Why the mafia threatened to have James Stewart killed: “Why don’t you go to hell?”
Nobody would have expected the nicest guy in Hollywood to fall foul of organised crime in the first place, but when the mafia did start making threats against James Stewart, he didn’t have any issues in standing up to the criminal underworld’s most fearsome figures.
His signature brand of bottled Americana turned him into one of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most enduring and indelible icons, but as Alfred Hitchcock discovered when he got on Stewart’s wrong side, his screen persona wasn’t entirely reflective of the man he was when the cameras weren’t rolling.
He also had a spiteful side, as his It’s a Wonderful Life co-star Donna Reed found out. After Frank Capra’s classic had bombed so hard at the box office that it killed a studio, Stewart blamed his younger and more inexperienced co-star for the film’s failure, refusing to work with her ever again.
When he first started making a name for himself in Hollywood, Stewart discovered that the mafia had its roots buried deep within the industry. One of the most prominent figures in Los Angeles was Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, who was one of the founders of the entirely self-explanatory group called Murder, Inc.
Siegel was a bootlegger during the Prohibition era, turned his hand to gambling rackets when the alcohol started flowing freely again in 1933, and it was common knowledge that he occasionally moonlighted as a hitman. In addition, he had a lot of powerful friends who wielded great influence in Tinseltown.
Siegel, a known associate of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and studio moguls Louis B Mayer and Jack L Warner, also developed a close friendship with Jean Harlow. In fact, Harlow was even named as godmother to his oldest child, Millicent, who became accustomed to A-listers visiting the family home.
“When I came home from school, Cary Grant was sitting in the room, waiting for my dad to get off the phone or something,” she recalled to D Travels Round. “I thought I would die when I saw him sitting there.” Maybe Stewart wasn’t privy to that information because Siegel tried to use him as the middleman to try and secure a date with Harlow years previously, but he wasn’t having it.
Grant even warned him about Siegel, telling Stewart that “the guy’s best pal is George Raft, and George says if Benny wants you to be his friend, you be his friend.” Obviously, he didn’t want to become Siegel’s friend, which made things so frosty that threats were eventually levelled against his life.
When he asked Stewart to set him up with Harlow, his response was indignant, as revealed in Michael Munn’s biography, The Truth Behind the Legend: “Why don’t you go to hell?” Siegel asked him, “What have you got to lose?” and the reply was hardly becoming of American cinema’s ultimate everyman. “My temper,” he said. “And believe me, you don’t want to see that.”
Even when death threats were made, Stewart stood his ground. “To me, those men were cowards,” he explained. “When they made threats, you had to stand up to them because if you were weak, that’s what they wanted: weak-mindedness. I wasn’t taught to be weak in the face of any kind of evil.”
