Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  There were many in Hollywood, both behind the scenes and at the head of the columns, who were convinced the only possible reason Jimmy had agreed to star in the film was to remain in close contact with Novak, with whom, it was believed by many then (and still today), he was romantically involved. Here is what noted filmmaker and critic Peter Bogdanovich wrote about what he presumed to know of Jimmy’s married love life, regarding not only Novak but Grace Kelly as well: “The common wisdom is that Ms. Kelly had already been through Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and that Stewart (in Rear Window) had no escape. Hitchcock hinted to me that Stewart also could not resist Kim Novak on Vertigo and the director’s longtime assistant and dear friend, Peggy Robertson, confirmed this romance; and a good friend of mine heard about it directly from a still-fond Kim Novak. Evidently the affair continued, because immediately after Vertigo the two of them co-starred in a pretty weak Bell Book and Candle. Of course, this occasional occupational hazard could have caused some private grief to Gloria, which Jimmy would no doubt have profoundly regretted after her passing.”

  This lively but uninformed scenario suggests that Jimmy and Novak made Bell Book and Candle because they were in love. Bogdanovich apparently was not aware of the contractual obligations regarding Novak and Jimmy, agreed upon before they had even met, prior to the making of Vertigo. And Hitchcock was a notoriously gossipy and unreliable source for anything but film technique and theory.

  Finally, when Novak was asked directly about the alleged affair, she denied it with a laugh that suggested the utter absurdity of such a thought: “First of all, at the time I made Vertigo, Jimmy was twice my age, married, and I was in love with another man, Richard Quine, although [Jimmy] may not have known it at the time. Richard would direct both Jimmy and me in Bell Book and Candle. Yes, I found Jimmy attractive, and he had a crush on me, I think, but I didn’t have one on him. I liked him in the way high school kids like each other. What he saw in me was the same thing I did in him, that I was not in any way a ‘Hollywood’ person. I had come out of the Midwest, so did he I think, and we retained those qualities. I can remember whenever we were together, and had to do a kissing scene, he would blush beet-red.

  “During the making of Bell Book and Candle, there was a scene where we were both bare-footed, our feet up on a coffee-table. We did the scene all morning, and when Richard called ‘Cut’ and everyone went off to lunch, Jimmy and I stayed right where we were, the whole time, our feet barely touching each other. It was quite a sexy moment, but that was it, the only time we ever had any non-filmed contact. Years later he did write a letter to me in which he admitted that during the making of Vertigo and Bell Book and Candle he had had an enormous crush on me, but had been afraid to admit it at the time. Then, when I did that cover story for TV Guide, that I wrote, during the period I was appearing on Falcon Crest, I said that Jimmy Stewart was ‘the sexiest man I ever knew,’ or something like that, and ever since then, people have thought we might have had an affair. That is uncategorically untrue. I won’t deny that I had a number of relationships in my day, I have never denied any of them, but in this instance it just isn’t true. For Mr. Bogdanovich to quote Hitchcock is laughable, since his whole body of work was about that fantasy, of his leading ladies being sexually available. I never told anyone, ‘happily’ or otherwise, that Jimmy and I were romantically involved, because it just wasn’t true.”3

  When Jimmy completed Bell Book and Candle, and Grant was announced as the lead in North by Northwest, Jimmy decided that perhaps it was time he returned to television, after he received an invitation to do so from his North Roxbury Drive neighbor Jack Benny, who wanted Jimmy to make another appearance on his highly popular Jack Benny Show. The brief but hilarious star turn he did was received by critics better than any movie he had made in years, and was the subject of choice the next morning at water coolers across America.

  Nonetheless, it did little in the way of jump-starting his film career. Jimmy’s negative reaction to the critical and commercial failure of Bell Book and Candle lingered and he began to focus on the coming demise of the studio system as the main reason films like it were being made at all (Bell Book and Candle was an independent venture by Taradash’s company, funded and distributed by Columbia). Nevertheless, at a time when nearly every major star was setting up independent production companies and taking charge of his or her own movies, Jimmy steadfastly maintained that his only film talent was acting, and steadfastly refused to produce, direct, or write anything.

