by Marc Eliot
She wasted no time latching on to Jimmy, who, by all accounts, didn’t quite know what hit him. She wanted him, and badly. He had the same boyish qualities as her late husband, even if Jimmy was tall, Presbyterian, slow, and drawling. Thalberg had been short, articulate, intellectual, and Jewish. Both men, however, were young, and different from most of the eligible men in town by their lack of skirt-chasing addiction, and Shearer sensed something familiar in Jimmy’s innocence. If for no other reason than to deny the reality of her husband’s passing, “The First Lady of MGM,” as she was known among the gossips, promptly dumped Mickey Rooney, whom she had just started seeing after Power, and went after Jimmy.
They were suddenly seen everywhere, including in the papers. “Jimmy gave Norma what she wanted: proof that she was still young, beautiful and desirable,” was the way Mickey Rooney summed up the whole thing. Indeed, she lavished him with gifts, took him places he never would have gone by himself, and imbued his image with something it had never had before, a sexually sophisticated incandescence that put a new sheen to the youthful innocent he had perfected in The Shopworn Angel.
According to Logan, “Jimmy was being skittish about the lavish attentions of the studio queen, as she took royal possession of him. She transported him around town openly in her yellow limousine, even though he slumped down on the back seat hoping that his friends would not recognize him. As proof of her ‘ownership’ she gave him a gold cigarette case sprinkled with diamonds. That meant that whenever she asked for a cigarette in front of others, the gift would advertise the giver. Jimmy didn’t want any sly looks. He would fumble in every pocket until he came up with a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes, his badge as a free man.”
If Stewart had been obsessed by what he perceived as the chaste lure of Margaret Sullavan, he was desperate to escape the heated web that Shearer had spun around him. While he remained polite and cooperative for a while, knowing full well that even with her husband gone, she still wielded a great deal of power at the studio, his resistance to her seductive ways eventually turned her off and she gave up, staying on friendly terms with him, even letting him have the lighter as a keepsake. She hoped it would be a permanent reminder to him of his refusal to allow her to light him up.
Although the gossip columns assured everyone the break was “mutual and amicable,” in truth it wasn’t, for all the obvious reasons why it couldn’t work—the age difference, the career conflicts (his star rising, hers falling), the financial inequity (she paid for everything), and the fact that Jimmy simply couldn’t take the heat of her pursuit.4
During this hectic period of melodramatic romance in Jimmy’s life, someone else had taken notice of him as well, although in a far-different and creative context. As the decade lurched toward its end, with the Depression at its peak and the world about to explode into another world war, one director with a camera and a Crucifixion complex was intensely searching for the perfect all-American innocent upon whom he could attach the cross of decency and democracy, not necessarily in that order. The director’s name was Frank Capra, and the actor he wanted most for his own personal Jesus was Jimmy Stewart.
Frank Capra was a product of an immigrant upbringing during which he worked his way not just through college, but, as he often liked to tell people, “through grammar and high school” as well. A child of the ways of the old world, he always sent money home to his mother, even when he was making as little as $90 a month. He attended the Throop College of Technology (which would become Cal Tech) on a scholarship, after which he enlisted in World War One. He spent his entire tour of duty in San Francisco, and upon being discharged tried a variety of jobs, including door-to-door child photography, which eventually led him to Nevada and that state’s many gambling venues. It was there among the state’s many legal tables and the wheels that Frank Capra first developed his skills as a hustler.
While living in Nevada he met a vaudevillian by the name of Montague who made his living performing Kipling’s epic poem “The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House.” At the height of the silent film’s first wave of popularity, Montague hit upon the idea of filming his performance, using lines burned into the negative that flashed above his head as he acted out the poem’s action. Capra was intrigued with the idea and convinced Montague to let him direct it.
