by Marc Eliot
Jimmy Stewart (in response): I’ll get married one of these days.
—WILLIAM MILLER, PIC MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 1947
Following the brief period of euphoria that came with the end of World War Two, Frank Capra’s prediction that the American public would want escapist movies, which he actually believed It’s a Wonderful Life was, proved not to be so. The new Communist occupation of Europe, the Rosenbergs spy case, and the so-called fall of China in 1949, all combined to introduce the notion of a cold war to American society that was soon reflected in the type of pictures Hollywood began to turn out. Themes such as anti-Semitism (Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947, and Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, 1947), wide-spread corruption (Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul, 1947, and again in his All the King’s Men, 1949), uncontrollable greed (John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948), and social paranoia (Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit, 1948) dominated the postwar big screen.1 Even John Wayne, the cinematic strongman of World War Two, was not immune to the cultural shift, reemerging in 1948 in Howard Hawks’s Red River as an aging, angry father figure, whose son, played by newcomer Montgomery Clift, was the first of the next generation of actors to personify the onset of what would later come to be known as the generation gap. Clift’s pained, neurotic persona in Red River served as the linchpin for a group of Broadway-bred “sensitive” actors that included Marlon Brando and James Dean. Virtually every good-looking actor under thirty summarily rejected the stylistic acting ways of the Duke, and by extension the entire “Greatest Generation.” The new breed could and would do things differently. It was the dawn of the Method, ’50’s Hollywood style, along with the youthful fervor of rock and roll and the paranoia spawned by the notorious blacklist, that, with the exception of Howard Hawks, damaged the careers of every one of the directors mentioned above, including Frank Capra.
All of which, following the commercial disappointment of It’s a Wonderful Life, left Jimmy Stewart, for the moment cinematically adrift, occasionally touching shore in a stream of meaningless movies that the public reacted to with what at best may be described as indifference. Increasingly desperate for work, Stewart hoped MCA powerhouse Lew Wasserman could guide him back into the movie fast lane. Wasserman quickly managed to line up five films for Stewart, each one, notably, an independent production, and each with a different studio serving as distributor. The situation made it painfully clear to Jimmy (and Wasserman) that since his acrimonious split over his contract extension with MGM, the other studios were united with Mayer against him (and any actor who tried to thwart the hitherto ironclad system). While, clearly, the grip of the studios was beginning to weaken, with actors from Cary Grant to Bette Davis increasingly seeking their creative freedom by staying independent, Jimmy was different from them in that he liked the studio system. He had been discovered by it and depended upon it for his livelihood. He did not see himself as a rebel or a troublemaker. He simply wanted to work, but when the studios rejected him—for whatever reason, either solidarity with Mayer or, at least as likely, the difficulty in casting the once-tender, boyish leading man fast approaching middle age—he had no other choice but to join the growing ranks of the acting independents.
While Wasserman continued to try to line up films for him, Jimmy, on Hayward’s advice, continued to make frequent goodwill public appearances in military uniform at such events as the Forest Lawn monthly sunrise services to honor the war dead. It wasn’t until 1947, a full year after It’s a Wonderful Life, that the first of Jimmy’s Wasserman-generated movies finally made it to the big screen: William Wellman’s Magic Town, made from a script by Robert Riskin for Wellman’s newly formed independent film company (distributed by RKO). Unfortunately, the film failed to find an audience, with a badly miscast Stewart in the role of a public relations man who discovers the perfect demographic town, Grandview. Cast opposite Jane Wyman, who offered him zero chemistry, the film, a mishmash of redemption, remorse, and Americana, was an irrelevant comedy without laughs that left both critics and audiences ice cold.
