Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  When he wasn’t out somewhere being honored, he spent long weekends at Roxbury dusting off old trophies and statuettes, or swimming in his unheated pool (not wanting to look extravagant during the energy crisis, he insisted on keeping the water at its natural temperature), answering some of the five hundred fan letters a month he still received, or if one of his movies was on TV—they played in Los Angeles and New York in the seventies on local over-the-air independent stations on the average of two to three times per week—watching without any apparent enjoyment, but rather with a critical eye, talking out loud about how “that was good,” or “she should have said it that way,” or “I wish I hadn’t done it like that,” or “that dialogue doesn’t work.”

  All the while the ticking of the big clock grew ever louder. It was the only thing he could clearly hear without his cochlear aid.

  His turn to be placed in the pantheon by the American Film Institute came on February 28, 1980.3 Fonda, in turn, served as the emcee, and at one point told the audience “The point I want to lay on you, is that Jimmy Stewart never went out and looked for a job. The parts just kept happening for Jim and they kept getting bigger and bigger.” Fonda’s speech was followed by film clips from several of the classic features Jimmy had made. After, Richard Widmark said a few words about their experience making Two Rode Together. George Kennedy did the same about Bandolero! Ruth Hussey, Karl Malden, Ernest Borgnine, all spoke of acting with Jimmy; Mervyn LeRoy and Henry Hathaway recalled directing him; and Douglas Morrow represented the writers.

  Then Frank Capra, hunched with age, his speech wet with saliva and roughened by a slight stutter that sounded as much the product of confusion as any speech defect, came to the microphone and, before a hushed audience, managed to say the following: “There is a higher level than great performances in acting. A level where there is no acting at all. The actor disappears and there’s only a real live person on the screen. A person audiences care about immediately. There are only a few actors, very few, capable of achieving this highest level of the actor’s art. And that tall stringbean sitting right over there, he’s one of them.”

  Those words brought Jimmy to tears, as he stood with the rest of the crowd to a standing ovation for Capra while the aged director slowly left the stage. Jack Lemmon came on next and lightened the moment with his well-known (within the industry) impersonation of Jimmy, uncannily accurate and altogether hilarious. To ringing laughter, Lemmon concluded by getting close to the mike, looking in Jimmy’s direction and saying, “You’re a great actor, sir.”

  Grace Kelly was the next to approach the mike. Looking heavier than her ice-goddess years but still elegant and beautiful, she said a few soft words into the microphone, and then handed the podium over to, of all people, Dustin Hoffman.

  It fell to Hoffman to give the last word, one that filled with unintended irony from the actor whose naturalistic screen skills caused many critics to hail him as the “next Jimmy Stewart.” His words so accurately sum up the turning of Hollywood’s generational tide, gratitude, awe, and respect that they bear repeating in total: “The truth of the matter is, Mr. Stewart,” Hoffman began, speaking in the measured tones of an actor with a Bronx accent who has spent thousands trying in vein to lose it, “I wanted to be here tonight to see a lot of your work and to hear people talk about you, people I’ve never met, and hear stories I’ve never heard. My father grew up with you. My father worked on the lot when you were making Mr. Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and he’s your age.” Hoffman then paused before adding, “My mother is my age and that’s one of the problems.” The joke broke the tension and the black-tied audience loosened up and laughed out loud. “I saw It’s a Wonderful Life two days ago for the first time. I think I’m maybe the only one here to have seen it recently. It’s a great, great film and a great piece of work and you could have shown it tonight and it would have been a tribute in itself. I congratulate you for a really first-class piece of work, sir. I’m up here representing my generation of actors…. When I saw you on-screen in that performance, you made me laugh, you made me cry, and you made me wish for a country which perhaps we haven’t seen for a while. I was told that It’s a Wonderful Life was not a success, that you came back from the Second World War and made this film and were told by critics and people in this town that your career was at a low ebb and that you were down and out. I was also told you’d made the comment that you weren’t sure whether you were an unemployed actor or an unemployed flier. Well, let me just say in closing that you made my parents very happy and you made me very happy, and if this world has any kind of Capra luck, you are going to make my children’s children very happy.”

