Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  As they spend more and more time together, she relates to Scottie a series of disjointed memories, symbols really: a long dark corridor; an empty, open grave; a tall tower. As Scottie desperately tries to make sense of it, he saves her from yet another suicide attempt by the bay, this time taking her into his arms before she has a chance to hit the waters. Waves smack, music swells, Madeleine says she doesn’t want to die and begs him to never leave her. He promises he won’t. They kiss, a deep, long, powerful embrace that ends in a long, dark fade.

  The movie then shifts back to Midge’s apartment, where she is busy working on a new painting. She has summoned Scottie in order to check up on him, and offers him a drink and a night out at the movies. Things seem fine, if a little stiff. Scottie is calm, though preoccupied when Midge shows him her latest painting—a portrait of Carlotta, but with her own face on it. The effect on Scottie is devastating. She knows about his obsession with Madeleine because she has been following him (a grim but clever joke on Hitchcock’s part—while Scottie has been tailing Madeleine, who has aroused his emotions, Midge has been tailing him, and is now in fear of losing him from her maternal clutches). “Not funny,” he mutters, canceling their date and leaving in an angry huff. Alone, Midge breaks down as she realizes the extent of her own moral dilemma. She desperately wants to be Carlotta, or Madeleine, whichever one Scottie is really obsessed with, but knows she just doesn’t fit the physical mold of his erotic fantasies. To Scottie, Midge (Margaret? Mother?) has been consigned by him to play the maternal, noneroticized role, and consciously, at least, he has no desire to resurrect anything with her.

  Now it is night. Scottie is half drunk and generally disheveled when Madeline appears at his front door. She has had “the dream” again. This time she remembers more details. Scottie figures out she is describing an old Spanish mission; he insists on taking her there to show her it’s real and exists in the present. There, in the barn next to the mission, Scottie logically explains to Madeleine the apparent meaning of the dream, pointing out objects that she had previously described to him; then he suddenly embraces and kisses her, before declaring his love. She says she loves him too, but “it wasn’t supposed to happen this way!” With that, she breaks loose and heads for the church. Scottie follows. To his horror, he realizes she is going up the tower; she is going to kill herself. He desperately tries to follow, but the height of the stairs makes his vertigo, the physical manifestation of all his guilt, fear, and repressed pleasure, kick in stronger than ever. He looks down and can’t tell if he is coming or going. As he tries to continue up the stairs, he falls behind, looks again down the shaft, which, from his perspective, appears to be stretching and shrinking.13 He is torn between the compulsion to keep looking down (back) and trying to go up (forward), until he hears a scream, and sees, through the tower window, Madeleine falling to her death. Scottie’s face breaks out in a sweat. His head turns from side to side, his cupped wrist goes to his chin, he screams but nothing comes out. His eyes bulge and dart. As nuns rush into the church, he manages to slink away.

  Scottie has now caused two deaths in the first hour of the film, the detective’s and Madeleine’s, by his inability to keep up during a pursuit. An inquest is held, in which Scottie is viewed as technically innocent but morally guilty, his weakness having allowed (“once again”) someone to die (from falling). He is also criticized for having “run away” from the scene of the crime.

  At home that night he has an astonishing dream, in which all the unjoined pieces come together. Elster is there with a living Carlotta, not “Madeleine,” presumably his real wife. There is the open or unfilled grave that Madeleine talked about. He imagines it is himself falling from the top of the tower. Only Scottie doesn’t land (a wet dream without the climax). Instead, he floats in vertigo-like suspension. The truth is too horrifying—that Madeleine is not dead, at least not the Madeleine he knows, that somehow he has been duped by her and used as a pawn, and that most likely Elster is behind it all. The truth—that there was something wrong about his love for Madeleine, and her death—awakens him from his sleep. He then lapses into a conscious state of total, immobilizing catatonia. Asleep he was awakened, awake he is asleep.

