Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  Vertigo was briefly rereleased in 1973, by Hitchcock himself, but went largely unnoticed and was quickly pulled, after which none of the five features were seen again in any form of American theatrical release during his lifetime. In the late seventies, as film schools began to proliferate, requests for classic films became more frequent, and Hitchcock, for reasons unclear today, personally allowed the other four to be loaned out in numbered and encoded 16-mm prints (to prevent copying) to nontheatrical institutions, but absolutely refused to give anyone access to Vertigo.

  Two years after his death, his wife, Alma, who was the sole executor of his estate, passed away and left everything to their only daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, a sometime actress who played small but memorable roles in Strangers on a Train (the senator’s pushy daughter) and Psycho (Janet Leigh’s nosy co-worker). In 1983, O’Connell announced that a newly struck print of Rear Window would be shown, by request, at the Toronto Film Festival and at the most important and prestigious of all the annual American movie events, the New York Film Festival—and that she had arranged for Gloria and Jimmy Stewart to attend both.

  Jimmy was delighted by the invitation and immediately accepted on condition that he was sufficiently recovered from the month’s worth of radiation he was scheduled to undergo to treat that facial bump, which turned out to be a malignant skin tumor. It was the first serious health problem for Jimmy since his series of heart scares, and one that put a bit of a fright into him, especially when, while in attendance at the Toronto Film Festival, he had to leave before the actual screening due to facial pain. Despite his absence, the first public viewing in North America of Rear Window since the death of Hitchcock turned that festival on its head, and the buzz surrounding the upcoming New York showing was louder than any fall release that year was getting. The screening sold out weeks in advance.

  October 2, the night of the festival, its positively euphoric director, Richard Roud, led a press conference attended by Universal Classics vice president Jim Katz, the company’s entire East Coast publicity contingency, and Jimmy Stewart, whose presence had been iffy right up until the last minute. Roud completely charmed the crowd with a story about the Stewart/Kelly project intended as a sequel to Rear Window. “It was titled Designing Woman and it was going to be for MGM. We had the costumes all ready, the final touches were being put on the script and the sets were built. One Monday morning Grace Kelly came to Mr. Mayer and said, ‘Mr. Mayer, I’m going to get married.’”

  Jimmy then expressed regret at having quit the picture as well, leaving out that his decision had been made for personal, rather than professional, reasons; he simply wanted to be with and act alongside Kelly again. He then praised the eventual release that starred Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck as a very successful and wonderful picture. Later on, joking with some other members of the press, he said that Hitchcock would have made more money with Rope if he had charged people five bucks a head to see how the picture was done.

  That evening, Jimmy sat with the rest of the audience and, for the first time in nearly twenty years, watched Rear Window. When the film ended and the lights went up, the audience, already heavily applauding, broke into a thunderous ovation when Jimmy stood and waved to the crowd.

  The next morning, in his hotel suite, he reflected on what it was like to see the film after so much time had passed. “The wonderful thing about it is that so much of it is visual. You really have to keep your eye open in the film, because it’s a complicated thing. And the audience was really with it. I thought that was just amazing. It just bears out the feeling that so many of us had about Hitch and his way of doing things.” And then, with carefully chosen words, he turned his attention to Kelly. “The wonderful thing about Grace was that she was just completely at ease with her lines. The emphasis was always in the right place, and this came from her. I remembered that very vividly, and it was really brought back last night. Absolutely fascinating woman. This was only her fifth picture.” Still later on, Jimmy went about as far as he would ever go in describing his feelings for Kelly when he told a reporter that “I remember her so vividly…she had a warmth and a tenderness about her and you could see that it wasn’t forced, that it wasn’t her way of acting. It was the woman herself. This…this warmth and tenderness combined with the tremendous acting skill she had…she was something very, very special.”

  And then came Vertigo. Its long-awaited general U.S. release began in December 1983 and proved a smash at the box office, taking in $2.3 million in its limited release, a huge number for its day, especially for a twenty-five-year-old cult film. Writing in the New York Times, film critic Janet Maslin said, “An astonishing burst of applause greeted the penultimate moments of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo at the performance I attended—astonishing because only seconds later, the film’s real ending left the audience in gasping disbelief. If Rear Window seemed a pleasant surprise when it re-emerged last fall, Vertigo now seems shocking.”

  Andrew Sarris had this to say: “There is something very darkly, very deviously funny in the spectacle of Stewart’s meticulous effort to remake the shop girl into the femme fatale. On the one level it is a directorial parable on Hitchcock’s own efforts with Novak, on another a critique of the eternal search for the ideal woman. The cream of the jest, however, is in the casting of supposedly all-American James Stewart in the role of the pathological Pygmalion…for the moment, let us say simply that Vertigo looks and sounds magnificent after more than a quarter of a century. Of how many contemporary films will we be able to say the same in 25 years hence?”

