In early March 1941 Jim remained on hiatus from his home studio upon completion of the two Metro pictures and one at United Artists, and spent his days at Clover Field in the Stinson working toward a transport license as a commercial pilot. He had gotten close, very close, to the flight time needed to qualify. Arriving home one day he found another government letter in the roadside mailbox. Under the shield of the Selective Service System was printed in capital letters, ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION as a U.S. Army reservist. Jim stood at the side of Evanston Drive, stunned to silence once again. Chills raked him. He would get away from Hollywood. He would wear the uniform. He would make Dad happy. He might even fly. His greatest relief: L.B. hadn’t won. Even if L.B. or Mannix or whoever had worked behind the scenes between Culver City and Washington to keep Jim out, they hadn’t succeeded. Now it was official, and he held the precious piece of paper saying he was in. All the way in.
He scanned the page. “You are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service in the…” Typed onto the pre-printed solid blank line was the word Army. There. The Army. The Air Corps. Such a relief!
He was to report to draft board No. 245 in West Los Angeles on the twenty-second day of March 1941. Well, there it was. James Maitland Stewart would follow old J.M. and Union Gen. Sam Jackson and Alex into line to swear the oath. Jim would do what his ancestors always did: feed a restless spirit with conflagration.
He now faced a certain future that would arrive on a certain date. He would later admit, “You have that sick feeling, that pigeon with a wing off, flapping around in your stomach. It’s the same feeling you have before a race or before you play in a football game or go in and ask the boss for a raise. It’s the same feeling I have when I go to a preview of a picture I’m in.”
He returned to Clover Field early and often in March and climbed into the Stinson to log more flight time. He was worried about getting his commercial pilot’s rating, as he related to his favorite reporter, James Reid: “You have to pass tests in precision flying. You have to execute a succession of figure eights around two pylons a certain distance apart—which isn’t so easy when you have to make your turns in a limited amount of space. You have to be able to come in from a thousand feet and make a full-stop landing within forty feet of a certain white line. You have to know how to go into and come out of tailspins. You have to know how to fly by instruments.” He also admitted to Reid he was sweating the four-hour written exam and had enlisted the aid of an Army instructor who stopped by Evanston every night.
Precisely because he arrived prepared and had not only gone by the book but also absorbed it, on Monday, March 10, he earned the coveted rating of commercial pilot that he reasoned would, coupled with his Princeton degree, put him further down the track for consideration as an Air Corps officer and command pilot, offsetting his advanced age of almost thirty-three in a program where ideal pilots were a decade younger than that.
On Sunday, March 16, he took off yet again into the early afternoon sky to log hours, always more hours to impress the Air Corps. He climbed out of Clover Field and banked right, heading north along the coast. Below sprawled Marion Davies’ beach house and its outbuildings, bringing to mind the old days of the William Randolph Hearst parties. Days he figured to be done with now. After a while he banked right again and flew over the Warner Ranch at Calabasas, over endless high-rolling hills and tall grass, a beautiful day to fly, but then they all were, days spent powering his plane through the air in utter and total freedom from the cares below. There wasn’t room for any thought other than powered flight and the instrument panel. Here he ruled his world, free of the Mayers and any woman who would try to control him.
“There’s so much to think about up there,” he said, meaning the gauges indicating performance of the ship and the weather outside, “that you forget things down below. Flying is something altogether different from the way I’m earning my living. That’s what I like about it…. Flying is sort of a guarantee that life will continue to have variety.”
He traced Mulholland Drive, skirting the ridge tops at an altitude of 5,000 and continued east. All of a sudden the engine coughed and the Stinson gave a lurch; coughed again and the nose dropped and he began losing altitude. Where was he, Tarzana? No, no, it was Van Nuys. He spotted the Van Nuys airfield in the distance and headed that way. He put in a call to Van Nuys tower saying he needed to land there, and they gave him a runway assignment. Except he couldn’t make it. He muscled the controls and with the engine sputtering kept just enough airspeed to descend with wings level. He heard nothing but the malfunctioning engine and felt its spasmodic coughs and in his ears was the roar of rushing air.
