by Marc Eliot
He then joined the debating team, the John Marshall Literary Society, where his drawling delivery was deemed too slow to be effective, and once again he was relegated to the third-string (tier) team. He also applied to and was accepted into the choir and the glee club, but found no excitement or stimulation in either one.
His only true enjoyment the first year at Mercersburg was the same as it had been his last year in high school, going to the movies. He went to the town’s local theater every weekend, Saturday or Sunday afternoons, sometimes both. In the dark, he could reconnect with happier days when he was a projectionist in Indiana, alone with the images of his projected, idealized heroes starring in his most private dreams.
As the spring of 1924 finally came to a close, Jimmy eagerly looked forward to returning home and spending the summer working in the hardware store alongside his father. Alexander, however, had other ideas. Concerned about his son’s still-gaunt look, he insisted Jimbo get a job doing physical labor in the hopes it would bulk him up a bit, as well as balance the mental exertion he had been through that first year at school. Although disappointed, Jimmy did not protest. From May through August he labored as a brickloader for a local Indiana construction company. At night he hung with his pal Bill Neff, three years older and a freshman at Penn State. Neff had by now developed a nice touch as an amateur magician and loved showing Jimmy his latest tricks. He also happily showed them to young Emma Stewart, an ever-present girlfriend (no relation) who Jimmy seemed to have acquired for the summer.
All was well until an incident with near-fatal consequences. Apparently after having gone hunting, Jimmy was cleaning his .22 caliber rifle at the table while alone with Emma in her kitchen when the gun suddenly went off, the bullet missing Emma’s head by less than two inches. According to Stewart, he dropped the gun and ran out of the house and never saw Emma again.2
That September 1924, safely back at school, he was unable to work up any real enthusiasm for a second round of dry studies and restricted social activities. Another uneventful academic year passed slowly and in the spring of ’26 he returned once more to Indiana, this time consigned by his father to spend the summer painting traffic lines on the sticky streets of the hot city.
The social highlight of Jimmy’s first senior semester was the October 26 ceremonial dedication of the school’s new campus chapel, attended by President Coolidge’s wife; both of Jim’s parents and his sisters attended.
Not long after, Jimmy came down with a sudden and severe case of scarlet fever. His condition was considered serious enough for him to be sent home to Indiana. During his bedridden convalescence his sisters cared for his every need, while his mother tutored him daily to make sure he kept up with his studies. In March, just as it appeared he was well enough to return to Mercersburg for the final months before graduation, he developed a serious kidney infection and accompanying high fever. His condition worsened and for several weeks he lay uncomfortably close to death. More than once a priest was called to the Stewart home to administer last rites (although they were not Catholic).
The fever finally did break, and after a few more weeks of recuperation, the family doctor said a still frail and ever-skinnier Jimmy was well enough to return to school. By now it was too late to finish Mercersburg on time, which seemed to bother his father far more than it did Jimmy. Acceptance to Princeton would be at least another year off now, if it ever came at all.
While still recovering, Jimmy turned his attention, along with the rest of the world, to the highly anticipated May 20–21, 1927, solo flight of Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France. In the weeks leading up to the big day, Jimmy began working on a hand-carved wooden model of the Spirit of St. Louis. As he painstakingly worked on the body, he asked his father for a large piece of beaverboard, on which he drew a map of the North Atlantic. Using crayon, he then added the skyline of New York City on the left and the Eiffel Tower on the right. With some basic heating techniques, he warped the board, so as to approximate the curvature of the earth. Into this diorama he attached his model plane. So impressed was Alexander, he decided to display the “work of art” in the hardware store’s front window.
Jimmy and his father followed every moment of the grand media buildup, via radio, to the day of Lindbergh’s planned 3,600-mile flight. If Jimmy and his father appeared more heavily invested in the heroics of “Lucky” Lindbergh than most, it likely had to do with the fact that the person who had built the real plane that carried the aviator across the Atlantic and into history was one appropriately named Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, Mercersburg class of ’18.
