Cagney by Cagney Read online

  “What is it, Mom?”

  “I know you want the best for all of us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you got this place because you love it, and it is beautiful. It’s everything you’d want in a country place. But, son, my idea of the place to be is on the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway, in a big plate-glass window, sitting in a rocking chair, watching it all go by.”

  She had spent about ten days in the country, and that for her was a little more than enough. She went back to the city and never came back to the country again. I had assumed that because I loved the country with vehemence that she would share my passion. So, again, she was teaching me one of life’s fundamentals: deep enthusiasms are never automatically transferable.

  When she came out to live in California it was in a Hollywood apartment near the city’s heart. We had her to enjoy for only a comparatively brief time because in 1945 a number of strokes came in tandem, and with two doctor sons in attendance, we learned quickly that all symptoms were discouraging and irreversible. Ed was living in her apartment, taking care of her, and Harry lived just a few blocks away. I got a call from Ed, and I went down. “We’d better get Jeannie and have her come home,” he said. Jeannie was then in a New York show, but she came quickly.

  The greatest piece of pantomime I have ever seen in my life was not performed on any stage or in any film. It was done by my mother on her deathbed. Because the strokes had deprived her of speech, she had only her eyes and one fully functioning hand to use. The four boys were in the room when Jeannie arrived. She came in and embraced Mom. Then we all got around and hugged Mom warmly, and she made a vocal sound that was unintelligible but spoke volumes of love for us.

  It happened that two brothers were on each side of Jeannie. Mom then raised her functioning arm, the right. She indicated Harry with the index finger of her useless hand, she indicated me with her second finger, she indicated Eddie with her third finger, and with her fourth finger indicated Bill. Then she took the thumb, moved it to the middle of her palm, and clasped the thumb tightly under the other four fingers. Then she patted this fist with her good hand and made a single wordless sound. We understood at once that Jeannie was the thumb and we four boys were to take care of our girl. It was a movement totally simple, totally eloquent, totally beautiful.

  Mom died about two months later. She was sixty-seven—and there was hardly a day of those years that had not been spent in giving.

  7

  So much blarney has been written about Hollywood’s Irish Mafia that a few words on the subject would seem salutary. There was a period in the early 1940s when Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Ralph Bellamy, Spencer Tracy, Lynne Overman, Frank Morgan, and I would get together once a week, have dinner, and make the talk. That’s all there was to it. Simply go into the week’s happenings, and if there was a story to be told, or jokes to be let loose, that was the place and that was the time. Laughter and fun among some old friends, nothing more. But Hollywood being what it is—that flatulent cave of the winds, John Barrymore called it—all kinds of ridiculous connotations were put on our little get-togethers.

  Sidney Skolsky, always a man to make news where he could, first called us the Irish Mafia. That there was some Irish blood can’t be doubted, but Bellamy has not one drop of Irish blood, Frank Morgan was German, and Lynne Overman is also a Teutonic name. I am one-quarter Norwegian. But “Irish Mafia” had a titillating ring to it, and so it remained in public print until, inevitably, time rang in its changes. First Lynne died, then Frank Morgan. Bellamy left to do Broadway plays, and Frank McHugh also moved East. O’Brien and I were the only two mainstays remaining, and because he was on the road so much, we could only see each other occasionally.

  Of all that group of intriguing fellas, Spence Tracy might conceivably have been the most intriguing, possibly because he was the most disturbing. It is, I think, a truism that phlegmatic people don’t last in the acting business, and two excellent non-phlegmatics were Bette Davis and Spencer Tracy. Many years ago in answer to a question from Robert Garland of the New York World-Telegram as to who I considered the most outstanding of the up-and-coming people in Hollywood, I said Bette Davis and Spencer Tracy. Up to that time I had only seen Bette once, playing a secondary part in a 1932 picture, The Rich Are Always with Us, and Spence I only knew from a second-rate thing called The Murder Man. They were both so remarkably alive that when they walked into a picture they carried it all with them. They were both incipient thyroid cases. Early in life Spence did have a serious thyroid problem, and anyone with thyroid trouble is in trouble. Spence’s problem was a slightly unsettled personality. He was a most amusing guy, a good companion who told great stories beautifully—but there was always the tension that was tangible. You can feel the stress in such people.

  I told Robert Garland that without any doubt the American public was going to hear from Spence. Not only did the public hear from him for years after, but once we became friends, I sure as hell did. My phone rang more than once at three or four in the morning, and that unmistakable voice would start talking without any preamble whatever. Never a “Hello” or a “Hi!” or even a “Good morning.” Just—“What are you doing, Cagney?”

  “Sleeping. It’s three in the morning!” Spence would ignore me completely and go right on with whatever was on his mind. The horrible part of all this was that invariably what he said was so interesting that I’d snap wide awake, and stay awake.

  One time I was at the Vineyard, the phone rang, and again without a “Hello” or “How are you?” was that intriguing voice. “You’re going with me, aren’t you?”

  “Going where, Spence?”

  “The funeral.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “Frank Morgan’s funeral.”

  “Frank? Frank died in California. He was buried out there.”