Ahead lay the Van Nuys runways and just then, at 500 feet, the engine quit. Mid-cycle. Quit. And in a power glide he glimpsed a flat farm field and aimed at it. Teeth gritted, gripping the wheel, he maneuvered as best he could into a landing in the field and… smacked into the parched California earth, sending a spray of dirt in all directions. Impact slammed his head off the control panel and he hung there in dust and smoke. Pretty or not, he was down and still alive. He worried how badly he had injured himself; he worried more about his plane.
An ambulance dispatched by the airfield tower came in to scrape Jim Stewart out of the Stinson and hurry him away to a hospital in Van Nuys. Consciousness brought with it worry, no, terror that his Air Corps career had gone down with the Stinson, and what good was a pilot who couldn’t keep his ship in the air? His swearing-in was just six days away! He thought as fast as his post-collision brain would go: James Stewart the actor couldn’t be admitted to a hospital after a plane crash. No. Impossible. It would be the end of everything. He kept his face down as the attendants pulled the gurney out of the ambulance, and James Stewart admitted himself to the hospital as James Smith.
But even in a town where discretion by the press saved many a star, word about the MGM leading man who cracked up his airplane got out anyway. The story hit the wires as he lay in the hospital with bumps and bruises to his ego and his body.
Buzz Meredith visited him during recovery and said, “He had a bump on his head the size of a baseball and there were cuts on his face, but he was sitting up and smiling. I said, ‘Jim, are you sure you can survive a war? You have trouble surviving in your own plane.’”
Three days later L.B. summoned Jim to a private meeting for an inevitable tongue-lashing about the folly of general aviation for movie stars. Jim entered the art deco Thalberg Building and rode the elevator up to three and the great man’s office, ready to face the worst. But the fact was that once he entered the service, who was to say he would live to make another picture anyway? He had crashed his plane on friendly territory accumulating flight time to earn his way into the job of Army Air Corps pilot, and sooner or later somebody would be shooting at him from the ground or the air meaning to kill him. Did it really matter what Louis B. Mayer thought anymore?
L.B. started out warmly but cut to the chase. “You’re just giving up this wonderful screen career you’ve made for yourself,” he told Jim, “and all you’ll be doing is sitting at some clerk’s desk on a military base somewhere, and then you’ll regret it.”
“Mr. Mayer,” said Jim, “this country’s conscience is bigger than all the studios in Hollywood put together, and the time will come when we’ll have to fight.”
L.B. changed tactics and asked Jim to consider fulfilling his obligation in the very fine Army Air Corps Motion Picture Unit based at Wright Airfield in Dayton, Ohio, where, Mayer reasoned, Jim would remain just a plane or car ride away from his family. Mayer argued that Jim could do a lot more good for his country as a recruiting tool, urging young men to choose to become pilots or navigators or bombardiers, than he could by serving as one man in one airplane. The boss didn’t even ask for an answer. He led Jim out of the office and down the hall and just implored him to keep the idea in mind, to consider it.
Mayer pushed open the door to his private dining room and motioned Jim inside. Voices boomed, “Surprise!” Jim stood in the doorway of a room crammed with more stars seated at the long table than there were in heaven. He looked around to see Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, Judy Garland, Ann Rutherford, Rosalind Russell, Diana Lewis, and Ruth Hussey along with Eddie Mannix, Bill Grady, and the publicity boys, Howard Strickling, Ralph Wheelright, and Otto Winkler. Stewart was shown to a seat next to L.B. at the head of the table and dined there with his MGM family. Afterward, L.B. rose to his feet and talked about Jim’s arrival on the lot and ascent to the top pictures in town. He said he realized how seriously Stewart took his work at the studio and appreciated the fact that Jim set such a fine example for other Metro contract players. Then, he looked down at the honored guest and promised that his job would be waiting for him upon completion of the military obligation.
