Cagney by Cagney Page 11

  This dropping in of the little touches became engrained. You’d frequently go back to your own memories to find these things, as I’ve said, and at one spot in The Roaring Twenties a funny bit derived from a true story I had been told years before. There was a studio worker who bragged to his pals about the great girl he had: “Fellas, wait’ll you see her. She’s the most beautiful thing you ever saw, and she’s crazy about me. You don’t know the thing we have.” Minutes later with his pals still around him, he calls his girl. “Hello, dear.… Huh? This is Frankie. Frankie.… Oh, huh. Huh.… How about dinner tonight? … No? Well, can I come over after dinner? … Oh, your mother. Yeah, I see. Well, I’ll just pop in for a second on my way home from the studio.… Huh? Oh, I see. Well, I’ll tell you what. When I’m driving by, can I honk my horn?”

  This actually happened, and I dropped it right into The Roaring Twenties. According to the script I have to go backstage to talk with Priscilla Lane, now a great success in show business while I have remained an old friend in the small time. I am asking her out to dinner and she has to turn me down. So I simply followed the basic dialogue as uttered by that studio worker years before, concluding with, “Is it all right if I blow my horn as I go by?” Just another bit of flavor to a bland piece of writing.

  Of course, when the substance is there, it is a pleasure to do your job and work for a richer kind of creativity. Then the performer has to translate into action the author’s intention. How well he does that establishes his worth as an actor. I’ve seen hit New York shows with top actors; I’ve seen the same show in Los Angeles with a road company, and the whole worth and impact of the show has been reduced by 50 per cent. Somehow the secondary cast has not projected the author’s intention.

  I believe strongly that this is one thing basic to our business—the intention of the author must be clear. You walk out on the stage intending to project to the audience the idea the writer had in mind, and if you don’t, the whole point, obviously, is lost or mislaid. Ed McNamara was a pupil of Enrico Caruso; indeed, he was Caruso’s only pupil. The first thing Caruso said when Mac came to study with him was, “First, Ed, you gotta to have the intention. You have the intention, and then you stay witha the intention, and you-a never for a moment let it get away from you. Because if you-a do, the picture is muddy, the intention is lost, and the audience doesn’t get what you mean for-a them to have.”

  When Mac first went to Caruso, he did so as the result of a frameup. A pal of his, Senator Billy Hughes of New Jersey, went to Caruso and said, “O.K., you guinea, you think you can sing? We got a boy over in Paterson who makes you sound like a she-mouse’s poop.” Caruso had to hear this prodigy obviously, so Billy got Ed up to the Ansonia Hotel where Caruso lived on the pretext that they were going to meet some old pals. When he saw Caruso opening the hotel room door, Mac damned near fainted, but he got his Irish up because he knew there’d been a plot of some kind. Caruso said he heard that Ed sang and sang “good.” Ed admitted this, and in reply to Caruso’s request that he sing something, defiantly picked Caruso’s greatest number, “Vesti la giubba.” Ed gave it everything, rattling the windows, and Caruso enjoyed it very much, asking him to do it again with everything he had. Ed thought he had given everything he had, but he did it once more, almost giving himself a double hernia as he powerhoused along. Caruso thought it was great and then pleaded with Ed to do it just once more, and again with everything in his power. Ed gave it everything he had, tearing the whole room apart virtually. When he finished, Caruso said, “That’s-a fine!” casually, and started to walk away. Mac grabbed Caruso’s coattail and said, “Hey, just a minute. Why did you make me do that the third time?”

  “I just want-a see you break-a you goddamned neck!” said Caruso.

  But Caruso was so impressed with this voice—he called it the finest natural organ he’d ever heard—that he insisted Mac study. Mac, who’d never had a lesson in his life, asked for the name of a good teacher, and Caruso, fearing the charlatan instructors all over the city, had Mac come and work with him. So Mac would come over to the Ansonia, always at nine in the morning, and invariably with the windows wide open in all kinds of weather. He discovered why Caruso set it up this way when one morning a voice bellowed from two flights up, reviling them royally. This was the great singer and rival of Caruso, Titta Ruffo, who lived in the Ansonia too. Ruffo stuck his head out of his window and yelled down, “You son-of-a-bitch, you bastards. I’m-a trying to sleep up-a here.” Caruso stuck his head out the window and knowing damned well he was bugging Ruffo, cautioned him, “Shhh!! Great-a singer here, great-a singer.”

