Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  Ford’s meditation on politics becomes, finally, his statement on Hollywood. Although conservative, he had no use for the opportunists who abounded, particularly Cecil B. DeMille, whose well-documented anti-Semitism Ford could not stand, and who saw in DeMille a user of the difficult political times of the fifties to promote himself through hollow biblical epics that were thinly disguised calls for unquestioned allegiance. Ford would take no part in what he considered the hypocrisy that had become the by-product of politically paranoid Hollywood, and a large part of what Liberty Valance is about has to do with the nature of those forced to sacrifice themselves, along with their times, to make the future a better place.

  For students of film, all of this comes down to an even higher truth—the poetic veracity of “the shot.” When Stoddard is finally called out by Valance, he “miraculously” wins the duel, and subsequently marries the girl, runs for office, becomes a senator, and lives off the fame and fortune riding the town of Valance has brought him. At first, to the audience, it appears that Stoddard somehow did outdraw Valance, but in flashback we learn the terrible secret behind Stoddard’s entire career, the lie that he has kept alive all those years: that it was Doniphon, standing down the road, who actually killed Valance but took no credit for it, unselfishly letting Stoddard get the glory and all that went with it, for the good of the town. To Stoddard, the feud between him and Valance was personal, mano-a-mano, and none of anyone’s business. Only by showing the audience the scene from another angle does Ford allow the truth to be seen. The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God, while its mise-enscène is a description of deception, Hollywood style, the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera sees it from where the director has placed it.

  In Liberty, Jimmy performs yet another of his amazing aging acts. At the age of fifty-four, he begins the movie as a young tenderfoot lawyer who can be no more than twenty-five, then manages to pull off the youthful part of his role far better than he does the “old” Stoddard. His performance is filled with all the nuances, edgy rawness, and subtle soft-spoken qualities that were the essential elements of his star power, something that Jimmy still had in abundance.

  In every sense, then—cinematically, narratively, in the precision of the performances, the film’s direction and its powerful themes—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ranks among the best work of Ford’s and Jimmy’s careers.

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was released in the fall of 1962 to mixed reviews. The Los Angeles Times said it was “old hat,” the New York Times called it “creaky,” and Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, dismissed it as a parody of Ford’s best work. The film proved a box-office dud, was quickly pulled from release, and remains to this day rarely seen, one of the forgotten moments of sixties-movie greatness.

  For Jimmy, the film’s failure made him see clearly that he could no longer play the energetic, youthful (if no longer young) idealist that had sustained him for so long. What to do next became a personal as much as professional existential dilemma. As an actor who defined the days of his life through the roles he inhabited, film was his true life’s blood; to Jimmy, it was beginning to feel terribly thin.

  To try to stop the bleeding, he signed a multiple-picture deal with Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox to star in a series of films, the first of which was a Nunnally Johnson–written domestic comedy, directed by old friend Henry Koster. Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation was the brainchild of independent producer Jerry Wald, his eighth and final project under a multiple-picture deal he had with Fox.4 Apparently, Wald had trouble attracting talent to the film. After purchasing the rights to the original novel, Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation by Edward Streeter, he offered it to writers S. J. Perelman and James Thurber for adaptation to the screen. They read the book and turned him down. Wald then gave it to Johnson. Directorial duties were offered to Leo McCarey, who was willing to helm it but became unavailable due to illness. Jimmy, who had already signed on, suggested Koster, his director for No Highway in the Sky. Wald then decided that Maureen O’Hara was “wrong” for the domesticated housewife opposite Jimmy. He offered to buy her out of the film and give her another one, then offered the role to virtually every older leading lady in town, including Loretta Young, Polly Bergen, Lucille Ball, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell. When they all turned thumbs down on the project, Wald went back and rehired O’Hara, at a considerable increase in salary.