As he settled in his seat, L.B. motioned for Jim to address the gathering. Jim arose much as Jefferson Smith accepting the Senate nomination. Jim said he had asked that nobody at MGM make a fuss about his departure and do something crazy like throw a party. Then he admitted that maybe a party wasn’t such a bad idea after all, and his delivery produced chuckles from people who knew of his closed nature and how difficult he found these situations. You could put James Stewart on a soundstage replicating the U.S. Senate in front of 500 actors and extras and he’d be fine, perfectly at home—as long as he portrayed someone other than James Stewart. But ask him to be himself, ask him to let his guard down, and the real Jim Stewart was revealed, the guy with the nervous stomach who had spent years proving his worth through his sex partners.
After dinner with drinks in hand, those in attendance mingled. Stewart said, “Clark Gable came up to me and said, ‘You know you’re throwing away your career, don’t you?’”
“Yep, I know,” said Jim.
“You won’t catch me doing that,” said Gable, “but I wish you Godspeed.”
Then every woman made a show of kissing Jim. It started with a peck on the cheek for luck from Rosalind Russell and then one from Judy, then Lana, and then Ann Rutherford. World-class kissers, both Lana and Ann, with neither letting on that they had already bagged Jim. It went with the territory—sooner or later, everyone bagged everyone in the jungle known as Hollywood. Jim seized the moment and approached a woman he hadn’t yet bagged, Ruth Hussey, and asked for a date on his first leave, whenever that would be. What was a girl to do but say yes—if he promised to wear his uniform.
Afterward, according to Stewart, Roz Russell wiped the lipstick off Jim’s face, and under each stain on the cloth she noted which lipstick belonged to which actress. “I carried that handkerchief with me for the rest of the war,” said Jim, “as a good luck token.”
The next night Jim was summoned to Franchot Tone’s house for a different sort of get-together, a stag party dubbed the Military Ball. Those in attendance, Gable, Fonda, Buzz, Grady, Spencer Tracy, and Robert Taylor, each had trekked to Western Costume for an appropriate military uniform for the evening.
Jim didn’t care that he was partying on the eve of induction day because he wouldn’t have slept anyhow. At four in the morning, he asked Buzz and Bill to drive him over to Evanston so he could pack. They changed out of their military duds and got him home and then piled into Grady’s convertible and raced east on San Vicente over to Brentwood and the intersection of Santa Monica and Westwood Boulevards where Jim and eighteen other inductees had been ordered to rendezvous. Jim and party arrived fifteen minutes late.
Suitcase in hand, wearing a suit and tie, fedora, and raincoat, Jim eased up to a nervous-looking collection of men and their luggage surrounding Army Sgt. James J. Smith. Stewart said to the gathering, “It’s a little early in the morning,” then, to the sergeant he gave his name. Smith checked Stewart’s name off his list on a clipboard. Jim looked around him at the crowded corner and a near riot. He assumed upon arrival that the crowd numbering a couple hundred, all ages and sizes, all manner of dress, were there to see him. He didn’t know at the time that the draft board had summoned the press—including newsreel camera crews—to assure adequate coverage of America’s most famous draftee, and he never reckoned that the others in his draft group would have entourages larger than that of a Hollywood star.
Jim began to get his bearings. It dawned on him that the crowd included parents of the inductees, sweethearts, and friends. He recognized that the most boisterous members of the crowd were college kids apparently from USC. Lots and lots of them. They didn’t have the slightest interest in old fogey Stewart but rather focused attention on two giddy fraternity brothers across the way. Off the sidewalk near the wall of a building, two boys who had been doing some drinking pounded tribal drums while a third played a trumpet and a fourth a trombone. The quartet managed to produce something that vaguely resembled “You’re in the Army Now.” Kids held signs reading, SO LONG, YARDBIRDS and GOOD-BYE, LITTLE FELLOWS. Jim stood there waiting, hands in pockets, grateful to have others in the spotlight this morning. One of the frat brothers wore an old German trench helmet that put Jim in mind of those sent to him by his dad from Germany, the ones he used as wardrobe in plays produced in his basement. He laughed to himself as photographers pressed in, snapping still photos, and newsreel crews shot motion picture film from vehicles parked at the curb.
