by Marc Eliot
One story he didn’t tell any reporters was that during the long delay he had decided to make up some reserve time with the air force. On a routine flight he was piloting, one of the engines of the aircraft conked out, and, with great difficulty, he’d managed to bring the hobbled craft to a safe landing. “All I could think of was not my personal safety,” he wrote in his diary, “but what Congresswoman Margaret Chase Smith would say if I crashed such an expensive plane.”
Take Her, She’s Mine opened at New York’s Criterion Theatre on November 13, 1963, to fairly awful reviews. Despite the thumbs-down from the critics and the Kennedy assassination nine days later, which produced one of the lowest box-office weeks in the history of movies, the film managed to do fairly well, outgrossing several “bigger” openings that year, eventually earning a fair profit for both the studio and the profit-sharing Jimmy.
By then he had already filmed a cameo screen appearance for John Ford as Wyatt Earp in a bizarre scene in an even more bizarre film, Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s mea culpa for “having killed a lot of Indians in my time” and his newfound need to “make amends.” The resultant film was a bloated mess, and a box-office failure. Ford would make only three more features before his death, none with Jimmy.3
Later that year, Stewart once again lamented in public about the death of the Hollywood studio system and how it reflected the culture’s passing scene. As the New York Times described him during the interview, he was “rather stolid, conservative…so reticent that strangers often find it all but impossible to elicit responses to questions. At 56, Stewart’s hair is gray and his face deeply lined. His speech is slow and deliberate. Stewart rarely mixes with fellow performers on a set but under suitably relaxed conditions and with the proper lubricants, he can be an entertaining raconteur. Stewart acknowledges that he misses Hollywood’s old studio system, where top stars were carefully nurtured and assigned prime vehicles. Faced with the anarchy of present day Hollywood, Stewart complains that he has a difficult time finding movies that he wants to make. ‘The Hollywood product today places too much emphasis on shock and not enough on old-fashioned sentiment,’ he states. ‘I still like to do movies that make the ladies cry.’”
The article went on to mention that, unlike his best friend, Fonda, Jimmy had not returned periodically to Broadway. And it slipped in almost as an afterthought that he was an ardent supporter of that fall’s Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater. In fact, Stewart’s enthusiasm for Goldwater, the extremist right-wing candidate the party had put up against the Democrat post-assassination candidate, the (then) hugely popular and broadly liberal Lyndon Johnson, bordered on the obsessive. The Goldwater presidential campaign seemed to reignite Jimmy’s passions, giving him the kind of energy that making films no longer did. He campaigned whenever he found the least bit of free time, between working on his newest film, Shenandoah, an imitation John Ford Civil War–lite family saga. Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (actor Victor McLaglen’s son), the film was filled with rifles, whiskers, chewed-on cigar butts, and a James Stewart that Newsweek described as not only “far from young, but [playing a role] of paterfamilias more tired than his eyes.”
Earlier that year, Jimmy had completed work on Dear Brigitte, yet another dull domestic comedy, this one with Ed Wynn, a comic who brought anything but youth to the picture, and a scene in which Jimmy played the accordion, which just about stopped whatever discernible heartbeat the film had had until then. Understandably, it brought an end to the Koster/Johnson/Stewart Fox unit, by far the least memorable of the series. Brigitte Bardot’s appearance in the film didn’t do anything for its box office. Nor did the preposterousness of the fact that Jimmy, fifty-six but looking on the far side of sixty—his increased drinking, or use of “proper lubricants,” as the New York Times had politely referred to it, didn’t help his looks any—was supposed to be the father of an eight-year-old tyke. Jimmy’s wife in the film was played by forty-one-year-old Glynis Johns. Moreover, Bardot had refused to allow her image or even full name to be used to promote the film, having reluctantly signed on strictly for the money (the reason the film’s name was changed from Erasmus with Freckles to Dear Brigitte, the only way the producers had of suggesting her presence). She appeared in only one brief sequence, at the end of the film, for which the entire cast had to travel to Paris, as she refused to fly to Hollywood for the shoot.
