Cagney by Cagney Read online

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  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1976 by Doubleday.

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  CREDITS

  The Granger Collection—c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6, c7

  Tom Kelley—c8

  From the Homer Dickens Still Collection—c9, c10

  Photo by Madison Lacy—c11

  Photo by Mac Julian—c12

  Photo by Zinn Arthur—c13

  Black Star/Joe Covello—c14, c15, c16, c18

  Roger Marshutz—c19, c20

  Photograph by Floyd McCarty—c21

  Sports Illustrated photo by Roy DeCarava © Time, Inc.—c22

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number for Hardcover: 74-18784

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76843-8

  v3.1

  To

  FRANCES VERNON CAGNEY

  and

  CAROLYN NELSON CAGNEY

  two gals who deserve the palm

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowlegdements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  My thanks to John McCabe and Jack Thomas

  for helping me remember it all

  Each man starts with his very first breath

  To devise shrewd means for outwitting death.

  CAGNEY BY CAGNEY. How’s that for a fatheaded title? I use it as kind of an official scorecard because I don’t seem to own my own name. Three biographies so far. First: Cagney. Second: James Cagney. Third: don’t remember, but Cagney’s sure in the title. What I have read from these is heavy with cockeyed conclusions and some solid misinformation. What I now propose to give you will at least come from someone who knows Cagney pretty well.

  An old friend, Ralph Wheelwright, advised me in 1955 to get at an autobiography. Having read some show business autobiographies, I saw no reason to add to the pile of what I’ve always called “junk writing.” But Ralph was so right when he said, “Somebody else is going to do the job if you don’t—and you won’t like it.” I hear, moreover, there are two other Cagney books in the making. So—before any more spring up—for what they are worth, here are some reminiscences that might add up to a book.

  1

  Being born at the turn of this century in New York City had its hazards. The infant mortality then, particularly in the Lower East Side, was high—roughly two and a half times today’s. For a time there, it looked as if I was going to be part of those statistics.

  I was a very sick infant. My mother, only twenty—a mere child herself—was terribly worried, of course. What bothered her most, next to my possible demise, was the fact that I hadn’t been baptized. As a good Catholic, she felt that if I were to die before I was given a proper name, I’d never be allowed into Heaven. She bemoaned this again and again to her brother: “He hasn’t got a name—he has to have a name!” Now, my uncle was a pretty rough Irishman. He humored her for a while, but Mom continued to cry the house down about my lack of identity. Finally he turned on her and said, “Carrie, for God’s sake, shut up! Stop your crying and call the kid ‘Ikey’!”

  Ikey Cagney. Sounds promising. It would have been good for a lot of laughs later.

  Without hesitating I can say my mother was the key to the Cagneys. She was born Carolyn Nelson on New York’s Lower East Side when poverty ruled there. She was forced to leave school at twelve. It was time to go out and get a job to help her family. When she told this to her teacher, the lady pleaded with her, “Oh, Carrie, don’t leave. You’ve got to stay. You’re the most promising pupil I have.” Then the teacher just sat there, weeping silently. That was a picture my mother never forgot.

  But there was no way out of it. That skinny little red-haired girl had to work in a factory, the Eagle Pencil Company, but as her days went by, one thought kept recurring until it became an obsession: I am damned well going to see to it that every kid of mine gets an education. It was a promise she kept repeating to herself the six years she worked in that factory. It was a promise she kept.

  She was an attractive woman, Mom. Her red hair was the truest titian, an iridescent tint, and in the sunlight I could see brilliant yellows and purples and bright reds in it. In all my life I have never seen anyone with such hair, and it went a foot below her waist. If I may say so, it was a glory. Little wonder she attracted my dad.

  The Nelsons and the Cagneys were both Lower East Side New York. My mother’s mother was Irish, born in County Leitrim around 1846. She married my grandfather Nelson, an ex-sailor who ultimately graduated to the status of barge captain.

  My dad’s people I never knew. Dad was a man of great and easy charm and gentle—James Francis Cagney, handsome, a ladies’ man. My mother would occasionally drop hints that he had never stopped being a ladies’ man. He was five foot eight—built like all us kids—stocky, but quick and graceful on his feet. A very good boxer, an excellent ballplayer. “Jimmy Steam” they called him because of his fast ball. I’ll never forget the time many years later when we all first saw Jackie Gleason. We were stunned. Jackie’s style, approach, mannerisms—everything—was my dad to the life.

  When Mom and Pop began their married life it was in the neighborhood near Avenue D and Eighth Street on the Lower East Side. There my brother Harry was born in 1898, and I came a year later, July 17, 1899. When I was two, we moved to 429 East Seventy-ninth Street, a better neighborhood, and not long after, we went to 166 East Ninety-sixth Street. All this while, young Cagneys kept coming along. There was Eddie, born in 1902, and Bill in 1904. The following year little Gracie joined us, but she died of pneumonia at ten weeks of age. In 1916, my last brother, Robert, was born. As a late child, of course, we were crazy about him, but he developed tubercular meningitis and died at thirteen months. The best was inevitably saved for last: my sister Jeanne, who came along when her four brothers were young men, which meant four fathers, my father having died the previous November.

