Cagney by Cagney Read online

  To get in the Ma Barker flavor with some pungency, I thought we would try something, take a little gamble. Cody Jarrett is psychotically tied to his mother’s apron strings, and I wondered if we dare have him sit in her lap once for comfort. I said to the director, Raoul Walsh, “Let’s see if we can get away with this.” He said, “Let’s try it.” We did it, and it worked.

  Not long ago a reporter asked me if I didn’t have to “psych” myself up for the scene in White Heat where I go berserk on learning of my mother’s death. My answer to the question is that you don’t psych yourself up for these things, you do them. I can imagine what some of the old-timers would have said in answer to that question. They would have laughed aloud at the idea of an actor pumping himself up with emotional motivations to do a scene. The pro is supposed to know what to do, then go ahead and do it. In this particular scene, I knew what deranged people sounded like because once as a youngster I had visited Ward’s Island where a pal’s uncle was in the hospital for the insane. My God, what an education that was! The shrieks, the screams of those people under restraint! I remembered those cries, saw that they fitted, and I called on my memory to do as required. No need to psych up.

  This psyching-up process, which I consider so wasteful and intrusive on the actor’s job, reminds me of the time I was working with a certain young actor, quite a competent young man it seemed to me. I said to him, “Let’s run the words,” so we went into my dressing room and did just that. A good rehearsal, and he was just fine. Next day after shooting the scene the director said we’d have to do it over. I asked why and got a vague reply, so we did it again, and this time I went to see the shot in the viewing room. There I realized what the difficulty was. This young man was breaking the first rule of acting: he was doing it for himself, not the audience. He was psyching himself up to be the character, instead of just understanding the character and playing it for the audience.

  This self-involved kind of acting reminds me of a story Ralph Bellamy tells. Ralph was on a TV set one day, shooting, and a young man in the scene was saying to the director, “What is my motive here? What am I thinking of?,” and all that junk. The director finally blew up and said, “Never mind what you’re thinking of, never mind what your motive is. Just do as I tell you. You’re holding up production.” Afterward, a little second cameraman said to Ralph, “These guys make me think of a man who is in a rather unique position. He’s standing on the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway in a pouring, drenching rain, on a cold, cold March morning at 3:00 a.m. And he’s peeing down his leg, feeling so warm and comfortable—and nobody else knows what’s going on!” Which, in my view, just about sums it up. These privately oriented actors, like the young man I did the scene with, aren’t telling the really important people—the audience—what is going on.

  I have a delightful footnote to the White Heat experience. At the time a marvelous review of the film by John McCarten appeared in The New Yorker. Mr. McCarten expressed regret that in years just prior to White Heat I used to terrify moviegoers, but unfortunately as time went by I seemed to have mellowed. He pointed out how wrong he thought that was, and congratulated me on returning to the ratfold. He went on: “Despite all the scatterbrained nonsense of the script, Mr. Cagney, representing a homicidal maniac whose favorite girl is his dear old two-gun mother, comes up with a performance so full of menace that I hereby recommend him for whatever Oscar is given an artist for rising above the asininity of his producers.… [The police] not only are bold, brave, strong and willing but use more paraphernalia in capturing enemies of society than were required for the invasion of Normandy.”

  I wrote Mr. McCarten an appreciative letter. Four or five years later, Bob Montgomery and I were being inducted into the Salmagundi Club as honorary members, and as we sat at our table a man came to us, stood there smiling, and said hello. It was Mr. McCarten, who announced that he had come over to ask me a favor. “Name it,” I said. He wanted an inscribed picture of me to be given a friend of his. I made a note of it and asked for the name to inscribe. “Kitty Paradise,” Mr. McCarten said. I asked him if he was kidding, but he assured me that this was the lady’s name. In due time I sent the picture to him for forwarding, and thought no more about it. But ten years later it was oddly comforting for me to read in Art News that Kitty Paradise had been made head of the kitchen department of the Salmagundi Club.

  8

  A couple of questions frequently asked are: 1. Do I ever watch my old films on television?, and 2. If I do, what ones do I best enjoy? The direct answer in both instances is, 1. Hardly ever, and 2. The ones with the music and dance. I can be puttering away with something upstairs, and if one of my oldies appears on the tube, my Bill never calls me down unless it’s one of the musicals, and even then I never come down to watch the so-called dramatic bits, only the dance routines.

  I can only repeat what I’ve repeated before: once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and-dance man. There is something special about it. You have to like dancing very much to do it because it is such hard work. The dance you’ve done you must have liked very much or you wouldn’t have done it. One also recalls all the hard work that went into a thing that turns out well. There are certain moments in my musicals that I find uniquely attractive. I think of the finale of Yankee Doodle Dandy doing the wings as I went down the White House staircase from the President’s office. That was a moment I particularly enjoyed and particularly like to view again. When we did The West Point Story in 1950, there was some pleasant dancing to be done. There was some critical hooting and hollering about the key plot line: the assignment of a Broadway musical director to actually live the life of a West Point cadet for some weeks. Such a thing just couldn’t happen, some critics said. Only it did. Both Westbrook Pegler and George M. Cohan did just that at various times. In any case, in The West Point Story beautiful Virginia Mayo and I did a number that I thought was some of the best dancing we ever did. It’s still a pleasure to look at because it showed some versatility and humor, things I prize highly and always strive for.

