by Marc Eliot
“I’ll never marry” Jimmy Stewart, interviewed by Edith Driscoll for a syndicated fan magazine piece, 1935.
“We were both” Bogdanovich, Pieces of Time.
CHAPTER 6
“I loved being in pictures” Bogdanovich, Pieces of Time, New York: Arbor House/Esquire, 1973, 132.
“James Stewart’s and” New York Times, February 18, 1938.
“There is no fault” Movie Mirror, May 1938.
“[H]e has been denied” Eyles, James Stewart, 44.
“I was a contract player” Ibid., 41.
“The whores” Quirk, James Stewart, 78.
“I had to” Ibid., 49.
CHAPTER 7
“When Frank Capra” Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, 384. His quote of Capra is from information including McBride’s interview with Capra, and from Glatzer’s interview with him in Glatzer and Raeburn, eds., Frank Capra: The Man and His Films, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975.
“I really felt” Lawrence Quirk, Margaret Sullavan, Child of Fate, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986, 89–90.
New York Herald Tribune review, July 18, 1938.
New Republic review, July 11, 1918.
“In a moment of ” Logan, Josh, 135.
“Jimmy gave Norma” Donald, Dewey, James Stewart: A Biography, Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1996, 180.
Stars in Your Eyes In his memoirs, Logan sheds more light on the connection between the Shearer/Stewart romance and the eventual play. Originally intended as a musical biography of the early life of Orson Welles, who, in the script, matures into a left-wing Hollywood radical, a popular, romantic theme often used in Hollywood and theater at the time. However, as Logan explains, he and the others connected to the show discard all the “unfunny Communist stuff, and do a show about the crazy way Hollywood people mix sex [rather than politics] and movies. I had an idea that just might be wild enough for a start. What if the young director was someone like Stewart, all wide-eyed and virginal, and Ethel Merman [as Shearer], the studio big star and owner because her [dead] husband had left it to her, was hot for him…the show was rewritten as Stars in Your Eyes.” (Logan, 141.)
Clark Gable in It Happened One Night It has often been reported that Gable was loaned out by Mayer as punishment. According to Joseph McBride, “Mayer wanted to teach [Gable] a lesson for making what the MGM chief considered extravagant money demands” despite the failure of Robert Z. Leonard’s Dancing Lady (McBride, Capra, 304). However, according to Warren G. Harris, Gable’s biographer, “Between his illnesses and his suspended salary, Gable had been punished enough. It was simply a business deal that benefited both studios. MGM had no project of its own ready for Gable, and it also earned $5,600 per week by charging Columbia $2,500 instead of the $2,000 [Gable] received at home.”
“I had seen” Frank Capra, 242.
CHAPTER 8
“He’s the easiest” Capra, The Name Above the Title, 220.
“He grabbed you” Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, 384–85.
“I just had” Ibid., 385.
“the accumulation” Ibid., 384.
Member of the Academy and member of the Directors Guild Nothing demonstrates Capra’s duality more than this. Capra was elected president of the Academy in 1935, a year when it nearly disbanded over internal disputes involving the formation of the Directors Guild. Capra, already a millionaire, had less to gain than most directors, and was reluctant to support the guild. It was only after the guild gained power and recognition that Capra joined it, seeming to adjust his loyalties to the pragmatic consideration of survival, both his own and the industry’s. Widespread boycotts threatened to bring down the Academy, its PR Awards ceremonies, and the entire industry itself, when Capra came up with the inspired notion of giving a special Lifetime Achievement Oscar to pioneering director D. W. Griffith—one of the most important figures in the formation of the feature film that spawned Hollywood as an industry, but, with the advent of sound had, despite being one of the founders of United Artists, fallen hard and fast into alcoholic obscurity. Capra understood the gesture would be taken universally as an irresistibly reconciling one, which not even the most committed anti-Academy unionist would dare miss. When Mr. Deeds won Capra his second Oscar that same year, 1936, it was presented to him by master of ceremonies George Jessel, who, after listening to Capra say with all modesty, “I don’t see how anyone could look over these [other] nominees [Gregory La Cava for My Man Godfrey, Robert Z. Leonard for The Great Ziegfeld, W. S. Van Dyke for San Francisco, William Wyler for Dodsworth] for the director and pick one out,” a disgusted Jessel replied, “Well, they all may be president of the Academy some day and then they can select whom they please.”
