by Marc Eliot
By any measure, Stewart should not have had to make the film at all. His role was far too small in what had turned into an ensemble production, and, besides, he was woefully miscast as a rough-and-tumble trucker. Everyone felt what the film’s producer, Pandro Berman, finally said in public, that “Stewart deserved a much better part than he got.”
All in all, Jimmy was miserable during the making of all three post–Philadelphia Story films, and as the new year finally arrived, the thing he most looked forward to was military induction.
Although The Philadelphia Story had completed production in August 1940, MGM, believing it had a smash on its hands, as well as an Oscar contender, held back its release until the day after Christmas in order to keep it fresh in the minds of audiences and Academy members. It became Jimmy’s first film since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to have its premiere at New York’s prestigious Radio City Music Hall. In its initial six-week engagement (limited only by the theater’s previous commitment to open Alfred Hitchcock’s highly anticipated Rebecca that February), it grossed $594,000, an astonishing number for its day (more than half what the play’s entire initial Broadway run had earned), and broke the previous Music Hall attendance record held by Walt Disney’s 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.7 By the time its initial domestic run ended, The Philadelphia Story had earned a profit of $1.4 million, which made it the second-highest grossing film of 1940, behind Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York, starring Hollywood’s number one most popular actor of the day, Gary Cooper.
As everyone had anticipated, the film was showered with Oscar nominations. For the second time in two years, Stewart was nominated for Best Actor. The film itself was nominated for Best Picture, Cukor for Best Director, Hepburn for Best Actress, Ruth Hussey for Best Supporting Actress, and Donald Ogden Stewart for Best Screenplay. Notably absent from the list was Cary Grant, who got the girl but lost the nomination.8
Meanwhile, in February 1941, Stewart finally managed to pass his physical (with a little help from a friendly medical doctor who examined the still-too-skinny actor. Jimmy claimed years later the doctor had “looked the other way” and put him down as having just met the minimum weight requirements). As the date of his induction drew near, Jimmy sent his pet dog home to the family farm and arranged to lease the house he had just rented out for a year to Burgess Meredith. Mayer, meanwhile, told Jimmy he was doing him “a big favor” by not suspending his contract while he was in the army. In reality, induction was the out that Mayer had been looking for. Believing Jimmy was too old to regain the momentum of The Philadelphia Story unless he won the Oscar, which the studio head believed unlikely, there was no practical use in keeping him around. As long as he was serving his country and no other studio could use him, he might as well burn through his contract. It was a highly publicized gesture that made Mayer, in his own mind at least, for the relatively small salary he paid Jimmy, look as if he were making some sort of grand sacrifice by playing the patriot and doing the right thing.
On February 27, Jimmy attended the Academy Awards dinner held at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where the ceremony had been moved, having outgrown the Cocoanut Grove. The evening was hosted by new Academy president Walter Wanger (Capra’s replacement). Jimmy arrived with Ginger Rogers, his date for the evening, and Ruth Hussey, his fellow nominee; and as had been the case the previous year, no members of his family were present.
He sat at the MGM table, and was, interestingly, the only Best Actor nominee in the category to show up in person for the awards. There is reason to believe everyone knew who was going to win in advance, and that the losers simply chose to stay away. A week earlier, Jimmy had received a phone call from someone at the Academy asking if he was going to be at the Biltmore. Before he could answer, the unidentified voice on the phone said, “I know it isn’t my place to say so, but I really think you would find it in your best interests to attend.” Stewart told Fonda about it, and asked if he had been contacted as well. Fonda said he had not received any such call. At that point, believing he had lost, he told Jimmy that he had decided not to attend after all, that he was going to go to Mexico with John Ford and get in some fishing, adding, “You know my views on all the Oscar crap, Jimmy—all those movie people in one room. I don’t mind the losing bit, it’s all those gasps of ‘not him’ if you win.”
Among the women, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, and Ginger Rogers all attended. Carmen Miranda, one of Stewart’s favorites, the actress he had impersonated for Katharine Hepburn on the set of The Philadelphia Story, set off a round of murmurs with her outrageous costume, accented by a silver turban topped only by Carole Landis’s embarrassing entrance down the grand stairway during which her slip fell from beneath her gown and landed at her ankles, nearly tripping her.
The ceremonies began precisely at 8:45, when President Roosevelt’s familiar voice was piped into the room. Originally scheduled by Walter Wanger to make a personal appearance, the president had begged off, citing the worsening international conflict. Instead, over a closed-circuit wire, Roosevelt praised Hollywood for its fund-raising efforts, defended Lend-Lease, and singled out for special merit the heads of the studios who had so diligently promoted, as he put it, “the American way of life.”
