by Marc Eliot
Next Time We Love opened early in 1936, and the high quality of Jimmy’s performance was noticed by everyone. Many thought it was his first film, and for years after, Griffith, who enjoyed an unusual (for him) success with the film as well, always credited Sullavan for having made James Stewart a star.
Jimmy agreed with that assessment, and, not surprisingly, had difficulty separating his professional gratitude from his personal feelings. “I’ll never marry until I find a girl like Margaret Sullavan,” Jimmy told a reporter from a Hollywood fanzine.
Despite Universal’s success with the film and Jimmy’s newfound popularity, Mayer remained without a clue as to what to do with him next. Mayer no longer doubted he could act, but still had no idea how to cast him. Some at the studio thought with his unusually long legs he had the makings of a good screen comedian. Others saw a spark of romantic leading man in his boyish good looks, but were put off by his awkward mannerisms. Still others thought, with a little building up, he might make a good action hero. In 1936, his first full year at MGM, Jimmy appeared in seven features, all made at the studio, small roles in unimportant pictures in which Stewart played a variety of characters while MGM tried to figure out how best to use him (and Grady waited to get him into After the Thin Man). In W. S. Van Dyke II’s Rose-Marie, he played a killer. In Clarence Brown’s Wife vs. Secretary, a Clark Gable/Jean Harlow vehicle, he played a typical all-American young man. In William Wellman’s Small Town Girl, a Janet Gaynor/Robert Taylor vehicle, he played essentially the same role. In Edwin Marin’s Speed, co-starring Una Merkel, he played a young race-car driver. In Clarence Brown’s The Gorgeous Hussy, an MGM all-star showcase, with Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Franchot Tone, Melvyn Douglas, Louis Calhern, Beulah Bondi, Sidney Toler, Gene Lockhart, and at least a dozen other familiar names, he played a young, romantic aristocrat. And in Roy Del Ruth’s Born to Dance, an Eleanor Powell vehicle, playing a young naval officer, Jimmy danced for the first and only time in his entire career in the manner of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly (as opposed to ballroom, or cheek-to-cheek, which he did in several films).
In the midst of all this speculation, Mayer personally had Jimmy test for the part of Ching, a supporting role in the studio’s upcoming big-budget production of Pearl S. Buck’s sprawling novel of the life of Chinese peasants, The Good Earth, to be directed by Sidney Franklin, with Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in the first leads. Jimmy was sent to makeup, where he was fitted with a tight hair cap, his eyes were glued up on either side, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were cut off. The screen test proved a disaster, and Mayer gave the part to Ching Wah Lee, one of the studio’s standard-issue “Orientals.” After that, Mayer ordered Jimmy to gain weight to make him more castable, and assigned one of the studio’s personal trainers to see to it he stuck to his regimen. Finally, he was cast in the role of the apparent nice guy who is really the killer in W. S. Van Dyke II’s After the Thin Man.
Throughout that rush of films, during his off-time, Stewart continued to hang out mostly with Fonda, with whom he had moved to a larger (and catless) house in Brentwood, with Josh Logan and Johnny Swope more or less permanent houseguests. Almost from the day they took over the place, there were parties practically every night, where the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood, which meant in the country, which meant in the world, came to play and in most instances, to stay, at least until the next day.
Fonda and Jimmy’s off-days usually began with an eggnog and brandy. As Jimmy recalled later on, “We were both too skinny, and one time we decided to gain a little weight…a little…so a fella told us for breakfast every morning we should drink an eggnog with brandy. But the thing was, we noticed that the eggnog kept getting darker and darker, and by eleven A.M. we were both pissed!”
And stayed that way until it was officially party time. Sometimes they would continue the festivities into the night on the Sunset Strip, an unzoned mile or so of anything-goes situated between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, with the clubs owned by the stars themselves and where whiskey, drugs, and sex flowed as freely as the popcorn and soda pop at most movies’ concession stands. They usually got things rolling at the Trocadero, before moving on to the Cocoanut Grove, hangouts that catered to the industry, stayed open all night, and always looked the other way, no matter what or who was going down.
