He was Hollywood’s aw-shucks everyman, the stammering senator from ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington‘, the small-town dreamer from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life‘.
But in the mid-1940s, James Stewart looked one of the most feared gangsters in America dead in the eye and told him his days were numbered. The gangster was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, co-founder of the crime syndicate later known as Murder, Inc., and the man who would soon build the Flamingo in Las Vegas. And by every account, Stewart did not blink.
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The feud had been building for years. Siegel moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, hoping to buy his way into the film industry’s glamour and money, and he built friendships with stars like George Raft. Stewart, who was close with Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, watched with growing disgust as Siegel worked his way into their circle. According to Michael Munn’s biography John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, and later James Stewart: Bomber Pilot, there was an earlier flashpoint too. Siegel had once tried to use Stewart to get an introduction to actress Jean Harlow. Stewart’s answer, as Munn recorded it, was blunt: “Why don’t you go to hell?“
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Things boiled over at Harlow’s funeral in 1937, where Stewart and Siegel got into a heated confrontation in front of the mourners. When Raft told Stewart to back off, he refused. “His time is limited,” Stewart reportedly said. “And so is yours.”
The bad blood never cooled. Stewart kept warning Cooper and Grant to keep their distance from Siegel, which worried even his closest friend, Henry Fonda. Stewart’s wife, Gloria, later told Munn that Fonda had begged her husband to let it go. “Hank told me that he’d told Jim to ease up on his criticism of Siegel,” she recalled. “It’s not that Jim was going around mouthing off to anyone and everyone… he was worried about them.”
Bugsy Siegel’s Threats Against James Stewart and His Fearless Response
Stewart didn’t ease up. In one face-to-face run-in, Siegel tried to get casual and use his first name. Stewart shut that down fast: “It’s Mr. Stewart to you.” Siegel, rattled, threatened him outright, saying that if the badmouthing didn’t stop, he would “have to do something about it.” Stewart didn’t flinch. He told Siegel he was welcome to try, and that if he ever got the chance, he would make sure Siegel “and your kind” were run out of Hollywood for good.
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Now, that’s a wild thing for a movie star to say to a man already linked to multiple gangland murders. And yet nothing happened to Stewart. Gloria later had her own theory about how her husband walked away from staring down one of the deadliest men in the country. “I can only put Jim’s survival down to sheer bloody-mindedness,” she said, “and knowing that he could be powerfully dangerous himself when aroused to anger.” She figured Siegel just never wanted to find out how far Stewart’s temper could actually go.
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Stewart’s own take, given years later, was simpler. He believed cowardice was behind every threat the mob ever made against him. “When they made threats, you had to stand up to them,” he said, “because if you were weak, that’s what they wanted: weak-mindedness.“
Siegel was shot dead in Beverly Hills in 1947. His Flamingo dream was cut short by the same underworld he had helped build. Stewart, the reluctant leading man who once told a killer to go to hell, kept making pictures for another five decades.
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