As it happened, the flight began on Jimmy’s nineteenth birthday, which he took to be a sign of some special, cosmic connection to Lindbergh. The night of the flight, Jimmy followed as much of it as he could by radio. “I don’t think I got any more sleep than Lindbergh did,” Stewart said, later on. “Lindbergh’s problem was staying awake; mine was staying asleep that Friday night while he was unreported over the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland.” Early the next morning, when Lindbergh’s plane was cited off the coast of Ireland, young Jimmy rushed to his father’s store to move the plane farther along the diorama, closer to the Eiffel Tower.
Lindbergh, upon completion of his daring feat, became the twentieth century’s first true-life media-created American hero. So great was his popularity that for a while his face was more familiar throughout the world than Charlie Chaplin’s, the international superstar of the movies, even though Lindbergh’s only exposure to the public was through newspaper photos, radio interviews, and brief newsreels. Jimmy was always struck by the shy, reticent manner of the tall, lean, handsome, diffident if a bit distant adventurer, and he couldn’t help but notice the resemblance of Lindbergh, in manner as well as appearance, to Alexander. As far as Jimmy was concerned, Lindbergh was the perfect reflection of his father.
Jimmy, in turn, fixated on the physical characteristics of his hero. He consciously tried to incorporate Lindbergh’s mannerisms into a personality and style all his own—the slight downward, one-sided tilt of his head when he talked while keeping his eyes riveted on his subject, his jaw traveling to one side of his face during long, unsure pauses.
Reluctant to take another municipal job, and grateful that his mother forbade any physical work so soon after his illness, Jimmy hooked up with and spent most of his spare time and summers with Bill Neff, who was determined to put together a summer tour for himself. His skills were developed enough to get him a job with a traveling carnival as a resident magician, Houdini style, and he was looking for an assistant who could help perform the tricks and possibly serve as his opening act. When Neff offered the job to Jim, he jumped at it, and soon the two were busy planning a publicity campaign to bolster attendance at the carnival. Neff came up with the idea. The afternoon before opening day in each town they played, Neff would tie a piece of thick rope around his ankle, attach it to the roof of the tallest building, then dangle from the side while strapped into a straitjacket and bearing a sign hand-painted by Jimmy that displayed the name of the act and where it was going to appear. Meanwhile, Jimmy played the accordion. Once a crowd gathered, Neff would wow them by wriggling out of his constrictions and, still dangling from one leg, urge everyone at the top of his voice to come and see the rest of the “even more spectacular” live show.
During actual performances, Neff, with Jimmy’s assistance, performed all types of complicated tricks, many of which utilized the special equipment they had built in Jimmy’s garage, including a breakaway box for sawing a woman in half, a “volunteer” from the audience who was actually an accomplice planted by Neff, none other than Jimmy’s sister Ginny. As Neff later recalled, “We had a real magic show, complete with floating women, disappearing acts, guinea pigs and rabbits and all that stuff.”
These days out on the road with Neff and Ginny were happy ones for young Jimmy, who enjoyed playing his accordion in front of crowds and helping with th
e tricks. Neff, who upon graduation would go on to have a successful career as a professional magician, appreciated Jimmy’s assistance and never failed to tell him how good he was, a natural crowd-pleaser, that even his painted signs were terrific. This much-needed boost to Jimmy’s ego inflated it like a helium balloon until it finally burst at summer’s end when he had to leave show business behind to prepare for his fifth, and what he hoped would be his final, year at Mercersburg.
Back at school, Jimmy’s postsummer boredom intensified during the long free hours he had between the few remaining classes he had left to make up. One day he called Neff for advice on how best to use his time. His friend suggested he try out for a part in the school’s winter play put on by the Stony Batter Club (like everything else in this Colonial-rooted part of the country, the club was named after the birthplace of a president, in this instance James Buchanan). Nah, Jimmy said. Theater was about the last activity he felt qualified for.
