James Stewart

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1983, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Speaker 20:30

As usual, the castaway is introduced by Roy Plumley.

Speaker 20:34

I cast away this week. is a great name in

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Films. A star for getting on for fifty years. It's James Stewart.

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Jimmy, how do you feel about putting your feet up for a bit on a desert island? Well, it's certainly, I remember the last time I put my feet up with you. Nearly ten years ago. Nearly ten years ago. You have a meager allowance of music. Is music important in your life? Yes, it meant a great deal to me. Did you have music lessons? Well, I started out. My mother was determined that I learned to play the piano, and I started out quite young with a woman music teacher by the name of Mrs. Buheid.

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Oh yes.

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Now misses Buhaid was a good music teacher, very strict.

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But a little too strict for me. As you

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came home uh you practiced the scales and so on and when you came back for your lesson

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as you were showing off with the scales.

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She uh got in the habit of when I missed a note or hit a sour one, she hit me on the knuckles with a pencil.

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And well, I've never quite forgiven misses Buhide for that, and my mother understood it.

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So I stopped my music lessons once and for all, and my mother

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taught me a few notes in the key of C and that's lasted me. What was your policy in choosing? Is it great music you've chosen or nostalgic music? I think nostalgic.

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I think all of these remind me of some particular

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Thing that happened some place I was. Well, what's the first one you've got on that little pile there? The road to Mandalay. Why?

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My father

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for the great big tall

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Fine looking Irishman.

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and he sang in the church choir

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Matter of fact, he sang whenever ever he was asked.

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And my mother played beautiful piano and played the organ sometimes in the choir.

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And this was sort of their favorite to him. They he he would break out with us, with my mother accompanying him.

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And I remember I sort of grew up with The Road to Mandalay.

James Stewart2:46

The wind is in the palm trees and the temple bell they say, Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay, come you back to man all day.

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On the Road to Mandalay sung by Kenneth McKellar.

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Jimmy, back to the beginning. Born in Western Pennsylvania, as a small boy, what were your ambitions?

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Oh, I don't know about the ambitions.

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On my interests, I sort of thought about that. I wanted to be a pilot.

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wanted to uh join the circus.

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Well, I guess that about Kalbishit. You succeeded in both those ambitions. You did become a pilot, and you were in a movie about a service at a Mumby. You played a clown.

James Stewart3:49

Yeah.

Presenter3:51

Which one was that?

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The greatest show on earth. I was thinking about it today because I was making a picture here when I read that mister DeMille was making a picture about Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Buddy Circus.

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I hadn't met mister DeMille, but I sent him a letter.

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and said that I'd always all my life wanted to be a clown, and could I have a part in the picture of a clown.

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And he

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sent me back a very short wire.

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Actually, about as short as you could get, he just said, yes, C. B. DeMille.

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Now you went to Princeton University. What did you read?

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I had sort of a rocky road. I had started out as a civil engineer.

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And then a professor called me up to his desk one day and said.

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I believe that you'd better consider getting out of this subject because it requires a certain amount of knowledge in mathematics.

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And as far as I can see, your knowledge of mathematics.

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I don't know what's happened to it, but it's it's very critical. So I took the hint and changed and sort of because of a a little skill in drafting that I had developed uh over the years, I got interested in architecture.

Presenter5:14

and graduated with a a degree in architecture. You also spent a lot of time in the Triangle Club shows? Yes, I was in that three years. What was the attraction? Was it the acting or the girls or what was it?

Speaker 25:23

What was your

Presenter5:27

I think it was just the acting.

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And the the idea of the show, the idea of before an audience, came to mean a lot to me.

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There were no drama classes in Princeton. There still aren't. The the Triangle Show was a complete extracurricular activity.

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But it really sent me off in the acting direction because of Josh Logan, who was a class ahead of me in Princeton, but he not only was in the Triangle Shows, he wrote them and wrote a lot of the music and was very popular.

