by Marc Eliot
However, if he had been looking for redemption in the comfort of the happier past, he hadn’t counted on what still lay before him, nothing less than full-scale resurrection, coming, of all places, from the mythic village of Bedford Falls, and not at all in the guise of Elwood P. Dowd, but old (young) George Bailey.
By the late sixties, the studio system, as Jimmy knew it, was on a one-way journey to oblivion. From its inception in the earliest years of the twentieth century, the movie business had been based on the notion of mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposability. Like automobiles, the thinking among the moguls was that films had limited values and that the American family had to be trained to buy one car every two years, two films once a week), and that when a film (or car) had run its course, it was ready for the junkyard. Old cars? There was no money in that for the likes of Ford. Old movies? Hollywood couldn’t care less about them. This is why the studios allowed the negatives of so many of the early silent films (and a considerable number of sound ones as well) to literally disintegrate in their cans. Before satellite TV, before cable, before home video, before college courses in film, before television itself, very few films had any kind of shelf life. The occasional “classic,” such as Gone With the Wind, might be theatrically revived every five or ten years, but that was the notable exception. For the most part, films that had had their first run were considered by the industry to be as worthless and disposable as yesterday’s newspaper.
When commercial television came into the homes it redefined the idea of entertainment for the American family. Although old films were a substantial part of the first generation of electronic offerings, by the mid-fifties, the great majority of network television was original programming that featured, for the most part, names that had never quite made it to the top in Hollywood and were on the downslide of their careers—Lucille Ball, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason—and whose childish brand of humor would hold a great appeal to a new, younger market.
Then, in the late sixties, a wondrous thing happened. After several TV networks began showing recent films as prime-time programming events—the NBC Film of the Week—it slowly dawned on the networks that there might, indeed, be life in recycled movies after all. The unions quickly made deals with the studios to cover royalties for the actors, directors, and other talent who had made the original films. At this point, smaller, independent stations, such as Channel 5 in New York City, searched for older films that had gone into the public domain, films that for one reason or another did not require royalty payments. In other words, free programming.
One such film Channel 5 discovered in the dust bin of discards was Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the film Capra had lost ownership of when Liberty Pictures had gone under. Most of Liberty’s assets had gone to Paramount Pictures to repay distribution guarantees. Paramount, however, had no interest in the negatives of the films it inherited and stored them away, not caring if or when the nitrate content turned the pictures, including It’s a Wonderful Life, into dust.1
When Channel 5 went looking for films in the public domain that had a Christmas theme to compete with the big-name “specials” the networks were running, someone came across It’s a Wonderful Life. A few days before Christmas 1969, the local station screened the badly scratched and faded film late on a Saturday night. To the station’s amazement, a buzz quickly developed about this oddly dark “Christmas” comedy from “way back” in the forties, and Channel 5 began making plans for the following season to start to run the film as early as Thanksgiving, and keep it in frequent rotation through New Year’s Eve.
The TV success of It’s a Wonderful Life in New York City quickly spread to other independent stations all over the country, and by the time Frank Capra’s memoirs were published, in 1970, both he and his book were in great demand. The Name Above the Title jumped onto the best-seller lists, Capra became a frequent guest on TV talk shows, and he developed a lucrative lecture-circuit career, primarily aimed at college campuses just beginning to introduce film studies into their curricula.2 Donna Reed, who had made her career as an ingénue/leading lady in the late forties and early fifties, and who had become a TV mother in the late fifties with a sitcom that ran for eight seasons with her as a soothing, middle-aged mom, found a new audience for her talents, and went on to do a number of one-hour television dramas, thereby extending her career well into the seventies.
However, no one’s career, or life, was changed more by the film’s resurrection than Jimmy Stewart’s. To the fabled baby boomers born either the year of or after the film was made, Jimmy became the everyman hero who takes on the establishment, who is for the “little people” and therefore an instant cultural hero. There he was again, courting Donna Reed, fighting old man Potter, raising his kids, taking the plunge off the bridge, the fight in the bar, Clarence, Zuzu’s petals, all of it. College students in particular loved the film and watched it during the Christmas season religiously. Even general viewing audiences began to ritualize it, allowing It’s a Wonderful Life to join a select handful of aging theatrical films that found an annual Christmas season television audience, including the 1951 Brian Desmond Hurst version of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim, Judy Garland’s magical turn as Dorothy in Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, and Leo McCarey’s 1944 Going My Way with Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley.
By the time Jimmy had decided to slip back into the staged unreality of Harvey, the audience waiting to see him had grown to film-cult proportion. After a brief but successful tryout in Ann Arbor, co-starring Broadway legend Helen Hayes and supporting character actor Jesse White, the play opened on February 24, 1970, at the ANTA Theater on West Fifty-second Street, and caused a near riot. Thousands of fans who had not been able to get tickets turned out to try to catch a glimpse of their hero as he entered the stage door.
No one was more surprised by all of the excitement surrounding his return to Broadway than Jimmy, who had taken on the limited eight-week run as a way of being able to bow out gracefully if the show didn’t sell any tickets.
