Q&A: Jimmy Stewart's wonderful life
Western Pennsylvania's gawkiest, gangliest and greatest gift to the world of movies was a nice guy off screen and on.
2021 is the 75 anniversary of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Jimmy Stewart movie that was a bust at the box office when it came out but is now an iconic Christmas classic. In the fall of 1986 I had the pleasure of interviewing Jimmy Stewart at his Beverly Hills home. He was 79 and would die in 1997. During my two-hour visit we sat in his big backyard, talked about his hometown and his acting career and petted his dogs. Here’s an expanded version of the interview that ran in AirCal magazine in December 1986:
Jimmy Stewart
When you look up the word "actor" in the dictionary, Jimmy Stewart's name isn't there. But maybe it should be.
Few actors in history have been so beloved by the movie-going public, or so honored by their peers, as the tall, slightly gawky, drawling country-boy type from Indiana, Pennsylvania.
Stewart, 79, no longer is acting, but his films are enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks to the explosion of the home-video industry. Uncut and uninterrupted by TV commercials, many of the best of his 80-plus movies are being seen for the first time by a whole new audience.
His 1940 Oscar-winning performance in “The Philadelphia Story” is available on tape. So are his Oscar-nominated roles in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “It's a Wonderful Life” and “Anatomy of a Murder,” as well as “Rope,” “Vertigo” and “Rear Window,” three movies he made with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s.
Although he rose to star status rather quickly, Stewart was never a stage-struck kid. He fooled around with magic and the accordion as a boy, and belonged to the theatrically oriented Triangle Club while at Princeton, but he graduated in 1932 with a B.S. in architecture.
He was headed for a rendezvous with a masters in architecture when a classmate, Joshua Logan, persuaded him to spend that summer with his acting company, the University Players, in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
There, Stewart met his lifelong pal, Henry Fonda, and caught the acting bug that would eventually land him in Holly wood via the stages of Broadway. His first (three-minute) part in New York earned him $45 a week, a decent sum during the depths of the Depression.
In 1935, with his roommate Fonda already signed to a Hollywood studio contract, Stewart left New York City to sign with MGM. Five years and 24 movies later, he was a Hollywood star-making $12,000 a week.
Stewart's Hollywood career was interrupted nine months before Pearl Harbor, when he enlisted as a private in the Army Air Corps. He won his pilot's wings and flew 20 missions over Germany in a B-24 before being given a desk job. By the time he retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968, he was a brigadier general, the highest military rank ever attained by an entertainer.
After the war, Stewart's roles took on a more masculine bent. He played everything from grisly cowboys and detectives to aviator Charles Lindberg and Harvey's rabbit-hallucinating Elwood P. Dowd, a role he's played on stage, in film and on TV.
One of the first stars to break with the studio system, he was also one of the first actors to elect to work for a percentage of his movies' profits, a decision that proved profitable when he appeared in several box-office hits made by leading directors like Hitchcock.
In all, Stewart was nominated for five best-actor Oscars, winning one. In 1985, he was presented with an honorary Oscar for his more than 50 years of work in Hollywood.
Long active with the Boy Scouts and other community organizations, Stewart's conservative politics are well known. He's a subscriber to William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, but says his politics are rooted in traditional values that come from the influence of his Scottish-Irish father and from his small-town upbringing.
Still quite active today, Stewart hits his Beverly Hills office each morning at eight to work and answer his mail (holding steady at about 200 letters per week), and swims in his pool daily. He takes his dogs on long walks each evening with Gloria, his wife of 37 years and the mother of their twin daughters, Judy and Kelly.
When he's not chasing one of his four grandchildren around the sprawling, landscaped grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion on Roxbury Drive, he's probably traveling somewhere to collect yet another award, like the Medal of Freedom the highest honor possible for a U.S. civilian, that his old buddy President Reagan gave him last year.
Jimmy Stewart
Q: It seems that quite a few of your movies are available on videocassettes these days. What do you think of the home-video revolution?
STEWART: I think it's a good idea, because the quality of videos is so good. They've really taken the time and effort to make the color good — it's like making a new print of the movie. And, of course, you can ask people over to see an old movie, and it doesn't have to be at two in the morning.
Home video is going to be a very important thing in getting more people back to the movies. It's all right, inviting people into your living room. But I think people'll do what they used to do — make an event out of going to the movie theater with family and friends. Movies are going to be around for a long time.
Q: Have you seen many movies lately?
STEWART: Not very many. But I went to one that really brought things back to me. We went with some friends down to the Cinerama Dome (in Hollywood) to see “Out of Africa.” You tend to forget about that great wide screen. “Out of Africa” was ideal for the big screen.
Q: Aren't the “Out of Africas” pretty rare today?
STEWART: I know what you mean. I think there's going to be a big change. The movies are like the Westerns. Westerns have had their ups and downs, too. The violence — people are getting tired of cars going off bridges and crashing into the water. If you've seen four or five of those, you've had enough of them. The sex — God knows, people aren't going to get tired of it, but it can be presented in a way that leaves a little more to the imagination.