  “No, no. I’m in New York. They’re going to have the funeral here. The body was shipped to New York. The whole family and all the friends are supposed to be there. You and I are expected.”

  I explained that I couldn’t make it, much as I wanted to. I was caught in an appointment with some hydraulic engineers from Boston who were coming to put a ram in up at the farm, and getting away was an impossibility.

  “Oh, don’t. Cagney, don’t do this to me.”

  “I just can’t get away. But keep me posted on what happens, will you?”

  He promised, and two days later the phone rang. And again without a preliminary, that voice. “Oh, oh, oh!” I asked him what the matter was.

  “Oh—you should have been there.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I went to the cemetery with Ralph [Frank Morgan’s brother]. I took one look at Ralph and I said to someone, ‘There’s no point in bringing him back. Just leave him.’ ”

  “Spence, don’t you know that Ralph is ten years older than Frank?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ralph is ten years older than Frank.”

  “No kidding. You mean that Ralph is sixty-nine years old?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, what the hell! Then he looks great!”

  In 1946, I played Joe, the champagne-tippling philosopher in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. Cagney Productions bought this beautiful Pulitzer-Prize play because of its great human warmth, and we gave it what James Agee described admiringly as “a loving production.” That would be right.

  When brother Bill and I first thought of buying the play for pictures, it was decided that a personal contact with the author was mandatory. It was my job, representing our little company, to tell Bill Saroyan what we planned to do. This was very simple. We were going to shoot the script as he wrote it. No nonsense of adaptation, which is frequently an ominous word used to cover up the alteration of something superior into a vehicle for a screen “personality.” We were concerned with the total personality of the charming play itself and no more.

  I met Bill Saroyan by appointment at The Player
s, but getting that appointment was almost like a Saroyan play and the sometimes bewildering simplicity that characterizes them. I called him at his home in Oyster Bay, and a girl answered.

  “Is Mr. Saroyan there?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Jim Cagney.”

  “Who?”

  “Jim Cagney.”

  “Just a minute.” Many minutes went by. The girl came back.

  “Who is this?”

  “Jim Cagney.”

  “What do you want to see him about?”

  “We bought a play of his, a thing called The Time of Your Life, and we’re going to do it. And I suppose I have a date with him to tell him what we propose to do with his play, and talk it over.”

  “Oh, just a minute.” The girl left, and another long wait intervened. The next voice I heard was a man’s.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Saroyan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You and I are supposed to have a get-together.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When do you want to do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you come in to The Players, and we’ll have dinner there and talk it over.”

  “Where’s this?”

  “The Players.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A club—on East Twentieth Street. Can you come in tomorrow?” And more of the same. I’m just stating the preliminary of the conversation. But come in he did, and Bill Saroyan is quite an interesting piece of work. At the time he had jet-black hair in high pompadour, a complexion white as bleached parchment, and strong, dark, protruding eyes. He came down to the bar, where I was waiting. I walked up and introduced myself. Like Spencer Tracy, he didn’t say hello, just stood there, listening. “Listen to that,” he said. I couldn’t hear anything but the typical sound of The Players’ bar: the billiard balls clicking, a radio faint in the background, the slapping of cards on the bridge table, the bartender shaking a cocktail. Bill was hearing these sounds, too, but they meant something to him. “It’s kind of a symphony, isn’t it?” he said. I said I thought you could call it that, and we sat down.

  He sat down, looking pleasantly wild-eyed. We did the small-talk thing, and then, sauntering over to our table came a fellow Player, Allan Reagan. Allan was known to take a drop or two. For years Allan and I had been swapping old obscure songs with each other, and this day he stood before our table, drew himself up to his full six foot two, pointed his finger at Saroyan, and sang very loudly and solemnly:

  If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy,

  Then go back to your home o’er the sea

  To the land from where you came

  Whatever be its name;

  But don’t be ungrateful to me—

  I said, to me—

  And if you don’t like the stars in Old Glory,

  And have no use for the Red, White, and Blue

  Then don’t act like the cur in the story,

  And bite the—“My Country ’tis of thee!”-

  And bite the hand that’s feeding you!

  It would seem almost impossible for Saroyan to get paler than he was, but he did. I said, “Mr. Saroyan, this is Allan Reagan.” Allan greeted Bill genially by first name and sat down for some more small talk. After Allan left, I asked Bill what disturbed him so much. “I thought he was accusing me of being un-American,” he said. It’s fascinating that Saroyan, a man who wrote so many good comedies, apparently confines his sense of humor to his writings.

  Cagney Productions lost half a million dollars on The Time of Your Life. The cameraman and the director had two weeks of rehearsal without turning a crank. They wanted to block it all out and plot exactly where they were going, shot for shot. This was laudable enough. Then when we finally got going, they decided they were going to do something else. Thus we lost two very expensive weeks of shooting time. The lack of decision on both their parts was, let me say, unhelpful.

  Notwithstanding the terrific money loss, the picture was beautifully done. We received a lovely letter of thanks from Bill Saroyan saying, among other things, that when he watched the film he forgot that he had written the play. “I was too busy enjoying it,” he said, “to care who wrote it.”

