Cagney by Cagney Read online

  It has been very interesting to see how protective the Vineyarders gradually became of the actor fella. Although I didn’t know them, never met them, whenever any of the islanders were asked by tourists where I lived, they were never told. One tourist walked into a real country store in North Tisbury about five miles from me and said, “How do I get to Cagney’s house?”

  “What do you want to know for?” said little Maude Call from behind the counter.

  “I’d like to see him.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “Well—” He wasn’t very sure.

  “Look,” said Maude, “if you don’t know him, don’t bother him. Let him alone. The poor man is trying to get a little peace and quiet, and you damned fools are always rushing into his house and asking silly questions. Now, stay away from him!” This kind of protective response from Vineyarders to inquiring strangers has happened a number of times, and I am much appreciative.

  The most amusing incident of the period when I was new to the island happened when we were staying with some friends, the Wortmans, at Chilmark. Also staying at the Wortmans’ was my old pal, that tremendous singer, actor, and all-round big broth of a boy, Ed McNamara. Ed took a chair, sat out front, and when people would drive in and ask where Cagney was, he’d reply, “Tell you what to do. There’s a man named Ellison Hoover, a very, very interesting man himself, and he’s entertaining the Cagneys. You go right down there now and see him.” Mac would give precise instructions on how to get to Hoover’s house.

  Now, Ellison Hoover was about as close as one can come to the definition of misanthrope. Except for a few close friends (and we counted ourselves among them), he wanted nobody around at all. On this occasion Mac kept sending people down to Hoover’s for a goodly number of days. Then, intensely curious, Mac, Wortman, and I drove down to Hoover, whom we hadn’t seen for a week or so, and when we got to his house we saw all the shades drawn, everything quiet as a tomb. We knocked on the door. No answer. Then we proceeded to holler, “Ellison! Ellison! Ellison Hoover!”

  Finally an upstairs window shade was pushed aside, and we saw that jaundiced, rheumy blue eye of Ellison’s peeking out. He stormed downstairs and flew at us. “You sonsabitches,” he thundered. “I haven’t had a minute’s peace in a week. Goddamn you!” What we had actually done was to confirm for Ellis his overall opinion of the worth of the human race.

  Ellison, a fine artist, attained a kind of fame ultimately. When Clare Briggs died and his cartoon strip, “Mr. and Mrs.,” needed an artist, the New York Tribune signed up Ellison. Art Farwell did the script and Ellison the cartooning. On the side Ellison executed magnificent crayon drawings, beautiful things that he didn’t regard highly, doing them only for his friends. He was quite a guy, and I was very fond of him. Along the way in show business I had picked up some broken-down Dutch comedy bits, and these would paralyze Ellison. For example, the Dutch burlesque comedian would alter “by a curious coincidence” to “by a curious coinkidinkie,” and Ellison would fall down laughing. His reaction to these phrases reminds me of a Dutch comic’s phrase that Frank McHugh always used—“Hello, cheesy—Hello, cheesy.” I knew there had to be some kind of burlesque background to that, so I asked Frank to fill me in. Frank explained all he knew of it was that after the burlesque comedian is on stage, a phone would ring, he’d make all kinds of elaborate approaches to it, finally picking it up to say, “Helllooo, Hello! I want to speak to the Cheese of Polize, please.… Ooooohhh, Hello, Cheesy!” And that was all Frank remembered of the routine. I knew there had to be an ending to it somewhere, and I kept asking around to no avail. Finally I learned the end of the routine from that fine actor, Jim Barton.

  Jim knew all the burlesque bits, and when I asked him if he knew the “Hello, Cheesy” thing, he said he certainly did. The burlesque comedian goes to the phone and asks for the “Cheese of Polize, please.… Ooohh, hellooo, Cheesy. I didn’t recockognize your voice. Cheesy, I got me here a delheminna. A very, very zerious delheminna.… Oh? Hmm? Not ‘delheminna’? Oh—probablem’? All right, I got me here a probablem. Cheesy, by a curious coinkidinkie, I godt me here all dis carpet. Dere’s carpet on the floor, dere’s carpet on the vindows, dere’s carpet on the valls, dere’s carpet on the zeeling, dere’s carpet everywhere! Now—vot I vonder, Cheesy, is dis—vot do I do with all dis carpet? … Mmmm? … Oooohhhhh, Cheesy! ALL dis carpet?”

