14/06/2026
Jimmy 💜 Stewart 🕊️🙏
For about a year between 1948 and 1949, the most famous bachelor in Hollywood was being interviewed for a job by a German shepherd.
The shepherd's name was Bellow. He belonged to a recently divorced former model named Gloria Hatrick McLean. He did not like the man who was trying to win her over, and he made it clear.
The man trying to win her over was James Stewart.
By that point Stewart was forty years old. He had won an Academy Award. He had flown twenty bomber missions over N**i Germany. He had been on the cover of Life magazine. He had dated Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich. The press called him the Great American Bachelor. He had never come close to marrying any of them.
He bought the dog steaks. He praised the dog. He showed up, week after week. The dog growled. Stewart kept coming.
He had met Gloria the year before, at a Christmas party at Keenan Wynn's house. Stewart had arrived a few drinks in, spotted her across the room, tried to introduce himself, and bungled the encounter so completely that she was, by her own account, unimpressed. She left.
He could not let it go.
For months he asked friends who she was. Gary and Rocky Cooper finally arranged a dinner — Stewart, the Coopers, Gloria — in the summer of 1948. This time he showed up sober. He told stories. He made her laugh. The dinner went well enough that she let him try again.
Which is when he met the dog.
Gloria had been married once before, to Edward McLean Jr. of the family that owned the Washington Post until the late forties. She had two small sons from that marriage — Michael, six, and Ronald, four — and a German shepherd who had been with her through the divorce and was not interested in surrendering ground to anyone. Stewart had to win over the dog before Gloria's children would meet him. He had to win over the children before she would consider marrying him. He understood the order, and worked through it.
It took most of a year.
On his forty-first birthday in May 1949, he proposed. They were married three months later, on August 9, 1949, at Brentwood Presbyterian Church. There were about eighteen guests inside the church. There were several hundred fans outside in the parking lot.
What had taken him forty years to find lasted forty-four.
He adopted Michael and Ronald immediately. He never referred to them publicly as his stepsons. In 1951, Gloria gave birth to twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, in a delivery so difficult she nearly died and was hospitalized for weeks afterward. Stewart later told the story of leaving the hospital in such an excited state on the day she was released that he nearly drove off without her. One of the nurses said she had never seen a husband behave like that. He spent the next four decades being that husband.
The family was famously private about itself. The Stewarts attended church on Sundays. They worked in the garden. They did not go to the industry parties they could decline. They did not separate, did not affair, did not feud publicly. By every standard of Hollywood marriage in the second half of the twentieth century, the achievement was unusual. By the standard of any marriage anywhere, it was real work.
The work was tested.
On June 8, 1969, Ronald McLean Stewart — a Marine first lieutenant — was killed by enemy fire in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam. He was twenty-four. He was, by then, Jimmy Stewart's son in every way that mattered, and had been since he was four years old. Stewart, who was simultaneously a serving Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserve and one of Hollywood's most visible supporters of the war, did not give a single interview about his son's death. The family grieved privately. They held each other up. They went on.
They had another twenty-five years together after that.
Gloria Stewart died on February 16, 1994, of lung cancer. She was seventy-five. She had been Stewart's wife for forty-four and a half years.
After her death, the man the press had once called the Great American Bachelor — who had become, in his second life, one of the most famous family men in America — withdrew almost completely. He stopped attending awards ceremonies. He turned down interviews. He gardened. He sat in the house they had shared in Beverly Hills for four decades. His daughters and his surviving son visited often; his grandchildren visited often; he was not alone. But he was not the same.
He lived another three years and four months after Gloria. His health declined through 1996 and into 1997. On July 2, 1997, James Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism at the house he and Gloria had bought together in 1951. He was eighty-nine. His children were in the room.
He had spent forty years trying not to be married. He spent the next forty-five being married. The second number is the one he meant to be remembered for.
He once said, of his life with Gloria and their children, that it had been a darn wonderful life.
He had been auditioned by a dog, and he had passed.
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