“The Law’s Kinda a Funny Critter”

Now, I reckon I’m not the only person around these parts who remembers fondly the 1973-1974 CBS-TV series Hawkins, starring the legendary Jimmy Stewart as slow-moving but quick-thinking West Virginia criminal attorney Billy Jim Hawkins. It was the aging film actor’s second foray into television, following The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971-1972), a cute comedy in which he had played a grandfather and an anthropology professor at a small-town university, beset by family challenges. And Hawkins was well-received, even though it was quite short-lived.

Billy Jim Hawkins was introduced in a teleflick called Hawkins on Murder in March 1973, but the series itself, created by David Karp and Robert Hamner, debuted on October 2, 1973. It was one of two 90-minute crime dramas rotating in a New CBS Tuesday Night Movies slot (the other show being Shaft, which had Richard Roundtree reprising his popular film role as New York City P.I. John Shaft). Stewart’s pin-striped attorney played it folksy. As Richard Meyers explained in TV Detectives (1981), “Billy Jim would ‘Um,’ and ‘Wall ... wall,’ his way through conversations until his clients felt he could not defend a saint in a paternity suit.” Yet, with help from a multiplicity of kinfolk he roped into helping him investigate his cases--most notably cousin R.J. Hawkins (Strother Martin), who served well as Billy Jim’s comic foil--Stewart’s character proved himself to be as savvy and shrewd as Perry Mason. The New York Times called it “the best role [Stewart] has had in years”--good enough, in fact, that it earned him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV Series.

But, Meyers notes in his book, “[a]s writers loved to put rumpled Columbo into opulent surroundings, so they loved to put down-home Hawkins in seamy surroundings. After getting an heiress off for triple murder in the TV movie, the series’ debut was ‘Murder in Movieland’ and it had Hawkins tangling with bisexual hustlers, homosexuality, raped teen-agers, and dirty tricks. It’s likely that viewers were not ready for or interested in these subjects. Hawkins’ case was rested after seven episodes.” Far too soon, if you ask me.

I’d always assumed that Hawkins’ failure was due chiefly to anemic ratings. It was one of several highly promoted crime dramas that didn’t make it that year, the others including Griff, The New Perry Mason, The Magician, Chase, Tenafly, Toma, and Roundtree’s Shaft.

However, a recently published biography, Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend (Barricade Books), by Michael Munn, suggests that the actor’s age--he turned 65 years old in 1973--and infirmities might have helped hasten the program’s demise. The following excerpt comes from pages 293 and 294 of Munn’s book:

‘I liked that series of films,’ Jim said about Hawkins. ‘I did them because I’d always wanted to play a lawyer since doing Anatomy of a Murder. I was a defense lawyer, and I liked the way my character played the game trial lawyers play. When the facts were against him, he argued the law. And when the law was against him, he argued the facts. And when both the facts and the law were against him, he banged his hands on the table.’

His scene-stealing co-star from Shenandoah and Fool’s Parade, Strother Martin, was his regular co-star in Hawkins. Jim had no objections about Martin, feeling that he ‘might well need someone to help carry the load ... as I’m not getting any younger’. He also stipulated, ‘I don’t care too much what Strother does ... just don’t let him carry a piece of string.’

Making Hawkins proved too grueling for Jim: ‘I made eight of those films for television ... in just two years ... but in the end I had to give it up. It was all too hectic for me. I’d been in films that were made in a hurry, but they were never shot as fast as they do with television. I just couldn’t keep up. I had so many lines to learn and not much time to learn them, and when you’re not a young man anymore, you don’t remember lines as easy as you used to. One time, I said, “I can’t do this. I can’t remember my lines.” The director said, “You know, Jim, it’s okay for you to use cue cards. A lot of actors do.” I said, “But I can’t see the cue cards.”’

Stewart’s commitment to the series might also have taken a hit as a result of events in his off-screen life. As Munn writes: “[D]uring production on one of the Hawkins films, John Ford died.” Ford was one of the motion-picture directors with whom Stewart had most often worked, on screen gems such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and one he most admired. “Jim attended the funeral and went back to work. But he was uncharacteristically bad tempered, and after getting into a rage about something trivial, he suddenly stopped and asked, ‘What am I doing?’ Said [his wife] Gloria, ‘He felt lost. All his friends were dying. He often said to me, “I’m losing all my old friends, and I’m not making any new ones.”’ ...”

Stewart did, though, make new fans. Hawkins brought him recognition among a younger generation of Americans who didn’t know him for his western films, or his Alfred Hitchcock collaborations, or even It’s a Wonderful Life. I have to count myself among that contingent. It is only too bad that Billy Jim had to disappear so soon, as Stewart lived for another 23 years after Hawkins went off the air. He could’ve spent at least several more of those years whippin’ the pants off over-confident West Virginia district attorneys and tricking murderers into giving themselves away on the stand. Aw shucks.

(Above) The opening from “A Life for a Life,” the third regular episode of Hawkins, originally shown on November 13, 1973. Jerry Goldsmith composed the “twangy theme.”