At dinner in London, Jimmy was quietly funny, but seemed very lonely. Gloria was off in Africa on safari with some of their children. They did that quite often together, but he’d had to miss this trip. He looked happy to have some company—I was with Cybill Shepherd—and he definitely enjoyed making her laugh, which he did. His tweedy Ivy League way of dressing fit right in with the quiet Old English atmosphere of the Connaught. His suite, which I saw briefly, was tiny, but all the rooms at the Connaught are small. He was never in any way ostentatious—only polite, wry.
In the latter half of the eighties, I accompanied Stewart to Washington, D.C., and went around the Senate with him. It was a pretty strange live-action Mr. Smith, and the sad irony is that he was in the nation’s capital trying to see if there was some legislation the senators could pass that would make it against the law for black-and-white movies to be colorized—films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy and Burt Lancaster were representing the Screen Actors Guild, and I was there for the Directors Guild. Lancaster took most of his meetings separately, but Jimmy and I did most of ours together. He was pushing eighty by then, and certainly no longer so spry, but he walked steadily and not slowly. There he was in the halls of the Senate, as in the movie, with people occasionally coming out of offices to see him or wave as word spread that he was around.
In the senators’ offices, his hat quite literally in his hand, his overcoat by his side—it was wintertime—I saw Jimmy Stewart plead for help to preserve his life’s work from being destroyed. He would explain that the colorization was extraordinarily distracting and severely altered the performances, the lighting, everything the director, actors and writers had spent their painstaking time achieving. “Just paint right over it!” He shook his head, and with a world of meaning in each pause, and the classic Jimmy Stewart intensity, he said, “It’s … it’s just … it’s … terrible!” Sometimes I would present the essential argument—to save Jimmy his breath—and then he would come out with a final, heartbreaking, “It’s just … it’s … terrible …”
All the senators seemed to agree, if not with much indignation or even real concern, but they were happy to meet Jimmy Stewart, and a couple even asked for autographs—for their wives or daughters, of course. Lancaster, Stewart and I went on Larry King’s CNN show together to spread the word. I did a paragraph or two. Lancaster did his best Lancaster, with hand gestures and teeth, through several solid and impassioned paragraphs, and Jimmy summed it all up with, “It’s … it’s … just … it’s … terrible!”
Eventually, there was a lot of hoopla in the media against colorization—everyone essentially agreeing with Jimmy—plus the success of Orson Welles’ original RKO contract in squelching Ted Turner’s vow to colorize Citizen Kane. All this led to the demise of colorization. However, since it remains much more difficult to sell black-and-white DVDs or videos, which is what brought about the lousy idea in the first place, there’s no guarantee it won’t come back.
Stewart could be a bit icy if he didn’t approve of something, or felt boxed in on a point after he’d made up his mind. I recall a frosty conversation when I was checking out his availability for a picture and he told me rather stiffly that he had retired from acting, that he was no longer doing pictures. He reiterated this and seemed to take a little pleasure from my declarations of regret. Obviously it was a very sore subject, but he made it clear he wasn’t about to change his mind and, as it turned out, he didn’t act again, except for a couple of voice-overs. Of course, by then he had suffered the humiliation of having had not one but two television series in which he starred go under fast (comedy: The Jimmy Stewart Show, 191–72; drama: Hawkins, 1973–74). That neither were really what the audience wanted from him, or good enough for him, had much more to do with their failure than with public indifference to Stewart. There was simply no studio to help keep his persona alive into old age and, on top of that, since the sixties, the big commercial appeal in America has moved ever more rapidly to youth.
James Stewart is the news photographer who suspects his Greenwich Village neighbor across the way has committed a murder, and Grace Kelly is the model who’s mad about Jimmy and gets dangerously involved, in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most likeable masterworks, Rear Window (1954).
So, in 1994, when I came to see Gloria and James Stewart for the last time, he had, over the previous fourteen years, done exactly one voice-over for a cartoon feature released three years earlier, and two years prior to that had published one book (Jimmy Stewart and His Poems). Of course, there were his Johnny Carson TV appearances—which led to the poetry book in the first place since he would read hilariously the often-amusing verse—and many honors: the American Film Institute Life Achievement, 1980; the Kennedy Center Honors, 1983; Special Academy Award, 1985; the Medal of Freedom (America’s highest civilian honor), 1985; the Film Society of Lincoln Center Tribute, 1990. There were also a number of biographies and picture-books published about him, retrospectives all over the world, and at least two or three exceedingly warm and laudatory television specials on his career and life, one of which was titled Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life. That late winter afternoon in Beverly Hills, just months before her death, and little more than three years before his, any observer would have called it the opposite way: Jimmy seemed weak though relaxed and Gloria seemed strong but edgy.
