Cagney by Cagney Read online

  Fortunately, the government stepped in, and they found that Brown and a man named Bioff had shaken the motion picture producers down for about a hundred thousand dollars. The Screen Actors Guild pressed the case against these extortionists, and Brown and Bioff were convicted. They went to prison, and so did Joe Schenck, who did a year at Danbury. It was not an easy time, and there were moments when things were a bit tender. My Bill got a phone call one night, and a man assured her I’d just been killed in an auto accident. She didn’t panic but called the Guild office where I was at a meeting. There were other planned surprises. The Mob had arranged for a several-hundred-pound klieg light to be dropped on me while on the set, but George Raft heard about it, told the Mob that I was a friend of his, and the project was canceled.

  Another group occupying my attention in 1942 was the Actors’ Committee of the National Victory Committee. As chairman of that unit I can attest we did a lot of night work. I remember Porter Hall saying that our epitaph should read, “Committeed to death.” But it was little enough we were doing for the war effort, and as was only fitting, a number of us were called together to go out on the road to plug the sale of war bonds. This was the Victory Caravan, which went cross-country for three weeks. We had quite a group. There were Cary Grant, Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Laurel and Hardy, Bert Lahr, Groucho Marx, Charles Boyer, and others, plus the most beautiful assembly of gals anybody ever cast an eye upon. Among them were Claudette Colbert, Joan Bennett, Joan Blondell, Arlene Whelan, Olivia de Havilland—such beauties. Bob Hope was our emcee until Chicago, where Bing Crosby took over.

  I had never worked with Bing before, and here was a great opportunity to see at first-hand the way this great performer did it. Bing had always been a remarkable fella to me, and I had always thought that everything he did was so relaxed and effortless. Not so. At our opening show at Soldier Field, Chicago, there was a crowd of 130,000, with 30,000 of them behind the platform we were working. Bob Hope was doing his stuff and he said, “Well, I know you’re waiting to hear the Groaner—,” and the place went crazy. Bing walked out to a reception for which the adjective “triumphant” is inadequate.

  20. The original Four Cohans: Jerry, Nellie, Josie, and George.

  21. Their able impersonators in Yankee Doodle Dandy: Walter Huston, Rosemary De Camp, Jeanne Cagney, and James Cagney.

  22. Man of a Thousand Faces (1937) shows the most gentle one.

  23. As the plant-happy captain. Mister Roberts, 1955.

  24. With producer and pal, Bob Montgomery, and two marines. The Gallant Hours, 1960.

  25. As Admiral “Bull” Halsey. The Gallant Hours.

  He stood there in that very humble, charming way of his, wearing a brass-buttoned blue coat, rust trousers, brown-and-white shoes, and a light green shirt that seemed to verify the legend that he’s color blind. After the audience explosion died down, Bing said, “Whadda yez wanna hear?” and they exploded again until the stadium walls nearly buckled. After they subsided, he said, “Ya wanna leave it to me?” and they blew up again. Finally, he said, “Hit me, Al,” and our orchestra conductor, Al Newman, started his boys off on “Blues in the Night.” They had played only the first two bars when the audience went into rapturous applause once more. Bing finished that song, and never in my life have I heard anything like it. I got the traditional goose pimples just standing there, listening. He did another, same thing.

  And if ever I wanted a demonstration of how it felt to live through that old vaudeville phrase, “What an act to follow!,” this was it. I was next on the bill, waiting in the wings to do my little stint, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Fortunately I had some good natural support in the form of my Civil War soldier’s uniform, eight cute girls, plus eight American flags blowing in the wind. I danced my brains out, the girls waved the flags energetically, and the entire cast came out and joined in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and this was, I can tell you, an experience.

  But I’ve almost forgotten the point of this story, which is that when Bing came offstage, the perspiration on him was an absolute revelation to me. Here he had been to all appearances perfectly loose and relaxed, but not at all. He was giving everything he had in every note he sang, and the apparent effortlessness was a part of his very hard work. I can remember the first time I had any fixed opinions about Bing. Up at the Vineyard in 1938 I heard one of his radio shows, and I knew at once that this was a most extraordinary fella. I actually started to write a piece about him, “The Miracle Known as Crosby,” but after a page or two, I stopped. I realized he was just beginning, and would add up to even more than he was. So I dropped it, thinking perhaps I’d save up my thoughts for the proper time. If this is the time, I’m glad at least to report my feelings about a man I always watch when he’s available to public view.