Stewart decided it might be best to leave Los Angeles for a while after Magic Town’s less than magical opening. When Princeton announced an honorary degree for him that spring, he decided to accept it in person. While at an on-campus reception, he met Brock Pemberton, the producer of the Mary Chase Broadway hit Harvey. At some point in the evening, Pemberton offered Jimmy the opportunity to take over the title role when the play’s original star, Frank Fay, now in the hundred and forty-first week of the show’s run, went on what Pemberton described as a much-needed vacation.2
Harvey had been around for quite a while even before it landed on Broadway, opening first on London’s West End in 1944, at the height of the war when audiences desperately needed a bit of humorous escapism. Jimmy happened to have been stationed there, saw the show and fell in love with its leading character, Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic bachelor (a “funny drunk” in vaudeville parlance); his nutty sister Veta Louise Simmons; and his best friend, an invisible six-foot rabbit who answered to the name Harvey.3
Based on the British production, Universal had purchased the film rights for what was then an astoundingly high sum of $1 million—more than it cost to make most movies at the time, with an additional $25,000 earmarked for Chase to write the screenplay.4 The studio originally intended it as a star vehicle for Bing Crosby, who was then Hollywood’s popular male movie star, thanks to his Academy Award–winning performance as Best Actor in Leo McCarey’s Going My Way (1944), a wartime Jesus-walks-among-us drama that broke all box-office records and in doing so revived the radio crooner’s movie career. He considered the role in Harvey for quite a while before turning it down after winning the Oscar, claiming his fans would be offended if their favorite “priest” were seen as being tipsy all the time and talking to an invisible rabbit (invisible God conversations that dotted Going My Way and its sequel, McCarey’s 1945 The Bells of St. Mary’s, were apparently okay).
The show’s long-delayed journey to Hollywood was due to a similar clause that had kept Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace from opening for several years after it had been made, the same reason that Hepburn had closed The Philadelphia Story while it was still filling houses on Broadway. In each instance, the producers of the stage production withheld film release rights until the Broadway runs ended. Universal opted to wait before filming began (unlike Warner with Capra, who made Arsenic and Old Lace and then had to wait two years before the film could legally open).
It has often been written that Stewart’s “retreat” to Broadway was proof of the old (and continuing) adage that the New York stage, the Great White Way, serves as either a training ground for new Hollywood talent or the graveyard of those whose film careers have worn down and have no other option but to return to the boards.5 Indeed, it certainly looked that way to the New York Times, which promptly dispatched reporter Gladwin Hill to interview Stewart, after informing him that the newspaper intended to write a major piece on the order of “The Rise and Fall of James Stewart,” on the failure of It’s a Wonderful Life and Magic Town, combined with Stewart’s coming in to a major hit show as a substitute for Frank Fay.
The newspaper, the adage, and everyone else couldn’t have been more wrong. Jimmy’s reason for taking the role was to let it serve as a public audition for what he wanted most—to play Dowd in the film version. When he’d first approached Jimmy, Pemberton guessed that he couldn’t pay anything like he assumed Jimmy was used to in film. Jimmy responded by offering to do the entire seven weeks for free, with the show having to cover only his hotel and day-to-day expenses. That idea actually came from Lew Wasserman. MCA also owned Universal Pictures, and once Crosby proved unavailable, Wasserman wanted Jimmy to star in the movie.
Fay played the role for 1,351 of its 1,775 Broadway performances. His first vacation, in 1946, saw him replaced by legendary song-and-dance eight-a-day, red-nosed vaudevillian Bert Wheeler, who knew how to win over the hearts of his audiences and milk the role for every laugh
it had. Jimmy, on the other hand, played it much more realistically, with the droopy-eyed style of drawl acting that had gotten him so far in his early days of theatrical performing. Although he hadn’t been on a live stage in twelve years, he took to the part naturally, and New York theatergoers fought over the limited amount of seats available to see him play the part. The hard-nosed New York theater critics, with some caveat, accepted him as Dowd. According to the New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson: “Although the structure of Mr. Stewart’s performance is much weaker than Mr. Fay’s, his honesty as a human being gives the climax of the play warmth and emotion. In every way that counts, Mr. Stewart is thoroughly admirable.”
Opening night, Stewart graciously thanked Fay from the front of the proscenium for letting him take over the role for a while, prompting a second standing ovation. Afterward, the stage-door crowd was so large, special security had to be installed on subsequent nights to ensure Stewart could get through it.
