by Marc Eliot
Further complicating matters on Destry Rides Again was Pasternak’s own infatuation with Dietrich. Well aware of her reputation for sexual voraciousness, he figured all he had to do was line up and take his turn. She rebuffed him in no uncertain terms by telling him she would sleep with him “over Hitler’s dead body” (she would use that line often, and after 1945 continued to rebuff Pasternak and all the others who came on to her by telling them with a smirk she still couldn’t sleep with them because Hitler was secretly alive in Argentina). Her rejection of Pasternak was revealing for several reasons. First, because at the time she was actively involved with Remarque, who, perhaps knowing his lover all too well, insisted on being present for the entire shoot, glued to Dietrich’s side. Secondly, the director-as-mentor route she had taken with Sternberg had resulted, once their celebrated teaming lost its steam, in a precipitous cooling off of her career. And thirdly, because from the first time she laid eyes on the tall, slim American boy with the pretty face cast to play Destry, she went into serious heat. As Pasternak was to recall years later, she literally rubbed her hands in delight at the sight of the ripe, young prospect before her. Ultimately, it would do Remarque no good to hang around once she set her sights on Jimmy.
It took less time than it would to remove a six-gun and garter belt before Dietrich had taken Jimmy to her bed and showed him the way European women treated their men. If other women had been turned off by Jimmy, disappointed by his shyness or mistaking it for a rural aloofness, Dietrich was driven crazy by it. She loved playing the temptress, the seducer, and the more passive he was, the more aggressive she delighted in becoming.
Like so many of her best film characters, such as Lola in The Blue Angel and Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress (1934), the throaty goddess luxuriated in the role of both teacher and participant, ecstatically feminine and always in charge. Seven years his senior at the time (Stewart was thirty-one, Dietrich thirty-eight), she played the Madonna-whore role offscreen as well as on to perfection. For Jimmy, this was the first woman he had found who, to say the least, did not remind him of his mother (at least not consciously). He reveled in his late-to-arrive-but-last-to-leave-the-party of Dietrich’s current love life. Even as the gossip columnists continued to cluck about the possibility of his upcoming marriage to Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy was busy diving into the deep waters of Dietrich’s ocean of sexual delights. The facts that she was married and carrying on with another man at the time (the ever-present Remarque) didn’t seem to bother him at all. It may have, in fact, made it better, giving him a free ride, as it were, with the “trap” of marriage an impossibility.
Predictably, none of this sat well with Remarque. When his jealous, fuming presence became a problem on the set, Dietrich simply had Pasternak remove him, which the producer, already jealous himself of the heated open-secret romance going on between his two co-stars, was only too happy to do. However, if Pasternak had any ideas about making any moves himself, that ended when the clever and manipulative Dietrich, aware that Jimmy liked to spend much of his offscreen time in his dressing room reading Flash Gordon comic books, presented him with a custom-made life-size doll of his movie-serial hero in the likeness of actor Larry “Buster” Crabbe, who played Flash on the screen. She delivered it to him personally like a young momma bringing her baby boy a new toy to play with, all shiny and gift wrapped, complete with big red bow. Then she locked the door behind her. It was not the last time the two would spend hours in love-lock on the set during the making of Destry Rides Again.
A few months later rumors of a Dietrich pregnancy, via Jimmy, swirled through Hollywood, beyond the reach of even the carefully controlled realm of the MGM PR machine.
Stewart remained characteristically silent about this relationship until years later, when he referred to it in the most oblique fashion, telling an interviewer, “I liked taking Marlene out to dinner and to dance back in the days of Destry…and so we dated quite a few times, which was fairly romantic…I was taken off guard by her adult concept of life.”
