Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  Not so quiet was General Potts, who publicly accused Senator Smith of favoritism and said that Smith was angry because she had wanted one of the ten available slots to go to her instead of her own administrative assistant, William C. Lewis Jr., also a reservist, who had somehow made it onto the preliminary list of nominees. Her response to Potts was that her only motivation was to maintain the high standards and therefore the morale of the United States Air Force. How would it be, she asked, if an actor, someone who plays heroes on the screen, is passed over those who actually are heroes, like Lewis? It was this kind of comment that not only ignored Stewart’s war record but appeared to belittle it.3

  In July, Stewart made a highly publicized, fully uniformed appearance in his Reserve unit. For the first time since the war, he was allowed to pilot a B-52 jet bomber across the U.S. skyways, performing various feats that showed off his still-considerable flying skills.

  On August 22, the Senate Armed Services Committee reconvened and rejected Jimmy’s nomination thirteen to zero, along with that of one other nominee.4 General Potts and the rest were approved. Afterward, in a statement to the press, Senator Smith suggested that if Colonel Stewart were to give up his acting career and devote all his time to the Air Force, she might be willing to reconsider her position. Once again, Jimmy chose not to respond publicly, although he remained at a loss as to how being a full-time actor disqualified him from being a brigadier general, a rank that had been part of his ancestry all the way back to 1863, when his mother’s father, Samuel Jackson, had earned it for his valor at Gettysburg. Was his own bravery during World War Two somehow devalued because he made movies? His worst fear was that, perhaps, just being part of the Hollywood community had, in the minds of Congress, somehow left the Red taint of the times on him too, and that the conditions of giving up his acting career for “full-time devotion” to the military were really code words that challenged his loyalty and his commitment to his country.

  President Eisenhower was also shocked at what he considered to be an unseemly turn of events. In February 1959, a full two years after the incident, in the last year of his second term, he once again nominated Stewart for promotion to brigadier general “for his great contribution to the Air Force.” This time the Senate unanimously approved the promotion, although not for the same position of SAC deputy chief of operations. Instead Jimmy was given the title of public information officer at the Pentagon, a far less important and less prestigious appointment. When questioned by a reporter after the approval vote why Senator Smith did not oppose the lesser assignment, she sniffed, “That’s more like it,” meaning the relatively minor position he had been awarded.

  Jimmy maintained his silence for two more years, until 1961 when responding to Pete Martin of the Saturday Evening Post about why he thought the whole unfortunate mess had taken place. Jimmy said, with an air of reconciliation and a sense of wanting to put the whole thing behind him, “The promotion was approved [the second time around], leaving me to wonder whether Senator Smith [the first time] was mad at me personally. I didn’t think she was. She was protesting against giving a movie actor an important rank because she didn’t think I had done enough recent flying to qualify for a star. I’m not sure that the senator fully understood that nobody was expecting me to climb into a modern jet bomber and fly it. Anyone who knows that my next birthday will be my fifty-third will agree that jets have made the pace too hot for my slowing reflexes…. Even before Senator Smith squared her jaw at me, I was in line for more suitable assignment—deputy director of the Office of Information.”

  Twenty years later, in 1980, when Jimmy was seventy-two, his friend Ronald Reagan, who had never seen a day of combat of any sort (except in the movies), was elected by an overwhelming majority as president of the United States, a position that automatically made him commander-in-chief of the armed forces.5

  In September 1957, one month after his original rejection by the Senate for his promotion to brigadier general, Jimmy reported to the set of Vertigo, where a still-frail Hitchcock was at last ready to start production on the movie. Both director and star were eager to begin a new film they could bury themselves in.

  Just before production began, Hitchcock confirmed that Kim Novak, the gorgeous, tempting, full-figured blond actress whom he had once considered for the role of Jennifer Rogers in The Trouble with Harry (1954) before going with Shirley MacLaine, was set to play Madeleine/Judy. Audiences, it seemed, couldn’t get enough of Novak. Box Office magazine named her the number one female film star of 1956, on the strength of her consecutive star turns in Josh Logan’s Picnic (1955), Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and George Sidney’s The Eddy Duchin Story (1956).

