Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  In 1948, Jimmy made his next movie for MGM, the first project he had done for the studio in nearly a decade, playing the title role in The Stratton Story, directed by one of the MPA’s founders, Sam Wood.

  During production, Jimmy started dating a pretty, young starlet by the name of Myrna Dell, and after two months—an eternity by Hollywood standards—rumors began to appear in the gossips that they intended to marry, something Dell later denied they ever talked about in all the time they were together. At least part of the problem, she later told one interviewer, was another woman. Not Rita Hayworth, Mitzi Green, or Helen Walker, all of whom the press had recently linked him to. No, she said, it was Jimmy’s apparent ongoing love for Margaret Sullavan. According to Dell, she was all he ever talked about.

  After his forty-first birthday passed, a depressed Jimmy confided to Dell that he was thinking of giving up acting and returning to the family business and the inner Pennsylvania folds of the Episcopalian Church. This did not come out of the thin, smoggy L.A. air. While reading in the local paper about his son going out with Dell, Alexander had come across a quote in which Jimmy said although he was still religious, he no longer felt the need to attend services every Sunday. That sent Alexander straight to the phone, to find out if his son had completely lost his mind as well as his faith. All of this angered Dell, who had strong feelings for Stewart, and who told friends that his father had Jimmy acting like he was turning twenty-one rather than forty-one.

  Regardless, there was no way that Dell could have turned around Jimmy’s life. She simply did not have the emotional arsenal or any real opportunity to try to somehow make Jimmy fall in love with her. And anyway, another woman had already fixed her sights on him with a determination that would not allow for failure.

  That July not long after he finished shooting You Gotta Stay Happy, Jimmy, glowingly referred to by Hedda Hopper in her columns as the “Great American Bachelor,” accepted an invitation from Gary Cooper and his wife, Rocky. Jimmy had maintained a casual friendship with the right-wing-, MPA-, and HUAC-friendly actor after presenting him with his Academy Award in 1942. They had a lot in common—both were Oscar winners, both were disciples of Frank Capra, and both personified the long, lean, quiet ways of Lincolnesque Americana in their early films. Later on Capra recalled the special, nonverbal bond that had grown between the two actors: “One morning I was watching Jimmy mow his lawn when Gary drove over. They waved greetings. Then Coop raised his hands and made some shooting signs. Jimmy nodded. Coop held up two fingers. Jimmy shook his head. Instead, he raised three fingers. This time it was Gary who was negative. He held up four fingers. Jimmy nodded; Coop nodded. Friday—four days away. Nothing had been said. Nevertheless, an invitation to go hunting had been made and accepted. They waved good-by as Coop drove away.”

  Cooper and Rocky, both having decided that Jimmy’s extended bachelor life did not appear to make him especially happy, decided to introduce him to one of Rocky’s good (and eligible) friends, Gloria McLean, by inviting them both to a dinner party in their home.

  Also present at the Coopers’ that evening were Ronald Reagan, newly separated from his wife Jane Wyman, actress Ann Sothern, and Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward. It was Leland who had to convince a reluctant Jimmy to come along in the first place, despite the fact that he didn’t have a date for the evening, having stopped seeing Dell.

  Although Jimmy wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had already, if fleetingly, met Gloria the year before, during the Christmas holidays, when, along with Bill Grady and Johnny Swope, he had decided to crash the actor Keenan Wynn’s party and help himself to some imported, hard-to-get hundred-proof holiday cheer. Gloria, who happened to be one of the invited guests, was not at all impressed with the invaders’ sloppy demeanor.

  This time, during dinner at the Coopers’, while chatting with Jimmy, Gloria realized they had a lot in common. They both loved to play golf and go sailing, were interested in animal conservation, and, perhaps most important, both loved movies—he making them, she seeing them. Later on that evening the party moved to Ciro’s, the famed night spot on the Sunset Strip, where Nat “King” Cole was appearing.

  During the show, Jimmy asked Gloria if she would like to go golfing with him. She would indeed, most definitely. He then asked her to dance.

  The next day she beat him handily on the links.

