James Stewart

• 1. Introduction

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  James Stewart gave away his only competitive Academy Award. He won Best Actor for the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, then handed the statuette to his father, who set it in the window of the family hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania. It sat there beside other family awards and military medals. That gesture says a lot about a man who appeared in 80 films between 1935 and 1991, yet privately believed the academy had given him the wrong prize for the wrong year. Stewart thought his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was better. He suspected the win was an apology for being passed over the year before. How does an actor ranked third on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest American male actors end up doubting his own talent for decades? How did a shy boy who built model airplanes in a basement become both a beloved everyman on screen and a brigadier general in the United States Air Force? And why did the film that now defines him fail so completely when it first reached theaters?

• 2. The Hardware Store Son

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  Alexander Maitland Stewart ran the J. M. Stewart and Company Hardware Store and expected his only son to take it over. The Stewart family had lived in Pennsylvania for many generations, and the path was fixed: Princeton University, then the store, as was the family tradition. James Maitland Stewart was born on the 20th of May 1908, the eldest child and only son, with two younger sisters, Mary and Virginia. The family was of Scottish and Ulster-Scots ancestry, deeply Presbyterian, and devout.

  Music filled the household because Stewart's mother was a pianist. When a customer could not pay his bill, Stewart's father accepted an old accordion as payment, and a local barber taught young James to play it. That accordion followed him for the rest of his career, a fixture offstage during filming. A shy child, he spent his hours after school in the basement with model airplanes, mechanical drawings, and chemistry sets, all aimed at a single dream of going into aviation.

  He was not a gifted student and earned average to low grades at the Wilson Model School. His teachers blamed daydreaming and creativity rather than any lack of intelligence. His father, a member of the Princeton class of 1898, doubted public school would get his son admitted, so he sent him to Mercersburg Academy prep school in the fall of 1923. There Stewart ran track as a high jumper, edited the yearbook art, sang in the glee club, and made his first stage appearance as Buquet in a 1928 production of The Wolves.

  Charles Lindbergh's first solo transatlantic flight deepened his obsession with the sky. Yet his father steered him toward Princeton, and Stewart abandoned the idea of becoming a pilot. He enrolled in 1928, majored in architecture, and joined the Princeton Charter Club. His thesis on an airport terminal design earned him a scholarship for graduate study. He turned it down to join a summer stock troupe called the University Players on Cape Cod.

• 3. The Long Apprenticeship

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  The New Yorker once praised a chauffeur who appeared for three minutes and walked off to spontaneous applause. That chauffeur was Stewart, in the early-1930s Broadway comedy Goodbye Again, his second New York role. The first had come weeks earlier in the brief run of Carry Nation. At the University Players he had met Joshua Logan, Myron McCormick, and a married couple named Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan, who became lasting friends. After Cape Cod he moved to New York with several of them.

  Progress was slow and humbling. Stewart took a stage manager job in Boston and was fired for frequently missing his cues. Back in New York he landed a part in All Good Americans, where his job was to throw a banjo out a window. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote that throwing a $250 banjo at the concierge was constructive abuse that should be virtuously applauded. The plays kept folding after short runs, and Stewart began thinking about returning to his studies.

  Yellow Jack changed his mind. Cast in the lead as a soldier who becomes the subject of a yellow fever experiment, he won unanimous critical praise when it opened at the Martin Beck Theater in March 1934. Audiences stayed away, and it closed by June. That summer he made an unbilled film debut in the comedy short Art Trouble, filmed in Brooklyn.

  Talent scout Bill Grady had tracked Stewart since seeing him perform at Princeton, and in 1935 he signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His first Hollywood role was minor, in the Spencer Tracy film The Murder Man. MGM saw no leading man in him. Biographer Michael D. Rinella described the studio's view of a lanky young bumpkin with a hesitant manner of speech.

• 4. Made A Star By A Woman

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  Margaret Sullavan campaigned to make Stewart her leading man in the 1936 Universal romantic comedy Next Time We Love. She rehearsed with him extensively, building his confidence and helping him fold his mannerisms and boyishness into a screen persona. The film succeeded, and Time magazine noted that the chief significance of the picture might lie in the presence of James Stewart in its cast.

