In personal and career terms 1938 topped 1937 for Jim Stewart. Ginger Rogers had asked for Jim to co-star in a picture at RKO called Vivacious Lady. Ginger very much wanted to be seen as more than Fred Astaire’s dancing partner, and she decided to hitch her star to former boyfriend Jim in what turned out to be a hit picture. The plot presented Ginger as a nightclub singer who falls in love with a small-town college professor and marries him after a whirlwind courtship. Then he has to take his showgirl back to meet the folks, with comedy hijinks ensuing. It was a plot Jim had run through in his mind a time or two, the idea of taking a girl, this girl in fact, to Pennsylvania to meet Dad and Mother, his own small-town parents.
Jim kept working and working. Next MGM cast him in The Shopworn Angel as a soldier from Texas about to go off to the Great War who meets and falls in love with a New York stage actress before shipping out to a fatal encounter with trench warfare. Joan Crawford was supposed to star but didn’t like the script; instead MGM cast newly signed Margaret Sullavan to star with Jim in what would prove a success at the box office, if never a believable plot line. But these silver screen love stories with Everyman Stewart romancing vivacious ladies earned him plenty of feature space in the fan magazines.
“Whatever it is that James Stewart has,” wrote reporter James Reid in the October 1938 issue of Modern Screen, “it’s enough to give the feminine population of Hollywood gooseflesh and complexes.” Reid interviewed Stewart on location in Burbank during summertime production of You Can’t Take It with You, a loud comedy adapted from a stage play that reminded Hollywood producer and director Frank Capra of his own boisterous family and would soon earn him Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards. The heat of late spring in Burbank neared 100 and drove the interviewer and his subject to an air-cooled restaurant, where the topic was, “Why hasn’t Jim Stewart married now that he has just passed his thirtieth birthday?” Five years earlier, Jim Stewart had been in New York City and struggled to make the rent; now he was giving the women of Hollywood “gooseflesh”?
“He has to find the right girl,” Stewart snapped. “So far he hasn’t found her.”
It soon became a telling interview as Jim showed his cards. “I don’t think I’d mind if she were a sort of duplicate of Margaret Sullavan. She could be the same size, look a little like that, be a little like that.” It wasn’t easy loving a woman married sequentially to two of your best friends and now living with the second of those husbands, Leland Hayward, just a half a block away from Jim’s house on Evanston Drive in Brentwood.
To save his sanity, Jim had become a Hollywood bachelor doing what came naturally to such creatures. He dated, gravitating to the leading ladies he used to watch in pictures during his Mercersburg days and then his New York City starvation period when he managed to scrape together dimes to go to the movie houses. The first in a string of Hollywood conquests was Norma Shearer, whom he had seen in many pictures, including A Free Soul, silk robe gaping as she reclined on a chaise longue and said to Clark Gable with outstretched arms, “Come on, put ’em around me.”
Norma Shearer was an Academy Award winner and the queen of MGM, once its most famous actress—she had appeared in the first MGM picture ever, He Who Gets Slapped, with Lon Chaney in 1924. Now, at the time of the release of her latest and last big picture, Marie Antoinette, Norma had become the studio’s most tragic figure, widow for going on two years of MGM’s executive producer Irving Thalberg.
Stewart bumped into Norma accidentally on purpose at a William Randolph Hearst costume party, he a cowboy, she Marie Antoinette in a massive, glimmering costume from her picture, which was about to be released. Jim had motive and opportunity for the meeting; he idolized Norma Shearer. Sparks flew between thirty-six-year-old Shearer and thirty-year-old Stewart; Josh Logan would claim to be an eyewitness to Jim’s tipsy proclamation to Marie Antoinette, “You’re the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen.” And that was that.
