by Marc Eliot
While Jimmy appreciated the honor, it made him a little uneasy. To him museums were like graveyards, he told one friend, and he wasn’t quite ready to go there yet.
But death was hovering. A day after his induction, word reached him that his youngest sister, Virginia, had, after a brief illness, died in Hastings-on-Hudson. That news drove him back to Harvey, whose unreality had become his favorite escape from grief. He agreed to do it once more, this time as a TV film—once more calling upon Helen Hayes and Jesse White from the successful Broadway run, and adding John McGiver as the doctor and Madeline Kahn as the nurse (Kahn’s appearance propelled her to stardom). But the one true constant for Jimmy, the one character that only he could cast because only he could see him, was Harvey the six-foot rabbit, who had, through the years, become part confessor, part shield, part comforter and all escape.
Harvey did well in the ratings, and Jimmy was soon offered another TV series, this one more closely suited to his age, skills, and temperament. What also made it more feasible was the word in Hollywood that Cary Grant, the elusive free agent was considering doing a TV series as well, and that he was negotiating in the $35,000-per-show range. That not only legitimized any screen actor going to the tube, but set a bar for money that few would turn down.5
In November 1972, Jimmy put his signature on a contract with his old studio, MGM, this time moving over to the TV division to star in Hawkins on Murder, a made-for-TV movie. The character had already become something of a TV staple thanks to Jimmy’s original portrayal of Paul Biegler in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, a so-called backwoods attorney who outsmarts the big-city boys, and makes the audience love him for it. In true television style, he was now about to play a derivation of his own original movie character.
The same week he inked the contract, Jimmy became a grandfather for the first time. Michael and his wife, Barbara, were living in London while Michael attended Oxford Law, and Barbara gave birth to a baby boy they named Benjamin.6
Hawkins on Murder aired in March 1973 to surprisingly good reviews. Fred Silverman, the head of programming at CBS, a slightly roundish, big man with a loping walk and slicked black hair, believed that older audiences were the essential prime viewers of television, and ordered seven ninety-minute episodes of Hawkins to rotate with the TV version of Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree in the role he had originated in the movies. This time around, Jimmy had it written into his contract that he would not work past six o’clock on any given day, no matter how much the production needed him.
The end of the first season brought a Golden Globe Award for Jimmy as Best Actor in a TV series. The network was ecstatic, and Silverman was planning an even more ambitious scope for the show the second year. Jimmy took a meeting with him, listened to all he had to say, including the considerable bump in salary, then politely turned him down. There would be no second season, he told Silverman. Too much hard work, he said, too little that was special about the medium, especially the lack of great directors. Instead, in April 1974, Jimmy made a brief appearance in MGM’s feature That’s Entertainment, directed by Jack Haley Jr., which highlighted the musical moments that had made the studio a legend. Jimmy, appearing before a movie camera for the first time in three years, introduced his version of “Easy to Love” from Born to Dance as a bit of amusing trivia squeezed in between the great sequences of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds, Judy Garland, Eleanor Powell, Cyd Charisse, and many others.
Two months later, wanting to spend time with his new grandson, he and Gloria traveled to London to appear yet again in Harvey, directed this time by distinguished British actor Anthony Quayle. Equity rules prevented Helen Hayes from repeating her role there, which went to the London stage star Mona Washbourne. The run opened April 5, 1975, the final performance underscored by six curtain calls for Jimmy, demanded by the tuxedoed, celebrity-studded audience.
For the run, Jimmy and Gloria moved into a small house on the outskirts of London, with room enough for their daughter Judy, who stayed with them and never missed a single performance of the show.
As it happened, also appearing on the London stage was Henry Fonda, reprising his successful one-man Broadway portrayal of Clarence Darrow. The cover of the September 1 issue of People magazine featured them both on the front page, sitting on a park bench in Grosvenor Square, Jimmy with his accordion on his shoulders, Fonda with his long legs stretched out, together on the other side of their lives.
The two old friends did, indeed, go to the park often during the day; they’d sit and speak little, Jimmy occasionally pulling apart the bellows and softly playing a tune that came out sounding as thin as a whistle, while Fonda sat wordless, slowly moving his feet back and forth in rhythm. They hardly spoke a word to each other; they didn’t have to. There was nothing left between them that needed to be said.
