Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  In 1939, Cukor was then hired by Katharine Hepburn to make a movie out of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, a project she and Howard Hughes, her secret investor (and lover), had commissioned Barry to write for her and had taken to Broadway in an attempt to reestablish her popularity. Hayward, meanwhile, who had navigated Hepburn out of her free-fall and anticipated a major comeback with the film version of her smash-hit Broadway vehicle, looked to play the role of fixer for Jimmy as well by getting him a role in what was shaping up to be one of the most anticipated movies of 1940. If anything could save Jimmy’s career, Hayward figured, it was The Philadelphia Story.1

  Not that getting the film made was all that easy. Despite The Philadelphia Story’s soaring success on stage that made it the talk of the 1939 Broadway season, its New York–based cast of actors and actresses—Joseph Cotten as C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord’s (Hepburn’s) divorced first husband; Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist; and Shirley Booth as Macauley’s wisecracking sidekick, Elizabeth Imbrie—failed to impress Hollywood when the studios came looking to buy the rights for a film version. Nobody wanted Cotten, Heflin, Booth, and especially Hepburn. When Selznick initially wanted to buy the property as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, Hepburn adamantly refused to sell to him. When MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford, Hepburn again said no. When Warner Bros. wanted it for Ann Sheridan, ditto. When independent film maker Samuel Goldwyn was willing to take Hepburn to get the rights to the play, but only if Gary Cooper were her co-star and William Wyler directed, Hepburn flatly turned him down. She then made it clear to one and all: either George Cukor directed her in the film version of The Philadelphia Story or there was not going to be a movie version.

  Finally, Louis B. Mayer put an offer on the table that Hepburn liked—$175,000 for the rights, $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord, and George Cukor at the helm. Mayer envisioned Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy (whom Hepburn had not yet met), or Robert Taylor in the role of C. K. Dexter Haven, and in the role of the gossip columnist Macaulay Connor (as a favor to Hayward, after the agent suggested to Mayer he could make the deal happen), James Stewart.

  Gable, Tracy, and Taylor all turned down the film, presumably because they each felt it was still too risky a career move to star opposite box-office dud Hepburn. (Besides, Gable was already looking ahead to playing Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind and didn’t want to work with Cukor, anyway, who was gay, and who the homophobic Gable believed favored filming female stars over their male co-stars.)2

  Jimmy’s reaction to being offered the role of Macauley Connor was, on the other hand, one of pleasant surprise. “When I first read the script,” he said later on, “I thought I was being considered for that fellow engaged to Hepburn. But as I read it, I thought to myself, ooh, that reporter part [Connor] is a good one, I’ll be happy to play it.”

  Unfortunately for Jimmy, Grant wanted to play Connor rather than the part he had been offered, of Lord’s ex-husband Dexter Haven, believing, although it was essentially a supporting role rather than the male lead, it was better written and funnier. However, as far as Cukor and Hepburn were concerned, Grant had to be her romantic co-star. In the context of the film’s reworked script, so as not to impede too much on the film’s romantic track, the role of Connor was reduced to little more than a foil to Grant’s star turn as Tracy’s disgruntled but still-in-love, once-and-future husband.3

  Stewart accepted the role of Connor without hesitation, even after he learned from Hayward how much more money Grant and Hepburn were being paid. Grant, four years older than Stewart and with a far more established screen presence, had become the first actor to successfully overcome the hitherto-ironclad studio salary system in 1936 by not renewing his original five-year deal with Paramount. Instead he signed two nonexclusive multiple-picture deals with Columbia and RKO, and reserved the right to negotiate his fees and percentages on a per-film basis. When Mayer offered him The Philadelphia Story, he agreed to sign on with two conditions. The first was that he be paid $137,500—twice what Hepburn was getting, figuring correctly that she would make her money on the back end if the film proved a hit. The second was that he receive top billing, to which Hepburn also agreed.

  For Mayer, it was a sweet deal, especially considering that for all he was paying for Hepburn and Grant, he had Jimmy under a tight financial rein. He was paying him $3,000 dollars a week, which meant that for the five weeks the film was in production, from July 5 through August 14, Jimmy would earn a total of $15,000. Although he was not happy about the discrepancy in salaries, he also knew he was in no position to complain and said nothing. But he wouldn’t forget either when, two years down the line, it would be time to renew his own contract with the studio.