Jim Stewart hit the sexual heights with Irving Thalberg’s widow, not quite Norma Desmond but a woman much closer to silent pictures than was he. Norma had grown accustomed to the highest strata of Hollywood culture, and that’s where she took Jim, the Pennsylvania kid motivated to purchase a tux so he could squire her about town. Since she was Norma Shearer, queen of MGM, Howard Strickling shooed the press away from what could quickly become an uncomfortable turn of events for ascending star James Stewart. What could the boy next door possibly be doing with the widow Thalberg, a woman six years his senior, a sexually experienced Hollywood type as proven by any number of pre-Code pictures. A mother of two. Was Jim soon going to be taking on not only the siren but her ready-made family as well?
Said Jim, “I was also having a good time with pals like Hank Fonda and Johnny Swope, and a lot of those good times were spent in the company of…various ladies.”
This Jim Stewart was the man who sat sweating in Burbank with reporter James Reid in June 1938, Norma Shearer’s lover, Jim Stewart, speaking passionately of Maggie Sullavan as a means of keeping the reporter away from the awful truth. But, of course, Reid would have known all about Norma because the press corps knew everything and averted gazes discreetly as necessary.
Wendy Barrie, Jim’s co-star two years earlier in the MGM picture Speed, shed light on what Josh Logan called “Jim’s womanizing ways,” which was part of the Stewart view of the male approach to the female.
“I think part of his aggressiveness with women,” said Barrie, “and he was aggressive, was due to his feeling that he was not handsome—he had this image of himself as a tall, gawky loon.”
The loon felt it his obligation to test the reaction of the great Norma Shearer to his advances. In response he got more than he bargained for; he found himself in a relationship. He received from Norma a symbol of entrapment, a gold cigarette case inset with diamond chips, which would be memorialized not only in a Broadway play called Stars in Your Eyes but also in the script for the 1950 Paramount Picture Sunset Boulevard, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. The aging Brackett had toiled on the MGM lot at the time of Shearer’s love affair with Stewart, working on the screenplay for Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka. In such a position, Brackett had heard all the gossip about Norma and Jim—and the lot was ablaze with it.
But Jim remained the isolated soul that had confounded Ginger Rogers and now froze out Norma Shearer. He didn’t like the way Norma spent her money and expected him to spend his own. Night after night in tuxes wasn’t for the frugal Stewart. As he told James Reid that June day, “What really pleases me is to get in an evening at the Palomar, the big dance hall down at Third and Vermont. You can dance all evening for forty cents—or a dollar, if you want to sit in the loges between numbers.”
Norma had no interest in forty-cent dances. She dressed to the nines, often styled in one of several perfectly coiffed wigs, and insisted on being seen in the best places. The rift between them grew and finally ripped them apart with, as Jim described it, Norma “giving me my freedom.”
“Sure, I’m restless,” Stewart grumbled. “That’s one of the penalties of being a Hollywood bachelor. It’s a tough town to settle down in. You’re under constant tension, if you’re any good at worrying. And I’m an expert at it.”
What did Jim, a rising movie star under long-term contract to the biggest studio in town, have to worry about? Well, plenty. His own studio didn’t know how to use him. He was like the rookie ballplayer riding the pine waiting for one of the regulars to twist a knee. That worried him. Yearning for a woman he could never have because she belonged to one of his best friends worried him. The act of dating and risking rejection worried him, as did the threat of some news item about a fast Hollywood woman making it to the attention of Dad back in Indiana. He worried about all of it, all the time, and no one ever would have expected it, judging him by that laid-back veneer.
“Jimmy never lost a certain shyness and nervousness,” said John Swope, who labeled the condition “a deterrent to him psychologically.” That hot-burning inner furnace would keep his metabolic rate so high that no matter what or how much he ate—and it was never a plateful because he couldn’t keep it down—he remained rail thin.
And yet the women kept coming. Norma Shearer was barely gone when Fox star Loretta Young, one of the most ardent heterosexuals in Hollywood, stepped up to declare affection for the restless one. Another frantic coupling ensued, and Loretta fell harder for the Stewart charm than Norma had, and Jim—well, Jim had bagged another of Hollywood’s vintage leading ladies without half trying. It was becoming quite an obvious pattern: He found only the A-team attractive.