Indeed, I had never seen Gloria edgy before. Usually she was the bubbling life of a party. Jimmy could be laid-back and reticent, but Gloria was always out there, bright, spunky, forthright, pushing him along to tell a story. Not today. There was some hard, unspoken other truth behind everything she said, but I couldn’t understand any of this subtext then. At one point, Jimmy leaned forward on the couch and then suddenly let himself fall back on the cushions and said, exasperated, “I don’t feel well!” Gloria barely looked up, and said something curt and slightly impatient, though couched humorously, to the effect that this feeling of his was not an uncommon occurrence. I had never seen her cut him off quite like that, and she clearly wasn’t kidding, either. He took this in his stride, but didn’t complain again. Later on, he looked around for a book he had been reading, and had misplaced. Gloria told him exactly where it was, but with a touch of impatience. The book, after he found it—where she said it was—turned out to be one of those popular biographies on him that basically go through his career, picture by picture, in the most rudimentary fashion, with press-release information and prose. He said it was helping him to remember some of the pictures he’d done. Gloria confirmed that Stewart couldn’t recall much about his films, that I probably knew them better than Jimmy did.
They both had a couple of glasses of white wine while I was there. Jimmy opened the bottle as soon as he came down to the family room, which was around five in the afternoon. Gloria had welcomed me warmly, and then encouraged Jimmy to get to the drinks as soon as possible. This amused Jimmy, who complied happily and said, “We usually wait till six!” The ritual first drink seemed to be a fondly welcomed daily event. When I asked about their twin daughters, Gloria said they were both doing fine now, especially considering that each had been through her share of problems with substance abuse.
Jimmy looked a little surprised that Gloria had so casually said such a personal thing in front of me, but then he picked up on her tone, and made some kind of small dark joke about their own drinking. Neither of them had ever been this unbuttoned with me before, and it made me comment on how long I’d known them. There were several laughs, and Jimmy’s spirits seemed considerably improved after he’d had half a drink. I spoke a good deal about my admiration of River Phoenix, who had died recently, and they commiserated, agreeing that it had been a tragic loss, spoke of the insidiousness and pervasiveness of drugs in the world. Most of the time, Gloria listened with some degree of intensity and sort of refereed but said little. Eventually, I got up to leave and hugged Gloria good-bye, thanked her. She told Jimmy to show me their garden on the way out, and waved good-b
ye, still looking strangely preoccupied under it all.
We went to the vast garden—which famously had been created by knocking down the adjacent Roxbury Drive house and expanding their large existing one—and Jimmy, in rather a good mood by then, launched into one of his long, extremely funny anecdotes, which he proceeded to tell all the way through Gloria’s beautiful vegetable and flower garden, with a couple of stops, right back to the front door.
The story was about the only time he had taken Katharine Hepburn flying. She had come over to him on the set of The Philadelphia Story and said, in her evidently typical terse way, “You fly.” Telling it, Jimmy did a take as though startled, and then looked around, glanced down and back up before he said, a bit tentatively, with a gesture as if to indicate it wasn’t any big deal, “Yeah …” With the same kind of military dispatch, Hepburn then told him that she would meet him the next morning, seven-thirty a.m., at the Santa Monica Airport (where Stewart used to keep his small plane). He practically saluted as he told this. He said she absolutely terrified him, which he certainly exaggerated for effect; but it was hilarious, in that liquid way Stewart had of tickling you with a constant barrage of nuances beneath the words, gestures, stammers. Everything always meant more than he ever really said, and his nostrils flared as he knifed through pretension or pomposity. In person, every Stewart story had a satirical edge.
The Hepburn tale continued with Kate arriving punctually, and then, while airborne, leaning forward over his shoulder and asking him peremptorily why he did every single thing he did. “Why did you do that!?” Patiently, he would try to explain. “Why!?” More patient explaining. He flicked a switch. “Why did you do that!?” Further polite explanations, funnier each time. Eventually, they land, she exits, says thanks, and never even mentions flying to him ever again. “’Course, she did a lawta flying with Howard Hughes,” he concluded, with the self-deprecating, slyly sexual, implication that Stewart obviously couldn’t match up to Hughes. Smiling, he opened the door for me after I’d finished laughing and thanking him for his hospitality. I hoped he felt better. “Oh, I’m OK,” he said. I waved back as he swung the door shut, and was still smiling as I walked up the path to my car. That was the last time I saw or spoke with him. I often wondered later if when he went back inside, Gloria had perhaps told him about the doctor, or waited until the possibility of cancer was confirmed. In any event, our brief visit was probably one of Jimmy’s last tranquil evenings.
I was in East Hampton at a friend’s house in July 1997 when the Charlie Rose TV show called for my reactions to, and comments on, the death of James Stewart. That was how I found out he had died. Overcome with emotion, I asked them to call me back in a little while. There was so much attached to the name Jimmy Stewart, whom I’d known of since I was about five years old, and whom my parents both loved. One of the memories that came flooding back so vividly to me was how kind he had been to my younger daughter Sashy at the wedding reception for Sean Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn’s son. Sashy was only about fourteen then, but growing up around our house, she had seen an awful lot of James Stewart movies, and he was her favorite actor, so it was a big deal when I introduced her to him that night. She poured out her admiration so fulsomely that Jimmy seemed touched. She was very specific about certain films, and he responded by thanking her profusely and telling her it meant a lot to him that someone as young as she was would be so familiar with his work and like it so much. Then Sashy teared up, thanked him again for all his movies, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He smiled warmly.
