by Marc Eliot
The word went out that any other MGM male who wasn’t married and who didn’t “perform” at the bordello would be released. Known homosexuals, such as Ramon Navarro and William Haines, who steered clear of the bordello, were eventually linked in separate gay sex scandals and were fired by Mayer in 1935.
It fell to Grady to read the riot act to Stewart, even though he had been “linked” to almost every female star he had made movies with, including Virginia Bruce (The Murder Man and Born to Dance), Rose Stradner (The Last Gangster), and, of course, Ginger Rogers. According to Grady, “I had to lay down the law to him. I had to tell him, Jim, if you don’t go and give a manly account of yourself at least a few times, Mayer and the others will start lumping you in with Navarro and Haines…and it will undermine all the casting efforts I’m making for you. So get your ass over there and get those rocks off with at least two of those broads.”
If there was any comfort for Jimmy in the mandatory visits to the brothel, it was in how they resonated with the echoes of his father’s high moral tone. At home, as a boy, Stewart had been admonished for even thinking about girls by his father. Here, at the studio, where he played boyish types, he had put himself in jeopardy by resisting the paternal guidance of Louis B. Mayer into the studio’s whorehouse. Somewhere between the layers of guilt and the promise of liberation lay a measure of physical pleasure, something he realized following his first visits to “prove” his manhood to Mayer. After that, he made fairly regular visits, and whenever Grady asked him how he liked the way these most talented and highly trained girls made him feel, he would only shrug his shoulders and say he’d rather be in love when he “did it.”
Try acting, Grady told him.
Ironically, it was the film he made before Of Human Hearts, Navy Blue and Gold (1937), that would change everything, although no one at the studio seeing the film before its delayed release predicted that. In it, Stewart was paired with another contract player, Robert Young, who the studio was also trying to make into a star and who also seemed to be going nowhere. The film traces the careers of three candidates at the naval academy, Annapolis, linked by their desire to play football. In his second year, Ash (Young) is relegated to a substitute while his two pals, Truck (Stewart) and Richard (Tom Brown Jr.), become the stars of the team. At one point Truck hears a lecture about an officer who disgraced the army. The officer turns out to have been his father. He angrily defends him and is suspended for it, while the rest of the team goes to the “big game.” He is benched until the fourth quarter, sent in, given the ball by Ash, and in turn unselfishly passes it to Richard, who makes the big final play and wins the game. While he gets all the glory, Truck is recognized as a true team player, an all-American in the highest sense, not just physically recalled but spiritually redeemed.
The film opened at New York’s Capitol Theatre the day before Christmas 1937, and proved a hit with audiences and critics. Stewart received the best reviews of his career, in a far different and more profound performance than the usual romantic play-acting he kept being assigned by the studio.
Six days before Navy Blue and Gold opened, Stewart began work on George Stevens’s Vivacious Lady, which was to be his last role of 1937. It was another loan-out, this time to RKO where he co-starred with his ex-lover Ginger Rogers. Although he was, at first, hesitant to take the part, he did so on the advice of his new agent, Leland Hayward, who also just happened to have recently become Margaret Sullavan’s third husband.
Sullavan had in the last year divorced Wyler and married Hayward, whose hot roster of talent included, among others, Garbo, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. The handsome, well-groomed, and always elegant Hayward wore impeccably tailored custom suits and highly polished black shoes, and had his hair cut every five days. He was, like Jimmy, a Princeton man, having attended in 1920 but lasting only a year before flunking out, prompting his wealthy father to cut off his allowance. He then became a newspaper reporter for the New York Sun, but was unable to get along on his meager (for him) $25-a-week salary. He applied for and was reinstated at Princeton, only to leave again, this time at his own choosing, to marry wealthy Texas socialite divorcée Lola Gibbs. They divorced after two years, then remarried seven years later (then divorced again after four years).