Unfortunately for the trophy collector, Loretta possessed something Jim had never before seen: an obsessive streak that soon terrified him. Hollywood writer Adela Rogers St. Johns would say that Loretta “chased him around shamelessly, and made a god damned fool of herself.” Jim was just being Jim—charm the girl, prove what he needed to prove to himself, then grow bored with any sort of routine, withdraw, and move on. He liked the sex—who wouldn’t? He just wasn’t going to marry this type of woman, especially somebody with the baggage of Loretta Young, who had already seen one marriage annulled and had become the talk of the town due to her affair with MGM’s Clark Gable that, some whispered, had resulted in a daughter out of wedlock. All this was way too messy for Jim, facing again and again the Vivacious Lady small-town-boy-meets-showgirl plot when he imagined taking these women back to Indiana to meet his folks. How in the world would he explain Norma or Loretta or even the sweet but worldly wise Ginger?
Jim remained restless, tense, and ascending as his latest picture, You Can’t Take It with You, went into general release in September 1938. Frank Capra had emerged as one of the most influential directors of the 1930s, reaching the heights with a run of Academy Awards for It Happened One Night followed by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and then Lost Horizon, a fantasy picture that did well at the box office but couldn’t match Capra’s extravagant production costs. The energetic director recognized in Jim Stewart’s streak of MGM pictures the raw material for something of a leading man next door with gentility, honesty, and solid comic timing for screwball. Capra signed Jim and figured to take him back to his Broadway roots by filming a hit stage play that would more or less guarantee success for all concerned. And a success it was, representing Stewart’s longest home run yet—a wallop struck at Columbia Pictures.
Why did MGM not recognize what Cole Porter, Ginger Rogers, Frank Capra, and David O. Selznick did? Selznick was hard at work on his epic-in-the-making Gone With the Wind but also churning out other pictures in the meantime, the latest being Made for Each Other, a romance intended to rebrand “Screwball Girl” (so dubbed by Life magazine) Carole Lombard away from comedies that were beginning to curdle at the box office. Selznick needed someone to play opposite Lombard in the role of an earnest apprentice attorney, one-half of a young couple struggling their way up the ladder. It was a part made for Jim Stewart in a project that ultimately failed due to script second-guessing and rewrites. Mediocre reviews spelled box-office poison, which was bad news for Carole Lombard, although Stewart proved more resilient and moved on.
MGM continued to fumble around with Stewart in successive bombs, Ice Follies of 1939 with Joan Crawford and It’s a Wonderful World with Claudette Colbert, proving that even a plug-and-play talent the caliber of Jim couldn’t overcome an indifferent script from the middle of the stack. Frank Capra, however, kept Jim’s number handy for a project called The Gentleman from Montana, a picture about the essence of American democracy to be set in Washington, D.C. Capra could feel this premise in his heart and his bones: An idealistic young senator handpicked by a political machine because of his naïveté settles into a temporary seat in the U.S. Senate and tries his best to genuinely represent the people of his state. It was a part Capra felt was handcrafted for…Gary Cooper, fresh off the arduous production of the French Foreign Legion epic Beau Geste for Paramount. Capra negotiated with Samuel Goldwyn for a Cooper loan-out to Columbia. After all, a picture as big as the U.S. Capitol needed a star as big as Gary Cooper to play in it, and six-foot-four Coop actually hailed from Montana! But Sam Goldwyn had already lined up Coop to star in two Goldwyn productions, The Real Glory and The Westerner. What could be accomplished by loaning his stud out for somebody else’s prestige picture?
Instead, Capra’s call went out to MGM for another loan-out of Jim Stewart. Capra had already been to Washington where he shot 2,500 still photos and exposed thousands of feet of motion picture film so he could get the feel of the seat of democracy. The photos would be used as background for set designers who would recreate the U.S. Senate chamber and other D.C. landmarks.