  Later that same year he signed on with Warner to make The FBI Story, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, a film about the venerable institution whose dictatorial leader, J. Edgar Hoover, happened to be one of LeRoy’s closest friends.4 So close, in fact, that Hoover assigned two agents to the production of the film “to make sure of the technical details.”

  The film shot five weeks’ worth of footage inside the FBI Building in Washington, D.C., and a couple of scenes in the Bronx, New York. Episodic in nature, The FBI Story is based on the best-selling book of the same name by two-time Pulitzer-winning Don Whitehead, the former Washington bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune. It tells the history of the FBI through the eyes and life of Chip Hardesty (Stewart), a member of the first generation of federal agents in the pre-Hoover FBI, a disheveled law enforcement organization with no leadership, focus, or power. Engaged to young Lucy (Vera Miles, in the usually thankless June Allyson “wife” role), he agrees to leave the Bureau and become a lawyer if she will marry him. Just prior to their wedding, Hardesty (hard work and honesty?) is invited to Washington to meet the Bureau’s new chief, J. Edgar Hoover, and agrees to take part in the overhauling of the FBI. A disappointed Lucy nevertheless goes through with the marriage, and stoically stands by as Hardesty helps take on the Ku Klux Klan, Indian murderers in Oklahoma, all the big-name gangsters of the thirties, suspected Nazis in South America, and, later on, Communists in New York City. Although the pressure becomes too much for Lucy and she takes their children with her when she leaves Hardesty, by the last reel she returns to the nest happily, fifties-housewife style.5

  The week The FBI Story opened, on September 24, 1959, at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall, in an interview with Variety that appeared on October 3, Jimmy defended its “classic” style of storytelling by publicly ripping into the growing independent movement: “Hollywood’s horde of independent film companies have fallen far short of their promises; that they have in most cases failed to deliver quality product. As a result, it’s up to the major studios to exercise leadership. [Independents] are cutting corners and cheating, clipping expenses and shoestringing things. That’s at the sacrifice of quality…the industry should also clamp down on those performers who come here [to Hollywood] to do one picture and go back to Broadway for a play, or to the South Seas to write the story of their lives.” Something else he said in that interview would, years later, reverberate through his own career: “I don’t see why the studios shouldn’t sell their post-1948 [movies] to TV…they didn’t make a mistake with their vintagers [pre-1948].”

  He was referring to a specific issue that was currently dividing what was left of the old studios and the unions over what to do with their most valuable asset, their inventory. At the time, selling films to TV was a major issue because of the question of residuals. The unions wanted them for their actors, directors, writers, and technicians; the studios felt they owned the properties and had no obligation to pay for them again. Jimmy’s harsh comments about the new generation of filmmakers, combined with his implied support for releasing newer, competitive product to TV for free, turned much of independent Hollywood against him, and likely cost him a shot at another Oscar for the two pictures he made in 1959, The FBI Story and the far superior Anatomy of a Murder for Otto Preminger.6

  After finishing The FBI Story, Jimmy took Gloria and the kids on a five-day vacation to Europe before starting production on Anatomy (Hoover arranged for around-the-clock “protection” for Jimmy and his family, as a “court
esy,” in appreciation for his having made the film). The ostensible reason for the trip was for Jimmy to receive an award at the Berlin Film Festival, after which he took the entire brood on a quick jaunt through Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, making lightning-fast stops in small towns along the way. The twins were now seven years old and Jimmy felt the time had come for them to see the world the way the boys had. Ever the commander, Jimmy was constantly changing rooms, and making sure that every last detail was the way he wanted it, sometimes staying up well into the night to ensure the following day’s itinerary.