The film holds no stylistic significance, no strong place in the canon of the James Stewart filmography; it does not accurately reflect the mood of the country during the time it was made (it appears more like a film from the mid-fifties than the early sixties). And yet, it somehow found an audience among aging loyalists of Jimmy’s who would, apparently, go to see him in anything and among the younger people who wanted to catch a glimpse of the elusive Brigitte Bardot.
Released in 1965, Shenandoah did even better, placing sixth among the top-grossing films of that year, Stewart’s biggest moneymaker since Rear Window, more than a decade earlier.
Although Lyndon Johnson had won the presidency in the fall of 1964 by one of the largest landslides in electoral history, Jimmy’s campaigning for Goldwater had invigorated his political spirits. It also once again widened the personal distance between him and Henry Fonda, who, according to Jimmy’s daughter, Kelly, was, through the years, “my father’s only real close friend.” What had further complicated matters between them was that Fonda’s daughter, Jane, and son, Peter, had publicly come out against the growing conflict in Vietnam, which did not sit well at all with Jimmy. As far as he was concerned, the war was 100 percent justified, and anyone who thought otherwise was un-American. He told one reporter, in an uncharacteristic burst of public anger, in response to a question about draft-dodgers that seemed to be aimed directly at his Fonda godchildren, “I hate them! I absolutely hate them! Whether right or wrong, their country was at war and their country asked them to serve and they refused and ran away. Cowards, that’s what they were.”
As in virtually every home across America, TV had brought Vietnam into the living rooms of the Stewarts, where it became the nightly subject over dinner, and in this instance split the family into two factions as wide as the Mekong Delta. Each of Jimmy’s two stepsons had his own opinion, one far different from the other’s. Michael, the younger of the two, who, like all four of Jimmy’s children, had expressed little or no interest in a show-business career, had set his sights on a major in political science. Soon his hair had grown long and he was openly student-protesting against the war, taking part in demonstrations that outraged his father.
Michael’s stepsister, Kelly, although not really political, was sympathetic with Michael’s commitment to his cause. “Michael and I were products of the times,” Kelly recalled later. “The youth movement was taking hold, the war didn’t seem to make much sense, and Michael and I didn’t feel as if we had to pretend it did. My sister and I were still in high school, and we couldn’t understand why anyone would want to go over to Vietnam voluntarily, to fight.”
Generational and political walls went up between Michael and Jimmy, with stony dinner-hour silences, broken by ever-increasing outbursts from one or the other. The situation then completely unraveled when one day Michael came home from school and announced that he had declared himself a conscientious objector, which Jimmy took as tantamount to draft-dodging.
Ronald, on the other hand, could not have been more a model Maitland-Stewart if he had been born into the line. While away attending Colorado State, he decided that, in two years, immediately following his graduation, he would join the marines. During family dinners, the arguments that followed between the father and Michael intensified, and Michael and Ronald and Kelly and their father often ended the evening having shouted themselves hoarse, filled with angry emotions. Gloria, for the most part, tried to stay out of these politically heated battles.
What made Michael even angrier was his father’s unwavering support of Ronald Reagan. The once-liberal head of the Screen Actors
Guild had since moved considerably to the right. He had become an outspoken critic of the burgeoning student-based Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, and was about to use that as a campaign platform for his 1966 run for the governorship of California, against incumbent Pat Brown, whom Reagan pointed the finger of blame at for all of Berkeley’s troubles. It was this two-term residency at the State House that would lead, after a failed attempt in 1976, to Reagan’s election in 1980 as president of the United States.
In the years before he became governor, Reagan loved to host fund-raising dinner parties with his wife, Nancy, at Chasen’s, where Jimmy and Gloria were their most frequent guests, and it was at one of those occasions in the winter of 1966 that Reagan asked for and got Jimmy’s support for a fall gubernatorial run. Jimmy enthusiastically agreed to do whatever he could for the cause.
Together, Reagan and Stewart made numerous public and private fund-raising appearances that helped finance the upcoming campaign. Jimmy enjoyed the endless receptions and always helped draw a big crowd, but consistently turned down offers from Reagan’s campaign to accept any official post, and later on, after Reagan became president, to run for governor himself. He just wanted to help out his pal, he told any and all comers, and refused any type of payback, ceremonial or substantial, for his efforts.
