by Marc Eliot
The very much hands-on, paternalistic Louis B. Mayer—a common joke in Hollywood at the time was that actors would rather come down with T.B. than have to work for L.B.—had just scored a major coup, having “stolen” Spencer Tracy from Fox. Tracy’s contract had loopholed during that studio’s merger/takeover by Zanuck. Zanuck didn’t care, believing Tracy had neither the looks nor the talent to fit into the studio’s new focus. Mayer snapped up Tracy and immediately cast him in Tim Whelan’s sixty-nine-minute B job, The Murder Man(1935). Other than marking the actor’s debut at MGM, it is an ordinary and forgettable murder melodrama in which the actor plays Steve Grey, a reporter who kills one of the two men he believes responsible for driving his wife (Virginia Bruce) to suicide after a bad business deal, then frames the other for the murder. In the Code-enforced climax of the film, Grey confesses to both the murder and frame-up.
When Bill Grady heard about the production, he immediately pushed for Stewart to be given the small role of Shorty, one of Tracy’s fellow newspapermen, a fourteen-line bit of no consequence. Grady also had his eye on a role for Jimmy in the upcoming sequel to the surprisingly successful movie The Thin Man. The William Powell and Myrna Loy vehicle, in which they played the alcohol-loving, high-living, sexed-up husband-and-wife team who happen to solve murders between martinis, had proven an enormous hit. At the height of the Depression, W. S. Van Dyke’s II’s The Thin Man provided perfect pop escapism, and Mayer wanted to crank out as many versions of it as he could.
The start of production on Van Dyke’s After the Thin Man was still months away, but Grady knew that if he didn’t get Stewart into something before then, he had little chance of landing him a decent role in one of the studio’s hottest properties. Grady, aware that Murder Man’s producer, Harry Rapf, was having trouble casting his film, buttonholed him outside the commissary and recommended Stewart for the part, even though he already knew Rapf had envisioned Shorty the size of a jockey.
Rapf told Grady to get lost. The two argued loudly until Grady finally left in disgust. He wasted no time in getting hold of Tim Whelan, an old friend, scheduled to direct Murder Man, and called in a favor. Whelan, who hadn’t yet cast the role, agreed to use Jimmy, sight unseen. When Rapf saw the dailies, he blew a gasket and went directly to Mayer, insisting that both Grady and Stewart be fired. Mayer summoned Grady to his office, chewed him out, and threatened to hand him his walking papers, until Grady reminded the studio head that he had just signed a new five-year contract, and that according to its provisions, should he be fired, he would still have to be paid. Mayer then decided to wait until the movie was finished and see how it did before taking any further action.
Jimmy, who had no idea of the behind-the-scenes battle that had taken place over his being cast in The Murder Man, focused all his attention on Tracy during the filming, following the actor around like a star-struck kid. As the production continued, Jimmy began to learn how making a film worked—the long process of waiting around, the time often spent kibitzing with the other bit actors while the stars retreated to their dressing rooms until someone called “Places” and a few seconds of footage was shot. One time during a particularly long break, Tracy turned to Jimmy, who happened to be standing nearby, and said, wistfully, “Gosh, I never get to go anyplace. I sit around all day and do nothing but wait.” Jimmy, astonished that the star had actually shared such a private thought with him and unaware that Tracy was the kind of drinker who never remembered anything he said, particularly on-set and especially to another actor, remarked, without thinking, “That’s ridiculous, Mr. Tracy. When this picture’s through, let’s you and me fly around the world.” To his amazement, Tracy seemed to go for the idea enthusiastically. “So we got maps,” Jimmy later recalled, “started planning the trip, and everything was soon arranged. A few days later I asked him what luggage he was going to take on the trip. ‘What luggage? What trip?’ and [he] walked away from me.”
Once The Murder Man opened, in July 1935, and proved a hit, all the off-screen skirmish over using Jimmy was quickly forgotten, and he was now being cast in one film after another, watched over carefully by Grady, who was waiting patiently for production to begin on After the Thin Man.
Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, Stewart and Fonda had begun to live it up, Hollywood style. Fonda had hooked them up with a couple of actresses, one a long-legged, dyed-redhead, gum-chewing starlet with a flair for comedy who could also dance, the other a bleach-blond, tall-stepping dancer who had become a star sharing screen time with Fred Astaire. At Fox, Fonda had first struck up a relationship with Lucille Ball, who then fixed up her girlfriend, twice-divorced Ginger Rogers, with Fonda’s roommate, Stewart. Rogers had recently dissolved her marriage to actor Lew Ayres, who had gained fame as the antihero of Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. High on his own fame, Ayres had become a self-righteous, real-life peace advocate (and a future conscientious objector). His politics made him too quiet and scholarly and intellectual for her, Rogers told friends, and his philandering and drinking didn’t help, either. She was free and single and ready to rumba.1 And the ladies were both more than willing to spend time with these two tall, good-looking, working young actors.
For Jimmy, dating a hot beauty like Rogers was an especially unbelievable rush, for it was not so very long ago, while still a student at Princeton, that he had sat alone in the Arcade Theater, mind-lusting after the young blond beauty. Now here he was, getting personal lessons from her at some of Hollywood’s most famous nightclubs on how to do the carioca. Not surprisingly, he was totally smitten with Rogers, the first woman to bring his long-suffering manhood to the altar of love.
In other words, she slept with him.
Having Rogers take Jimmy’s cherry was an accomplishment for which Fonda somehow insisted on taking all the credit. He commemorated the milestone the following night with a bottle of champagne, reassuring his friend as he popped the cork that he was not about to turn to salt for what he had done. With the quiet, assured logic that Fonda would become known for on-screen, he tried to alleviate the massive dose of postcoital guilt Stewart was reeling from by reminding him over and over again that he wasn’t Rogers’s first and that she wouldn’t be his last, and the world hadn’t come to an end because of what happened.
Soon Jimmy and Ginger were a regular Hollywood gossip column item. One afternoon, after spending a day sleeping off the night before, Jimmy woke Josh Logan, who was staying at the house, and told him they (Jimmy, Fonda, and Logan) were all going over to Ginger’s for dinner. Logan, who had never met the actress, became animated at the thought of actually getting to hang out with some genuine Hollywood royalty. On the drive over, Logan, still clinging to his academic mindset, insisted on discussing the financial merits of the newly released Max Reinhardt version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, to his horror, discovered that Jimmy was no longer the artistic purist he once believed him to be.
“‘I saw it and it stinks,’ said Jimmy.
“‘How can you say that? It’s a work of art!’
“‘It won’t make a nickel.’
“In my fuzzy condition I decided it was time to save my friend from this insidious Hollywood commercialism,” Logan later recalled. “‘How could you change so quickly from a man of ideals? You sound like a crass distributor who can only think in picture grosses.’
“‘That’s the way they judge films out here—and anyway, it still stinks.’”
A little later Logan, having had too much to drink during dinner, tried to find a bathroom. As he later recalled, “Down the hallway I wobbled to a likely door, opened it and plunged down a ladder twelve feet into the basement. Heaven must protect drunks, for I got up unharmed, climbed back to find Fonda and Stewart waiting for me.
“‘Come on outside, Josh,’ Fonda said.
“I followed them, thinking they were going to drive me home. Fonda said, ‘We don’t like the way you’re behaving.’
“‘Well, I don’t like the way Mr. J. Hollywood Stewart talked to me. I think you’ve all sold out for the money. I’m gonna move out of your money-tainted house. You go your way and I’ll go mine.’
“‘Okay with me,’ Fonda shrugged.
“‘And with me,’ said Jimmy.”
But in his heart Jimmy knew that what Logan had said contained a kernel of truth. Everything about him was changing. He had left Logan and the rest of his Princeton/Triangle/University Players days behind him. Even Broadway was beginning to fade into the sunset. He was a new man now, flying in a new world.
And he liked it.