That spring the Stony Batters were putting on Romain Rolland’s The Wolves, loosely based on the celebrated Dreyfus case. Although relatively obscure, Rolland’s play was a natural for student productions, with its single courtroom set and, most important for Mercersburg, all-male cast.
After auditioning, done at Neff’s insistence, to his surprise and delight Jimmy was given one of the leads, that of Buquet, a civilian revolutionary hero who rises to power after the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. Although the Stony Batter production was, not surprisingly, amateurish high-school-level stuff, the Monday night it “opened,” February 20, 1928, marks nineteen-year-old Jimmy Stewart’s first official stage performance in a full-length play before a live audience.
There was, apparently, little in evidence of what would one day come to be regarded as the familiar Stewart style of acting. The director, Carl Cass, later described Jimmy’s performance as “clumsy,” the actor a “funny-looking long-legged kid” who had to be carefully coached lest he trip over himself and fall flat on his face. The school paper, the Mercersburg News, was less judgmental than Cass when it described Jimmy’s performance as “excellent,” “swaggering,” with “the confident manner of a polished star.”
Regardless of what anyone thought of his acting, Jim was definitely on a social upswing because of the play. Two nights after it closed, he made his debating debut at the inter-society play-offs, and was a member of the winning team with its spirited defense of the Volstead Act.
The only thing left now was graduation, a day that seemed to Jimmy to be forever in coming. After finally receiving his diploma in front of his entire family, Jimmy was loaded into the family car and returned to Indiana, his academic future still uncertain.
Although it was not yet too late, Princeton had so far remained noticeably silent about whether or not they were going to accept Jimmy Stewart. To pass the days while he waited for their answer, Jimmy returned to bricklaying, until one hot August afternoon, while on the construction site of Indiana’s new First National Bank building, he looked up to see Alexander rushing toward him, waving a letter back and forth above his head. Jimmy stood and ran to his father, who handed him the already opened notice. He stopped, carefully held up the single page, and read out loud. Good news! “Admissions Committee…pleased to inform you…accepted for the fall 1928…”
The long months of speculation were over. He would, after all, be able to fulfill his father’s dream, even if it was not exactly his own. At this moment, pleasing felt almost as good as being pleased. As for Alexander, he was indeed elated. He heartily shook his son’s hand and patted him on the back as he congratulated him.
As the time for his departure to Princeton grew near, Jimmy began his familiar pattern of separation anxiety, but Alexander would have none of it. His son was going to Princeton or he was going nowhere. And, he told his son in no uncertain terms, to forget about staying home. If he intended to be a bricklayer all his life, he could find himself another town to live in.
A day or two later, Alexander personally drove his son to Princeton’s New Jersey campus for an overnight tour of the grounds. As Stewart would recall the visit years later, in a statement he gave to a press gathering at Princeton in 1990, “We got there in the evening, and the next morning [my dad] took me out and introduced me to Princeton in the best way anybody can ever be introduced: through the front gate, with Nassau Hall rising up ahead, and the sun set perfectly in the morning sky. I’ll never forget it. And I suppose that was the whole idea to begin with.” Whether or not he was truly impressed with the Ivy institution’s splendor, Jimmy made no further protestations.
According to a 1938 MGM publicity release, “Princeton and Jim Stewart were made for each other…. He knew it from the first day he walked up the main drag, known as University Avenue. He took pride in the rich traditions of the school, in the stories handed down to him by his father. He made friends easily. He enjoyed every moment of that first year.” This description of Stewart’s early days at Princeton has since been taken as the last word, a kind of sacrament of remembrance reinforced, perhaps, by the selective sentiments of Stewart himself, who was as eager as his first studio to forget some of the less pleasant, more complicated events between his entrance and his ultimate graduation from the storied institution.