He needn’t have worried. Critics fell over themselves raving about his performance, and there wasn’t an empty seat the entire eight weeks.
Still, prior to opening, he could not shake a bad case of the nerves returning to the live stage, even in a role he had played so many times before. Broadway audiences could be tough and cruel, and he was feeling particularly vulnerable those days. “I’m nervous,” he told Judy Klemesrud of the New York Times, “When you haven’t been onstage in twenty years, it’s a pretty hard thing to get back into. Especially the voice projection. But my wife, Gloria, and I kind of welcomed the change. We found ourselves sitting around Beverly Hills having conversations with our two dogs. Hollywood is a little quiet and depressing right now. It’s another one of our disaster times.” He didn’t have to elaborate, and Klemesrud kindly didn’t press the issue. The cloud of grief that hung heavily over him was obvious.
The day after it opened New York Times’s chief drama critic, Clive Barnes, gave Harvey, and Jimmy’s performance in it, the newspaper of record’s official anointment of greatness when he declared: “Stewart’s garrulous, genial presence is a delight. You feel that apart from Harvey himself, there is no one that you would rather encounter in your favorite neighborhood bar.”
The New York Daily News called the production “marvelous,” Jimmy’s performance “a master class in acting.”
The New York Post said Jimmy was “better than the late Frank Fay” in the role of Elwood.
Life magazine jocularly described Jimmy as “the perfect hippie hero, and with his hallucinatory rabbit he is taking the happiest trip on Broadway. Maybe, to draw a younger audience, the show should be called ‘Hare.’”
Walter Kerr, in the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section, wrote that “Mr. Stewart makes the play’s last act astonishingly moving—was Frank Fay funnier? Who can honestly say now? He was nowhere near so touching.”
And on
e local TV critic, John Bartholomew Tucker, compared the opportunity of seeing Jimmy in Harvey as akin to seeing Laurence Olivier in Oedipus Rex or “Yankee great Joe DiMaggio play center field.”
Jimmy and Gloria had taken up residence on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers for the duration, where a color photograph of Ronald and his mother, taken by Jimmy when they briefly visited him in Dong Ha six months before the boy was killed, occupied center position on the suite’s mantel.
They threw small post-theater cocktail parties almost every night, preferring a homey atmosphere, even if it was the luxe Waldorf, to going out on the town. In proper fashion of those who bow to show business royalty, everyone was willing to come up to their suite for drinks, talk, hors d’oeuvres, and good conversation. Everyone who came by when they first entered the suite always asked the same cute question: Where was Harvey?
At least part of the show’s popularity could be traced to the revival of It’s a Wonderful Life, once it became clear as many young people were coming to see the show as old ones, children who wanted their parents to take them to see Zuzu’s father. Typical of the tykes who were taken by Mom and Dad backstage was one young man Stewart remembered this way: “A kid came with his dad, who said, ‘Son, this is Elwood P. Dowd.’ The kid said, ‘I liked two things you said and I forget what they were,’ but I said to myself, ‘Thank the Lord for small favors. He could have said he didn’t like anything!”
Toward the end of the show’s run, the Phoenix approached Jimmy about the possibility of extending the run at the ANTA a few more weeks, and he immediately agreed. He simply didn’t want to stop playing Elwood. Another seven weeks was agreed upon, and again, the run sold out every seat. In a Broadway season that offered such new fare as Sleuth, which would go on to win the Tony for best drama; Borstal Boy, Home, Child’s Play, Conduct Unbecoming, Bob and Ray—The Two and Only, and revivals of Candide, Hay Fever, Othello, and Songs from Milk Wood, Harvey remained among the year’s top-grossing plays.
As May approached, the Phoenix once again sat down with Jimmy, this time to discuss the possibility of his staying with the show through the summer. After all, they told him, that was the time when most of the kids would be out of school and they could guarantee full houses. Besides, they were prepared to offer him a hefty raise to continue doing what he obviously loved so much.
To their surprise, but not Gloria’s, Jimmy turned them down. He was feeling the grind of thirteen weeks, eight-shows-a-week on his aging body. He had had enough. His last performance, on May 2, 1970, was an emotional one. Gloria was in the front row, and dozens of his friends were in attendance as well. Everyone knew that this was most likely the last time Jimmy Stewart’s presence would ever grace the Broadway stage, where so long ago he had begun his professional acting career. When the curtain fell, he came out alone for the final bow to a ten-minute standing ovation, as tears streamed down the surface of his pancaked face.
Jimmy and Gloria did not return directly to California. There was still the layer of grief that hung over their house the way smog did over L.A.—relentless, dense, and unhealthy. Instead, he booked a trip for them to one of their favorite retreats, the Aberdare mountains of Kenya, where Gloria could practice her photography. Both of them had, in fact, become fairly good at taking National Geographic–style photos. Gloria was by now so enamored of wildlife she had become a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Zoo (their daughter Kelly had found a focus for her “nihilism” by spending the summer on the south shore of Lake Rudolf in Northern Kenya, on a dig with Richard Leaky, the son of the famous anthropologist). Somewhere along the way, Jimmy, inspired by the grand vista of Africa’s hills and mountains, began writing the singsong little verses that later on would become a talk-show staple whenever he appeared on them, particularly the Johnny Carson show, where Carson would love to hear Jimmy recite his nonsense poetry as if it were bubble-gum wrapper versions of the wit and wisdom of William Shakespeare.