  Caruso was pre-eminently an artist who carried intention to its fullest extensions. He said to Mac, “To sing-a sad, you gotta feel-a sad, really sad. You feel-a happy, then sing-a happy, but unless you feel-a happy, you cannot sing with the intention.” This is as may be for those who can do it that way, but speaking purely for myself, I believe all an actor has to do is know the intention, understand the emotion to the fullest, and then call the doing of it into service. The adherents of the so-called Method insist that an actor has to be the part. Be it. May I say politely, “bunk!” I don’t hold with the Method because I’ve seen it get in the way. These actors so frequently perform not for the audience, but for themselves. This to me is heresy. It is, after all, for the people in the audience that you exist as an actor. It is for them that you perform. Indeed, to repeat with emphasis, audiences determine the material itself.

  As verification of that, there is the account of Frank Fay and his bookings. Frank had been playing for weeks at the Palace in New York as a headliner, and on the Monday matinee when all the booking agents gathered to look at the week’s new acts with a thought to booking them in theatres across the country, one out-of-town agent was heard to say about Frank, “Such a great talent, but I wouldn’t dream of hiring him for my theatres.” What he meant was that the sophisticated Fay material simply wouldn’t play in vaudeville houses outside New York and the big cities.

  Certainly Warner Brothers usually had a pretty good idea of what the public wanted, no matter how derelict they were in helping the material get fashioned. They took advantage of the nostalgia for World War I with The Fighting 69th, the great Irish regiment from New York. What with all the Micks in the stock company, it did seem a natural. There were Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Alan Hale, George Brent, and Tommy Dugan. Most people who know the movies will remember Tommy as the frozen-faced comedian who invariably played company managers or old vaudevillians. Indeed, he was an old vaudevillian, one of the first deadpan comedians that I can remember. He was a very funny man, never laughed, but sure made everybody else do so.

  We were doing some night shots for The Fighting 69th on the Warner ranch, and some coffee seemed like a good idea. Tommy volunteered to do this because he was an expert coffee-maker, so he started to gather wood, and Frank McHugh volunteered to help him. Frank helped him and helped him and helped him to a point where Tommy never got the coffee on the fire because he didn’t even get the fire made. It was a scene they should have put in the picture. Finally, coffee was brought in from outside, and at midnight we got the box lunches traditional for location work. Tommy was chewing on a piece of chicken, and a bone got stuck crosswise in his throat. He thought he’d get rid of it by pouring down some hot coffee. It was hot all right, so hot it scalded him severely all the way down, and he was on his way to the hospital in very short order. But he came out of it with comparative ease.

  Hardly anything disturbed Tommy; that deadpan never altered. Yet one day I actually saw him smile, and I was amazed. Solid, tough, good stuff, Tommy. Once he was driving on the perimeter of Los Angeles and picked up three hitchhiking servicemen. He took them some way, then courteously explained that this was as far as he was going in their direction. One of the soldiers said belligerently, “Look, mister. You take us all the way to where we’re going—or else,” or words to that effect. Now, Tommy was well up in his sixties, but he stopped the car care
fully, put on the brake, went around, and opened the door. Then he said, “Out, punks. I’ll take you on one at a time.” And he would have too if they hadn’t chickened. Pure spunk.

  Moreover, Tommy had a discerning eye. During the making of the picture he said to me, “You don’t seem to have had much comfort out of this fame that you should have been enjoying all these years, Jim.” I told him there has been no comfort at all in the sheer fact of celebrityhood, none at all. “Yes, I know,” he said, with some understanding, “you just never had the gift—if you want to call it that—to be the celebrity type.”

