Jimmy Stewart
Page 45
Nor was he able to attend any of the celebrations that took place when Vertigo was rereleased yet again, this time in 1993, fully and meticulously restored to its original 70-mm form, with its images considerably brightened, an entirely digitalized soundtrack that brought the beautiful Bernard Herrmann score, conducted by Muir Mathieson, to the forefront; and the warm, rich colors of the first Technicolor, VistaVision version, unseen in its proper ratio and spectrum balance since 1958. Once more, the film was hailed as Hitchcock’s masterpiece, and Jimmy’s acting a feat of contemporary wonder.2
Then, in October 1993, Gloria was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Preferring to die in the only home she had ever lived in with Jimmy, and hoping to do so with dignity, after the first of the new year, she refused any further treatments; she passed away on February 16, 1994, in his arms.
That was really the end for Jimmy. He told friends and family that he no longer wished to live, that his bad heart was shattered emotionally, and that they shouldn’t grieve for him. “I’m devastated,” he said. “I don’t know how I’m going to live without her. The only consolation is knowing that we will soon be reunited. Our love will continue in heaven.”
He spent his last months mostly in bed, drinking and watching television. On January 31, 1997, he tripped over a plant in his bedroom and had to be rushed to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for stitches to close a bloody gash in his forehead. There it was discovered that his skin cancer had returned, and this time it appeared to be untreatable. He was sent home, and six months later, on July 2, at the age of eighty-nine, the exact same age that Alexander had lived to, an embolism lodged in his lungs. The clot caused a heart attack that killed him instantly.
FOOTNOTES
1. The eight films were Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1952), Thunder Bay (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), The Far Country (1955), Strategic Air Command (1955), and The Man from Laramie (1955).
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2. He was always billed as “James Stewart” on-screen, preferred “Jimmy” in real life, was “Jimbo” to his father, “Jimsy” to his mother, and “Jim” only to his best friend, Henry Fonda.
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3. In addition to Mann and Hitchcock, during his long career Stewart made multiple films for the following directors: Frank Capra (three), Clarence Brown (four), Andrew McLaglen (four), Henry Koster (five), John Ford (three) (Stewart did not appear in Ford’s episode of How the West Was Won), W. S. Van Dyke II (three), George Marshall (two), William Wellman (two), H. C. Potter (two), and Richard Thorpe (two).
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1. Stewart never explained to anyone who these “other people” might have been.
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1. Fifty-four out of the 104 students in Stewart’s class went on to Princeton.
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2. Stewart’s first and only public mention of Emma Stewart, whose father was a prominent Indiana lawyer, came nearly sixty years later, upon his return to Indiana to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. According to others in attendance that day, a laughing Stewart vividly recalled the incident.
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3. From the club’s formation thirty-seven years earlier by Booth Tarkington, it was the club’s tradition to take their productions “on the road.”
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4. Perry, like Jimmy, was from Indiana. They had known each other from childhood but were never particularly close. After graduation Perry returned to Indiana and married Jimmy’s sister Doddie.
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5. The Logan-penned song was later recorded by Guy Lombardo, who had a minor hit with it.
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6. The fledgling company had already gone broke once, struggling to keep up with the lease it had signed with the Elizabeth, the local motion picture theater that was otherwise dark Monday and Tuesday nights, for which they had agreed to pay a crippling 50 percent of their gross receipts.
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7. There is no reliable primary or secondary source that confirms this part of the story.
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1. In 1938, MGM made Yellow Jack into a movie directed by George Seitz with Robert Montgomery playing the role Stewart had created on Broadway.
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2. Forgotten by the public, Art Trouble almost never appears in any James Stewart filmographies, but it nevertheless remains notable as his first official appearance in motion pictures.
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3. Once Hopper changed her career and became a syndicated columnist, she continually took credit for “discovering” Stewart. As late as July 14, 1964, Hopper said in the Los Angeles Times that “I appeared in a play with [Stewart] in New York…when I returned to Hollywood, I told Metro about him.”
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1. Rogers’s first marriage was to vaudevillian entertainer Jack (Cul) Pepper.
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2. The film was released in England as Next Time We Live.
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3. A few years later, in 1939, Stanwyck got married for a second time, to movie heman Robert Taylor, who had a reputation as an intense, real-life ladies man. Their marriage lasted twelve years.
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1. Bondi would go on to play Stewart’s mother in several more movies, including George Stevens’s Vivacious Lady (1938), Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and again in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). She and Stewart also appeared in Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), but not as mother/son, and had no scenes together.
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1. This was the kind of film that Thalberg would never have green-lighted. The story was too precious, the relationships too undefined, and the ending too downbeat to qualify as a so-called typical MGM picture. It was, in fact, more suited to Columbia or Paramount. The script was based on “Private Pettigrew’s Girl,” a short story that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1918, at the height of World War One, and had been filmed twice before, once in 1919 as a silent, George Melford’s Pettigrew’s Girl, then again in 1929 as a part-silent, part-talkie directed by Richard Wallace and starring Gary Cooper and Nancy Carroll, this time called The Shopworn Angel. It would also be done again in 1959 by Sidney Lumet, as That Kind of Woman, starring Sophia Loren, Tab Hunter, and George Sanders.
