An extraordinarily ordinary life
Patrick Boyle
JAMES STEWART by Marc Eliot Aurum, £20, pp. 448, ISBN 1845131819 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Who is the greatest male film star of all time? Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Al Pacino are all contenders and each in his time has topped at least one poll. But my vote would go to James Stewart (or the more familiar ‘Jimmy’, as his biographer, Marc Eliot insists on calling him). Compared with other actors whose careers lasted over 30 years, Stewart starred in the largest number of films that were actually good, and, by good, I mean memorable. When Robert Mitchum, who was himself a considerable star, died the some month as Stewart, in 1997, it was hard to recall more than six films he’d been in, whereas one could name a dozen of Stewart’s without difficulty.
More so than any of his contemporaries, James Stewart in the right role was capable of elevating a film to a higher plane. His presence could make a good film a great one. Wouldn’t Mr Smith Goes to Washington have been naively simplistic without Stewart’s intelligent portrayal of an honest senator? Wouldn’t It’s a Wonderful Life have been too mawkish with any other actor in the leading role? In Rear Window who else could have made a compulsive voyeur an acceptable hero? In Vertigo would we have had sympathy for someone with an insane necrophiliac obsession for a dead woman had it not been James Stewart? And wouldn’t the threehour-long courtroom drama of Anatomy of a Murder have palled if it wasn’t for the infectious enthusiasm of the defending attorney?
Besides his distinctive mid-western drawl, Stewart’s greatest characteristic was his likeability. Real life characters, such as Monty Stratton, the baseball player, and Glenn Miller and Charles Lindbergh, must have been flattered by his impersonations of them. Even when playing vengeful cowboys or bounty hunters in westerns directed by Anthony Mann, you couldn’t help liking him. In contrast to the majority of leading men, he was not a sex symbol. Rather the opposite. He represented the clean-living, honest, intelligent, conservative, patriotic, all-American boy that women wanted to mother.
His apparently decent life is one of the problems Eliot faces when writing his biogra phy. Jimmy Stewart really was the cleanliving, straightforward, conservative patriotic American he often played in his films — and how interesting is that? Unlike almost everyone else in Hollywood, Stewart wasn’t having affairs with his co-stars, wasn’t dating the studio’s big names, wasn’t marrying and divorcing every two years, and wasn’t having a homosexual relationship with any of his male friends. In that respect, all we learn from Eliot’s carefully researched biography is that Jimmy had crushes on a few Hollywood actresses (Margaret Sullavan, in particular, who for a time was married to his friend Henry Fonda), that he was probably ravished by Marlene Deitrich during the making of Destry Rides Again and that, at the age of 40, he married a once-divorced socialite called Gloria McLean, had twin girls and remained faithful to her for the rest of his life.
Outside film-making, the most eventful part of Stewart’s life was his participation in the second world war, where he was made a major, and later promoted to colonel in the American Air Corps. In spite of persistent attempts by the Hollywood moguls to keep him safely out of the firing line, Major James Stewart was bent on doing his patriotic duty, and flew several dangerous missions over Europe, including bombing raids over Berlin. He saw many of his comrades killed and witnessed the horrors of war at first hand. After the war, he experienced something close to a nervous breakdown and spent weeks in a military hospital. Besides rows of American medals for bravery, he was also awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre by the French. In contrast to John Wayne, who never saw active service, but fought bravely in a dozen war films, Stewart was so traumatised by his experiences that he refused to take part in any film that glamorised war.
The other interesting feature of his private life was his unlikely lifelong friendship with Henry Fonda. They both started their careers in the film industry in the mid-Thirties. They had both worked in theatre, both starred in movies that had originally been successful on the stage — Mr Roberts with Fonda and Harvey with Stewart — they both continued to be stars until late middle age and on screen, with their tall angular bodies and slow speech patterns, they were not dissimilar performers. Yet, ideologically and in terms of lifestyle, they could hardly have been more different, and both despised the other’s politics. While the Fonda family supported Kennedy and condemned the Vietnam war, Stewart believed in unquestioning loyalty to his country, in spite of losing his stepson in Vietnam, and later put his name to the Reagan presidential campaign.
Stewart stood aloof from Hollywood society and for one of America’s greatest stars, led an extraordinarily ordinary life. So, in order to compensate for this, Eliot has mostly concentrated on Stewart’s professional career and on a history of the Hollywood film industry during his time. We learn who was sleeping with whom, which studios were being successful at any one time, which films were being nominated for Oscars and who won them (Stewart’s only Oscar, surprisingly, was for his role in The Philadelphia Story) and, at the same time, we are given brief biographies of the stars, agents and directors who were part of Stewart’s life. He worked with nearly all the famous Hollywood directors from the Thirties to the Sixties, but four in particular helped shape his career. He made three films with Frank Capra, of which Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life are the best known, seven with Anthony Mann, Winchester 73 and The Man from Laramie being the most successful, and three with John Ford, the best being The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. But he is, perhaps, best remembered for the four he made with Hitchcock — Rope, Rear Window, The Man who Knew too Much and Vertigo.
According to the most recent international film critics’ poll, conducted by Sight and Sound, Vertigo is now ranked the second best film of all time. Ever since François Truffaut published his book on Hitchcock it has been necessary to credit Vertigo with almost fathomless psychological depths. At the end of the film, when Kim Novak has fallen off the tower to her death, Eliot describes the reactions of Stewart’s character, Scottie, thus:
He walks to the edge of the tower, his arms outstretched in Jesus-like supplication. As the film enters its final fade, the audience does not know what to think. The final suspension suggests that Scottie’s vertigo can never be truly ‘cured’, that the true definition of his illness is and always will be a twisted desire to go forward in his life by trying, however impossible it may be, to travel backwards into the past.
The truth is that Vertigo is one of Hitchcock’s better psychological thrillers with blatant plot flaws which we must ignore, made exceptional by the intensely strong performance by James Stewart in the leading role. At over 400 pages, Eliot’s book is too long and has a tendency to include all the fruits of his research, regardless of their interest. Accounts of Jimmy’s conventional home life, his relationship with his right-wing, strongminded but basically decent father (fatherson relationships seem to have become an American obsession of late) and details of where he and Gloria went on their holidays, hardly hold the attention. But for the most part it’s an entertaining and informative read, and certainly stimulating to anyone interested in the great days of Hollywood and the fate of some of its output.
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