The New York Times profile that had originally intended to chart the actor’s ups and downs was rewritten as a “star” interview and retitled “Jimmy Stewart Prepares to Meet a Rabbit,” a far more positive, even genial recap of Stewart’s career, with liberal quotes from the actor.
The Daily News was the only paper in town to talk about the elephant in the room. Columnist Erskine Johnson started off his rather fanciful August 21 column this way:
They say Jimmy Stewart is a forgotten man. I’d like to argue about it, but the box-office data on the last Stewart picture, It’s a Wonderful Life, makes that “forgotten” business hold water.
It was a good picture. It had comedy, home-townness, good entertainment and a lot of good supporting players around Jimmy. But now that it has played all around the country, they added up the shekels on paper and Jimmy’s agents said, “Sorry, Jimmy, they’ve forgotten you. You’ll have to start all over again.”…
That Jimmy Stewart and many others have to stage a comeback just because they’ve been out of sight for a while seems a regrettable situation. The only proof that counts with the studios, however, is that box-office take, which is the public’s voice.
Jimmy’s highly successful, if brief, run in Harvey ended on August 30, when Fay returned, but it was a thoroughly revitalized Stewart who returned to Hollywood to enthusiastically begin work on a new film Wasserman had gotten for him. Something of a departure for Jimmy, especially after Harvey, the docu-bio drama was based on the exploits of Chicago journalist Jim McNeal, who’d won a Pulitzer prize for his series of articles that helped to clear the name of Joseph Majczek, an innocent man convicted of killing a cop. Call Northside 777 was written by Jerome Cady and Jay Dratler, and produced under the strict guidance of Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox.
Jimmy’s role in Call Northside 777 was, in every way, different from the type audiences had come to expect from him. Zanuck had personally selected the ham-fisted Henry Hathaway to direct. Because of his harder, adventurous edge, which the producer felt the film needed, his film work had all the finesse of a barroom brawl. The script itself was tough, no-nonsense, and edgy, and the role of McNeal demanded a certain gritty brusqueness. Wasserman had to convince Zanuck that Jimmy could do it, and he was right. By the time the film had finished shooting, the dailies revealed that all remaining traces of the familiar, charmingly boyish James Stewart were gone, replaced by a toughness and a manliness no one had seen in him before. Both audiences and critics alike were duly impressed.
Upon its release in February 1948, Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, singled out Jimmy for special praise, calling his performance “winningly acted.” The Herald Tribune said, “The performances, from James Stewart’s characterization of an inquisitive reporter to the merest bits, have honesty and persuasion.” While no one called Northside 777 a great film, which it wasn’t by any means, Jimmy had shown enough in it to get the doors of Hollywood to crack open for him once more.
His next movie was King Vidor and Leslie Fenton’s On Our Merry Way (aka A Miracle Can Happen, 1948), yet another product of Wasserman’s relentless wheeling and dealing on Jimmy’s behalf, this time with United Artists. The film centered around a roving reporter who asks a series of randomly selected “people in the street” what child has had an influence on his or her life. The film was made up of three segments, each starring a duo of actors—Fred MacMurray and William Demarest (who would reteam again twenty years later on the TV sitcom My Three Sons), Dorothy Lamour and Paulette Goddard (Burgess Meredith’s wife at the time), and Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, working together on-screen for the first time.6
In the film, Fonda and Stewart are a couple of musicians who rig a talent contest as a way to pay for the repairs on their broken-down bus. The influential child is the daughter of the mechanic, who brings out the latent moralists in them. To get help with their part of the film, Stewart and Fonda placed a call to John O’Hara, another old friend from the New York days, and privately commissioned him to write their segment. O’Hara finished it in ten days. Satisfied with their written parts, they then asked John Huston to help direct their sequences. Huston accepted at first, only to change his mind at the last minute, citing a project about to go into production that he said he had somehow “forgotten about” (Huston was drinking heavily at the time). In a panic, they turned to George Stevens, Jimmy’s director in Vivacious Lady, who agreed to do it as long as he didn’t get any on-screen credit, which explains his absence from the official director’s line.7
During production, the magazine Woman’s Home Companion dispatched feature writer Barbara Heggie to do an on-set profile of Jimmy, which she titled “Penrod in Hollywood.” The fact that she misspelled his name throughout the entire piece said a lot about the still-wavering, if misconceived, perception by Heggie of her subject: “All the engaging awkwardness of a Booth Tarkington boy—but what else is it that gives Jimmie [sic] Stewart the power to tie the American woman into emotional knots?”