  He is committed to an asylum and cannot be brought around, surely not by Midge, who tries her own patented “Mozart” cure supplemented by her own brand of maternal care (“Mother is here…”). Eventually Midge gives up on Scottie (and her own maternally driven rescue fantasy) and walks out of the hospital and out of Scottie’s life, disappearing down a long hospital corridor that resembles nothing so much as the open grave in Scottie’s dream. We never see her again.

  A year passes. Scottie is freed (but not free), crazy (as in not cured), and apparently unable to remember the context of the dream that paralyzed him.14 As a result he reverts to his favorite habit of “wandering (in circles, on foot, driving apparently aimlessly along the streets of San Francisco).” But the wandering this time is pointed. Everywhere he goes he thinks he sees Madeleine—leaving her apartment house, at Ernie’s, in the flower shop window, inside the museum. He has, in effect, become possessed by Madeleine, just as she supposedly was by Carlotta.

  Then one day, while walking along a boulevard, he is suddenly taken aback by a beautiful young, dark-haired, full-figured, big-breasted girl in a skin-tight sweater who bears a strong resemblance to…Madeleine! All at once, the erotic illusions are revived, and the pursuit begins yet again. He follows her up to her drab rooming house flat and literally forces himself into her room. He quickly realizes she is a hooker—she confesses as much—and convinces himself that despite her miraculous resemblance to Madeleine, she really is who she says she is, Judy Barton (also Kim Novak) from Salinas, Kansas. He asks her to go to dinner with him and she reluctantly agrees. He gives her an hour to get ready. As soon as he leaves, she flashes back on what really happened that day at the tower, that Elster was waiting at the top of the stairs, knowing Scottie’s vertigo would prevent him from being able to make it all the way up in time (to climax), with the body of his already murdered wife, the one he throws out the window to her “death.”

  Judy writes a note of confession. She finishes, tries to leave, realizes she can’t—she is as helplessly in love with Scottie as he is with her—tears the note up, and prepares for his arrival.

  He takes her to Ernie’s, where he begins what becomes the film’s final, fatal, phenomenal depiction of Scottie’s obsession. He begins to slowly but relentlessly and fetishistically turn Judy back into Madeleine, and she, however reluctantly (and masochistically), allows him to do so.

  He makes her wear the same corsage Madeleine wore, buys her the same gray suit and the same black, shiny high heels, and finally, forces her to dye her hair platinum blonde (what harm would it do? he asks). He leaves her at the beauty parlor and waits for her back at her hotel room. When she arrives, everything is nearly perfect—except her hair is down. Scottie insists she put it up in a swirl—in Madeleine’s (and Carlotta’s) swirl. It is the final link, and, with great reluctance but helpless to resist, she goes into the bathroom, only to reemerge in a ghostly green light (the reflection of the neon outside her window, and the dress she wore the night Scottie first saw her at Ernie’s). She is, at last, Madelein15

  They stare at each other. They embrace. They kiss. As their lips press together, Scottie is, to his horror, overcome with one last bout of vertigo, only this time it comes on not in shrink/stretch form, but as a spiral, the same shape of the swirl in Judy’s hair. The room begins to turn, and suddenly he is back at the mission the day Madeleine died. It is Madeleine, not Judy, in his arms. He remains locked in her embrace, but his eyes look away, trying to find an escape, an explanation, a reason.

  The kiss ends, and Judy, or Madeleine, decides to put on her necklace, the same one that Madeleine wore, the same one that hung around Carlotta’s neck in the portrait at the museum. For her, the kiss ended the game. They can both come clean now and start over. She will be his Madeleine and h
e will be her Scottie. They’ll be able to laugh about it all one day.

  For Scottie, however, the necklace holds a far different meaning. Because of it, he finally understands the last, missing piece of this maniacal puzzle. Nothing is real anymore except the deception that has been put over on him. He understands now that he cannot ever resurrect lost love, even if he believes that love is never truly lost.