When Stewart took script in hand from a messenger at the front door of Evanston and started to look through it, the gravity of this “tremendous, wonderful role” hit him. He also knew the production would be hell for a man with a nervous disposition and weak stomach, and he was right. Eighty-nine production days culminated with a five-day shoot in Washington, D.C., at the Capitol, National Press Club, Senate Office Building, and a location that knocked Stewart for a loop, the Lincoln Memorial.
Stewart’s most dedicated couple of days involved the application of a tincture of mercury bichloride, a caustic mercury-chlorine compound used to treat syphilis, onto his vocal cords by a physician to produce a wicked sore throat—the hoarseness that would come at the end of the twenty-three-hour filibuster staged for Mr. Smith’s climax. Stewart didn’t simulate that painful last-minute speech about lost causes; he lived it.
But the road to classic status wasn’t easy for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which earned the label “radical” after a premiere at Constitutional Hall in D.C. that was attended by Capra and an audience of congressmen and their hangers-on. How dare Mr. Capra assert that corruption was standard practice within the hallowed halls of Congress? In retrospect, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington continues to resonate specifically because it identifies the conflict of interest of politicians at a national level who could be bought and paid for and so malignantly influence American policy. The screenplay also happened to be written by a card-carrying Communist named Sidney Buchman, and so Capra and Stewart sweated out the first few days of release to see if moral outrage would sink the ship. Then, general release in block-booked movie palaces produced unprecedented word of mouth about Stewart, co-star Jean Arthur, and an American fable chronicling a decent young man fighting the good fight and prevailing against all odds.
Jim had remained sober as a judge in all regards through production of Mr. Smith, down to driving well below the speed limit, for fear “that something was going to happen to him,” according to Jean Arthur, and spoil this chance he had been given. Now with Mr. Smith wrapped, Jim took the month of August 1939 to visit France and England, places he always had wanted to see, places so vital, so peaceful. But just to the east lay a Germany that was growing bolder by the day, grabbing land and rattling sabers.
At the time of his European trip, Jim had already been signed by producer Joe Pasternak at Universal Pictures for a western. Pasternak had been making a name with a string of profitable Deanna Durbin pictures. Now Joe was feeling his oats and had latched onto a script called Destry, adapted from a book by popular western writer Max Brand that (claimed Pasternak) had a part that was perfect for Jim Stewart. Early trade ads capitalized on the forthcoming Mr. Smith Goes to Washington by pitching a working title of The Man from Montana. After Pasternak announced that he had signed Stewart, he began to have the script tailored for Jim and went after the perfect woman to work with Jim: Hollywood exile Marlene Dietrich.
What? The MGM string bean Stewart in a western? Paired with a woman who had been driven clean out of the country after a series of lethal bombs, including Selznick’s The Garden of Allah? Hadn’t Tom Mix already ridden Max Brand’s Destry dinosaur in a 1932 picture? But Pasternak had a gut feeling and a vision that motivated him to track down Dietrich on the French Riviera. He managed to get her to the phone, where he explained that he wanted her in Hollywood for a western.
“You must be crazy,” she moaned in a voice known the world over. “Haven’t you heard? I’m box office poison.”
In the end Pasternak got his girl, the hottest ticket in Hollywood eight years earlier in the wake of The Blue Angel and Morocco, but then with each fancy, inaccessible-to-middle-America production thereafter, she had lost her audience.
Jim returned to New York City from his European vacation aboard the French liner Normandie on August 28, 1939, after an Atlantic crossing that also transported George Raft, Constance Bennett, Sonja Henie, director Josef von Sternberg, and many other high-profile celebrities across the North Atlantic. Stewart then flew cross-country, arriving in Hollywood August 30 to start memorizing early scenes for his Destry picture, even though much of the script hadn’t been finalized. Two days later, radios blasted the news of German tanks rolling through Poland, and a few days after that, Pasternak picked up Marlene and her lover and companion, famed German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, at the Pasadena train station, where once Hank had picked up Jim. Then, as now, no reporters or photographers covered the event.
Over at Universal, Pasternak introduced the incomparable Marlene to her star-struck co-star, charming and charmable (if you were a movie queen) Jim. He beheld five-foot-four, blue-eyed, honey-haired Dietrich in the flesh, complete with that cat-ate-the-canary smirk, which came with the package. She had him at hello.