Q: The cast of “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) — Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and you — was great. And the movie was so witty and intelligent. Did it have any mass appeal?
STEWART: I think so. Fox said it did very well. That was a very exciting time for me. I had never worked with Katharine Hepburn before. I was lucky to get the part —and I had no idea I was going to get the Academy Award.
As a matter of fact, I was making a picture, and I wasn't going to go to the awards ceremonies, but someone called me on the phone and said you'd better get down to the Ambassador Hotel. I didn't know what the hell was happening.
Q: That was 1940, and you'd just done 24 movies in about five years. Did you have any feeling that you were being overworked?
STEWART: No. That was the ideal way to make movies. I admired the big studio system and the moguls who ran it. This was the ideal way to make movies. . . . Henry Fonda felt the same way. It was the idea of learning your craft while working at it.
You went to work six days a week —lessons, exercises, weightlifting. You took screen tests. You had little parts in big pictures and big parts in little pictures — that's when they were doing B pictures all the time.
It wasn't a question of, "Read this script and see if you like it." It was, "Here's a script and you start next Monday — and you're in the first scene, so be prepared."
Q: You had no choice of roles?
STEWART: Absolutely no choice.
That's the way it was for all the people at MGM. One time I got loaned out to Universal Studios, and the price they paid was that MGM got to use their back lot for four or five days.
They'd send you out on the road for a picture you weren't even in. I remember they said to go up to San Francisco and come out before the movie, tell them who you are and tell them a couple of jokes.
Well, I went to Morey Amsterdam and he gave me three jokes. In those days — and I'd forgotten about it — there were shows at ten in the morning. And at ten the place wasn't packed. It was a bad time for those jokes. Awful. And they didn't seem to get any better, either. I was there for three days.
Q: Was Hollywood in the '30s as crazy and glamorous as they say it was?
STEWART: Whatever glamorous means, I've never known -- but there was glamor. It was established by the studios — they were responsible for the glamor.
And all the wild things that were going on… in MGM's case, it had a public relations outfit that made up half of the wild things. But it was an exciting place. The work was exciting. As I said, you'd work six days a week, and then everybody from all the studios would go to the Trocadero — which is torn down now -- on the Strip.
Everybody'd go for a good time. They'd have different bands, and all the comics got up and tried to outdo each other. I remember one time a lady with a little girl — brown-eyed and wearing bobby sox -- asked if her daughter could sing. They put it up to the audience, and we said OK. She got up and sang for an hour — it was Judy Garland.
Q: Who were your pals in those days?
STEWART: Bob Young, Walter Pidgeon, Spencer Tracy. I was in my first picture with Tracy, and he was wonderful to me. Considerate. A great fellow to learn from.
Q: Of all those women you worked with — Hepburn, Kelly, Dietrich, Lombard, Rogers — do you have a favorite?
A: I really don't have a favorite. In a way, Grace Kelly, but it's very hard.
Q: You've called the Western the true movie form. Why?
STEWART: The Western is the basic movie form because the Western is a visual form, and that's what movies are. John Ford always said -- and he'd say it when we were all talkin' in a scene — "Cut. Everybody's talkin' too much." One time I heard him say, "If you can't tell your story visually on the screen without relying on the spoken word, you're not using the medium properly.”
Q: Yet “The Philadelphia Story” was all dialogue.
STEWART: It was from a play. And if you think back over the years, the number of pictures that have been successfully taken from plays... there are damn few. One of the reasons for this is that on the stage the spoken word is the whole thing. Everything else is background.
In the late '40s, studios would use the Lux Radio Theatre to boost a movie. They sent the script of “Winchester '73” to the Lux people, and they sent it back. They said, "We can't use this script -- nobody says anything. We don't know how to fill in all visuals."
Q: In those days, were you big enough to say, "I want that picture"? And could you get it?
STEWART: I plugged harder for the of role of Charles Lindbergh in “The Spirit of Louis” than I did for any picture. I tried everything. My former agent, Leland Hayward, was producing and Billy Wilder was directing it.
And they said, "You can't play it. You're too old." And I said, "I know I'm old, but you know they have a makeup department. They'll put a blond wig on me. And I'm just as skinny as he was." And they said, "You're too old."
There was a young actor named John Kerr who was around for a while, and they wanted him. But he read the script, and he didn't like Lindbergh for political reasons. That's the way I got the part.
Q: As a pilot, playing Lindbergh must have been a special treat.
STEWART: He was my hero. I worked at my Dad's hardware store when I wasn't in school, and for Lindbergh's flight I made a world out of beaverboard. Over here was the Woolworth Building and over here was the Eiffel Tower, and I made a model of the Spirit of St. Louis and hung it up.
My dad let me keep the lights on, and the Indiana Evening Gazette was across the street, and I'd go over there and find out where Lindbergh was and I'd move the airplane. People kept coming all night.
Q: You had it in the window of the store - which is where you put your Oscar for 20 years, too?
STEWART: He put it there. I didn't.
Q: Are you a product of a small town?