CHAPTER 9
“My father first” Frank Capra Jr. interviewed by author.
“At the New York premiere” Robbins, Everybody’s Man, 67.
“It was a great” Elsie West Duval, from a piece published in Reminisce, May–June 1998.
“man or woman.” Source wishes not to be identified.
“prayed like mad” Parade magazine, January 28, 1990.
“Save your clean” Eddie Mannix, an MGM executive and friend of Stewart, quoting a letter to Jimmy from Bessie, Quirk, 105.
Stewart and Fonda Here is what Andrew Sarris wrote about these two performances: “It is hard to believe that Fonda was once the third-ranking Fox leading man, behind Tyrone Power and Don Ameche, but such he was and such he might have remained had he and John Ford not made film history together. Still, Fonda never achieved either the mythic magnitude of the personality movie stars like Cagney, Stewart, Grant, Wayne, Bogart, Cooper, and Gable…. Fonda’s young Lincoln was a case in point as an intermediate performance in 1939 between James Stewart’s forceful projection of his own personality in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Robert Donat’s uncanny incarnation of old age in Goodbye, Mr. Chips…. Significantly, Stewart won the New York Film Critics Award that year, and Robert Donat the Oscar, but Fonda’s performance fell by the wayside.” Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 187.
“Everyone was out” Interviewed by Roy Newquist, Conversations with Joan Crawford, New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1981, 103.
“general unflattering portrayal” Gerald Gardner, The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987.
“Director Frank Capra” “The Role I Liked Best,” Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1946.
“obligatory Capra scene” Sarris, You Ain’t Heard, 355.
“It was the filibuster” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1967.
“When Jimmy was” McBride, Frank Capra, 416.
“He played” Quirk, Stewart, 113.
“lean, gangling”…“the most complete” Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet.
CHAPTER 10
“She’d slept with him” This and other quotes that appear in this chapter are from the published diaries of Erich Maria Remarque as quoted throughout in Julie Gilbert’s Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard, New York: Pantheon, 1995.
“I liked taking” Ean Wood, Dietrich: A Biography, Cornwall, United Kingdom, MPG Books, 186.
Sarris quotes re Stewart and Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, 306.
Doubling See André Bazin’s essay in What Is Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
“When people stared” Ginny, quoted in “My Brother Becomes a Star,” Coronet magazine, February 1940.
The Mortal Storm and German response Despite the great pains MGM took to keep from identifying Germany as the country where the film is set (for economic reasons as much as for any other, fearing a boycott of their films throughout a lucrative, Nazi-dominated Europe), Borzage was targeted as anti-Fascist; i.e., pro-Jewish, and, later, as at least
sympathetic to the Communists by HUAC, so the German government actually protested to the studio during the making of the film. Robert Stack, one of the young players in the film, recalled that while filming, a representative from the Swiss consulate showed up and announced that he had been told by the Germans to warn MGM, “Your picture will be remembered by Berlin after they win the war.” (Donald Dewey, direct attribution or source not provided by author.)
CHAPTER 11
“Stewart’s most distinctive” David Freeman, “The Last American,” Buzz magazine, August 1997, 89.
“When I first” Dewey, James Stewart, 217 (unattributed).
Stewart’s humorous behavior during the filming of The Philadelphia Story, Charles Higham, Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975, 103 (unattributed).
“I had learned” From local newspaper clippings in the collections of the Historical and Genealogical Society of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and the Jimmy Stewart Museum.
“The only lottery” Starr Smith, Jimmy Stewart Bomber Pilot, St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2005, 29.
