MOVIES : The Marathon Man : Jimmy Stewart knows something about going the distance, whether it be for a charity or surviving in pre- and postwar Hollywood

Jimmy Stewart reached beside him on the sofa to pick up a folder, adjusted his tortoise shell eyeglasses, and read some of its pertinent information aloud. He wanted to be sure to mention that this year a development outfit called Palisades Highlands was kicking in $30,000 prize money to sweeten the pot for the 11th annual Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon next Sunday at Griffith Park, proceeds of which benefit the Child Study Center at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

“Didja get that the prize money is broken down into first, second and third-place teams. . . .?” he said in that familiar, somewhat querulous voice. The folder trembled slightly in his long, slender hands--he’s about to turn 84--and he uptilted his chin to gain a better visual angle on the print. He wanted to say lots of good things about the marathon, not only about how it had raised $2 million for the hospital, but how it had become a family event that got bigger and better each year. Stewart is a devout Presbyterian; clearly this event fell into the category of good works.

It just as clearly did not fall into the category of personal publicity, of which he has had no need for years. After all, when news of Ronald Reagan’s presidential hopes first surfaced and Jack Warner said, “No, Jimmy Stewart for President, Ronald Reagan for best friend,” didn’t everyone know what Warner meant?

A newsman in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” With Stewart, there’s not much choice. The son of a rural Pennsylvania hardware store owner, when he hears the bell he’s ready for a sale. Today it’s the marathon (highlights of which will be shown on Channel 2, 6 p.m., May 23). It’s also the interview, the latest in what must be thousands and cannot produce a question he hasn’t heard as many times before. He treats both with the same dutiful grace and workmanship with which he has tended one of the unquestionably great modern American lives.

To think about Stewart is to realize he is the sole survivor of the class of leading men whose careers began in the Golden Age of pre-World War II Hollywood and include Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and--for decades his closest friend--Henry Fonda. It’s also to realize how many of the changing shades of modern experience he’s played, from young sophisticate to Depression-crazed banker to Cold Warrior to figure besieged by neuroses and obsessions and unavoidable violence.

In some of his postwar roles in Westerns, he embodied D.H. Lawrence’s description of the American soul as “isolated, hard, stoic and a killer,” even if he showed these qualities jarringly at odds with a fundamental decency. But he was also lucky Lindy, whose sky-blue eyes were flooded with vistas of immaculate freedom. And a romantic figure who paired with many of Hollywood’s most beautiful or at least prominent women, including Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak.

Any movie star--or mega-star, in our current inflated parlance--becomes deeply buried in our collective psyche and its endless sorting out of the representative self-image. Even if his tormented George Bailey weren’t trotted out in our annual “It’s a Wonderful Life” Christmas rite, Stewart’s personal history would feed into a peculiarly American strain of dark innocence, the yearning you see in Martha Graham and hear in Aaron Copland, the quiet fortitude of Thornton Wilder and the Edgar Lee Masters of “Spoon River Anthology.”

“Every once in a while I think that it really has been a wonderful life,” he said. “My whole life has been governed by a monumental bunch of good fortune, which started when I was on the stage in New York, when I got started in the acting thing. Then when I came out here in 1935 under contract to MGM, this was the ideal way to make pictures. You learned your craft by working at it. Unlike so many now, you didn’t sit at home and wait for something you liked and reject everything you disliked. As soon as you were through with one thing, it was ‘OK, now you play George. Go down to costuming and get fitted for what you’ll wear. You’ll start Tuesday.’ You either got a big part in a small picture or a small part in a big picture, but all the time you were learning. It was a great system.”

Stewart had come inside after spending a few minutes on the patio for a photo shoot (his wife, Gloria, had been overseeing their two golden retrievers, who bounded around him as jubilant as dolphins). So much of his aging has been done in public that there there isn’t much surprise to his appearance--save the mottled aftermath from a bout with skin cancer on his left cheek. One thing that isn’t so apparent in his films is his height. His long limbs make him look taller than his 6 feet 3, and convey an enveloping grace. You can understand how it was a great deal more than boyishness that made him so much in demand as a bachelor when he first came to Hollywood, particularly when you recall his debonair roles. His eyes took in a great deal without losing their humor.

Which remains bone dry. On the patio, the subject of “Rear Window” came up, specifically how radiant Grace Kelly was looking those days. “That was her fifth picture,” Stewart said. “We were going to do ‘Designing Woman’ together after that, but then she got engaged. When she told Louis Mayer, he said, ‘That’s wonderful. We’ll give you a reception. You can even take some time off.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. . . .” A microscopic glint of mirth flashed in his eyes as he left Mayer’s mounting incredulity to take shape in the air.

James Maitland Stewart had not started out to be an actor (his major at Princeton was architecture). The Indiana, Pa., of his birth was a Grover’s Corners kind of town, population 5,000, nestled in the rolling hills west of the Allegheny mountains, and there was every expectation that at some point young Jimmy would come back to run the store, which had been opened by his grandfather in 1853. Long past retirement age, his father Alexander kept the place running in the event the acting business didn’t pan out for his son (even though he kept Jimmy’s Oscar in the store window).