  The story goes that on the flight back to the States, one of Hoover’s agents told Jimmy the Bureau was on the hunt for a jewel thief and thought he might be on that very plane. Jimmy nodded, got up, quietly walked the aisles, came back, and told the agent who he thought the thief was. How did he know? the agent asked. The size of his diamond stickpin, Jimmy said. The agents arrested the fellow when the plane landed. He was later convicted, after which Hoover sent Jimmy a personal letter of congratulations. Did it really happen? Perhaps some version of it is true, although it smacks of old-Hollywood precision promotion, the days when apocryphal acts of heroism and bravery were the very fodder upon which a hungry-for-details press relied. In truth, no one in “new” Hollywood believed the ridiculous story, and used it as an excuse to put even more distance between themselves and Jimmy’s old-time style of studio-controlled “self-promotion.” It was just at this time that Jimmy finally won his long-sought promotion to brigadier general. The congratulatory silence coming out of pendulum-swinging, now-liberal-leaning Hollywood was deafening.

  Anatomy of a Murder (1959) was based on a best-selling novel written by Michigan Supreme Court Judge John D. Voelker writing under the pseudonym Robert Traver. The story revolves around a soldier with an extremely short fuse (played by a frighteningly ferocious Ben Gazzara, a Broadway actor whose performance in the film made him a movie star) who is married to a woman with an extremely short sense of morality (the hot and sexy Lee Remick, a last-minute replacement for Lana Turner, who walked out on the film after production had already begun, claiming she couldn’t get along with Preminger. Moreover, the material seemed far too risqué to her. In fact, on-screen at thirty-nine, Turner looked too old and Preminger fired her. Gazzara was at the time only twenty-three.)7

  The young, trigger-tempered soldier is accused of killing a tavern owner after he’s raped his wife. The equally short-fused prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney General Claude Dancer, was played by George C. Scott, whose film career was also made by this film. Joseph Welch, the Boston attorney-turned-folk-hero for having taken on Sen. Joseph P. McCarthy during the nationally televised McCarthy vs. the United States Army hearings, played presiding Judge Weaver. And Jimmy was cast as Paul Biegler, the small-town lawyer who defends the seemingly undefendable Lt. Manion. What is most notable about the film is that, for the first time, Jimmy played crotchety—an aging lawyer whose country-bumpkin ways appear to be no match for the tight-collared, red-necked angry young prosecutor, until a brilliant defense move turns the entire case upside down.

  The film was prime Preminger, who loved to push the limits of what he felt was an overly restrictive Production Code. His The Moon Is Blue(1953) was the first Hollywood film to use the word “virgin.” The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) was the first Code film to deal directly with heroin addiction and to explicitly show the horrors of heroin withdrawal. And his Porgy and Bess (1959) was racially controversial. Anatomy of a Murder was about a sensational rape and murder trial complete with visible panties on display as Exhibit A. It proved not only daring and provocative but highly successful at the box office.

  Casting Jimmy as the defense attorney was a shrewd, if risky move on Preminger’s part. The always-wholesome actor gave the film the necessary moral heft it needed to balance out its increasingly sordid plot developments, but nevertheless resulted in a vicious letter-writing campaign aimed at both Preminger and Stewart—the director for making such a “disgusting” film, and the actor for appearing in it. Nevertheless, Jimmy was so good in the role that he created a prototype of the “small-town lawyer,” which Andy Griffith would capitalize on for television series fare, first as a sheriff and justice of the peace in The Andy Griffith Show and later on as a lawyer in Matlock.

  There were many who thought the temperamental Preminger and the veteran Stewart would prove to be a bad mix, but it turned out not to be so. They enjoyed each other’s on-set manner, Jimmy appreciating Preminger’s formality, the director respecting the actor’s professional approach to his role. Jimmy also was impressed with Preminger’s use of wide-screen black-and-white cinematography, which gave the film at once a classical and contemporary feel.

  Anatomy of a Murder opened three months earlier than The FBI Story, due mainly to Preminger’s being able to get the film cut, scored, and printed in less than a month after filming was completed, and it opened to raves: The Saturday Review said “the marvelously equivocal portraits provided in Anatomy of a Murder by James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and George Scott reveal complexities in character such as rarely are seen on the American screen.” The New York Times raved about how “magnificently [it] hews to a line of dramatic but reasonable behavior and proper procedure in a court,” and singled out Jimmy for special praise. “Most brilliantly revealed is the character of the lawyer for the defense, a part that is played by James Stewart in one of the finest performances of his career. Slowly and subtly, he presents us a warm, clever, adroit and complex man—and most particularly, a portrait of a trial lawyer in action that will be difficult for anyone to surpass.”