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2. Double-nominee Greta Garbo (Clarence Brown’s Anna Christie and his Romance), Nancy Carroll (Edmund Goulding’s The Devil’s Holiday), Ruth Chatterton (Dorothy Arzner’s Sarah and Son), and Gloria Swanson (Goulding’s The Trespasser) all lost out that year to Shearer.
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3. Shearer was nominated for Best Actress in 1929/30 for E. Mason Hopper’s Their Own Desire, won an Oscar for Robert Z. Leonard’s The Divorcee, was nominated again in 1931 for Clarence Brown’s A Free Soul, again in 1934 for Sidney Franklin’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and again in 1936, the year Thalberg died, for George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet. All of these films were made under the auspices of Thalberg. Her career never fully recovered its momentum after his death, and she retired in 1942.
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4. So powerful was the intensity of this affair that in 1939, a year after his return to New York, Josh Logan directed a Schwartz/ Fields/McEvoy musical called Stars in Your Eyes that played upon the highly publicized Shearer-Stewart romance. The show starred Ethel Merman and Richard Carlson in the “Shearer-Stewart” roles. Jimmy Durante was also featured, as was Logan’s old friend and former University Player Mildred Natwick. The plot of Stars in Your Eyes revolves around an aging movie queen who once owned a movie studio and falls in love with a young, upcoming director. See the chapter notes for more.
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5. Although Capra, in his memoir, claimed to have directed all three and most film authorities agree, based on stylistic evidence, several other s
ources state that Harry Edwards directed Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.
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6. Aka For the Love of Mike.
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7. From 1931’s Platinum Blonde through 1950’s Riding High (Paramount), a total of nine screenplays and four additional films were made from Riskin material, including two remakes.
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8. This five-award sweep of all the major categories holds a unique spot in Hollywood lore, an achievement made all that more remarkable by the fact that Columbia, at the time, had no voting members in the Academy (Capra was, however, heavily involved in the politics of the industry and an ardent supporter of the Academy. He became its president in 1937 and served in that capacity for five years). In the seventy-two years since the One Night coup, only two other films have ever pulled off the top-five sweep: Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991).
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1. Most likely the boy was autistic.
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2. L. B. Mayer had also wanted it for MGM, one of the reasons Cohn was so quick to grab the rights to the play, for a then-unheard-of $200,000. Capra had no love for Mayer, who had fired him during Capra’s days making silent movies. He maintained a lifelong grudge against the studio head, and vowed he’d bury him with the Oscars that You Can’t Take It With You, made at Columbia, would win.
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1. Best Actor that year went to Spencer Tracy, in Norman Taurog’s Boys Town, over nominees Charles Boyer in John Cromwell’s Algiers, James Cagney in Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces, Robert Donat in King Vidor’s The Citadel, and Leslie Howard in Pygmalion, directed by himself and Anthony Asquith. Capra won out over Michael Curtiz for Angels with Dirty Faces, Curtiz again for Four Daughters, Taurog for Boys Town, and King Vidor for The Citadel. Spring Byington lost to Fay Bainter in-William Wyler’s Jezebel. Riskin lost to Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Lewis, and W. P. Lipscomb for their adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. At the time, the Academy made no distinction between original screenplay and adaptation; it did between screenplay and original story, the latter for which Riskin was not nominated, as the film was based on the Broadway show. Walker lost to cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg for The Great Waltz. Capra had previously won Best Director for It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
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2. Gary Cooper was in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and, later on, Meet John Doe (1941).
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3. Their relationship had always been competitive and at times contentious. There is still much debate today about which of the two is responsible for what in their collaborative efforts. After the failure of Lost Horizon, Riskin had begun looking for a new deal, and when the Goldwyn offer came along, he jumped at it.
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4. Buchman would go on to write several more Cary Grant movies, including Frank Lloyd’s The Howards of Virginia (1940) and George Stevens’s The Talk of the Town (1942). Buchman, with Seton I. Miller, won an Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1941 for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, directed by Alexander Hall.
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5. There may have been another reason as well. It was felt by some that besides being politically explosive, the original treatment too closely resembled a Pulitzer prize–winning play by Maxwell Anderson, Both Your Houses. The similarity was discovered by lawyers at Columbia near the completion of Capra’s film, and to avoid any potential legal problems, the studio eventually bought the rights to the Anderson play as well.
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6. Because of the widespread corruption suggested by the script, Capra decided it was best to leave the state unnamed.
