A Wonderful Film ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ Has Earned A Cult-Like Following Among Holiday Viewers

They clutch her hands. They weep. They share with her the sorrows of their lives, all the while seeking her assurance that everything will be all right. To them, she is not Karolyn Grimes, a middle-age woman living in Kansas, but Zuzu Bailey, only 6 and living in the make-believe town of Bedford Falls.

Over and over they ask her to repeat the line, the one she uttered with such innocence to end that movie so long ago: “Look, Daddy. Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”

She obliges, always. She might try to sell them a Zuzu doll, or maybe a Zuzu cookbook, but she is always respectful of the movie and its faithful.

“I would never want to taint their memory of the movie,” Grimes says - but you can call her Zuzu. She answers to both.

Fifty years after the release of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the national fascination with its story of an aborted Christmas Eve suicide has never been stronger. Festivals and special screenings are cropping up around the country. High schools are staging plays based on the movie. At least one town, Seneca Falls in upstate New York, seeks anointment as the true Bedford Falls, N.Y., while Indiana, Pa., calls itself “Bedford Falls ‘96” on the grounds that it produced the movie’s star, Jimmy Stewart. In Italy, computer hackers have carved a virtual-reality Bedford Falls from the fields of the Internet.

And, of course, there is the Zuzu Society.

The cornucopia of nostalgia overflows with Christmas ornaments and books and commemorative plates to mark the film’s golden anniversary. There is even a 50th-anniversary watch, with hands that tick inexorably over the smiling faces of George Bailey and his adoring family. And, as if to bring dysfunction to the extended Bailey family, at least one lawsuit is pending over the rights to what has become, through artistry and overexposure, a national treasure.

Hollywood has a long and somewhat wacky tradition of capitalizing on Christmas. Sixty years ago, two Santa’s helpers, played by Laurel and Hardy, led a battalion of toy soldiers against child-snatching bogeymen; today, Arnold Schwarzenegger is joyfully tearing up a mall on Christmas Eve. Along the way, there have been dancing Scrooges, a scatological Christmas, courtesy of National Lampoon, and the kidnapping of Santa Claus by Martians.

But no other movie has approached the cultish popularity of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a 1946 film that neither won an Academy Award nor realized the box-office expectations of its director, Frank Capra. It was not until the mid-1970s, when the movie fell into the public domain, that the saga of George Bailey insinuated itself into the national consciousness through repeated television broadcasts.

Now, because Republic Pictures acquired a piece of it in 1993, the movie is broadcast only once a year; NBC will show it on Dec. 20.

Still, the story endures. It goes like this: Business failure and unrealized dreams have persuaded George Bailey to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge on Christmas Eve. Instead, he winds up rescuing his guardian angel, Clarence, who allows George to see what his hometown of Bedford Falls would have been like had he not been born. George realizes how valuable the gifts of family and friendship are, the townspeople come to his financial rescue, and Clarence earns his angel’s wings for a job well done.

With its subplots of suicide, alcohol abuse and general depression, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is perhaps the darkest holiday favorite ever filmed. It is not universally loved. One film critic maintains that the movie would have made more sense if George Bailey had killed himself. And for every family that has incorporated the movie into the holiday schedule, it seems, there is someone who detests the film and someone who is obsessed with it.

Nobody knows this better than Jeanine Basinger. She is the curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives in Middletown, Conn., which has extensive correspondence and production materials from the movie in its Frank Capra collection. And she gets calls.

“There’s the cuckoo fan, asking if I would rip a corner of the original script and mail it to them because their grandmother is dying,” she said. “Then there’s the person who saw it for the first time and wants to talk about it. And there are the people who are really angry that everyone else seems to like this movie and they want to punish me personally for it.”

Basinger, who is also a professor of film studies, dismisses critics who see the movie as sentimental pap.

“Some people don’t get it,” she said. “This film is a real downer. It’s about a guy who’s trying to kill himself. He wants to leave this small town and now he knows he’s never going to.”

But the messages that rise above the nearly consuming bleakness - messages of hope, of finding grace in everyday existence - clearly resonate with audiences. Holidays tend to bring moments of stress and sobering re-evaluation, she said, then added, “But when you sit down and watch it during that time period - when you’re fretting and dreading - it doesn’t let you down.”

The Capra archives contain scores of letters from people who say the movie has brought them muchneeded encouragement, even a lifeline from the seas of despair. The most dramatic example may be that of Robert C. McFarlane, the former national security adviser who tried suicide in the midst of the Irancontra affair in the mid-‘80s. While he was recuperating, a stranger sent him a videotape of the movie with the message: “Watch this.” He did. And, he has said, it helped him to see the value of his life.

But the movie has changed no life more dramatically than that of the young actress who appeared in the role of George and Mary Bailey’s third child. Her screen time lasted no more than six minutes, and her character was named after a once-popular brand of gingersnap cookies called Zuzu.

For years, the role of Zuzu carried no more meaning for Karolyn Grimes than her 10-second walk-on as a matchstick girl in “Hans Christian Andersen,” or any of her brief appearances in 14 other films. She was a “bit actress,” she said, and a limited one at that.

By the early ‘50s, “Wonderful Life” was all but forgotten, the screen career of Grimes all but finished. Orphaned at 15, she was married in Missouri at 18, divorced and the mother of two at 26. She worked in a medical laboratory and on the assembly lines of factories producing shoes and shirts. She took a road trip once to Hollywood, but never visited any of the studio lots.

“I had put that life on a shelf in the basement,” she said. “That life, literally, was gone.”

By the early ‘80s, Grimes was married to a successful contractor in Kansas and working as a lab technician. She was best known in the area as “the quarter lady,” because she collected the change from various video-arcade machines that she and her husband owned.

Then the telephone started to ring. The movie was being televised so frequently, and was affecting so many people, that some wanted to talk to the real Zuzu. “At first, it wasn’t much,” she recalled. “But then it got to be radio, television, people calling from all over the United States.”

Today, being Zuzu is both a mission and a business. Her fan club, the Zuzu Society, publishes a newsletter that provides updates on her personal life and promotes all things Zuzu, from ornaments and sweatshirts to her biography, “Every Time a Bell Rings” (Pastime Press, 1996), by Clay Eals.

But Republic Pictures has sought to curtail the cottage industries that have sprung from “Wonderful Life,” including the ventures of Jimmy Hawkins, who played Tommy Bailey in the movie. Hawkins, who has marketed jigsaw puzzles, calendars and trivia books, has sued, and Grimes said she may join him in a second lawsuit.

The little money she makes, Grimes said, is secondary to the privilege. When she goes on one of her “Zuzu gigs” she becomes, in some people’s eyes, an icon of hope and innocence, of whatever it is that makes people believe in angels.

Two weeks ago, at an appearance at the Decades memorabilia store in suburban Detroit, people waited for hours in the cold to meet Zuzu, said Bill Krout, one of the owners. There was the man who said the movie had saved his life, and the woman who told her fiance she would not marry him until he had seen the film. More than a few wept.

“It’s not me,” Grimes said, “it’s the character they’re in love with. But it’s like a gift. And you don’t feel like you deserve it.”

She said she still draws strength from the movie; its messages echoed when her second husband died and when her teen-age son committed suicide. The film is so much a part of her life now, after a 30-year absence, that the gravestone above the plot reserved for her in the Resurrection Cemetery in Lenexa, Kan., has two names carved in its granite: one was given to her by her parents, the other by Frank Capra.

At 56, the former child actress has made room within herself for another persona. “When I curse, I’m Karolyn Grimes,” she said. “But I’m Zuzu when I’m on - when people need me to be Zuzu.”