STEWART: I think so. I give the credit to my father, mostly, but my mother too. She was the only one he'd listen to. He had certain values — family, community friendship, church and loyalty — that I got from him.
The idea of community meant so much to him. He sang in the choir of the Presbyterian church and was involved in city council. When he was 40, during World War I — when America first got into it — he just disappeared. He didn't tell my mother, nobody. Three days later be came back an officer. He was in France until the end of the war.
Q: You did basically the same thing, enlisting in World War II, right?
STEWART: Sure. I was in my 30s, and at the studios everyone was saying I was too old, and they could fix it if I was drafted. But my Dad would have come out and shot me.
Q: You've been called a "super patriot." Did you have any problems with your career because you were a political conservative?
STEWART: No. I was raised like that and sort of followed after my father and never gave it a thought. The idea of being anything but a conservative — I never considered it.
Q: You and Henry Fonda were roommates on Broadway and longtime buddies. But politically you were diametrically opposed.
STEWART: Oh, yeah. We would argue our heads off for the first six or eight months we knew each other. But finally we got together — I think we were both drunk — and we said, "Look, we just yell at each other all the time. This is no fun. You shut up about politics and I'll shut up about politics, and we'll never mention it again.”
And we never did. When some thing came up and we were together, we'd just leave the room.
Q: Was there any burning passion or desire to be something else besides acting — weren't you going to be an architect?
A: I wasn't a good student. Here's where my father came in again. He said “be an engineer.” So my freshman year at Princeton I took some engineering courses, but at the end of the year a couple of professors came up and said you'd better get out of this.
I had to go to summer school between my freshman and sophomore years or I'd have been out on my ass. During that summer school someone told me about a mathematics class called 'descriptive geometery,’ which sounds terrible, but it’s not as bad as algebra. I took that during summer school and was able to get into architecture.
Q: Did you enjoy it?
A: Yes, very much. It was a creative type of thing. Joe (Jose) Ferrar was there at the same time I was. Josh Logan, the great director, was in the class ahead of me and he really was responsible for me getting into acting.
I got a scholarship to get my master's degree in architecture and that's what I was going to do. I think all the time my father was letting me get this education he didn't care what kind of education it was. All he wanted to do was have me come back and take his place — in the hardware store. That was it. He never said that, but I always thought it.
I was on my way to commencement up in front of Nassau Hall — and I can remember exactly where it was — and Josh Logan came up to me and said, 'You're coming back to grad school. In the summer we have a place up in Massachusetts called ‘Falmouth’ and we have an outfit called the ‘University Players,' which I'd heard of from three or four other Princeton guys.
And he said, 'Why don't you come up and spend the summer. It's a nice place at the seashore, and I think you'll enjoy it.' And after that summer, I made up my mind to be an actor. If he hadn't asked me to go up there ...
Q: Your famous speech pattern -- your drawl — where did it come from?
STEWART: I swear I don't know. Maybe it came from Indiana, maybe I was born with it.
Q: Did they ever try to get you out of it?
STEWART: No. But I knew about it and got to be very conscious of it. For instance, sometimes I'd do a scene with Hitchcock and he'd look up and say, "Jim" -- he always called me Jim — "this scene is timed."
It was something I had to be able to control. In things like the filibuster in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” you couldn't "hmmm" and "ha." You'd really be in trouble.
Q: What was it like working with Hitchcock? Was there a lot of tension on the set?
STEWART: There have been books written about that and people saying that he was so terrible with women and that there was an evil-type thing — which is absolutely ridiculous.
He kept an excitement on the set. How he did it, I don't know. But nothing seemed to upset him. I remember “Rear Window” at Paramount, when there was just one set.
In one shot he wanted me in focus in the foreground and across the courtyard, too. Now you're dealing with depth of field here, and you have to have more light. So they had all the lights at Paramount on us and even borrowed some from Columbia and MGM.
Finally, just as they told Hitch they had enough lights, the lights tripped the sprinkler for the fire system. It started to rain — and I mean really rain. And he said, "See if you can get someone to turn off the rain, and while you're at it, someone might get me an umbrella"
And he sat under this umbrella until they got the sprinklers turned off. Nothing threw him.
Q: You're so revered now as an actor, but did the critics ever blast you?
STEWART: Oh, sure. I've gotten terrible reviews. You know, you just remember the bad ones. I was in a play at the Shubert Theater in New York, a leading role with a new actress from Austria. The New York Times said: "Jimmy Stewart wanders through the play like a befuddled tourist on the Danube." I've remembered it all my life.
Q: Of all the awards you've won, which is the most treasured?
STEWART: They mean a great deal, and I'm proud of them. I've great respect for the Academy Awards. It's really a pat on the back from your fellow actors. They voted for it.
Q: Is there anything you dreamed of doing but never got the chance to do?
STEWART: No. Gloria and I traveled a lot. We've been to Africa and Brazil... It's been a wonderful life. My family is getting along fine. I have four grandchildren coming tomorrow. This place will be jumping. You think that dog's barking now.