According to Remarque, Dietrich, during the making of the film, went on to build in her apartment a virtual shrine to Stewart made of photos and surrounded by flowers, and even hired detectives to find out how real the relationship was between de Havilland and Jimmy. As naïve as he may have been in some areas, Jimmy was astute enough to suspect that these were the actions of an obsessive woman, a Hollywood has-been with European pedigree who wanted to latch on to a new star. His eventual retreat from Dietrich’s clutches was said to have infuriated her, to the point where decades later she barely mentioned his name in her 1987 memoirs, and then only to dismiss him and any notion of their one-time affair by describing him as nothing more than a dundering, humorless fool, in real life exactly the young, confused fellow he played to perfection on the screen; as the originator and perfector of the “whatever happened to my other shoe” style of acting.
Destry Rides Again was rushed into release on November 29, 1939 (only five weeks after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), to qualify for Oscar consideration. By that time, the “romance,” such as it was, between its two romantic stars had cooled. The film, however, opened hot and heavy and stayed that way through its entire initial domestic run. Dietrich’s career fully recovered from its thirties slump, and she would go on to become one of the biggest Hollywood stars for the next quarter-century.
Jimmy, too, began the new year on a high note, as awards season brought its usual celebrity fever to both the industry and public alike. He was named Best Actor for his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington by the New York Film Critics, no small accomplishment for what was considered the second most prestigious prize after the Oscar. It made him look like a sure thing to win an Academy Award.
To nobody’s surprise, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington received a handful of Academy nominations besides Jimmy’s, including one for Best Picture, Harry Carey for Best Supporting Actor (one of the nasty jokes going around at the time was that Carey shouldn’t have been nominated for a role that had about eight lines of actual dialogue and that the honor should have gone instead to the Lincoln Memorial, whose heavily shaded reaction-shot performance in the film was far more moving), Capra for Best Director, Lewis Foster for Original Story, Sidney Buchman for Best Screenplay, Lionel Banks for Interior Decoration, John Livadary for Sound Recording, Dimitri Tiomkin for Best Score, and Gene Havlick and Al Clark for Best Editing.
The Oscar ceremony was held on February 29 at the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, hosted by Bob Hope. A stiffly tuxed Stewart showed up alone at the Awards and took his place at the MGM table near a beaming Frank Capra and his wife. He could not help but notice when Vivien Leigh, on the arm of David O. Selznick, arrived and sat at the head of the specially designated Gone With the Wind tables in the MGM section next to Olivia de Havilland (in black evening dress with lace inserts and a white ermine jacket), who was wrapped around Leigh’s husband, Laurence Olivier. Dietrich, accompanied by Joe Pasternak, sat several sections away from Stewart, in the Universal Studios section, and avoided his eyes, as he did hers.
In those years, the Academy Awards ceremony was built around a rubber-chicken dinner served at large round tables, with each studio designated an appropriate number and arranged strategically near the aisles to reflect the likelihood of that night’s winners and losers. After the meal was served, the actual presentation ceremonies began, at eleven o’clock.
Capra, in his last days of his final term as president of the Academy, had pulled off one final coup by selling the exclusive rights to the awards ceremony to Warner Bros., who paid $30,000 to make a short film of the evening. Thus the modern media black-tie affair and eventual annual televised broadcast of the event was born. On this night Capra was scheduled to officially hand over the presidency to his successor, Walter Wanger.
The end of Capra’s run as the head of the Academy was the result of a tidal power shift in Hollywood that, ironically, he had helped bring about, namely the l
egalization of the trade and talent unions (that had been so bitterly opposed by the Academy, which was mostly comprised at the time by management and moguls). The burgeoning power of the unions had caught the attention of the federal government, which began a series of investigations into possible Communist infiltration; fear of reprisals began to pervade the industry. For his union activism, Capra had come under suspicion as a possible subversive even before Mr. Smith was released. His resignation as the head of the Academy, coinciding with the end of his directing contract at Columbia, which neither he nor Harry Cohn had been eager to renew, all combined to kill what would otherwise have been the picture’s “can’t-miss” status, despite an all-but-hysterical Hedda Hopper declaration in her pre–Oscar predictions column that “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is as great as Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech!”