  Hobbs was a fat but hollow comedy, in which, like the three others to follow, Jimmy’s character would disappear into the lush Technicolor backgrounds, making faces of befuddlement over the behavior of his children/teenagers/wife, as he gently crinkle-eyed his way into the fabric of film-fare middle age—fathers in cardigans who no longer work, have no career or interests in anything but the weather, have lots of kids but no sex, and seemingly endless amounts of money.

  Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation went into production that November, just days after Valance had wrapped. At least in Hobbs, Jimmy was allowed to play a realistically close-to-his-own-age character (he was fifty-five when production started). His screen wife, Maureen O’Hara, was forty-one at the time. They go away for a quiet vacation and family chaos ensues. In a performance that seemed phoned in from the sleep ward, Stewart’s special ability to show up quietly and at the same time be noticed on-screen came into full use.

  He understood well the limitations of Hobbs, but at this stage of his career, it was less important to him what film he was making than the fact that he was making a film at all. He cranked his performance out smoothly, like a well-oiled machine, and it seemed to please him, until, in the middle of production of Hobbs, tragedy struck.

  The call came from Gloria while he was on Hobbs’ Carrillo Beach. She had just heard from the family. Alexander had suffered a stroke. He had been taken to the Cleveland Clinic, then sent home. He was not expected to live.

  Jimmy immediately left the set, drove home, picked up Gloria, and went to the airport. They arrived in Indiana the morning of December 28. Jimmy rushed directly to his father’s bedside and stayed there until it was over.

  After the funeral, he and Gloria returned to Hollywood, where he finished work on Mr. Hobbs. An inconsolable Jimmy Stewart did not step in front of a big-screen movie camera again for nearly a year and a half.

  25

  “This aging problem is not so bad for men as it is for the girls. I know that I have changed. I’ve lost a lot of hair and I’m getting some new lines in my face. I keep in pretty good shape though—play a lot of golf. What is amazing is how some of my friends keep looking so young. My old friend Hank Fonda still looks like a young man—and he’s two years older than I am!”

  —JIMMY STEWART

  Grief was not the only reason Jimmy did not immediately return to making movies. At least part of it had to do with the ongoing crisis at Fox studios, where, just before Alexander’s death, Jimmy had signed on to star in Koster’s next domestic comedy, Take Her, She’s Mine, based on the hit Broadway comedy by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, the team that had also written The Jackpot. To acquire the rights to the script. Fox had paid Broadway producer Harold Prince $150,000.

  However, before it could go into production, virtually all ongoing Fox projects were shut down and new ones put on hold after the financial debacle that took place as a result of the making of Cleopatra. (The romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had brought international headlines and numerous delays that nearly bankrupted the studio.) It took nothing less than the return of Darryl F. Zanuck, who had gone into independent production to make the highly successful The Longest Day, to get things back on track.1 For the better part of 1962, Take Her, She’s Mine was put on hiatus. No one knew how long the film would be delayed, or if it would ever get made at all. Meanwhile, Jimmy, under contract, had to be ready to begin production on a moment’s notice.

  He kept busy on television, doing another Jack Benny; an episode of the popular Fred MacMurray TV show My Thr
ee Sons (in which he played Brigadier General James Stewart), and a previously signed episode of the Alcoa Hour drama series called “Flashing Spikes,” directed by John Ford.

  He also made a number of public appearances, including the Hollywood premiere at the Fox Wilshire Theater of Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, notable for the turnout/tribute of several of Jimmy’s former co-stars, including Joanne Dru (Thunder Bay), Ruth Hussey (The Philadelphia Story), Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder), and Rosalind Russell (No Time for Comedy), along with his current co-star in Mr. Hobbs, Maureen O’Hara. The ostensible occasion for the reunion was to celebrate Jimmy’s first starring role at Fox back in 1937, in Seventh Heaven, but really, it was to give a show of support for him in his hour of personal darkness.