Between their shooting schedules, Fonda and Stewart fantasized about what their next-door neighbor Garbo was really like. Her house was surrounded by high fences and neither had ever seen her. One day they decided to dig a tunnel under their house to get into hers. The story, endlessly retold by Jimmy and surely apocryphal (and always denied by Fonda), served as their much-needed excuse for what drove Garbo to move as far away from the two of them as she could. The real reason she upped and left was far less romantic than the silly “digging” Stewart dreamed up. It was, in fact, literally odorous; the thirty-five stray cats Fonda had more or less adopted had stunk up not only his living room but the entire neighborhood, including Garbo’s house. She simply couldn’t stand the smell, or Fonda because of it, and left.
Margaret Sullavan had been in Hollywood for three years working steadily at Universal. After starring in John Stahl’s Only Yesterday (1933), the screen adaptation of the play she had appeared in on Broadway, she made William Wyler’s The Good Fairy (1935), a weeper about a girl from an orphanage who becomes the “good fairy” to others, notable for the real-life romance it produced between the director and his leading lady. Sullavan and Wyler were married during the making of The Good Fairy.
Sullavan’s next film, made on loan to Paramount, was King Vidor’s So Red the Rose (1935), a standard Civil War romance based on the Stark Young novel that made the best-seller list in the rash of Gone With the Wind copycats. It received decent enough reviews—Richard Watts Jr., writing in the New York Herald Tribune, praised Sullavan’s “proper lyricism”—but did nothing to advance Sullavan’s steady but as yet unspectacular film career. Back at Universal, the disgruntled actress turned down script after script, until she came across a Melville Baker screenplay based on an Ursula Parrott novel, Say Goodbye Again, which chronicled the disintegration of a young couple’s love when the husband, a journalist, is assigned overseas, during which time she becomes a major Broadway star. Complicating matters is the unexpected arrival of a baby. The film takes a melodramatic, soapy turn when the husband contracts a rare, fatal disease while stationed in China, and, during a tearful reunion with his wife, insists they get divorced so she can marry the new man in her life, but (to satisfy the Production Code) he dies before that can happen. She tearfully vows never to forget him, even as her new fiancé realizes he cannot marry her after all. The studio eagerly green-lighted what it saw as a surefire vehicle that could very well take Sullavan to the top of the top, changed the working title to Next Time We Live, then changed it again, at Sullavan’s insistence, to the more provocative Next Time We Love.2
The script didn’t particularly impress Sullavan, who told Wyler she considered it weak. When Wyler, who was directing the film, insisted she make it, she in turn insisted to the powers at Universal that the role of her husband be played by James Stewart, “that great new actor from the Broadway stage who has already done some pictures at MGM.”
Fine, the studio said, except, they insisted, they’d never heard of James Stewart. No one in Universal’s casting department could remember him in anything he’d been in, including The Murder Man or his second movie, W. S. Van Dyke II’s Rose-Marie, a Jeanette MacDonald/ Nelson Eddy vehicle in which Jimmy was cast rather unconvincingly as a killer. Neverthess, Sullavan cited them as proof of just how good a film actor he was. She remained adamant, and insisted she would make the film only if Universal made a deal with MGM to borrow him, an offer Mayer jumped at, having no idea what else to do with the young, gangly actor he was paying $350 a week whether he was working or not.
No one at Universal could understand why Sullavan was willing to risk her big-break movie on an unknown co-star. In fact, the catalyst for Sullavan’s lobbying for Jimmy had been a chance encounter between the two one afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard, where Sullavan, being driven to the studio from her Beverly Hills home, happened to spot him walking along by himself, hands in his pockets, head down. She had the driver pull over, rolled down her window, and called him over. Soon he was sitting alongside her, reminiscing about New York City and Broadway.
Jimmy, whose relationship with Rogers had by now begun to cool—she found him just too inexperienced, too callow for her heat, she told friends—was ripe-ready for the return of Sullavan in his life, in any form, while for her, Jimmy was not exactly the one who had gotten away, but one of the many she liked and for one reason or another had let get away. With him, though, she was careful about breaking a heart so tender, one that he wore so plaintively on his sleeve. It was that very nonvoracious quality about him that she had always been attracted to. “She was protective, loving, maternal toward him,” Myron McCormick told Sullavan’s biographer. “She wasn’t usually like this with most men. If she wasn’t getting sexually predatory with them she was indifferent, or contemptuous.”