Indeed, Capra, once seen as a hero for brokering a peace between the Directors Guild and the studios, was now largely regarded by those same studio heads (with reinforcement from Washington) as a troublemaker, sympathetic to unions and therefore to Communism, and his films were suspected of being filled with a disturbing level of anti-American propaganda. The industrial-strength resentment toward Capra became evident as the night wore on and the juggernaut that was Gone With the Wind, Selznick’s independent colossus of a motion picture celebrating the glory of the past century’s great civil war, went on to be the night’s big winner. It won Best Picture over Mr. Smith and a host of other first-rate films that dominated that year’s awards.5 Victor Fleming won out over Capra as Best Director for Gone With the Wind.6 And, in what was one of the biggest upsets of the night, a double upset really, Clark Gable, the acknowledged king of Hollywood, lost Best Actor, not to Jimmy, but to Robert Donat, the star of Goodbye, Mr. Chips; if Gable somehow didn’t get it, the thinking had been going into the awards, Stewart surely would.7 When he didn’t and Donat did, he said nothing, smiled, and, if he was upset about losing, didn’t show it. Instead, as always, he played the good soldier, congratulating Donat afterward for his great performance.
Despite his losing bid for an Oscar, Jimmy’s performance in Destry proved, among other things, that he was not merely an extension of Frank Capra’s dark/light vision of Depression-era America, that he could play period (Western) comedy, and that he now held a special niche in the middle-Americana mode of modern movies. Alongside Henry Fonda and his own Lincoln-laden movie (John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, in which the nineteenth-century president was at once humanized and lionized in yet another Depression reminder of purist democratic ideals), Stewart had become a part of Hollywood’s new youth movement, the first generation of male movie stars who had not just risen to stardom after the onset of the sound era, but had also helped render the silents obsolete even as they replaced the leading men who had appeared in them.
While the rest of the country hailed Jimmy as one of their own, MGM, increasingly unable to feel the cultural pulse of the nation, and without its one true visionary of the thirties, the late Irving Thalberg, failed again to capitalize on his surging popularity. It was Jimmy’s good fortune to be the choice of another top director, Ernst Lubitsch, of the famous “Lubitsch Touch” (often described as being the imagined scene played off-screen in so many of his films, but also a definition of his sophisticated, if offbeat comic pace set against the sugary romanticism of his movie imagination).
Lubitsch was, in every way, the polar opposite of Capra: light where Capra was heavy, heavy where Capra was light, romantic where Capra was pedantic, and timelessly sharp-witted where Capra was pointedly political. Having scored in Hollywood after emigrating from Germany at the behest of Mary Pickford, Lubitsch was quickly signed by Paramount. He racked up an impressive roster of fake European “kingdom” comedies and romantic costume musicals that both celebrated and mourned the continent that Germany, this time under Hitler’s maniacal rule, was about to annihilate once more. As the filmmaker himself often liked to say, “I’ve been to Paris, France and Paris, Paramount. Paris, Paramount is better.”
He had already successfully paired Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade (1929), the film that would not only make the two leads into stars but Lubitsch into one as well, proving that he, too, could make the transition from silent films to sound. After such classics as One Hour with You (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), the Code-bending Design for Living (1933), and The Merry Widow (1934), he wanted to film an adaptation of yet another European romantic comedy fantasy, this one based on Nikolaus Laszlo’s Hungarian stage play Parfumerie, but ran into strong studio resistance. Paramount wanted more modern America and less antique Europe in its comedies.
