Cagney by Cagney Read online

  In the early 1940s my Bill and I received additional impetus to remain basically home folk. Our children—Jim, Jr., and Cathleen (“Casey,” we call her)—came along, and what we did before we adopted them I just don’t know. When Jim came along in 1941 we were really overwhelmed by the experience, and the fact that he was a perfectly beautiful little guy didn’t hurt any either. Shortly after Jim came Casey, also beautiful, equally important to us right from the beginning. I recall the wonderful, wonderful feeling of having them both sit on my lap as I told them stories. I told all the great traditionals, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Bears and Goldilocks, but I made a great mélange of them. To this day Jim and Casey talk about those stories. For example, I dreamed up an account of the three and a half bears. In this version the three bears had a cousin who came to visit them, but he was a half bear only because he had length and width, no thickness. In fact when this bear cousin turned sideways, you couldn’t see him. Now, this little cousin bear was walking through the woods one day when he saw Goldilocks being followed by the big, bad wolf. The wolf obviously being up to no good, the little bear challenged him. The wolf went on the attack, but the smart little bear outfoxed him—to mix animal images a bit—by turning sideways. Naturally the wolf couldn’t see his prey and he was very upset. And so on. This was a typical incident in those fairy tales I told my kids and they, I’m glad to say, are now telling the same stories to their kids.

  One day when our kids were young my Bill heard Casey talking to little Patty, the daughter of the Kuniyukis, the Japanese couple we had asked to help us out in household chores during the war. Little Casey and Patty were discussing something about sex they’d obviously picked up piecemeal at school. So my Bill gently got Casey to one side and explained that what the girls were saying was untrue. She told Casey that any questions she had on the subject would be answered frankly and clearly. Casey asked my wife if she would tell her anything; my Bill said yes, anything. “All right, Mom,” Casey said, “how do you make cardboard?”

  One day I was walking down to the barn with young Jim, and in a perfectly clear and beautiful soprano he began singing the “Marseillaise,” in French. He didn’t realize I was paying any attention. Later, I started to sing “Allons—” and I stopped to ask him the next word. He didn’t know what I meant. I explained that I had just heard him sing the song in French. He said he didn’t have any idea, and he didn’t. Never sang it again, couldn’t get him to sing it. Now figure that one out if you can.

  When Casey was little, we didn’t even know she’d taken the trouble to learn The Lord’s Prayer. But my Bill heard her one night as she knelt beside her bed, “Our Father, who art in heaven. Hollywood be thy name.…”

  Another vital part of my family was making her presence felt in the world. Allow me to do a little justifiable bragging about my sister Jeanne, a very bright gal who decided she was going to be an actress after she graduated from Hunter College at nineteen. When I went to her graduation exercises, she announced her plans to me, speculating that I might be surprised to hear them. Indeed I was, because Jeannie was an expert linguist, speaking a fine French and German. On top of this, she had a very well-rounded personality. I had an idea she might become a teacher.

  “Darling,” I told her as she stood there in her cap and gown, “you are a lot smarter than I’ll ever be, and I’m not the one to have any opinions about what you should do with your life. And if acting is what you want to do, you go ahead and you just do it. Though there’s one thing you have to do, my pet. You have to get into a gymnasium.”

  Jeannie had been the total student type, had never put one foot in front of the other athletically, and I knew that among other things, development of stamina was essential for her future in what is physically a very demanding business. She agreed, and I said, “Get into a gymnasium, or better still, get to work with Johnny Boyle and have him teach you to dance for a solid six months. If you do that, moving from one place to another will never be a problem for you.” She said fine. That was June, and she started the dancing regimen in California with Johnny at once. I was in the East until November, and on my return what I saw absolutely stunned me. Jeannie was doing wings, cramp rolls, all kinds of buck dancing—really intricate steps, with full assurance and control. By the time Yankee Doodle Dandy came along, there was no doubt she could play that lovely dancing lady, Josie Cohan, beautifully. It was, if I may say so, type casting.