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But he also, during his college days, he and a friend of his from Harvard started a stock company up in Massachusetts called the University Players.

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And they got a lot of people from the colleges in the East.

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and it became a very popular summer theatre.

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And

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The time of my graduation from Princeton, I remember Josh Logland, and I remember exactly where it was on the campus.

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And he came up and he said, Why don't you come up to the University Players in Falmouth this summer and spend a little time. Play your accordion in our tea room. Accordion? I didn't know you played the accordion. This is news. Well, this was one of these growing up things.

Presenter6:42

Again, my mother helped me with the cords and everything. All in C. All in C. And I jumped at the chance for this and went up to Falmouth. I lasted two nights in the tea room, and they were very straightforward about their objections. They just said that the patrons of the tea room lost their appetites because of my accordion playing. So that was as far as I went with the accordion playing. So what did they give you to do? Well, I became, I painted sets.

Speaker 17:10

Well I decayed.

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I sort of helped assistant directors in the plays. I started getting very small parts.

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and uh more interested in the theatre.

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then a producer by the name of Arthur Beckhardt.

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Tried out a

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Play

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The leading character was played by Osgood Perkins, Tony Perkins' father.

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And I played a tiny little part on the first act.

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And when they left, they said we're going to New York with this in September.

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And if you want to come along, you're welcome to have this part. Well, I was supposed to go back to graduate school and get my master's degree in architecture.

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But it was one of those decision time arrived.

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And I decided to uh give the stage a try. So there you are on Broadway.

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So let's break your second record. What do we have now?

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Well, this sort of means a lot to me because it was Moonlight Serenade. It's sort of Glenn Miller's theme song. But I remember I last May I was up

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for a reunion. I served in the Eighth Air Force here during the war and I was up for our second division reunion and we stayed at Norwich and they were so very, very kind to us.

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And the last night of the five days we were there, the people of Norris gave us a wonderful big party. There were about five hundred of us attended the reunion.

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and then about two hundred and fifty more people from Norwich gathered together,

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They had an orchestra playing Glenn Miller music, dressed in Army Air Corps uniforms like Glenn Miller was when he played over here during the war. And somebody came up to me and said, You're supposed to lead the orchestra in Moonlight Serenade.

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Which I did. It'd been a long time since I've done but uh it's amazing. I remembered from doing the picture I remembered You played Glenn Miller in the movie, didn't you? Mhm. Well, let's listen to Moonlight Serenade, that well remembered theme tune.

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The Glen Miller Orchestra.

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Well, let's go back to your Broadway debut.

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You began to get quite a lot of parts in various plays. In one play you were an Austrian nobleman, I read.

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with an Austrian nobleman's accent, no doubt.

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Yes, I was an Austrian nobleman in that play, principally because I needed the work.

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I felt very strongly that I should

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in some way get some type of accent. I knew that I couldn't go all the way and be an Austrian nobleman, but there was a woman voice teacher in Broadway in those days, Frances Robinson Duff.

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And I decid, although it was kind of rough, I think three dollars a lesson.

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I decided to go to her and I asked her if she could give me a semblance of an accent.

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Well, after four lessons

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She called me in to her private office and said, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to let you go. I I don't think I can teach you an Austrian accent.

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And I said, well, that's fine. I'll work things out. She said, by the way, if you would ever feel you want to learn how to speak English correctly, well, you come back to me.

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Uh you began doing quite well in the theatre.

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and you attracted the attention of of a Hollywood talent scout.

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What was he after? What had he got you in mind for? Well, in those days the major studios had had they all had scouts on Broadway, and when the pictures were trying out in smaller towns or in Boston, they would go up, especially if there were new actors and new actresses.

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and they'd follow you down and see how you did in Broadway.

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Then the usual process would be they'd call you and they'd give you a test.

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Mod pie.

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was doing a play called Divided by Three, which was directed by

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Guthrie McClinick.

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And I was given a test with the young actress that uh was playing in the play with me.

