The Books: “Jimmy Stewart: A Biography” (Marc Elliot)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

I had misplaced this book and forgot about it – so even though we are now at “T” in the alphabet, I have to swoop back and include this book. I’m too OCD to let it slide.

Marc Elliot appears to be the new bigwig on the block, in terms of serious in-depth entertainment biographies. A couple of years ago, he came out with a detailed huge book about Cary Grant (Excerpt here), and he just came out with a book called Reagan: The Hollywood Years, which I am eager to read.

Here is what I think Elliot’s gift is. He does not skimp on the movies themselves of his particular subject – he delves into the meaning of a career, rather than just its surface elements. So – what are the phases of Stewart’s career? What did Capra bring out in him? What did Mann? What did Hitchcock? But I think his real gift (and I noticed this in the Cary Grant book too) is in breaking down for us, through meticulous research, all of the business decisions of the powers-that-be that made these men such giant stars (besides their talent, I mean). Elliot is brilliant on contracts and negotiations and the repercussions thereof. That stuff can be rather dry, especially for a fangirl like myself, but it’s never dry with him. It becomes THE thing that sets his book apart from other books. Cary Grant had a precedent-breaking deal with a couple of studios – unheard-of at the time. He was basically freelance. How did he do that?? Elliot breaks it down for us, and makes us see just how prescient Grant was – he wasn’t just lucky, he was smart – and he does the same thing here with Stewart. Stewart’s agent got him a deal for the profits of the films he worked on – which catapulted him up into the highest echelon of salaries. He became a millionaire with that deal. Because the real money isn’t in the salary you make as an actor. The REAL money is when you get a piece of the film itself. Actors nowadays all have such deals, it’s part of being a star. You produce the film, or you help produce it – you negotiate for a portion of the gross profits. I remember when Jack Nicholson somehow got that kind of deal for himself when he played “The Joker” – not only did he get a portion of the film, but also a portion of all the memorabilia surrounding the film. It made front-page news at the time. That is a gargantuan sum. But back in the 30s and 40s, even though these people were huge stars, they were still, essentially, contract players. Now, naturally, they made a lot of money – but the deals of Stewart and Grant changed the industry. It was a prophecy of things to come, of the studio collapse, of all actors going freelance, and the result being that salaries skyrocketed. When Stewart got the deal for the profits of the film, every actor in Hollywood started pressing their agents to get them similar deals. The pressures on the studio were enormous. “If HE can have that, then I want it, too!”

I love this story that Quincy Jones tells, which is relevant. He and Grant were good friends. Grant came from a poverty-struck lower-class background, and Jones and he clicked on that level – Jones said something like, “The lower class in England was looked down upon like black people were in America – we understood each other.” And once, he mentioned to Grant his theory of “horizontal money”:

Sometimes I would get into a lot of mixed metaphors. The way I expressed things cracked Cary up because it was so un-British. For instance, I would say, ‘I’m getting to the age where I’ve got to start making some more horizontal money.’ He asked me what that meant. I explained, ‘Well, when I’m up in the studio conducting, that’s vertical money. But when you’re at home watching TV and An Affair to Remember comes on, that’s horizontal money.’ Cary talked about that for years. He told all his friends.

The real money to be made is not the vertical money. That’s just you WORKING for your living. But when you lie down to rest, and you STILL make money, then you’re in the horizontal bracket, and you’re then all set. Very few actors make horizontal money, although it’s a little bit better now because of residuals. Although, let’s be honest – those only really matter for the stars, the Bea Arthurs and the David Schwimmers and the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss who honestly never have to work again because of their residuals. My friend and I were recently laughing – her husband had a small part on The Sopranos, he appeared in one episode. He recently got a check – a CHECK – for eighteen cents. So that’s what residuals are for your basic day-players – so that’s not REALLY “horizontal money”. My friend’s husband was laughing like, “Do I CASH this? This is an insult!” Most actors, even successful ones, still have to hustle to sing for their supper. But people like Stewart and Grant saw the opportunity in that horizontal money – Grant was an independent spirit, he didn’t even have an agent, for God’s sake – he negotiated that deal for himself! In the 1930s! Unheard of. Stewart had a shark of an agent who did it all for him – but nevertheless there is a similarity in the two men’s trajectories, in terms of horizontal money.

So Elliot is really really good on that level. Hollywood opens its secret doors of negotiations when you read him and you start to get a sense of how things actually work.

But he is also good, like I mentioned earlier, in describing the feel of a person’s career. Not just “what happened”, but what it MEANT. What was Jimmy Stewart’s persona? How did it change? What did he mean to people? And how did THAT change? Elliot sometimes falls into the trap of analyzing Stewart’s films in terms of how they fit in with Stewart’s biography – and I’m not wacky about that because it seems to discount the creative spirit. Meaning, Elliot will say things like, “Stewart was probably attracted to the role because it showed a character who had unresolved issues with his father, and Stewart had those same issues.” Uhm, not so fast. How about he was attracted to the role because it was a good part? Acting is NOT an exorcism of personal demons. Or, it can be – but that seems to me to be a byproduct, not a goal. Stewart may have been releasing some demons in some of his best parts (it is apparent that he was) – but the choice to DO the role is often more complex (or simple) than: “Let me work on this because I went through the same thing …” Acting can be rather mysterious, especially for those who have a gift for it. You don’t always know WHY you are attracted to something. It may just feel like a good role and then in retrospect you realize how much it dovetails with your own experience. I’m not saying Elliot is wrong – it just becomes too simplistic at times.

