by Marc Eliot
13
“It’s a Wonderful Life sums up my philosophy of film-making. First, to exalt the worth of the individual. Second, to champion man—plead his causes, protest any degradation of his dignity, spirit, or divinity. And third, to dramatize the viability of the individual—as in the theme of the film itself. I wanted It’s a Wonderful Life to say what Walt Whitman said to every man, woman, and babe in the world: ‘The sum of all known reverences I add up in you, whoever you are…’ I wanted it to reflect the compelling words of Fra Giovanni of nearly five centuries ago: ‘The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!’”
—FRANK CAPRA
“After World War II, Stewart somehow failed to regain his stride with critics and audiences. Although he wisely abandoned Leo and Lion for an ambitious fling with Frank Capra, his explosively emotional performance in It’s a Wonderful Life was overlooked in a year galvanized by the classical grandeur of Laurence Olivier in Henry V and the sociological scope of William Wyler’s timely The Best Years of Our Lives. As far as the critical establishment was concerned, Stewart was drifting more and more beyond the award-consideration pale to action pictures and wacky farce comedies.”
—ANDREW SARRIS
Hedda Hopper loved to tell this story about Jimmy Stewart and his battle experiences in World War Two: “In my files are copies of two telegrams that always amuse me. They were sent shortly after the German surrender in 1945. One from me to Alexander Stewart, Indiana, Pa., reads, ‘Where is our Jimmy? Please wire me Hollywood collect.’ The reply was, ‘We don’t know. If he does not show up soon, I may have to go after him myself. (Signed), Alex Stewart.’”
As much as he may have wanted to, there was no need for Alexander to rescue his son. He showed up that September in Indiana, on a brief stop-over on his way to Los Angeles. The entire town turned out to cheer for his hometown public appearance, after which the local newspaper called for him to run for governor.1
Three days later, a photo of him graced the cover of Life magazine.2 It had been taken in Indiana by the magazine’s legendary Peter Stackpole, who had covered the parade. In addition to the standard portraits, however, Stackpole wanted a more original, candid shot and asked if they might be able to go fishing together. Jimmy agreed, although he had never handled a fishing pole in his life. He quickly sent someone over to the hardware store for some tackle and the two went out in a boat on the small lake near the edge of town. As Stackpole snapped away, Jimmy became hopelessly entangled in his own line. Finally, ready for casting, he tossed it over the side and somehow managed to hook the photographer right under his left eye.
The magazine ran the standard photo of Jimmy posing on shore in his uniform.
By the time the magazine hit the newsstands, he was back in the warmth and comfort of Southern California. And, just as when Jimmy had arrived for the first time a decade earlier, Fonda was waiting at the station for his train to roll into Pasadena. This time, a handful of reporters had gathered for the occasion. “Hey Jimmy, where did you get the gray hair?” one shouted, to which he quietly and unsmilingly replied, “It got pretty rough overseas at times.” Another apologized, warned he had a bad question, and asked if there was anybody “special” waiting for him. Again Jimmy answered with a grim, direct simplicity, “No. At least not yet. But you’re right, it’s a bad question.”
After obligingly answering a few more, Jimmy tossed his duffel into Fonda’s car and the two quickly drove off.
Jimmy’s eight-room rented Brentwood house on Evanston was still occupied, but no longer by Burgess Meredith, who, upon being drafted himself in 1942, had subleased it to a single businessman. When Meredith was discharged, he married the actress Paulette Goddard and decided to buy a house to go along with his new life, letting the tenant remain. When Jimmy sent word that he was coming home, the tenant he had never met said he needed a few days to move out, and those “few days” stretched into three months, during which time Stewart stayed with the Fondas.