“She liked having sex with big-name male stars and called each one a ‘conquest,’” said her friend, Hollywood actor and writer Steve Hayes, who also knew Stewart. “That’s an interesting viewpoint. No mention of love or attraction; just one conquest after another.” For Joan Crawford, sleeping with and controlling directors and co-stars was business; for Marlene, it was sport. Conquests.
Tight-lipped Jim would admit later that his association with Dietrich was “fairly romantic” and that he was “taken off guard by her adult concept of life.” That’s saying something for a man who had dated Norma Shearer. His relationship with Dietrich grew plenty adult and, according to Remarque, the thirty-eight-year-old Marlene became pregnant as a consequence of the passionate affair with Stewart, with no child resulting after a sudden trip to New York City. Much later in life, Dietrich would have nothing kind to say about her Destry co-star, although they did make another picture together in 1951.
Stewart’s friend Burgess Meredith dismissed the notion that an abortion had resulted from the Stewart-Dietrich affair and said, “If you ask me, the person who began those rumors was Dietrich. I think she considered it an unpardonable sin when Jim told her it was over.”
But their 1939 feature, Destry Rides Again, proved a tremendous hit, revitalizing Dietrich’s career and showcasing the fact that the man nicknamed Slats could even play westerns, which no one saw coming.
Jim rolled back through the lion’s gates at MGM as a genuine Hollywood star, a talent to be exploited with a real assignment, not middling programmers. This time he was given a romantic A-picture, The Shop Around the Corner, about pen pals who unknowingly begin working together at a Budapest leather goods shop and, after many trials and tribulations, fall in love. Sought-after director Ernst Lubitsch, fresh off work with Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, also at Metro, led a strong ensemble cast including Stewart and the love of his life to date, Margaret Sullavan. By now Jim had grown accustomed to the exercise of working with Maggie, romancing her and kissing her on soundstages and then sending her home to his Brentwood neighbor, Leland Hayward. If these productions unhinged Jim emotionally, he gave no hint of it on-screen. The smooth, happy, and stage-bound production of The Shop Around the Corner wrapped principal photography in six short weeks.
As the holidays approached at the end of 1939, Jim wanted and needed to get away. He headed east, back to New York City, where he met Doddie and Ginny for a reunion, with plans to proceed back home to see his parents for Christmas. The world had reached the end of the 1930s, which for Jim had been a crazy decade that began on the stage playing before dozens and ended on the screen playing before millions. He was thirty-one now as he flew east on DC-3s to reach LaGuardia. Even riding tailwinds it was eighteen hours coast to coast with at least three stops along the way—more if mechanical difficulties arose—offering time to think about the past, present, and future. He felt his life was about to change; he just didn’t know how soon. In fact change would come in just days with a new romantic association like none he had had to date.
He had been playing with fire when he got involved with some of the most ego-minded women in Hollywood. Loretta began to scare some sense into him when she came on so very strong and talked marriage. Then, the relationship with Marlene, so sexually sublime and adult minded, had terrified him by the way it ended in high drama. It ended the way it had to end because there could be nothing worse than bringing a movie star home to Indiana, unless it was bringing a pregnant movie star home. That indeed could be worse. So Jim made a rule for himself and he lived by it: He decided he would not marry someone in the business. Period.
Of course, sharing this information on a first date might put a damper on romance, so he continued to play the field. A couple of months earlier, on October 10, he had sat eating dinner at the Cock ’n Bull restaurant at the bottom of Sunset Strip. Across the way, he noticed two very attractive sisters dining together. They were the de Havilland girls, Olivia and her slightly younger sister, Joan, who used the last name Fontaine. Olivia recorded the incident in her journal—she thought it giggle-worthy that James Stewart was so obviously interested in one sister, or both.
