Cagney by Cagney Read online

  While on location for Mister Roberts, I was sent the script of Love Me or Leave Me, the Ruth Etting biography. I took one read-through and said, “My God, yes. We go with this one.” There was nothing to be added, nothing to be taken away. It was in fact that extremely rare thing, the perfect script. I was so pleased to find one that didn’t need any help, any devices. Among other things, I was pleased with the biographical honesty. The protagonists in this powerful account of Ruth Etting’s life were all alive: Ruth, Martin “The Gimp” Snyder, the first husband, and Johnny Alderman, her second husband. Under the usual “life is just a bowl of cherries” Hollywood reworking, their taut and bitter story would have emerged as a romp through the primroses. Fortunately the participants were well paid for their authorization, and the facts could be faced uncompromisingly. All of tin’s, too, was set against some pretty good music.

  “Gimp” Snyder was a belligerent man who had suffered a prenatal polio attack that gave him a decided limp. After seeing the picture, he said to someone, “Where did Cagney learn to imitate my walk?” I didn’t. I had observed people with that kind of affliction, and very early in planning the role, I knew that doing the limp with any kind of support gadget would be intrusive. So what I did was very simple. I just slapped my foot down as I turned it out while walking. That’s all. Mr. Snyder liked the picture from all accounts. I learned later that the part had been offered to Spence Tracy and he turned it down, why I don’t know. It was a damned good part.

  I had worked with Doris Day before, of course, in The West Point Story. But I really didn’t get to know her then, and there certainly was nothing substantial for her to do in that picture. But when we started on Love Me or Leave Me, I saw something in her I hadn’t noticed before, or maybe it was just coming into bloom. I don’t know. She had matured into a really exceptional actress, and I told her so. I said, “You know, girl, you have a quality that I’ve seen but twice before. There was a gal named Pauline Lord who created the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and I’m also thinking of Laurette Taylor. Both these ladies could really get on there and do it with everything. They could take you apart playing a scene. Now, you’re the third one.”

  In thinking about Doris, Pauline Lord, and Laurette Taylor, and the single quality they shared, I am also put in mind of the Barrymores—Ethel, Jack, and Lionel. They had that quality, too—and if I had to put that quality into a word, it would be “unshrewdness.” It is that part of a personality that immediately evokes from the audience the response of, “Isn’t that nice?” Walter Catlett had it, too: wide open as a barn door, no guile at all. Unshrewd. In all of these people there is a beautiful basic simplicity stemming from their lack of guile. And that lack of guile photographs.

  I have always said that shrewdness unaccompanied by other balancing and compensating factors is a very unattractive quality. People who are just shrewd don’t stay around long in the acting business. I’ve seen them come into show business and become shrewder and shrewder. They don’t last. Acquisitiveness takes over. I know of one comedian who would never let anybody else have a laugh in his pictures. “That’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine.” He was gone in three or four years. Sometimes, of course, that lack of guile can be tragic. At the end of his career, Jack Barrymore said to his manager, “Where did all the money go?” It was all gone. The same with his brother Lionel, and with Walter Catlett.

  I’m sure Doris Day has a better business head on her than these people, but she shares with them the quality that makes people seeing such actors say instinctively, “Why, there’s a person who wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.” This quality, coupled with genuine acting ability, is irresistible to an audience. I was explaining something like this to Doris between shots in the prison scene of Love Me or Leave Me when the director, Charles Vidor, came over. Charlie was an amusing and cynical Hungarian, and he asked us, “What are you talking about?”

  “Just actor talk, Charlie,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “All right, what am I doing?”

  “You’re telling Doris how good she is.”

  “That’s exactly true—and I know you’ll agree.”

  “I agree, I agree!” he said, laughing.

  “Charlie, don’t you like to tell people how good they are?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. But only sometimes.” Which was ever Charlie’s way.

  After Love Me or Leave Me, Doris went into the Pillow Talk things, and I for one have always considered that one hell of a waste.

  I hardly thought it in the nature of things that I would ever be playing and, happily, dancing the role of George M. Cohan again, but thirteen years after Yankee Doodle Dandy, the opportunity presented itself. Bob Hope was putting The Seven Little Foys into work at Paramount, and the script called for the appearance of George M. at a Friars’ Club banquet where he trades kidding insults with Eddie Foy. This segues into a challenge dance routine on a tabletop between Bob and myself. Bob’s invitation to do George M. coincided neatly with my desire to lose fifteen pounds. So he and I rehearsed the dance for three weeks, and I lost my unwanted lard.

  There was one bit of trouble. In the routine, I had included a step for my solo portion that I had been doing for years, but not for perhaps a decade before this. It’s what dancers call a knee snap, basically a pick-up with a roll on each foot. This is a step that gives the knee quite a bit of extra work. After about a week’s rehearsal with Bob, I found my knees had swollen, but I thought little of it. Came time to do the number with Bob on the table, part of which called for me to leap up on it, then turn and pull Bob up with me.