  A wicked, frightening smirk crosses his face. He decides to teach Judy a real lesson in calculated rage, revenge, and reclamation. He forces her into his car and drives her back to the mission. Judy grows ever more agitated while he talks about having to go back into the past “for the last time.” He pulls her into the church and forces her up the steeple. He literally drags her by her arms to the top; Judy begs for her life. In the belltower in her last desperate attempt, she throws her arms around Scottie and kisses him. This time, however, there is no swirling delirium. Instead, a curious nun appears out of the darkness (“Mother Superior”?) and so frightens Judy that she backs out of one of the tower’s openings and falls to her death.

  It is this third and final death that “cures” Scottie. Ironically, it is his resurrected ability to scale the heights that leaves him physically alive but emotionally alone. He walks to the edge of the tower, his arms outstretched in Jesuslike supplication. As the film enters its final fade, the audience does not know what to think. Has he finally been freed of his primal, displaced obsessions, or is he about to dive after them, to join Carlotta, Madeleine, and Judy and all they represent to him, in eternity? This final suspension suggests that Scottie’s vertigo can never be truly “cured,” that the true definition of his illness is and always will be his twisted desire to go forward in his life by trying, however impossible it may be, to travel backward into the past.

  In a decade whose most popular films were defined and dominated by youth, the best performances were done by veteran actors in what might arguably be the greatest roles of their careers—John Wayne in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) and Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Gary Cooper in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), Alan Ladd in George Stevens’s Shane (1953), Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), and arguably the best of all, Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, a bravura display of tortured and timeless emotion, controlled as expertly as a jet plane in the hands of an ace pilot. At once mature, erotic, manly, and vulnerable, Jimmy’s work in this film stands alongside the best and most complex acting ever captured on screen. For so many reasons, both personal and professional, no actor was ever more perfectly suited to play the role of the middle-aged, damaged, sexually repressed voyeur Scottie Ferguson than Jimmy Stewart.

  Without question, his performance is enhanced immeasurably by the astonishing duality of Kim Novak (whose chemistry with Jimmy makes Hitchcock look like even more of a genius), an actress who never looked lovelier, or more mysterious, or more alluring, or sexual, in a film whose distinctive, singular, signature style no one has ever been able to duplicate.

  While today Vertigo is routinely ranked by scholars, critics, historians, and audiences (if sales and rentals are any indication of the latter) as one of the greatest movies of all time, in 1958, while both Novak and Jimmy received terrific notices, the film did not, and was subsequently met with both critical and box-office indifference;—not enough nouvelle, too much vague. That year the Best Picture Oscar went to Morton DaCosta’s antique Auntie Mame; Best Actor went to David Niven and Best Actress to Wendy Hiller for their performances in Delbert Mann’s dour Separate Tables; Best Director went to Vincente Minnelli for his splashy, if inane, wide-screen musical Gigi. Except for two technical nominations, Best Art Direction and Best Sound, Vertigo was shut out at that year’s Academy Awards.16

  Because of it, Vertigo became something of a curio, a speed bump along the otherwise smooth highway of Hitchcock hits, coming as it did after Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Wrong Man and before North by Northwest, all of which were far more commercially successful. Disappointed with the film’s initial critical and box-office reception, Hitchcock, who owned the negative to Vertigo, pulled it from general circulation in the seventies (along with four other of his Paramount movies). In truth, although it didn’t do anything like Hitchcock believed it would, the film was not a financial failure. By the end of 1958, its first year of domestic release, it ranked as the twenty-first highest-grossing Hollywood film, having earned a respectable $3.2 million, good, not great; $2 million less than his previous Stewart venture, Rear Window (Vertigo’s final negative cost was $2,479,000, about a million dollars more than what it cost to make Rear Window).17

  Jimmy, too, was deeply disappointed by the film’s apparent failure. He had banked on the strength of his name above the title and the power of his performance to push Vertigo into major profits (that he had a piece of) and when it failed to do so, he believed it signaled nothing less than the end of the arc of his big-budget movie-making career. From that point on, he feared, he would recede into the archives of Hollywood history and legend, along with the studio era itself and the other glorious stars it had produced who, like him, had once dominated the kingdom of Hollywood-style greatness.

