by Marc Eliot
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Quotes
Introduction • James as in Jimmy, Art as in Life
PART ONE • Jimsy and Genesis
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
PART TWO • Learning to Carioca
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
PART THREE • Mr. Christ Goes to Calvary
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
PART FOUR • Flying High into Hell
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
PART FIVE • Man, Marriage, Mann
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
PART SIX • Venus, Veritas, Vertigo
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
PART SEVEN • Valor and Death, Disillusionment and Resurrection
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
PART EIGHT • The Final Rise; the Final Fade
chapter 28
chapter 29
Footnotes
Tributes
Sources
Notes
Filmography
Final Thoughts and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Marc Eliot
Copyright
This biography is dedicated with respect, admiration, and gratitude to the following:
ALFRED BESTER, WILLIAM GOLDMAN, HENRY MILLER, PHIL OCHS, HAROLD ROBBINS, AND ANDREW SARRIS.
In my youth, their work ignited the fires of my own creative passions, passions that burn within me still….
And to the memory of SHEN ZHONGQIANG, my eternal Shanghai brother-in-peace. Wherever your spirit rests today, it is also here.
“He was the most naturally gifted actor I ever worked with. It was all instinct, all emotion; I don’t think it came from training or technique…it came from forces deep within him.”
THOMAS MITCHELL
“The story goes that when the news first hit Hollywood of Ronald Reagan’s ambitions to be president, Jack Warner, the legendarily blunt mogul, responded, ‘No, Jimmy Stewart for president, Ronald Reagan for best friend.’”
RELATED BY DAVID ANSEN IN NEWSWEEK
“That’s the great thing about the movies…after you learn—and if you’re good enough and God helps you and you’re lucky to have a personality that comes across—then what you’re doing is—you’re giving people little, little, tiny pieces of time, that they never forget.”
JIMMY STEWART, QUOTED BY PETER BOGDANOVICH
“I would prefer to place James Stewart in a triptych of equal acting greatness with Cary Grant and James Cagney…and say that Stewart is the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema, particularly gifted in expressing the emotional ambivalence of the action hero.”
ANDREW SARRIS, FILM HISTORIAN AND CRITIC
“All the women want to mother Jimmy Stewart, that’s his great quality.”
FRANK CAPRA
“Stewart was closer to a representation of Hitchcock himself than any presence…his image was reshaped by Hitchcock to conform to much in his own psyche. He is, in important ways, what Hitchcock considered himself…with an alter ego attractive enough to engage the sympathies of his audience. Cary Grant, on the other hand, represents what Hitchcock would like to have been.”
DONALD SPOTO, HITCHCOCK BIOGRAPHER
“When something is happening to a star, a Cary Grant or a James Stewart, the public feels it more.”
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
“A show business optimist? That’s an accordion player with a beeper….”
JOHNNY CARSON
Introduction
James as in Jimmy, Art as in Life
A figure races in the darkness along a series of rooftops, like the flash of an idea across the mind. Just behind, an older, uniformed officer is in hot pursuit, and still farther behind him a third, tall and thin plainclothesman, bent like a fox at the hunt, struggles to keep up. Shots ring out, revealing the first is a criminal, running from the others. He makes desperate rooftop-to-rooftop leaps, the last across a dark, sheer-drop alley. The older and slower uniform makes it as well. The plainclothesman tries next, but, although thinner and apparently younger than the uniform (but not as lean or youthful as the thief), he doesn’t quite get over. Instead, his body slams onto the side of the steep A-frame. He slips downward toward the edge. He dangles by his fingertips from a dangerously unhinged gutter drain. The uniform turns back to rescue the plainclothesman. He inches closer down that slippery slope, reaches out to grab the plainclothesman’s wrist, loses his footing, and, with a final scream that rips apart the night, falls to his death. Horrified, the plainclothesman hangs, suspended and helpless, looking over his shoulder into the hungry, deadly abyss that eagerly awaits him.
These are the spectacular and spectacularly disturbing opening moments of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo, in which James Stewart, at the absolute peak of his acting form, plays the tragically flawed, insanely obsessed, and deeply existential John “Scottie” Ferguson. In Vertigo, Stewart’s style of acting perfectly reflected not only his familiar cinematic persona—the ordinary man adrift, perhaps trapped in an abnormal world, longing to find his rightful physical, emotional, and spiritual place in it—but also to a greater degree than in any other movie he made, his real-life personality.
Stewart, like Ferguson, was withdrawn and a wanderer, a Presbyterian soul who fought against the perils of losing control of his own closely held emotions. He grew up in the shadow of an imperious, distant, at times completely absent Godlike father to become a man continually hanging by his fingertips above the canyons of disillusionment that beckoned throughout his otherwise high-flying and glorious life.