Regardless, his analysis of the development of Stewart’s career was really interesting and although I have always loved Stewart, I did not know a lot of his story. Much of this was new to me. I’ve seen most of his great movies and love him quite a bit, but I didn’t know about the subtle change in him over the years, from naive idealist to dark torment … or I noticed the change from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Vertigo but never really thought much about it. Jimmy Stewart was not a sex symbol. Women loved him, but they wanted to mother him. His early roles show that. He has a slow delivery of his lines, deliberate, he doesn’t waste his energy. He doesn’t push. He was a leading man, but not like Gary Cooper was a leading man, or Cary Grant. He had something different going on.

Capra illuminated the idealist, the man willing to almost destroy himself in pursuit of an idea, a goal – a shining martyr to America … but how fascinating – you never could have predicted this: Anthony Mann saw something else in Stewart after WWII – and it probably saved his career. Stewart in a Western?

This now seems so obvious, because he made so many good ones – but back in the early 40s that was not the case. Stewart was a small-town guy, totally present-day, a shambling slow-talking sweetheart, maybe a little too naive – but not idiotically so. Mann saw that Stewart could bring a cold intellectual quality to a role, there was something in him that was NOT passionate – and while in certain roles that made him the sweet man that he was, put into another context it could be quite threatening. Mann revived Stewart’s career and gave it new life. It’s interesting to consider that so many of Stewart’s movies that are now seen as classics were not hits at the time. It’s A Wonderful Life flopped. Vertigo didn’t flop, but it wasn’t a success. Stewart was one of those actors lucky enough to live long enough to see the development of television totally revive his career – he was in his twilight years when It’s a Wonderful Life started its unstoppable juggernaut on holiday television, and it catapulted him back up into the stratosphere. Same with the film nuts of the 70s and 80s – famous people now – Scorsese and the like – who saw the depth and breadth of his work and ran film festivals of the films he did with Hitchcock or Mann. Stewart did not die in obscurity, only to be re-discovered with the advent of cable television and TCM. It’s a Wonderful Life on television made him a huge star all over again.

I know there are so many great moments in Jimmy Stewart’s long and illustrious career, but I have to say – that that phone call scene in It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite bit of all. You just ache watching it. So so good.

Elliot is also very interesting on Jimmy Stewart’s experiences in WWII and how it changed him forever. Here’s a really nice tribute post about Stewart as a pilot – very inspiring (and that looks to be a really nice site, in general. I’ve been scrolling through his archives and I am very impressed and moved). Jimmy Stewart, post WWII, was darker and more tormented than he had been before. Scorsese writes:

If the prewar Stewart stood for something essentially American, the postwar Stewart stood for something truly universal. It’s difficult to think of another American star who remade his own image so thoroughly, or so bravely.

It’s a Wonderful Life came out after WWII, and it was thought it would be a huge hit, that the American populace would respond lovingly to its message, after so many years of fear and hardship. But that was not the case. Films after WWII got darker, more overtly political and paranoid, film noir became the next thing, and home and hearth were definitely not what the audiences were responding to. VERY interesting. Stewart realized that after the flop of It’s a Wonderful Life and looked about for something to revive him, a new path, something different.

It was directors like Mann or Hitchcock who allowed him to express all of this new stuff – even though he didn’t appear in war pictures. Stewart, after WWII, refused to ever appear as a soldier on film. There might have been one or two pictures where he caved on this stated principle of his – but in general, he did not want to be in a movie that depicted war, or glorified it. He had had it. He was a staunch lifelong Republican, he was proud of his service, and he was also proud of his son for serving (his son ended up dying in Vietnam, which shattered Stewart) – but he didn’t want to participate in any way in films that glorified war. So he didn’t. He also never spoke about his experiences (although the tributes given to him by men who served with him are eloquent and very moving), and whatever it was that had changed him remained private – but we can see the result in the films following WWII. Elliot analyzes the difference in the persona, pre- and post- and I hadn’t really thought about it before, but you can really really see it in the films. Thank goodness Stewart had directors who saw something in him other than the aw-shucks idealist, because his career would have been short and boring otherwise. He’s wonderful in romantic comedies – I love him in the sweetness of those old movies – but Hitchcock, in the same way he did with Cary Grant, saw something else in Stewart. And look at how different the two men are. You can’t really picture Stewart in To Catch a Thief and it’s hard to imagine Cary Grant in Vertigo. Hitchcock was brilliant in his perception at what was beneath the glitter in these two huge stars. Hitchcock kept coming back to Stewart. He was honing his own idea of the man, and you can see that in the development of the pictures they made together.

Fascinating.