  This very effective number, “Brooklyn,” was staged by a little red-haired gal named Godfrey, who had been with Jack Cole. She put the entire involved sequence together in about ten days. I did my rehearsal dancing with her, and because she weighed about a hundred pounds, it was no effort at all. I tossed her around like a rag doll, doing all the things that were required with great ease. Then in came Virginia Mayo to take her place as my partner, and here was quite a difference. Very beautiful and talented Virginia is not exactly a wraith of a girl. It took a little adjustment but it worked out well, and Virginia in her usual fine style made that number something I always enjoy watching. In Chicago recently I had the solid pleasure of seeing Virginia again and sharing good reminiscences over lunch. She was starring there in No No Nanette!, as beautiful and talented as ever.

  After The West Point Story, I was in excellent condition, as I always am after having trained down to fighting trim and dancing weight. One morning just after wakening, however, I stretched, and apparently with some violence, because I pulled a spinal disk out of place. This was a disk that had been ruptured when I landed on my head in the judo session with Ken Kuniyuki. That displaced disk produced a paralysis in my left arm to such a degree that I couldn’t raise my hand above the waist. It was a very serious business, but I procrastinated by failing to go to the doctor for a few weeks. I finally got to New York to see Sid Gaynor, the orthopedic man for the New York Yankees, and he recommended an operation. However, my brothers Harry and Ed were dubious, and they told me that if I used some sense, the injury would repair itself. I took their advice and just took it easy. Now my arm is in excellent condition, and my hand is functioning properly. The only thing I do lack now is the dexterity that I used to have in playing Spanish guitar. I can no longer make the spread. But my hand does work, and I use it without any sign of disability.

  I went back to playing a tough one when Cagney Productions did Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye fro
m the novel of that name by Horace McCoy. We made this picture on a deal with Warner Brothers whereby they would give the banks (where we owed money for the loss involved in The Time of Your Life) the first five hundred thousand dollars the picture made. One of the attractions of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was that damned good actor, Luther Adler, who taught me an acting trick I have remembered. Luther’s really chilling moment in the picture came as he was sitting at a desk, just about to look up at me. Instead of lifting his face and looking at me at the same time, he lifted his face only, his eyes remaining hooded, looking down. Then, after his head was fully raised, he lifted his eyelids and stared slowly at me with infinite menace. Such a little thing but such a powerful thing. I had never seen an actor do that in my life, and I have been around a bit. Later I suggested that particular bit of business to Dana Wynter to use in the Irish picture we did, Shake Hands with the Devil. And when she whipped those big brown eyes from the ground at me it was a decided jolt.

  I had seen the exciting Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings play What Price Glory on Broadway in 1924. With Louis Wolheim and William Boyd both raunchy and tough as Sergeant Quirt and Captain Flagg, this was a pretty zesty piece of work. It had been remade into a pretty good picture in 1926 with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Despite all these favorable antecedents, What Price Glory had never struck me as being anything up my street until I heard it was going to be made as a musical. I warmed to that idea immediately and decided to take it on. Then when John Ford was brought in as the director, he vetoed the idea of a musical. “What’s wrong with the original?” he asked. That’s a question that can only be answered negatively, but I was recruited on the basis of its being a musical, and I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Still, I was committed at that point, and I did it, but not, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “for my ease.”

  John Ford had a slightly sadistic sense of humor. It’s hard to resist the impression he occasionally allowed things to occur in order to satisfy this inner enjoyment. One scene in What Price Glory required me to come out of a building, exhilarated by the thought of going on leave, jump into the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by my sergeant, and drive off. Before the scene, Ford, smoking that tiny pipe the Irish call a dudeen, came over and said, “Do you really want to ride with this guy?” I answered, “Why not?”

  This guy was the actor playing the sergeant, Bill Demarest. Bill had actually driven motorcycles in combat during World War I and knew these machines down to their tiniest nut and bolt. I assured John that I saw no harm in riding with Bill.

  “Why?” John asked, with drawn-out deliberation.

  “The script says so.”

  “Well,” he said, taking a draw on his pipe, “you don’t always do what the script calls for, do you?”

  “No, you know I don’t. But this one seems reasonable.”

  “Well, all right. But I wouldn’t.” And with that he turned and walked away, still sucking on the dudeen.