  Gloria Hatrick McLean was born in 1919 in Larchmont, New York, to Edgar B. and Jessie Hatrick. Edgar Hatrick had made his career by introducing newsreels to movie theaters to be played after the coming attractions and before the double feature. His efforts got him promoted to vice president and general manager of the Hearst Metrotone News, after which he moved the family to the tony suburbs just north of New York City.

  While still a teenager, Gloria’s good looks landed her a variety of local modeling jobs, and a stint as a dance instructor at the then-popular Arthur Murray Dance Studios and Schools. She thought about becoming an actress and took acting lessons for a while, but eventually rejected show business, preferring the more tangible pleasures of hunting, fishing, and golf.

  With her quick wit and intense green eyes, she quickly joined the ranks of the most eligible young women in New York’s registered social set. One evening, at a social function for Cosmopolitan Pictures, a Hearst subsidiary, Gloria met Edward Beale McLean II. Not long after, they married. Ned, as friends called him, was from a wealthy publishing family. His mother, Evelyn Walsh, owned the legendary Hope diamond.6

  Gloria and Ned moved to a ranch in Colorado, where she gave birth to two boys, Ronald in 1943, and Michael, three years later. By 1947, the marriage was over. Gloria divorced Ned in Sun Valley and moved with her boys to Los Angeles.

  Single motherhood did not suit her and she let it be known among her social set, which included the Coopers, that she was interested in the possibility of remarriage. That was when Gary and Rocky Cooper decided that despite the more than ten-year difference in their ages, she and Jimmy were perfect for each other. They set up the dinner and let the dance take on a life of its own.

  That October of 1948, only weeks after they had started dating, rumors of a new Jimmy Stewart romance began to appear in the pages of the gossip press. The Los Angeles Times, the paper of record for the film industry, covered the story in headlines:

  JAMES STEWART LINKED WITH GLORIA McLEAN—

  Hollywood Agog Over Latest Romance Rumor Concerning Its No. 1 Bachelor

  James Stewart, Hollywood’s No. 1 bachelor, is still rolling with Cupid’s punches, it seems. But Cupid is still in there swinging, this time reportedly in the charming person of Gloria McLean, former wife of Edward B. McLean II.

  The question furrowing Hollywood’s brow nowadays is: Is Stewart serious with a girl at last?

  Jimmy last night gave an answer—of sorts:

  “I’ve had Mrs. McLean out to dinner several times. If that be romance, make the most of it.”

  Rumors of the romance stirred months ago when Stewart and Mrs. McLean were reported “engaged.” That—as sometimes happens to Hollywood rumors—proved wrong.

  Agent Pooh-Poohs

  But the rumor didn’t die. It popped up again, this time in a Denver newspaper report that said Stewart and Mrs. McLean were to have met in the fashionable Hotel Broadmoor in Colorado Springs last week. The meeting, the report said, was called off because Jimmy had some screen chores to do.

  His agent pooh-poohed that one.

  “If that’s so,” Jimmy retorted, “I guess every time I take a girl out to dinner, there’s grounds for thinking there’s a romance, eh?”

  Who could have said it better?

  Only, of course, a romance was exactly what it was, and a serious one at that.

  It had really begun the instant Jimmy had laid eyes on Gloria. The spark he felt was unlike the usual instant heat zap he got from starlets, the ones who always, if temporarily, lit him up inside the forbidden zone. This was something else, more of a cool, sharp beam that didn’t go
away. (It did not hurt at all that Gloria physically resembled Jimmy’s mother, Bessie, or, more accurately, the way she looked when he was a little boy.)

  She had a lot of Alexander in her as well. She was into sports, physical fitness, was smart, articulate, haughty, and just a bit controlling. All of which Jimmy loved about her. “I could tell right off that she was a thoroughbred,” Jimmy later told friends. “For me it had been love at first sight. She was the kind of a girl I had always dreamed of. The kind you associate with open country, cooking stew and not fainting because it was made of cut-up squirrels. She’d look at home on a sailboat or a raft; in a graceful swing from a tree branch into the swimming pool.”