  Despite the great showing, because of the death of his father his heart wasn’t in it. He had already quietly begun to make plans to get out of his contract at Fox, retire, and move the family out of Beverly Hills to Santa Ynez, where he’d purchased half of an 1,100-acre ranch, for which he paid nearly half a million dollars, a significant addition to his growing portfolio of real estate investments in Beverly Hills, the Valley, and partnerships in dozens of profitable oil wells. The other half of the ranch had been bought by a Florida-based oilman who’d entered into an agreement with Jimmy to turn it into a cattle- and thoroughbred-horse-breeding farm, with the understanding that his interests be limited to business, while Jimmy and his family could live on the rest. One of the reasons Jimmy chose this site was that it was near the Santa Ynez County airport, where he had easy access to his private plane.

  After closing on the ranch, Jimmy took the entire family on another trip to Africa—only the second time all the children had been permitted to come along—and this time, despite the official Stewart family policy of not killing wild game, young Michael, then seventeen, bagged a lion. Although not happy about it, Jimmy quietly congratulated his stepson and let it go at that. The only “weapons” Jimmy carried were Nikon cameras, preferring that brand because the lenses were made bayonet-style, and quickly interchangeable. Peter Stackpole, a former Life photographer and a frequent traveler with the Stewarts, had introduced photography to the family, telling Jimmy, “If you want a record of your trip, take as many pictures as possible; the law of averages is bound to work in your favor.” As Jimmy later recalled, “We used to take movies in the jungle but our 8 mm camera was unfortunately eaten by a hyena one night. Now we just take stills.”

  Not long after their return to the States, Jimmy was off again, this time only with Gloria, for a ten-day holiday to Acapulco. He then sent Gloria back to California while he flew directly to Dallas to record the narration for several air force training films.

  His first day back in L.A. from Dallas, a tour bus pulled up in front of the North Roxbury Drive house, by now a regular stop on the regular “See the Stars Homes” trips through Beverly Hills. Jimmy waved to the tourists and shouted “hi” to the drivers. He knew all of them by name. At that point the bus door opened and a little girl came out and ran over to him. He picked her up, smiled, gave her a little kiss, and put her back down. Her parents came rushing over to apologize. He laughed and invited them all in for some ice cream and soda. Later, when someone asked the family how they had felt during their visit, they smiled and said, “Right at home!”

  That November, How the West Was Won was finally released, the long delay due mostly to technical problems and to everyone’s surprise, no one’s more than Jimmy’s, the film was a smash hit at the box office. Counting both release formats, CinemaScope and regular wide-screen, in its initial domestic release it managed to gross a total of $17 million, more than the long-delayed release of Cleopatra; Zanuck’s other road show, The Longest Day; and David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, to become the number one box-office film of the year.

  The amazing success of what was a quite ordinary movie, its big-screen technology notwithstanding, proved, among other things, that the name James Stewart still had some box-office pull, in this instance enough to thrust him back into the top rank of Hollywood movie stars. He decided to postpone indefinitely both his retirement and the move to the ranch. How the West Was Won proved the catalyst to get the moribund Take Her, She’s Mine back into production, the first post-Cleopatra Fox project to get the green light, with a new, $3.5 million budget personally approved by Zanuck. When asked about the delay, Jimmy, who, up until the success of West had been hoping the film would never get made, put the most positive spin he could on the situation: “It was a profitable wait for the picture. I wish these waits could happen more often for the sake of the script. They’ve had time to polish and tighten it so we’re starting with a script we’ll actually be shooting, instead of one that has to be rewritten as we go along…it was sad that the studio had to shut down, but I think Darryl Zanuck was wise to do what he did.”

  In Take Her, She’s Mine, Jimmy was cast in the role of Frank Michaelson (originally played on Broadway by Art Carney), paternal wisdom-spouting husband of Anne Michaelson (Audrey Meadows in the film) and father of twenty-one-year old Mollie Michaelson (Sandra Dee).2 With less-than-laugh-riot dialogue—such as Dee’s pouting, “Telling me your troubles would be like complaining to Noah about a drizzle”—Jimmy made the film without complaint, more or less walking through it until the last day of shooting.

