Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  The famed British director had come to America in 1939 to be able to continue making movies. With England officially at war, the industry there had all but shuttered, the film company he’d worked for, Gaumont-British, had gone under, and he was deathly afraid that Hitler was going to successfully invade Great Britain. Hitchcock’s arrival in Hollywood in partnership with David O. Selznick set into motion one of the most contentious creative alliances in film history. Their stormy relationship nevertheless produced several near-great movies: Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), and one undisputedly great one, Notorious (1946). Hitchcock completed his obligations to and partnership with Selznick in 1946 with The Paradine Case, one of the few American failures Hitchcock made in the forties, and one that pointed him in the same independent direction as Capra and so many others. Tired of working for the always-difficult Selznick, he decided instead to form his own film company, appropriately titled Transatlantic, and began searching for his first property.

  He chose Under Capricorn, a vehicle intended for his then-favorite leading lady, Ingrid Bergman. However, when her schedule proved too difficult for Hitchcock to work around—she was making two other movies while appearing on Broadway—he shifted gears and settled on adapting a play he had seen and enjoyed in London’s West End some twenty years earlier, one that had remained at the back of his mind and would be eminently workable, and probably superior, when made into a movie. The play, Rope’s End by Patrick Hamilton, was to be the continuation of an experiment Hitchcock had tried once before—shooting an entire film in a single, confined set.1 The first, Lifeboat, in 1944, took place completely on a raft, and was good enough to earn Hitchcock an Academy Award nomination.2 With Rope, all the film’s action was to unfold, as on stage, in the various connected rooms of a Manhattan penthouse.

  In the film, a murder has taken place. Two homosexual student lovers have killed a friend simply for the thrill of it—a killing based loosely on the sensational true-life bloody Leopold and Loeb child abduction and murder case of the 1920s. Eventually the crime is (literally) uncovered by their professor, whose philosophical teachings may have, in fact, unwittingly inspired the slaying. The dead body is hidden in an antique chest, the closed lid of which serves as the table for a buffet supper. The buffet was placed at the forefront of the set, looming large in the screen’s mise-en-scène.

  The trick that Hitchcock wanted to perform was to shoot the entire film in single ten-minute magazine takes, in real time.3 To enhance the atmosphere and open up the set, a picture window with a panoramic view of the city dominated the background, growing continually darker as day turned to night. The film was shot in Technicolor—a first for the previously unrelenting black and white the director loved.

  For the screenplay, Hitchcock turned to old friend Hume Cronyn, an odd choice, but one the shrewd director knew would not interfere with his specialized vision of what he wanted to accomplish. Cronyn provided less a complete script than an expansion on the original play, changing very little of it. For the finessing, the gloss, and the deeper abstract connections, Hitchcock hired Arthur Laurents, a young, talented, up-and-coming playwright. Laurents had first been discovered by Irene Selznick, David’s ex-wife (he had by now left her to marry movie star Jennifer Jones), who had since gone on to become a Broadway producer. While Selznick and Hitchcock often clashed during their years together, the director always had strong positive feelings for Irene, and did not hesitate when she recommended Laurents, who had just done a successful uncredited screen rewrite of Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (released in 1948), good enough to eventually earn it Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Sound Recording, and Best Screenplay (for Frank Partos and Millen Brand).4

  The other thing about Laurents that Hitchcock liked was that he was gay and currently involved with Farley Granger (“Fah-Fah” to Hollywood insiders), an actor the director was interested in for the part of Phillip, the weaker-willed of the two killers. Hitchcock loved that kind of “doubling,” believing the resonance of those actual relationships deepened the reality of those on the screen. For the role of Brandon, the other killer, Hitchcock wanted Montgomery Clift (another known-to-the-industry homosexual). And for the role of Rupert Cadell, the professor, Hitchcock assumed there would be no problem getting Cary Grant, who had had the biggest and most successful film of his career two years earlier starring in Hitchcock’s Notorious. Grant, who had also had gay relationships in the past, would, for Hitchcock, complete the “doubling” aspects of the film—three homosexuals played by three homosexuals, in a screenplay written by a homosexual, based on a real-life murder committed by two infamous homosexuals. The very thought of all this made the always mischievous, devious Hitchcock salivate.