  At that point, the audience stood once more, this time to cheer Hoffman’s heartfelt words. When the ovation began to fade, director George Stevens came to the podium to introduce the evening’s honored recipient by reading the inscription on the award: “For one whose career has, in a fundamental way, advanced the film-making art and whose work has stood the test of time.”

  The crowd then hushed once more as Stevens gestured toward Stewart. Jimmy smiled in his familiar closed-lips fashion as he stretched to his full height, and the applause began like a storm from another county that blew into the center of town by the time he made it to the stage.

  In typically soft-spoken manner, with his white hair bumping up against his orange-red toupee, and bifocals on his nose, he looked above the lenses to peer into the crowd. “Thank you all for sharing such a wonderful evening…which is about to go down hill fast…as I fumble around for the right words to express my appreciation. I know it’s late and I promised myself to talk fast so as not to keep you up any later than is necessary. The problem is…I don’t know how to talk fast.”

  The audience laughed with hearty, knowing, adoring appreciation. “I guess you could say that, until tonight, the American Film Institute has honored brilliance…daring…abundance of talent and attainment of the highest ideals of the motion picture community and that…er…brings us down to where we are now. When the American Film Institute…in all its wisdom…adds a new name and a new category to the Life Achievement Award—Jimmy Stewart, a remarkably fortunate fella,” he told the twelve hundred movie stars and executives in attendance. And with that, as the houselights came up, as the crowd stood and cheered one last time, he turned and disappeared into the wings, a lifetime’s memories of achievement and honor left behind in the empty spotlight.

  Six months later, in the early evening of August 1980, seventy-two-year-old Jimmy Stewart was rushed to Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica, California, suffering severe chest pains. After initial reports of a heart attack, one saying he had died, the official word was released by a hospital spokesperson the next day that Jimmy had, in fact, not suffered a heart attack, but the effects of “an irregular pulse.” He was released after two days.

  Not much later, Jimmy found a new television outlet to replace both his former regularly recurring slots on the Dean Martin Show, which had been canceled, and the Jack Benny Program, which had ended a few years before with its star’s death. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson became a regular stop for him after his initial visit, in October 1979, to share with Carson and NBC the show’s seventeenth birthday. Carson, who was not a relaxed or particularly spontaneous host, took an instant liking to Jimmy, identifying with his small-town ways, his Midwestern values, and his total lack of pretense.

  Audiences responded as well. Like Carson, they loved the easy chat about safaris and old Hollywood and, most of all, the corny “poems” Jimmy liked to share with the audience, nonsense verses, mostly about animals, with a slightly risqué feel to them that kept audiences and Carson roaring with approval. Jimmy, always with pitch-perfect timing, exaggerated his drawl and his signature hand gestures, as he both poked fun and managed to pay tribute to himself without the slightest trace of ego, narcissism, cynicism, or bitterness.

  January 1981 began with a stint as the grand marshal of the annual Tournament
of Roses Parade in Pasadena, but the big deal of the year was the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth president of the United States, held at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. The Stewarts were among the most honored private guests of the new president, for a week of three days and three nights of nonstop parties. Jimmy was asked to perform in the big show, hosted by Johnny Carson, on a bill that included Bob Hope, Ethel Merman, Mel Tillis, Debby Boone, Charley Pride, and Charlton Heston, the cream of Hollywood’s conservative crop.

  For his bit, Jimmy, in tuxedo decked out with his pilot wings and service medals, used the occasion to publicly salute his good friend: “It is an honor for me to salute you as the new commander-in-chief. It is an honor for me to be able to call you, from now on, Mr. President.” Reagan was visibly moved by Jimmy’s words, tears running from his eyes when he stood to return the salute.

