How love killed James Stewart James Stewart with wife Gloria in 1986. In 1948, at a dinner party given by Gary Cooper, Stewart, Hollywood’s playboy extraordinaire, met the patrician looking Gloria Hatrick McLean. She was clever, recently divorced and the mother of two boys. Hollywood didn’t impress her. Stewart said,” I could tell right off that she was a thoroughbred. She was the kind of a girl I had always dreamed of. The kind you associate with open country, cooking stew and not fainting because there was squirrel in it. She’d look at home on a sailboat or on a raft; in a graceful swing from a tree branch into a swimming pool.” They married in 1949. Unlike so many Hollywood unions, it lasted forty-five years. Stewart adopted her two sons, and the couple had twin daughters together. They lived in the same Beverly Hills house for the rest of their lives. The actor added: “Gloria made this family for me. She made a home for me to come home to.” In 1969, Gloria’s son Ronald, a Marine lieutenant, was killed in Vietnam. The grief was unimaginable, but it only made the couple closer. When Gloria died of lung cancer on February 16, 1994, Stewart was not devastated in the conventional sense; he ceased to live. The star withdrew from his friends and from public life. He stayed at home, obsessively tending the garden his wife had planted. He spoke to her as if she were still alive and living with him. In 1996, doctors needed to replace the battery in the actor’s pacemaker. It was a routine procedure, but he refused to let them do it. Stewart had once said that when his purpose was gone, he would cease to fight. On July 2, 1997, surrounded by his children, he died of a cardiac arrest. His final words were: “I’m going to be with Gloria now.”