Later, the first dance of the evening was led out by the bride and groom, joined only by the groom’s mother, Audrey Hepburn, and her partner just for that dance, Jimmy Stewart. Gloria was there, and danced with him afterward, but for obvious dramatic and strangely romantic reasons—it being Hollywood, after all—the star team that night was Stewart and Hepburn. And it certainly was a memorably electric, mythic moment: two of the last classic movie stars, who never did a picture together—but should have, you’re thinking as you watched them—both tall, trim and graceful, dancing cheek to cheek to a slow tune in the misty light. Something from the lost films of James Stewart, the ones he didn’t make after the system fell apart. But the beautiful work he did leave behind—just the final heartbreaking sequence from Vertigo alone would be enough to immortalize him—is right up there with the best acting anyone did in the twentieth century.
Born James Maitland Stewart, May 20, 1908, Indiana, PA; died July 2, 1997, Los Angeles, CA.
Selected starring features (with director):
1938: Vivacious Lady (George Stevens); You Can’t Take It with You (Frank Capra)
1939: It’s a Wonderful World (W. S. Van Dyke); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra); Destry Rides Again (George Marshall)
1940: The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch); The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage); The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor)
1946: It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
1948: Call Northside 777 (Henry Hathaway); Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)
1950: Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann); Harvey (Henry Koster)
1951: No Highway in the Sky (Koster)
1952: Bend of the River (Mann)
1953: The Naked Spur (Mann)
1954: The Glenn Miller Story (Mann); Rear Window (Hitchcock)
1955: The Far Country (Mann); The Man from Laramie (Mann)
1956: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock)
1958: Vertigo (Hitchcock)
1959: Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger)
1961: Two Rode Together (John Ford)
1962: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford)
1964: Cheyenne Autumn (Ford)
1966: The Flight of the Phoenix (Robert Aldrich)
1968: Firecreek (Vincent McEveety)
1976: The Shootist (Don Siegel)
12
JOHN WAYNE
John Wayne and I first met in 1965 while he was on location at what used to be called Old Tucson in Arizona for the making of Howard Hawks’ El Dorado. I was there for more than a week avidly watching Wayne, Hawks, Robert Mitchum and James Caan, among many others, work on a kind of unofficial sequel to Hawks’ and Wayne’s popular Rio Bravo of six years before. They were night-shooting and on my first evening there, one of the shots took a particularly long time to light, so Wayne—who had been introduced to me by Hawks himself and knew that John Ford had sort of “approved” me—spent over an hour talking with me about the making of movies, and various directors. When he was finally called away for a shot, he said, enthusiastically, “Jeez, it was good talkin’ about—pictures! Christ, the only thing anybody ever talks to me about these days is—politics and cancer!”
Almost forty years later, at the start of the twenty-first century, and twenty years after Wayne’s death—in a public poll on the popularity of all favorite movie stars ever—Duke Wayne stood at number one. This is based solely on his acting in pictures and not at all on his politics or cancer. Yet during his lifetime too many people either endorsed or deplored Wayne because of his right-wing political views, which still strikes me equally as dull as those people in charge of the gold stars on Hollywood Boulevard who refused (for a long period) to allow Charlie Chaplin’s name in because of his left-wing politics. Neither actor’s views really matter very much in terms of their creative work or what they left behind. Wayne isn’t remembered today for winning his first bout with lung cancer—or very painfully losing his second—or for endorsing certain national political candidates, or even for acting in a few easily forgettable fifties anti-Communist movies. (The whole country was lurching out of control at that time, why blame Duke?)
John Wayne as Tom Dunston, a character more than twenty years older than the actor was at the time (and one that continued to define him), in Howard Hawks’ first Western (and first of five films with Wayne), the classic Red River (1948).
Wayne remains popular as a remarkably charismatic and effective personality actor whose unique qualities and limited but
expressive talents were explored and mined by at least four key American film artists (Ford, Hawks, Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan), and have thereby subsequently enriched the work of a host of other directors with varying degrees of ability (from Cecil B. DeMille, Tay Garnett and William Wellman to Henry Hathaway, Nicholas Ray and John Farrow; even, once, rather amazingly, Josef von Sternberg). In a lifetime of almost thirty years as a top-ten box-office attraction (plus twenty before that as a not unpopular star actor), Wayne’s accumulated persona had even before his death attained such mythic proportions that by then the most myopic of viewers and reviewers had finally noted it. He brought to each new movie (good or bad) a powerful resonance from the past—his own and ours—which filled the work with reverberations above and beyond its own perhaps undistinguished qualities. That was the true measure of a great movie star of the golden age.
There’s a moment in Rio Bravo—which features, I think, Wayne’s most genuinely endearing performance—when he walks down the steps of the jail/sheriff’s office toward some men riding up to meet him. Hawks frames the shot from behind—Wayne striding slowly, casually away from camera in his slightly rocking, graceful way—and the image lingers a while to let us enjoy this classic, familiar figure, unmistakable from any angle, America’s twentieth-century Hercules moving across a world of illusion he had more than conquered.
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