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As a result of the test, I got a contract at MGM. To play what? What was the part that they had in mind when you? They didn't do things like that in those days. You were signed to a contract which had sort of options about pickup options. The first option was for six months. It started out at $300 a week, and then it was lifted maybe $50, $60. But nobody read the small type, or very few people read the small type, because in the small type,

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When you signed this contract, you were signing a seven-year contract if all their options were picked up.

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And you were assigned to the studio.

Speaker 113:27

Video

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You went to work every day. You weren't there for any particular part. You did little parts and big pictures and big parts and little pictures. You sort of learned your craft by working at it. And sometimes you were working on several pictures at once, is that right? Oh, yes.

Speaker 113:43

Boyer

Presenter13:44

Oh yeah.

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But that's the way things were handled in those days. I must say, I've always felt very fortunate that I

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had the advantage of that

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type of training.

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Because it was a very good thing as a basis for work in the cinema. Yes, surely. And they gave you the publicity build up. Right. It was invaluable. Yeah. Did they hire you out to other studios when they hadn't got anything for you? They hired me out a lot. The contract players, they would do that.

Speaker 114:07

Uh

Speaker 214:08

Yeah, I think

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What was the first picture you made? A picture called Murderman with uh Spencer Tracy.

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And uh

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My name in the picture was Shardy.

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And the casting director brought me up and the producer said, What part do you want this man to play?

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And the casting man said, I thought he would be good for the part of Shorty.

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And the producer said, You must be crazy. You've got the string being six feet four and a half, and then you want to play the part of Shorty.

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And the casting man said, Well, I thought perhaps we could change the name and the producer said, Oh, no, now you want to change the script on me, too Well, to make a long story short, I played in the picture and the name wasn't changed. My name was Shorty.

Presenter15:00

That was your first picture. How many have you made? What's the total? Have you any idea, Jimmy? We were talking about it the other night. It's between seventy nine and eighty one, something around in there. That's a lot of movies. Yeah, a lot of movies. Let's have your third record. What's that to be?

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Well, this takes me back.

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Henry Fonda and I were friends for years and years back in when we were first getting started in Broadway. He was working as an actor a couple of years before I was.

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But we were in different studios.

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And we didn't appear in many pictures together. We did one right after the war, which was just a sort of a comedy and didn't mean much.

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Then we did

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A picture called Fire Creek. That was in the western, pretty successful picture.

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Then we did what we're called Cheyenne Social Club.

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Which was a lot of fun. I didn't want to play it in the first place because I had the script and I fell named Jim Barrett wrote it.

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And uh I gave it to Hank to read and he said, Well, I think it's a a funny script and everything, but I don't see what you want me to play this part for because I don't talk I don't say anything.

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So I called Jim Barrett and I said, give Fonda something to say and he'll do the picture. So the next day I got three pages of dialogue and Fonda talked the whole time. We were on our way from South Texas up to Montana or something to take over something that my brother had left me when he died.

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and we got shots of the two of us on our horses.

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Fond of talking the whole time.

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And after the picture was over, it was sort of an advertising thing to do.

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Somebody wrote a tune for us and it was a combination of tune and fond of talking and we brought in the idea of the ride from Texas up to Montana.

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And it's called Rolling Stone, which brings back many memories, and of course.

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brings back a truly wonderful memory and that's Henry Fonda.

James Stewart17:10

Rolling on.

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Just like a rolling stone.

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Looking for

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Some land to call my own

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John Outriding runs an old boy name of Hank Jameson.

James Stewart17:29

Yeah.

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Uh

James Stewart17:29

And his sister only had three toes and a left foot.

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Cheyenne might be the town To stop this lonely roll and stone.

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Rolling Stone, you and Henry Fonder.

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Jimmy, let's get back to those early days in movies. You had to do as you were told to some extent as a contract artist, but if you were allotted a part that you really felt was beyond you or not suitable, could you protest? Yes.