The first divorce left his pockets lined sufficiently, and he took off for Hollywood with ambitions to become a producer. Instead he wound up eking out a living as a bottom-feeding press agent. In 1932, he returned to New York City and opened the Leland Hayward Talent Agency as an East Coast branch of Myron Selznick’s Hollywood Talent Agency (Myron was the brother of David O. Selznick). This time the plan worked; during the next five years Hayward signed several New York–based actors and writers and promptly sent them west, to Myron, who then secured lucrative studio deals for them. Their partnership lasted until 1937, after which Hayward moved back to Los Angeles, this time into posh Beverly Hills, and married Sullavan. He was, by then, riding high from his cut of the agency’s profits, especially the success he’d made of Hammett’s original The Thin Man, which he sold in 1933 to MGM by explaining Nick Charles as a kind of idealized extension of himself. The original film eventually became an eleven-year, six-film studio franchise that returned handsome residuals to Selznick and Hayward.
In 1936, Hayward expanded his agency and partnered with Jimmy’s relatively small-time agent, Leah Salisbury, who later that same year decided to sell out her remaining interest to Hayward, a move that gave him sole control over a roster of actors that included Jimmy and Fonda. The incestuous nature of all this was pure Hollywood. Jimmy was in chaste love with Sullavan. Sullavan enjoyed playing Jimmy’s muse. Fonda was her first husband and Jimmy’s best friend. Jimmy had played the villain in the sequel to the first Thin Man film, and Hammett was represented by Hayward, Sullavan’s third husband. And now they were all not only friends and associates but, except for Fonda, happy neighbors.
Hayward believed the only way Stewart would ever rise in the hierarchy of MGM’s talent was through loan-outs, where he could have the opportunity to play the kind of parts he was never going to be offered at his home studio. When Rogers, who was now one of the biggest female stars in Hollywood, specifically requested Stewart as her co-star, it was Hayward who urged Jimmy to take the part.
Rogers knew what she was doing. Having made her career as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner, which she had been for most of the decade, she now sought to establish herself as a serious nonmusical actress and was looking for a leading man who would not overwhelm her on-screen. Jimmy, she believed, was the perfect choice, precisely because she didn’t think he was strong or aggressive enough to do it. In their romance, that had been the man problem. For her career, it was the perfect solution.
If there were any bad feelings on Stewart’s part for Rogers, he never showed it, at least not on screen. The picture is a light, breezy romantic comedy involving a shy botany professor, Peter Morgan (Stewart), who falls in love with a dazzling New York nightclub singer, Francey Brent (Rogers), marries her, and then frets over how to tell his gruff father and his sickly mother. Yet again, the parallels to Jimmy’s own family life helped him imbue his acting with an impressive emotional depth.
His performance was so good in Vivacious Lady that Stevens gave him equal co-billing with Rogers, which ticked her off, as her gamble had resulted in having the exact opposite effect she had hoped for when lobbying for Jimmy to be her co-star. Still, the film accomplished what she had wanted it to. Their unexpected on-screen chemistry was so powerful, it delighted audiences; the film did remarkably well, and Rogers once more shimmered in the starlight she craved.
However, as successful as it was, it didn’t provide Stewart with the platform from which he could make the leap onto the A-list roster. One element remained missing from all sixteen movies he had made thus far—a great director who could focus in on and precisely exploit Stewart’s unique talents.
7
When
Frank Capra hired James Stewart he was a minor MGM contract player, thirty years old, with Princeton, Broadway, and only three years of Hollywood experience behind him. The director had spotted Stewart in Navy Blue and Gold, directed by Sam Wood, in which Stewart played a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. [Capra]: “He had a minor part, he wasn’t the star. He did a little something defending a fellow naval student. When I saw him I thought, ‘Oh, my lord, there’s aguy.’”