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“Jimmy loved to work. In 1975 he was asked to do a run of Harvey on the stage in London. It’s about a nebbishy man who has an invisible six-foot rabbit for a friend. My producer friend Jim Wharton and I went over to see it, and Jimmy gave a magnificent performance. I’ll never forget his curtain call. He came out, and took a bow, and the English audience gave him a standing ovation. Then he did something magical. He turned to the wings and said, ‘Come on, Harvey, everyone wants to see you.’ By his gestures, he brought Harvey to the middle of the stage and put his arm around him. Everybody in that theater would have sworn that he could actually see Harvey standing there with Jimmy. Then Jimmy stepped back and gave Harvey a solo bow, and the audience went wild.”
—WILLIAM FRYE
Jimmy waited until the London run of the show closed before announcing his “semiretirement” from film. “I don’t think I’ll be making many more movies,” he told a People magazine reporter upon his return to the United States. “I just don’t fit in anymore.” Having read a script he was offered, he said “Frankly, I don’t even understand who the hell is doing what to whom—or why…”
With that, he settled back into the comfort and sanctity of North Roxbury Drive, aware that he had entered the final stretch and was moving headlong toward the finish line. The relatively quick succession of deaths—his mother, his father, his son, and his sister, had parted the clouds of life between him and the entrance to the gates of heaven. For the first time, he seemed resigned to take that last long walk into his own legend.
When the news that Leland Hayward had passed away that March, in 1971, at the age of sixty-eight, Jimmy dropped into an even deeper depression. Five months later, on August 31, during production of one of the occasional “special” episodes of Hawkins, word reached Jimmy on-set that John Ford had died. Not long after, Dave Chasen, the always gracious host of Jimmy’s and Ronald Reagan’s favorite restaurant, the ultimate Hollywoodian who had given Jimmy such a memorable bachelor party, met his maker. Then Bill Grady, the man who had been so crucial to Jimmy’s early, formative film years at MGM, passed on. And then in December 1974, Jack Benny, Jimmy’s good friend and neighbor, host of the TV show in which Jimmy appeared almost every Christmas with Gloria to replay what was essentially the same episode of them eating in a restaurant trying to avoid the company of the over-bearing Benny and his wife.
At every one of their funerals, Jimmy was called upon to share his memories of the deceased, an obligation that became emotionally more difficult each time. It was why he had stressed to reporters, whenever asked, that he was only semiretired, believing that as long as he kept working, kept one hand in the game doing an occasional episode of Hawkins, he could prolong these last years as much as possible.
It did not mean, however, that he would do anything. As always, Jimmy maintained strict limits as to what he would allow himself to be in. When work did come his way, if he didn’t think it was the right type of material, he’d turn it down, no matter how much he wanted to be back in front of a movie camera.
Such was the case when director Peter Bogdanovich and author Larry McMurtry, both of whom
had hit it big with The Last Picture Show in 1971.1 They wanted to return to the cinematic turf of melancholic Texas with something called Streets of Laredo, a late-ninetenth-century tale built around a group of aging rangers who travel the herd to Montana. Stewart read the script and rejected it, saying that it sounded like three old fogies, referring to the dream cast Bogdanovich had wanted—Jimmy, Fonda, and John Wayne.2
Jimmy still wanted to work with Wayne one more time, though, as a way to honor John Ford, and, after reading and rejecting dozens of scripts, found one both he and the Duke could agree on, The Shootist, to be directed by Don Siegel (1976). It was to be Wayne’s last film, in which the character’s death on-screen anticipated the actor’s death off it. Wayne was in the late stages of terminal cancer and, in true (Hollywood) cowboy style, insisted on going out with his boots on. Jimmy played Wayne’s doctor, who has the unenviable task of telling his character he’s dying of cancer. At the end of the picture, when a climactic shoot-out has taken Wayne’s life before the disease can finish him off, Stewart stands over the actor’s bullet-riddled body and remembers the character. Less than three years later, in 1979, Jimmy would stand over the Duke’s casket to remember the actor.
