Show Business: Innocent Revisited

Saddlesore and dust-caked, two aging cowpokes ride slowly into the gathering dusk. John O’Hanlan (James Stewart) listens with mounting exasperation as his longtime sidekick Harley Sullivan (Henry Fonda) rambles on:

HARLEY: I had a dog one time who used to lay on his back in the sun. Just lay there with his hind legs all spread out, you know, and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was laying there like that one day and a wagon ran over him. He never laid that way again. He always walked funny after that. He was a good dog, though. Sam Breedlaw give him to me. Sam’s married to my sister. He’s a chamberpot and pin drummer . . .

JOHN: You know where we are now, Harley?

HARLEY: Not exactly.

JOHN; We’re in the Wyoming territory. And you been talking all the way from Texas.

HARLEY (injured): I’ve just been keeping you company.

JOHN (restrained): I appreciate it, Harley, but if you say another word the rest of the day, I’m gonna kill you.

Jimmy Stewart and Hank Fonda are as comfortable together in screen saddles as they have been in a friendship that goes back to 1932 and summer stock. Now the old cronies have teamed up again in The Cheyenne Social Club, a wonderfully outdated odyssey of bawdy innocence. True, the film is populated with more pasteboard characters than you could empty a pair of Colt Peacemakers at. There is not just one whore with a heart of gold, but six. There is the starched, parched lawyer feller and the inevitable gang of scabrous villains without a redeeming virtue to their sinister names. The dialogue is beautifully peppered with the buckshot of obscure Old-West metaphors (Harley: “I used to be a real cedar-breaker, but now I’m just bringing up the dregs”). But the film’s sole purpose is to give Stewart and Fonda a chance to weave their well-tuned wiles. The result could win the heart of a Wichita banker.

Invincible Sincerity. At 62, Stewart would not seem to be the man to get terribly excited about one more western. In 35 years he has appeared in nine plays and made 73 films that have grossed more than $190 million. On Broadway this spring, during ten successful weeks, he re-created his classic portrayal of Elwood P. Dowd, the bibulous dreamer whose pal was an imaginary rabbit named Harvey. But the role of the guileless cowboy caught in a web of goodnatured immorality is as much a part of the Stewart myth as the tremulous, pleasantly nasal accent that has made him the world’s most imitated actor this side of James Cagney.

In this age of permissiveness, who else but Jimmy Stewart could do a double take, mumble incredulously, “Do you suppose this is a wh . . .” and make such delicacy believable? Stewart has a rich cinematic history of clod-kicking embarrassment before the ladies; he can still say “ma’am” more effectively than anyone else in the business.

It is his quality of moral radiance that early led him to thickly sentimental crusader roles in such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. “But when I got back from the war in 1946,” Stewart recalls, “people didn’t want the Mr. Smith kind of movie any more, and I refused to make war pictures.” He had made one memorable western, Destry Rides Again (1939), but had not given much thought to making more until Universal got him into something called Winchester 73. Says he: “It was a desperation move that happened to pay off.”

His style is so fixed and seems so natural that audiences tend to think of him as a screen personality rather than an actor. That does him an injustice. Stewart says, “I’ve always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, ‘Aren’t you tired of always playing Tracy?’ Tracy replied, ‘What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?’ You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.”

Deeper Tragedy. The Stewart-Fonda style in Social Club seems effortless, but it involved considerable pain for Jimmy. On location in Santa Fe, his horse Pie, Stewart’s mount in at least 15 of his westerns, died; Stewart was consoled by a meticulous likeness of the gelding painted by Fonda. A deeper tragedy struck when Stewart’s stepson was killed in Viet Nam. Stewart did his best not to brood, and Fonda helped buoy him after the day’s filming by yarning, Harley-like, about the years they have spent together. Stewart also told his own tales, like the time Fonda went to sleep on a bar in Mexico and awoke to find that John Wayne had wrapped a boa constrictor around his head.

For all their camaraderie, Fonda and Stewart have distinct attitudes toward certain subjects. Unlike Fonda, Stewart got married once—for good—when he was 41. His wife Gloria has another son by her previous marriage and they have 19-year-old twin girls. But Stewart is more than just a good family man; he is the objective correlative of the Middle-American ideal. He is a member of the Los Angeles Boy Scout Council, a member of the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church, a veteran of 20 World War II bombing missions over Germany and was, until his retirement in 1968, a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve.

Stewart says he would like to bring Harvey back to Broadway next season, and he has just signed with NBC to do a half-hour TV series beginning in 1971, in which he will play a college professor. It seems a little late in his career to be starting a TV series, but the role of a college prof is a natural for Stewart. One can easily picture him as a western-style campus sage shambling across the green, quietly proselytizing fiery radicals and calling aggressive, upbeat coeds “ma’am.”