  In May 1963, news arrived that his father’s widow, his second wife (Jimmy never referred to her as his stepmother), had decided to leave Indiana, Pennsylvania, and move back to her native Canada. He knew this meant the time had come to sell his father’s beloved hardware store that had remained closed since Alexander’s death. “After it was all over and I was alone, I went to the hardware store and let myself in, with a key I hadn’t touched for thirty years. The interior smelled of metal, leather, oil and fertilizer, the odors of my childhood. I sat at his scarred oak desk and idly pulled open the middle drawer. It held a clutter of pencils and paper clips and bolts and paint samples. Something glinted dully among them. I picked up the funeral-train penny with the flattened Indian face and the burst grain. I had lost mine, so now I took his. Then I left the store, locking the door behind me. There have been many offers to buy the business, but I could not endure the thought of another man’s standing in the middle of Dad’s life. I have sold off all the merchandise and today the store is vacant, just as a part of me will always be.”

  Aside from the penny, the only thing Jimmy took back with him to Beverly Hills was his Oscar for The Philadelphia Story. His single comment to the press about this episode was, “It’s sad closing this chapter on a little town which has such deep memories for me.”

  Gloria could plainly see that Jimmy was depressed, and to try to cheer him up, suggested they do something they hadn’t done in nearly ten years—go out to dinner at a public Hollywood nightspot. It was the kind of activity Jimmy had sworn off when he had begun seeing her, and he’d kept to his word, one of the reasons since his marriage that his name had rarely showed up in any of the gossip columns. This time, Gloria insisted, and they went for what he believed was going to be a quiet dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, Chasen’s, the green-and-white bungalow-style establishment on Beverly Boulevard near Doheny Drive he still often frequented for lunch—either the chili and cheese toast—and maybe an afternoon Flame of Love cocktail if he happened to run into old friend Ronald Reagan, or half a salad followed by a house special called Sole Hitchcock (“So special it wasn’t on the menu. It was a secret recipe given to Dave Chasen by Alfred Hitchcock,” recalled Bill Frye). For dessert, Jimmy never varied in his selection—a single scoop of vanilla ice cream. No matter what mood Jimmy was in, he always behaved the same to the staff. Upon making his entrance, he would hand the hatcheck girl a twenty-dollar bill. After a while, there was no need for him to say anything. She would simply break it into three fives and five ones. When she’d hand it back to Jimmy, he’d give her two ones (before leaving the restaurant, he would hand Claude, the headwaiter, one of the five-dollar
bills).

  This night Gloria and Jimmy weren’t in their banquette very long before radio and TV broadcaster Arthur Godfrey—a disciple of the New York City Winchell school of power-schmooze and report-it-the-next-day-on-the-air, who was in town and making the Hollywood rounds—stopped by for a chat. Before he left, Hedda Hopper spied the threesome and invited herself to join the party for a drink. All four were then forced to move to a larger banquette when Jackie Gleason and his drinking pal, Frank Fontaine, a regular on Gleason’s TV show, decided to expand the jamboree. Comic actor Tom Poston came over as well, and pretty soon the night turned into a roaring drink fest. A wobbly Jimmy (who never held his liquor all that well), lost in the swirl of his own soused imagination, was later helped from the car to his front door by Gloria’s firm arms.

  Jimmy agreed to go on a promotional tour for Take Her, She’s Mine. Although he didn’t particularly like the movie, he had nothing much else going on. His ennui had as much to do with the movie itself as with the way the movie business was now being run, as it had changed so completely from his (and its) studio-system heyday. Personal promotion, for instance, during the height of the studio era, had been a relatively rare thing, confined usually to premieres, magazine interviews, and the occasional radio appearance or two. Now, having settled back into the business, he felt obligated to help develop an audience for his films. “It gets difficult to be optimistic in Hollywood,” he said to one reporter, and therefore, found it necessary to “find the audience out there” for them, which he fully intended to do.