It was at the Cocoanut Grove that Stewart first met many of the stars who were to become his lifelong friends and some his eventual neighbors, including Jack Benny and his wife, Mary; George Burns and Gracie Allen; Harold Lloyd; William Powell; Norma Shearer; Dolores Del Rio; Red Skelton; and a teenage Judy Garland always escorted by her mother. Occasionally he would run into his ex, Ginger Rogers, but if he held any lingering heartbreak over her, he didn’t show it. For one thing, he was too busy fighting off the actresses and starlets eager to get a chance with him. He may not yet have been a top-ranking star to the rest of the world, but to the young ladies of Hollywood, he was a working actor who had actually made some movies, had a few dollars in his pocket, didn’t smoke those smelly cigars, and was under sixty, the age of the men they usually wound up dating when they were on the career make.
Fonda later recalled how stars and starlets were always the aggressors, sending them flowers with little notes attached the way a man would ordinarily treat a woman. And they loved it, even when the women were as aggressive as their screen image. Barbara Stanwyck, just divorced after seven years of marriage to actor Frank Fay, chased Stewart all over town, but had trouble convincing him to take her home to his bed. He was always opting instead for parties, and hanging out. Stanwyck nicknamed him “the problem child,” called him crazy to his face, and walked out on him: the end of yet another romance that never was.3 Meanwhile Collier’s magazine, a popular rag of its time with literary pretensions and loads of Hollywood gossip, dubbed Jimmy the newest “Blade of Beverly Hills.”
All the duo’s skirt-chasing, or perhaps more accurately in Jimmy’s case, all the being chased by skirts, ended when Fonda returned from London, where he had gone to make a movie, and announced that he had gotten married. Again. On September 6, 1936, while overseas, Fonda had tied the knot with Manhattan socialite Frances Seymour, the young widow of George Brokaw (who had been married once before, to Clare Boothe). Frances and Fonda had been introduced by her wealthy uncle, the former head of Standard Oil, while Fonda was shooting Wings of the Morning. He proposed to her in Budapest, she accepted in Paris, they were married in New York City, and they spent their honeymoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
This meant, among other things, that the house he had shared with the others passed on to Jimmy, or, as his friends referred to him now, “Bachelor Number One.” As a wedding present, however, Jimmy, Logan, and Swope let Fonda and his new wife, Frances, stay on in the house, while they all found another one that just happened to be located a block away from where Margaret Sullavan was now living.
After the Thin Man opened on Christmas Day, 1936, and went on to become a big hit, the sixth highest grosser of the year. The New York Herald Tribune called Jimmy’s performance “a characterization as surprising as it is effective,” and Variety singled him out for special praise: “James Stewart is calm until the blow-off when he does his best work.” “The blow-off” was the final scene in which Stewart, to this point in the movie little-noticed, suddenly turns into the villain, with a strong ten-minute breathtaker in the slick, Dashiell Hammett–Van Dyke–Thin Man fashion of rapid-fire revelation to resolution.
Everyone, it seemed, except Mayer was suddenly aware now of the hot new young actor in town. Mayer promptly agreed to loan out the actor to 20th Century Fox in order to star in Henry King’s Seventh Heaven to the tune of $1,000 a week, complete with a $3,000 signing bonus (all of which went to MGM). As far as Mayer was concerned, if someone else wanted to pay that kind of money for the contract player’s time, that was just fine. Because he was now operating without the youthful visionary Irving Thalberg by his side (whose unexpected early death in 1936 left n
o one to help guide the studio), Mayer still did not have a clue as to what, or who, Jimmy Stewart was.
But others did. Both on-screen and off.
6
“I loved being in pictures. Right away—didn’t miss the stage at all. Loved it. All that stuff ya hear ’bout how the big studio was nothing but an enormous factory—this just isn’t true…it was wonderful.”
—JIMMY STEWART
When Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of the newly merged 20th Century Fox, signed twenty-five-year-old French film sensation Simone Simon, she had only made two pictures in America. Zanuck decided to use her in the Janet Gaynor role for his planned remake of the 1927 silent classic, Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven. In need of product, he had decided to raid his own catalog of premerger and rarely seen silent Fox Films. The story of Seventh Heaven concerns the adventures of Chico, a Parisian sewer worker who falls in love with Diane (Simon), a young and beautiful prostitute thrown into the streets for not making enough money for the brothel. A priest advises them to get married and start over. They set a date, but before they can officially become man and wife, World War One breaks out and Chico enlists. Word soon reaches Diane that he has been killed. She renounces her life as a prostitute and remains faithful to his memory, until, miraculously, he returns, after the war, blinded but still alive. She tells him it doesn’t matter about his eyesight, that she will be his eyes from now on. They move into a small garret they name Seventh Heaven, where they live happily half blind ever after.
