Take the most gentle, stuttering boy-next-door actor in Hollywood history and put him in the cockpit of a B-24 bomber over Nazi Germany, not for publicity but as a commanding officer leading combat missions. James Stewart later rose to brigadier general, the highest-ranking actor in American military history. This episode traces the gap between the folksy persona and the private man, from a Pennsylvania hardware store to an Oscar, a war, and a business deal that upended the studio system.

The conversation covers an accordion accepted as payment at his father's store, a Princeton thesis designing an airport terminal, rooming with Henry Fonda in New York, and an MGM contract for a lanky actor no one knew how to use. It follows the hesitant delivery that made audiences trust him in Frank Capra's films, the Oscar displayed in the hardware store ...