To begin with, as even Stewart later admitted, Princeton had remained a reluctant choice, a product of the defeat of his will that had come up against his father’s, whose insistence that his son attend the university had everything to do with family pride, if little to do with family. In truth, Jimmy was less in awe of the immediate campus than in fear of what lay ahead. It was already part of Jim’s character to take the way of least confrontation, to comply rather than to confront. But, as he was soon to discover at Princeton, passivity could sometimes be a nascent form of rebellion all its own, yielding the most remarkable, if unexpected, results.
Like Mercersburg, Princeton was steeped in ritual and tradition. It wasn’t until early into the twentieth century that its longstanding policy of restrictions began to weaken. Until then, any young man not brought up Presbyterian was not seriously considered for admission (Catholics got in before Jews, Jews before African-Americans). Women were kept out until 1944. Such were the ways of American higher education in those days, nowhere more glaringly than in the Ivy League.
As Jimmy quickly discovered, hallowed convention was at the foundation of everything at Princeton. It was the best way to ensure the continuation of a family’s educational lifeline, and as such, freshman were required to identify themselves to upperclassmen, their surrogate older brothers and fathers, by wearing a dink, a little black cap worn everywhere except the shower and in bed that marked the newbie for what and who he was. Although it has always been reported that Jimmy’s major was architecture, Princeton did not offer an undergraduate degree in that field. He actually majored in electrical engineering at the university’s School of Engineering, with mechanical drawing his unofficial minor, to help him qualify for eventual acceptance into the university’s graduate program of architecture.
Jim’s first roommate at Princeton was Stephens Porter Brown, a geology major and fellow native Pennsylvanian whose father, an insurance salesman, had also managed to get his son into Mercersburg. As freshmen, they were assigned to the worst housing on campus, a single room they shared in Reunion Hall, itself a ritual of we’ll-make-a-man-out-of-you endurance. That first winter they were so cold, they took to burning furniture to keep their unheated quarters warm (or so Jim claimed in an interview he gave to the Princetonian in 1947 without giving any insight or specifics as to how this feat could safely be accomplished indoors). In any event, the two were friends, but their separate interests prevented them from becoming truly close.
Although Jimmy’s academic preparation for becoming an architect was meant to return him home with a knowledge of construction that would serve him well in the family business, a career in aviation was the private dream he still harbored. However, this inner conflict quickly
devolved from one of battling tradition and familial conformity to one of simple incompetence. Although he might have subconsciously understood that failing mathematics would not only automatically disqualify him from his intended major but also liberate him from his father’s predetermined vision of the continuation of the family business, it is possible Jimmy was just no good with numbers, and lacked the motivation and therefore the discipline to master them.
Instead of getting down to the daunting matter of learning calculus, Jimmy concentrated on another and to him far more pleasant diversion—running track. Because all freshmen were required to take at least one physical education course, Jimmy went out for the track team, and, to his surprise, made it, although the coach ordered him to drink two glasses of milk a day to keep his weight up. But as hard as he tried, Jimmy couldn’t keep on the extra pounds. Knowing he would never make first string, he dropped off the team (they went undefeated that year) and spent a lot more time alone in the dark at the movies, though he later claimed he used it to concentrate on his mathematics studies.
Midway through his first year at Princeton, Jimmy had discovered the town’s two local movie theaters. Every campus has them, broken-down neighborhood palaces that screen idiosyncratic films intended to specifically appeal to the student body that supports them. In this instance, they were the Garden and the Arcade. Jimmy took to going on a regular basis, every Friday and Saturday night, and eagerly joined in the tradition of the mostly undergraduate Princetonians who talked loudly and sometimes mockingly at whatever was taking place on the screen. “Look out, there’s someone behind you,” or “Kiss her, you sap, can’t you see she’s in love with you?”
Jimmy quickly developed a list of his favorite stars. At the top were silent-film-star-turned-talkie-sensation Norma Shearer—especially in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), Sam Wood’s The Latest from Paris (1928), and Robert Z. Leonard’s A Lady of Chance (1928)—and all-sound-all-the-time Ginger Rogers in James Leo Meehan’s Campus Sweethearts (1929), a film that made him wish Princeton was coeducational.