In the winter of 1976, the scales of life and death continued to balance. That February, Jimmy became a grandfather for the second time when his stepson Michael and his wife, Barbara, had another baby boy. The happy event occurred just after the completion of production on The Shootist, and when Jimmy had just begun to actively campaign for Ronald Reagan, then waging a furious campaign for the Republican nomination for president against the incumbent, the appointed but unelected Gerald Ford. Reagan, sensing he could beat Ford, even after he had pardoned Richard Nixon, a move that proved highly unpopular with the electorate, took Jimmy along to as many rallies as he could manage—seven key states in the Midwest, numerous one-stop airports, and enclosed lime green shopping malls with artificial flowers and fast-food courts, places where, Reagan knew, “his” people would turn out in large number to see not just him, but Jimmy as well.
In the speech Jimmy gave and never wavered from, he reassured audiences that despite all that had happened to him in his personal life, an oblique reference, perhaps, to the death of his son in Vietnam, “I’m more conservative now, if anything. I’ve always been a Republican conservative and promilitary, ever since I supported Eisenhower and Nixon.”
Jimmy’s campaigning persona was decidedly low-key, somebody resembling an older Jefferson Smith, as he’d tell the people that it was in their best interests to nominate and then elect Ronald Reagan.
Shortly after Ford won the nomination (but not the presidency, which went to Jimmy Carter, thereby setting up Reagan’s 1980 victorious march to the White House), Jimmy and Gloria made plans to travel once more to Kenya, where Kelly had lived almost continually since the moment of her high school graduation and where she was now engaged to University of Cambridge professor Alexander Harcourt. Upon their return, Jimmy and Gloria spent time with Michael, Barbara, and the grandchildren, now living in Phoenix.
Whenever they were home in Los Angeles, Gloria ran their social lives, concentrating on various charitable activities. At one Annual Beastly Ball, sponsored by the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association, Jimmy paid $4,600 to become the “adoptive father” of an orangutan. Mostly, however, she carefully limited their outings to places and events where Jimmy would feel most comfortable among their closest friends, among them the Reagans who, like the Stewarts, still loved to go to Chasen’s for dinners, and perhaps do a little dancing afterward. Even here, among friends, Jimmy tended to stay by himself, withdrawn, preoccupied, alone in the crowd. If he talked to anyone, he preferred it to be Reagan, sharing a drink while discussing politics in a corner somewhere while Gloria played the role of life of the party for the both of them.
Later that year, good friend and producer William Frye got Jimmy to agree to star in Airport ’77, a sequel to the smash Airport series of disaster films, part of the then-popular cycle that had followed in the wake of the amazing success of Ronald Neame’s 1972 The Poseidon Adventure, with big stars doing cameos in larger-than-life nightmares. “Gloria, Jimmy and I were staying with friends at a ranch in Mexico, and I was working on the script of the film,” Frye later recalled. “I asked him if he’d like to read it, and he said sure. The next day he said, ‘Who’s going to play Mr. Stevens?’ referring to a small part in the picture. ‘You, I hope,’ I said, and to my delight he agreed.”
Phillip Stevens is an aging billionaire (said to be based on J. Paul Getty), who is not on board the ill-fated crash but part of the obligatory cast of characters anxiously awaiting to find out who will survive and who won’t.
The film premiered at the Anchorage Fine Arts Museum in Alaska and was well received by critics. It eventually grossed approximately $15 million in its initial domestic release and went on to be seventeenth on the list of top grossers for 1978. It wasn’t a flop, but neither was it the kind of smash that would change anyone’s life, especially Jimmy’s.
Frye then asked Gloria and Jimmy if they would do some overseas promotion for the film, and they agreed. The world tour included Alaska, Australia, Bangkok, and Japan. “We got into Tokyo very late at night,” recalled Frye. “When we were getting off the plane, an official told us we could get out the back way, and Jimmy said, ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ The official said there were maybe eight or ten thousand people at the airport ‘waiting for you.’ ‘Waaalll, in that case,’ Jimmy said, ‘I’ve gotta go out there. If they came all the way to see me, I’m not going out any back way!’ It took us forever to get out of that airport!”