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Yes, there was a great feeling of belonging. Mhm. I mean, the the big studios have been painted so darkly by so many people, you know, as these enormous impersonal factories that turned out this rubbish that uh had no point or that it just was not true.

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and the Moguls that every one writes about with not too kind words.

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They were exceptional people.

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and they headed the studios.

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And they were proud of their jobs. They loved the motion picture.

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And they all had an amazing judgment as far as.

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Choosing people, choosing stories that the audience, the general movie audience, would enjoy.

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Very quickly you achieved star status. Which of your early films, the early ones of the thirties, do you look back on with particular affection?

Presenter18:59

Well, I think the first one with Margaret Sullivan, Next Time We Love, which was sort of the first leading part I had, and she was responsible for getting me the part. You played opposite her several times, didn't you?

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After that, this was the first time I was loaned to Universal for that picture.

Speaker 119:12

Yeah.

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And uh the Philadelphia story, that got to an Oscar, that was a very good picture.

Speaker 119:21

Yeah.

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And Frank Capra's version of You Can't Take It With You was great fun. Yes, there again I was loaned to Columbia Pictures where Frank.

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was for his whole career, really.

Presenter19:35

Most of the time you were playing light comedy. Yes, mostly. Looking back over them, it was mostly light comedy. There was a remake of Seventh Heaven with that gorgeous Simon Simon, as I remember. You certainly acted with some very beautiful young ladies. Which ones appealed to you most? Professionally, I mean? All of them.

Speaker 119:46

Yeah.

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I think I sort of halfway got stuck on all of them during the filming of the pictures. They were wonderful.

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Record number four.

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Don't cry, Joe.

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Why do you like that one? I don't know. It it was one of one, two, three, four that I have that over the years have become favorites of mine. I just like to hear them. This is the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra, isn't it? Yeah.

James Stewart20:24

Pride Joe

Speaker 120:26

Yeah.

James Stewart20:29

Let her go, let her go, let her go.

James Stewart20:41

Uh

James Stewart20:43

Let her go, let her go, let her go.

Speaker 220:49

Don't cry, Joe. Gordon Jenkins

Presenter20:51

and his orchestra with Betty Brewer and the chorus.

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One of your hobbies was flying. You used to pilot your own plane, didn't you?

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So when the United States went into the war you you joined the Army Air Force.

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and he was stationed in this country for a long time.

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Yes, over two years. You flew a Liberator and uh you ended your stay here as commander of a bomber wing, having made a lot of missions over enemy territory.

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So heavily decorated, back to Hollywood, but a change of pace now, not so much like comedy.

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Well, I think the main reason for that was the audience had changed in their likes and dislikes.

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We found that after the war the number one thing was out and out wonderful slapstick comedy, the Red Skeletons, the Jerry Lewis, that type of comedy.

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Or

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The Waster

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which I hadn't

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done very much of. But these two, people wanted these. People didn't want the quiet

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Easy, light comedy.

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They eased back into it as the years went on after the war. But uh right after the war they didn't go for it. Did you enjoy making Westerns? Yes, very much. I d I got into it practically by accident.

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Before the war I did destroy rides again, but this was really a tongue in cheek western. After the war there was a western that had been around town a long time and nobody seemed to want to make it called Winchester Seventy Three and I

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I had the opportunity to make the movie of the play Harvey.

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And my agents just stuck in this Western. They owned the Western and they they just stuck it in as a part of the deal.

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And I made the picture of uh Harvey, and then they asked me to do the Winchester picture.

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Well, Harvey really didn't do very remarkable business when it opened.

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But I did the the Western Winchester seventy three.

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And it did very well. That was the first of quite a lot of Western. So that sort of got me started.

Speaker 122:56

So I don't know.

Speaker 122:57

Yeah.

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on the Western and also got me to know Anthony Mann, who worked at uh Metro for a long time, but I got to know his work and uh liked it.

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And oh.