  Director Edward H. Griffith said Sullavan made Stewart a star by co-starring with him in four films. Yet Sullavan was the focus of his early romantic feelings, and those feelings went one way. He was smitten when they met at the University Players and invited her on a date. She regarded him as a close friend and co-worker, protective and maternal toward him, but never romantic. Stewart never directly revealed his feelings, though she was always aware of them. In The Shopworn Angel in 1938, he drew on his own unrequited love while she was married to his agent, Leland Hayward. The film's director, H. C. Potter, later suggested they might have married had Stewart been more forthcoming.

  Frank Capra supplied the breakthrough. Impressed by Stewart's role as a Naval Academy football player in Navy Blue and Gold, Capra cast him in the ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You in 1938, opposite Jean Arthur. Capra called him one of the best actors ever to hit the screen, a man who understood character archetypes intuitively and needed little directing. The film became the fifth highest-grossing of the year and won Best Picture.

  The collaboration continued in 1939 with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where Stewart played an idealist thrown into the political arena. The Nation declared he had taken first place among Hollywood actors. He won the New York Film Critics Circle award and his first Academy Award nomination. By now his slow drawl was so familiar from radio shows like the Lux Radio Theater that comedians had begun impersonating him.

• 5. Private To Colonel

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  Stewart was rejected for being underweight in November 1940 before he ever wore a uniform. He enlisted anyway in February 1941, becoming the first major American movie star to join the United States Army to fight in World War II. His family carried deep military roots. Both grandfathers fought in the Civil War, and his father served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I.

  Already an avid pilot with a commercial license and over 400 hours of flying time, he reported for induction as a private on the 22nd of March 1941. He was nearly 33, over the age limit for Aviation Cadet training, so he applied for a commission as both a college graduate and a licensed commercial pilot. He received it as a second lieutenant on the 1st of January 1942. A recruiting short he made, Winning Your Wings, drew an estimated 150,000 new recruits.

  Stewart feared his fame would keep him behind the lines. After training pilots for over a year at Kirtland Army Airfield in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he appealed to his commander and was sent to England in November 1943 to fly B-24 Liberators with the 703d Bomb Squadron. He flew from RAF Tibenham and later RAF Old Buckenham. A mission to Ludwigshafen, Germany, on the 7th of January 1944 earned him a promotion to major.

  His decorations included the Distinguished Flying Cross, the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. Promoted to full colonel on the 29th of March 1945, he became one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in only four years. In early June 1945 he presided over the court martial of a crew that accidentally bombed Zurich, Switzerland.

  His military life did not end with the war. He helped found the Air Force Association in October 1945 and later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, completing transition training on the B-47 and B-52. Senator Margaret Chase Smith initially opposed his promotion to brigadier general. He reached that rank on the 23rd of July 1959, becoming the highest-ranking actor in American military history. During the Vietnam War he flew as a non-duty observer on a B-52 bombing mission in February 1966. He retired on the 31st of May 1968 at the mandatory age of 60, and was awarded the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal.

• 6. The Film That Failed Then Found Itself

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  It's a Wonderful Life lost money. Released in 1946 as the first postwar film for both Stewart and Frank Capra, it earned mixed reviews and only moderate box office, failing to cover its production costs. Several critics found it too sentimental. Stewart had nearly walked away from acting altogether, considering a return to Pennsylvania to run the family store.

  Capra gave him what Stewart called a new beginning. He played George Bailey, a small-town man driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, then led to reassess his life by an angel second class named Clarence Odbody, played by Henry Travers. During filming Stewart doubted his own abilities and kept thinking about retiring. President Harry S. Truman said that if he and his wife had a son, they would want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart in that film.

  The movie's revival came through a quirk of law. After its copyright expired in the early 1970s, frequent television showings turned it into a beloved Christmas classic. The American Film Institute now counts it among the 100 best American movies ever made. Critic Andrew Sarris argued the performance had been underappreciated, calling the proposal scene with Donna Reed one of the most sublimely histrionic expressions of passion. Stewart named it his personal favorite of all his films.

