Jimmy Stewart
Page 46
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4. Her relationship with Flynn would end a year later when she fell in love with director John Huston, after being directed by him in the 1942 melodrama In This Our Life.
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5. Mayer signed Hedy Lamarr after she had made the controversial 1933 Czech film, Gustav Machat’s Ecstasy, in which she appeared nude, the only thing about the movie anybody ever remembers. Coming off the international scandal it caused, Mayer grabbed her for MGM, announcing that he had signed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” By the time she had starred in John Cromwell’s Algiers in 1938, the initial novelty had, for the most part, worn off. Mayer, nevertheless, continued to use Lamarr and loan her out.
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6. There is physical evidence to suggest that Mayer actually tried to get many of his biggest actors out of the draft. Mayer had vehemently tried to convince the Culver City draft board not to take Mickey Rooney. He also met with Stewart every day to convince him not to contest the board’s rejection, that to do so would mean throwing away a lucrative and important Hollywood career where he could do far more good for the cause of freedom as a screen hero than he could working as a clerk in some office, because the army would never dare send him out on active duty. Jimmy was not impressed with Mayer’s arguments.
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7. The stage production of The Philadelphia Story opened on Broadway in February 1939, ran for 415 performances, and grossed just short of a million dollars. It played another 254 performances on a national tour that grossed more than $750,000. Twenty-five percent of the play’s grosses went to Hepburn and Hughes.
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8. The other Best Picture nominees that year were Anatole Litvak’s All This and Heaven Too, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Sam Wood’s Kitty Foyle, William Wyler’s The Letter, and Wood’s Our Town. The other Best Actor nominees were Charlie Chaplin (The Great Dictator), Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath), Raymond Massey (John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois), and Laurence Olivier (Rebecca). The other Best Actress nominees were Bette Davis (The Letter), Joan Fontaine (Rebecca), Ginger Rogers (Kitty Foyle), and Martha Scott (Our Town). The other Supporting Actress nominees were Judith Anderson (Rebecca), Jane Darwell (The Grapes of Wrath), Barbara O’Neil (All This and Heaven Too), and Marjorie Rambeau in Gregory La Cava’s Primrose Path. There were several writing categories, including Original Story, Original Screenplay, and Screenplay. The other Best Screenplay nominees were Nunnally Johnson for The Grapes of Wrath, Dalton Trumbo for Kitty Foyle, Dudley Nichols for The Long Voyage Home, and Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison for Rebecca.
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9. Best Picture is a studio and a producer’s award, which is why Selznick, rather than Hitchcock, was given the Oscar.
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10. They were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress for their performances in Sidney Franklin’s The Guardsman (1931). Lunt lost to both other nominees, who shared the Oscar—Wallace Beery in King Vidor’s The Champ and Fredric March in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Fontanne lost to Helen Hayes, who won for her performance in Edgar Selwyn’s The Sin of Madelon Claudet.
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1. Clark Gable was actually the first American movie star to enter the European war theater on active duty, but as an enlistee, whereas Stewart, contrary to most previous reports, actually had been drafted.
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2. At this time, the Air Corps was not a separate branch of the military, but the flying division of the army. It was officially known as the Army Air Corps until 1947, when it became the United States Air Force, an independent branch of the United States Armed Forces.
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3. Fontaine won over her sister, de Havilland, intensifying the sibling rivalry between the two that would last a lifetime. The winner of Best Picture of the year was John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley.
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4. Later on, while Stewart was overseas, he reportedly received a “Dear John” letter from Shore, who had met actor George Montgomery and had decided to marry him instead. Actor Burgess Meredith dismissed the entire romance as the type of relationship soldiers often had during wartime, when they believed anything they did might also be the last thing they did, and Stewart apparently did not want to die in combat without having at least gotten married. Others insist that it was Hayward who had arranged the whole thing, hoping to spark a romance between Shore and Stewart. Still others have suggested it was Shore who first asked Hayward to invite her to dinner so she could meet the actor she found irresistibly handsome.
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5. 91st Psalm: I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress…His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;…For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.”
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6. Jimmy was only the second flier in World War Two to receive this honor.
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1. Stewart’s response to the local press was that he didn’t think it was such a good idea. “It’s only in pictures that I make a good office holder. I talk much too slowly for a politician.” As for his being given a hero’s welcome, he shrugged that off, too, reminding everyone that “thousands of men in uniform did far more meaningful things and got small recognition, if any.”
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2.Life Magazine, September 24, 1945.
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3. Jimmy loved being in a house with Fonda’s children. Along with Johnny Swope and Josh Logan, he had agreed to be one of their three godfathers. On more than one occasion, Jimmy told Fonda that his home life was “just what I want in life, a family like that.”