Instead, after Reagan’s election, he wanted to go back to making more movies and signed on to do another one for Andrew V. McGlaglen, The Rare Breed, opposite his Hobbs co-star Maureen O’Hara. Production went smoothly, almost mechanically, and once the film was in the can, Jimmy went into production on Flight of the Phoenix for director Robert Aldrich, a plane-crash-in-the-desert drama that Aldrich adapted from a novel he had optioned by British author Elleston Trevor. As it happened, Gloria had read it at about the same time, and, independent of Aldrich, had suggested to Jimmy that he would be perfect in the role of the aging, grizzled pilot/hero of the story, Frank Townes. When Aldrich made his offer, Jimmy jumped at it.
The film had an outstanding supporting cast that included Richard Attenborough, Hardy Kruger, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, Dan Duryea, and George Kennedy. The rough edge of Aldrich’s heavy touch actually helped make the film an even more biting saga. Shot on location in Yuma, Arizona, it echoed, however faintly, the desert atmospherics of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and would go on to inspire such large-scale all-star miracle rescue fare as Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
During the unusually long and difficult production, according to his daughter Kelly, Jimmy went to extraordinary lengths to make sure he spent sufficient time with the family. “We had never all actually gone on a full safari together, with everyone there at the same time for the whole time. Mother had decided to take the kids and join some friends in Africa. When Father heard about this, he really wanted to join us, to be with the whole family together on a vacation no matter how brief, so he checked his schedule and found that he had just enough of a break during filming to board a plane, fly to Africa, spend one day with us, then return and head immediately to the set to resume filming.”
On July 27, over the objections of director Aldrich and Fox head Richard Zanuck, Stewart simply walked off the set, leaving word that he would be back in a week, and that they should shoot around him until then. Late in the evening of August 2, just as he had promised, an exhausted Jimmy Stewart returned to his Holiday Inn suite in Yuma, and the next morning showed up on-set to resume working on the picture. There were no further interruptions until the film was finished, and also no further mention by anyone of the “furlough” taken by its star.
Flight of the Phoenix held its “world premiere” in December 1965 in order to qualify for the Oscars (thereby opening ahead of The Rare Breed), and began its regular domestic theatrical run on January 20, 1966, to indifferent-to-negative reviews and so-so box office, due at least in part to its total lack of younger stars or women to make the all-male plot more compelling (the only female character in the film is glimpsed in a brief mirage sequence, starring a young and unknown Barrie Chase, a dancer mostly remembered for her TV work on Fred Astaire’s specials). The film wound up placing a respectable forty-fifth among the highest-grossing movies of the year—not great, not awful; like the film itself, run of the mill.
As 1966 kicked in, Jimmy and Gloria took a long vacation during which they delivered their twin daughters to schools in Switzerland for their junior high school years abroad. Ronnie, meanwhile, had elected to go to Orme, a military prep school north of Prescott, Arizona, in anticipation of becoming an officer with the marines, while Michael chose Mercersberg, the same school his dad had attended as a youngster.
Shortly after the Stewarts’ return to Los Angeles, Jimmy put in his annual Reserve stint with the air force; otherwise he and Gloria kept mostly to themselves, except to attend the occasional black-tie affair, such as the star-studded twenty-fifth anniversary celebration for Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson thrown by Frank Sinatra at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The couple had first met via Cary Grant when Brisson had stayed at Grant’s beach house in the late forties, after Grant’s live-in partner, Randolph Scott, had moved out. The Brisson marriage was, besides Jimmy and Gloria’s, one of the few Hollywood domestic success stories; to share in the festivities, a virtual Who’s Who of Hollywood upper echelon of glitterati turned out. Even Grant, who lately had become increasingly uncomfortable being photographed in public with his new, much younger bride, the actress Dyan Cannon, nevertheless showed up in full-smile regalia, along with the Dean Martins, the Kirk Douglasses, the Mike Romanoffs, the Vincente Minnellis, Roddy McDowall, radio and film producer William Frye, book publisher and TV game show personality Bennett Cerf and his wife, Claudette Colbert, Pat Kennedy Lawford, the Alan Jay Lerners, the Leland Haywards (he had remarried), and the Josh Logans.4
Early in 1967, Jimmy began work on a new picture at Warner Bros., Firecreek, for director Vincent McEveety, whose previous experience was limited to directing one TV movie for Disney, Adventures of Hector, The Stowaway Pig, one-hour episodes of television’s neoclassic Western TV drama Gunsmoke, the neonoir series The Fugitive, and the popish spy satire The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Jimmy had originally assumed McLaglen would helm, but McLaglen had taken on an assignment instead to direct Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark, and Robert Mitchum in The Way West. Firecreek was originally conceived as a feature-length film for TV, using most of the crew and talent from Gunsmoke, until its escalating budget dictated it had to go into theaters or be shelved.