—FROM JOSEPH MCBRIDE’S FRANK CAPRA
The unexpected death in 1936 of thirty-seven-year-old Irving G. Thalberg, legendary head of production at MGM, threw the studio into turmoil. This turned out to be fortuitous for Jimmy when, in 1938, he was given the opportunity to work again with Margaret Sullavan, a deal cannily put together by Hayward. The film was The Shopworn Angel (1938), to be directed by H. C. Potter. Thalberg, his reputation as one of the great studio heads notwithstanding, was known to meddle in projects often to the point of overbearance, leaving his stamp, rather than his stars’ or directors’, on their films. This would not be the case with The Shopworn Angel.
When Jimmy read the script, he knew immediately he was perfectly suited to play the role of Private Bill Pettigrew. In the film, Pettigrew is stationed at Camp Merritt, just outside of New York City. One evening a limousine driving the “New York Entertainer” Daisy Heath (Sullavan) accidentally runs him down and nearly kills him. Pettigrew happens to have idolized Heath for as long as he can remember. Once healed, Pettigrew starts to see her on a regular basis, until he is shipped overseas to fight in World War One. She then tells her somewhat jealous lover, Broadway producer and “mentor” Sam Bailey (Walter Pidgeon), that she’s going to marry the boy, to give him a reason to stay alive and return safely, after which, she says rather glibly, she can always divorce him. Bailey reluctantly agrees. Then, one night while performing, she receives word that Pettigrew has been killed in the line of duty. The film ends with Heath and Bailey in the throes of grief and guilt.1
By now, Sullavan had developed a formidable reputation as a man-eating manipulator and a woman who married to advance her own ambitions. Many critics saw her character in The Shopworn Angel as an extension of Sullavan’s public persona, a further cashing-in on the reputation she had built. She more or less plays with the Stewart character, and marries him partly out of the need to want to see him stay alive, but also partly as a joke to be shared with Sam Bailey. However, a deeper look at Sullavan’s Daisy reveals a more complex character. Full of life, talented, famous, and funloving, she is in a relationship with a man she doesn’t love (in many ways a Wyler substitute) and is attracted to and reinvigorated by a younger, innocent boy, one who ignites her latent maternal needs and desires (Stewart). The guilt that both she and Bailey feel at the end of the movie is due at least partly to her having married on a lark, so to speak, but also to their not realizing the precious commodity that life really is. For all her continuing flamboyance on stage, the real fire in her life burns out with Pettigrew’s death.
And, of course, there is Jimmy’s portrayal of the soldier. His unrequited love for Sullavan is mirrored by Pettigrew’s for Daisy. Key to the film, Sullavan’s life, and Stewart’s, is the vague sexual relationship that drives the story. Here is what Pidgeon later told interviewer Lawrence Quirk: “I really felt like the odd-man-out in that film. It was really all Jimmy and Maggie, and that was the way it should have been. It was so obvious he was in love with her. He came absolutely alive in his scenes with her, playing with a conviction and a deep sincerity I never knew him to summon away from her…. Of course, they both kept up the front that they were friends, and that their mutual affection was purely platonic. For her it may have been, though sometimes I felt she was more emotionally involved, off-screen, with Jimmy than she consciously was aware she was. Or maybe, being the flirtatious Southern belle she was, in most situations, she got some ego-kick out of his adoration of her…. Sullavan was in love with love, and she loved Jimmy being in love with her; it enhanced her feelings about herself.”
None of this was lost on Hayward, whose natural jealous tendencies were painfully exposed by the romantic scenes Sullavan and Stewart had together. Although he was well aware of how much Stewart loved Sullavan, his notions of the emotional, nonphysical complexities of that love were not very sophisticated. For instance, he often suggested to Sullavan that both Fonda, her ex, and Stewart were really gay; after all, they were always living together and neither one appeared “man enough” to keep a woman, especially her, sexually satisfied. Hayward remained noticeably ill at ease throughout the making of the film, however, and overly possessive of Sullavan, behavior that only led to more speculation in the gossip columns that Stewart and Sullavan were “once more” an item.
