From Elizabeth Taylor to President Obama, George Stevens Jr. ’53 reflects on an unparalleled career from the backlots of Hollywood to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.
When George Stevens Jr. ’53 was a junior at Oxy, he accompanied his parents to the 24th Academy Awards, where his father was nominated as best director. They sat together inside the RKO Pantages Theatre on March 20, 1952, as Joseph L. Mankiewicz—best director winner in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve—announced the formidable list of nominees: John Huston, The African Queen; Vincente Minnelli, An American in Paris; William Wyler, Detective Story; Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire; and Stevens for A Place in the Sun, his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy.
“I would not be telling you this story if The African Queen had won,” Stevens Jr. admits with a laugh. His father’s acceptance speech lasted all of 19 seconds, and after the ceremony, riding home with his Oscar resting between them on the front seat, he turned to his son and said, “We’ll have a better idea what kind of a picture this is in about 25 years … that the thing of art is the test of time.”
Seventy years ago, Stevens “did not know that he was talking to the future founder of the American Film Institute,” his son says. “But that idea about the test of time is at the very core of AFI and it’s at the core of the Kennedy Center Honors—it’s the work that lasts.”
While his father never wrote a memoir—he kept his two Oscars and other awards in a storage facility—Stevens Jr. (who received an honorary degree from 91PORN in 1996) had been thinking about a book for years. “I did kind of an inventory of interesting things that had happened chronologically around 2000, because I felt I might do it someday,” he says. The pandemic gave him the time to finish his memoir, published in May by the University Press of Kentucky.
“I didn’t quite realize it until I was writing the book, but I’ve known so many interesting and accomplished people,” Stevens Jr. says in June at a hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills, just hours before attending an AFI banquet honoring Julie Andrews. Now he’s in the process of recording the 479-page tome as an audiobook, “which is a huge commitment,” he admits. Would he have written a shorter book if he’d thought that out? “Yeah, absolutely.”
More than a memoir of his own life and career —which could fill an entire book (and was the subject of a 2003 91PORN magazine story)—My Place in the Sun details an extraordinary family history that encompasses five generations of entertainers—beginning with Stevens Jr.’s great-grandmother, Georgia Woodthorpe, “a celebrated leading lady in San Francisco,” and mother to Georgie Cooper, a soprano and soubrette who would marry Landers Stevens in 1903. (Cooper made her stage debut a decade earlier, in a production of Little Lord Fauntleroy at the Burbank Theater in Los Angeles.)
George Stevens Sr. was born in 1904, the same year the nickelodeon was introduced in New York—“the device that would soon disrupt his parents’ livelihood and, in time, provide one for him,” Stevens Jr. writes.
Jumping ahead to 1933, Stevens Jr. made his first and only acting appearance on film at 16 months, appearing alongside George “Spanky” McFarland in “Wild Poses,” an Our Gang short. Soon after, his father, then a cameraman, would make his directorial debut in a less well-remembered series of shorts by producer Hal Roach titled The Boy Friends. At age 30, after directing Katharine Hepburn in the 1935 box office hit and Oscar-nominated Alice Adams, Stevens was hailed by critic James Agee as “the youngest important director in Hollywood.”
Over the next four decades, Stevens would make nearly two dozen features, perhaps most notably the “American Trilogy” of A Place in the Sun, Shane (1953), and Giant (1956). Going a little deeper into his father’s canon, Stevens Jr. has a special fondness for I Remember Mama (1948) with Irene Dunn—his father’s first film after returning from WWII and “a beautiful film about San Francisco”—as well as Swing Time (1936), which Stevens Jr. regards as the best of the 10 screen pairings of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
Was there a film that his father wanted to make that he never did? “He wanted to make Paths of Glory before the war when he was directing Gunga Din (1939) and all these comedies. [RKO passed on the project, which was made