  It was a night that restored glamour in Washington, D.C., and set the black-tie tone for the duration of the Reagan presidency. Rather than bringing politics to Hollywood, Reagan had brought Hollywood to the capital, and it would be there that the country’s prime cultural focus would remain for the next eight years. Nancy Reagan conducted a well-organized rondo of parties, galas, events, and evenings that dazzled the press and kept the country’s populace glued to its television sets, beginning with the inauguration and continuing nearly uninterrupted for the two terms of the Reagan presidency.

  The very next month, on February 6, 1981, Jimmy and Gloria were headed back to Washington as guests of the Reagans to help celebrate the president’s seventieth birthday in a private party at the White House. It was the first of what were to be many nights the Stewarts would spend in the eighties sleeping in the grand old mansion.

  At least partially due to his exposure at such close proximity to the White House, and also to his frequent appearances on the Tonight Show, Jimmy’s schedule began to fill up, with still more honors and awards being given to him from all around the world. His life seemed newly reinvigorated, and he seemed to be enjoying his fame as never before. That spring, due to the popularity of his verses on the Carson show, in a deal brokered by the legendary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, he was offered a half-million dollars by Warner Books to write the story of his dog Beau, the subject of several of his goofy poems. He politely declined.

  That May, Jimmy and Gloria were invited to take an audience with Pope John Paul II.

  And then death returned with a vengeance.

  The world had watched with a combination of joy and sadness as Henry Fonda had won the Best Actor award the previous March for his performance in On Golden Pond, the first and long-overdue Oscar for one of Hollywood’s best ever (and most liberal) actors.4 It was, to be sure, a sentimental award, given more for the sum of his work than the performance he gave in an otherwise ordinary movie, in which he played the cranky father to his real-life daughter, Jane, and distant, imperious husband to the great Katharine Hepburn. Everyone could plainly see that he was in poor health when he was shown at home by remote camera immediately after his name was read. However, the news that came on August 11, that Fonda had died, still managed to stun the nation. Jimmy had taken to visiting the bedridden actor regularly, sitting by his bedside and shouting to his best friend, who also suffered from severe hearing loss.

  At the wake held in the Fonda home overflowing with friends, families, and show business luminaries, Jimmy sat alone, motionless, in Henry’s study, in his comfortable old leather chair, staring ahead into the past while around him the air buzzed with compensatory energy and activities. He looked not unlike Scottie Ferguson, in Vertigo, after his nightmare turns him catatonic, except that this was no movie; this was real, the grief not dramatized and psychotically obsessive like in the film, but depressingly sane.

  “Then, suddenly,” remembered Shirlee, Fonda’s wife, “he lowered his head very slowly over his lap and brought it back up at the same time that he raised his arms out as far as they would go and said, ‘It was by far the biggest kite we ever flew’…. After about five minutes of talking about nothing except these kites, he fell back into the same silence and same position he’d been in before he started talking.”

  Ten days later, Jimmy was back in the coronary unit. The pain in his heart, the doctors told his wife, was something no medicine could cure.

  PART EIGHT

  The Final Rise; the Final Fade

  Mr. and Mrs. James Stewart in the sunset of their lives.

  COURTESY OF KELLY STEWART HARCOURT AND THE ESTATE OF JAMES STEWART

  28

  “Rear Window has already started its new run with strong results at the box office, indicating that viewers are still spellbound by the Stewart-Hitchcock chemistry. Vertigo, perhaps Hitchcock’s greatest work, Rope, one of his most rarely shown, will follow soon, along with the colorful 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much…It’s a provocative notion, contrasting the glamorous Grant of To Catch a Thief say, with the troubled Stewart of Vertigo.’”

  —DAVID STERRITT

  In September 1982, Grace Kelly, only fifty-two years of age, died in an automobile accident in Monaco. Coming as it did one month after the death of Henry Fonda, it deepened Jimmy’s state of grief and mourning. Of all his leading ladies, Kelly had been his favorite, the only one who had become a lifelong friend of the family.

