Jimmy Stewart

A Wonderful Life

Jonathan Coe

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781628728545
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Over a career that spanned forty-three years and seventy-seven films, Jimmy Stewart went from leading man to national idol. Classics such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, Harvey, and, of course, It's A Wonderful Life are far more than mere movies; they are visions of America as it wanted to be seen. With his inimitable (though widely mimicked) down-home drawl, Jimmy Stewart came to embody the ideal American male, lean, affably sarcastic, honorable, endearingly awkward. His double takes were memorable; his way of muttering his asides charmed audiences. Most of all, he was the man whose heart was always in the right place, and who would see always see his way clear to doing the right thing. "If Bess and I had a son, " Harry Truman once said, "we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart."
Jonathon Coe traces Stewart's beginnings in a small town in Pennsylvania, his amateur dramatics and college years at Princeton, and the early films and stardom through to his heroics as an air force pilot during World War II and his triumphant return to Hollywood. Though he was adored in black and white, Stewart's mature work shows his range as an actor, his ability to play far more than just the good-natured leading man. By the time he retired from acting, Stewart had films credits that were unparalleled—and a place in the American heart that was unrivaled. Illustrated with 150 photographs, taken on and off the set, this handsome tribute gives us the private man as well as the screen legend and guides us through the whole wonderful life of Jimmy Stewart.

1

THE IDEAL WAY TO MAKE PICTURES

1908-1938

Frank Capra was the director who made the first decisive intervention in James Stewart’s career. Watching Stewart’s dignified, affecting performance in MGM’s starchy 1937 flagwaver, Navy Blue and Gold, he recognised a valuable asset, one that had not so far been exploited by the directors who had presided over the aimless competence of Stewart’s first dozen or so films, but which Capra himself would soon set about deploying to his own political and cinematic ends. What he saw, in short, was a unique combination of qualities: ‘I sensed the character and rock-ribbed honesty of a Gary Cooper, plus the breeding and intelligence of an Ivy League idealist.’

It’s the second of these qualities that has tended to get overlooked in the fog of mythology surrounding the stories of Stewart’s folksy, small-town background. The family into which he was born, on 20 May 1908, was a wealthy, conservative and educated one. The Stewarts had arrived from Ireland and established themselves in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, at the close of the eighteenth century. Some fifty years later, Stewart’s grandfather founded the town’s hardware store. Ramshackle and quaint though this enterprise has been made to sound over the years (in the course of numerous interviews), it must have developed into an extremely profitable family business; there was enough money around, for instance, to send Stewart’s father Alexander to Princeton, to put his children through private school, and, in 1914, to move the family into a two-storey house at 104 North Seventh Street which still looks fairly imposing today.

By all accounts Alexander, who inherited the store, appears to have run it along unorthodox lines, sometimes preferring to barter rather than accept payment in cash. (A fact that in itself suggests he was not exactly desperate for funds.) A travelling circus passing through town is reported to have paid for its goods with a twelve-foot python, which was put in the shop window and fed live mice by the seven-year-old Stewart. More significantly, another item that came into the store in lieu of payment was an old accordion; it was passed on to Stewart and he learned to play it, an accomplishment that would stand him in good stead at the outset of his dramatic career.

Stewart with his mother, Elizabeth: the earliest surviving photograph.

The atmosphere in the Stewart household seems to have been energetic, boisterous and informal; Stewart has spoken of his father being ‘pugnacious and gay, full of a thirst for adventure’, and one is irresistibly reminded of the noisy, life-loving Bailey family in the early scenes of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Their dynamism and confidence, however, had a firm grounding in conservative values. The Stewarts were dutiful members of the First Presbyterian Church of Indiana, and fervent patriots with a long history of military involvement. Stewart’s great-great-grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, and since then, in the words of a childhood friend, Bill Moorhead, ‘there has been a Stewart in every American war: it didn’t matter if they were under weight or over age – somehow they managed to find ways to serve their country’. Stewart’s mother recalled that when Alexander enlisted to fight in World War I (at the age of forty-six), the young Jimmy persuaded her to buy him a miniature soldier suit, which he wore constantly while his father was away and would not even allow her to wash. Echoes of this early fetish for all things military can be noticed in the happiness and sense of ease that would later beam out of Stewart’s face whenever he got to wear a uniform on screen – as, for example, in Born to Dance, Shopworn Angel, The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command.