  Furthermore, unlike Gable, Jimmy was eager to work with Cukor, believing it was a real opportunity to perform for one of Hollywood’s top directors who seemed to “get” him. Like Capra, Cukor was another European immigrant sentimentalist (although a far more sophisticated one), the child of Jewish-Hungarian immigrants who had settled in New York’s Lower East Side. And finally, Jimmy didn’t mind being the “new kid” for another reason; he had already begun to develop one of his chaste co-star crushes, this time on Hepburn. He expressed it early on during the production by doing little gags and bits he performed for her between setups, at times running around with a flowerpot on his head imitating Carmen Miranda. That always brought a frothy giggle from Hepburn, as did the long, drawling stories of his struggle to make it with Henry Fonda at his side back in New York City.

  During filming, Stewart immediately offered to share with Hepburn his boyhood fascination with aviation, aware as he was of Hepburn’s affair with the billionaire Howard Hughes and his obsession with flying. For her part, Hepburn was eager to learn as much as she could from Jimmy about flying, if only to impress Hughes the next time he took her aboard one of his planes.

  After offering several times to take her flying, and always receiving a laughing no, Jimmy surprisingly got his chance when one time an obviously nervous Hepburn accepted an invitation: “I had learned to fly,” Jimmy later recalled. “I had my pilot’s license. It was a Friday, a break in shooting. She said, ‘I’ll meet you out at Santa Monica airfield. I want you to take me for an airplane ride.’ I didn’t have a plane of my own, so I rented one for the occasion—it was, after all, a very important occasion. It was a single-engine Fairchild, with a cabin; she could sit in the co-pilot’s seat. She was there right on the dot that afternoon. We got in, and I started the engine. She sort of took over; she wanted to know what everything meant on all of the gauges. As I was taxiing, she told me I was taxiing too far; when I ran up the engine, she said it didn’t sound right at all; she questioned a reading I had made on one of the gauges, saying it was quite wrong. I wasn’t sure whether she was ready to take off, because she had so much to say that indicated she’d rather not fly with me at all.

  “Finally, she said, ‘All right, you can go up.’ During the takeoff run, she kept talking and talking, saying what things were wrong about what I was doing. She’d snap, ‘We don’t seem to be gaining speed. The airplane will never get off the ground if we go like this.’ Finally we did get in the air, and there was a little turbulence, which she blamed me for! As we made the first turn, she said, ‘No, don’t do that; let’s just go straight.’ Which meant going right out over the ocean! I told her that, and that we had to turn. She said, ‘Wait until we get higher, and then we can go out.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She kept coming back to the instruments; she was concerned with the tachometer, which lots of times fluctuates a little—that’s the rule rather than the exception. She didn’t understand it at all. Its behavior was totally unacceptable to her. Her seat was very uncomfortable; she wasn’t able to see enough; she kept saying, ‘You can’t see anything. You can’t see up, you can’t see back, it’s impossible.’ I told her, ‘Kate, I think maybe we’d better go back.’ She agreed. I was so nervous by this
stage that I made a terrible landing; terrible, terrible! We bounced several times, and Kate absolutely had no kind words to say about that at all! Finally I taxied up, and she said, ‘Thanks very much. I’ll see you at work on Monday’ and left! I was a wreck! I felt I’d been through a terrible thunderstorm and lost the engine. It was a nightmare! I never went flying with her again!”

  At Cukor’s insistence, Jimmy dropped most of his manneristic yawling and arm-lurching that had informed so much of the boyish innocence of his earlier portrayals, particularly those he’d done for Capra. Cukor was after something else from him, a cinematic rather than theatrical performance, one that would deliver a measure of emotional screen intimacy that he had failed to sustain with either Capra, Lubitsch, Borzage, or any of the other directors he had thus far worked with. Most of them, including Capra in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, were content to capture Stewart’s innocence and charm, emphasize it with the cinematic italics of cutting and close-ups, put him in front of the entire Senate or have him skiing across the Alps and montage-mutilate his most intimate, climactic moments.