  “The romance very nearly broke up before it got started,” Gloria later recalled. “At the time, I had a beautiful big German police dog named Bellow. When Jimmy saw me to the door [that first night], Bellow took one look at the strange man and went for his jugular.”

  Jimmy: “I realized that I first had to woo the dog. I bought him steaks at Chasen’s. I prattled baby talk to him. Patted him. Praised him. It got to be pretty humiliating, but we finally got to be friends. I was free to court Gloria!”

  During that year, Jimmy concentrated as much on revitalizing his career as he did igniting his love life. Returning to MGM to star in Sam Wood’s The Stratton Story was a big deal for him, as much as it was for the studio and for all of industrial Hollywood. In those uncertain times, performers not suspected of being Communists were, by reductio ad absurdum, loyalists, and were easily forgiven for all past industrial sins. Although Mayer still held a vengeful attitude toward Jimmy over their contractual differences, Sam Wood was eager to get The Stratton Story made, and, when Cooper proved unavailable, wanted and got Jimmy to play the lead.

  Wood’s previous baseball film, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), the very softly focused biography of New York Yankee Lou Gehrig, who’d died at a young age of the disease that would eventually bear his name, had starred Wood’s good friend and politically correct actor Gary Cooper. Wood then lobbied for Cooper to play Monty Stratton, a ballplayer who, at the peak of his pitching career, had shot himself in the foot and wound up losing his leg. Mayer believed that despite the success of Pride, baseball pictures almost never made money, and at first agreed to green-light the feature only if Van Johnson played the part. As far as Mayer was concerned, Johnson, one of his favorites, epitomized perfect all-American youth, with his curly red hair and winning smile, and would bring the film the kind of warmth it needed to offset the grim saga of Stratton’s blowing off his own leg.

  Johnson, however, was prevented from being in the film by the real Stratton, who personally rejected him for the role. The ballplayer had somehow gotten casting approval over who would play him on the big screen, and after inviting Johnson to his home and working out with him, decided the actor, a professional song-and-dance man, wasn’t a good enough ballplayer to be convincing as a major league pitcher. (It probably didn’t hurt Jimmy any that Wood worked on Stratton to convince him the only actor besides Cooper who could do justice to playing him was Stewart.)

  At the direct urging of Lew Wasserman and the indirect lobbying of producer Dore Schary—a relative newcomer to the scene who had come to MGM via RKO and who would eventually rise through the corporate ranks to lead the successful coup that ousted Mayer in 1951—Jimmy got the part.

  Schary then ordered Wood to cast June Allyson as Stratton’s wife, who had previously become something of a team with Van Johnson and had expected to be working with him again on the picture, but Wood had other ideas.7 He wanted Donna Reed, though when Jimmy heard that, he vetoed her. He still had a bad taste in his mouth from It’s a Wonderful Life, and didn’t want to go through another round of movie-making with her. At that point, Wood, desperate to start shooting, went with Allyson, thereby creating one of the most successful “marriages” in all of Hollywood history.

  Allyson and Jimmy’s on-screen chemistry was real. They had known each other before either of them was married to their current spouses—Jimmy to Gloria, Allyson to actor Dick Powell. Jimmy and Allyson had dated, and at one point they actually considered marriage. Allyson recollected, “I knew Jimmy before he married Gloria. With my cooking, it’s a good thing he didn’t marry me. The poor dear weighed only 154 pounds before he was married and he was all of 6 feet 2 or 3 inches tall. Jimmy hated being photographed when he was out with a girl and he seldom took his dates to nightclubs. Instead, he fed them steak that he grilled himself in his own backyard. If they didn’t like that and wanted the limelight, they were not for him…Gloria was the perfect choice. They were both so suited to each other—both slim and dignified and both with the same sense of humor.”

  Without question, on screen at least, the key to the successful pairing of Jimmy and June lay in their wholesomeness rather than any sexual chemistry. It was that wholesomeness that audiences wanted to see in Jimmy when he starred in films such as The Stratton Story, about a married man whose moral stamina allows him to overcome any and all obstacles, with, of course, the unwavering support of a good woman.