  When time came for the shot, I dived out of the building on cue into the sidecar, and Bill jumped aboard the motorcycle. Now, Bill was wearing hobnailed boots, and what neither of us realized at the time was that the rubber had worn off the motorcycle’s brake pedal. We began our ride down a steeply graded hill, and to the right just beyond the hill’s curve was a stone wall. To the left of the curve was what we call a parallel, a stand on which lights for the scene are hung. On this occasion, a little electrician stood in front of the parallel with an arc trained on us for the proper illumination. Bill and I roared down the hill about forty miles an hour, and as we came down toward the curve, Bill’s hobnailed boot slipped as he applied the brakes. Knowing that hitting the wall would be catastrophe, he turned left and we crashed into the parallel, hitting the electrician and breaking both his legs. The motorcycle’s handlebar whipped around catching Bill in the groin, knocking him silly. Luckily, I had managed to brace myself as I put both arms in front of my face. I was stunned, but Bill and the electrician had to be taken to the hospital. Once they had been taken care of, I limped up the hill to find John Ford standing there, quietly sucking on his dudeen. As I drew abreast of him, he looked meditatively at me and said, “What’d I tell ya?”

  Some time after What Price Glory, I did Run for Cover, a Western that seemed to promise something deeper in content than the average Western. This is a picture I did see because an old friend wanted to look at it and I went along for company. However, it didn’t move me in the viewing to anything very much but anger. We had tried to make as offbeat a Western as possible, but whoever cut the film was evidently revolted by anything but clichés. As a consequence, little things that the director, Nick Ray (a good man), and the actors put in to give the story extra dimension were excised very proficiently. The result was just another programmer.

  In 1954 John Ford called me and said, in effect, how about a nice vacation? He had Mister Roberts in the planning stages and wanted me to play the captain. There were several distinct attractions held out: just a few weeks’ work in Honolulu and, most pleasingly, the role of Doc was to be played by Spence Tracy. It all looked like fun. Spence, however, had no intention of playing Doc, I discovered later, but John was lucky enough to get Bill Powell for the part, a hell of a guy, a hell of an actor.

  Things worked out quite well. Bill Powell and I didn’t work very much, swimming and sunning on the beach, telling stories and relaxing in depth. Then we’d get the wigwag from the ship we were shooting on to pop over to work, so we’d go out there, holler, jump up and down, then back to the beach again. Most pleasant.

  I met a young fella on that picture, a nice young fella. I had actually seen him on television some time before, and I was much struck by him because he knew how to be funny without being brash, a thing rare among young comedians. One sees a great deal of brashness these days masquerading as comedy, but it’s a repulsive mask. When I saw this young man on television he went all through that hour show without missing a beat. An apple-pie performance. I missed the credits on the program, so I didn’t know who he was. I called the office of Cagney Productions and said, “Sign this young man if we can get him, whoever he is.” We weren’t able to, but three weeks later I saw him again on TV, this time playing a straight dramatic role, that of a drunken reporter. I called brother Bill and asked him to track the young fella down, but in the interim John Ford had seen the young man.

  The young man, Jack Lemmon, to my pleasant surprise had been cast in Mister Roberts. I had preceded the company to Honolulu, so when they all came in, I met the plane.

  I said to Jack at this, our first meeting, “Hello, son. How are you?”

  “How do you do, Mr. Cagney?”

  “Just how left-handed are you?”

  “What?” He was startled.

  “Just how left-handed are you?” I repeated.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  And he didn’t. I then explained that in the first television show I saw him do, an adaptation of the old play, The Man from Blankney’s, in which he played a soda jerk, everything he did—wiping the counter, sweeping up, moving objects—was done with his left hand. I refreshed his memory. “Oh,” he said, “I’m not left-handed at all.”

  “Not at all?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am so right-handed that I decided I was going to play everything left-handed and make it a mark of the performance. For the challenge of the thing.” To me this was proof that a mind worked in back of Jack Lemmon’s acting, and that he was determined to bring some distinction to any part he was playing.

  The shooting began, and Mister Roberts progressed in good order. Then I realized that upcoming was a scene with Jack, as Ensign Pulver, that I had found so funny in the reading that I realized it would be marvelously so in the playing. The difficulty was that it was so funny I had serious doubts about my ability to play it with a straight face. I talked it over with Jack. I said, “We’ve got some work ahead of us. You and I’ll have to get together and rehearse that scene again and again and agai
n until I don’t think it’s funny any more.” He agreed because he had the same feeling about the scene. So we got together and did it and did it and did it. But every time I came to the payoff line in the scene, “Fourteen months, sir,” I just couldn’t keep a straight face. Finally, with enough rehearsal we thought we had it licked. We came to filming time.

  The scene has Pulver down on deck where he suddenly sees me and scampers up the superstructure to get away. I see him and say, “Young man. Young man!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come here.” He does, and I look at him with great curiosity. “Are you one of my officers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pulver, sir.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m in charge of laundry and entertainment.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “How long have you been aboard?”

  “Fourteen months, sir.”

  Now—I submit that this is one hell of a funny little scene: the commanding officer of a naval vessel finally meeting an ensign who had been ducking him during their voyage for well over a year. I used to collapse every time Jack said “Fourteen months, sir,” but when we filmed it, I was able to hang on just barely. What you see in the film is the top of Mount Everest for us after our rigorous rehearsals. It still kills me every time I think about it. Mister Roberts is the kind of thing I enjoy doing best in the non-musical field, drama with comic overtones. Comedies as such have never appealed to me particularly. I have always thought a story with opportunities to drop in some fun was a lot better than trying to be funny for two solid hours.