Capra had stumbled onto his calling, and soon made his way to Hollywood, where he landed a job as a gag writer at Mack Sennett’s silent film studio. He did numerous scripts for the Our Gang comedy series and helped develop the personality of and physical bits for screen clown Harry Langdon. Feeling held back by the Sennett laugh-a-minute machine, Langdon left the studio for First National and took Capra with him, where the comedian’s feature films made him nearly as popular as the other silent comedy gods of the era, Chaplin, Keaton, and Chase. Langdon made his reputation via the original comic persona that Capra helped him develop, the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, do-no-evil, blessed innocent eternally redeemed by his goodness, i.e., God (i.e., Capra).
Capra wrote and directed three Langdon features, The Strong Man (1926); Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926); and Long Pants (1927)—all of which rank among the finest of the silent era comedies.5 Langdon then decided he didn’t need Capra, or anyone, anymore, that like Chaplin and the other comic screen kings did, he could write and direct as well as star in his own movies. He also modified his character into what Capra later described as a “Jack the Giant-Killer”—the little man as heroic and romantic savior. That was more or less the end of Langdon.
At first, the split between the two marked both of them as industry losers, and for a while Capra could not find work in Hollywood. He moved to New York City, where in 1927 he was hired to direct an independent feature, Love o’ Mike,6 starring an as-yet-unknown stage actress by the name of Claudette Colbert. The film was a financial disaster and Capra, with nowhere else to go, returned once more to Hollywood, broke and apparently without any future, when he happened to bump into Max Sennett one day while both were strolling along Hollywood Boulevard. They talked awhile and Sennett offered to rehire him as a silent-screen gag writer at $75 a week, considerably less than he had been paying him when Capra left. The grateful director took the job.
Also in 1927, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, the so-called poverty row of the major studios, hired Capra away from Sennett, on the strong advice of Cohn’s second-in-command, Sam Briskin, to direct That Certain Thing, starring Viola Dana and Ralph Graves, a former actor and fellow gag writer of Capra’s at Sennett. Graves had convinced Briskin that Capra was perfectly suited to direct That Certain Thing, because of the way the script romanticized the working class, something that resonated with Capra, and Briskin in turned convinced Cohn. The film opened on New Year’s Day 1928, received rave reviews, and revived Capra’s career, turning him into one of Columbia Pictures’ hottest “new” directors.
Thus began a long and sometimes contentious association between Capra, Cohn, and screenwriter Robert Riskin.7 Riskin was a former Broadway playwright whose sense of story, character, and class-conscious comedy melded perfectly with Capra’s. The Capra/Riskin creative partnership turned out some of the most socially aware Hollywood comedies in the history of film, among them American Madness (1932), Lady for a Day (1933), Broadway Bill (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and You Can’t Take It With You (1938). The most successful Capra/Riskin collaboration was 1934’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, the first Hollywood film ever to win all five major Academy Awards—Gable for Best Actor, Colbert for Best Actress, Capra for Best Director, Riskin for Best Screenplay, and Capra (as producer) for Best Film of the Year.8 By the time It Happened One Night went into production, Capra had become the most popular and successful studio director of his time.
If there was any single element missing from It Happened One Night, it was Capra’s notion of the ideal leading man. While Gable was great in the movie, he was, to the director’s way of thinking, a bit too insensitive for the
kind of hero he’d envisioned, someone who was more reminiscent of the Langdon-like innocent he could both protect and elevate to the level of blessed, if tortured, sainthood.
Two films later, Capra first thought he had found his man in Gary Cooper, who starred in the director’s masochistic self-denying Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and then in Ronald Colman, in 1937’s utopian-tinged socioreligious resurrection fantasy Lost Horizon. Neither film nor actor proved to be exactly what Capra was looking for. Cooper, like Gable, was simply too inherently sexual to be Capra’s pop-culture Jesus, Colman too exotically Continental.
It wasn’t until Capra saw Jimmy Stewart in MGM’s delayed release of Navy Blue and Gold that he knew he’d finally found the right actor. Where everyone else saw a light, all-American type, Capra picked up on Stewart’s darker, more anguished turn in the film. “I had seen Jimmy Stewart play this sensitive, heart-grabbing role and sensed the character and rock-ribbed honesty of a Gary Cooper, plus the breeding and intelligence of an ivy-league idealist. One might believe that young Stewart could reject his father’s patrimony [in You Can’t Take It With You], a kingdom in Wall Street.” It was Jimmy’s strong performance that convinced Capra he could turn the gawky, shuffling, stuttery, underused, and overlooked contract player into the most popular movie star in the world.