Jimmy Stewart is a great American actor, and it was really fun for me to get to know him as a person a little bit better. I admire him even more now. I don’t think his longevity was an accident. I think he was a practical man, who thought practically about his choices as an actor, and was willing (especially in things like Vertigo) to show himself as weak, human and conflicted. This is not the case of most giant male stars. They get more cautious as they get older (phone for Robert DeNiro, a call for Robert DeNiro) – not Stewart. He got braver … and braver … and braver … and braver …

Remarkable.

Here’s an excerpt from the book about the byzantine negotiations that went in to the making of Philadelphia Story. It shows Marc Elliot’s gift for making clear and real the contractual issues and back-and-forth that happens when getting ready to do a movie.

EXCERPT FROM Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

In 1939, Cukor was then hired by Katharine Hepburn to make a movie out of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, a project she and Howard Hughes, her secret investor (and lover), had commissioned Barry to write for her and had taken to Broadway in an attempt to reestablish her popularity. Hayward, meanwhile, who had navigated Hepburn out of her free-fall and anticipated a major comeback with the film version of her smash-hit Broadway vehicle, looked to play the role of fixer for Jimmy as well by getting him a role in what was shaping to be on the most anticipated movies of 1940. If anything could save Jimmy’s career, Hayward figured, it was The Philadelphia Story.¹

Not that getting the film made was all that easy. Despite The Philadelphia Story‘s soaring success on stage that made it the talk of the 1939 Broadway season, its New York-based cast of actors and actresses – Joseph Cotten as C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord’s (Hepburn’s) divorced first husband, Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist; and Shirley Booth as Macaulay’s wisecracking sidekick, Elizabeth Embrie – failed to impress Hollywood when the studios came looking to buy the rights for a film version. Nobody wanted Cotten, Heflin, Booth, and especially Hepburn. When Selznick initially wanted to buy the property as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, Hepburn adamantly refused to sell to him. When MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford, Hepburn again said no. When Warner Bros. wanted it for Ann Sheridan, ditto. When independent film maker Samuel Goldwyn was willing to take Hepburn to get the rights to the play, but only if Gary Cooper were her co-star and William Wyler directed, Hepburn flatly turned him down. She then made it clear to one and all: either George Cukor directed her in the film version of The Philadelphia Story or there was not going to be a movie version.

Finally, Louis B. Mayer put an offer on the table that Hepburn liked – $175,000 for the rights, $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord, and George Cukor at the helm. Mayer envisioned Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy (whom Hepburn had not yet met), or Robert Taylor in the role of C.K. Dexter Haven, and in the role of the gossip columnist Macaulay Connor (as a favor to Hayward, after the agent suggested to Mayer he could make the deal happen), James Stewart.

Gable, Tracy, and Taylor all turned down the film, presumably because they each felt it was still too risky a career move to star opposite box-office dud Hepburn. (Besides, Gable was already looking ahead to play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind and didn’t want to work with Cukor, anyway, who was gay, and who the homophobic Gable believed favored filming female stars over their male co-stars.)²

Jimmy’s reactio to being offered the role of Macaulay Connor was, on the other hand, one of pleasant surprise. “When I first read the script,” he said later on, “I thought I was being considered for that fellow engaged to Hepburn. But as I read it, I thought to myself, ooh, that reporter part [Connor] is a good one. I’ll be happy to play it.”

Unfortunately for Jimmy, Grant wanted to play Connor rather than the part he had been offered, of Lord’s ex-husband Dexter Haven, believing, although it was essentially a supporting role rather than the male lead, it was better written and funnier. However, as far as Cukor and Hepburn were concerned, Grant had to be her romantic co-star. In the context of the film’s re-worked script, so as not to impede too much on the film’s romantic track, the role of Connor was reduced to little more than a foil to Grant’s star turn as Tracy’s disgruntled but still-in-love, once-and-future husband.³

Stewart accepted the role of Connor without hesitation, even after he learned from Hayward how much more money Grant and Hepburn were being paid. Grant, four years older than Stewart and with a far more established screen presence, had become the first actor to successfully overcome the hitherto-ironclad studio salary system in 1936 by not renewing his original five-year deal with Paramount. Instead he signed two nonexclusive multiple-picture deals with Columbia and RKO, and reserved the right to negotiate his fees and percentages on a per-film basis. When Mayer offered him The Philadelphia Story, he agreed to sign on with two conditions. The first was that he be paid $137,500 – twice what Hepburn was getting, figuring correctly that she would make her money on the back end if the film proved a hit. The second was that he receive top billing, to which Hepburn also agreed.

For Mayer, it was a sweet deal, especially considering that for all he was paying for Hepburn and Grant, he had Jimmy under a tight financial rein. He was paying him $3,000 a week, which meant that for the five weeks the film was in production, from July 5 through August 14, Jimmy would earn a total of $15,000. Although he was not happy about the discrepancy in salaries, he also knew he was in no position to complain and said nothing. But he wouldn’t forget either when, two years down the line, it would be time to renew his own contract with the studio.

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 a 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.

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.

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.