Later in the year Jim showed his hand; it had been Olivia, known around town as Livvie, who had drawn his interest. A movie magazine asked Jim to provide his viewpoint as a male in Hollywood to a list of questions. The magazine asked Jim to name an opposite number among actresses to provide the woman’s view. He chose Livvie. They had seen each other around town from a distance for years, but on this face-to-face meeting for the magazine piece, she told her diary, “Heavens! I didn’t know he was so tall! My gaze traveled up—up—up—and at last I came to the Stewart face.” She liked his face; he liked hers.
Up until December 1939 Olivia de Havilland had been known primarily as Errol Flynn’s girl in a number of costume pictures at Warner Bros. of Burbank. Rumors around town said Errol and Olivia were on again, off again. Of course, Flynn had been married to French actress Lili Damita since 1935, but that barely seemed to put a dent in his daily consumption of girls anywhere within reach. Errol had already proposed to Livvie, but she told him a relationship was impossible as long as he remained entangled with Lili. Which is not to say Livvie and Errol hadn’t gotten physical; after all, he was Errol Flynn and she was only human.
In December Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta, followed by Hollywood and New York City, and then went into limited release amidst gushing reviews and spectacular word of mouth. Suddenly de Havilland, billed fourth as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, had become a star of the first magnitude, no longer a damsel in need of rescuing but now a luminary of prestige pictures.
According to the official story, Leland Hayward, now not only Jim’s agent but Livvie’s as well, called Slats during his stay in New York City with Doddie and Ginny. Was Jim interested in escorting poor dateless Livvie to the New York premiere of Gone With the Wind ? But Stewart’s preexisting interest in Livvie suggests the story of a blind date was a studio invention. Either way, Jim rode a limo onto the LaGuardia tarmac to pick up Livvie, and thus began several days of wining, dining, dancing, and general carrying on.
Jim and Livvie had a lot in common. Underneath, they were a couple of closed books, fierce introverts who were perfectly fine with their own company. Each had grown up with a dictatorial father figure, although hers had been a stepfather. Each thought a lot but said little; each had an internal nervous streak. Each had experienced frustration at a home studio that seemed indifferent or, in Livvie’s case, downright hostile. Both placed career ahead of all and refused to rush impetuously into matrimony as so many of their peers seemed to. Yes, Livvie was a movie star, but for the first time since Ginger, Jim wasn’t dating a much older, much more famous, sexually experienced movie queen.
Soon, Jim and Livvie were seen at all the hotspots, the Cocoanut Grove, Ciro’s, and Café Trocadero being favorite haunts. She even stopped seeing her then-boyfriend, United Artists talent agent Tim Durant, and dated Jim exclusively into the spring of 1940. Marriage rumors abounded, with a different fan magazine taking up the marriage watch each month. For once the tables were turned on Jim—an aloof young woman had managed to capture his imagination because he never quite knew what she was thinking. Was he ready to settle down? He began to wonder, and yet he knew his future was up in the air.
By now the situation in Europe had grown ever more dire. England was tied to Poland by treaty, and when Germany had invaded Poland six months earlier in September 1939, England was obliged to declare war. Now, all that stood between Germany and England was the lush countryside of France. Jim scanned the newspapers daily for changes to the European situation, and nothing kept happening. Sky watchers in London expected German air raids at any moment—hundreds of thousands of wooden coffins had been pre-built and stacked in London in case of the worst. It was the Sitzkrieg, the phony war, an oppressive calm before the storm that everyone knew would brew up and everyone was dreading. Jim returned to work on what was, for MGM, an unprecedented production during the quiet time, The Mortal Storm, set in Germany and showing how the rise of National Socialism was tearing families and friendships apart. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released by Warner Bros. a year earlier, had been the first anti-Hitler major production by a Hollywood studio. The Mortal Storm would be the second, this time much more personal and upsetting as it depicted corruption of German young people by the Nazi propaganda machine and the removal of Jews from German society. Up to now, the Hollywood studios had been avoiding actions that might alienate their European markets, of which Germany remained a linchpin. But Jack Warner had finally bucked the trend, and now Louis B. Mayer would follow suit.