Another, deeper problem for Lubitsch regarding the massive cultural shift in the Hollywood of the thirties was that many of the first wave of silent leading men and women had been left behind by the industry’s aural modernization. In 1937, Lubitsch lost his best leading man when the heavily accented Maurice Chevalier left Hollywood and returned to France (where he would remain for the next twenty years). Not long after, Lubitsch, frustrated with Paramount’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for his work, signed a two-picture deal at MGM. The first was 1939’s Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo in full legend mode. The other, made that same year, was his long-simmering adaptation of Parfumerie, retitled The Shop Around the Corner. It was to be Lubitsch’s fondest remembrance of a rapidly disappearing Europe, of small shops with quality service operated by well-dressed capitalists for whom the whole world existed within their retail establishments (while their shops served as a cinematic microcosm of the whole world). They were run by a solicitous, formally attired staff and frequented by well-heeled clients who felt superior to the clerks, over all of whom the proprietor (rightly, in Lubitsch’s old-world view) played God.
The plot concerns the sinister ambitions of one clerk, Ferencz Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut), who wants to be the manager of the shop, run by Mr. Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan). Two other young clerks, Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) and Alfred Kralik (Stewart), are conducting a romance via anonymous love letters, during which they fall in fantasy-love, while continuing to dislike each other in person. The climax of the film revolves around Kralik’s unmasking of Vadas, Matuschek’s promotion of him to manager, and the blossoming of real love between Novak and Kralik.8
If Jimmy had had any reservations about working on his fifth film in 1939, one that appeared, at least in script form, as an ensemble piece, a lateral career move at best, they paled beside the fact that he would have the opportunity to play the lead opposite Margaret Sullavan. Once again, it thrilled him to know he would be acting alongside the object of his romantic desires on the big screen, kissing and mooning in properly chaste but for him intensely erotic posturing, for all the world to see. For her part, Margaret Sullavan considered performing with Jimmy like walking through a beautifully green park in early spring, before the first mowing of the new grass.
The character of Kralik seems in retrospect a bit too passive and a bit too precious, especially in the field of romance, but all is forgiven for the scene in which Sullavan, bedridden, reads a letter from her thus far unidentified secret admirer, while Stewart, sitting beside her, must listen to his own words and pretend to know nothing about the person who has written them. Years later, reflecting upon the magic of the moment, Sarris said it best when he noted the high level of acting in the sequence, how it was “dangerously delicate. It would have been very tempting for a flickering triumphant expression to have passed over Stewart’s face, but instead an intensely sweet and compassionate and appreciative look transfigures the entire scene into one of the most memorable occurrences in the history of the cinema [and] I could not think of any other actor who could have achieved an effect of such unobtrusive subtlety…. The stellar electricity generated by Sullavan and Stewart energizes even Lubitsch’s elegant style to a new peak of emotion.”
The great French critic André Bazin once identified a cinematic phenomenon he called doubling, wherein the characters i
n a film mirror the relationship between the characters in real life, with the resultant sparks supercharged—the reality of the actors’ lives off-screen adding depth to the lives of the characters they portray, and vice versa. Nowhere is that more evident than in the courtly shyness of Kralik/ Jimmy toward his untouchable goddess Novak/Sullavan, whom he both fears and hopes will remain unattainable (or unpolluted). What the audiences sees when they watch The Shop Around the Corner is the real chemistry between the two, Jimmy’s worshipful reticence to express his true emotions (while in love with a woman who stands before him but he cannot see) and Sullavan’s always ambiguous feelings toward the one person in her real-life circle she not only didn’t marry but also didn’t sleep with. In an otherwise unexceptional movie, these moments deliver the finest form of docu-biography that exists and by doing so exhibit one of the great emotive powers of film.
The Shop Around the Corner was shot in sequence (its scenes filmed in the same order they appear on screen), a highly unusual happenstance in movie production, made possible because of its single primary setting, and was completed in a mere twenty-seven days (shooting began the day after Jimmy filmed his final scenes for Destry). While this might not make any apparent difference to general audiences, for both Jimmy and Sullavan, each of whom had begun in live theater, it was a rare opportunity to make a film in which they could build the emotions of their performances in unified chronological scenes rather than in individual shots taken from the end, beginning, or middle of the script for the economic consideration of locale setups. This is one of the reasons the film’s dramatic build works so well, and the romantic chemistry between the two actors so compellingly latches on to the viewer’s emotions.