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4. Prior to being granted her interview, Stewart’s advisors warned Hopper of the no-talk-of-war stipulation. The closest she got to discussing any of his military experiences was to break the news that he was planning to return to England at the completion of a memorial library being erected to honor the soldiers in his division who had been killed in action. When Hopper reminded Stewart that he was the last of the big-time Hollywood bachelors, he responded, “Frightening!”
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5. The most successful films used gunfights as a metaphor for battle or were new-style “psychological dramas,” in which the damage of the war was brought home in less-direct fashion. Fonda’s first film after three years of war duty was John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), the lyrical, if extremely dark, version of the famed gunfight at the OK Corral. Gable’s was Victor Fleming’s Adventure (1946), a noirish psychological drama co-starring Greer Garson, Hollywood’s premier on-screen “war widow,” a film best remembered for its memorable tagline that made oblique reference to the actor’s wartime duty: “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!”
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6. According to Stein, quoted by Brooke Hayward in her memoir Haywire, “We bought his [Hayward’s] agency in 1944 and his clients turned out to be our most important clients. He overshadowed everyone in the business…he was by far the outstanding man in the entire agency field in California.” (See Notes for further information.)
According to Dennis McDougall, author of The Last Mogul, “For giving up his agency, Hayward got MCA vice presidencies for himself and Nat Deverich [his partner, after the death of Myron Selznick and Hayward’s full acquisition of his agency], guaranteed by a ten-year employment contract calling for a base weekly salary of $500 plus half the commissions generated by every client the Hayward-Deverich Agency brought to MCA. Essentially, Hayward and Deverich didn’t have to do anything for the next ten years to earn a minimum of approximate
ly $100,000. In addition, MCA promised to help Hayward buy his Connecticut farm and a new home high up in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills.”
Hayward’s client roster at the time of the sale included Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney, Dorothy McGuire, Dame May Whitty, Ginger Rogers, Margaret Sullavan, Gail Patrick, Clifton Webb, Pat O’Brien, Andy Devine, Gregory Peck, Fredric March, Raymond Massey, Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Boris Karloff, Thomas Mitchell, Oscar Levant, David Niven, Barry Sullivan, Irwin Shaw, Dorothy Parker, Russel Crouse, Howard Lindsay, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Dashiell Hammett, Waltern Van Tilburg Clark, Arthur Koestler, Walter de la Mare, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Hornblow Jr., Joshua Logan, Salvador Dali, Henry Fonda—and Jimmy Stewart.
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7. According to film historian Jeanine Basinger, it was Cary Grant who first brought the project to Koerner.
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8. Arthur would leave the production prior to its opening. She was replaced by an unknown actress by the name of Judy Holliday, whose performance in the play made her a star.
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9. Harold S. Bucquet’s Calling Dr. Gillespie (1943) and Willis Goldbeck’s Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case (1943) in the role of Nurse Marcia Bradburn, and as Melodie Eunice Nesbit in George B. Seitz’s The Courtship of Andy Hardy (1942).
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10. The reason that today “children of all ages” know the names and faces of Judy Garland, Charlton Heston, and Jimmy Stewart over, say, Ginger Rogers, Victor Mature, and Clark Gable.
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11. The film’s world premiere was a dinner-dance screening by invitation only, held at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, on December 9, 1946. The guest list of all the players and crew of the film also included Clark Gable, there in support of his friend Stewart, and one hundred other stars, all of whom had appeared, at one time or another, in a Capra feature.
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12.It’s a Wonderful Life received three Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, Best Actor, Stewart; and Best Director, Capra), but the awards all went to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. That film won Best Picture, Best Director, Wyler; and Best Actor, Fredric March. It’s a Wonderful Life eventually made a $3 million profit by the end of its initial domestic release, and was the twenty-seventh highest grossing film of the year. (Nineteen forty-seven was not a good year for films; an unusually stormy winter kept ticket buyers at home.)
In its first week of domestic release, It’s a Wonderful Life wound up ninth on the top ten grossing films. They were, in descending order, Alfred E. Green’s The Jolson Story, George Seaton’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, Richard Whorf’s Till the Clouds Roll By, Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, Richard Wallace’s Sinbad the Sailor, Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque, Clarence Brown’s The Yearling, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and John Farrow’s California.
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13. The film’s break-even point for Capra’s company was approximately 6.3 million dollars, double the production cost. In addition to shooting the film, Liberty’s expenses included the manufacture of prints, newspaper and magazine advertising, coast-to-coast distribution (RKO), and exhibition—a large portion of admission went to the theater-owner or the distributor, often the same in the studio era.
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14. Richard Wallace’s remake of Sinbad the Sailor, delayed several months due to Technicolor processing problems.
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1. All were Oscar nominated for Best Film in their respective years of release.
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2. Or so the carefully scripted press releases read. Actually, Fay flew to Colorado to do Harvey for a special limited run that played to sold-out audiences, an unofficial test run for the future national touring company.