  George Brent was an essential ingredient of The Fighting 69th, and a solid actor and fine gentleman George was and is. After a very productive career in the business, he was able to satisfy a life’s dream and return to his native Ireland for the retirement years. There is always something very comforting in knowing that an old friend has obtained his heart’s desire, and I felt very happy for George. Not a long while ago as I was in the doctor’s office getting my yearly physical in came an Irish-American I know, a horseman. He had been in Ireland not long before and I asked him how George was doing over there. “Oh, he’s back,” the man said. “Living down around Rancho Santa Fe.”

  So I scurried around to find out where George was, got him on the phone, and said, “George, I’m pleased to hear you’re here. But what happened?” He said, “It’s still a wonderful country, but, oh, Jim—those Irish mornings! You freeze. So the wife and I decided that the only place to be was where it was sunshine most of the time.”

  Part of the stock company was also called out to do duty in an item called Torrid Zone, a zone Warner’s created on its back lot in Burbank. This is the picture I call Hildy Johnson Among the Bananas because it’s really just a reworking of the Hecht-MacArthur play The Front Page. Because the story line of Torrid Zone was so terribly predictable, I thought that just to effect some kind of change, I’d grow a mustache. It was really rather a silly-looking thing, but at least it was inoffensive. Inoffensive, that is, to everyone except the top brass. They gave the producer of the picture, Mark Hellinger, some emphatic hell about my little peccadillo. Mark, a happy-go-lucky guy with a flair for high living, came to me about it.

  “Jim,” he said, “the boys in the front office want to know why you grew the mustache.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” I said.

  “The brass claims it takes away some of your toughness.”

  “They know all about that, don’t they, Mark? Hell, what do we want to do? Sell the public the same piece of yard-goods all the time? Let’s have some variety.”

  Mark went back to the front office and conveyed my feelings. With that, the powers-that-be said, “Oh, the hell with it. It’s just Cagney being his own difficult self again.” In any case, Torrid Zone proved to be a money-maker—and I suspect that the fact had precious little to do with my mustache one way or the other.

  In those days when pictures had to be cranked out on an undeviating schedule, one went everywhere for screen stories, and sometimes the original sources were good, sometimes bad. City for Conquest, which we did in 1941, is an example of the former, being taken from Aben Kandel’s novel of that name, a novel with some fine things in it. I went to work on that picture with something of a will for just that reason. I played a truck driver turned fighter, and so I dieted and trained myself from 180 pounds down to 145 in order to do the fights. To get in the ring and be convincing one has to be in shape or one drops down dead.

  I did all my own fight scenes; the prospect of a few punches in the puss never bothered me. I was hurt once in the picture. They threw in a fair-to-middling fighter who had been a pro, and this was his first appearance in pictures. I think he figured one job was going to make him a star because when the director said, “All right, action!” the fighter got a little excited. He threw one, hitting me right on the chin. A dandy. I swung around so the camera couldn’t see me, and I laughed as I said “Oh, you son-of-a-bitch.” I got a kick out of it because his face was absolutely stricken when he realized what he had done. Then I threw one, hitting him square on the chin, and his knees buckled. We mixed it up and finally the director said to cut and to print it.

  “My God, Joey,” I said, “did I hurt you?”

  He said, “I saw my whole family. I saw my whole family. I saw my Uncle Ben, my Aunt Minnie, I saw my Cousin Davey. I saw them all.”

  From that point we got along fine. That night I went to see my mother in the hospital where she was confined with multiple strokes, which left her bereft of speech. But she could certainly see, and as I walked into her room, she looked up and said, “Ooooohhh!” I asked her what was the matter, and she indicated my cut eye and lip. I said it was nothing and that the boy hit me accidentally. But Mom made a sound indicating she thought he meant to hurt me; then I explained the whole thing, telling her how the fighter saw his whole family after my blow. Then she thought it was funny, as indeed it was.

  I worked like a dog on City for Conquest. There were some excellent passages in Kandel’s novel, passages with genuinely poetic flavor, and all of us doing the picture realized that retaining them (as we were doing) would give City for Conquest distinction. Then I saw the final cut of the picture, and this was quite a surprise. The studio had edited out the best scenes in the picture, excellent stuff, leaving only the novel’s skeleton. What remained was a trite melodrama. When I realized what they had done, I said to hell with it, and that cured me of seeing my pictures thenceforth. I even wrote a letter of apology to the author. Yet City for Conquest did well at the box office, which ought to prove something or other.