Among the more frequently repeated anecdotes dating from this period are the stories of how Stewart nearly killed himself, at the age of four, by tying a box kite to his go-cart and attempting to fly it from the roof of the house; how he staged amateur dramatic productions in his parents’ basement (patriotic affairs, naturally, with titles like The Slacker and To Hell with the Kaiser) and how he later assisted as a projectionist at the local cinema during his school holidays. Tempting though it may be to see these as pointers towards his future career and lifelong interest in aviation, it seems equally truthful to say that they sound like the more or less typical enthusiasms of any resourceful, imaginative young boy growing up in such a time and place. Stewart has said that he ‘can’t recall anything unpleasant’ from his childhood, and this implies that there was rarely any painful conflict with the parental values which dictated, among other things, that his schooling should take place at Mercersburg Academy, a local private boarding school steeped in Presbyterian ritual and tradition. Similarly, he deferred to his father’s wishes at the end of his prep-school years, when it came to the choice of college: Stewart himself favoured the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but Alexander wanted him to go to Princeton, of which he had fond memories from his own student days.

As it turned out, the move to Princeton was a very fortuitous one. Not that Stewart had now found his feet academically: he began as an engineering major (but couldn’t cope with calculus), switched to political science (but found that his reading speeds weren’t up to it) and finally studied architecture, in which he graduated with honours. His extra-curricular activities at Princeton, however, would signal the discovery of his true vocation. Whereas at Mercersburg he had directed most of his energies towards the track and football teams, with a token appearance in the class play The Wolves somehow squeezed in along the way, at Princeton these priorities would be reversed. Finding his lanky build more and more of a liability on the football field, Stewart turned increasingly to drama, and was one of more than two hundred hopefuls who auditioned for Princeton’s famous theatre group, the Triangle Club. He performed a not very distinguished audition piece – the director apparently had trouble adjusting to his softly-spoken mannerisms – but was recruited anyway, mainly on the strength of his accordion-playing.

Although Stewart also belonged to another student group, Théâtre Intime, which specialised in serious drama, he was clearly more at home in the Triangle productions – light-hearted affairs with an emphasis on music and undergraduate humour. They would open on campus and then go on tour across the country, often attracting a good deal of attention from the Hollywood and Broadway talent scouts. Stewart took only minor parts in his first two years, and his contributions were predominantly musical. His singing voice has always been excellent (it can be heard to best advantage in MGM’s Born to Dance) and he even cut a record as lead vocalist at this time, on a song called ‘Love Comes But Once’, which was written by his fellow student Jose Ferrer and performed by his band The Pied Pipers. It was while performing a musical number entitled ‘Blue Hell’ in the 1928 Triangle production, The Golden Dog, that Stewart was spotted by the writer and star of the show, Josh Logan. Logan was taken by the ‘attractive personality’ that Stewart projected on stage, but recalled that when he asked the incipient architect whether he had ever considered becoming a professional actor, he simply turned on his heel and ‘walked away as if I had slandered him’. Two years later, however, Logan would write an entire show specifically with Stewart in mind. It was called The Tiger Smiles, and won its leading actor a favourable review and a picture in Time magazine. Stewart’s leisurely, naturalistic delivery and (perhaps calculated) air of amateurism made a very favourable impression upon audiences. ‘He spoke in a stately pavane even then,’ Logan has written. ‘He still felt he was an architect. This stage “monkey business” was just fun. But he was so good I knew deep down he loved acting but was too embarrassed to admit it.’

On stage (seated, far right) in the Théâtre Intime production of NERISSA, 1930.

Stewart, Josh Logan (centre) and Marshall Dana in the 1930 Triangle Club production, THE TIGER SMILES.

Prior to writing this show, Logan had been involved in setting up a theatre group called the University Players, which was based at a movie theatre in West Falmouth on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Conceived as a collaborative venture between Princeton’s Théâtre Intime and the Harvard Dramatic Society, it soon expanded to include performers from Smith, Yale, Vassar and Radcliffe. In its brief existence (from July 1928 to November 1932) it built up an impressive reputation, and several of its members went on to successful Hollywood careers – notably Henry Fonda, Myron McCormick and Margaret Sullavan. The troupe was youthful, idealistic and highly volatile. ‘We were totally involved, ecstatically alive,’ according to Logan, who also observed, rather more coolly, ‘The energy of two dozen undiscovered stars, the mixture of grand and poor, mostly poor, the fact that everyone was nearly the same age, the lack of a principal or teacher to shake fingers or teach “academic precepts” – all of this made for a kind of hell … Physical fights were non-...