  We had fun making The Time of Your Life. My brother Ed, with wit ever ready, brightened one of my days during shooting by appearing when we were doing a scene in which champagne was served. We used real champagne—Mumm’s—and when shooting was done for the day, I asked Ed if he’d like a little glass. Ed was a teetotaler, but he agreed for conviviality’s sake, so I poured him a half glass. Next morning I asked him how he was.

  “Not so good, Jim.”

  “Why?”

  “Hangover.”

  I was incredulous. “You mean from that little bit of champagne?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Not just that champagne. I mean a hangover from mixing my drinks.”

  “God, what did you do—go home and start belting down other stuff?”

  “Oh, no,” Ed said. “Don’t you remember in 1939 when I came out on the Grace Line with Mom and we got off for a little visit in Havana? Just to celebrate, I had a half glass of beer.”

  In the cast of The Time of Your Life we were lucky to get that great ex-vaudevillian, James Barton, who played Kit Carson, the charming old pathological liar. Jim’s own career sounded as if it was fiction, but the engrossing thing about it was that it was true in every particular. He was the consummate performer. A great dancer, he could sing songs that would lift you out of your seat, and he could do a dramatic scene with the best. My brothers and I often tried to get Barton to put his fantastic life story between covers. He started on a showboat, and not the glamorous side-or sternwheeler, but an unpowered old schooner that sailed from town to town down the Chesapeake. The actors would warp the boat into a pier and then bring it around so that the stern sheets would be facing the dock. After taking chairs out of the hold and putting them on the dock, they’d do a come-on show to get the townspeople in, and follow up with the regular show in the stern sheets.

  When Jim was a boy in the nineties, black-face comedians were extremely popular, and he became one at the age of seven. He started to dance at that age, too, learning terribly intricate Irish jigs and reels, which I couldn’t begin to do even after he showed me. Jim did everything in show business, all the hokey-pokey shows, burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway musicals, then the legitimate theatre and films. He did it all.

  When the Actors Equity Association called the famous actors’ strike in 1919 that stopped all the shows on Broadway, there was a benefit performance for the Actors’ Fund. Some of the striking actors had contracts with various producers that specified that if they appeared on any stage they would be in violation of contract. What some of them like Ed Wynn did was to go to the benefit performance and, pointedly ignoring the stage, do their acts right in the aisles, thus technically honoring their contracts. Caruso, Al Jolson—all the great show business names were there, but it was the unknown Jim Barton who closed the show, and kept closing it that night. The audience wouldn’t let him go. Nobody knew this little burlesque comedian, but that night he topped the top ones, and in Variety’s phrase, had to beg off. After he and his encores were exhausted, he just looked at that audience he had won so solidly and said, “Thanks for the use of the hall!,” and exited. “Thanks for the use of the hall” is now a saying with some currency in show business. Jim and I talked about that line, and he told me where he got it.

  “There was a saloon in Chicago,” Jim said, “near where I was playing at State and Lake. I was in the saloon having a beer when a man came in. He was a derelict, a real bum, but his vocabulary and diction were impeccable, a flawless speaker. It was the old face-on-the-barroom-floor routine come to life. He began to quote Shakespeare, and everyone was so taken with him that they began to buy him drinks. They kept buying him drinks. Finally he had lapped up so much sauce he became objectionable and they had to throw hi
m out. Right on the street. The drunk picked himself up, staggered back through the swinging doors, and intoned in his sonorous voice to them all, ‘Thanks for the use of the hall!’ ” Jim appropriated the line and used it when and where applicable.

  After our pleasant encounter with Saroyan, I went back to Warner Brothers to do White Heat, and although ultimately it turned out to be a good picture in a number of ways, it was another cheapjack job. There was a limited shooting time, and the studio put everybody in it they could get for six bits. A case in point. There was one character in the script who looked as if he could lighten the proceedings—the fat boy, Tommy. Who else better to lighten proceedings and bring a much-needed spark than Frank McHugh? I asked for him, and Warner’s yessed me and yessed me until the first day of shooting, when they told me they just couldn’t get Frank. I found later Frank had never been asked.

  The original script of White Heat was very formula. The old knock-down-drag-’em-out again, without a touch of imagination or originality. The leading character, Cody Jarrett, was just another murderous thug. For some kind of variant, I said to the writers, “Let’s fashion this after Ma Barker and her boys, and make Cody a psychotic to account for his actions.” The writers did this, and it was a natural prelude to the great last scene in the picture where I commit suicide by pumping bullets into the blazing gas tank I’m standing on.

  But what an opportunity was missed with a number of things simply because time and money weren’t placed second to quality! Casting the role Frank McHugh should have played with a straight actor was typical of this. In one scene the character gets a letter from his sweetheart, but it was so thoroughly marked over by the prison censor that it couldn’t be read at all. As it now appears, that scene is dimensionless; with Frank doing it, it would have been rich. Nothing against the young fella who played the part. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my saying that his experience stacked up against Frank’s was strictly no contest. Here was an all-too-typical example of the studio trying to save a bit of money and thereby failing to achieve a potent bit of added flavor that would have helped the picture.