  Granger quickly accepted. Then, one by one, problems began, beginning with the cast, having mainly to do with the still-taboo subject of homosexuality in American commercial movies. Cary Grant was the first to drop out. Not long after, Clift said no, telling Hitchcock he couldn’t do the part because he was afraid it would “raise eyebrows.” According to Laurents, “Both Cary Grant and Montgomery understood [the characters were gay] and both were leery. Since Cary Grant was at best bisexual and Monty was gay, they were scared to death and they wouldn’t do it.”5 Grant’s loss in particular was a difficult one for Hitchcock to accept, and it caused a rift that prevented the two from forming their own independent production company. Grant returned to making mostly easy comedies and conventional romances, such as Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Monkey Business (1952), before announcing his first retirement, one that would end seven years later when he reunited with Hitchcock to star in To Catch a Thief.

  It was only after Grant declined that Hitchcock was forced to turn to an alternative list of actors for the two remaining leads. Casting Brandon was easy. John Dall was a social acquaintance of Hitchcock’s, a frequent dining companion at the director’s favorite Beverly Hills restaurant, Chasen’s, the most famous celebrity eatery in town (originally called Chasen’s Southern). In addition to Hitchcock, it was the home away from home for such stars as Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, W. C. Fields, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Jack Benny, Howard Hughes, James Cagney, Alan Ladd, and writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dall was Ivy League educated (Columbia) and, perhaps most important, had scored big in his film debut a few years earlier in Irving Rapper’s The Corn Is Green (1945), opposite Bette Davis, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar. Dall, who was also gay, was nonetheless willing to allow himself to go in that direction on the screen.

  The path to Jimmy Stewart was much more complicated. Wasserman, eager to keep Stewart working, had a working relationship with Hitchcock, born out of the director’s loose bond with Irene Selznick’s talent agency prior to its being folded into Hayward’s, which was then sold to MCA. Although Hitchcock was still intrigued with the idea of using a homosexual as an unwitting accomplice (an intellectually superior man who was unaware of his own darker sexual desires appealed to Hitchcock—“You’ve given my words meaning I never dreamed of,” Cadell says at one point), he changed his mind quickly when he discovered that the Bank of America, Transatlantic’s underwriter (along with Warner, which had agreed to distribute), had based its funding of Rope on the international box-office strength of Cary Grant, something that Jimmy Stewart could in no way match. The only way the deal could still go down, Hitchcock told Wasserman, was if Jimmy took less salary than the $300,000 Grant had agreed to up front (plus a percentage of the profits). He offered $175,00 for Jimmy’s services, and no profit participation.

  Wasserman would have none of it. He held firm and Hitchcock, eager to start filming (and stop running up costs at his own company), agreed to give Jimmy the same terms he had offered Grant. To get the bank to agree, he personally guaranteed any losses that might be incurred as the result of having Jimmy in the film (although how such a thing could be proved no one was ever able to explain).6


  It was a major financial victory for Stewart, although, as he would admit later on, he thought it was a mistake to take the part. “Rope wasn’t my favorite picture,” he told Fonda and others whenever anyone asked how it was going. He was annoyed at the trickery of the single-take shoots that seemed to totally preoccupy Hitchcock. “The only thing that has been rehearsed around here is the camera.”

  Another problem for Jimmy was Farley Granger, who had signed on because he wanted to work with the sophisticated and beautiful Cary Grant, whom he had a crush on, not the unsophisticated and decidedly unbeautiful Jimmy Stewart (with whom he was less than enamored). As Laurents so succinctly put it, “Jimmy Stewart was not sexual as an actor, while Cary Grant was always sexual.”

  Playing one of three gay leading characters in Rope only caused Jimmy’s lack of inherent cinematic hetero heat to be seen by some as clear evidence that he was, in fact, homosexual. Conceding he was “miscast” in Rope, a defensive Jimmy told Louella Parsons after the film failed at the box office that it had been nothing more than “an experiment. I’m glad I did it and I’ll go on record as saying I’ll make a picture for Alfred Hitchcock anytime.”