  At Gloria’s urging, Jimmy went back to work. She hoped that the new project he was offered might take his mind off these two latest, incalculable losses. The film was for television, something called Right of Way, co-starring an aged Bette Davis, to be directed by TV producer George Schaefer. Despite the stellar star quality of its two leads, the film, shockingly, was turned down by all three broadcast networks (one executive at CBS described the story about terminal illness, and its geriatric stars, as having zero box-office power in the world of ever-younger over-the-air demographics). It was finally sold to then-fledgling HBO, whose average viewing numbers in those days rarely peaked above 500,000 subscribers, making Right of Way the first made-for-cable film in TV history.1 Worse, for Jimmy (and Gloria), the script was all about aging and death and afforded its two stars ample time to cry on each other’s shoulders while thinking about their dear friend and co-star Fonda’s recent passing. At one point, after nailing a particularly touching scene, Jimmy looked upward and said, simply, “Thank you, Hank.”

  It was the last live action feature film in any form that Jimmy Stewart would appear in. It aired in the fall of November 1983, and, was unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) for the most part unnoticed and quickly forgotten by even his most loyal of fans. Jimmy, convinced more than ever his acting career was finally over, resigned himself to more rubber-chicken dinners, some in America, some abroad, some for the military, and some for charity.

  If there was anything that occupied his time in a more pleasant way, it was the frequent visits he and Gloria made to the White House as guests of the Reagans—along with their frequent traveling and socializing companions Ruth and Tom Jones, an aircraft executive from Northrop, California; Betsy Bloomingdale; and Betty and Bill Wilson, the latter appointed by Reagan to be the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, part of the president’s famously informal “kitchen cabinet.”

  What particularly amused Jimmy, when he thought about it, was how throughout all the years they had been acting together in Hollywood, Reagan was always the supporting player and he, Jimmy, the star. Now, here, in Washington, it was all Ronnie Reagan; he had become the most powerful man in the world, and Jimmy, who had played a small but important part in getting him there, was what amounted to an extra—all of which was fine with him. If this was to be his final fadeout, the production values couldn’t have been better. Anyway, he told himself, he had always prided himself on being a team player, and what better team could he have chosen to play on than this one?

  On May 20, although he wasn’t feeling in top shape—Jimmy believed he had aggravated a “bump” on his face by shaving with a new razor—he and Gloria trave
led back to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. There he was greeted by three thousand cheering fans outside the county courthouse. Waving to the crowd, he told them that coming home was like meeting and getting reacquainted with an old friend. For the next three days, the entire town, including several of his World War Two unit who had traveled to Indiana for the occasion, devoted itself to its favorite son. The highlight of the celebration came when a nine-foot statue of the actor was unveiled across the street from the original location of his father’s hardware store. It seemed to Jimmy a fitting end, a concrete wreath upon his own Hollywood life story.

  And then, once again, his career took an unexpected and extraordinary turn, in what may be seen as nothing less than a miracle of cinematic resurrection.

  It began, oddly enough, with the death of yet another close friend, Alfred Hitchcock, on April 29, 1980 (two years before Henry Fonda’s and Grace Kelly’s passings). As part of the director’s fifties contract with Paramount deal, Hitchcock was given eventual ownership on five of the films. When his eight-year exclusive lease with the studio expired (each eight-year period commencing with that particular film’s initial domestic release), most rights reverted to Hitchcock. Three of the five—Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo— starred Jimmy Stewart.

  After Hitchcock’s death, none of the five remained available for distribution. This was still the era of movie-screen–dominated exhibition—before the wide acceptance of cable, the existence of home video playback equipment, Blockbuster-type rental outlets, pay-per-view, or DVDs for rent via the mail. If one wanted to view certain classic films, such as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator or Hitchcock’s Vertigo, it necessitated either knowing someone with a clandestine print, or the willingness and financial wherewithal to hop a plane to Paris to catch a screening at that city’s famed Cinémathèque.