  And speaking of a burlesque, there is the little matter of The Oklahoma Kid, made in 1939, which was my first Western. A Western is something not as foreign to a former New York street kid as one might think. I am, have been, and will be always a man for horses. There are many beautiful sights in this beautiful world, but I really cannot think that there is anything to equal a pair of superb Morgans—or any other horses, for that matter—standing proud and straight in all their beauty on a well-turfed field. As horse opera, The Oklahoma Kid is a typical example of how the motion picture business too many times takes the easiest way creatively. The picture was an idea of Ted Paramore’s, who conceived of doing the story of the mountain men, particularly of their paragon, Kit Carson. We researched it and I came up with some things I wanted to do, pretty exciting things, I thought. Warner’s, without warning pulled Paramore off the script and without a word to me, changed directors. When I got the final script it had as much to do with actual history as the Katzenjammer Kids. It had become typical horse opera, just another programmer.

  The clothing I had elected to wear—worn shirt and pants, broken-down hat—was replaced by the fanciest kind of cowboy costume. The script was so typically predictable that again the actors were reduced to cuffing it, ad-libbing where we thought it would do the most good. Not long ago I was at a party and a gentleman there said he had seen me on television in the “feel the air” movie. Funny how little things you drop in a picture can become the most memorable things about it for most people. This bit of business derived from a friend of Ed McNamara’s, a gent who had the habit of inhaling deeply when going outdoors, saying, “Feel that air, just feel it!,” and proceeding to do so. Simply to give my one-dimensional character in The Oklahoma Kid something just a trifle memorable, I dropped this little bit in several times—reaching up to feel the air as I said that line—and it persisted in audience memory.

  At one point in the film, standing on a rock while a bunch of bad guys led by Bogie and Ward Bond pound by on their horses, I was supposed to launch a lariat at Ward’s horse, get it snugly around the neck, and pull it up short. Naturally, such a trick roping is done by an expert while they show the hands of the rope artist, then shoot a closeup of me straining and heaving.

  But on this occasion I was intrigued by the thought of handling a rope, so I went over to the wrangler scheduled to do the actual roping and asked him just how he did it. He asked me if I had ever roped before, and I told him honestly I never had. Whereupon he showed me the looping and the general mechanics of the procedure, and I thought just for the hell of it I’d try the trick myself, never dreaming for a moment that it would work.

  15. In another of his eight films with Pat O’Brien. Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938.

  16. A trio distinctly up to no good. With Frank McHugh and Humphrey Bogart, The Roaring Twenties, 1939.

  17. “Bill” and Jim with Casey and young Jim.

  18. Facing the battling Cagney is Frank McHugh; above and to the right, Donald Crisp and George Tobias. City for Conquest, 1941.

  19. Waving lots of grand old flags. Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942.

  It worked. As Bogie and Ward came in on the shot riding their horses past my rock, I threw that loop button-bright right over the neck of Ward’s horse. I held on to the rope for just a brief second, then let go—otherwise I’d have taken Ward right off his perch. The director, Lloyd Bacon, yelled “Cut!”

  “Why didn’t you hang on?” Lloyd asked
me.

  “What did you want me to do—kill Ward?”

  Lloyd said merrily, “Why not?”

  So the shot turned out to be effective. The wrangler who showed me the basics came over to me and said very skeptically, “So you never threw a rope before?”

  “So help me, never did.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Isn’t that great?” He walked away, the picture of total disbelief. Every time I saw him thereafter he looked at me and said, “So you never threw a rope before?”