The crucial difference between the character Scottie and the actor Stewart lay in their relative sanity. Scottie’s ultimate undoing is brought about by his belief in the power of possessive, obsessive sex as a curative, a liberating, redemptive act even after it has caused the death of his (so-called) loved one, a fatal trap disguised as a letting go that leads him eventually to the brink of suicide. The foundation of Jimmy’s sanity, meanwhile, lay in his abject refusal to ever let go of his unwavering faith in the curative, redemptive liberation of love as the reflection of the moral righteousness of Western Christian ideology. These beliefs, in turn, helped him realize the power of his continual on-screen persona, that of a spiritually based, romantic all-American beacon of enlightenment to millions of Americans for more than half a century of turmoil and upheaval, from the depths of the Great Depression, through World War Two, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and up to and including America’s early involvement in the ongoing conflicts of the Middle East.
The idiosyncratic stylistics of Stewart’s screen acting, the tools with which he used to project the inside of his characters onto the dreamlike surface of the silver screen, included a repertoire of physical tics, exaggerated gestures, and slowed-down jaw-boning that generation after generation (and multitudes of impersonators, both professional and party-level) came to recognize as “Stewartisms.” Some were as simple as appearing to shake hands with himself during a scene while having a conversation with someone else (or, as in the case in Henry Koster’s Harvey [1950], with some unseen “other”), the country-boy crackle of honesty and confusion in a high-pitched, drawn-out drawl, the slow, silent, frustrated shake of his head. Others were more subtle and complex, like the depth
of his soul that shone so clearly through those piercing Pennsylvania steel blue eyes. Anthony Mann, a director who guided the actor through eight films in an intense five-year period during the first half of Stewart’s greatest sustained period of filmmaking, the fifties, once observed, “All the great stars that the public love have clear eyes…. The eyes do everything: they’re the permanent reflection of the internal flame that animates the hero. Without those eyes, you can only aspire to second-string roles.”1
Indeed, Stewart’s otherwise ordinary face—with its delicate, translucent skin so thin that the tiny blue veins on his cheeks were always visible, even under makeup, its square jaw rounded to just this side of soft, and its nose a bit too thick to make him leading-man handsome—was artistically lit by those startling blues that illuminated the passionate longing that lurked within. Whenever his brows arched upward, it was his eyes that gave in to helpless supplication, while the top of one wrist pushed back and forth against the bottom of his dropped jaw, making it seem as if he were rubbing away some recurring pain, physical or otherwise.
In Stewart’s best work, the amazingly expressive eyes and face helped define his characters’ quests to maintain their moral purity, their innocence threatened by an attractive if corrupting temptation that was almost always sexual in nature. In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954) it takes the human form of the director’s familiar, fetishistic ice-goddesses (Kim Novak and Grace Kelly, respectively), in other films it manifests itself in alluring objects that substitute for the “love interest”—the eponymous experimental plane in Billy Wilder’s The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), the phallic rifle in Mann’s Winchester ’73, a seat in Congress in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington(1939). These external manifestations triggered moral conflicts that repeatedly brought Stewart’s characters to the brink of self-inflicted, near-crucifixionlike tragedy, until they were in the end rescued, redeemed really by the sheer force of their own will, the visible power of their inner spirituality (except for Vertigo, which makes the point by the sheer absence of redemption). As morality was conceived in the studio era, about the only thing that separated the continuum of Stewart’s physical persona from the standard Hollywood female heroine, whose purity was almost always reverent but whose corruption was almost always sexual, was that her redemption was almost always made possible by some supposed heroic male knight in shining armor. In that sense, James Stewart’s cycle of hyper-sensitive self-surviving existentialists made him the best self-redemptive heroine Hollywood ever produced.
Jimmy’s complex and unique film persona took a long time to perfect. It certainly did not come together during his disastrous early years at MGM, when the studio continually miscast him, up to and including his role as the killer in W. S. Van Dyke II’s After the Thin Man, made in 1936, Stewart’s eleventh movie in just over two years. Although he was never again cast as “evil,” at times throughout his career, his characters’ complex nobilities showed serious moral flaws: the professor in Rope (Hitchcock, 1948), the clown in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), one of two rival siblings in Winchester ’73, the intimacy-fearing voyeur in Rear Window, the twisted obsessive in Vertigo. By the end of each of these films, the ability to convince audiences that his character has remained loyal—to someone else or, as was more often the case, to his own soul, whether riding off into the sunset or standing on the edge and resisting falling into the abyss—made him a star of legendary moral and heroic magnitude.