  Harvey followed a similar arc. Stewart first played the genial Elwood P. Dowd, whose best friend is an invisible man-sized rabbit, on Broadway in July 1947, replacing Frank Fay during a vacation. The 1950 film adaptation drew mixed reviews and weak box office, yet earned him his fourth Academy Award nomination and grew popular through later television showings. He returned to the role on Broadway in 1970 and won the Drama Desk Award for it.

• 7. Reinvention In The Saddle

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  Winchester '73 changed how Hollywood paid its stars. Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered a deal with Universal in which Stewart took no fee in exchange for a percentage of the profits. He ended up earning about $600,000, far more than his usual rate. Other stars copied the arrangement, and the decaying studio system weakened further. Stewart agreed to the 1950 Western only in exchange for being cast in the screen version of Harvey.

  He chose Anthony Mann to direct, and the Western became his vehicle for reinvention. In Winchester '73 he played a vengeful sharpshooter chasing a stolen rifle toward a showdown with his brother. Across The Naked Spur in 1953 and The Far Country in 1954, Mann developed Stewart into a more mature, ambiguous, edgier presence: troubled cowboys who know violence first-hand and struggle to control it. In 1954 Stewart topped Look magazine's list of the most popular movie stars, displacing rival Western star John Wayne.

  Alfred Hitchcock found other depths. Their collaboration began with Rope in 1948, shot in long real-time takes that left Stewart sleeping little and drinking more heavily under the pressure to be flawless. Rear Window in 1954 cast him as a photographer confined to a wheelchair, forced to act largely through facial responses. The two even formed a corporation, Patron Inc., to produce it. Critic Vincent Canby later called the performance grand and said Stewart's star status had long obscured recognition of his talent.

  Vertigo in 1958 ended the partnership. Stewart played an acrophobic former policeman obsessed with a woman played by Kim Novak. It met unenthusiastic reviews and poor box office on release, though the Sight and Sound critics' poll later ranked it the greatest film ever made in 2012. Hitchcock blamed the failure on Stewart being too old, at 50 and wearing a silver hairpiece, to convincingly be Novak's love interest. He cast Cary Grant in his next film instead, a role Stewart had wanted. Stewart closed the decade with an acclaimed turn as a small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, which brought him his first BAFTA and his fifth and final Academy Award nomination.

• 8. The Guarded Heart

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  John Ford said you do not get to know Jimmy Stewart; Jimmy Stewart gets to know you. Biographer Scott Eyman described a man guarded about his personal life, a loner who kept his thoughts and feelings to himself even in interviews. He did not marry until his forties, which drew so much attention that gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called him the Great American Bachelor.

  His 50-year friendship with Henry Fonda began in Manhattan, when Fonda invited him to be a third roommate to help make the rent. The two shared an apartment again in Hollywood in 1935 and gained reputations as playboys. Their favorite pastime, noted by both men's children, was quietly building and painting model airplanes, a hobby from their New York years. They also flew kites, played golf, and reminisced. A political argument in 1947 reportedly led to a fistfight between the conservative Republican Stewart and the liberal Democrat Fonda, after which they simply never discussed politics again. When Fonda died in 1982, Stewart's only public comment was that he had just lost his best friend.

  Gloria Hatrick McLean became his wife after a rocky start. Their first meeting came at Keenan Wynn's Christmas party in 1947, which Stewart crashed, arriving inebriated and leaving a poor impression. A year later Gary Cooper and his wife brought the two together at a dinner party, and they began dating. A former model, divorced with two sons, Hatrick married Stewart at Brentwood Presbyterian Church on the 9th of August 1949. He adopted her sons, Ronald and Michael, and the couple had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on the 7th of May 1951. Ronald was killed in action in Vietnam on the 8th of June 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a Marine Corps lieutenant.

  Gloria died of lung cancer on the 16th of February 1994. Biographer Donald Dewey wrote that her death left Stewart depressed and lost at sea. He grew reclusive, spending most of his time in his bedroom. In February 1997 he was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat. A thrombosis formed in his right leg on the 25th of June, leading to a pulmonary embolism a week later. Stewart died of a resulting heart attack on the 2nd of July 1997, at 89, surrounded by his children at his Beverly Hills home. President Bill Clinton called him a national treasure, a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot. More than 3,000 mourners attended his memorial service, and Brigadier General James Stewart was buried with full military honors and a three-volley salute at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.