“The emotional and nervous strain was terrific,” said Jim Stewart of the experience of making The Mortal Storm, the last of four pictures that would co-star him with the woman he could never have, Maggie Sullavan. As they shot, the British Expeditionary Force of 158,000 troops landed in France in support of French infantry divisions that daily expected to receive a German frontal assault. The free world felt that the combined British and French forces would stabilize the situation. Hitler wouldn’t dare attack and suffer the bloody nose the Allies could inflict. But Hitler did the unexpected: The Sitzkrieg ended when Germany invaded not France but Norway and Denmark.
Soon after The Mortal Storm wrapped, Jim began No Time for Comedy, his first picture at Olivia de Havilland’s home studio, Warner Bros. In a move not unlike trading big-league ballplayers, David O. Selznick had traded the rights to James Stewart to Jack Warner in exchange for Olivia de Havilland’s appearing in Gone With the Wind. Warner had done this prior to the release of Mr. Smith and Destry Rides Again and now in April 1940 when production commenced, he gleefully watched one of the top actors in the world toiling on Warner soundstages. Both Jim and Livvie had told the Warner brass that they would not participate in any PR trumpeting their romance, not for No Time for Comedy or for her Warner Bros. vehicle in production, My Love Came Back.
Despite the presence of fun and funny Rosalind Russell as his co-star, Jim didn’t find anything easy about playing comedy these days. A month into production, news broke that 1,500 German tanks had motored through the Ardennes Forest in front of 1.5 million troops. Supported by Luftwaffe dive bombers, the armor and infantry attacked French cavalry and French infantry, tore through both, threatened Paris, and then made an oblique move northward toward Calais and the English Channel and split Allied forces in two. Far from bloodying Hitler’s nose, Allied troops had been driven from the field and just that fast, Europe was about to fall to Nazi Germany.
For what it mattered in a world falling apart, No Time for Comedy had been a Broadway hit for Laurence Olivier, and Jim Stewart was no Olivier. A rewrite was in order to pitch the plot toward Jim’s unique talents. Instead of portraying an urbane playwright on Broadway contemplating leaving his wife, Jim is a reporter who writes a play in his spare time and meets and falls in love with the actress chosen as the play’s star. It was standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, with some hints of Mr. Smith tossed into the cocktail shaker. The result was an economical Stewart star vehicle that would go on to make money for Warner Bros.
By the time the Warner picture had wrapped, Italy was an Axis participant in the war, Germans had marched into Paris, and, while Jim was on hiatus before starting another picture assignment, France surrendered.
The weight of the world fell upon the shoulders of the cast of his next picture back at MGM, The Philadelphia Story. Jim would portray a cynical newspaper reporter who falls in love with a society girl as the second-billed male star to Cary Grant, on loan from Columbia Pictures. The female lead, Katharine Hepburn, had starred in the stage version of The Philadelphia Story and rode the Hollywood comeback trail after having been considered box-office poison as recently as 1938. Hepburn believed that this new picture would be her triumph, and the three superstars responded beautifully to George Cukor, one of the most skilled directors in town. The production was efficient but never chummy among Hepburn, Grant, and Stewart as the world spun into fragments in the summer of 1940. During the final weeks of production, the battle for Britain had begun—and Stewart and Hepburn felt great sympathy for Bristol-born Grant. Cast and crew devoured the latest news of German planes pounding British airfields in an attempt to knock the Royal Air Force out of action, while RAF Spitfires scrambled to meet the threat. The German goal of clearing the skies of British fighters would set into motion Operation Sea Lion, the ground invasion of the United Kingdom, and so hundreds of thousands of German troops amassed on the French coastline, waiting. As Jim Stewart followed reports of the action, he confirmed for himself an unassailable fact: This next war would be an air war. The Luftwaffe had used air power as a key component in all its invasions. And now both Germany and England were jockeying for position with, you guessed it, air power. Whoever ruled the skies would rule the world. And this fact meant everything, simply everything, to Jim Stewart.