  Novak, however, had not been all that easy to get. Harry Cohn had first caught sight of her as Marilyn Novak when she was touring the country as “Miss Deepfreeze” (a job description Hitchcock especially loved), to promote a new type of refrigerator, after which she landed a bit part in a Jane Russell vehicle, Lloyd Bacon’s French Line (1954). Cohn then signed her to an exclusive contract, renamed her, redressed her, and reinvented her as “Kim Novak” in public, and referred to her as “that fat Polak, Novak,” to anyone he knew in person. Once the crude but shrewd studio head had Novak under contract for $150 a week, he convinced Otto Preminger to pay Columbia $100,000 to let her appear in the director’s controversial heroin-addiction movie. (Just before making Vertigo, Novak starred in the title role of George Sidney’s Jeanne Eagels [1957], for which she was paid a bonus of $13,000 from Cohn, money she had to fight for, while her co-star, Jeff Chandler, received $200,000—and no one recalls his even being in the film once they see Novak’s spectacular star turn.) When she found out how much Chandler had gotten, she fired her agent and—at the urging of none other than Frank Sinatra—signed with the William Morris Agency. (Cohn punished her for doing so by placing her on suspension, until Time magazine put her on its cover and he realized she was worth more to him working than not and renegotiated her contract through the agency.)

  That was when Hitchcock had decided he wanted her for Vertigo. Cohn agreed to let her appear in it only if Wasserman, who represented both Hitchcock and Jimmy, would agree to have Jimmy make his next movie for Columbia.6 All four men—Hitchcock, Wasserman, Cohn, and Jimmy—then met for lunch (without Novak, who no one thought important enough to invite) and came to terms on Jimmy’s reciprocal appearances in the two pictures.

  The story of Vertigo was taken by Hitchcock from the popular French novel D’entre les morts.7 He was attracted to it because the main character falls in love with a dead woman. In the film version, Vertigo, this premise defines the agitated, flawed, ongoing nightmare of John “Scottie” Ferguson—the obsessive longing for irretrievably lost love in a beautiful, living woman who becomes, to him, an idealized version of an irreplaceable dead one. Wracked with desire, guilt, and remorse over the death of a client, Madeleine Elster, Scottie eventually goes insane, blaming himself for her demise. It is the power imposed by the loss of that love—of the nature of lost love itself—that Hitchcock suggests is the deeper cause of Scottie’s emotional undoing and what gives the film much of its dark and powerful beauty. Hitchcock’s own well-documented sexual fantasies written about by others, his lifelong obsession with the untouchable blondes he repeatedly cast in his movies, are reflected to a remarkable degree in his use of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, more so, perhaps, than even he might have realized (although he rarely acknowledged any emotional connections to his biographers). Jimmy’s Protestant roots, his childhood experiences with his disappearing and then reappearing father, during which time he took over his role and, in a sense, “became” his father, his natural shyness around women, and the recent death of his mother were all elements of his history and personality that made him so profoundly perfect a choice to play Scottie Ferguson. (Hitchcock’s other ’50s leading man of choice, Cary Grant, had many appealing qualities but excluded the very one that Jimmy’s acting projected better th
an anyone else at this point in his career—that of repressed-rage morbidity.) An open, warm smile almost never crosses Jimmy’s face in any of his Hitchcock films, although we see him in close-up to a startling degree in the various nonverbal scenes where he is trailing Madeleine (whereas a smile almost never leaves Grant’s face in North by Northwest).

  As for Novak, her experiences in Hollywood closely resembled that of the character of Judy, without, of course, any of the streetwalking or hustling Hitchcock’s movie suggests as a substantial part of the character’s young life. Novak’s manipulations by Harry Cohn, who chose what roles she was to play, his continual “loan-outs” and the fact that each film found her in a different “role,” vividly resonate in a film where a young and beautiful woman is controlled and manipulated by at least two powerful male figures—Ferguson and Elster—and possibly a third, her father, whom she suggests at one point in the film (as was true in her real life) she had a more complex relationship with than either of the two men are aware, and who may be the source of her criminally infused moral vulnerability.