They eventually arrived back at the North Roxbury house in June, just in time for Jimmy to turn down an offer to repeat his live portrayal of Elwood P. Dowd in Los Angeles. Helen Hayes had already agreed to be in it, but Jimmy still said no. What he really wanted to do was to make another movie, and signed on for what would be his fourth and final collaboration with Andrew McLaglen, Fools’ Parade, an action adventure, shot on location in Moundsville, West Virginia.3
In it Jimmy plays Mattie Appleyard, a long-termer released from the penitentiary after serving his forty years for murder. He has a glass eye, a physical correlative to his lack of moral vision. Waiting for him is Anne Baxter, the madam of a local riverboat bordello, and assorted bad guys looking to corrupt what appears to be the nicest lifer who ever lived. He manages to kill a few more bad guys, goes to trial, is released, and sets off into the sunset on his merry one-eyed way.
The film was received indifferently, did little at the box office, and convinced Jimmy once and for all that his best filmmaking days were behind him. He was right; he would never again appear in a major motion picture with his name above the title. At the completion of the shoot, he accepted an offer to star in a half-hour TV series on NBC, slated for the 1971–72 fall season. His ratings on TV had always been high, from his earliest days on the tube with Reagan on G.E. Theater, to his many guest shots with Gloria on Jack Benny and his singing/accordion appearances on the enormously popular Dean Martin variety show.
The networks, sensing a real score, made Jimmy an offer he couldn’t refuse, which turned him into what was then the highest-paid actor on TV.
Hal Kanter, a producer who had worked with Jimmy on Dear Brigitte, had known him since the war and had worked with virtually the cream of the movies-to-TV star set, including Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, and Elvis Presley. He had recently been at the forefront of integrating network family fare with such controversial shows as Julia, staring Diahann Carroll. After Julia proved a hit, NBC asked Kanter to develop a show for Jimmy Stewart, and he jumped at the chance. Jimmy wanted to do a sitcom that stared Gloria as his wife, a cross between Jack Benny’s show and Ozzie and Harriet. Kanter agreed, Gloria screen-tested, and she was all set to start rolling when the network turned her down, saying she wasn’t a good enough actress to pull it off. Kanter then turned the casting of the part of Jimmy’s wife into a major promotion for the upcoming series. “There hasn’t been such a search since David O. Selznick hunted for Scarlett O’Hara’s maid in ‘Gone With The Wind,’” he announced to the press. “We’ve talked to every woman in this business over the age of 15 [itals added]. I’ve seen at least 50 actresses. Jimmy has read with 20 of them. We’ve screen-tested five and there are four more yet to be tested. Many of the actresses are well-known names. What surprised me is that some of them freeze up when they read with Jimmy. Especially the Broadway actresses. They are bowled over by his professionalism and I guess you could call it star power.”
Jimmy smiled for the press but privately was infuriated that some hot shot at the network had decided that Gloria was not good enough to play Gloria on some silly TV show. The role eventually went to Julie Adams (Jimmy’s co-star in Bend of the River). Adams, forty-four, was eighteen years Jimmy’s junior, and it stretched the credibility of their relationship even further when they were supposed to have a grown son.4
The Jimmy Stewart Show (so named because, as Kanter put it, “the deep think boys at NBC gave a great deal of thought and research to the title and discovered the word ‘show’ is known to everyone”) debuted September 19, and did not do well in the ratings. Jimmy looked old, tired, uncomfortable, and miscast. What’s more, he had quickly discovered that he hated the grind of making what was, in effect, a short film every week. Early on, while still trying to make up his mind whether or not to go into television, he had talked it over with good friend Fred MacMurray, who told him it was the easiest thing he had ever done. And it was, for MacMurray. He had been doing it successfully for twelve years and had had it written into his contract that all his sc
enes for the complete season of his sitcom, My Three Sons, be shot together, with the rest of the cast doing the daily/weekly/monthly fill-ins. That allowed MacMurray to play golf for most of the year, while the show continued with his name and image effectively cut in when needed. Jimmy rejected that approach, preferring to shoot his show with the rest of the cast, something he had come to regret.
Not that it really mattered. The era of Ozzie and Harriet and the Jack Benny Program was coming to an end. On the horizon was a new crop of sitcoms; The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, and All in the Family that would change forever the face of TV comedy, effectively warehousing the Lucys, the Gleasons, the Nelsons, the Bennys, the MacMurrays, and the Stewarts.
The Jimmy Stewart Show was canceled after one season and its star couldn’t have been happier.
In 1972 at the age of sixty-four, Jimmy, along with Gene Autry, was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Great Motion Picture Performers at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The company was considerable: John Wayne’s The Cowboys, directed by Mark Rydell, was voted the top Western film of the year, an episode of TV’s Gunsmoke took the honors in that category, and John Ford received a special award for his contribution to Western heritage.