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7. Stewart never made any negative public statements about either Arthur or Capra, their professionalism or their politics. It should be noted, however, that he never again worked with Jean Arthur, and did not make another movie with Capra until both had returned from their respective duties serving in the armed forces during World War Two, when neither was able to find film work that easily. Stewart made eight movies before he and Capra reunited one last time to make It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for Capra’s independent Liberty Pictures.
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8. A persistent rumor of the day had Joseph P. Kennedy offering $2 million to Harry Cohn to buy the negative of the film before it officially opened, so he could destroy it.
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1. Jannings actually won the 1928 Oscar for two performances, The Last Command and Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh. Academy rules were eventually changed so that only one performance in any category could be considered for an award, thereby preventing an actor or actress from competing against him- or herself. The other nominees that year were Richard Barthelmess for both John Francis Dillon’s The Noose and Alfred Santell’s The Patent Leather Kid, and Charles Chaplin in his self-directed The Kid. The Last Command also shared Best Picture honors with William Wellman’s Wings.
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2. The seven films they made together as director and star include The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935). During this period, Dietrich made one non-Sternberg film, Rouben Mamoulian’s Song of Songs (1933).
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3. The part went instead to Claire Trevor.
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4. This situation had been resolved by Charles Chaplin, who was married to Goddard at the time and had her under an exclusive contract that gave him final say over what movies she could appear in. Never enthusiastic about Destry, he jumped at the chance to force Goddard out of the film. Chaplin then cast Goddard in his own new movie, The Great Dictator. One final curious note: Goddard and Chaplin divorced in 1942, and sixteen years later she married Remarque, Dietrich’s lover at the time of the making of Destry.
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5. Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory, Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, and Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men.
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6. The other nominees were John Ford for Stagecoach, Sam Wood for Goobye, Mr. Chips, and William Wyler for Wuthering Heights. Destry Rides Again was shut out in this and every other category, having received no nominations.
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7. The other nominees were Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights and Mickey Rooney in Busby Berkeley’s Babes in Arms.
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8. The film was remade in 1949 by MGM as a turn-of-the-century American musical vehicle for Judy Garland and Van Johnson, Robert Z. Leonard’s In the Good Old Summertime, adapted for an original Broadway musical in 1963 called She Loves Me with words and music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and remade again as a non-musical movie in 1998 by Nora Ephron, from her own script, updated and reset in New York City as the e-mail romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the Stewart/Sullavan roles.
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9. The film has since been rediscovered by film enthusiasts and is generally considered to be one of the best movies of the thirties, often ranked by critics and polls in the top one hundred films of all time.
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10.That Uncertain Feeling (1941), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Heaven Can Wait (1943), A Royal Scandal (1945), Cluny Brown (1946), and That Lady in Ermine (1948). The best of these was To Be or Not to Be, a political farce disguised as a screwball comedy that starred Jack Benny and, in her last movie, Carole Lombard (who died in a plane crash in Nevada shortly after completing a War Bond drive. At the time of her death, she was only thirty-four years old and had made an astonishing seventy-one movies). Heaven Can Wait was Lubitsch’s most elegiac movie (not to be confused with the Warren Beatty/Buck Henry Heaven Can Wait [1978], whic
h was actually a remake of Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan [1941]). Lubitsch died eight days into the filming of That Lady in Ermine. The film was completed and credited to Otto Preminger.
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11.Seventh Heaven (1927, silent), awarded in 1929, and Bad Girl (1931, sound).
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12. Because of his thin, nonmuscular frame, Stewart could not lift Sullavan and carry her in his arms for any length of time. As a result, he acquired the on-set nickname of Stringbean. The situation was so bad that a special pulley system had to be concocted to make it appear that Jimmy was able to “heroically” carry Sullavan, a full foot shorter and thirty pounds lighter than him, across the border.
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1. Generally credited with resurrecting Hepburn’s career, Cukor always claimed to have “discovered” Cary Grant, although Grant had made twenty movies before Sylvia Scarlett, and had developed something of a name for himself playing opposite Marlene Dietrich for Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) and opposite Mae West two times, in Lowell Sherman’s She Done Him Wrong (1933) and Wesley Ruggles’s I’m No Angel (1933). In 1954, Cukor, at producer Sid Luft’s urging, performed another female career resurrection à la Hepburn, this time for Judy Garland, against Warner Bros.’ wishes, after she had been released by her contract at MGM, by casting her as the female lead in A Star Is Born.
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2. Cukor was hired to direct Gone With the Wind, but was quickly fired at Gable’s insistence, replaced by his friend, macho film veteran Victor Fleming.
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3. When Grant went to Hepburn to enlist her help to get him the part of Connor, she assured him he could have the role if he really wanted it, but if he were smart, he would listen to Cukor and stick with Haven, a sure-thing Oscar for whatever actor played him. If there was one thing the Oscar-less Grant wanted more than the part of Connor, it was a gold statue from the Academy. Always unsure of himself when it came to casting, Grant went against his own doubting instincts and followed Hepburn’s advice, leaving the role of Connor to Stewart. Cukor assured Grant he had made the right choice.