The chemistry that Jimmy and Sullavan had on-screen in this film was pure dynamite. Women cried openly in theaters at the film’s ending, while men sat uncomfortably grim and silent. Critics raved, rightly giving their performances far better reviews than the overall picture itself. The New York Herald Tribune called the pairing of Stewart and Sullavan evidence of “two of the finest actors appearing on the screen today.” The New Republic said that “the human quality here is owing partly to the schooled restraint of writing and direction, but even more to the unaffected appeal and warmth of Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart (and Walter Pidgeon)…. Stewart is the deep slow yokel because he has created the illusion of a personal hurt and belief.”
The film had a legion of female followers, one in particular who happened to be in a position to get closer to Jimmy than the others. Even before the July 1938 release of The Shopworn Angel, Norma Shearer, Irving Thalberg’s widow, had fallen madly in love with him.
Marrying the boss, or as film critic and historian Andrew Sarris once called it, “boudoir careerism,” has always been one of the surest and shortest routes to the top of the Hollywood heap. Indeed, when Norma Shearer wed Irving G. Thalberg, after making ten years of mostly forgettable silent films, she soon found herself the recipient of the 1930 Oscar for Best Actress (for Robert Z. Leonard’s The Divorcee), over some of the fiercest and most talented competitors of the day.2 Cynics took great delight in pointing to the former beauty queen with the slightly crossed eyes and insisting she would never have stood a chance without the industry muscle of the formidable Mr. Thalberg.
Shearer had originally come to Hollywood via the pageant route, where she was discovered by and subsequently married MGM’s head of production. By the time she became a widow at the age of thirty-four, she had been nominated for four Academy Awards, had won one, and was young, rich, and suddenly very much on the loose in LaLaLand.3
After Thalberg’s unexpected passing, Shearer’s career began to lurch unevenly. Her appearance in the 1938 production of Marie Antoinette (directed by the usually reliable MGM helmer W. S. Van Dyke II), the first film she made after her husband’s death, co-starred Tyrone Power, whom she insisted be borrowed from 20th Century Fox so they could work together while they carried on a so-called torrid love affair. Because Power’s bisexuality resulted in an early end to the romance, such as it may have been, Shearer came unescorted to the annual William Randolph Hearst–Marion Davies December costume ball, in those days the most coveted invitation in Hollywood.
That she was asked to attend at all came as a surprise to her. Hearst was Thalberg’s only true Hollywood rival in terms of power, and he had a mistress, Marion Davies, whose career he navigated as surely as Thalberg had Shearer’s. So sensitive was the rivalry that when, in 1934, Shearer was cast by Thalberg for the lead role in Sidney Franklin’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street—after Hearst had lobbied heavily to get Davies the part—Thalberg and Shearer were not only immediately excluded from all social activities that took place at Hearst’s legendary Castle at San Simeon, but the movie magnate saw to it that Davies’s contract was transferred from MGM to Warners (something Thalberg, for a number of reasons, was more than willing to make happen).
When the invitation came for the cos
tume party, Shearer chose to wear the same provocative costume she had in the ballroom scene from Marie Antoinette. By several accounts, including George Cukor’s, Shearer was on the hunt that night and had her radar turned up for the first eligible bachelor she could find.
That blip turned out to be Jimmy Stewart.
Josh Logan accompanied Jimmy to the party. Stewart came dressed as a cowboy, outfitted head to toe courtesy of the MGM wardrobe department, and almost immediately upon his arrival he locked eyes with Shearer.
As Logan later recalled, “In a moment of alcoholic gallantry, Jim told Norma, one of the early idols of his Princeton movie-going days, that the five foot one actress was the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. That was enough for Shearer. Despite the age difference between them—Shearer was eight years older than the just-turned-thirty actor—‘The Merry Widow,’ as the always aloof Shearer was referred to behind her back [after Thalberg’s death] by those on the lot, was determined to sleep with every available man at MGM (and a few not so available) to convince herself, among other things, that she was still young enough to be alluring.”