  There was much fun on the Victory Caravan, but typically I went to bed at an appropriate hour. Our two stay-ups were Pat O’Brien and Al Newman. They’d be up all hours of the night, talking and drinking, drinking and talking. After about three days of this, Pat, who always manages to look fresh, went into the barber shop early one day to have his usual shave. “Where’s Newman?” the barber said. “Oh,” said Pat, “I drank him at four o’clock this morning.”

  After Yankee Doodle Dandy, it became time to reassess my relationship with Warner Brothers. In the usual pattern of things, I’d leave them when the salary got inadequate, a truce would be suggested, and I’d go back at a salary increase, always with their explicit promise that if my box-office value went up, they would give me a new contract. Year after year it became a predictable bore; there was just no desire on their part to keep the promise. Each time I’d say to them, “Well, how about it, boys? Isn’t it that time again?,” and the inevitable reply was, “Business is very bad. We can’t afford to make that kind of commitment now.” Finally we made a contract where I had the option, and in this new deal I was supposed to be getting a percentage of the gate. I found they were doing some pretty fancy things with the books, so that marked the end of that. I walked out again, and brother Bill and I formed a little company to make our own pictures.

  The major studios had a curious and very elemental point of view about their actors: anybody they paid a dollar to belonged to them, but body and soul. Quite simply, the studio owned you. It said so right in the contract if you looked at the fine print long enough. The loopholes were damned few and pinhole small.

  So the Cagneys went on their own. Our first picture was Johnny Come Lately, a charming period piece about an itinerant newspaperman in the nineties. Grace George, the gracious star of many Broadway productions and the wife of the great Broadway showman William A. Brady, was in the cast. But I think our biggest accomplishment in Johnny Come Lately was to establish as one of the hallmarks of Cagney Productions the liberal use of good supporting actors. As Time magazine said about this, “Bit players who have tried creditably for years to walk in shoes that pinched them show themselves in this picture as the very competent actors they always were. There has seldom been as good a cinematic gallery of U.S. small-town types.”

  Any number of times in pictures like Johnny Come Lately, I’ve seen actors in secondary roles do their work so damned well that I’ve walked over, put my arm around him or her, and said, “You were great, goddamn it, you were great!” And they were great, very often better than the actors they were supporting.

  In 1943, because Yankee Doodle Dandy was still around, I was asked if I would do a patriotic benefit at the Polo Grounds. I agreed, and that afternoon was a thrill for me quite beyond anything before or since, because I had the opportunity to walk among the heroes of my youth. What words can I find to say how it was as I sat in the dugout talking to Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Roger Bresnahan? Roger Bresnahan, one of the greatest catchers in the game, was catching Christy Mathewson one glorious time when my dad took me to a Giants’ game. It was Roger Bresnahan who influenced me to become a catcher, with his superb style. And on this afternoon of the benefit, there I actually w
as shaking his hand and the hands of all those great stars who were playing an old-timers’ benefit game.

  It had to be called an all-star roster: Ruth, Johnson, Bresnahan, George Sisler, Eddie Collins, Heinie Zimmerman, Irish Meusel, Zack Wheat, and Red Jack Murray. Every one of them I had worshiped as a kid. Everybody in the stands that day was hoping, hoping, that the Babe would hit one out of the ball park, and don’t you know, he did. I wonder where in the hell one can find a thrill to equal that these days? It may be hard for young people to get such a kick now because I sense in America these years—and I’m saddened to say it—I sense a systematic attempt to tear down our heroes. Eddie Robinson just said in his posthumously published autobiography about Charles A. Lindbergh, “To hell with his politics. He is our last, great hero.” If ever our country needed heroes, it is in these melancholy days, and when I hear of tilings like the broadcast not long ago that said Thomas Jefferson slept with his slave girls, I am depressed. Maybe Jefferson did, maybe he didn’t; in any case, why drag that in? What does that have to do with the greatness of this man? I’ve seen announcement of a projected story on George Washington purporting to prove he was drunk when he instigated a massacre of some French troops. This robbing us of our heroes is the heritage of some fine so-called liberal thinking that tries to kill one of the finest things we possess—warrantable pride in our past and the things that made us. Worship of the past? Nonsense. We can’t escape our past. It’s always with us, and we need the best that’s in it.