  A month after production on Rope wrapped, in the winter of 1948, Jimmy traveled east by train, to New York City, where he had signed on to take over the role of Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey.

  PART FIVE

  Man, Marriage, Mann

  Jimmy and Gloria’s wedding day—August 9, 1949.

  16

  “The American dreamboat is Jimmy Stewart. Sure, sure, they’re also mad about Clark Gable, Eddy Duchin and Victor Mature…but it’s Jimmy they burn to mother and smother in the oven of their lovin’. That’s because he’s a bachelor and never been snagged by any of these mantraps.”

  —SYNDICATED COLUMNIST EARL WILSON, CIRCA 1940S

  Two days after his second New York run ended in Harvey, Jimmy began filming Hank Potter’s You Gotta Stay Happy, a so-called airport comedy shot mostly at Newark Airport in New Jersey. It was yet another independent movie, this one under the auspices of Rampart, a company owned by his co-star, Joan Fontaine, and her husband, William Dozier. Wasserman had urged Jimmy to take the part, even though it gave him only second billing under Fontaine. After the failure of Rope, Wasserman thought it was important just to keep Jimmy’s name out there and he hoped a light comedy would remind audiences of the “nice,” i.e., “straight” James Stewart.

  Because the thirty-one-year-old Fontaine was pregnant at the time, she had an especially difficult shoot with a script that attempted to recapture the lost art of physical screwball comedy.1 Jimmy, having worked with stodgy journeyman Potter before (with Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel), did the best he could in a plot with distinct echoes of Capra’s It Happened One Night. The nonsensical tale (based on a serialized novel by Robert Carson that ran in the Saturday Evening Post while the film was being made) centers around Dee Dee Dillwood (Fontaine), a “wacky” heiress on her honeymoon, unsure if she has, after all, married the best fellow for her, Henry Benson (Willard Parker). Her uncertainty causes her to hide in the bedroom of the adjoining honeymoon suite that happens to be occupied by Marvin Payne (Stewart), the owner/operator of a small flying cargo business. An attempted suicide on Dee Dee’s part gets her taken along with Payne and his copilot, Bullets (Eddie Albert), on a run to California. Also on board is an embezzler who has paid them to get him out of town (Porter Hall), a GI (Arthur Walsh) and his new bride, a corpse, a shipment of whitefish, frozen lobsters, and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee. As if this wasn’t enough, during the flight, an emergency forces them to land in a field, where they are met and assisted by a farmer (Percy Kilbride). By the end of the film, Dee Dee and Payne have found true love—with each other.

  The film proved Wasserman right, and actually fared better than any of Jimmy’s other postwar efforts to date, including It’s a Wonderful Life. Following its November 1948 release, the New York Times agreeably proclaimed, “James Stewart, to our mind, shows up much better in You Gotta Stay Happy than in any of his previous post-war efforts.” Time magazine was positively effusive: “This is the kind of role that Jimmy Stewart could play blind-folded, hog-tied and in the bottom of a well. He gives it all the best Stewartisms.” These reviews read better than the picture played. In truth, it dragged when it should have soared, schlumped when it should have stretched, and, despite a perky box office after its first run, quickly left the consciousness of the American filmgoing public.

  Still, You Gotta Stay Happy succeeded where It’s a Wonderful Life had failed; it was an independent picture that showed a healthy profit. This was not an insignificant turn of events, for Jimmy or the industry.

  The studio system continued to crumble into disarray, with successful competition from independents the least of its postwar problems. Like a prehistoric monster in a B movie, the ugly head of paranoid anti-Communism had begun to stomp its jackboots. The formation of the Hollywood Alliance in 1941 by studio-head Walt Disney; directors Sam Wood, Clarence Brown, and King Vidor; stars John Wayne, Robert Taylor, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Ward Bond, and Richard Arlen had all but invited HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) to come in like some heroic gunslinger to “clean up” the town, with every breathless victory reported by “journalist” Hedda Hopper, who used her syndicated Hearst column in unwavering support of Hollywood’s far-right movement.