  The Stratton Story became the first unqualified hit of Jimmy’s postwar film career, the movie that finally restored him to the front ranks of Hollywood’s A-level stars. His portrayal of a ballplayer with a life-threatening injury who overcomes it reverberated with American audiences as a clear metaphor for a generation of soldiers seriously wounded on the battlefield and now struggling to return to normal civilian life. To achieve the effect of having an artificial leg, Stewart wore a leather-and-steel device that kept one knee stiff and forced him to walk with a limp.8 As he had in Mr. Smith, when he used an external method—throat painting—as part of his acting technique, Stewart employed a physical prop to help him find the character’s interior.

  The Stratton Story was also the first of a series of films in which Jimmy portrayed a living American cultural hero. In the next decade he would enact the lives of such uncomplicated (or so they were thought to be at the time) American iconic figures as Charles Lindbergh and Glenn Miller, polishing up the luster of their “perfect lives,” while adding his own performance’s sheen to their legends.

  Immediately after The Stratton Story wrapped, Jimmy went right back into the MGM studios to make Richard Thorpe’s Malaya, an uncomplicated star vehicle for Spencer Tracy.9 Tracy was at the height of his postwar popularity, and Jimmy was eager to work with him again.

  Malaya revolves around a rubber-smuggling scheme during World War Two. The Allies need it, the Japanese have it on occupied Malaya, the Americans intend to smuggle it out. Royer (Stewart) is chosen to help Carnaghan (Spencer), a smuggler currently serving a life prison in Alcatraz looking for a pardon by completing the mission. Their mysterious but knowledgeable middleman, The Dutchman, was played by Sydney Greenstreet, in a variation of The Fat Man from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941).

  The film, a so-so, rainy-Saturday matinee adventure yarn, came and went fairly quickly. It was released in the shadow of another Tracy film, George Cukor’s hilariously urbane Adam’s Rib, one everyone at MGM loved, with its unbeatable chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and her co-star. Audiences much preferred Spencer’s Adam to his Carnaghan, and proved it at the box office.

  In real life Tracy was nothing like either Adam or Carnaghan, neither a man-o’-war adventurer or a domesticated intellectual. He was, rather, a bad drunk, frustrated by marital difficulties, his off-screen relationship with Hepburn, health problems, and money woes. This time around, in Malaya, unlike years earlier, Tracy was anything but kind to Jimmy, no longer the wide-eyed boyish innocent, but someone who was about to overtake him (again) in the popularity polls. For his part, Jimmy was turned off by Tracy’s star-power demands, and the nickname his co-star had assigned him: “son of a bitch,” as in “Listen to me, you son of a bitch,…”

  Neither said good-bye the last day of production, and they never again spoke directly to each other.

  The Stratton Story held its premiere
at New York’s prestigious Radio City Music Hall on May 12, 1949, to coincide with the onset of the baseball season. It went on to become MGM’s biggest hit of the year and the sixth highest-grossing film of 1949, earning an impressive $4 million in its initial domestic run. The New York Times once more singled out Jimmy for praise: “The Stratton Story was the best thing that has yet happened to Mr. Stewart in his post-war film career…he gives such a winning performance that it is almost impossible to imagine any one else playing the role.” The New York Herald Tribune agreed: “The redoubtable James Stewart has turned baseball player in The Stratton Story. Thanks to his engaging and artful performance, a sentimental and inspirational screen biography has more than a little power.”

  However, Jimmy had far more important matters on his mind than how the movie was received. Shortly after Stratton’s release and during production on his next film, Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow, Jimmy asked Gloria, whom he’d been seeing now for a year, to help celebrate his forty-first birthday. He spent the entire day rehearsing his proposal speech to her. She said yes even before he finished stammering through it on one of his narrow, bended knees.

  As he loved to tell friends later on, whenever he recounted the story, “I, I, I pitched the big question to her last night and to my surprise she, she, she said yes!”

  17

  “If the prewar Stewart stood for something essentially American, the postwar Stewart stood for something truly universal. It’s difficult to think of another American star who remade his own image so thoroughly, or so bravely.”

  —MARTIN SCORSESE