  We Cagneys have a deeply engrained sense of privacy. I wasn’t particularly aware of it at the time, but we would never intrude upon each other. Each family member would do what he or she had to do without bothering the other. Jeannie, of course, chose her own row to hoe when she decided to go into show business. An interesting thing to me was that after she got working in the theatre she would be doing jobs here and jobs there and I never knew about them. As I was on the West Coast and she was on the East Coast, I found out only later that she had done many plays and many TV shows that I had never known anything about. I think the basic thing in her thinking was that she didn’t want to trade on her brother’s name and get him involved in her career. She never wanted to become a burden, and she certainly never has been.

  In 1941, I did The Bride Came C.O.D. with Bette Davis. I have never seen that one so I have no firsthand information as to how it came out. But I have no reason to doubt Bette’s word when her autobiography said, “… Jimmy, with whom I’d always wanted to work in something fine, spent most of his time in the picture removing cactus quills from my behind. This was supposedly hilarious. We romped about the desert and I kept falling into cactus. We both reached bottom with this one.”

  I think probably the only funny line in the picture came when hefty Gene Pallette ran across the desert in search of his daughter, followed by sheriffs and a group of frantic people. After huffing and puffing along, Gene suddenly stops dead still in the midst of all this fuss and furor and says, “What am I running for? I’ve got four million dollars.”

  Certainly of more moment was the next one, Captains of the Clouds, my first adventure in Technicolor. It was a pretty detailed look at Canada’s role in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Shot on location with the Royal Canadian Air Force, this was quite a piece of work at times, and I mean work.

  One day we had just finished a scene—Alan Hale, Dennis Morgan, and I—in which we had to bring in a plane, jump out of the cockpit onto the tarmac, then sprint fifty or sixty feet to get out of camera range. And this we did all day. The first take, the plane wasn’t where it should have been; the second take, we were where we shouldn’t have been, and so on down the line. Nothing right, just one miss after another. We wore out three sets of cadets, and all they had to do was walk between us and the camera as the plane taxied in. When we left the set at day’s end, the three of us were bone tired.

  We went to the hotel, showered, and sat around in the room talking and trying to relax. There was a knock, and I opened the door to find a young man who asked if Alan was there. Thinking he knew Alan, I invited him in, and Alan and Denny assumed that the fella knew me. As it turned out, nobody knew who the hell he was. But he made himself at home immediately, grinning from ear to ear, at his ease. Finally this genial character turned to Denny and me and said, “Now tell me. Is there any work to it at all, or is it all play?”

  Here we were, hardly a leg under us from this day of jumping in and out of planes onto the tarmac, weary all the way through—and we get a query like this. I looked at the fellas, they looked at me. Then Alan Hale, who was a big, pleasant, wonderful guy, looked at the stranger, and said to him, “Get out of here, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!,” and threw him out.

  The one consolation for all the hard work we did was the kind of person you worked with. Alan Hale, that wonderful guy we all loved. Always in a good humor. Dennis Morgan, also a nice, nice guy. George Brent and I pulled a pleasant gag on Dennis once. This was at the time when Denny had just joined Warner’s, and George, who wasn’t in our picture, had com
e to visit me on the set. Denny, of course, is a big, good-looking Scandinavian (his real name is Stanley Morner), and on this occasion he was standing before the camera for a lighting session; all lights were on, and he was unable to see us standing beyond the camera. So George and I started this rib by speaking very seriously, letting our voices carry in to Denny. “Good-looking guy, isn’t he?” George said.

  “One of the best around here,” I answered. “And you know something else?”

  “What?”

  “He sings, too!” I said, “and now can you imagine a guy with his physical equipment and also a singer? Can you think of what he’ll do to these gals around here?”

  “My God,” George said, “what now? How do we cope with this?”

  Denny couldn’t take it any longer, so he peered out from behind the camera, just barely able to make us out. Then he saw me grinning and he said, “Oh, you bastards!” So we had a good laugh and I brought George over to meet him. Wonderful people.

  As the years wear on, I look back at those people and think about them. When they were around, I really enjoyed them, but now I realize that I could have enjoyed them more. But the picture business has always been such a hysterical one and the demands on attention so great that one didn’t have time to really savor everything to the fullest—particularly your friends. That is one of my regrets.

  6

  Psychologically I needed no preparation for Yankee Doodle Dandy, or professionally either. I didn’t have to pretend to be a song-and-dance man. I was one.

  In just about every interview, in most conversations, one question emerges unfailingly: what is my favorite picture? Many people assume that one of those knock-down-drag-’em-outs would be my choice. A discerning critic like Peter Bogdanovich can’t understand why I choose Yankee Doodle Dandy over White Heat and The Public Enemy. The answer is simple, and it derives from George M. Cohan’s comment about himself: once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and-dance man. In that brief statement, you have my life story; those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.

  Yankee Doodle Dandy began, of course, with Cohan’s interest in seeing his life story filmed. He was aware that this was a valuable property, and he wanted it done with style and taste. As I got the story, he went first to Samuel Goldwyn, then committed to a picture with Freddie Astaire. Goldwyn submitted the idea to Freddie, who didn’t think it was for him. Cohan took it to Paramount, but after listening to their offer, he turned it down.

  At the same time that arrangements were being made for Cohan to sell his life story, my brother Bill was hard at it looking for a story with genuine American flavor. This was uppermost in his mind when he came upon the Cohan possibility. Bill then put everything behind getting the story done with thoroughness and depth. Bill wanted to do the Cohan story as a 100 per cent American experience principally to remove the taint that apparently still attached itself to my reputation—a reputation now scarred by my so-called radical activities in the thirties when I was a strong Roosevelt liberal. Anyone of that background was usually colored pinko in hue at the very least. Bill chose Yankee Doodle Dandy with deliberation.

  Meanwhile, my friend Ed McNamara had been in a show with Cohan. Cohan sounded him out about me, and Mac was able to point out that I had been a song-and-dance man for years in vaudeville. On learning this, Cohan’s people took the idea to Warner Brothers with the proviso that I do it, all of this taking place without my knowledge. Then the Warner’s script for the picture—written by a man named Buckner and approved by studio head Hal Wallis—was sent to me at the Vineyard for approval. I read it with incredulity. There wasn’t a single laugh in it, not the suggestion of a snicker. And this was a script purporting to be about a great American light entertainer, a professional humorist, a man who wrote forty-four Broadway shows, only two of which were not comedies. I said to brother Bill, “It’s no good, I won’t touch it. But I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give it a blanket O.K. now if you put the Epstein boys on it to liven it up and inject humor.”

  Julius and Phil Epstein were two very bright lads. They had invigorated the scripts of Strawberry Blonde and The Bride Came C.O.D., and I knew and liked them both. The minute Phil and Julie went to work, I made the deal to do Yankee Doodle Dandy. When I got to California to prepare for shooting, I wanted to be as close to Cohan as I could, so I had Warner’s hire Johnny Boyle. Johnny had been featured on Broadway in The Cohan Revue of 1916, had actually staged dances for Cohan, and knew Cohan’s personal dancing style firsthand. From Johnny I learned Cohan’s stiff-legged technique and his run up the side of the proscenium arch. Johnny and I had a great time rehearsing together, but it was hard, hard work—so hard that Johnny hurt one foot badly enough to be virtually incapacitated for dancing the rest of his life.

  Despite that, we got the rehearsal job done—almost. In the dancing business, you must have the steps so set in memory that you don’t have to think about them. You must go over them unendingly until they become completely automatic. The very first number in Yankee Doodle Dandy for me was “I Was Born in Virginia.” I got a few rehearsal licks in with Walter Huston, sister Jeannie, and Rosemary de Camp—the other three Cohans—but I went on to the shooting stage not knowing entirely what I was going to do. It got by, but I didn’t feel right about it. Then we came to the “Yankee Doodle Dandy” number from Little Johnny Jones. Again not enough rehearsal and again apparently nobody noticed it, but I did. There was a rigidity in certain areas of the number because I wasn’t always sure of what the next step was going to be.