  Outside of the little extra bits and pieces dropped in by the actors, everything about The Oklahoma Kid was cliché, even the ending—guy getting gal, kiss, fadeout. So I thought a bit about how to spruce it up. What I finally did was to construct a little sequence beginning with the moment the girl’s father (Donald Crisp) says “Congratulations” to me for winning her. Instead of going into the clinch then as per the script, I looked at him, looked at her, looked at her again, took off my hat, handed it to Donald, and said, “Hold that.” Clinch and fadeout. A minor thing, but it removed the heavy hand of banality weighing down that ending. After he saw it, that very good director, Lewis “Millie” Milestone, nodded approvingly and said, “I was wondering how you were going to get out of that one.”

  Banal script notwithstanding, the actors went to the post set to do the best job we could with the material at hand. Bogie played a heavy in it, doing his usual expert job. By this time in his career he’d become entirely disillusioned with the picture business. Endlessly the studio required him to show up without his even knowing what the script was, what his dialogue was, what the picture was about. On top of this he would be doing two or three pictures at a time. That’s how much they appreciated him.

  He came into the makeup department one morning and I said, “What is it today, Bogie?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I was told to go over to Stage 12.” There he was fulfilling his contract, doing as required, however much against his will. We shared the same attitude: when there’s a job to be done, you do it. New acting talent would come along, and the studio’s idea of building them up was simply to throw them into one picture after another as quickly as possible. In this sink-or-swim situation the ones who survived were the ones with natural durability. Bogie had that kind of durability. Albeit he was a tremendous personality, the studio didn’t do anything about him until fortuitous circumstances put him opposite Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and away went Bogie. Sheer accident. The studio had no thought of using him to the fullest, indeed of using anyone to the fullest bent of their talent. The policy toward talent was simplistic: just throw them in, then throw them out. Talent was not nurtured, it was simply consumed.

  Another durable fella was George Raft, who did Each Dawn I Die with me. With typical confusion, Warner’s had somebody else ticketed to play the part I finally played, a reporter railroaded to prison; and George wound up playing the hoodlum role, instead of the usual other way around. George was a real pro, letter-perfect in his lines every day, every word. I must say I can’t say the same for myself.

  When we were doing Each Dawn I Die, Freddie Astaire came over to have lunch with us. Freddie had been in the big Dillingham shows in New York around the time George was playing nightclubs there. That was how they got to know each other, and Freddie had a great regard for George as a dancer and, of course, vice versa. It was interesting to watch their meeting after all those years. Both of these very sensitive fellas were shy of each other, keenly self-conscious. I realized at once that very little would be said unless I jumped in and played straight man for them. I did so gladly. Finally George unwound and began telling some vividly interesting stories about his mother and himself in their early days of privation.

  When he was fifteen and his mother in her early thirties, they used to enter flatfoot waltz contests in the hopes of getting the five-dollar prize. In a flatfoot waltz you cannot take your heels off the floor, forcing you to glide over it as if it were a magnet. George used to cut holes in his heels and insert dimes so that the gliding would be easier. He and his mother did very well on the dance-hall circuit, and later on when he got into the nightclubs, he did a very fast and a very good eccentric Charleston.

  George told Freddie and me that in those early days he used piano wire for shoelaces. He laced them up tightly in order to numb his feet so he could dance faster. I told him that was dangerous as hell to do, and he agreed. “I know,” he said, “I found out later. I used to get pale green around the mouth. I was actually suffering a mild heart attack.” George also told us that when he was working for the clubs, he was really working for the Mob—capital M. They, of course, owned all the New York nightclubs, and were expanding into Florida. In a single night in New York, George would work as many as seven nightclubs, going from one to the other, repeating his very strenuous act in each establishment. Finally he got into a Dillingham show on Broadway that became the climax of his career to that date, and the clubs became of secondary importance.

  The Mob, however, had different ideas. They told George he was going to Florida to open their new nightclub down there. George explained that he couldn’t because of the Dillingham show, but the tough boys weren’t having any of that. He raised hell, said he couldn’t do it, but did agree to go down to the train that night to see the boys off for Florida. At the station they grabbed him, took off his overcoat, shoes, and hat—and hid them. “All right,” George said, “you win!” He got on the train. But as they pulled into North Philadelphia, he jumped off and ran in his stocking feet through the snow to catch a taxi back to New York. He made the Dillingham show that night and didn’t show up in Florida as planned.

