The Full Biography
James Stewart. Actor. The Indiana, Pennsylvania, kid who made a stammer into the country’s idea of decency, then spent a war in a bomber and a life after it proving the stammer could also hold a Hitchcock dark.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is George Bailey on a bridge, or a man in a Western hat who looks like he would rather be home. What the still cannot show is James Maitland Stewart of Indiana, Pennsylvania, a hardware-store household, a Princeton architecture student, a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, and a death in 1997 that the bridge has never accepted as the whole file.
He was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pa., the eldest child of Elizabeth Ruth Jackson and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who ran the J. M. Stewart & Co. hardware store on Philadelphia Street. The store was the first room. The boy played the accordion. He built model airplanes. He went to Mercersburg Academy and then to Princeton, class of 1932, architecture, a thesis on an airport terminal, because that was the useful profession a hardware household understood. The Triangle Club was the other education. He acted. He played the accordion in the shows. After graduation he followed Joshua Logan and a Princeton friend, Henry Fonda, toward the stage. The University Players on Cape Cod. Broadway. Yellow Jack. A contract with MGM in 1935 that paid him a living and, at first, not much else.
The stammer was not a defect the studio sanded off. It became the instrument. Early pictures used him as a lanky juvenile — Wife vs. Secretary, Born to Dance, a sailor in Navy Blue and Gold. Frank Capra found the temperature. You Can’t Take It with You (1938) put him opposite Jean Arthur in a household of eccentrics and made the stammer a moral weather. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) made him a civic object: Jefferson Smith, a junior senator who filibusters a corrupt machine until his voice is a ruin. The picture is still assigned in classrooms. The performance is not a civics poster. It is a man coming apart in public and refusing to sit down.
Destry Rides Again (1939), with Marlene Dietrich, proved the same face could do a Western without a swagger. The Shop Around the Corner (1940), for Ernst Lubitsch, is the quiet masterpiece the December broadcast skips: two clerks in a Budapest shop, Margaret Sullavan, letters, a romance that is almost all timing. Then The Philadelphia Story (1940), as Macaulay Connor, a reporter who is funnier and drunker than the civic saint the country would invent for him. That performance brought the Academy Award for Best Actor. The first Oscar is a reporter, not the bridge. He was, for a stretch before the war, the most complete young leading man MGM had: light, precise, a voice that could break without breaking the frame.
Then he left. In 1941, already a star, he was drafted, failed the weight requirement, fattened himself, and entered the Army Air Forces as a private. He had been a licensed civilian pilot. The service used that. He trained on B-17s, then on B-24 Liberators, and in November 1943 went to England with the 445th Bomb Group. He flew combat over occupied Europe — twenty missions is the number the biographies settle on — as a squadron commander and then as operations officer for a combat wing. Flak. Night. The unglamorous arithmetic of a heavy-bomber war. He came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Croix de Guerre, and Air Medals, and he did not make a handshake tour of it. He stayed in the Reserve. He would, over the decades, rise to brigadier general — the highest rank a Hollywood actor has held in the United States military. The stills sometimes reduce all of that to a uniform in a publicity still. The logbook is the file.
He came back older. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is the second monument and was, as a first-run, a disappointment: mixed notices, a weak box office, a picture that looked like a failure until television, years on, made it a December climate. George Bailey on the bridge is the civic object. The performance under it is a man who wants to get out of a small town and cannot, and who is not always kind about it. Harvey (1950) put him opposite an invisible rabbit and earned another nomination. Anthony Mann found the Westerns that used the new hardness: Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), The Man from Laramie (1955). These are not hearth pictures. They are revenge, obsession, a decent face doing indecent work on a frontier.
Hitchcock found the dark. Rear Window (1954) put him in a wheelchair with a lens, watching a courtyard, inventing a murder because looking is what he has left. Grace Kelly is the visitor. The picture is a thriller and a diagnosis. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with Doris Day, used him as a father who cannot control a plot. Vertigo (1958) is the third monument and the one the saint-readers still underfile: Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective who breaks a woman, Kim Novak, to fit a dead one. The picture failed, then became, for a generation of critics, the greatest American film. A complete life of America’s decent man has to hold flak, Vertigo’s obsession, and a conservatism the liberal classroom sometimes wants to sand off. He played decency. He also played men who watch and cannot stop. Both are the instrument.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959), for Otto Preminger, brought a fourth nomination — a small-town lawyer in a rape-and-murder trial, a jazz score, a performance that is almost all listening. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), for John Ford, opposite John Wayne, is the Western about the story the newspaper prints instead of the one that happened. How the West Was Won (1962) put him in a Cinerama wagon as a mountain man, a civic western the holiday broadcasts still run. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), for Robert Aldrich, used him as a pilot on a sand dune who has to trust a model-maker with the wreck. Bell, Book and Candle (1958), with Kim Novak again, is a light comedy the Hitchcock readers skip. The FBI Story (1959) used him as a G-man across decades. He worked into the 1970s — The Shootist with Wayne, a television movie, a voice — and then, mostly, he stopped. He had already written the public man in Smith and Bailey and Scottie. He did not become a late-night anecdote. He became a man in Beverly Hills who had already been those people and was now a neighbor who had flown missions. On radio, in the 1930s and 1940s, he had already learned to do the stammer without a camera; the Lux and Screen Guild hours are a second file the December broadcast never opens.
Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.James Stewart
He married Gloria Hatrick McLean on August 9, 1949, at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church. She had two sons, Ronald and Michael, from a first marriage; he adopted them. Their twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, were born in 1951. The marriage held until Gloria’s death in 1994. Ronald was killed in Vietnam in 1969, a Marine lieutenant, a death the house did not tour. Stewart stayed in the Reserve through the Vietnam years and took the grief as a private fact. He was not a Hollywood marriage as the columns understand the phrase. He was a husband who went home.
Six things most people never knew
- Indiana, Pennsylvania, and a hardware store are the first rooms. Princeton architecture first. The stammer sits on a midwestern house, not a studio invention only.
- The first Oscar is The Philadelphia Story, not the bridge. 1940. A reporter. Funny. The civic saint is a second weather.
- He flew combat in B-24s. Not a handshake tour only. Twenty missions. The general’s rank in the Reserve sits on those missions.
- It’s a Wonderful Life was not a first-run smash. The December climate is a second life the picture earned after it had already failed.
- Hitchcock’s Stewart is the dark monument. Vertigo especially. The saint can also be a man who breaks a woman to fit a dead one.
- Gloria’s death in 1994 is the private plot. He went quieter. He died three years after. The bridge did not.
The children have had to share a father who is a December climate. Friends from the sets describe a professional who was prepared, shy, and finished with a false note. The Stewart at home was the same shyness without a mark. Indiana, Pa., still claims the boy. The bomber group claims the log. The bridge claims the rest.
The later years
Home, after the features had thinned, was the North Roxbury Drive house in Beverly Hills, a marriage, dogs, and a professionalism that no longer needed a call sheet every morning. He stayed in the Air Force Reserve and in 1959, already a middle-aged star, was promoted to brigadier general. He flew, on official business, in a Vietnam-era bomber as an observer; the Pentagon used the name, and he treated the trip as duty, not a publicity hop. He campaigned for Republican tickets — Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan — in a town that preferred its saints without a party. He did not sand that down. A complete file holds the filibuster and the campaign stops.
He chose the remaining pictures the way a careful man chooses a guest list. Shenandoah (1965) put him on a Virginia farm in a Civil War the picture wanted him to sit out. The Rare Breed. Firecreek, opposite Fonda again. The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), with Fonda, is a comedy about two aging men and a brothel they inherit, a last light temperature. The Shootist (1976) gave him a doctor opposite Wayne’s dying gunfighter. He did television movies, including Right of Way with Bette Davis in 1983, two old professionals in a small frame. He voiced Wylie Burp in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), a last western joke. He did not pretend any of it was Vertigo. He also did not treat the small screen as a comedown. It was work.
The honors arrived as a civic inventory. In 1985 the Academy gave him an Honorary Award — “for his fifty years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues.” The same year Ronald Reagan hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him. The American Film Institute had already given him its Life Achievement Award, in 1980. Indiana, Pa., named the hometown airport after him. He showed up. He did not make a lecture circuit of decency. He read poems on The Tonight Show — a piece about a dog, Beau, that broke the room — and then went home to Gloria. He painted, a private hobby the columns treated as a surprise. He flew, when the Reserve or a friend’s field asked. He stayed, by the accounts of neighbors, a man who would rather be in the hardware aisle than on a dais. Indiana still keeps the storefront in the civic memory even though the hardware shop itself is gone.
Gloria died on February 16, 1994, of lung cancer. He was eighty-five. Friends said the house got quieter in a way the stammer could not cover. He went out less. He had already, in Smith and Bailey and Scottie and the Mann Westerns, written the public man. The private man is a husband who outlived his wife by three years and did not make a tour of it. He died on July 2, 1997, at home in Beverly Hills, of a heart attack, with a thrombosis and the rest of an old body in the file. He was eighty-nine. The funeral was at the same Brentwood church as the wedding. The bridge still plays in December. The bomber log is the file the December broadcast skips.
After he was gone
Every decent American on film still pays him a tax. Every Christmas still steals the bridge. Vertigo still argues, and the argument has already been won by the people who watch it twice. The missions are the correction. The stammer is the instrument. The hardware store is the first room. Kelly and Judy and Michael have had to share a father the country reduced to a snowy street. The AFI clip and the honorary Oscar are in the civic file. The Shop Around the Corner still teaches timing. The Mann Westerns still surprise people who thought he was only George Bailey.
He came out of Indiana, stammered a Senate, won as a reporter, flew a bomber, failed a first-run Christmas, let Hitchcock break him, and died after Gloria had already gone. If you only remember the bridge, you have the climate. If you remember the logbook, Vertigo, and 1940, you have him.
Portrait: Studio publicity still · Public domain (PD-US, studio publicity still) · via Wikimedia Commons