Despite McEveety’s uncertain film credits and the production’s origination as a TV film, Jimmy was enthusiastic about it, mainly because Henry Fonda had agreed to co-star, and Jimmy was eager to bury their political differences. Eighteen years and complicated politics had kept them from doing screen time together since King Vidor’s On Our Merry Way.5 In the interim, everything in their lives had flowed along opposite shores, up to and including their opinions on the Vietnam War.
In the film, Jimmy and Fonda were cast as dire enemies, with Fonda in the role of an intellectual but deadly gunslinger, his familiar redemptive darkness swathed in a dark nobility. Jimmy, on the other hand, plays the town’s part-time family-man sheriff, who is called upon to defend the townfolk from a band of outlaws (the land in question, the Missouri range, was more or less the same setting for the same plot—landowners vs. cattlemen—that framed George Stevens’s Shane a decade earlier and that would again two decades later in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate). Firecreek also borrows liberally from High Noon, with a gunfight at the end between the surviving good guy, Stewart, and the surviving bad guy, Fonda, in which Fonda is about to kill Stewart until his granddaughter, played by the lovely Inger Stevens, shoots Fonda in the back, Grace Kelly style in High Noon.
Filmed in Arizona in December, many of those who were on-set remember Jimmys’ and Fonda’s close relationship, how they would go off together talking low so that only the other could hear, laughing at things only they
knew were funny, and then going their separate ways, Fonda to play cards with the other “villains” of the film, Jack Elam and James Best, while Jimmy would keep mostly to himself, working on his character, thinking him through, and practicing hand gestures and faces that would match his dialogue.
The film, Jimmy’s seventy-first, opened on February 21, 1967, in New York City; critics immediately saw the similarities between it and High Noon, something that did not work in Firecreek’s favor. Having been tossed off by Warner, prior to its release, as part of a deal with its new distributor, Seven Arts, the film never had much of a chance and quickly disappeared (and because of the financial difficulties Seven Arts eventually ran into, their catalog, including Firecreek, has had very little subsequent TV play and remains largely unseen).6
Firecreek was followed by a long layoff of Jimmy from films. The hard truth was that fewer producers and directors were willing to go with an actor young people knew only as an old man, whose skin was weathered, who wore toupees as obvious as top hats, whose eyes constantly watered and whose hearing was permanently impaired (due, it was said, to the plunge he had taken into the icy waters to save Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. That dive began the start of a long, slow descent into near-deafness in one ear, not at all helped by his extensive flying for the air force).
Moreover, the screen was being taken over by the next wave of independent-minded actors, producers, and directors all young enough to be his children. Or grandchildren. While he was laboring as an aging sheriff, actors such as Warren Beatty were creating a new kind of shoot-out film (Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) younger audiences would flock to. That same year, Dustin Hoffman in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (also 1967) helped radically shift the notion of what a Hollywood leading man could be, from Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda/Gary Cooper/Cary Grant—tall, handsome, and all-American (in spirit if not birth)—to big-nosed, short, ethnic, immigrant-rooted neurotic “antiheroes,” all of which set the stage, as it were, for 1969’s epochal Easy Rider, directed by co-star Dennis Hopper, and produced by Henry Fonda’s son, Peter. The film turned perennial “B” actor Jack Nicholson, the king of the celluloid neurotics, into an instant mainstream sensation, and established Peter, playing Captain America, a dope-smoking, free-loving hippie with a heart (and a Harley), as a big-screen Hollywood movie star.
