by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
“He’s really a non-judgemental kind of guy, and that’s because he knows he is not a perfect man. He doesn’t pretend to be.”
-Henry Fonda
When I was young my mother worked nights at a bakery, and her first shift of the week started Sunday evening at seven. She would sleep all through Sunday afternoons, while my father was out driving his cab and my brother hung around with his friends, which left me alone with little to do, so I started watching old black & white movies broadcast on PBS, (this was before specialty cable channels like Silver Screen Classics), on our Zenith System 3. That’s where I first got acquainted with Jimmy Stewart in films like Harvey, The Philadelphia Story and Anatomy of a Murder.
The lanky cinematic icon with the squeaky-clean, folksy All-American image is the subject of Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, a new book from veteran British entertainment biographer Michael Munn.
*Trivia Time* Was Jimmy Stewart from Indiana or Pennsylvania? Answer below.
Jimmy Stewart is comprised almost entirely from interviews Munn conducted over his twenty-year friendship with Stewart and his wife Gloria, as well as a number of people who knew the actor well, in their own words, which is how I prefer my biographies, (for me using direct quotes gives you a better sense of the person and their character). But this book read like it was carelessly pieced together, at times somewhat awkwardly, with fragments here and there, and multiple redundancies and repetitions, which give Jimmy Stewart an uneven pacing and leaves many important questions unanswered. While some parts are interesting, Stewart himself comes off at times like a doddering old man, and other times a bore. Reading those passages, I could almost hear the actor’s distinctive voice in my head, and it didn’t help that Munn would annoyingly write the word “well,” (as Stewart was prone to begin every single sentence he ever uttered), the way he pronounced it (“waall”). I felt like I was trapped sitting next to a verbose senior citizen on a long train ride.
Take away that Stewart was a movie star and had famous friends, and with the exception of the time he spent in the military during World War II, (which was barely covered because he didn’t like to talk about it much, apparently), and the most interesting part of the book is Woody Strode denouncing him as a racist, which brings me back to what I said earlier about unanswered questions. There were a few comments about the aforementioned subject from some of his Stewart’s friends, but very little from the man himself, leaving just accusations with speculation and little evidence. Why bother making such a serious topic a prominent part of the piece if you can’t follow it up thoroughly?
On the other hand Jimmy Stewart did tell me a number of things I didn’t already know, like how Stewart was an informer for the F.B.I., and a few things that surprised me, like how he was quite the ladies’ man when he was younger, and on that level the book did, on occasion, work for me.
Of all the old-time golden age of Hollywood movies stars, Jimmy Stewart was not the greatest and certainly not my favorite, although he did turn in a number of memorable performances in some really great films. And after reading Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, he still isn’t.
*Trivia Answer* Both. (Trick question, he was born in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania)