PART THREE
Mr. Christ Goes to Calvary
Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy, in his only Best Actor Oscar–winning performance, as Macauley Conner, in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940).
REBEL ROAD ARCHIVES
8
“He’s the easiest man to direct I’ve ever seen. A man who gets what you’re talking about in just a few words. You wonder if you’ve told him enough about the scene, and yet when he does it, there it is. He knew by looking at me, and I can look at him and know him. It’s not because I’ve worked with him so much; I think he’s probably the best actor who’s ever hit the screen.”
—FRANK CAPRA
Jimmy Stewart began filming Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You on April 25, 1938, under strict orders from Capra to gain weight; he was far too thin to carry a movie, as far as the squat Italian director was concerned. To Capra, coming from a world where food was as sacred as it was scarce, Stewart’s slight frame bordered on the sacrilegious. Throughout production Stewart continually stuffed his face with Butterfinger candy bars, but it made no difference; his weight remained a constant 140 during the entire shoot.
For all the apparent consternation that caused Capra, it was still a far cry from the problems he’d had with Gable during the filming of 1934’s It Happened One Night, when the dashing star, feeling that MGM was punishing him for his outlandish womanizing by sending him down to the minors—loaning him to Columbia Pictures to be in Capra’s under-budget on-the-run comedy—displayed his anger and frustration by showing up the first day drunk and did his best to stay that way for the rest of the shoot. Compared to Gable, Stewart was Capra’s chaste and sober prince.
This was no casual coronation. Capra was an old-world family man. In an industry where paternalism was a way of life, where producers acted as industrial-strength father figures treating grown actors and actresses as their unruly children, the most visceral connection a director like Capra could make to an actor was a surrogate one. It was, in fact, the scene in Navy Blue and Gold where Stewart rises up from his seat in class to defend his father that had convinced Capra that Stewart could do the job in You Can’t Take It With You. Of Stewart’s acting in that scene, Capra said, “He grabbed you as a human being. You were looking at the man, not an actor. You could see this man’s soul…when you’re dealing in the world of ideas and you want your character to be on a higher intellectual plane than just a simple man, you turn to persons like Jimmy Stewart because he has a look of the intellectual about him. And he can be an idealist…a pretty fine combination….”
What adds a deeper understanding to Capra’s sentiments was the real-life drama he was going through at the time with his infant son, John, born stone-deaf and diagnosed at the age of three as mentally defective. It was something Capra was ashamed of and wanted to cover up.1 His fairly far-reaching descriptions of his discovery of Stewart, on the other hand, were filled with a bursting fatherly pride and idealism.
For Jimmy, the emotional pull was equally strong. As far as Jimmy was concerned when he was chosen by Capra to star in his new film, Hollywood had become one big happy extension of his family. In response he expressed unqualified, almost worshipful appreciation. As he told Joseph McBride, the director’s biographer, “I just had complete confidence in Frank Capra. I always had, from the very first day I worked with him…. I just hung on every word Frank Capra said.”
You Can’t Take It With You was Capra’s most complex film to date, a risky venture that would not only, upon its release, solidify his position as the most popular director in Hollywood, but make Jimmy Stewart the quintessential Capra hero. Based on the Pulitzer prize–winning smash Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart You Can’t Take It With You, and freely adapted by Capra and Robert Riskin (about 25 percent of the original concept and dialogue remained), it seemed on the surface another of the zany thirties comedies that loosely fit the definition of screwball but violated one of that genre’s sacred rules by inserting a layer of serious social commentary beneath the uneven weave of the humor’s crazy-quilt pattern. Riskin described the theme as “the accumulation of gold beyond a man’s need [being] idiotic.” It was a tough message for a so-called funny film, especially one made at the height of the Depression when most screen comedies were based on the notion of escapism.