Sergeant Smith stood next to Jim and murmured, “We’re short one man.” He shouted over the cacophony, “Alvin James King! King, are you here? Alvin…James…King!” The sergeant turned to Stewart and said, “He better show or there’ll be a warrant issued.”
Smith looked at his watch one last time. He shot a glance at the raucous band and shouted, “Cut out that racket!” Word was relayed to the musicians, and the street corner fell silent. To the inductees he said, “We will march down this street to the trolley stop and board the next train downtown! Fall in by twos!” The eighteen men clumsily arranged themselves.
“Move out!” Sergeant Smith ordered, and they ambled down the street in the loosest of assemblages. Jim gave Bill and Buzz a nod. They nodded back to Slats and watched him stride off down the street. He was noticeably taller and more gangling than the men with him, and yet still boyish. They had seen their friend every which way. Sober, drunk, loud, quiet, contemplative, and bemused. Slats was the guy who had somehow put himself in a position where the most famous women in the world were desperate to seduce him, and Meredith and Grady had seen him come home so many times from the hottest nights imaginable.
But they had never seen Jim Stewart look the way he looked now. Jim was gleeful. He might even have been deep-down happy. They didn’t understand how this situation would make any man happy, but as he strode down the street and out of sight, on those spindly legs, with that ridiculous gait, they were happy because he gave every indication he was happy.
Inductee Stewart found himself on West Third Street downtown at Induction Station No. 2. On the second floor, amidst the great clatter of reporters and photographers surrounding him and crowding in, under the glare of lights on stands, he filled out questionnaires. He faced his first fire when a flashbulb exploded as they sometimes did, sending a shower of sizzling glass onto the desk and his papers. He flicked the hot shards onto the floor with the back of his hand and went on grinning.
He was fingerprinted—the press photographed it in multiple takes, from several angles. Eye test? The press was three feet away. A physical behind closed doors revealed that his hearing was 20/20, his visual acuity was 20/20, and he had twenty-eight teeth, normal reflexes, a normal gait, and no hernia, tonsils, hemorrhoids, or venereal diseases. He dressed again and went into another room with other inductees and just as many members of the press corps, raised his right hand, and repeated to an officer facing the group:
“I, James Maitland Stewart, do solemnly swear that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America and will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whom-soever. I will obey orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me according to the rules of the articles of war. So help me, God.”
The officer said, “Congratulations. You’re in the army now.” The men were assigned serial numbers and Jim learned his would be 39230721.
From there, he and the others filed onto a bus that drove them south to Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, near Long Beach and the ocean. Stepping off the bus the recruits ran a gauntlet of surrounding soldiers. “Suckers!” they shouted. “Get a load of that one!” somebody said of the skinny man who towered above the others. They were lined up on the parade ground and a drill sergeant taught them to count off. All were assigned barracks and then marched to the Mess Hall for lunch. Jim sat and managed a couple bites of food in a cavernous room full of men and conversation.
After lunch his group marched to the quartermaster depot to be uniformed and equipped. Jim held two pails of sand to force a full load of weight on his size-eleven feet so they would flatten out for fitting with shoes. He was issued a khaki-green uniform. He learned how to stand in formation, open and close ranks, march, and salute. He received a set of dog tags, a regulation haircut, and a Springfield rifle. He slept in bunk beds with all the others—beds spaced five feet apart. He spent the next day on KP, and the day after that scrubbing floors; he was a real soldier now.
On that first trip to the Mess Hall, he realized what an oddball he truly was. Why, these were mostly kids surrounding him, and here he was, more than a decade their senior, the old guy, the tall guy, the quiet guy, and worst of all, the movie star followed around the post by a reporter and photographers. It wasn’t easy for Jim Stewart to talk to the other recruits; they had no idea how to approach a motion picture luminary.