  By the time all five Hitchcock films were rereleased, they had grossed more than $50 million, and, perhaps even more important, had restored both Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart to the forefront of the country’s cinematic imagination. Once again, as had happened with broadcast TV’s discovery of It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy was remembered and revered not as an aging time traveler through the memories of moviegoers, nor merely a contemporary, but a crucial, true modernist in a series of expressionist movies that showed off the best of both him and the medium within which he worked. Particularly among young people studying film in colleges, “Jimmy Stewart” attained an iconic preeminence, his career the reflection of both one man’s extraordinary career as well as the history of American pictures.

  Unfortunately, he was too old and frail to do much of anything about all the new celebrity other than to bask in the belated glory of his best work. Even if he had wanted to take advantage of the many offers that had started to come his way, he just wasn’t physically strong enough. He was caught in both the curse and the blessing of film, in its Dorian Gray ability to hold up a mirror of perfection for all time. Those who give themselves over to it can never compete with their own long-gone youth, beauty, and talent. Their images provide moments at once caught and lost for all time, displayed by the unreachable past that will live forever as history, present, and future.

  For Jimmy, revisiting his own past allowed him to take his mind off the darker events of his life that had taken place, the loss of his son, Hitchcock, Henry Fonda, and Grace Kelly at the top of that nightmare list. It allowed him to have his phone calls returned by the new studio heads born after his greatest moments of glory. It allowed him to pretend he was twenty, thirty, even forty years younger than he was, just by turning down the lights and turning on the projector. It allowed him an added layer of attention and respect during the remaining glitterati of the eighties Reagan era of American culture and politics.

  And finally, it allowed him a way to ease into his own final fade with a dignity he might otherwise not have enjoyed. Unlike the fate of John “Scottie” Ferguson, Jimmy Stewart did not wander. Instead, he spent his last years in quiet reconciliation, prepared to face the last sunset of his life with peace and dignity.

  29

  “It’s over. It’s over. No, it’s over.”

  —JIMMY STEWART

  Scripts kept coming in, mostly for grandfathers of the grumpy t
ype, either for TV or low-budget films, both categories Jimmy unequivocally rejected, refusing to play—as he often referred to the parts offered, loud enough for the studio boys to hear, even if they were listening—“grouchy old men.”

  Instead, he continued to frequent the White House until 1989, when the Reagans left the capital for retirement and life on their California ranch. Once the president left D.C., there was no longer any reason for Jimmy and Gloria to continue their sojourns east, except for the occasional award ceremony, of which there seemed to be no end.

  Jimmy, in fact, planned to never visit D.C. again, and likely would not have had an issue not arisen that made his elderly blood boil as if he had been placed in a cauldron. Shortly after his eightieth birthday, he picked himself up and went to Washington, à la Mr. Smith, to testify against the growing practice of “colorizing” old black-and-white films to make them more palatable to television stations and video distributors looking to cash in by bastardizing the works of some of the greatest filmmakers in the world. To the producers and bottom liners of the studios, the only color that mattered was green, and they intended to harvest as much of it as they could, regardless of what it did to the original works. Colorize It’s a Wonderful Life? That would be like replacing its shadows with sunshine, removing its furniture for the sake of showing off its wallpaper, and reducing its image of evil to the intensity of a cartoon.

  None of which made the slightest difference to Ted Turner, whose need for color programming to feed his nascent cable movie stations seemed justification enough. He owned the MGM and 20th Century catalogs, many of the films of which were in glorious black and white. From 1965 through 1985, for instance, the black-and-white version of George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street (1947) earned about $50,000 from TV play-offs during the Christmas season, while the colorized version introduced in 1985 made a million dollars. Those kinds of numbers were hard to argue with. But argue with them Jimmy did, taking on not only the studios but also one of their biggest blowhards, Jack Valenti, LBJ’s former White House aide, the studios’ company man in Washington, and when filmmakers protested that their work was being destroyed, Valenti’s callously cavalier response was that it was “a property issue. There’s only one Lincoln Memorial and there are copies of films. Nobody says that when a film is colorized all the black-and-white versions are destroyed.”

  What was particularly galling to Jimmy, Frank Capra, and many of the younger, purist-schooled filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, was that no one seemed interested preserving the films as they were. Hitchcock had proved that the old movies could earn new money, not because of their color, but because of their content.

  “The colorization idea is a vicious lousy unkind thing to do to a motion picture,” Jimmy told members of the press, and he was backed by such Hollywood heavyweights as Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

  Congressional hearings were held on the subject, and when Capra declined to testify, due to illness (heart problems), he asked Jimmy to go in his stead. His testimony was an impassioned plea for preservation, and included the following remarks: “I’ve said it before and I’m glad to say it again; the computer coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It’s morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film history alone.1

  “For fifty years or so, I’ve made my living as a screen actor in 80 films—one-half of them in black-and-white. I pray that they’ll stay that way. Of course I remember the excitement that Technicolor film created back in the 1930’s. It gave the studios a beautiful new option for their screen artistry. But for many creative reasons, we continued to make black-and-white films well into the 1960s. Some directors, like Woody Allen, still choose black-and-white today for the same reason; it tells a story in a unique and highly dramatic way. Black-and-white reduces character, settings and events to the very essence of darkness, light and shadow….