Now she determined to flex her muscles and turn him into the star she had always felt he would become. However, when she brought his name up to Carl Laemmle, the hard head of Universal, he told her that Francis Lederer had already been cast in the role. Lederer was one of Hollywood’s vaguely exotic European leading men (he was actually Czech), whom the studio, in all its infinite wisdom, had earmarked for the part in the film of the “young, all-American Princeton type.” Unable to shake Sullavan’s resolve, Laemmle passed off what he started calling “the final casting” to the film’s assigned director, Edward Griffith, an able if ordinary silent screen veteran who had a dim flair for breezy contemporary comedy and who would go on to become the favored director of icy screen goddess Madeleine Carroll. Griffith, not wanting to rock this temperamental star’s boat, chose the path of least resistance for himself, okayed Jimmy for the role, and the loan-out deal with MGM was made.
Filming for Next Time We Love began on October 21, 1935, with a noticeably anxious Jimmy Stewart, and before long, Griffith was feeling the pressure from Laemmle, who was unhappy with the dailies and wanted Jimmy replaced before any more film was shot. In her memoirs, Brooke Hayward, Sullavan’s daughter, wrote, “They were both particularly fond of the scene [in Next Time We Love] in which Jimmy had to go away on assignment, leaving his young wife and baby behind. Jimmy felt that the situation called for a tear or two on his part, and had no difficulty filling his eyes for the first take, but the baby threw something at him and they had to cut. The second take was likewise ruined by the baby and the third and the fourth. By the fifth take, Jimmy was unable to summon up any more tears. He didn’t know about glycerin, which is often used in movies to stimulate tears and, in any case, would probably have been too embarrassed to ask for it, so he went behind the scenery, lit a cigarette, and held it to his eyes in the hope that the smoke would make them tear up. This experiment transformed his eyes into two raw blobs, and he almost threatened to shoot the child. Mother was delighted, particularly by the cigarette.”
Sullavan calmly guaranteed both Griffith and Laemmle that Stewart would come through for them. To make it happen, after the cigarette scene, she worked privately with him, every night after shooting, coaching him for the next day’s scenes, showing him exactly how he should move (and not move), encouraging him to tone down the more mannered aspects of his stage-trained persona—the hand movements, the projected voice, the neck turns, the awkward bent-forward posture—and instructed him to look directly into her eyes when he spoke to her, and to keep on looking at her, and only her, w
hen she spoke to him.
All of this extracurricular coaching did not help Sullavan’s already shaky marriage to the insecure Wyler, who was off making These Three for Samuel Goldwyn, the third movie version of Lillian Hellman’s controversial lesbian drama originally written for the stage as The Children’s Hour. In addition to directing his cast, Wyler had to play referee to the verbal fisticuffs between jealous-of-each-other co-stars Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon.
Stewart remained oblivious to the whispers floating around that the nights he was spending with Sullavan had less to do with rehearsals than romance. And in a sense, they were correct. Sullavan was, in her fashion, seducing Stewart with her talent, treating him like a doting mother dressing up her favorite little boy and teaching him how to behave in public. How to act.
These were not just the only formal “lessons” Jimmy ever had; they were also the best he could have ever hoped for. Sullavan taught him the secret to channeling his most private desires into characters whom audiences could understand and relate to, and, most important, be moved by. It was this understanding of how to bring his emotions to the surface that would lead him for the first time to experience the true art of film acting—to make the connection between what was inside of him and what an audience saw, the bridge to what they would both feel. These sessions with Sullavan, in their way, were as “real” as any romance would have been. Being close enough that he could smell the perfume of her shampoo while she carefully tutored him was intoxicating and, for Jimmy, an act more intimate to his way of thinking and feeling than any he had ever done with Ginger Rogers. And, as a result, he would never be quite the same way as he was before, not as an actor and not as a man.
The difference in his acting was noticeable. He’d gained a new confidence in his approach, and stopped hiding behind the mechanics of his automatic mannerisms; he’d become naturally charming on camera, instead of trying to mimic the gestures of a charmer.