Josh Logan recruited Stewart to join his University Players in Falmouth, Mass., in the summer of 1932. The story remains apocryphal whether or not it was on the strength of his accordion play, but Stewart lasted one night as a tea-room musician before joining the rest of the company, which included Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, Myron McCormick and Mildred Natwick. He had a small part in a Broadway tryout production of “Goodbye Again,” and went with it to New York. Watching Judith Anderson at work, he began to realize what fine acting entails.

“She was a star of enormous popularity and I’d never had the experience of working like that,” he said in a 1990 Newsday interview. “This tremendous admiration I got for this woman who was able to project things to the audience, the effect she had on the audience--that was what convinced me that I wanted to get good in this acting thing, that it was worth trying. I’ve never changed. I’ve always looked on the acting profession with respect.”

He did six other plays before shooting a two-reel Warner Bros. comedy in Long Island. Then he came to Hollywood. Of “Murder Man,” he’s said, “I was all hands and feet and didn’t know what to do with either.” But he caught on quick. He made 24 films in the next five years, including “You Can’t Take It With You” (which won a best picture Oscar), “The Shopworn Angel,” “Destry Rides Again” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” for which he won the best actor award from the New York Film Critics. He won his first Academy Award for the 1940 production of “The Philadelphia Story” (he also received an honorary Oscar in 1985).

Other major awards (there are plenty of smaller ones) include: Venice Film Festival Award, New York Film Critics Award and annual Film Poll for best actor in “Anatomy of a Murder,” 1959; AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, 1980; Medal of Freedom Award, 1985, and first movie star recipient of the Governor’s Award for the Arts in 1991.

Stewart was very much in the Hollywood social swim in those days, but his closest friends remained Sullavan and Fonda. How Fonda, one of Hollywood’s outspoken liberals, and Stewart, a stalwart Republican conservative, remained so tight is one of the great tributes to the transcendent quality of friendship, which they were careful about preserving. Stewart tells this story about their early days in New York:

“We were rooming together at the Madison Hotel. He was in a play and I was in something and one night we went someplace to have something to eat and drink and took the subway home. There was somethin’ political going on. We started talking about it, then got in an argument about it, then we got into a fight--before I knew it we were swingin’ at each other. Thank God it was snowin’--I went down on my face more than he did.

“We got to the hotel and he said, ‘Listen carefully, if you go along with this, I will: I want us never to mention anything to do with politics again from this minute on.’ And we never mentioned it. I’d do something for the Republicans and he’d do something for the Democrats and we’d never mention it. For 30 years. It was a nice relationship.”

With the inevitability of World War II looming, Stewart joined the Army, and because he was already an experienced pilot, he was assigned to the Army Air Corps. He made it a point to refuse publicity or coddling based on his celebrity, and became a bombardier instructor. In 1943 he went to Europe as commander of an Eighth Air Force bomber squadron, and flew 25 missions over enemy territory. He returned to the United States in 1945 as a colonel; his decorations included an Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Croix de Guerre (he later joined the Air Force Reserve, where he became brigadier general in 1959).

The war of course had changed things dramatically. When asked if the suffering and calamity he’d seen made him dubious about play-acting back in Hollywood, he replied, simply, “No.” What he did experience however was a crisis of confidence. Stewart has often said in interviews how the great effort of his work has been in seeming effortless--and he’s mercilessly self-critical. He’d jumped at the chance to play George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful life,” but when it came time to go to work, he was hobbled with indecisiveness--until Lionel Barrymore got hold of him on the set one day.

“He said, ‘Now look, I’ve heard this poppycock about your worry about being away and I don’t want to hear it any more. Acting is a noble profession. It’s a lot more than you give it credit for. You don’t just lose it.’ It was a quite a help for me.”

Now that “It’s a Wonderful Life” has become a staple of Christmas in America, it’s surprising to recall that at first the movie was a commercial failure. “When it didn’t do well, it was absolutely a slap in the face,” Stewart told the New York Times in 1990. “It was sort of a bad time for all of us. It broke Frank’s (Capra’s) company, Liberty Films, and he and Willie Wyler and George Stevens had to sell their assets to Paramount. My contract with MGM had run out during the war and they had offered me a new one, but my agents Lew Wasserman and Leland Hayward advised me not to do it. So I wondered, ‘Have I lost my audience? Aren’t things working anymore?’ ”

It didn’t help that critics such as Jesse Zunser of Cue could write of Stewart in 1947’s “Magic Town,” “Jimmy is still exuding boyish charm in lethal doses.” During long dry periods after the war, Stewart flew kites with Fonda in Brentwood. Their friendship once again restored him. “He never sat down and talked about acting, but every now and then he’d say something about its importance and your ability and your chance to make it a fine profession. He’d put this in very simple ways, but it impressed me and got me to feeling that I was capable of continuing on after the war.”