  Somebody else who assumed that George’s natural gentleness made him an easy mark was Peter Lorre. Lorre felt greatly superior to George, regarding him as a lowbrow. In a picture they were doing together, Lorre said in his inimitable whine, “Georgie, here’s what you do. You come over here—,” and he took George by the arm to guide him. But you don’t take George Raft by the arm and do anything. You can suggest something, but you do not guide him, you do not push him. George said very pleasantly to Lorre, “Don’t take my arm. Just tell me what you’ve got in mind.” Lorre began to explain and took George’s arm again. George told him not to do that, and once more Lorre took forceful charge, and hang! Lorre got smacked right between the eyes, knocking him ass over teakettle. Then George said very nicely, “I told you not to do that.” Mr. Lorre didn’t do it again. And Georgie has survived piano wire laces, Mr. Lorre, and the New York Mob, thank you very much, and is now close to eighty, still in fine fettle. A very nice guy.

  George Raft was typical of the interesting breed of actors I worked with at Warner’s. They were a lively bunch, and one of the liveliest was Allen Jenkins. In the early days he was rather an undisciplined fella. One time when he was very unhappy with the way the studio was treating him, he got drunk and called up Darryl Zanuck, very hard-driving and able man that he was, and told Zanuck what he could do with the contract. At the time Allen made this phone call, Pat O’Brien was in the room with him. Pat was just starting a brand-new contract at about four grand a week on a forty-week basis, a tidy sum. Allen went into full gear with his tirade against Zanuck, topping it off with, “Now you can take your contract and shove it, and that goes for O’Brien, too!” Pat shouted, “Leave me out of it!” Nothing happened as a consequence. Jenkins went back to work because Zanuck knew him as a tempestuous personality who cherished a drink or two. That was the old Allen. Before his death recently he had gone absolutely AA for a number of years.

  Another Warner’s regular was George Tobias, and I had a particular affection for George because he was an open and direct kind of fella—the kind of man one could describe with total accuracy as nice. George played a French Canuck in one of the pictures, and as we sat at a table rehearsing the lines, I noticed that one of his pronunciations was not authentic. I asked him if I might make a suggestion, and he readily agreed. I explained that his way of saying so-and-
so was inaccurate. “You’re not kidding me now?” he said, knowing that gags and leg-pulling were standard operations in our coterie. I assured him I wasn’t, and he promptly said he would speak the line the way I pronounced it. I spoke it for him, and he agreed that it sounded correct. During the shot he pronounced it that way, and it all worked out very well. This was so typical of George—an openness and a warm directness that made working with him such a comfortable experience.

  The best part of the entire Warner Brothers setup was this stock company—guys and gals who knew their business, did the job, and had fun doing it. As to the material we had to work with, we set no great store by it because the boys turning out scripts were doing the best they could under the perpetual rush-rush conditions. Writers were pressed to crank out their stuff by the yard, and consequently there was a limited story line in all their things. These pictures became what I’ve already labeled “cuff operas,” which went to the camera as the actors did a “You say this to me and then I’ll say that to you” structuring.

  An excellent example of that was the first day of shooting The Roaring Twenties. Our director, Raoul Walsh, asked me how I liked the opening scene as written, and I said I thought it was pretty bad, as indeed it was. “I think so, too,” Raoul said, “I’ve got a new one. Want to hear it?” I told him to fire away, and after he finished telling it, I told him the one I had in mind. Then Frank McHugh said he had one, so Raoul and I listened to Frank’s, and by the end of his description, Raoul and I said, “There it is!” So we shot Frank’s, and one hell of a good opening it was. Those pictures were sheer product, and if anyone was practicing art, I never saw it.

  So while we were on the set of The Roaring Twenties, we made changes constantly, hoping to bring life to the silly thing. A case in point. In a gangster film there is no cliché so strident as one guy knocking another out. In the script two hoods come up to me, one says something that prompts me to bounce him, and down he goes. I varied the scene by placing the second hood behind the first, and when I belted No. 1 his head went back, hit No. 2 in the chin, and they both went down.