  As time wore on, we got the so-called dramatic scenes behind us, and the comedy scenes. It all added up finally to some good work, and I was reasonably happy with it. But by the time we scheduled the “Off the Record” number from I’d Rather Be Right, I was so dog-tired that at one step in the routine which I knew well—one of my old steps I’d been doing for years—I went blank. I just couldn’t think of the step. I said we’d do it again, we went, and I blanked again. Finally I told Mike Curtiz, the director, that I was so damned tired that I couldn’t think of my own step, and that we’d better call it a day. He explained that we would have to finish the shot that day. I asked him how long he wanted to be on the set. “Mike,” I said, “I can’t think of the next step when I get there. I’m tired.”

  Mike called the front office, and Jack Warner swore I was holding up the scene because I wanted the extras to get another day’s work. This was as far from the truth as it was possible to reach. Had I been able to get through the day with that number behind me, I would have been exhilarated. But I daresay Jack Warner thought I was just being difficult. I wasn’t, but my poor brain was.

  In the non-musical parts of the picture, with the Epstein boys at work, the dialogue was nice, easy stuff. Moreover, I had the pleasure of working with that superlative actor, Walter Huston. I knew we were working well together when after we finished Walter’s death scene in which I collapse weeping in his arms, I turned to hard-boiled Mike Curtiz and saw tears streaming down his cheeks. “Cheeses Chrisdt, Jimmy,” he said, “beautiful, beautiful.” That may have been the ultimate compliment.

  Naturally, brother Bill and I were concerned about what George M. himself would think of the picture. During the making of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Cohan was confined to his Fifth Avenue apartment bearing up bravely under the cancer that was to kill him later that year, 1942. He had a representative out in California, however. This was Ed Raftrey, 300 pounds of amiable Irishman who was nevertheless under strict orders to pounce on anything he knew Cohan wouldn’t like. Inevitably in a story that is, as we made quite clear in a prefatory title, only based on a person’s life, certain liberties with the facts had to be taken. Brother Bill in showing the final cut to Ed Raftrey was very apprehensive. Bulky Ed sat at one end of a long lounge for the viewing, and my 220-pound brother sat at the other. During the showing, nothing came from Raftrey. Not a sound, not a move. Then as the story came to a close, the lounge started to shake
violently. Big Ed was sobbing, thereby relieving brother Bill vastly. Fortunately before George M. died, he was able to see Yankee Doodle Dandy, and he gave it his blessing. I like to think that this only contact we had was professionally appropriate: one song-and-dance man saluting another, the greatest of our calling.

  So Yankee Doodle Dandy turned out to be something I could take real pride in. Its story abounds in all the elements necessary for a good piece of entertainment. It has solid laughs, deep warmth, great music. And how much more meaningful are those patriotic songs today in view of all our current national troubles! Yankee Doodle Dandy has lots of reasons to be my favorite picture. When I got the Academy Award that year, I was able to say my few acceptance words with some feeling: “I’ve always maintained that in this business you are only as good as the other fellow thinks you are. It’s nice to know that you people thought I did a good job. And don’t forget that it was a good part, too. Thank you very much.” Praise from your peers generates a special kind of warmth.

  And my peers were very much on my mind in 1942. In September of that year, I had become president of the Screen Actors Guild, and we all had a deep professional worry to attend to. Gangsters were muscling into pictures, and they decided that the Screen Actors Guild offered lucrative opportunity for exploitation. Whereupon the Chicago Mob sent out to California one George Brown, head of the projectionists’ union. Mr. Brown was rather colorful; he always had a mouthful of chewing tobacco, with brown spittle running down the side of his mouth, all that in great contrast to a spotlight-sized diamond ring he always wore. He brought a couple of hoods with him, and together they tried to take over all the labor unions in Hollywood.