Henry and his wife, Frances, had built Tigertail, as they called their Dutch Colonial–style house just above Sunset Boulevard on Tigertail Road (a real “cat house,” according to Jimmy). It was complete with a children’s playhouse that was a miniature version of the main house, including a working fireplace, a refrigerator, and a record player. Tigertail was the perfect place for Jimmy to hang until his house was ready, with plenty of room and privacy while he contemplated the next phase of his life and career.3
Moving in with the Fondas proved providential for Henry, who had returned from the war far more depressed and insecure about his future in show business than Jimmy, whose presence helped cheer him, especially when several of the “boys” would come by for their weekly card game. John Ford was a regular, as were John Wayne and Ward Bond. Despite Fonda’s lack of appreciation for the politics of Ford’s “gang,” and Jimmy’s too for that matter, all of that was left at the door in favor of an evening of Pitch. They played it around a big card table in full movie-costume regalia, cowboy hats and gun holsters, with spittoons nearby. They’d light up stogies, take out their guns, lay them on the table and play as if they were in some local saloon, remaining in whatever character they had chosen to play for the entire night.
At Christmastime, Jimmy once again dressed as Santa Claus, which Hank and Frances, as always, enjoyed as much as the children did. During the cool afternoons of the Los Angeles winter, Fonda and Jimmy loved to fly kites and reminisce about “the old days” or go to the golf course to try to improve their handicaps.
According to Hedda Hopper, who got the first in-depth postwar newspaper interview with Jimmy, every studio was “clamoring” for his services, eager to put the real-life war hero up on the big screen. In her nationally syndicated piece, she declared that “the whole town loves and admires him, and he can have had any picture he wants.” As was usual with the machinery of studio-controlled gossip, the story also included the “news” that the “shy” Stewart (studio lingo for single and straight) was dating two actresses at the same time, Anita Colby and the luscious Martha Vickers, but that he slept alone in a large bed and always wore pajamas, both trousers and jacket.4
The truth about Jimmy’s personal life and professional career was considerably more complicated than Hopper and MGM allowed the public to believe. To begin with, the status of his contract with MGM was unclear. Mayer let it be known, via Hopper, that although it had been voluntarily suspended by the studio while Jimmy was in the service (as a so-called favor to the star), he was willing to renegotiate it. In truth, he wanted to extend it in the studio’s favor, with little in the way of a pay raise. Had he not suspended the contract, he would have had to make a brand-new and presumably far more expensive deal for Jimmy’s postwar services. Mayer felt that he held all the cards. Like virtually every other prewar male movie star who had gone into the service, the five years spent away from the cameras had taken a visible as well as emotional toll. Those who went to war looking like young Adonises—the Clark Gables, the Henry Fondas, and the Jimmy Stewarts—all returned with the unspecified war marks of savagery on their faces. Gable, in particular, looked weathered and weary (the death of Lombard written in every line that surrounded his sad eyes). Fonda had begun to lose his hair, the sockets of his eyes had hollowed, and his skin had taken on the consistency of a well-worn saddle.
Stewart’s hair loss was even more dramatic, as if plucked out from the front strand by strand, accentuated by a washed-out grayness around the fringe. His face had tightened with age and was marked by the tension and fear of war; his eyes occasionally lapsed into a haunted stare. His body, though, like Fonda’s (but unlike the paunchy Gable) was as lean as ever—he weighed the same 140 the day of his discharge he was supposed to have weighed the day of his induction. And these days if anyone had noticed that he was shouting a bit, they didn’t mention it. He had lost so
me of his hearing as a result of all the bombs bursting he’d been exposed to on the many raids he’d led.
The studios, all too aware of what the country had been through, wanted to give audiences some escape from it. In that sense, Jimmy’s mindset of not wanting to talk about his experiences as a warrior matched that of the moguls, only none of the veteran stars, including Jimmy, seemed especially predisposed or well suited to return to prewar everything-is-wonderful, isolationist comedies about an age of relative innocence that seemed lost now, forever.5
Even nights when he and Fonda, Bill Grady, and a couple of others would make the rounds of the nightclubs along the Strip, Jimmy appeared to have acquired a new wariness about being out in public, especially when women he didn’t know approached. Grady took it as a look of loneliness, and determined to see if some “instant cure” might not make it go away, at least for a couple of hours. One night, when a provocative note was sent over to him by one of the local lovelies, complete with a request for an immediate answer, Jimmy turned to the waiter who had brought it and said, “Would you bring me a revolver, please?” tossing the note back at the silver tray on which it had arrived.