MGM’s inability to properly cast young Stewart was a clear reflection of its inability to understand the essence of the talent of the new actor it had “discovered.” Nowhere is this more evident than in his 1938 “official biography” released by the studio three years after Louis B. Mayer had signed him, which describes “James Stewart” this way: “His type is as normally average as the hot dog and pop at Coney Island. He is good looking without being handsome, quiet without being a bore, ambitious without taking either himself or his job too seriously and unassuming without being dull. Stewart’s growing appeal has sometimes been difficult to peg. He’s no Gable and certainly has none of the qualities of a Valentino. A sixteen-year-old fan seems to have hit it when she wrote to him, ‘I like you because you’re like the boy next door.’”2
Although Stewart was from a small town in western Pennsylvania, and his movie persona was most often a projection of a rural, working-class innocent whose unshakable morality and all-American common sense enabled him to outwit the big-city slickers, his lineage was, in fact, quite urban and sophisticated. Both sides of his family tree are rife with educated, self-made multimillionaires, beautiful women, perceptive land developers, adept businessmen, and, most consistently, military heroes who fought in virtually every American war, starting with the Revolution.
He was the only son of three children of Alexander M. and Elizabeth Stewart. Alex, as his charismatic father was known, owned and operated a popular hometown hardware store, but was, at heart, an adventurer who loved to periodically run off to play soldier as much as, if not more than, staying close to home and protecting the nest. When he was around, he proved a tough taskmaster who ruled his brood with an iron heart. When he was gone, his absences caused young Jimmy to assume the filial duties as “the man” to his mother and two sisters, a task that left indelible marks on his malleable personality, instilling at once a sense of manly responsibility and a resistance to the overly protective instincts of the women of the house. The result was the development of a Presbyterian courtliness and sexual aloofness in the boy that would, one day, form the basis for Jimmy’s on-screen persona.
And it is within the complexities and contradictions of that persona that the depth of his talent is revealed. As a child he was in respectful awe of his father, even as he was forced to compete with him for the attention and affection of his sisters and mother, something he only really got when Alex was gone. He was also expected to follow in Alexander’s footsteps, eventually to take over the family business, but when he got the chance, he rebelled, choosing instead a career in show business, a profession for which his father had no respect. And, quite as much as he loved being the head of his own house when his father was away, to Alex’s dismay Jimmy avoided marriage and fatherhood until well past his fortieth birthday.
Instead, he remained a child at heart, making movies until he went to war. Not long after he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), he was drafted into the armed forces and saw action as a fighter pilot. Five years and dozens of combat missions later, including one final bombing sortie into the heart of Berlin, Stewart returned to America a highly decorated, if extremely war-weary, hero.
Indeed, despite all the smiles and the post-mission medals, it was apparent to even the most casual of observers that the ravages of combat had profoundly changed him, both physically and psychologically. The boyishness of his face was finally gone, replaced with a tougher, more grimly etched visage. His body seemed stiffer and more defensive. His demeanor was no longer that of a callow youth but a hardened man. For the rest of his life he would refuse to discuss in any meaningful detail his wartime experiences, but the effects of what he had seen and done were always visible, living within him like a parasite on his psyche and his soul. Although he actively maintained his military commission until advancing age forced his mandatory retirement, he never agreed to play war heroes on-screen or would appear in any films that glorified combat.
After making Capra’s 1946 sardonic postwar black comedy It’s a Wonderful Life, whose rich, if dark, humor proved too intricately entwined with the haunting nightmare of a man obsessed with suicide to find success at the box office, Jimmy began to question whether or not he would ever return to the past glory of his career, and of his youth—until he commenced the decade that would finally lead him to lasting greatness. In 1950, at the relatively late age of forty-two, Jimmy made the first of his eight movies with Anthony Mann, four years la
ter the second of four (three in the 1950s) with Alfred Hitchcock. These comprised eleven of the twenty-four features he would make before the decade ended, nearly a third of the eighty films he would appear in (plus numerous TV appearances and theatrical runs) over an astonishing fifty-five-year career, an even more impressive number when one factors in the five years of military service in which he made no features.3
That same year, Jimmy-come-lately married divorcée Gloria Maitland—adopting her two sons from a former marriage and going on to have twin daughters of his own. During the Vietnam era, when one of his stepsons rebelled against his conservative pro-war values (which Jimmy took at least in part as a rejection of his own generation’s military valor during World War Two, an interesting twist on his own early rejection of his father’s choice of careers), Jimmy, in turn, stubbornly denounced that rebellion as severely as his father had his. Something essential is revealed when we discover that none of his four children ever expressed the least interest or desire to follow in their father’s footsteps and try for a career in show business. One, however, did march off enthusiastically to Vietnam only to die by enemy fire in the line of duty. Following that tragic turn of events, Jimmy Stewart never made another meaningful movie.
After a run of increasingly mediocre pictures, he turned to television, a medium he hoped would launch one last mainstream connection for him to the outside world. He tried, without success, to launch two TV series, neither of which captured the imagination of the public. After that, he finally came home, took his shoes off, and called it a career as he sank softly into the living room sofa of his legend. He took to writing tongue-in-cheek “verse,” called it poetry, and occasionally performed some of it on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
He lost his wife to cancer in 1994. At home one night three years later, at the age of eighty-nine, he died quickly and quietly while watching television. To his personal friends and family, he bequeathed his private belongings. To the rest of the world, he left an eternal legacy of cinematic greatness.