One of the stops was Hong Kong, where in their free time they toured the countryside. One afternoon a guide suggested that even though they didn’t have the proper permits, they should all drive out to a high point where they could stand on a peak and look over to the Communist mainland. At the foot of the rise, the driver stopped the car and said he could go no farther. At that point, Jimmy got out and went alone up to the high point, where he stood gazing unsmiling into the great expanse, even as the official Hong Kong guards at the base of the hill pushed each other out of the way to get a glimpse of the legendary American movie star. Mr. Glenn Miller! Mr. Shenandoah! they shouted up at him. He turned, waved, and then went back down to his waiting ride.
In January 1978, Jimmy did something that struck many as odd and slightly defeatist, but that didn’t bother him at all; he signed on to appear as spokesman in a series of sixty-second spots for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, to be aired during NFL games, the World Series of Golf, and the baseball playoffs, for a fee of more than $1 million. To Jimmy, being in front of the camera was what it was all about. Besides, he was friends with Leonard and Harvey Firestone, the sons of the corporation’s founder, since they were all classmates at Princeton. When the brothers got word of Jimmy’s desire to work, they came up with the commercial campaign. For his part, Jimmy was all too happy to lend his name and prestige to a company that had lately come under fire over safety issues involving its Firestone 500 tire.
After he finished shooting the spots, he took a brief vacation with Gloria to Denver. When a reporter there asked him what he was up to, he said he had come to celebrate the thirty-fifth birthday of an old friend. Who might that be the reporter asked? “Harvey,” Jimmy replied.
In the fall, Jimmy appeared in Michael Winner’s 1978 remake of Raymond Chandler’s often filmed novel The Big Sleep, starring Robert Mitchum as the fabled Philip Marlowe. Mitchum, during production, rather ingloriously commented to the press that while the picture was all about corpses, one of his living co-stars, meaning Jimmy, looked deader than any of them. They did not remain friends.
Also that fall, Jimmy appeared in Don Chaffey’s G-rated The Magic of Lassie, co-starring Mickey Rooney, and The Green Horizon, a Japanese-produced venture set in Kenya that went straight to cable TV and eventually video. The reason he agreed to be in it: Gloria wanted to go on safari and
they both wanted the opportunity to visit Kelly, who was living in Rwanda.
One event that did matter a great deal to him was the 1979 American Film Institute Tribute to Henry Fonda, who had been chosen to join a prestigious handful of Hollywood greats, including John Ford, James Cagney, Orson Welles, William Wyler, Bette Davis, and Alfred Hitchcock. Jimmy couldn’t resist using the opportunity to tease his old friend about his acting and his politics. “You know,” Jimmy said, referring to the night he won the Best Actor Oscar over Fonda for The Philadelphia Story: “I voted for you against myself for your performance in The Grapes of Wrath in 1941…of course, I also voted for Alfred Landon, Wendell Wilkie and Thomas Dewey.”
In May 1979, his daughter Judy married Steven Merrill, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco ten years her senior. The marriage took place at North Roxbury, two weeks shy of Jimmy and Gloria’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. The celebratory tone of the wedding was somewhat muted when word reached Jimmy that his one-time roommate in New York City and Los Angeles, Johnny Swope, had passed away.
Upon completion of The Green Horizon, Jimmy, now in his early seventies, reluctantly removed the semi from the retired of his future agenda. He also hung up his flying wings, when the latest round of qualifying tests revealed that his hearing had gotten so bad and his reflexes so slow, he should no longer pilot any aircraft.
After that life became, for Jimmy, a series of live memorials. Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, he gained the unique position of witnessing the value of his own life while still alive—at most of the events that chose to celebrate him, he was treated as if he were already dead. He made numerous “Grand Marshal” appearances at parades where he served as something of a living float, sat patiently through commercialized “lifetime tributes” on TV, numerous rubber-chicken Variety Club nights of honor; he accepted walls-full of lifetime achievement awards, including one from the Beverly Hills branch of the Friars Club attended by such Friars luminaries as Cary Grant, June Allyson, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Cukor, Lucille Ball, Jack Lemmon, Gregory Peck, Mervyn LeRoy, and Henry Fonda, and which was presented by former president Gerald Ford.