Zanuck had wanted to pair Simon with Tyrone Power, one of the top stars on 20th Century Fox’s A-list roster, but Power flatly turned down the role. He hated the script and feared that “playing French” opposite one of France’s most popular leading ladies could hurt him. When Zanuck failed to come up with anybody at his own studio who was either willing to play the part or whom Simon approved of, he finally asked her for her personal wish list of leading men. At the top of it was James Stewart.
She had seen him in a couple of movies and liked what he did on-screen, especially his nonthreatening manner. If he co-starred, she believed she wouldn’t have to worry about the film being stolen from her. Zanuck then approached Mayer, who turned to Bill Grady for advice about what to do. Grady told him to agree to the loan-out, and Mayer made the deal.
Production on Seventh Heaven began at the Fox studios on December 2, 1936, under the direction of Henry King, a former silent-screen actor and director who Zanuck liked to use for what he called house projects, films that came down the pike and were made by chosen directors on assignment via the head of production or, as in this case, Zanuck himself.
As one might have predicted, the chemistry between the hot, sultry actress and her chosen screen co-star was nonexistent. Simon was one of those European imports, like Garbo and Dietrich, who had the look, sound, and shape that set isolationist-era American men on fire, the kind of woman who the studios loved to use to satisfy the public’s exotic, i.e., sexual fantasies, and the kind who had no problem taking care of their own while they were at it. It was, for instance, well known around Hollywood that those in the business who gained Ms. Simon’s favor were rewarded with a gold key that opened the door to her private boudoir.
Stewart was not one of those who received that particular prize. So turned off was he by Simon’s upfront sexuality that he virtually ignored her during the entire making of the movie and spent whatever off-camera time he could talking with Henry King about flying private planes, a subject they both had a far deeper interest in than either the picture or its female lead.
The film opened in March 1937 to mixed reviews, the movie criticized for its obvious back-lot imitation Paris, Stewart’s unbelievable French accent, and what seemed Simon’s near-total lack of acting ability, especially when compared to the silent film version’s original star, Janet Gaynor.
Back at MGM, Jimmy gained little forward momentum from the loan-out and found himself back playing in another slew of supporting roles behind some of the biggest stars of the day. His next film, Edward Ludwig’s The Last Gangster (1937), was a vehicle for Edward G. Robinson, one of Warner’s custom-cut “gangsters,” who’d first made it big with his portrayal of Enrico Bandello in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1930). That film’s closing line—“Is this the end of Rico?”—had made Robinson an instant star. Although he had tired of playing heavies, Robinson nevertheless agreed to make The Last Gangster because of the huge amount of money he was offered.
Stewart doesn’t make his entrance until midway through the film and then has to age ten years in the last half hour. To make the transition more believable, he was given a pencil mustache. The picture, an anachronistic look at late-twenties gangsterism, a genre about to be made obsolete by the larger forces of evil threatening the world, was an out-and-out flop, and as such did nothing for either Robinson or Stewart’s careers.
Running on the contract hamster wheel, Stewart made two more movies in 1937. In Sam Wood’s Navy Blue and Gold (1937) and Clarence Brown’s Of Human Hearts (1938), he reverted to type and played all-American college boys.
In Hearts, he benefited from playing a supporting role to the great Walter Huston in a scenario set on the Ohio frontier in the middle of the nineteenth century. Stewart plays Jason Wilkins, a young man who grows up under the strictures of a stern cleric of nonspecific denomination (Hollywood’s favorite religion), played by Huston, and who rebels by running away and going to medical school—science being the symbol of his lack of faith. After struggling through medical school, with the tireless help and sacrifice made by his widowed mother (Beulah Bondi), he becomes a battlefield surgeon during the Civil War following the death of his father.1 Having heard nothing from him in two years, his mother is convinced her son is dead (as was Simon regarding her husband in Seventh Heaven). In her grief, she writes a letter to Abraham Lincoln (John Carradine), asking for information as to where she might find the remains of her son. Wilkins is then summoned to the White House by Lincoln himself who, in the middle of the war, has somehow found the time to chastise him for neglecting his mother. Sufficiently upbraided, Stewart returns home and tearfully reunites with long-suffering Mom.