“You know my views” Pickard, Jimmy Stewart, A Life in Film, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. The story about the anonymous phone call has been reproduced in numerous articles and books, never denied by either Fonda or Stewart. (unattributed)
“Look what I won” Stewart’s and Burgess’s responses are from Sidney Skolsky’s “Tintypes: James Stewart,” Hollywood Citizen-News and syndicated, August 31, 1963.
“I wanted him” Quirk, James Stewart, 131 (unattributed).
“I never thought” Dewey, James Stewart, 220 (unattributed).
The phone conversation between Stewart and Alexander Pickard, Jimmy Stewart, 53.
“a military secret” The official is unidentified in a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Herald Express on March 7, 1941.
CHAPTER 12
“I’m sure tickled” “Film Star Stewart Wears Olive Drab,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 23, 1941.
Jimmy’s letter to Hayward re agent commission This was reproduced in whole in Sidney Skolsky’s column that appeared in the Hollywood Citizen-News on May 3, 1941, and in syndication across the country.
Alex’s letter It and similar memories of James Stewart are part of “Recollections of J. M. Stewart,” an unpublished manuscript that is held by the Historical and Genealogical Society of Indiana County, Pennsylvania.
“shy and taciturn…unavailable for an interview” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1943.
“I found that” Lawrence Quirk, James Stewart, 146.
“women reporters” This and other information and quotes from the PR session are from an article that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on December 19, 1943, headlined “Capt. James Stewart Exhibited to the Press by 8th Air Force.”
“I was really afraid” Dewey, James Stewart (unattributed). Some background into the military experiences and Stewart’s fear are from a two-part series that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, beginning December 8, 1945, and concluding December 15, 1945, by Col. Beirne Lay Jr. It was one of the few pieces that ran detailing Stewart’s combat, one that, significantly, contained no direct quotes from Stewart, who declined to participate in the writing of the article by a fellow officer.
“Fear is” As told to Richard M. Schneider, Guideposts, n.d. This and the related quotes that follow are from Schneider.
“braved mud” and “If you think” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1945.
“I watched the way” Walter Matthau, speaking at the American Film Institute regarding the Life Achievement Award given to Jimmy Stewart, February 1980.
“they shot [his men up]” Fishgall, Pieces of Time, 171.
“[Leland] was always” Hayward, Haywire, 307.
“The country’s had enough” Hollywood Citizen-News, September 4, 1945.
CHAPTER 13
“It’s a Wonderful Life” Jeanine Basinger, The It’s a Wonderful Life Book, Norwalk, Conn.: The Easton Press, 2004, Introduction.
“After World War II” Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, May 19, 1987.
“In my files” Hedda Hopper, Chicago Tribune Magazine, April 18, 1954.
“Hey, Jimmy, where” This question and the others asked at the train station and Stewart’s responses are from the Los Angeles Examiner, October 3,1945.
The game of Pitch Michael Freedland, Jane Fonda: A Biography, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988, 10.
Footnote about Jimmy living in Fonda’s house During this visit, Jimmy made time to visit with Clark Gable, whose wife, Carole Lombard, had been killed, along with her mother, a few days earlier (January 16) when her plane crashed into the mountains shortly after takeoff, following a war bond drive in Las Vegas. Gable, a newly commissioned air force officer, was determined to see action, despite the fact that he was forty-one years old. Quote from James Brough, The Fabulous Fondas, New York: David McKay Company, 1973, 90.
“the whole town” Hedda Hopper, syndicated column, October 1945.
Stewart’s dates and sleeping attire Sidney Skolsky, “Tintypes,” Hollywood Citizen-News, November 15, 1945.
“Four years ago” Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography, New York: Macmillan, 1971, 371.
“uniting producer-directors” Ibid., 372.
“It was the story” Ibid., 376.
“For crissake” Capra, The Name Above the Title, 377.
“wildly melodramatic” Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, 355.
“Jimmy didn’t feel” Bogdanovich, Pieces of Time, 135.
“Both Capra and Stewart” Life magazine, September 23, 1946.