  This tearing down of our heroes has extended itself these days even to our national humor. The rip-down, pull-down, kick-’em-all-around type of humor has taken on undue influence and strength, I believe. I’m not the kind to dwell unduly on the good old days, but one of the many good things about the old days was the integrity of American humor. Kid national life? Sure it did. But never with a bitter iconoclasm that destroys rather than builds up—never destructively, scorning the general scheme of living in America. Ripping people apart, no matter how cleverly done, brings no smile to my lips.

  During World War II, most of the entertainment world set about making personal appearances to sell bonds and entertain in camp or outpost those young men who had no chance to get to town. The air watches, particularly, were at their secluded posts for long days at a time. One Christmas night Ralph Bellamy, Frank McHugh, and I were having the holiday dinner at the Bellamys’. We got a telephone call that some kids on duty atop one of the Santa Monica mountains weren’t going to get time off on that important day. We didn’t even bother to finish dinner. We drove up to the lookout post, did the stale jokes, and I gave out a couple of songs. One began to realize that however little it was one had to offer in way of entertainment, how much it meant to those youngsters and how fully it was appreciated.

  The USO was sending people all over the world then, and when they called asking if I would go to England, I said, “Why not?” When we crossed the Atlantic in 1944 on a transport ship carrying over thirteen thousand men it was, of course, vital for us to wear life jackets everywhere on board. The Nazi submarines were a formidable menace at the time. Each morning we had a drill so we could get to the lifeboats efficiently in case of a torpedo. One of the ship’s officers, a man with a resounding Scotch burr, told us assembled one day, “Now, I want to tell you boys something. Listen carefully. There isn’t enough life-saving gear on board to take care of everybody, but we’ve done the best we can. Not everybody will survive a sub attack. But I just want to give you this word of counsel: you must all remain in your assigned positions, because if you decide to go to one side of the ship or the other, you could capsize the whole business. So please be aware of that, gentlemen. I thank you.”

  One day during the crossing, some hours after our regular morning boat drill, the alarm sounded. The real thing. When I reached my assigned place, I found a tall young stranger, obviously lost. He was ashen and so, I suspect, was I. He looked down at me and said, “Well, hello.” I returned the greeting, and he, certain that this was his last day of life, said, “Nice to have met you, Mr. Cagney. Today’s my birthday.” But he celebrated it without worry. We had a false alarm, although the wolf pack was all about us.

  The concentration of troops aboard was incredible. They were even sleeping on the decks. And some of those lads were massively seasick. One officer came to me and said his company’s top sergeant, a really great guy, was so afflicted with mal de mer that he wanted to die, and would I come down and say hello to him? I went down to D Deck, and here was this tall, bright, tough sergeant stretched out in agony, looking like a pile of old clothes.

  “Hello, fella,” I said.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Cagney,” he said painfully. “Glad to see you. I just want to say that I have never felt so bad in all my life. Never—in my entire life. I want to tell you something—and I mean it. When I get to England—if we get to England—if I get to England—Im going to marry me an English girl or a Scotch girl or whatever they’ve got over there. I don’t care. Because I am going to stay over there for good. I ain’t never gonna ride on this ocean no more.”

