AN UNLIKELY DUO
Biography chronicles long-term friendship of two Hollywood legends
Hank & Jim Scott Eyman Simon & Schuster
Hollywood legend James Stewart was a firm conservative, a rockhard Republican, a pinnacle of the right.
Fellow actor Henry Fonda was a liberal Democrat who will forever be identified with the rebellious Okie image of Tom Joad in the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
They were huge stars, titans of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and they were as politically apart as one could get. Yet they remained lifelong friends, from the time they shared dingy lodgings as impoverished young actors in New York to Fonda’s final days when a frail Stewart was a faithful visitor to his dying buddy’s bedside.
“They were able to maintain their relationship on a very close basis,” marvels Hollywood historian Scott Eyman whose new book, Hank & Jim, chronicles the 50-year friendship of two remarkable men. And at a time when extreme polarization is convulsing U.S. politics, Eyman finds reassurance in the example they set.
Political differences might well have built a wall between them — indeed, Stewart and Fonda did have one major blow-up — but they reached an understanding never to venture into that area again. Eyman sees their relationship as a classic example of how to get along in a volatile arena — of “how to handle diametrically opposed positions between two people who still had a lot in common.”
Eyman is the bestselling biographer of John Wayne, of legendary MGM boss Louis B. Mayer and of iconic directors John Ford, Cecil B. deMille and Ernst Lubitsch. He has 14 books to his credit. But he admits Hank & Jim occupies its own niche.
“The reason it attracted me was that I’d never read a book like this before,” Eyman says by phone from his Florida home. “Most books dealing with great friendships are about eminent politicians and statesmen — Churchill and Roosevelt, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But I’d never read a book about the close friendship between two eminent 20thcentury acting figures because, for one thing, most eminent actors are extremely jealous of each other!
“Even if they’re friendly, there’s always that competitive thing. But they showed nothing of that. They weren’t competitive in the least.”
They starred together in four movies: As jazz musicians in the 1948 comedy On Our Merry Way; and in three westerns: How the West Was Won (1962, though they share no screen time together); Firecreek (1968, on opposite sides of the law); and The Cheyenne Social Club (1970, an amiable western comedy).
Still, there were disparities between the two stars that extended beyond politics. The womanizing Fonda went through five marriages and in his later years expressed shame over this fact.
“He didn’t much like himself,” Eyman says. “He was a difficult guy to live with on a daily basis.” By contrast, Stewart was married to the same woman, Gloria, for 45 years.
Stewart was more gregarious and outgoing, whereas Fonda was aloof and withdrawn. “He didn’t talk much,” Eyman says. He was locked up in his own head. He was just a crusty guy.”
Fonda’s coldness extended to his relationships with daughter Jane Fonda and other family members.
“Jane has made a subsidiary career of complaining about her father,” Eyman says tartly. “But as I got deeper into the archives and documents, it became clear that she personalizes everything and thinks that he had a personal problem with her. But he was like that with everybody.”
The book gives us a Fonda who found no real comfort from his stage and screen triumphs in such enduring classics as The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Lady Eve, a rare opportunity to demonstrate his gift for comedy. None of these achievements silenced his obsessive perfectionism.
“He always felt he was on the edge of failure, and he felt everybody else was on the edge of failure as well for failing to live up to impossibly high standards which he wasn’t living up to as well,” Eyman says.
But Stewart also provides an interesting study in psychology. Eyman says the prewar Stewart — star of such hits as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story — was markedly different from the seasoned artist who portrayed painfully conflicted human beings for director Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo and in a classic cycle of westerns directed by Anthony Mann.
It was the war that changed Stewart, who led hazardous B-24 bombing missions over Germany and rose to the rank of colonel.
“I think Fonda was fully born as an actor before the war,” Eyman says. “Stewart was born an actor afterwards — and the war was crucial to that. I don’t think he could have played the parts before the war that he did after the war.
“I don’t think he was willing to go that deep. I don’t think he knew how to go that deep. He grew up in a very comfortable environment. He didn’t have a lot of angst in his own life, or dissension or pain.”
Eyman has been obsessed with movies since childhood and he considers himself the most fortunate of individuals for being able to write books about Hollywood. But he says monetary considerations have never driven his choices. “I only write about people who intrigue me,” he says.
A quest for revealing detail drives all of Eyman’s books. Hank & Jim is full of such gems: the day a young Stewart stood at the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue in New York, playing his accordion in the hope of earning some money; Fonda’s love for doing needlepoint, an appreciation that later saw him develop into a gifted painter; Stewart’s devotion to a cantankerous horse named Pie who remained his onscreen steed for 20 years; Stewart’s decision to vote for his friend the year both were nominated for Oscars. (Stewart won.)
“What I try to do is give a sense of these iconic figures as human beings — how they lived and breathed and what it was like to be around them and who they were when the cameras weren’t rolling,” Eyman says.
“I’m looking for the intimate detail. I don’t mean what people do in bed — that’s superficial and tells you very little. It’s the intimate behavioural details that make the person come alive on the page.”