That was a terrific question, if it were asked of Clark Gable or Cary Grant. Jimmy’s career was unique in more ways than one, not the least of which was that while he was often classified a leading man, he was never a sex symbol—just the opposite, in fact; he represented the very epitome of on-screen Puritanism Americana. That was his stock and trade. Henry Fonda may have played Abe Lincoln on-screen, but in real-life it was Jimmy who was far more Lincolnesque—tall, awkward, soft-spoken, real-life heroic; the very definition of the lean, wise American loner. These qualities and his war experiences, although he refused to talk about them, had actually elevated his stature, if not his box office, among American men. Women still remembered him as that nice boy, but not one capable of tying them into emotional knots.
Among the “revelations” of Ms. Heggie’s article was that “Jimmie” loves coffee and spaghetti for lunch, wears his tweed off-set jackets with sleeves that are perennially too short, has startling steel blue eyes, and has stopped reading Flash Gordon because “the poor guy has taken up fighting giant beetles.” All in all, a neat little basket of condescending tidbits that did nothing to fuel Jimmy’s resurgence, until the reporter moved to an area that was supposed to be off-limits. “Later, over coffee, the subject of marriage came up,” Heggie reported, “and Stewart immediately became depressed. [Ever since] his bachelor pal John Swope married Dorothy McGuire there is scarcely a friend at whose house Jimmie [sic] can drop in without disturbing some snug domestic tableau. This makes him feel unwanted. But marriage is not a week end [sic] in Mexico; it is serious business and he is a cautious man.
“‘I don’t want to marry one of these actresses and have it last a month,’ he told me moodily, ‘and if I find some nice girl and bring her out here what would Hollywood do to her? I’m not so conceited that I think I can buck what a lot of others guys haven’t been able to buck.’”
Meaning what? Lose your wife to another man? Or fail to please your parents? Ms. Heggie did not follow up on one of the most revealing statements Jimmy had ever given to the public
.
Shortly thereafter, as if to deflect all the unexpected attention the Heggie piece was getting, Jimmy sat with Hedda Hopper and tried to keep the focus on business. He said he was thinking of starting his own repertory company for actors who wanted to tour the country performing live before audiences, because “something has to be done to relieve the employment situation here.” Hopper listened politely, then brought up the marriage question, to which an exasperated Stewart replied, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t aim to be rushed.” Jimmy was forty at the time of the interview.
On Our Merry Way actually opened two weeks before Northside 777, and, perhaps not surprisingly, did nothing at the box office. Reviews were generally poor, and both pictures faded quickly from the screens of theaters and the memories of audiences everywhere.
And then came Rope, Jimmy’s first opportunity to work with Alfred Hitchcock, one of Hollywood’s top directors, his first since Capra, one who was capable of understanding precisely what it was about Jimmy that made him so extraordinary and unique, both as an actor and as a man, and who would use it in the four unforgettable features they would make together over the next decade.
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“Stewart claimed that Rope was the toughest job an actor ever had…as it was, he had to hang around the set eighteen days before making a bona fide entrance for the rolling camera. It was the final dress rehearsal for reel 3 in which Jimmy makes an entrance while Farley Granger is playing the piano. The piano stopped and silence ensued, as all eyes went to Stewart. He just made it into the room and was ready to open his mouth. ‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to make your entrance differently.’
“Jimmy punched the air in a defeated gesture. ‘Hey, look,’ he complained, ‘I’ve waited three weeks for this!’”