Of Human Hearts premiered in February 1938 in Greenville, South Carolina, the title the result of a publicity contest sponsored by MGM to replace the awkward original title, Benefits Forgot. The film received fairly good notices. The New York Times lauded the cast, singling out Stewart for special praise, in a role he likely understood better than most—that of a boy trying to rebel against an overly stern father and in doing so, gains the motherly love and support he so desperately wants and needs: “James Stewart’s and Master Reynolds’ farm boy [Reynolds played the Wilkins character before he grows up to become Stewart] and all the others are flawlessly typical.” Movie Mirror magazine agreed: “There is no fault to find with production, direction or acting. The individual performance of each cast member—especially of Mr. Stewart, Miss Bondi, Huston and young Reynolds—are flawlessly typical.”
However, the film’s downbeat vision of war at a time when the country was being drawn into international conflict did not find an audience. After thirteen films, Jimmy, approaching thirty years old, had not as yet been able to break out as a major star and remained, for now, just another of Hollywood’s familiar nameless faces in the crowd.
In the studio era, once an actor was cast as a “type,” that was what he or she usually played. Character-juveniles, a strange hybrid of which to this point Stewart was considered to be, rarely evolved into leading men. More often a “char-juv” evolved into a “char-man,” as was the case with Mickey Rooney. Jimmy was not considered by MGM as able to keep up with the Gables, Flynns, Grants, Nivens, Colmans, Coopers, Powers, even the Fondas, when it came to what they believed a romantic, heroic lead had to be. American film critic Howard Barnes summed up MGM’s feeling in 1936 when he described Jimmy this way: “[H]e has been denied Robert Taylor’s beauty and endowed with none of the strong, silent intensity of Gary Cooper.�
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Jimmy believed he had no choice but to go along with whatever MGM wanted him to do, whether he liked it or not: As he said in 1979, “I was a contract player. It was a full-time job. You worked a six-day week, fifty-two weeks a year. If you weren’t making tests with new people the studios were thinking of signing, you were in the gym working out to keep in shape. Taking voice lessons. Going out and exploiting pictures you weren’t even in. Beating the drum for motion pictures. You didn’t pick your movies. You did what you were told. Your studio could trade you around like ball players…. Each morning I had to check which one[of five movies] I was working on that day and see what part I was playing. You did small parts in big pictures and big parts in small pictures.”
The problem went even deeper than he was willing to acknowledge. His nonsexual on-screen persona had by now led Mayer to wonder if, in fact, there was something “wrong” with him. Whereas other MGM names had to be literally pried loose from the bevy of starlets they were bedding, despite the fact that the men were all married—such as Gable, whom, it was said, often took to bed the chambermaids of whatever hotel he happened to be staying in; Franchot Tone, whose suavity had led him into the arms of some of Hollywood’s most fabulous beauties; and Spencer Tracy, a known womanizer from the moment he first stepped on a sound stage—Jimmy kept himself away from all of that, preferring the company of one steady woman, and if he didn’t have one, he was content to have none, rather than five.
Single MGM actors over the age of twenty-five, like Jimmy, often came under the suspicion of Mayer, especially when they failed to project heterosexual heat on-screen. To alleviate the situation, and to quite literally separate the men from the boys (meaning in this instance the straights from the gays) as well as to protect his star females from unwanted and unprofitable pregnancies and his own selfish desires for them, Mayer had a private brothel built within walking distance of the studio’s front gate. Attendance there was as mandatory as it was for the studio gym, and Mayer, it was said, kept a close inventory on the comings and goings of his male stars. According to Grady, “The whores were hand-picked; starlets who had given up on their careers; cast-off girlfriends of well-placed men who wanted to make a buck; some were imported from Mexico for the guys who liked them Spanish. Mayer’s boys got them thoroughly tested for venereal disease…every effort was made to suit the girl to the actor—if we could find Gable’s or Tone’s type, so much the better. They were a horny bunch and most of them thought of it as a convenience.”