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I think I've I made seven, eight Westerns with them. And there was a film in which you played a a hard-boiled reporter, which was a brand new kind of role for you. Called Northside 777, wasn't it? Yes, well here again, it was an effort to get away from the pre-war parts because I sort of give Henry Hathaway, the director, credit because he picked me for the part.

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And uh

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I've always been very grateful to him because the picture did very well.

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and sort of got me started along different lines than the type of thing I did so much before the war.

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Record number five.

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Number five, there I've said it again, is sort of Don't Cry Joe again because I just love the tune and I find myself humming it every once in a while.

James Stewart23:59

I love you, there's nothing to hide. It's better.

James Stewart24:09

Than burning inside I love

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There, I've said it again I've said it.

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There I've said it again.

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Vaughan Munro with the Norton sisters.

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You got on very well with Hitchcock. How many films did you make with him? Four. He made that celebrated remark that actors should be treated like cattle. Was this a light-hearted remark, or did in some strange way he mean that? No. It was his way of getting out of a remark he was credited with that he didn't make. He said that he is supposed to have said that actors are cattle. And it became in the papers and everything. And so soap he.

Presenter25:05

He took it upon himself to correct me. He said, I did not say that actors are cattle. I said that actors should be treated as cattle. It's a fine distinction. And I I think the wonderful comedy and humor that he had sort of smoothed the thing over.

Speaker 125:14

Thanks.

Presenter25:21

Some of the pictures that you made with him I'm thinking particularly of uh rear window and and rope sort of disappeared. They weren't around for years. They they've come back now. Well, leave it to Hitchcock to sort of do something different and do something that uh nobody else had tried.

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He never talked to me about why he did it, but about thirty years ago these five pictures actually

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had been the rounds and they'd been uh

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some of them more successful than others, but they've done very well.

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And suddenly Hitchcock just decided to take them all off the market and store them. So they collected all the negatives, collected all the prints,

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and put them in a safe.

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And people have just made bets about why he did it.

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There's one theory that he did it because he didn't want these pictures to go to television yet.

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And now these pictures, these five pictures, are coming up all fresh again, as if we hadn't seen em before. Yes, his agent, who happens to be my agent, too, was put in charge.

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Of the Hitchcock estate, as far as motion pictures were concerned. He owns these pictures, his estate owns them.

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and after he died, his agent, under Hitchcock's orders,

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picked out these pictures, and after quite a while of dealing back and forth,

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Universal became the distributor for the five pictures.

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Record number six.

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Number six, I've got a crush on you. It's a Gershwin tune, and here again a sort of a nostalgic thing.

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In the thirties, there was a place in New York on West 52nd Street.

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that a lot of us w would uh meet sort of if we had a job, it would be after the theater. Fonda and I would come in for a late drink.

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It was a very nice place, a very quiet with an upstairs with a piano, and every once in a while someone had a party there.

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We came in this one night.

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And

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There was absolutely nobody in the place. And we asked the bartender, he said, What's happened? Wh where is? And he said, Well, just listen.

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Don't talk or anything, and just listen.

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and both of us could hear the piano, and the tune was I've Got a Crush on You.

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So we sneaked up the stairs and came into this room. There were probably sixty, seventy people on the floor and in the middle of the room

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was the piano.

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And at the piano was George Gershwin playing I've Got a Crush on You. So I'd I I kind of remember it. Alas, there's no recording of him playing it, but uh well this one you've chosen is Ella Fitzgerald.

James Stewart28:11

Could you care?

James Stewart28:14

For a cunning cottage we could share

James Stewart28:22

The world will pardon my bush.

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Cause I've got a cra

James Stewart28:32

Wish my baby all

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Ella Fitzgerald, I've got a crush on you.

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You talked about home. Where is home? Is it New York or still in Hollywood? Oh, I'm still in Beverly Hills. But you spent a lot of time over here? Yes. And a lot of time in Africa. You're very interested in conservation, in wildlife. Well, the big force here is my wife, Gloria. She's the one that got me interested in it and got our children interested in it. And she is certainly a hard worker in that department.