  Also successful at the box office but sticking much more closely to the original author’s intention was Strawberry Blonde, taken from James Hagan’s Broadway play One Sunday Afternoon. It was turn-of-the-century nostalgia, very tastefully done, and we were shooting it under its Broadway title. But my mother came to visit me while we were shooting. It was part of our family legend that when she was about sixteen she went to a dance with a fella named Eddie Casey. That happened to be the very night the song “Casey Would Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde” was first introduced. Because Mom was a strawberry blonde, she and Casey were inevitably the feature of the evening. So, as a tribute to my mother, we renamed the picture.

  The day we shot the scene where I waltzed with my strawberry blonde, Rita Hayworth, my mother came. There it all was—1890, just as she remembered it: waiters with handlebar mustaches and colored vests, and the foaming beer steins. There were even pretzels on the table. She made only one comment, and an authoritative one, too. “Jim,” she said, “pretzels didn’t come in until later!”

  Even with a script as good as that, one is always looking for the little touches to add. My character, Biff Grimes, a dentist unjustly sent to prison, has to work on the warden’s teeth. I had the property man hang up a striped coat in the hall outside the warden’s office. As I appear in the shot I am all in stripes, too, and I bustle into the hall, remove my striped coat, hang it up, and don the striped coat already hanging there. It is, of course, an exact duplicate of the coat I’ve just taken off. Don’t you know I had a letter some time later from a sailor aboard a battleship in Alaskan waters saying that this very funny bit absolutely made his day. His letter certainly made my day.

  My mother’s presence in California reunited our entire family at least temporarily. Brother Bill, of course, had been in California since 1931, and by 1941 he was an associate producer at Warner Brothers. Ed came out with Mom in 1938, and not long after retired from medicine. He was later to be very valuable as a script adviser when brother Bill and I founded our own little motion picture company. Harry came out to join us all in 1941, continuing with his medical practice.

  There were always family get-togethers, of course, and parties with close friends, but the big Hollywood bash where one wanders around large groups of people making the talk has always seemed to me a complete waste of good living time. This is not to say my Bi
ll and I haven’t gone to the large parties and occasionally enjoyed ourselves, but for the most part we chose not to. In fact, on occasion my wife and I have given so-called big parties, but we always had people in who were real fun, like George Burns and Gracie, Dick Powell and June, and of course the Frank McHughs, the Hacketts, the Pat O’Briens.

  At one particularly memorable party we had the people I’ve just named and several others—Bob Montgomery and Betty, George Murphy and Julie, and Esther Williams with her then husband, Ben Gage, who had a good baritone voice. After dinner with all the fixings, I went into the big living room and I said to the piano player, “When I kick the rug over to the piano, you segue directly into ‘Swanee River,’ and by the time I get to the piano, George Burns will be right behind me.” And as I did that, getting to the piano and kicking the rug, I turned and there was George Burns. We went right into a soft-shoe break, George did a step, then I did a step, and that was the start of the evening’s fun.

  Dick Powell had a wonderful way of singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” off-key. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. In order to sing off-key deliberately, one must have excellent pitch, and Dick used to kill me with this crazy thing. Wherever we were, if there was a piano available, I’d always ask Dick to do “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” It never failed.

  That night Ben Gage sang, Frank McHugh told his stories as only he can tell them, O’Brien was on, and Andy Devine did his bit. Everybody there did something, making it one of the most pleasurable evenings I’ve ever experienced. One of the guests, a lovely gal, said, “This thing has to be repeated,” so she invited everybody at the party to come to her house a week or two later. “I’ll send you each a note,” she said, which she did. In the note she added, “Black tie.” Well, the same cast appeared—everybody ready, willing, and able, but whatever the psychology of it was, the black tie killed the whole fun of the evening. Nobody got on, nobody made a move. A real shame. Those things are hard to repeat.