After a round of pleasantries by the evening’s emcee, Bob Hope, the actual awarding of the statuettes began. David Ogden Stewart kicked things off with a Best Screenwriting Oscar for The Philadelphia Story. Best Director came next. Frank Capra opened the envelope and read aloud the name John Ford, for The Grapes of Wrath. Now it was time for Best Picture. Director Mervyn LeRoy came to the podium, opened the envelope, and read aloud the name of the winner: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The upset victory belonged to the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, who had won the previous year for Gone With the Wind, and had now defeated the two heavy favorites, The Grapes of Wrath and The Philadelphia Story.9
The acting awards, considered the most important in terms of box office, were the last to be handed out. For the occasion, the theatrical husband-and-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, both previous nominees, who happened to be in Los Angeles for the West Coast swing of their Broadway triumph There Shall Be No Night (both losers in 1932), were given the honor of handing out the honors.10 The first award, for Best Supporting Actress, went to Jane Darwell for her performance as Tom Joad’s (Henry Fonda’s) mother in The Grapes of Wrath, over the heavily favored Ruth Hussey. The audience gave Darwell a standing ovation, in response to which, at the podium, she said that winning the award was great, but that she hadn’t worked in six months and much preferred someone giving her a job.
Next came Best Supporting Actor, which went to Walter Brennan for his performance in The Westerner, a total surprise that added even more suspense to the remaining three awards. Everyone had expected either Jack Oakie, who had so perfectly satirized Mussolini in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, or James Stephenson, who played Bette Davis’s lawyer in The Letter, to win. After a respectable round of applause and Brennan’s acceptance speech, the room grew deeply silent, except for Oakie, who burst out in tears, his wails audible even as he sobbed into his handkerchief.
The emotional response was even stronger when Ginger Rogers won for Kitty Foyle, beating out Katharine Hepburn, who everyone felt was the surest bet of the night. Rogers, who was sitting at the RKO table, rushed to the podium and burst into tears as Fontanne handed her the Oscar. “This is the greatest moment of my life,” she declared, and then went on to thank her mother, Lela Rogers, for having stood by her so faithfully. There were some who thought she looked directly at Stewart when she said that, but no one could be certain.
And then, finally, it was time for the Best Actor. As soon as the name “James Stewart” escaped Lunt’s lips, the entire audience burst into a rowdy, stomping cavalcade of approval, complete with shrieks of approval and plates being rattled against tables. Although Jimmy had been the overwhelming favorite, many in the house thought that
Fonda might pull off yet another upset, as the momentum seemed to be going away from The Philadelphia Story.
As he approached the microphone, Jimmy took a big gulp that sent his Adam’s apple dancing up and down. When his words finally came, they slipped out slowly and steadily, in the familiar drawl that had become the actor’s audible trademark. “I want to assure you,” he began, as the room fell to a hush, with what sounded like a curious echo of Rogers, “that this is a very, very important moment in my life. As I look around the room a warm feeling comes over me—a feeling of satisfaction, pride, and most of all, gratefulness for the encouragement, instruction and advantage of your experience that have been offered to me since I came to Hollywood and with all my heart I thank you.”
The Los Angeles Examiner reported in the next day’s edition that “as he had done in many a wild motion-picture scene, [Jimmy] stumbled dazedly back to his table amid shouts and applause.” That night, Jimmy uncharacteristically stayed out until well past dawn, roaming Hollywood and the Sunset Strip with the Oscar clutched in his hand, accepting the spirited congratulations of everyone, celebrity and civilian, wherever he went. When he finally did get home early the next day, he woke Burgess Meredith out of a deep sleep to show off his prize. “Look what I won,” he said, with a big grin on his face, to which Meredith replied, “So you’ve been to Ocean [Amusement] Park again.”
Although he remained beaming and appreciative for the next several weeks, Jimmy believed that he had really been given the award for what amounted to a supporting role behind Cary Grant, as payback for the Oscar he should have won—for the previous year’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Grant, who, it was whispered about, had developed something of a crush on the still youthful-looking Stewart (who bore a striking resemblance to Grant’s live-in lover, Randolph Scott) remained annoyed for a long time that despite trading up for what he believed was the better role, he had not even been nominated, and told friends that Stewart had benefited from the “special attention” Cukor had lavished on him.
As if in response, Cukor told an interviewer shortly after Jimmy won the Oscar: “I wanted him to be his natural self, only I wanted to highlight and underline his boyishness, his spontaneity, his stunned wonder when love hits him during the scene when he and Hepburn take a midnight swim together. He followed along with my ideas and never regretted it.”
Capra, on the other hand, was angered by what he considered Cukor’s public self-aggrandizement, and went around telling people that he was the one who had taught Stewart how to act for the screen, a boast that added much credibility to the notion that the Oscar had been a belated acknowledgment of Jimmy’s performance for Capra as Jefferson Smith.
As for Jimmy’s own assessment of his Oscar-winning performance, he had this to say: “I never thought much of my performance in The Philadelphia Story. I guess it was entertaining and slick and smooth and all that. But Mr. Smith had more guts. Many people have suggested that I won [the Oscar] as a kind of deferred payment for my work on Mr. Smith. I think there’s some truth in that because the Academy seems to have a way of paying its past debts. But it should have gone to Hank that year. That was one helluva performance he gave in The Grapes of Wrath.” What he left out of this interview, and of most others for years to come, was that he had actually voted for Fonda, hoping his friend would get both the Oscar and a much-needed boost to his not-as-yet-superstar career.
