One Can’t Imitate His Life

You can hardly get any more American than the guy I sat across a table from yesterday. The lanky frame, the country drawl, the honest face. It’s the most recognizable voice and face in America. He should have been President. He should go on Mt. Rushmore. It’s hard to imagine a more beloved figure ever strode the American scene. He represents everything we like to think we are. Ethical, kind, compassionate, even frugal but generous, he holds up a mirror to society as it wants to be.

Now that Cary Grant, John Wayne and Henry Fonda are gone, he’s all that’s left of a golden age of entertainment, a part of America’s most famous stock company of enduring heroes. He was always Mr. Everyman from smalltown America, pitting his only weapon, integrity, against the forces of political or corporate greed. He was Us-against-Them. He was Mr. Smith going to Washington, the sodbuster against the cattle baron, Lindbergh against the sea, the gangly good guy with the guardian angel saving the town. You knew who to root for when he was on screen.

He’s the only guy alive who can make three syllables out of saying, “Well,” who can get the girl with a cracker-dry shy stammer that makes him the most-imitated man alive. There’s not a nightclub comic in the land who can’t do five minutes of shtick in his voice. Nobody in the world has to ask who it is they’re imitating.

Movie actors didn’t have to go to war. He did. They sold bonds to build bombers. He flew the bombers. They flew over USO camp shows. He flew over Schweinfurt. They supported the war effort. He was the war effort. When he made general, it was in effect a battlefield commission.

So, Jimmy Stewart is a national treasure like the Washington Monument, Mickey Mouse or the gold at Ft. Knox. They used to say Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. He was a Mississippi faro dealer compared to James Stewart.

If you asked 100 people to pick the guy they would want to symbolize an American to the world, 98 of them would pick Jimmy Stewart.

He was such a natural on screen, it was perfectly possible to believe he wasn’t acting, that he was the guy who shot Liberty Valance, that he was Lucky and there really was a Harvey or else why would Jimmy Stewart be talking to him through a whole picture?

Some legendary celebrities have their own golf tournaments. Others have their tennis exhibitions. Jimmy Stewart has his relay marathon. Like everything associated with Jimmy Stewart, it’s worthwhile. It’s for the Child Study Center of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, for abused and otherwise handicapped children.

It’s a marathon because it’s run at the Olympic distance, but by a relay teams of five, each of whom runs about 5.2 miles before passing the baton. The event will be held on April 1 in Griffith Park with Jimmy Stewart at the starting gun, and 5,000 runners are expected to compete--1,000 teams. Last year, $321,797 was raised. This year, the take is expected to approach $500,000, with major expenses underwritten by Athletic X-Press and two dozen other sponsors.

This will be the ninth year for the Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon--for the past four, actor Robert Wagner has been his co-host--and more than a million dollars has been raised.

It’s more than a foot race, it’s an event with celebrity teams, corporate teams and neighborhood teams vying for no prize money. “Every cent goes to the kids,” Stewart says.

Some actors have horses named after them, others, buildings; Stewart prefers a race for ribbons--and for kids.

It’s somehow reassuring to know Jimmy Stewart was one of the great non-athletes of our time. Unlike some show-biz types who think secretly they could have been middleweight champion of the world or winner of the U.S. Open or A.J. Foyt if things had turned out differently, Jimmy Stewart, like every other red-blooded American boy, preferred things with engines to daydreams in a gym.

He became an actor by accident. He went to Princeton to become an engineer, but when they threw calculus and advanced algebra at him, Stewart walked offstage. Or, rather, on stage. “The professors said, ‘You either get out of engineering or out of Princeton,’ ” Stewart recalls. He got out of engineering but stayed at Princeton, where he threw in with Josh Logan, who was directing the renowned campus Triangle shows. Jimmy played the accordion in those days and may have had a lively career doing “Lady of Spain” for a Lawrence Welk-type band, but he decided to try acting. His first critic was to say of him, “He’s all Adam’s apple and he swallows his words,” but the public loved him. “He could steal a scene just by leaving his hat on,” a colleague once moaned.

Whatever he did, America liked it. And him. Because his off-screen hours were spent flying--he got his commercial license in the 1930s--he got plucked out of the ranks of draftees for the Army Air Corps. He was instructing trainers in Sioux Falls when the government put him in a B-24, a plane he had never flown, and told him to take it to Africa by way of South America, then to England. And, then, to Germany. Just like in the Capra movies, the smalltown boy made good. Aw-shucks won out again.

Lots of guys can imitate the way Jimmy Stewart sounds. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m doing a Jimmy Stewart imitation myself,” he says. But hardly anyone can imitate what Jimmy Stewart did. That was not so easy. Although he survived 21 missions in his own war, he lost a son in battle in Vietnam. He is a man as modest as the characters he portrays. He has lived in the same house and with the same wife--the lovely Gloria--for 40 years. He has served his country, his industry and his community well. And still is. When you think of Jimmy Stewart, you smile. When you see him at the marathon relay, at least take off your hat.