  Because of his long military service, Jimmy, no less a right-leaning performer than the others on the list, had been gone for most of the early days of the first wave of anti-Communism. Throughout much of the first half of the forties he was off fighting a real enemy rather than a suspected one. By the time he had returned to Hollywood, HUAC had begun a new and very blunt probe to “investigate” the political affiliations of many of the postwar industry’s most famous actors, writers, producers, and directors, not coincidentally the majority of whom happened to have gone the independent route. Jimmy, as red, white, and blue as they came, had no problems with HUAC or the Motion Picture Alliance.

  The same could not be said for Frank Capra. He was brought before HUAC and testified before the committee in what amounted to a last, desperate effort to salvage his career.

  Although Jimmy was aware of all that was going on between Capra and HUAC, he did not come out in public support of him. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the director’s innocence, he just did not think it was right for him to take sides in what he felt was Capra’s battle. Keep your nose clean and mind your own business was one of the earliest lessons learned by young Jimmy from his father. It was a credo he chose to live by, one that would eventually cause an even deeper rift than the one currently developing between him and his best friend, Henry Fonda, intensified by Jimmy’s refusal to publicly come out in defense of Capra.

  In the spring of 1947, the ultra-liberal Fonda publicly aligned himself with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, and a host of lesser Hollywood lights in signing an open letter to HUAC, complaining of its tactics and rather brazenly telling the committee to get lost. The letter was later repudiated by most of these same names, none of whom suffered any loss of work, except for Fonda. Before he put his signature to the page, he and Jimmy had a long and at times heated discussion about whether or not either one should get openly involved with the increasingly political polarization of the film industry. Jimmy vehemently opposed Fonda’s intention to sign and privately warned him of the consequences to his career such an action might bring (it was a warning that was meant as cautionary rather than threatening).

  Fonda, however, had made up his mind. Despite Jimmy’s pleas, he went ahead and put his signature on the document. Stewart was angry at him, but this did not, as has been written elsewhere, signal the end of their friendship. Precisely the opposite; it was their concrete closeness that gave each of them the strength to disagree, even passionately, over any and everything, always in the spirit of helping each other. Fonda thought
it was his patriotic duty to take a stand. Stewart did not disagree; he just feared that that stand might effectively end Fonda’s film career. As things turned out, he wasn’t far from wrong.

  Except for an unbilled cameo in Fletcher Markle’s independent feature Jigsaw (1949), Fonda did not star in another Hollywood movie for seven years following John Ford’s brilliant Fort Apache (1948) until Ford’s 1955 Mr. Roberts, the film version of the hit show that had run during that same period of time on Broadway—starring Henry Fonda for much of the time.2 In 1948, the same year Jimmy put his footprints in the cement at the fabled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, Fonda relocated with his family back to their East Coast home.3 He then accepted the title role in his old pal and one-time director Joshua Logan’s stage version of Mr. Roberts, the best-selling autobiographical novel by Thomas Heggen, produced by Leland Hayward, about an idealistic officer who, in the days preceding the onset of World War Two, seeks a transfer to another ship rather than deal with a bullying captain. He does eventually confront his captain for the sake of his men, and, through an unfortunate (but not strictly coincidental) series of events, loses his life for it. The reluctant hero taking on an increasingly out-of-control bully holds the drama together in both the novel and the play. The theme had a strong appeal to Fonda, who regarded the story as a metaphor for the madness and tyranny that he believed had gripped Hollywood.

  Mr. Roberts would go on to win five Tony awards.4 On the strength of his Broadway popularity and the waning of the blacklist (which no one ever officially admitted or could prove had ever officially included the actor), Fonda eventually returned to making movies in Hollywood, but the memory of the aging Academy remained long and characteristically vengeful. He would not win Oscars for some of the strongest roles of his career until his sunset performance in 1982’s On Golden Pond, a year after a younger and more liberal Academy had already granted him its traditional consolation prize (referred to in the industry as the graceful losers’ award), an honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar.5