  In that sense, the entire film may be taken on some level as a feature-length dramatization of the devastating fallout from a series of unresolved Oedipal-based conflicts in which the two leads, Madeleine/Judy and Scottie, the actors who play them, the two supporting characters, Midge and Elster, and the film’s director are all playing out variations of a similar, if romanticized (or at least eroticized) scenario involving love, loss, replacement, and idealization to a degree in which no other film (certainly no Hollywood studio film) ever had. In that sense, Vertigo, like Scottie at its chilling climax, stands alone.

  In 1955, a first-draft screenplay had been commissioned by Hitchcock from Maxwell Anderson for a flat fee of $65,000, and he was dissatisfied with almost everything about it. Hitchcock then hired a little-known screenwriter, Alec Coppel, who had worked on a film called No Highway in the Sky while he was at Fox, and who now was under contract to Paramount. Hitchcock worked with him closely from September through the end of 1956 on an entirely new draft.8

  Sensing something was still missing, Hitchcock next brought in Samuel Taylor, a writer he particularly liked (after he couldn’t get Ernest Lehman, one he loved and who would, later on, write the screenplay for North by Northwest). It was at this point that Hitchcock took ill. While lying in bed believing he was near death, he realized the real underpinning of his lost-love screenplay in a single, compelling visual motif—a man literally hanging on to life by his fingertips, who won’t or can’t let go.

  During Hitchcock’s hospitalization, Sam Taylor met with Jimmy numerous times, finding in the actor, as Hitchcock assured Taylor he would, a willingness to go where he hadn’t before. While Taylor commiserated with Jimmy over the loss of his military promotion, he began to formulate the character of Scottie as a man consumed with loss. After conferring with Hitchcock, Taylor developed Scottie into someone trying desperately to retrieve the sense of romance from his youthful past, while being irrevocably propelled into the emotional banality of his aging future. The illness of vertigo, both director and screenwriter agreed, could be defined as a condition that stretched a person’s heated emotions like passionate taffy, only to have them shrink from the brute coldness of lost love.

  The now-famous opening rooftop sequence introduces John “Scottie” Ferguson (Stewart) and his inability to keep up with both a thief and a pursuing uniformed officer during a rooftop chase that inadvertently leads to the uniformed officer’s death. As Ferguson dangles from an infirm gutter high above a darkened alley, he stares into the darkness of eternity.9 The movie begins and ends literally and figuratively with Ferguson on the edge, and all that comes between—the dangling body of the movie—may very well take place all in Scottie’s mind while he hangs by his fingertips suspended between life and death.

  Scottie is temporarily suspended from the force while he recuperates from his near-death experience (we never see how he gets off the roof). He frequents the apartment of his former college sweetheart, the overly maternal Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes, who wears unattractive glasses, no makeup, has washed-out blond hair that droops unflatteringly, and designs cantilevered bras). Scottie explains to her how his vertigo has manifested itself in a fear of heights.10 He also mentions that he has heard from one of their college classmates, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who wants Scottie to pay him a visit. Midge urges him to go, which he reluctantly does.

  At Gavin’s magnificent waterfront offices (so elegantly designed by Henry Bumstead that Hitchcock had his own home office made into an exact copy, minus the raised floors and a sloped ceiling that gave audiences the illusion that the much shorter Helmore “towered” over Jimmy), Scottie listens as Elster, who has read about Scottie’s “misfortune,” offers him some private detective work until he gets back his job with the police. It is a scene reminiscent of the hook-baiting opening of Dial M for Murder, as Elster tells Scottie he wants to hire him to follow his wife. Scottie asks if she is having an affair. No, Elster says, nothing as simple as that. She thinks she is possessed by a woman who has been dead for more than a hundred years.11

  Scottie tries to back off, but allows himself to at least check out the situation, partially out of friendship but also, he says, because he needs something to do with his time while he recuperates. But the look on his face reveals something else. He has become intrigued by the notion that a dead person could somehow come back to life.