He went through a sorting process like all the others, determining what his role would be in the Army, but Jim had programmed his role and now sweated out confirmation of assignment to the Air Corps. He needn’t have worried. His military record included a document from the Adjutant General’s Office dated March 22, the date of enlistment, indicating that Private Stewart was indeed an Air Corps assignee. That piece of paper meant everything. But there was another piece of paper. Mayer had been in contact with Washington and had gotten his way: After basic training, Stewart would be assigned to the Motion Picture Unit at Headquarters Squadron, 50th Transport Wing, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, “for the purpose of making motion picture shorts for the Air Corps. It is believed his services would be particularly effective in securing Flying Cadet candidates.” Metro planned to see that its player-soldier kept plenty busy in the service. In the same document, Stewart was named for “the forthcoming School of Aviation Medicine Picture, as well as assisting in directing and as a commentator.”
Directing? Was this supposed to be an enticement to Jim? Gosh, everyone wants to direct pictures! Private Stewart looked at the order and saw blood. He wasn’t any eighteen-year-old kid staring at orders; he was James Stewart, Academy Award winner and friend of powerful people, and that better goddamned mean something because Jim Stewart was going to war.
He spent five days at Fort MacArthur. On Thursday, March 27, he and several others from his induction class were assigned to Headquarters, Air Corps Basic Flying School at Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California, outside San Francisco. Jim settled in there and shed himself of that pigeon-with-a-clipped-wing feeling.
He started buzzing about Moffett’s runways in an AT-6 Texan trainer, showing potential as a military pilot, and he declared to the press: “I’m feeling swell, getting in good condition, and get along fine with the other draftees. They all treat me very well.” He added, speaking now directly to his father, “We enlisted men have come to love the service. Every one of us has turned his face from our normal pursuits and has his eyes lifted to a new ideal. There is a unity of thought and action that can not and will not be broken.”
He earned corporal stripes and became a squad leader, his duties including drill instruction for new recruits.
“When you drill, and yell orders all day,” said Jim, “going through the manual of arms, by nightfall you’re hoarse and ready for bed.”
When he had been on station at Moffett for a month, a directive from Washington ordered him to Wright Field, Ohio. Corporal Stewart lost his temper, and because he was James Stewart, secured a meeting unprecedented for a recruit: Jim was welcomed in the office of Col. E.B. Lyon, commanding officer at Moffett Field.
If Jim hadn’t been Jim, he would have been cooked now. Since Jim was Jim, he had his flight logs and a photostat of his commercial pilot’s license in hand when he walked in to meet with Moffett’s C.O. Jim thought it fitting that he was doing battle with MGM in the office of a man named Lyon. Stewart stood at attention before his commanding officer; Colonel Lyon offered him a seat and urged Jim to be comfortable. Jim got right to the point: He had been assigned to the film unit at Wright Field in Ohio and that was the last thing he wanted. He was in the Air Corps and an experienced pilot and his goal was not to make movies stateside. He showed his license and his logs. He wanted to be a combat pilot overseas. This had always been his goal.
Lyon was used to hotshot recruits, but not privates as sophisticated, or as unique, as James Stewart.
After the obligatory discussion about Jim’s advanced age and how that might make it unlikely he would fly, Lyon provided extraordinary help to a newly minted noncom and air cadet. After reading the Adjutant General’s orders and listening to Stewart’s story, Lyon sent a request for reconsideration to the Chief of the Air Corps in Washington. He stated that Stewart “does not desire to engage in any phase of Motion Picture activity or publicity while he is in the Army, and he does not desire to be transferred from this station. He has repeatedly, while at this station, shunned publicity. He wants to be treated exactly as any other American boy drafted into the service of his country.”
Lyon went on to assert that it was in the Army’s best interest to keep Stewart on his current course, that he was only forty hours of flying time in a 200-horsepower aircraft short of qualifying for commission as a second lieutenant. In fact Jim spent his weekends at Palo Alto Airport logging hours at his own expense in a Stinson Reliant and a WACO biplane to boost his flight time in high-performance aircraft. He allocated some of this time to acrobatics, a necessity for Army pilots—anything to stay away from serving as a pretend soldier making pictures for the U.S. government and for an MGM that would force him into the likes of Come Live with Me and Ziegfeld Girl.