  The cameras started to roll. Not anticipating any difficulty, I leaped on the table, and as soon as my legs hit, up each of them shot a screaming pain. I didn’t change expression but reached down and pulled Bob up. We proceeded to do the routine with both my legs paining almost beyond endurance. When I looked at the scene later, there was no sign of agony or even discomfort on my face. I would guess this shows what long training can do if the need is there.

  Right after the number I called Bob into my dressing room and showed him my knees. He couldn’t believe it. They were full of fluid, easily twice their normal size. But in a few days they were normal again and I was all right. I guess at fifty-six even a long-time song-and-dance man can’t expect to bounce around in quite the same way he did at, say, fifty.

  9

  Might I now digress—to the point? Digress, because for a time I move out of the chronological sequence of my days; to the point, because outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.

  I don’t think of myself in any active sense as a philosopher, but it is certainly true that I am given, and for long years have been given, to that part of the philosophical process called wonder. Wonder, I think, begins with simple curiosity and some form of marveling, leading inevitably to the asking of that vital question, “Why?,” and all this in the hope that some solid answers might supply themselves. I find I am doing that increasingly in my life, and in taking my great concern for the land and assessing that concern, I ask many questions. Oftener than not, I find no answers other than this: many people are indescribably wanton in their despoliation of the land either through stupidity or a colossal selfishness—and I use “colossal” in its true or non-Hollywood sense.

  I have, of course, been in love with the country from early childhood, and when the opportunity came to own some of it, I acted. I tried farming the Martha’s Vineyard property, but its soil was not of the best, and getting help was difficult. Consequently, with the guidance of Bob Montgomery, who had a place near Millbrook in Dutchess County, New York, I found an ideal spot in that area.

  In 1955, when I bought the New York farm, I grew even closer to the country, and now I think of myself in retirement years as essen
tially of the country. Not long ago I had the chance to see close up the entire span of the United States, and this heartwarming experience reaffirmed my pride in this great republic, but it also made me even more apprehensive about the encroachments on the beauty of the land, encroachments that don’t in any way seem to be diminishing.

  I set out to drive from Beverly Hills to my farm, and as I progressed along a multiplicity of roads and highways, a number of random thoughts came to me that I confided to a tape recorder, thoughts elemental to my interests. These brief thoughts I offer now are not, God knows, answers to great questions or problems, but perhaps in keeping with the spirit of wonder that has always been so active in me, they are questions and observations that are not only self-revelatory but concepts that I may need to ponder more and bring into sharper focus for myself.

  Another essential reason for my using the tape recorder on that trip was to recall stories about myself that constitute much of this book’s contents, and as I went from state to state along Highway 66, I was surprised at memories evoked at many turns. I had been an extensive traveler, albeit not a very luxurious one, in my vaudeville days, and this trip was partially a tour of reminiscence. But primarily it was a voyage of discovery. Always having been a lover of the New England scene, I have used that charming part of our world as a standard for beauty. For me there has never really been any place like it. But I must now make apologies to the various states we traversed; I hadn’t realized how beautiful they are. But I am learning.

  For instance, when I first moved to California, I sneered at the desert country and could see no reason why anybody should ever want to live there. Then, bit by bit, I gradually awakened to the unique beauties of the desert. On my recent auto trip, I came to realize similarly that each of the states we passed through has its own beauty. Oklahoma and Missouri, for example, seemed to possess a green unsurpassed anywhere, and I was much struck by the extent of their tree cover. My Bill was born in Iowa, and learning from her of that state’s extensive wheat belt, I was expecting flat, uninteresting country. Wrong again! I was delighted to see the rich kind of beauty that surrounded my wife in her childhood. And instances like this could be multiplied right and left all along the winding paths of our trip.

  But, of course, everywhere I went I saw the unrelenting oppression of man-made blight, and especially that blight under our very wheels. At various points on Route 66, I saw road widths that seemed unjustifiable, lanes added for no discernible reason at all. How does this happen? Years ago when the highway-building racket started, a lot of us conservationists, seeing the proliferating highways and interchanges, realized that this in time was going to be a formidable problem. These highway boys at last had found a racket that could be legitimized in the name of progress, interconnecting the country with needless concrete at one whopping fee per foot. It made me put a few words together:

  Lay down the ribbon of concrete, boys,

  And we’ll divvy up lots of loot;

  We do it all quiet and neat, boys,

  At ten thousand dollars a foot.

  We’ll certainly take care of our friends, boys,

  As we give the law the bend, boys.…

  But why go on? This senseless destruction of the land has infuriated me for years. The wantonness of that land slaughter in California made me write a little note to myself:

  Tear the tops off the mountains

  And terrace the slopes,

  For the land must be ready,

  For dingbats and dopes.

  If that sounds bitter, let me say I mean it to be bitter.

  The tremendous physical change in our country, I suppose, has come slowly. But to me it seems abrupt. Driving with some friends from my farm to a Pennsylvania horse show six years ago, we had to go through New Jersey. It struck me tellingly. What, what has happened to beautiful New Jersey? Mile upon ugly mile, I saw nothing but gas stations, road signs, auto dumps, used-car lots, and strident billboards prevailing over the green land. And all this was six years ago. No telling what it looks like now, but I am making a fairly weighty guess that the green has diminished even more.