Capra had nearly left Columbia Pictures when his previous film, Lost Horizon (1937), proved an unqualified disaster, so much so that Capra threatened to sue Harry S. Cohn, the head of the studio, to get out of his remaining contract. Cohn, however, refused to let him go, even though the film’s huge budget and subsequent box-office failure had nearly bankrupted Columbia. To keep his disgruntled director in place, Cohn uncharacteristically doubled Capra’s salary and bought the rights to You Can’t Take It With You for him, after the director had caught a performance of the show on Broadway and expressed an interest in turning it into a movie.2
The story concerns the goings-on inside the mansion of the Vanderhof-Sycamore family, “a house where everybody does exactly what he wants to do,” the screenplay says, because the family has so much money they don’t work anymore and, as the head of the household keeps reminding them, they might as well have fun now because they can’t take any of it with them when they die. The patriarchal grandfather, Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore as a Vanderbilt-type patriarch), collects stamps and buys friends. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (Spring Byington), writes plays that remain unproduced. Her husband, Paul (Samuel S. Hinds), makes fireworks in the basement. Penny’s daughter, Essie (Ann Miller), ballet-dances barefoot all day under the direction of her personal Russian tutor (Mischa Auer). The only so-called normal member of the clan, Alice (Jean Arthur), actually has a job working as a stenographer for Tony Kirby, played by Jimmy Stewart. The part of Kirby was greatly expanded from the original play so that the focus of the film became the love story between Alice and Tony, rather than the antics of her family.
Tony’s father, as it turns out, has designs on the mansion, and there is a strong suggestion that the romance may, in fact, be a ruse for a land grab. Eventually the two families meet, zaniness dominates, everyone is hauled off to jail (as so often happens in screwball comedies), Tony denounces any claim on the land, Vanderhof gives it away anyway, everyone learns a good Christian lesson of one kind or another, and they all live unburdened with their material trappings, happily ever after, after all.
If this was a typical screwball comedy, it was decidedly “Capracorny” in style (as some pundits had already begun referring to the director’s from-bleakest-to-brightest comedies). Clearly, the more conflicted, darker elements of the director’s point of view had begun to
emerge in this movie. In retrospect, the film’s plot seems uncomfortably close to the failed Lost Horizon, where the rest of the troubled world is left behind by a group of travelers when they discover a seemingly perfect, if isolated, Shangri-La, the Vanderhof mansion (the hub of the Family of Man) being a more Americanized version of the isolated utopia the characters in the film Lost Horizon believe they have stumbled upon. As allegories of pre–World War Two isolationist freedom from an oppressive system, the physical locale of both films—the exotic Shangri-La and the world-in-the-Vanderhofmansion—appear too separate and elitist to qualify as landmarks of perfection for the working-class movie-goer. In addition, the original Kaufman-Hart play had an element of paranoid anti-Communist humor that the film completely eliminated; on-stage the fireworks in the basement were meant to ward off the coming Red Menace, the great threat to the upper-class privileged surrounded by poverty in the American proletarian thirties. In the film the two families have no political inclinations whatsoever. (Interestingly, 1938, the year the film was released, also marked the formal start of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, an outgrowth of the ultra–right wing Motion Picture Alliance, and no one, least of all Capra, wanted to come off in his work wearing the slightest shade of pink. Any reference to Communism, pro or con, was considered too dangerous, and therefore treated in American motion pictures to a great extent as if it didn’t exist at all.)
Ironically, while Capra was making “populist” films that championed the little guy, by the time of You Can’t Take It With You, he was a millionaire and a registered Republican. A year earlier, he’d voted for Alf Landon for president because Capra feared Roosevelt’s Depression-era politics would result in all the money being taken from the rich, including himself, and given to the poor, his target movie-going audience. Capra’s complex balance of the conflict between his personal politics and his public idealism manifested itself in his off-screen, at times seemingly contradictory, activities, most vividly in the duality of his being at the same time president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the conservative power wing of the industry—and a founding leader of the upstart Directors Guild, the lib-rad faction of Hollywood’s workers. Capra’s cunning fence straddle partially protected him from career-threatening attacks from both sides of the industry’s widening political divide, but in the end satisfied neither.