Katharine Hepburn was also said to be upset that Stewart had taken the acting honors for what was “her” picture, tailor-made to bring her back into Hollywood’s open waiting arms, with an anticipated Oscar to seal her victory. The next day a bitter Hepburn told reporters that she had, in fact, been offered Ginger Rogers’s role in Kitty Foyle but had turned it down because she didn’t think she could play a shopgirl in a soap opera.
Back on the RKO lot, Rogers erupted in the middle of rehearsals for her next film, William Wellman’s Roxie Hart (that would eventually become the basis for the hit musical Chicago), when someone commented about what Hepburn had said. “She ought to keep her damned mouth shut,” she screamed.
Neither Grant, Cukor, Hepburn, or Rogers ever made another movie with Jimmy Stewart.
The day after the awards, Stewart received a phone call from Alexander. “You won some kind of prize,” his father said, by way of a greeting. “I heard about it on the radio.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Stewart replied. “It’s a Best Actor award. They give ’em out every year. I won it for The Philadelphia Story. You seen that one yet?”
“Never mind about it,” Alexander said. “What kind of prize is it?”
“It’s a kind of statuette. Looks like gold but isn’t. They call it the Oscar.”
“Well, that’s fine, I guess. You’d better send it over. I’ll put it on show in the store where folks can take a look at it.”
Stewart said he would send it off that day. When it arrived at the store, Alexander put it in a small glass display case with dozens of other awards, mostly military, that the Maitland and Stewart men had collected through the years.
Exactly seven days later, Jimmy was ordered to report for duty as a buck private. When a reporter called to ask how much weight Jimmy had had to gain to meet the official requirements, he replied rather briskly that that was “a military secret.”
And so it was that Jimmy Stewart wound up his initial five-year, nine-month residence in Hollywood, during which he appeared in twenty-eight features and won the coveted Academy Award. If his career had ended here, he would have likely been remembered as one of those extremely conventional actors who played off their natural personalities to achieve a familiar screen persona that touched audiences’ hearts.
But it didn’t end there. His wartime good-bye to Hollywood was, in a very real sense, a farewell to his own innocence and youth as well, the most recognizable and beloved qualities of his persona that had taken him to the very top of his profession and won him worldwide fame. Now he was about to walk onto another stage, one of battle, in a world war that would deepen, darken, and complicate everything about him and the world he knew and loved. And when that terrible war would finally end, Jimmy Stewart would reemerge into a new and very different kind of spotlight.
One of brilliant, if tortured, cinematic greatness.
PART FOUR
Flying High into Hell
Receiving the Croix de Guerre for “exceptional service” in helping to liberate France.
COURTESY OF KELLY STEWART HARCOURT AND THE ESTATE OF JAMES STEWART
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“I, James Stewart, do solemnly swear that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America and will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever; that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me, according to the rules of the Articles of War. So help me God.”
—JAMES STEWART TAKING THE OATH OF SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES AT FORT MACARTHUR, MARCH 22, 1941
“I’m sure tickled I got in,” Stewart said in reply to Colonel Robenson, who had just congratulated him and eighteen other new draftees on becoming a soldier of the United States. Freed from the gerbil wheel he’d found himself on making movies in Hollywood, the army was, if nothing else, the real thing. And it was a lot of something else as well, starting with the crucial ancestral inch taller Jimmy felt he’d grown. In the beginning, when he had, one way or the other, won his private battle of the bulge and qualified for duty in the armed forces, nothing was more important or meaningful to him than acceptance into the Maitland/Stewart World of Real Men, otherwise known as the United States Armed Forces, because in his family, gold-plated Oscars were nothing compared to brass balls. Indeed, ever since his induction, a new and powerful emotional bonding had taken place between Jimmy and his father.
Burgess Meredith and Bill Grady threw Jimmy a going-away party at Franchot Tone’s house, where all of his friends could stop by to say farewell and wish him luck, among them Henry
Fonda (preparing to serve as an Air Combat Intelligence officer in the Pacific), Spencer Tracy, and James Cagney. To add a touch of humor to the event, everyone dressed up as a Knight of the Round Table. And for extra good luck, Grady arranged for a Hollywood starlet originally from the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, known around the lot for her shapely figure and round heels, to give Stewart the kind of send-off that would, in the parlance of World War Two, make sure he never forgot exactly what it was he was fighting for.
If that event had been cloaked in privacy, the same could not be said for Jimmy’s actual induction. MGM saw his military service as something for the studio to make the best of, meaning cash in on. Mayer turned on the publicity machine, seeking to make the most out of “the first American Hollywood actor to be drafted.”1 Mayer made sure that every newspaper and radio reporter knew exactly when and where it was to take place. Dozens of photographers and reporters greeted him that morning, taking rolls of pictures and barraging him with questions.
If Jimmy said little directly to the press, Meredith and Grady, too, made the most of the opportunity. “We’ll be seein’ you,” Meredith shouted to Jimmy, to a roar of approval from the small gathering of fans that Mayer had also made sure were on hand. Grady dutifully told the reporters that MGM had amended its policy and generously “waived” (suspended) Stewart’s contract and that they would definitely “pick it up when he is dismissed from service.”