  The only rough patch Jimmy experienced with Cukor came during the one love scene he had to play with Hepburn, set on the grounds of the estate (as is virtually the entire movie). Tracy and Connor meet the night before her wedding, both having had too much to drink, and Connor, who has fallen for Tracy, makes one final, ultimately futile plea to win her love. During rehearsals, Stewart, feeling somewhat intimidated by Hepburn, and unwilling to come too close to how he really felt about her, reverted to the familiar tic-rich mannerisms, something that Cukor would not have in his movie. He instructed Jimmy to stand completely still when he spoke, not to flail his arms or shake his foot, or stutter his words, or glance away, or do anything but look straight into Hepburn’s eyes and tell her how he felt.

  The filming of the scene practically left Jimmy undone, and it wasn’t until Cukor’s good friend Noel Coward, who had happened to stop by the set that day and during a break told Jimmy how wonderful he was in the scene, that he was able to finish it at all. When Cukor finally called “Cut,” satisfied that he had gotten what he wanted, Jimmy, in a cold sweat, retreated to his private dressing area to pull himself together, while a smiling Hepburn turned to the director and told him how surprisingly good an actor Jimmy really was.

  Grant thought so as well, impressed with what he took to be Stewart’s carefully worked-out style of casual acting, in contrast to his own way of working, which was on a purely instinctive level, making sure his own screen image never veered too far from the public’s expectation of “Cary Grant.” Grant told director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich years later he found Jimmy’s studied performance “fascinating.”

  Production wrapped on August 14, 1940, with Cukor managing to bring the star-studded movie in five days ahead of schedule. The following week Jimmy busied himself with appearances at various anti-Nazi benefits, including one he organized himself for the third weekend in August, held at the Coliseum in Houston, Texas, in support of Great Britain, now at war with Germany (America was still officially neutral, despite Roosevelt’s then-controversial “lend-lease” program that helped arm the British). For the heady occasion, Jimmy invited his pal Henry Fonda and two actors he had more recently become friendly with, Tyrone Power and Mischa Auer (one of his co-stars from both You Can’t Take It With You and Destry Rides Again). At the gala, Jimmy did some magic tricks he remembered from his youth, using Fonda as his able assistant.

  He also invited Olivia de Havilland, who quite graciously accepted the offer. She was in the middle of making Santa Fe Trail at Warner for Michael Curtiz and also in a blazing, secret sexual affair with co-star Errol Flynn, whom she simply adored.4 Nonetheless, her appearance at Jimmy’s benefit refueled the rumors of their involvement, to the point where the gossip press ran stories of how they were about to get engaged (“the real reason de Havilland attended”). When the benefit was over, Jimmy flew alone to Canada and met up with his family for a brief vacation, after which he returned to begin making the first of three scheduled movies, nonstop, Clarence Brown’s Come Live with Me, George Marshall’s Pot O’Gold (while on loan to United Artists; Marshall had directed Jimmy in Destry Rides Again), and Robert Z. Leonard’s Ziegfeld Girl.

  There was a reason both he and the studio wanted to stockpile as much James Stewart product as possible. The buzz for The Philadelphia Story was enormous; the talk around town was that everyone in the film gave the best performance of his or her career. MGM, uncertain of what America’s eventual entry into the war would do to its foreign distribution, and therefore its budgetary limitations, and with many of its leading men eligible for military service, wanted to ensure it would have as much product as possible for future domestic release. That October, while filming Come Live with Me, Pot O’ Gold, and Ziegfeld Girl (the latter two simultaneously, with Jimmy shuffling back and forth between UA for Pot O’ Gold and MGM for Ziegfeld Girl, causing him to come down with a bad cold and a rough cough that nearly sent him to the hospital but which were not considered serious enough by either studio to suspend filming)—James Maitland Stewart was officially notified of his induction into the United States Army.

  On September 16, 1940, in preparation for what looked like the United States’ inevitable entrance into World War Two, President Roosevelt had signed into law the Selective Training and Service Act—otherwise known as the draft. All American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six had to register with their local boards. The first nine hundred to be inducted were chosen by a highly publicized national lottery broadcast throughout the nation on October 29. Jimmy Stewart’s number came up 310 and he was given thirty days to report for his physical. “The only lottery I ever came close to winning,” he said, “was the drawing for the first draft before Pearl Harbor.”