Back in late 1944, while Jimmy was still stationed in England, Leland Hayward had sold his business, and its valuable A-list of movie stars, to Jules Stein and his burgeoning MCA talent agency. Stein had decided to try to expand his music management company into film production and needed a ready roster of top clients.6 Hayward made the decision to leave Hollywood partly because his wife, Margaret Sullavan, had tired of the movie business (as had the business of her) and longed to return to Broadway, and partly out of a real fear that California was about to be bombed by the Japanese. When the opportunity came for Sullavan to star in The Voice of the Turtle and the show proved an enormous hit, running for more than a year, Hayward decided the time was right to divest himself of his West Coast affairs and relocate to New York City, to do business on Broadway and live in Connecticut.
Before he left Los Angeles, one of the last clients he had signed was the up-and-coming Gregory Peck, among the first of the new postwar crop of young, handsome male actors. Hayward had quickly secured a one-picture deal for Peck at MGM, to appear in Tay Garnett’s Valley of Decision (released in 1945). The success of that film led Mayer to offer Peck a seven-year exclusive contract, which Hayward advised Peck to turn down, which he did. Hayward believed, correctly, that exclusivity was a thing of the past, and that Peck should do what a lot of other newbies were doing, going freelance; picture-to-picture was where the real money was. A-liners working without exclusive contracts were routinely earning in the neighborhood of $750,000 a picture, not counting profit participation.
Mayer, in retaliation, barred Hayward from the studio’s lot. When the time came, in the fall of 1945, for Jimmy to deal with Mayer’s insistence on renegotiation, Hayward was, technically, no longer his agent; Jules Stein’s MCA was. Nevertheless, Hayward participated indirectly, as “personal advisor,” and informed Mayer, through Stein, that as far as he was concerned, there was nothing to negotiate. Forget about that “generous” suspension of time, Hayward said. Stewart’s contract at MGM was up.
Mayer was furious. He had so magnanimously “suspended” Jimmy’s contract for the five years during his military service so that it wouldn’t run out while the actor was “away,” as he liked to put it, and had recently on numerous occasions proclaimed publicly that he wanted to throw Jimmy a ticker-tape parade to celebrate his safe return (it never took place), while in private he insisted to Stein that James Stewart still belonged to MGM.
Bill Grady, meanwhile, told Jimmy off the record that Mayer was willing to forget the five suspended years that were technically left on Jimmy’s original contract and that the president of the studio, Nick Schenck, had personally authorized a new deal at very favorable terms, but that it had to be for seven years. Jimmy, via Hayward, via Stein, said no. He insisted the money was far too low for a Best Actor Oscar winner. Schenck’s best and final offer was $125,000 per picture, with a guarantee of one picture per year, no profit participation. Hayward considered that an insult, and indicative of the fact that MGM didn’t really want Jimmy at all. At least not enough to pay him even close to what other stars were earning.
Mayer then pulled out all the vengeful stops. Articles began to appear in the studio-controlled “gossip” press about how much the actor had aged while being away, about the rumors of a “nervous breakdown” he had suffered as the result of combat, and, pointedly, that perhaps he had had it in Hollywood. One only had to look at how many of Stewart’s prewar films had not made any money.
Among the most consistently negative of the studio mouthpieces was Jimmy’s “friend” Hedda Hopper, who, at Mayer’s directive, now wrote a series of “reports” about all the new faces in Hollywood, such as Van Johnson, whom she described as the new hot kid on the block, a cross between James Stewart and Gary Cooper, and younger by years than both. Mayer’s campaign was effective. As a postwar freelancer, Jimmy did not make a movie for a year after returning home from the war.
Whenever he was asked about his absence from the screen, Jimmy would say only that he was thinking of leaving the film business altogether. In truth, he believed he could survive in Hollywood without ever shooting another foot of film. He had invested his earnings wisely, including buying part of Southwest Airways, a start-up venture of Leland Hayward’s and his business partner Jack Connelly, with additional seed money from Cary Grant (whom Stewart had convinced to invest in the company while they were making The Philadelphia Story), Fonda, Johnny Swope (the company’s secretary-treasurer as well as a flight instructor), songwriter and performer Hoagy Carmichael, and businessmen Gilbert Miller. As far as Stewart was concerned, if the film business didn’t work out, he could pursue commercial aviation as a full-time occupation.