Lyon’s request to Washington for reconsideration worked. Stewart remained at Moffett Field and was no longer assailed by orders from Air Corps Headquarters to fly east to Ohio. There at Moffett, far from Culver City, Louis B. Mayer, and the world of Hollywood with its tawdry games and close contact with tortured souls, James Stewart became immersed in the culture of flying.
The army’s guidebook for pilots stated, “All pilots must know how to use the Technical Order files,” which covered the airplane and its parts as well as its fuel, hangars, flying field, supplies, and other hardware. It also required pilots to have thorough knowledge of the electrical equipment, fuel system, oil system, propellers and accessories, wheels, brakes and struts, air and hydraulic system accessories, ice-eliminating equipment, control units, fire extinguishers, CO2 inflation equipment, and accessory power plant. In other words, pilot candidates had to be equal parts mechanic, scientist, and mathematician. Jim was no great student, but he had a knack for mechanics in part from spending his early life around handy men at the hardware store.
“He told me that when he was twelve, he made a crystal radio,” said Fonda earlier to a reporter. “He said he did it with oatmeal boxes and wires. I didn’t believe him, so he made one—and the damn thing worked.”
On June 14, 1941, Corporal Stewart made application for promotion to second lieutenant in the Air Corps and that same day wrote his official request to the War Department to be rated a pilot. He was able to document 265 hours of logged flight time piloting an airplane under 200 horsepower, and 102 hours in planes over 200.
Stewart phoned various friends in Hollywood for endorsements for his promotion and began the conversation, “Say listen, I need your help with something.…” Leland Hayward responded on Southwest Airways letterhead to the Chief of the Air Corps: “It is a great pleasure to write this letter of recommendation for Stewart. I have known him intimately for many years and have managed his business affairs. I can only state he is a man of high intelligence, integrity, ability, an excellent pilot and an outstanding American in all ways.”
Jim’s pal Jack Connelly, co-founder with Hayward and Swope of Southwest Airways, affirmed that Jim “is thoroughly capable of fulfilling the duties of an officer in the United States Army.”
Wrote Clarence Brown, director of Come Live with Me: “His quiet, workmanlike manner and his great sincerity in anything he undertakes should find him a deserving candidate for this commission. I am sure he will prove worthy of any advancement which you see fit to bestow upon him.”
Moffett Field Director of Training K.P. McNaughton wrote: “He is a gentleman. He is modest, conscientious, industrious, and intelligent. He is positive without being self-assertive, and a man of few words but a great deal of push. I have flown with him and found him to be a capable pilot. I know that he will bring credit to the Air Corps, and I strongly recommend that he be favorably considered for the commission which he is seeking.”
The application crept through channels. On November 13, not quite eight months from his induction, Corporal Stewart made a request to appear before a Board of Officers to determine his eligibility for the military rating of pilot. The next day, he settled into a North American BT-14 trainer and started the single 450-horsepower Wright engine. He demonstrated a series of takeoffs, climbing turns, approaches, stalls, spins, chandelles, steep banks, eights on pylons, and forced landings. He nailed everything and was rated “excellent” by his examiner in a thirty-five-minute flight.
On November 14, a board was convened at the Presidio of San Francisco and determined that Corporal Stewart had received certificates on school courses about organization of the Army and Air Corps, defense against chemical warfare, military law, military discipline, map and aerial photograph reading, military sanitation and first aid, and aerial navigation. Stewart appeared in person at the Presidio, one of many applying for second lieutenant, and was approved by lunchtime when the board adjourned. But his promotion had a catch.
Yes, he would become an Army pilot, effective January 1. But his second assigned priority was “public relations” and his third was “recruiting Air Corps.” Said the board, “He is a noted actor and his services could be utilized to marked advantage as public relations and recruiting duties for Air Corps personnel.”
On the first Sunday of December, the Japanese launched an attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that demonstrated a Japanese commitment to air power in the Pacific, just as the Germans had been using air power to roll over Europe. The looming conflagration would be in large part an air war, bearing out Stewart’s earlier belief, and his determination to serve in combat strengthened. But he seemed further away than ever from real service.