  Scottie goes to Ernie’s restaurant that night, where he knows Elster and his wife will be dining, to catch his first glimpse of Madeleine. Sitting at the bar, he sees her with Elster as they leave the dining room. Ravishingly wrapped in a green satin dress, her platinum hair twisted into a provocative swirl, Scottie is stunned by her beauty and reacts as if he has been struck by emotional lightning. So powerful is his attraction to her that when she pauses near him, he has to turn away. She passes him, then turns and looks back; he dares to glance directly at her, then once more turns just as she does. This broken-backed circle of head turning, accentuated by Madeleine’s almost hypnotic stare, marks the beginning of something strange, balletic, and beautiful, although no one—the audience, Scottie, or Madeleine—can possibly yet know what.

  Several minutes of brilliant silent filmmaking follow, Hitchcock style, with no dialogue, only the beautiful, haunting masterpiece soundtrack of Bernard Herrmann (conducted by Muir Mathieson). It is the following day. Scottie is tailing Madeleine’s Rolls-Royce in his Plymouth as she drives around, apparently in circles, through the ups and downs of the streets of San Francisco (an apt visual metaphor for the mood swings of both characters, his real, hers faked). Scottie follows her to a flower store where she buys a bouquet, to a museum where she sits before a portrait of the long-dead Carlotta, whose hair is also tied in the same peculiar swirl as Madeleine’s, to a cemetery where Madeleine leaves the flowers, to a rooming house where she appears to vanish into thin air. Scottie questions the proprietress, who tells him the place once belonged to Carlotta Valdez.

  To this point, Hitchcock has led Scottie and the audience on a bit of a wild-goose chase and a fraudulent one at that. Just as he would do three years later in Psycho, he has set up a false plot, a lot of good old-fashioned ghost story hokum, although it will soon become all too apparent there is nothing good, old-fashioned, or ghostly about Madeleine. The next day Scottie reports to Elster, who encourages Scottie to keep following his wife, who, he says somberly, is no longer Madeleine at all, but the living embodiment of…Carlotta Valdez.

  Scottie agrees, no longer reluctant but enthusiastically immersed in the case. Back at Midge’s studio, he tells her what’s been going on, and she immediately suspects this is something more than a mere “case.” She has recognized what is already there, the growing obsessiveness Scottie has for Madeleine. He dismisses her suspicions as nonsense, but Midge knows better, and by now so does the audience, although still neither knows exactly what. What everyone can plainly see on both sides of the screen is that S
cottie is a goner. He has fallen, and hard, for Madeleine. Or Carlotta. At this point it apparently no longer makes any difference.12

  The next day is filled with more lineless auto surveillance, up and down those hilly avenues, around in circles, until Madeleine leads him to, of all places, the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, that cantilevered wonder of San Francisco, where he watches in horror as she throws herself into the cold bay waters. Without hesitation, he dives in after her and pulls her to safety. While she remains unconscious, he throws his arms around her and says her name, over and over again. He has rescued her (he thinks) from being possessed by the dead and “delivered” her back to the living. By doing so, he has reignited his long-dormant desire for romance. This, finally, is where Vertigo really begins.

  That evening, back at his home, Madeleine is in his bed, naked. Her clothes hang around the kitchen, drying. It is clear that while she was unconscious, Scottie stripped her, put her to bed, and, appropriately (to him), lit the fireplace to greet her when she awakens. The unseen stripping will be echoed in reverse in a key scene later on in the increasingly fetishistic nature of Scottie’s growing and decidedly unhealthy obsession with Madeleine. Just as vertigo has prevented him from being able to keep his mind clear when looking down from great heights, so has Madeleine’s beauty clouded his ability to think clearly about her, and ultimately about himself. In other words, she is the living manifestation of his vertigo.

  Madeleine disappears while Scottie is on the phone with Elster, telling him she is okay. The next day she pulls up to his front door, intending to leave a note of apology for her “bad behavior.” Jumping into the bay is not something she is proud of, she tells him. They decide since they are both wanderers, they may as well “wander” together for the rest of the day. He takes her across the bridge to Muir Woods, the location of the giant-sequoias forest. There they discuss the meaning of life in front of a gigantic crosscut of one of the trees. Scottie sees in the circle the continuum of life, while Madeleine sees in it only death, including her own, as she points to the exact spot in the tree’s time line when she, meaning Carlotta, was born, and when she, Carlotta, died.