![]() To trace Jimmy Stewart’s life from Indiana, Pennsylvania, to Beverly Hills is to risk all our hard-won skepticism about movie stars. “‘Well,’ he says, ‘why don’t you send it back, and I’ll put it in the window of the hardware store.’ So I packed it up and it was there in the window for twenty years.” “He said, ‘I heard on the radio you got some kind of prize-what was it, a plaque or what?’ It was usually when he got to work that he called me.” Stewart folds one full- length leg over the other slowly, purposefully, with deliberation, a man with all the time in the world, who’s never heard that life is a rat race, a man who learned his ways in Indiana, Pennsylvania. ![]() He never got the idea that our time out here was so much earlier than it was back there. "My dad called me the night I got the Academy Award, called me at four-thirty. Presented with an honorary Oscar in 1985 for fifty years of distinguished work in over eighty films, he was nominated five times in the best-actor category, winning in 1940 for The Philadelphia Story. It’s a comfortable room, crowded with books and photos and flowered cotton couches, not much different from most family rooms as long as you don’t notice who the people in the photos are or that those gold statuettes on the shelf are Academy Awards. Half a century’s press clippings have ritualized the litany of words to describe him as he walks Baron back inside to look for a leash-”gawky,” “gangling,” “lean,” “lanky,” “awkward”-and for the way he folds himself into the family den when the photos are finished and it’s time to talk. He gets up from his chair in the shade of an orange tree, stooping low, bending nearly in half to keep from scraping his head, legs every bit as long as you’d guess, maybe even a little longer. “The dog, I mean.” Her timing is as good as Jimmy’s. “Never seen him act like this,” Stewart says, genuinely baffled, truly perplexed. ![]() Baron is looking at everything but the camera, cheerily wagging his tail all the while. At the moment Jimmy Stewart is in his backyard, trying to get his dog to cooperate while their picture is taken. ![]() “You can hardly get your car up the street,” growls Gloria Stewart. “He’s the friendliest, most accommodating star in Beverly Hills,” say the Hollywood star maps, telling how often he steps outside to chat with his fans. A pair of tour vans has stopped in the middle of the street in hopes that Jimmy Stewart will come out to greet them in person. “A great day for sightseeing buses too,” says Mrs. Gone and nearly forgotten, except here at Jimmy Stewart's house, where the milkman's white truck is parked in the driveway. There was a time when salty jokes were made about milkmen and their midday deliveries, back in the days when wives stayed home alone and lonely while husbands marched off to work, but those days are gone, long gone, like the milkmen themselves. The milkman is making his delivery – eggs and butter and quarts of milk stacked neatly in his wire basket. He talked to Bart Bull about his long and wonderful life. In a career spanning half a century, Jimmy Stewart has drawn an indelible portrait of the American man, and proven that regular guys can be heroes, too. "What was most heroic about Jimmy Stewart was he never tried to be a hero."
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