  Driving from the West on my recent trip, I realized more than ever the tremendous job we have to do in reclaiming some of the land from the terrible onslaught of the bulldozer. With increased population, the bulldozer seems inevitable, but how saddening, how indefensible! A long time ago it struck me that progress takes its primary form these days in the pursuit of the buck. One must make his way in whatever way he can, of course, but it also occurs to me that what we are determines our life path. As I put it in another way:

  What we are determines our basic needs,

  And the needs decree each course of action.

  No need, no action may be regarded as rule,

  With self-satisfaction, however miniscule,

  Calling the turn with utter finality,

  Obscuring for all of us each stern, stark reality.

  Seeing what we want to see, needing no other view,

  Until crisis arrives in the form of catastrophe,

  Functions then gone, will lost to atrophy,

  Man’s malignant stupidity collecting its due.

  Not all highways feeding our cities are infestations. Driving into Tulsa, for instance, was a pleasant experience because it was clean and unmarred. Moreover, the city itself seemed to have no matchbox buildings, the characterless blocks set down helter-skelter in so many cities without any sense of form or proportion. I saw some tall buildings in Tulsa, but they seemed both functional and beautiful. A development we passed there was perfectly lovely, done in excellent taste, and attractively low-profile, in keeping with the Indian idea. So it can be done with foresight as the guideline.

  Foresight is the necessary prelude to any harmony in human affairs. No one much remembers today the great figures in our country who foresaw so clearly the rape of our land as far back as eighty years ago. It’s unpleasantly amusing to see pompous politicians on television speaking of their plans to preserve our ecology. To hear them speak, one would think they were the first to feel the needed concern. Nowhere do they credit the earlier figures in ecology like Bennett, Haupt, Carhart, Vogt, Osborne, Pinchot, and Teddy Roosevelt. These were the men who laid it all out for us to see, but we wouldn’t look until it was perilously close to being too late. These great men are forgotten, and their warnings have been taken up by vote-hungry Tweedledums and, most recently, by the kids, who feel they’ve discovered ecology. Well, even the ones among them who only give lip service can be a positive influence if it makes their stupid elders realize what’s going on.

  It will take some awakening. Eighteen years ago the Conservation Foundation, of which I am a member, asked me if I would narrate a radio series telling the story of conservation, and I agreed, of course. The next I heard of it was an occasional comment by a friend that I had been heard on these programs—at 6:00 A.M. Profit-hungry radio stations wouldn’t dream of giving these vital messages prime time when they would do a bit of good.

  For fifty years now I’ve been trying to do my own broadcasting about ecology in my own way, never hesitating to let people know exactly what I think about this hideous wasting of resources. A friend of mine at a gathering one night brought up my name and got this rejoinder from a man there: “Cagney! Oh, that’s the nut who goes around turning off the water in the dentist’s office.” I proudly plead guilty. When I’m in the dentist’s chair and he has to leave for a bit, I promptly turn off that precious clean water until he returns. In these days of such drastic clean-water shortage, it’s folly to sit there and watch that good pure stuff swirling away, unused. When people hear me tell this, they laugh, and I tell them, “Mister, there’s going to come a time when you wish to God somebody had thought about these things—because there is only so much water, and it’s getting dirtier by the minute.”

  A very good friend of mine for forty years on arising invariably turns on both bathroom faucets before he even starts to get his shaving equ
ipment together. I notice this every time I visit him. It goes on for minutes, all that good water pouring down, wasted. Frequently he will turn around and go back into the bedroom for something, and I will shut off the water while he’s gone. He comes back in, turns it on again, and doesn’t even know it’s been shut off. Four decades this has been going on, and he’s never tumbled to the fact that I keep closing the faucets. Such a thoughtless waste of gallons and gallons of that precious stuff, and yet this is a thoughtful man in every other way.

  As I drove across the United States recently it was borne in on me again and again how beautiful so much of it still is—those trim houses and yards of Pennsylvania farmers being typical of the best in our countryside. Those industrious farmers—all I can say is, bless them, bless them. And at one point just as I was luxuriating in their beautiful cultivation of land and homes, a graceless outdoor movie screen loomed up to scar the landscape brutally.

  Ten years ago my Bill and I were driving through Spain, and along a highway leading from Barcelona I noticed a long row of enormous old eucalyptus trees, beautiful, noble trees, thirty to forty inches in diameter. As we drove along, feeling genuinely edified by their beauty, I gradually noticed that each of these trees had been ringed for death. The bark had been notched into the cambium, the layer where the food is drawn up from the roots to sustain the branches and leaves. This notching was the process whereby the trees would dry up, allowing them to be cut down more easily. On and on, mile after mile, those doomed trees stretched. They were being taken down, I discovered a bit later, because another highway was due for construction. “But why, why?” I asked. “On each side of that road there is a wide flat area where an added highway can be placed without disturbing the trees. Why don’t they put it there?” The Spaniard I was talking to didn’t know, wasn’t concerned. What the hell, they were only trees. In a rage, I wrote: