at best as casual press attention, single-paragraph blurbs buried in the middle sections of the nation’s newspapers, until rumors began to float that the real reason the medal was begin given was that Jimmy had asked for it as a way to gain some publicity to rejuvenate his failing career.
The rumors were in reaction to a series of industry-driven columns by various gossips, who gushingly recalled Jimmy’s World War Two heroics as a way to remind everyone what a war hero he was and how much he truly deserved the promotion. In response to the persisting whispers that it was all a cleverly designed attempt to help his flagging career, Vincent X. Flaherty wrote in the March 21 Los Angeles Examiner, “Col. James Stewart isn’t seeking publicity or campaigning to be a general or anything of the kind. He completely deserves the rank and honor of a generalcy [sic]. There isn’t a member of the Air Force Reserve better qualified…just thought I’d try and set something straight about a man who not only was a hero but was long ago recognized as a great flyer and leader of men.”
On April 17, 1957, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced it planned to hold public hearings on the air force’s decision to promote Jimmy and ten other active reservists, including his one-time commanding officer, Gen. Ramsey Potts, after Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, officially questioned the motivation behind the promotions, thus delaying what would ordinarily have been a pro forma vote, and causing the Senate committee to go forward in public. Even before the hearings could begin, Smith grabbed headlines of her own when she held a press conference and announced, with much gravity, that “there is some doubt as to what degree some of the nominees are truly active reservists.” She then went on to request detailed records on all the nominees, including those of Col. Jimmy Stewart. Her inquiry had to do with the actual time Jimmy had served in the reserves, a question to which she already knew the answer. Before going public, she had done considerable research into Jimmy’s postwar record and discovered that he had done only one fifteen-day stint as a reservist in the eleven years following the end of World War Two. And, during all that time, he had officially worn his uniform a total of eight days. Finally, because he had been stopped from flying after Berlin, she wondered if he even qualified as a pilot on any craft developed and used by the air force since the B-29. Holding her cards close to her vest, she waited for the right time to put her hand into play.
The public hearings before the Senate Armed Services Co
mmittee began May 7. None of the nominees themselves showed up. Instead, they were all represented by one Lt. Gen. Emmett (Rosie) O’Donnell, who vigorously defended all ten of them, but none more vehemently than the best-known of the lot. “Colonel Stewart is qualified for the promotion and a very positive inspirational force to the young men of the country,” O’Donnell told the committee. When it was her turn, Senator Smith pointedly asked for more specific justification for the promotions. A stunned and apparently unprepared O’Donnell said he would need more time to gather that information, and at that point the hearings were adjourned.
The story then exploded, with photos of Jimmy in uniform splashed across the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country. The next day, Senator Smith, for reasons no one could fathom other than she wanted to keep the pressure up and the publicity high, gave a public scolding in the press to Air Force Lt. Gen. O’Donnell, accusing him of misrepresentation and extensive false testimony in an effort to promote Col. James Stewart, actor, to reserve brigadier general.
General O’Donnell angrily responded, via the press, that he had done nothing of the sort. Senator Smith then issued the following statement: “Stewart’s normal civilian pursuit is that of the motion picture actor. Obviously he can’t maintain his proficiency for deputy director of operations of the Strategic Air Command by being a motion picture actor. Past national presidents of the Reserve Officers Association have complained bitterly to me that the Stewart nomination was destructive to the morale of the Air Force Reserve.” Then she dropped the big bomb. Colonel Stewart, she declared, had not put in sufficient reserve time to qualify for the promotion.
Stewart was shocked and depressed by Smith’s statements. Was he being punished for being an actor? He began to wonder if he had, despite all his efforts to avoid it, been caught up in the web of 1950s paranoia that had made Hollywood a hotbed of political opportunism, fakery, glamour, and mistrust. Was he a victim of “guilt by association,” while the real heroics and patriotism of his military service were being ignored? Despite being bombarded by reporters, and urged by Wasserman to say something in his own defense, he steadfastly refused to make any public comment.