  My first vivid recollections of New York were of Seventy-ninth Street, a wide thoroughfare lined with brownstone-front houses, all built into flats for the steady, sensible working people who lived in our neighborhood. It was only in 1912 or so when the neighborhood began to sour under the infiltration of the scabrous dope pushers who came in.

  As a youngster, of course, I was very much a city boy, but one day my dad rented an open four-wheeler known as a barouche and piled me, my mother, and three brothers into it for a two-week visit to my great-aunt in the then open country that is now Flatbush. That vivid memory is with me yet, and I can still see the tremendous elm in her front yard and the morning glories growing on the white picket fence. Ever since those two glorious weeks at the turn of the century, morning glories have been my favorite flower and, just as lasting in its effect, during those few days I changed from a city boy to a country boy. When I returned to Seventy-ninth Street from Flatbush
after two weeks of freedom in the golden air, I was indescribably saddened. It is enough to say that I have loved the country ever since, totally.

  Not that life on Seventy-ninth Street was dull. In 1904–5, some houses were being built across the street from us one winter, and the night watchman hired to protect the building materials sat close to his stove in his little shack in front of the construction site. Some neighborhood kids decided to liven things up by peeing down his stovepipe, and the resulting odor drove the man out in a fury to catch the wrongdoers. The one he caught and frantically beat up was my brother Harry, who was purely a bystander. My mother at the time possessed two handy items: a thick, six-foot-long horsewhip and a blazing temper. When she heard of the injustice done to Harry, she put on her little jacket, ran downstairs to the watchman, and whipped him up and down the street. He howled his head off, but he never bothered Harry again.

  Another time, my little brother Ed, in colliding with a dog, had hurt his head badly on the pavement and thereafter was subject to episodes of severe brain inflammation. One day when he was in school just recovering from a siege of meningitis, he made the mistake of whispering to the boy next to him. A teacher walking down the aisle heard Ed whisper. So this instructor reached down, grabbed Ed by the hair, yanked him out of his seat, and beat both sides of that sensitive little head. Ed ran home crying and when my mother heard the story, she put on her little jacket again, and went out looking for the teacher. The brave fellow was hiding and remained in hiding for days after. He knew Carolyn Cagney was looking for him.

  My father’s temperament was slightly less feisty. After working for a time as a bookkeeper, he obliged a bartender friend of his who couldn’t show up for work one evening by taking his place behind the bar. This was no hardship for Pop. From early on he had been rather well acquainted with saloons. He knew how to serve the product, and he knew how to consume it. So attractive indeed was this life that later on he bought his own saloon.

  One of my earliest memories is of the first day I ever entered school at the age of six when I went very proudly into Pop’s saloon and told him that I had learned a song. He gave me a glass of sarsaparilla, set me up on the bar, and told me to go ahead. Whereupon I belted out this minor classic:

  Fly away, fly away, birdee-o, dadadada.

  Bring her a feather and bring her a song—

  And that will please birdee-o all the day long.

  We were a musical family, the piano always on the go, and all of us invariably fooling around with a tune. I used to sing “I Want a Girl—Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad” for my mother and father, and they’d sit there, holding hands, beaming like the summer sun.

  Pop’s gentle waywardness was thoroughly engrained. He had the charm of an Irish minstrel, he did everything to the tune of laughter—but he was totally deficient in a sense of responsibility to his family. Despite this, he always thought he was doing well for us. At times, things got very rough. At best he had a spotty job record: here a job, there a job, and long stretches of nothing in between. This coincided with the Cagney boys all trying to get through college and working after school, so that at times it was only our part-time jobs that put the groceries on the table.

  Still—though we were poor, we didn’t know we were poor. We realized we didn’t get three squares on the table every day, and there was no such thing as a good second suit, but we had no objective knowledge that we were poor. We just went from day to day doing the best we could, hoping to get through the really rough periods with a minimum of hunger and want. We simply didn’t have time to realize we were poor, although we did realize the desperation of life around us. I recall the Fitzpatrick family on Ninety-sixth Street who were put out on the sidewalk when they couldn’t pay the rent, and this not long after they had seen their little child run over by a refuse wagon. The Cagneys never had that kind of experience, thank God, and it never occurred to us, despite the poverty, to hold our heads or feel sorry for ourselves. We just did the best we could.

  Another of Pop’s little weaknesses was the horses. After he died, my mother found an old checkbook among his effects, and the stubs read as high as $150 and $200, all to his bookmaker. That money would have seemed a fortune to us if we had seen even half of it.

  But he was irrepressible. He sailed happily through life, charming everyone, and all the time belting down the sauce that I suppose helped to sustain both his charm and his improvidence. When the flu epidemic of 1918 came along, the inroads of all that booze made him an easy victim. Dead in two swift, terrible days. My mother loved him deeply, and his going was an agony for her. But despite the terrible loss she felt after Pop left, despite the aching sorrow she knew seeing her man die before her eyes, she was staunch stuff. This sturdy lady kept the family intact, and we boys worked to help keep us all together.