To stay active Jimmy starred in radio adaptations of several of his hit movies, a pre-TV style of home drama that had become the vogue. He did four the last two months of 1945 alone—Destry Rides Again, No Time for Comedy, Vivacious Lady, and Made for Each Other, plus one original script, The Sailor Who Had to Have a Horse, a noncombative comedy about a sailor whose shipmate was a palomino.
Then, in the winter of 1945, Frank Capra, also without a studio deal, decided to form his own production company and approached Jimmy about starring in an independent feature to be called It’s a Wonderful Life.
Following the end of the war, Capra, like Jimmy, had not found a welcome committee for his services. His career had begun to stutter after he lost the Best Director Oscar for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, his last picture for Columbia. He made only two more films before the war, both at Warner Bros., both in 1941: the dark, suicidal comedy/ drama Meet John Doe, which starred Gary Cooper, and Arsenic and Old Lace, a drawing-room comedy about murderous aunts that starred Cary Grant (the release of which was delayed for two years due to contractual restrictions regarding the Broadway run: the movie could not open until the show closed). Underlying Capra’s downturn was the fact that his dual roles as president of the Academy and head of the Directors Guild had, ultimately, backfired, leaving each side resentful of his role with the other. What’s more, in the mushrooming chauvinism of America’s suddenly united populace after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and its star director, had lingered as more cynical than when it was first released, if not in the minds of general audiences then certainly with the studio heads (and, eventually, Congress), who wanted little to do with anything or anyone who had had something bad (i.e., anti-American, i.e., Communist) to say about how the government conducted its business.
Capra was not the only director, producer, or studio head to see the path of his career twisted by the war. Once America formally joined the Allied forces, the government wanted Hollywood to turn out fiercely anti-Axis films that would inspire not just those on the front (who were shown them regularly along with feature films) but their families back home, and it enlisted the services of some of t
he industry’s most talented filmmakers, including Capra, John Huston, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Anatole Litvak, Don Siegel, and the Walt Disney animation outfit.
Capra’s six-part Why We Fight propaganda series, unsigned by the director, an enlistee given the rank of colonel for his filmic efforts, was among the most striking to come out of the war. And yet, upon receiving his discharge in 1945 and returning to Hollywood, Capra felt the distinct chill of the cold-war-conscious studios that had not forgotten what they considered the left-leaning politics of Mr. Smith or Capra’s diminishing profit potential. In postwar America, no studio was sure if Capra was still employable, and none were willing to put up enough money to find out. The only real option the director had was to go into business for himself. “Four years ago Hollywood was my town,” Capra wrote in his memoirs. “When I fiddled, people danced. I was president of everything. Now [after the war] the pip-squeaks with L.P.’s (Learners Permits) asked ‘Frank who?’”
According to Capra, the idea to form an independent production company called Liberty Films had begun while he was still in the army. Working with other Hollywood pros to turn out propaganda movies, he’d started to think about what it would be like to commercialize this pool of talent, “uniting producer-directors in service into a post-war independent combine of independent filmmakers. The prime candidates were John Ford, Willie Wyler, George Stevens, John Huston, Garson Kanin, and Frank Capra.” In 1945, Capra named himself president of Liberty Films. Its vice presidents were Wyler and Stevens, its secretary-treasurer was Samuel Briskin, and its trademark logo was the same shot of the cracked Liberty Bell that had adorned Capra’s Why We Fight series.
After securing the right from RKO to use its facilities in return for a first look at anything he made, Capra put up $40,000 of his own money—each partner/investor was required to put up a proportionate amount, based on his stock holdings—(he was the company’s largest share owner). He then began to search for what he considered the best commercial property he could get his hands on, a film that would provide the kind of escapist fare he believed audiences were looking for. He already had one piece, something whose working title was The Flying Yorkshiremen, that RKO wanted him to do, a film that would feature Barry Fitzgerald in the lead. Capra appeared willing to make it until Fitzgerald, for reasons that remain unclear, rejected the role (most likely political, as he was a Hollywood right-winger). Capra, through Liberty, then purchased a property called It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a comedy about a poor man who lives rich, which had been rejected by every studio because it was considered outdated, a Depression movie a decade too late. It went nowhere.