  In that short space of time, Jimmy finished shooting all his scenes for Come Live with Me, Pot O’ Gold, and Ziegfeld Girl. Come Live with Me is a lame, unfunny comedy about a German immigrant (Hedy Lamarr, one of Louis B. Mayer’s personal “discoveries”) who needs to marry an American (Stewart) to stay in the country.5

  Pot O’ Gold, an independent musical pastiche intended to capitalize on the popularity of Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, the hosts of a highly rated radio show at the time, was produced by President Franklin Roosevelt’s son, James, in what turned out to be his only venture in Hollywood. To flesh out the band’s appearance, Mayer also lent Roosevelt Paulette Goddard to play opposite Jimmy, who sang several vocals with the band, and appears on film at least to be avoiding Goddard at every turn, not only for plot purposes, because in the film he simply can’t stand her (or she him), as much as for her real-life politics, which were extremely left-wing. The film’s seltzer-bottle humor didn’t help. (The name of the film was changed to The Golden Hour for foreign markets, where its stars were virtually unknown.)

  According to stories that abounded during the filming of Come Live with Me, Lamarr was said to be turned off by Jimmy’s awkward manner during their love scenes, accounting for their lack of screen chemistry. Lamarr, also being stockpiled, was, at the same time, shooting King Vidor’s Comrade X, opposite Clark Gable, with whom she was having a blistering sexual affair whose heat carried over onto and all but ignited the screen. As for Jimmy, he grumbled that he thought Lamarr was not a good enough actress for the role she was playing and that her overall iciness toward him off-set did nothing for the picture.

  He was right; it didn’t.

  Mayer somehow thought they were so good together, despite Jimmy’s obvious distate for Lamarr, that he recast them opposite each other in Ziegfeld Girl (1941) because he thought rural Jimmy and exotic Hedy made the perfect couple, both as lovers and as international ambassadors of peace; a symbolic marriage between the old world and the new. The film itself was a very soft sequel to Leonard’s 1936 highly successful The Great Ziegfeld, notable for having as its stars William Powell and Myrna Loy (as Ziegfeld and showgirl Billie Burke)
in the midst of their great run of Thin Man movies. Mayer, looking to guarantee Ziegfeld Girl’s being a hit, shoe-horned every available MGM star into the film, including Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Tony Martin, Jackie Cooper, Ian Hunter, Edward Everett Horton, Philip Dorn, Paul Kelly, Eve Arden, Dan Dailey Jr., and Fay Holden. The film itself follows the lives of three young Ziegfeld hopefuls and their boyfriends, and the effect on all of them after the girls have been chosen to join the most famous chorus line in history.

  Stewart did not think he would actually be able to make the movie at all, as he was scheduled to take his physical the same day as principal shooting was to begin, until he received notice that, without his requesting it, he had been given a deferment. At first he suspected Mayer had pulled some strings to make that happen and was not happy about it. When he finally did take the exam, he was notified that he failed to qualify for induction on the basis of preset height-weight limitations. At six foot three and 130 pounds, the army said he was too skinny to defend his country.6

  The news of his rejection hit the newspapers and as soon as Alexander read about it, he called his son on the phone and urged him to get on the ball and gain the necessary weight to keep the family tradition of service intact. If he didn’t, he warned, he would personally come out to Hollywood and kick his butt.

  Jimmy was shaken by both the army’s rejection and his father’s phone call. He had to deal with the fact that in all the history of the Mait-lands and the Stewarts reaching back to the Revolution, every able male had always volunteered to serve his country. Just by having waited for the draft was bad enough; being rejected was unthinkable. The first thing he did after talking to Alexander was to appeal the notification and set a date for a second physical. He was to take it that February, giving him less than three months to put on ten pounds and make them stick. If he looked a bit distracted during the making of Ziegfeld Girl, it was because all of his concentration and energy went toward gaining weight. He was constantly eating fatty foods, lots of milkshakes, and fried chicken wings and trying his best to work out as often as he could at the studio health club to see if he could put some muscle on his thin-boned frame.