  He was not entirely wrong.

  23

  “Ford, Hitchcock, Wilder, Wyler, Capra, DeMille, Hathaway—they all base their work on one primary theory, and that is that movies are primarily pictorial—not words.”

  —JAMES STEWART

  Four months after Vertigo was released, Jimmy broke the sound barrier.

  It was a brisk morning in September 1958 that Colonel Stewart and Maj. Tom Hart, liaison officer at Palmdale for the Air Defense Command, climbed into a jet headed for Dallas to attend the annual Air Force convention. During the thirty-two-minute flight the jet climbed to 38,000 feet and reached supersonic speed. Newspapers described the incident as “breath-taking.” When asked why he’d done it, Jimmy just smiled and told reporters, “It was the most amazing flight I’ve ever made.” Unfortunately, he did not feel the same way about his next movie.

  Richard Quine’s Bell Book and Candle was a tangy, if wispy venture, but one with far-reaching consequences to Jimmy’s career. From the start, Jimmy had utterly no interest in the film, whose supernatural (and superficial) overtones satirically echoed the fakery suggested in the plot of Vertigo—in Bell Book and Candle, Gillian (Kim Novak) is a witch who tries to put a spell on Shepherd Henderson (Jimmy). Any further comparison of the two films would be like comparing Shakespeare’s Hamlet to television’s Bewitched. What had been a bit of enjoyable neo-Cowardian fluff on the West End and Broadway stages, written by John Van Druten and starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, landed with a thud as loud as Carlotta’s body off the top of the mission tower. This despite Jimmy and Novak’s great on-screen chemistry and solid supporting cast that included Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, and Elsa Lanchester.

  Screenwriter Daniel Taradash, who was also the producer (along with his partner, Julian Blaustein), had a multiple-picture deal with Columbia and had brought the play to the studio with the idea of using its original stage cast, a plan vetoed by Harry Cohn because he felt Palmer was too old to play the part on the big screen. Taradash’s next dream cast was Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, but Kelly had since married and retired from the screen; and Grant, although interested, wanted certain changes made in the script to make it better suited to his particular style of cinema suavity—he could not appear to pursue Novak in any way, shape, or form; she would have to pursue him. Taradash knew that wouldn’t work, as Novak’s character had all the magic powers. His next choices were handed to him by Cohn, who still held the option on Jimmy’s services as part of the agreement to let Novak do Vertigo. He suggested to Taradash that he use both of them in Bell Book and Candle.

  Jimmy, meanwhile, had hoped to return to form in Hitchcock’s next production, North by Northwest (a loose remake of his own highly successful 1942 Saboteur, which had starred R
obert Cummings and Priscilla Lane). Because of that, he kept delaying the start of Bell Book and Candle, waiting for the call from Hitchcock.

  It was not going to come. Hitchcock later told François Truffaut that part of the reason he felt Vertigo had not done better was because the lead actor looked too old for the part, the primary reason he would never use him again in any film.1 Instead, the part in North by Northwest went to Cary Grant. Hitchcock, as was his nature, did not tell Jimmy there was no way he was going to get North by Northwest, even as he was having the screenplay finessed by the great Ernest Lehman to Grant’s persona until it fit him as perfectly as one of his custom-made Savile Row suits. Once Cohn announced that Jimmy and Novak were going to make Bell Book and Candle, Hitchcock used that as his excuse, allowing him to diplomatically avoid confronting Jimmy and maintaining their personal friendship, which both valued.

  As for Jimmy’s acting in Bell Book and Candle, the best that may be said is that he was no Rex Harrison. Never good at playing sophisticates (as he had unsuccessfully attempted in Rope and The Philadelphia Story, in which, despite his Oscar, he remains to this day the forgotten player in what is essentially a Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant two-seater), in Bell Book and Candle, his performance was so flat that the only sign of life was his familiar slow stammer, hardly the stuff of seduction for a witchy sex kitty as sassy as Kim Novak.2