The Country Curmudgeon: A real American hero
By Roy Hicks
Thursday, March 12, 2009 10:09 AM PDT
His name was James Maitland Stewart, but he is better remembered by most of us as “Jimmy.” He was born in Indiana, Pa., in 1908.
A shy youngster, he excelled as a young student in high school and at Princeton university, eventually becoming attracted to drama. After a struggling start, he eventually became one of Hollywood’s stars of the first magnitude.
Stewart’s enduring and irresistible screen persona was as the quintessential American: a tall, gangly, easygoing and somewhat awkward Everyman always trying to make the best of whatever situation in which he found himself. Nowhere was this clearer than in his early roles in “Mister Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” and culminating in what was said to be his favorite film, “Harvey,” as the gentle alcoholic Elwood P. Dowd. But he also began taking on tougher roles in westerns such as “Winchester ‘73” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
What most Americans younger than myself do not know about Jimmy Stewart is that, in real life, he was exactly what he appeared to be on the silver screen: a real American hero totally true to his movie image.
Although an established movie star by 1940, Stewart probably could have ducked military service and spent World War II making propaganda films, but, with a lifetime interest in aviation, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and like many other real Hollywood heroes, such as Clark Gable, Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Eddie Arnold, Audie Murphy, Lee van Cleef, Charles Bronson and many others, he actually went off to fight. He flew B24 Liberator bombers in many missions over Europe and eventually returned as a genuine war hero and (like the late Arthur Godfrey and U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater) a brigadier general in the Air Force.
More unusual in post-World War II Hollywood, Stewart was a genuine and hard-core conservative, unlike his longtime friend and former struggling Hollywood roommate Henry Fonda, who turned out to be a subtle, but never totally unmasked, liberal “sleeper.” Make no mistake, friends, the attitudes of Fonda’s treasonous daughter Jane did not come out of nowhere. They were spawned by her daddy, who perhaps first formed his near-communist attitudes during the filming of “The Grapes of Wrath.” The contrast between Stewart and Fonda was briefly illustrated in their conflicting roles in “The Cheyenne Social Club” of 1970.
As endearing as Stewart was to America as the awkward Everyman, there were a few other things most of our fellow travelers do not know about this remarkable man. First, he was an amateur poet. Second, he’d been married to his wife of 45 years without a breath of scandal. Gloria died in 1994, and Stewart was said to have been heartbroken by her loss.
One of his final movie appearances was as “Doc Hostettler” with John Wayne in the latter’s last movie, “The Shootist.” Here he, Lauren Bacall, Scatman Crothers, Harry Morgan and Ron Howard could all have easily won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor of 1976.
And, finally, Jimmy Stewart was a pretty good musician. He first learned to play the accordion, which he reprised in his 1957 movie “Night Passage” with fellow World War II star Audie Murphy, and could play the piano, which he did in “Anatomy of a Murder” in 1959.
Jimmy Stewart died in 1997 at the age of 89: ironically, one day after his younger fellow screen-star Robert Mitchum. Thus two of our movie giants left this world together, but let’s never forget this stalwart American icon. He surely deserves that.
Roy Hicks, a Payette resident, writes a weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Hicks can be directed to: Roy Hicks, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914