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3. The comic conceit of Harvey was not a new one. Its title character takes the form of a “pooka,” a large fairy sprite in animal form that populated many of the Irish folktales that its author, Mary Chase, had grown up reading and hearing.
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4. The breakdown of the deal was $750,000 for the rights, an additional $250,000 to be paid on the first day of principal shooting. Chase’s $25,000 writing fee was paid at the time of the initial purchase.
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5. Stewart’s Hollywood friends tried to put the best face on the move. Fonda threw a farewell dinner in which the main dish served under a platter turned out to be a giant, live rabbit. Bill Grady sent Stewart two live rabbits a day for ten days, up until the day of his departure for New York City.
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6. It would not happen again for another fourteen years, until How the West Was Won (1962), directed in segments by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall in which they appeared in separate sequences.
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7. Stevens did not want to be seen as a second choice, nor did he like the concept of multiple directors. Also, Huston had initially agreed to do it without credit, and Stevens would have had to accept the same offer. The other two segments were directed by King Vidor and Leslie Fenton, respectively.
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1. Hamilton had also written the play Angel Street, which had been turned into the classic suspense film Gaslight, directed by George Cukor, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.
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2. The director, who never won a competitive Oscar, lost that year to Leo McCarey (Going My Way). The film also earned a nomination for Writing—Original Story, for John Steinbeck, who also lost to McCarey.
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3. At the time, 35-mm film came in ten-minute “magazines,” or reels, the maximum amount of footage allowable for a single, uninterrupted “take.”
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4. It won one, Best Sound Recording (20th Century Fox Sound Department). Best Picture went to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Best Actor to Olivier, Best Actress to Jane Wyman for Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda, Best Director to John Huston for Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which also won Best Screenplay.
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5. Both Grant and Clift would work with Hitchcock on other projects. Grant, who had already made Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946), would go on to do To Catch a Thief in 1955 and North by Northwest in 1959. Clift would play an ultra-straight priest in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953).
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6. The deal wasn’t an entire mystery. Hitchcock agreed to the $300,000 with a built-in “safety net,” meaning that there would be little or no money up front for Stewart, as there would have been for Grant, with most of it payable on the back end. Hitchcock guaranteed Wasserman and Stewart that if the profits fell short, he would make up the difference to $300,000 for Stewart. When the film did not earn back its negative cost, Hitchcock remained true to his word, seeing to it that Stewart was paid exactly that amount for his work on Rope.
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1. Fontaine nearly miscarried during production due to an on-set accident involving her jumping off a hay wagon; inexplicably, she performed it without a stunt double, but managed to carry the baby to term. This prompted a brief hospital visit in which the only representative from the film to visit her was Stewart. When she was released, she baked a fortieth-birthday cake for him.
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2.Jigsaw is also known as Gun Moll. During filming, Ford was replaced on Mr. Roberts, reportedly due to illness (although some still believe the politically conservative director didn’t want to work again with Fonda), by Mervyn LeRoy, who shared directorial credit. LeRoy, in his memoir, claimed he shot 90 percent of the film.
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3. Stewart’s footprint (and handprint) ceremony took place on February 13, 1948. Fonda’s had actually gone in six years ear
lier, on July 24, 1942, the same day as Rita Hayworth, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson, and Charles Boyer.
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4. In 1948, Henry Fonda won the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for Best Actor, Joshua Logan and Thomas Heggen (Heggen had written the original novel the play was based on) won both as playwrights and for Best Play, Logan won for Best Director, and Leland Hayward for producing.
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5. Fonda had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (as producer, with Reginald Rose) in 1958, for Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. They lost to Sam Spiegel, who won for The Bridge on the River Kwai. In 1941, he lost for Best Actor in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, to Jimmy Stewart (The Philadelphia Story).
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6. According to an interview conducted by the author with Jimmy Stewart’s daughter, Kelly Stewart Harcourt: “The diamond was in the possession of the McLean family. It had a kind of ‘evil eye’ connotation to it, that we believed was some kind of curse. There was a bit of insanity that plagued the McLeans ever since they got the diamond.”
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7. Sometimes billed as June Allison. Her real name was Ella Geisman.
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8. His second “limp” role in a row. In Rope, his character also had one, but, unlike Stratton’s, which signified the struggle for a return to physical normalcy, the one in Hitchcock’s film denoted a physical imperfection that personified a moral one.
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9.Malaya is also known as East of the Rising Sun in foreign distribution.
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1. The Hollywood Ten were cited in 1947 for contempt by HUAC, and all served up to a year in prison. They were Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, and Adrian Scott. In several other biographies of Stewart, Maltz is not even mentioned. His proper accreditation for Broken Arrow was restored in 1991 at the behest of the Authors Guild. By then, both Maltz and Blankfort were dead.