  The family was always very tightly knit. Harry, my oldest brother, was a flawless athlete—trackman, a crack swimmer, a magnificent diver. Like all of us, he made almost a religion of never giving up. Once when the family was in its usual financial straits—deep, stony broke—Harry entered the 71st Regiment Collegiate track meet. We were so poor that he couldn’t afford to buy sneakers, so he borrowed a pair of ordinary rubbers, lashed them to his feet—and won. He was only about twelve when he decided to become a doctor, despite all the financial hurdles he had to face. The thing that triggered this decision was seeing my mother in Presbyterian Hospital suffering from the effects of a gall bladder operation.

  Harry entered medical school at Columbia, and in the summer of 1918 he was forced to take time out for a hernia operation. At that very same time he was on the Columbia diving team. He had the hernia operation, and immediately after entered the diving competitions. The coach and the doctor okayed it on the proviso that Harry wear a tightly taped bandage; so, swathed in that restrictive binding, Harry went right ahead and won the intercollegiate fancy diving championship.

  I can remember, when I was in high school, Harry getting up at night, walking the floor until three in the morning, pounding his studies into his head, boning up for his exams. In the middle of med school, the financial hardships made him drop out, and one of his professors told him sadly that this would be the end of it. Med school dropouts, he said, never came back. Harry denied that, said he’d be back the following year. He was, and he got a medical degree in 1925.

  Not that Harry was a humorless grind. He had a great sense of mischief, always teasing, and one day he kidded a beautiful girl in our neighborhood, who reported it to her brother. The brother came charging out to find Harry and me on the curbstone. Bup (that was the brother’s very stimulating name) stopped and said to his sister, “Them?” “Yes.” “What the hell! Do you think I want to get killed?,” and he charged right back into the house. That will indicate to some extent the Cagney brothers’ reputation.

  Harry was a great athlete, bigger and stronger than I, but he couldn’t fight worth a damn. Anytime he was in trouble he announced to the opposition that he had a brother who could lick anyone. I was elected to do the fighting, and I didn’t mind it a bit. I did the same thing for my brother Ed, but my brother Bill was a very feisty, gutsy little guy who could “go” when necessary. His perennial enemy, about a head taller than he, was Eddie Kinlan, and those two were always ready (as we said in those days) to “hook it up.” One day when they really went at it, it proved a standoff because someone stopped the fight. Bill came home and complained to my mother that someone had broken up their fight. Mom asked him if he had been losing. “No.” Had he been winning? “No.” Mom, in her wisdom knowing that it would have to be settled sometime, told Bill to go out and find Eddie and have it out. “Then when you do,” she said, “I’ll make you the best dinner you ever had.” Bill promptly went around the corner to the Kinlans’ place, knocked on the door, and when Eddie’s dad answered, said to him, “I’m Willie Cagney. I want Eddie to come and fight it out with me.”

  Mr. Kinlan beamed, turned back to his son somewher
e in the house and said, “Ah, hah. All right, Eddie, come and fight it out.” Bill couldn’t see Eddie, who was deep in the house, but he could see the expression on Mr. Kinlan’s face as he watched his boy’s reaction. Clearly Eddie was dogging it, wanted no part of Bill, and in obvious frustration the old man yelled at Bill, “Get outta here, you little bastard, or I’ll break your leg.” So Bill left, reported all this to my mother, and she said, “Fine, son!,” giving him a dinner he was very happy to consume.

  I think this story illustrates as well as any the kind of neighborhood we were raised in. My mother, having been brought up on the Lower East Side where fighting was a part of life’s everyday fabric, knew that this was the way it was, and running away did no one any good.

  Ed never fought, however. He was a gentle lad. But as I say, there certainly was genuine athletic accomplishment in the family. Ed became a powerful wrestler and All-Scholastic soccer center; Harry, in addition to his diving, was a good ballplayer.

  Harry once had an argument with a good street fighter nicknamed Bulldog. Harry boasted to Bulldog that he had a brother who could lick him, and I duly did just that. Some weeks later, Bulldog courageously challenged me again, and in making our arrangements, he uttered this deathless line, “Nobody’s gonna get tough over me no more.” Again, Bulldog was put away.

  Around this time my brother Ed, just up out of a sickbed, had been badly beaten up by a local boy, Willie Carney. Carney having tried to steal a golf ball Ed was playing with. I went looking for Carney but couldn’t find him. That night a kid came up to our flat breathlessly to announce that Carney was fighting with a kid down the block. I arrived in time to see the kid stretched out, and I promptly told the boy I’d take his place. I gave Carney a chance to rest, and then we went to it. We were going at it hot and heavy when the cops arrived and broke it up. By arrangement we met the next night and were slugging away when the cops raided that one, too. The third night we kept slugging away, but he just refused to fold. I had great admiration for that spunky guy because he took my best punches with style. Once I feinted with my left and hit him a stiff right on the chin that should have finished him, but he just rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and kept right on coming.