Presenter29:07

Another of your interests is photography. Yes, I sort of been interested in taking a lot of pictures of my all my children growing up and a wonderful chance to get pictures in Africa.

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But slowly I suddenly realized that the children really picked up the idea of the camera work and liked it.

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And for some reason I wonder why my cameras ended up in their hand.

Speaker 129:30

Uh

Presenter29:31

So at the present time I'm out of cameras. Record number seven.

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I really don't know when I first was introduced to this tune.

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Ragtime Cowboy Joe

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But I believe it was when I was in training in the service.

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And somebody in my squadron or something we've been sitting around and somebody in my squadron knew the words to this song.

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And I found that those five or six chords that my mother had taught me in the key of C.

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worked and played this tune to my satisfaction and uh the fact that I'm able to accompany myself is sort of fun. And as you're not going to have a piano on the island, who's singing it and playing it on this record? Joe Stafford.

James Stewart30:20

Ragtime! Talk about your ragtime! Ragtime! Talk about your ragtime! Ragtime! Love that ragtime! Ragtime, Cowboy Joe! He always sings swingy music to the cattle as he swings back and forward in a saddle on a horse. That a syncopated gated and there's such a funny meter to the roar of his repeater, how they run when they hear the fellas gun. Because the western folks all know he's a highfalutin', rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona. Ragtime, Cowboy Joe.

James Stewart30:53

Break time, talk about your rag time, break time, talk about your rag time, break time. Love that break time, break time, Cowboy Joe.

Presenter31:21

Joe Stafford with the Starlighters and Paul Weston in his orchestra, Ragtime Cowboy Joe.

Presenter31:28

Jimmy, we've dumped you on this island. It's not a bad island, as islands go, but you've got to look after yourself. Could you rig up shelter, a hut? Oh, I think so. I've never done m much camping out, but I think I can manage. Done any fishing? I used to a lot. Oh, that's good. So you'd have something there. You a good cook? I'm a terrible cook, but I've done a little cooking of fish. I think I can get along all right there. Now, as a pilot, we know that your navigation is good. Could you make a craft to navigate? Would you try to get away? No, not on the ocean. You'll wait for us to come and fetch you.

Presenter32:05

Your last record, number eight.

Presenter32:08

I don't know whether everybody has heard of a favorite tune, but this is mine.

Presenter32:12

Johnny Mercer has been oh, he's been gone for quite some time, but I think he just did some wonderful work in the

Presenter32:20

the popular music area.

Presenter32:23

But I think one of his best is Dream.

Presenter32:26

Here, Mercer wrote both the music and the words.

Presenter32:31

I think of this one a lot. And who are the artists? McPied Pipers.

James Stewart32:39

When they might come true.

James Stewart32:53

Never are as grave as they seem.

James Stewart33:00

So dream.

Presenter33:07

Dream by the Pied Pipers. If you could take only one disc out of the eight, which would it be?

Presenter33:12

It would be dream, that one.

Presenter33:15

And one luxury to take to the island, one thing of no practical use that would give you pleasure to have around. Just getting back to our talk about photography and everything. I've taken quite a few pictures. I've sort of followed my children growing up with pictures, and I have a big album.

Presenter33:31

The trips we took and I think I'd take that. A family album to thumb through.

Presenter33:37

And one book we give you the Bible and Shakespeare.

Presenter33:41

You may have one other.

Presenter33:42

I'd take Robinson Crusoe.

Presenter33:44

It's got some very good practical hints in it, hasn't it?

Presenter33:47

I think so. I think it'd be very uh

Presenter33:50

Very useful. And it's a good story. Well, thank you, James Stewart, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Thank you for coming back on the island. Great pleasure. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 234:11

Desert Island Discs was devised and introduced by Roy Plumley, the producer was Derek Drescher.

Speaker 134:24

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.