  Time magazine was one of the few major publications that did not particularly like the movie, apparently put off by its frank sexual nature, calling it “a courtroom melodrama less concerned with murder than with anatomy…”8

  Anatomy of a Murder grossed more than $2 million in the first six weeks of its initial domestic release, prompted major Oscar buzz, and went on to become the seventh biggest earner of 1959. For his work in it, Jimmy won the New York Film Critics Award and the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Actor, and an Academy Award nomination, his first since 1950’s Harvey. He believed he would win the Oscar, despite the powerful juggernaut for MGM’s $15 million biblical extravaganza, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (whose script had been masterfully doctored by British playwright Christopher Fry) and the other unusually strong acting performances that won Best Actor nominations, including Laurence Harvey for Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top, Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s hilarious Some Like It Hot, Charlton Heston for Ben-Hur, and Paul Muni in Daniel Mann’s The Last Angry Man.

  The annual award ceremonies were held on April 4, 1960, at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The host was Bob Hope, and the event was broadcast live on the ABC television network. The drama of the night boiled down to the competition between Ben-Hur and Anatomy of a Murder. Ben-Hur, made by MGM, one of the studios that, ironically, Jimmy had singled out for praise in his criticism of the independent movement, was, in fact, struggling to remain afloat, and had put all its chips on Ben-Hur, a copycat of Paramount’s hugely successful 1956 DeMille Old Testament bibliopic The Ten Commandments. MGM owned the property (so to speak) and had decided to remake its silent version much the same way Paramount had owned the first Moses epic and even went so far as to hire Charlton Heston, DeMille’s hand-chosen Moses, to play the title role.

  The three-and-a-half-hour film didn’t disappoint, at least not at the box office, grossing an astounding $80 million, worldwide, in its first year of release. The Academy, at the time made up of older, more conservative, studio-loyal members, loved nothing more than a moneymaker, and for its earnings alone, the smart money said Ben-Hur was the film to beat.

  On the other hand, young Hollywood had thrown its support behind Anatomy of a Murder, because of its willingness to stretch the boundaries of its provocative content and for its lively display of acting. As the evening wore on, and it became apparent that Be
n-Hur was going to sweep, there was little tension left when Susan Hayward approached the podium to announce the Best Actor awards. She opened the envelope, smiled, and said in her famously husky voice, “And the winner is…Charlton Heston!”

  A respectable round of applause followed. No one in Hollywood ever thought Heston was much of an actor, with his blustery, pompous style and his granite, immovable face. But he was the star of the biggest film of the year and to the voters of the Academy, that mattered.9

  As it happened, Heston and Jimmy and their wives arrived at the Pantages at precisely the same moment, and graciously agreed to pose together for photographers. Heston later remembered, “As the flashbulbs finally petered out and we turned to go to our seats, Jimmy took my arm and said, ‘I hope you win, Chuck, I really mean that.’ I don’t know another actor alive who would’ve said such a thing. He’s an extraordinary man.”

  And an extraordinarily disappointed one when Heston’s name was called, even if he chose not to show it in public. Instead, he remained gracious, stayed at the proceedings until the very end, skipped all the post-festivities, and went straight home with Gloria. He had had a lot riding on Anatomy, the last of his films released in what had been an incredible decade of filmmaking. He had wanted to end the ’50s on a climactic, high-note flourish. Instead, he did it by losing a two-man chariot race to God.

  A year later, as Cary Grant smoothly traversed the countryside in North by Northwest, a film that not only outgrossed Vertigo three to one (in its initial domestic release) but was hailed as the finest work of both Grant’s and Hitchcock’s careers, a dispirited Jimmy was finishing up a minor and quickly forgotten Daniel Mann feature for Columbia, The Mountain Road, in the type of role he once swore he would never play—a U.S. army commander fighting the Japanese in southern China during World War Two. When it opened, in June 1960, the New York Times dismissed it as a “mild little war sermon.”