Who the Hell's in It by Peter Bogdanovich

Author:Peter Bogdanovich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780571224319
Publisher: London : Faber, 2005.
Published: 2004-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in Stewart’s first Western (of some eighteen), Destry Rides Again (1939), directed by old pro George Marshall. Stewart and Dietrich (whose first Western it was, too) had a torrid affair during shooting.

The shy, retiring character Stewart generally played around women evidently was like catnip to them (my mother always said she wanted “to mother him”) and Jimmy was a well-known ladies’ man prior to his marriage to Gloria Hatrick McLean in 1949 at the age of forty-one. The popular image of Stewart from that point on was as “an exemplary husband” and family man. Since they soon had twin girls and Gloria had two sons from her first marriage, he was suddenly a responsible father of four. What was known only among a few people in the business was that Jimmy did continue occasional dalliances with his co-stars in the fifties. He once joked very obliquely about this around the time of Rear Window (1954), when asked how he felt about being married while kissing Grace Kelly. “Waall,” he said, “I’m married, but I’m not dead!” The common wisdom is that Ms. Kelly had already been through Gary Cooper (High Noon, 1952) and Clark Gable (Mogambo, 1953), and that Stewart had no escape. Hitchcock hinted to me that Stewart also could not resist Kim Novak on Vertigo (1958), and the director’s longtime assistant and dear friend, Peggy Robertson, confirmed this romance; a good friend of mine heard about it directly from a still fond Kim Novak. Evidently the affair continued, because immediately after Vertigo the two of them co-starred in a pretty weak Bell, Book and Candle (1958). Of course, this occasional occupational hazard could have caused some private grief to Gloria, which Jimmy would no doubt have profoundly regretted after her passing.

Ironically, it was Stewart’s involvement with his first postwar Western, Winchester ’73 (1950), that eventually changed Hollywood beyond recognition, certainly far beyond where either Jimmy or I could see at the time we first met in January 1964. Winchester ’73 also marked the beginning of his extremely fruitful relationship with its director, Anthony Mann, and was among the first and best of the genre’s darkening trend, a kind of noir Western with complex and ambiguous reverberations. Since its subject, in essence, is the uniquely American obsession with firearms—in this case a highly prized rifle—the picture tragically retains a contemporary significance and an ominous quality perhaps not nearly as resonant, nor as grimly intended, on its initial release. Since one of the key uses of art is to illuminate, Winchester ’73 continues to serve that purpose.

Although Cary Grant had flourished since the end of the thirties as an independent star, not signed to any studio’s long-term contract, and although by the end of the forties such stars as Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney had their own production companies, it wasn’t until Jimmy Stewart’s percentage deal on Winchester ’73—negotiated for him with Universal by his agent Lew Wasserman (whose own company, MCA, within a decade

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