  “The first film I made after the war was Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Some people call it a perennial or a classic and that’s all right by me. But those classics are the first targets of the colorizers, and the colorized version was shown on TV last year. I watched half of it and had to turn it off. I couldn’t get through it. The artificial color was detrimental to the story, to the whole atmosphere and the artistry of the film. I felt sorry for the director, the cinematographer, the costume designer, the make-up man and all the actors….

  “A certain actor friend of mine named Ronald Reagan is fond of saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ I agree with that kind of home-spun wisdom and that’s exactly what I’d like to say to anyone who wants to paint up my face like an Easter egg. Our black-and-white films ain’t broke, and they don’t need fixin.’”

  Unfortunately for Valenti, he had to follow Stewart’s testimony. After being sworn in, Democratic representive Sidney Yates of Chicago, the chairman of the Appropriations Interior subcommittee, simply stared at Valenti in silence for several seconds, then began to speak. “Well, Jack, we’ve heard from Mr. Smith. Who are you going to be? Claude Rains or Edward Arnold?”

  The halls of Congress exploded with laughter and applause, while a red-faced and furious Valenti sat and stared directly at Yates.

  That was it. Show over, fade to black and white. Although several issues still remained to be settled, including questions of ownership that eventually became trademark and copyright hot buttons, a moral victory had been won. And, for one last time, it was Jimmy Stewart who played the people’s hero, this time helping to keep alive, in all its pristine beauty, the cultural and artistic record of the century in movies he had played such a major role in. In an industry seemingly bent on self-destruction, his notion of preservation was ultimately a powerful, if vanishing, voice of an American way of life. What his pal Ronald Reagan had done for the nation’s politics, Jimmy Stewart, it may fairly be said, did for the nation’s culture. So it was that this time life wound up imitating art, instead of the other way around (which is what movies are usually all about), that glorious day the remarkable Mr. Stewart once more went to Washington.

  For the rest of what had been yet another extraordinary decade for Jimmy, the public got little of him, beyond hearing his voice on an endearing Campbell’s soup commercial (that significantly jacked up the gross sales of the venerable school lunch staple) and seeing him occasionally on the Tonight Show. The memoir he had once intended to write never happened. Instead, a book of his purposely corny Grandpa America poems was eventually published by Crown, to considerable success—it reached number three on the New York Times Fiction Best Seller list, and number four on the L.A. Times list. As Robert Osborne, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, stated, quite aptly, with a smile coming through his words: “Go Figure!” Jimmy went on a brief signing tour and capacity crowds turned out everywhere, to which he kept stating, under his breath as he got ready to write his signature in customers’ copies, “I don’t believe it…I just don’t believe it…”

  In 1991, he gave his voice to Fievel, the mouse in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, directed by Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells, with Jimmy’s vocals personally directed by Steven Spielberg, who also produced the film (with Robert Watts). It was his final film, and, in truth, his heart wasn’t really in it. He and Gloria completed their twenty-third African safari and took their pleasure still going to Chasen’s for dinner with the Reagans, visiting their children, all in their thirties now and scattered to the four winds, and their four grandchildren (two by Michael, two by Judy, all boys).

  They also still liked to entertain at both the house on North Roxbury and at the ranch, for a select, regular group of friends that included producer William Frye. After dinner, Jimmy always reached for his accordion, or simply sat at the piano, at which point, according to Frye, Gloria would playfully roll her eyes for the others and say “Oh no, not again.” Jimmy would then launch into one of his favorite ditties, “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” or “Dear Ruth (I’m Telling You The Truth),” or both.

  Only for
very special occasions would they venture into the ceremonial spotlight. One such instance occurred in 1991. Gloria was a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) and was invited to a ceremonial dinner that was being held on the West Coast, where the school had a branch, for what actor John Karlen calls “the hierarchy.” Karlen said, “The dinner was held at L’Hermitage, a very upscale restaurant and hotel in Beverly Hills. I’m also an alumni, and I happened to be sitting a few tables away from Gloria and Jimmy, who looked dead drunk to me. I went up to him, hugged him, and gave him a kiss on the mouth, and he stuck this tongue right back and deep into mine. ‘Jimmy,’ Gloria said, playfully but with authority, ‘That’s enough!’ Then she chuckled.”

  “It was funny but also sad to me,” Karlen recalls. “He looked so old and frail, with watery eyes and no color in his cheeks. It reminded me of how, in the end, even the lions are brought down, only not by other lions, but hyenas. That’s the law of nature, and the fate of man. Even movie stars!”

  Death kept hustling its way through the gates, and that same year, 1991, Frank Capra passed away. He was ninety-four, and represented the last link, both off-screen and on-, to the glory days of the studio era that had given the world Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart the world.

  In April 1993, he went back into the hospital for heart surgery, a risky affair for an eighty-five-year-old man. A pacemaker was installed and he recovered enough to be released, but was in no condition to attend his birthday party that May, hosted by former president Ronald Reagan.