  All during our voyage one thought remained uppermost in my mind: would I see my kids again? Every morning I’d awaken in my bunk with the sensation of their arms around my neck. But we made it. The old Mauretania arrived at battered but unbeaten Liverpool in January 1944. There were sunken ships all around the harbor. As I got off the ship and walked across the dock, I looked up at the Mauretania and saw the thousands of boys up on the decks, waving. I thought of what one well-placed torpedo could have done to those fine young men. I went on tour at once, and I recall especially a paratrooper camp in Wales. I began the performance, part of which was to give a dancing lesson. I did a complete routine to show the fundamentals, and at the finish I was, of course, breathing hard. A little soldier yelled, “Hey, Jim, you’re gettin’ old.” I agreed, and then to give us all a little fun, I asked him to come up on stage with me. He was a typical, friendly little Brooklyn roughneck. I said, “Now, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to have the piano player begin, and I’ll start dancing. All you’ve got to do is hop from one foot to another eight times on each foot, in time with the music.”

  He agreed, and away we went. I was doing a simple time step, but what he failed to realize was that he was doing an exercise totally new to him. Before I got through the first chorus, he was ready to collapse, thus earning him a rousing chorus of razz-berries from his pals. After it was over, he stopped, gasping for air.

  “This is for you, Jim,” he said, handing me a piece of fused lead and copper.

  “Thanks very much. Where’d you get it?”

  “Where’d I get it? It hit me in the goddamned head!”

  The medics had removed this piece of shrapnel from his skull, and he was saving it. But he gave it to me, and I’ve kept it proudly at home all these years.

  Dancing, if done consistently and as part of a measured regimen, is a form of health insurance. One of the reasons I feel good now in my mid-seventies is that I have learned one must never surprise the heart. I estimate that exercise enough to get you out of breath twice a day helps you stay fit. Also for my exercise I have had fun with judo, principally under the tutelage of Ken Kuniyuki, who had been a top judo instructor in Los Angeles prior to Pearl Harbor. After that he was packed off with many other Japanese-Americans to the detainment center at Pocatello, Idaho. When he got out of there there were damned few jobs for Japanese, and my wife and I were delighted when Ken, his wife, and their little girl agreed to come into our household. In addition to his regular work, or perhaps as part of his regular work, Ken, a fifth-degree black belt in judo, taught me some essentials. I had a dojo built, which is a kind of ring with a heavy pad on it, and we would work out there. During one of those sessions Ken gave me a massive heave-ho, and I went over his head, landing on mine. I heard a loud crunch in my neck, and I lay there, stunned, as Ken asked me if I was all right. I asked him to try my neck, and thankfully it was all right.
I was lucky to have landed sideways; a few inches more the other way, and I would have been in permanent trouble. Judo was fun, but its permanent legacy to me was an undue physical buildup. It put an eighteen and a half neck on me, and from the waist up, I got heavier.

  Knowing judo was a professional need for our 1945 Cagney production, Blood on the Sun, in which I played an American reporter of the 1920s who uncovers the incipient plottings of the Japanese imperialists. My costar in Blood on the Sun was Sylvia Sidney, who played an Eurasian girl, and convincingly, too. One day Sylvia was making a costume test before the camera, and I watched her as she turned around, and then around again, looking as elegant as any Shinto princess and twice as lovely. Now, Sylvia is Jewish, and I with my affection for Yiddish can’t resist the opportunity to use it when I can. This was a very piquant occasion because she looked to be a thousand leagues away from her actual ancestry. To tease her, from behind the camera I said, “Zee gigt aus vi a Chinkeh!” (She looks like a Chinese lady!). Imperturbably, and without stopping her pirouette before the camera, she said, “Fa vus nit?” (Why not?). It is some accomplishment to be talented, beautiful, and funny.

  I think my mother merited those adjectives. Her talent was for living bountifully in poverty or in plenty, her beauty was of both the external and internal variety, and her sense of humor was indestructible. When my expanding fortunes allowed me to buy the Martha’s Vineyard farm, I hastened to share my deep love of the country with Mom. Not long after my purchase, there appeared on the market a nearby summer home, very spacious, just right for a large family with a gracious big porch all around it, and with a view of the water you couldn’t match anywhere. I bought it with the specific purpose of letting it be the summer place for Mom, Harry and Ed with their kids, for Jeannie—for everybody. My mother came up, and for all I knew was enjoying herself fully. But one morning she said, “Son, let’s have a talk.”