“the pain and sorrow” Sarris, You Ain’t Heard, 356. Here is more of what Mr. Sarris wrote about It’s a Wonderful Life: “The last-minute happy ending never quite compensates for all the suffering that precedes it, and yet there is something unyieldingly idealistic in Stewart’s persona that clears away any sour aftertaste from what in the final analysis is one of the most profoundly pessimistic tales of human existence ever to achieve a lasting popularity. Yet even in its darkest moments, It’s a Wonderful Life achieves a mini-epiphany with a burly, surly patron sitting grimly at a bar near the despondent Bailey. When he hears the name ‘Bailey’ mentioned, he hauls off and socks the already tortured protagonist seemingly without provocation until we learn that the assailant’s wife is the schoolteacher whom the distraught Bailey has unfairly scolded on the telephone for letting his little girl go home alone in the snow and cold. The ‘heavy’ in every sense of the word emerges as one of us as he movingly describes his wife’s crying over the episode. In this one moment the humanism of It’s a Wonderful Life cancels out all the cute, cloying embarrassments of the angel played by Henry Travers.”
“The film was” Frank Capra Jr. interview with author.
“it was when” Sarris, Village Voice, May 19, 1987.
CHAPTER 14
“Later, over coffee” Barbara Heggie, Woman’s Home Companion, April 1947.
“something has to be done” Hedda Hopper, syndicated column, Chicago Tribune, February 1948.
CHAPTER 15
“Stewart claimed” Alfred Hitchcock, as told to Favius Friedman. Popular Photography, November 1948.
“raise eyebrows” Charlotte Chandler, It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005, 170.
“Both Cary Grant and” Arthur Laurents, Original Story, New York: Knopf, 2000,
“Rope wasn’t my favorite” Chandler, It’s Only a Movie, 169.
“The only thing” Laurents, Original Story, 128.
“Jimmy Stewart was not” Chandler, It’s Only a Movie, 170.
CHAPTER 16
“One morning I” Robbins, Everybody’s Man, 103 (unattributed).
“I could tell” and “The romance” Ibid., 70 (unattributed).
“I knew Jimmy” June Allyson with Frances Spatz Leighton, June Allyson, New York: Putnam’s, 1982, 95.
C
HAPTER 17
“If the prewar” Martin Scorsese speaking at the American Film Institute presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jimmy Stewart, February 1980.
“When I first” Quoted by Aline Mosby, Los Angeles Daily News, August 8, 1949.
“rather bewildered” This and other details of the wedding are from the Los Angeles Daily News, August 10, 1949.
CHAPTER 18
“Winchester ’73 was” Stewart quoted in McBride, Frank Capra.
“When the picture” Dewey, James Stewart (unattributed).
“was not only” Richard T. Jameson, “Anthony Mann,” American Film: A Journal of Film and Television Arts, January 1990.
“Mann’s reputation” Elliott Stein, Village Voice, August 11, 2004.
“The Westerners” Terrence Rafferty, New York Times, August 8, 2004.
CHAPTER 19
“I played” Allyson, June Allyson, 77.
“Where Gloria and I” Coronet, July 1970.
“I remember painfully” Jimmy Stewart interview with Jack Holland, 1968 (Universal press release).
“Fonda, his long-time” Teichmann, Fonda.
CHAPTER 20
“Hitchcock saw in Stewart” Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, 19.
“A lot of things” James Spada, Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess, New York: Doubleday, 1987.
“I was absolutely” USA Today, March 6, 1987.
“We were all so” Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, New York: Regan Books, 2003.
“Every man who” Ibid.
“It gave me” Quirk, James Stewart, 190.
“When you think” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 16, 1968.
CHAPTER 21
“I’ve never got much” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1967.
“the biggest single” Newsweek, May 9, 1955.
“For a long time” Paramount press release, circa July 1955.
“When Richard [Powell] and I” Allyson, June Allyson, 95.
“In The Man from Laramie” Stein, Village Voice, August 11, 2004.
“That [film] distilled” Eyles, James Stewart, 130, further unattributed.
“My dad had” Eleanor Harris, Los Angeles Examiner, January 1, 1956.