Slowly he began a metamorphosis, a darkening of character consistent with the postwar mood. He played a hard-boiled reporter in “Northside 777” and a Nietszchean headmaster in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope.” The hold-out deal he alluded to earlier, engineered by his agents Wasserman and Hayward, also reflected a sea change in the new Hollywood. In it, he worked independently for a percentage of profits instead of drawing a straight salary (and soon became one of Hollywood’s wealthiest stars). He made several memorable Westerns under director Anthony Mann, including “Winchester 73,” “The Man From Laramie” and “The Naked Spur.” By the early ‘50s, he not only re-established his career, he became bigger than ever.

“As the country stumbled into postwar maturity and atomic worry, Stewart, too, changed, from affable and homespun to somebody vulnerable, edgy, pained, isolated,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Jay Carr in a 1990 tribute. “Those (five Anthony Mann) Westerns were extraordinary. Not just because they revived his career. Not even because they did for the Western genre what film noir did for the crime genre--bringing post-Hiroshima doubt and uneasiness into what had been a frontier clarity about moral issues. The new Westerns were gritty, brutal, unsparing. And they showed Stewart capable of ferocity.”

Says Time magazine’s Richard Schickel: “I don’t know any actor of his prominence who made such a radical shift in his image. I think he was overmatched in ‘Rope,’ but it’s a long way from ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’ I hadn’t remembered him being as good as he was in ‘Anatomy of a Murder,’ where he could seem to be a yokel, but in fact was very tough and shrewd underneath. He’s also terrific in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much.’ It’s been an extraordinarily honorable career.”

Some of his other notable movies from that period and beyond include “Broken Arrow”(1950), “Bend in the River”(1952), “The Cheyenne Social Club” (with Fonda) (1970), “The Glenn Miller Story” (1954 reissued in 1960), “The Spirit of St. Louis” (1957), “Strategic Air Command” (1955), “The F.B.I. Story” (1959), “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), “Vertigo” (1958), “Bell, Book and Candle” (1958), Mary Chase’s “Harvey” (1950) (he also did the play, both in New York and London), and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), in which his frontier senator displays an amazing retroactive corruption.

Though his celebrity remains imperishable, continuing a career as an actor is problematic. Not many roles are written for 84-year-olds, insurance costs are daunting for budget-minded producers, and his self-doubt has returned.

“It’s over,” he said last year. “I think it’s a time thing. I’ve run out of acting ability. And I think it’s just age. I’m sorry, if people don’t like it that way.”

But his general optimism remains. He considers the angry doubt and disorder that characterizes our age only another test for the American character. “The war and the Depession have had their affect over the years, but I feel very proud that our country has sized up. This anger and doubt, you think it’s something new, but it’s happened before. We’ve not only survived it, we came out better and more robust and exhilarated. The whole country, by getting together, becomes stronger.” (These remarks were made before the rioting that broke out after the Rodney King beating verdict).

Asked about the most important thing he’s ever done, he replied, “Marrying my wife. She’s made my life more exciting and interesting and meaningful than I ever thought it could be, and she’s kept that up.”

Stewart married Gloria Hatrick MacLean in 1949. The daughter of MGM head of legal staff Edward Hatrick, she brought two sons from a prior marriage to millionaire Edward MacLean Jr., Ronald and Michael. She’s always been a formidable woman, active in the World Wildlife and East African Wildlife Federation, and on the board of directors of the L.A. Zoo. (They have twin daughters, Kelly and Judith. Ron, a Marine lieutenant, was killed in Da Nang in 1970.)

As he spoke, she pensively walked with the dogs on the spongy lawn outside, stepping as gracefully as a deer. At 73, she’s retained a surprising amount of her younger beauty. She does not share her husband’s optimism.

“The world isn’t looking up,” she said. “Just last night Jimmy and I were talking about how difficult it is for young people now. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and I’m too old to figure it out. I hope he’s right. He’ll not be around to find out about it either.” Of her husband, she said, “He’s an extraordinarily sensitive, God-fearing, completely honest person. There’s no outside show-off. And he’s a good actor. No question about that. He’s an entirely different person than you’re used to meeting. If he wasn’t unique, I wouldn’t have married him.”

Former producer (“Easy Rider”) William Hayward is the son of Leland Hayward and Margaret Sullavan and has known Stewart for his entire life.

“He’s an exception to any star’s life,” Hayward said. “He’s lived in the same house for 100 years, he’s stayed married to the same woman and he’s spent enormous amounts of time traveling with his kids--dedicated, exhausting traveling. He’s somebody who’s lived with the same principles all his life--they’re even part of his roles. I’ve never heard anybody say anything bad about him. He’s never been at the end of ugly gossip of any kind.

“The past years have been hard on him. The partial loss of his hearing has been tough--it forced him to give up flying. The death of Hank Fonda left a hole. But of course there’s Gloria. Her involvement with African wildlife, her position at the zoo--that’s not ‘ladies at tea’ stuff. I think that part of the world has been improved through her efforts. I think in a way that’s true of Jimmy too.”

The last line was given lightly as a generalizing afterthought, the tone one uses when stating the obvious.