Cagney by Cagney Page 17

Man comes and the trees go,

  The waters soon follow apace.

  They make their way toward the mother sea

  In broad fingers of liquid lace;

  Carrying with them the willing land

  For which they have much affinity.

  Making up, as they do, with the good clean air,

  God’s very own blessed trinity-

  Air, Soil, and Water.

  Still distressed days later, I added:

  When one considers just what man is,

  Happy it be that short his span is.

  If he were around longer, there’d be an even swifter journey from beauty to dry death, a journey that I, like Hamlet, would ache to think on.

  As to ultimate responsibility for all this—and I don’t believe this has occurred to anyone before—the initial move in the destruction of our environment unwittingly is ours, individually. There is the investment motive. These ruthless developers can only get their money from a bank. Banks function only to make a profit. They rent the money out. But—whose money are they lending? Not their own. They’re lending our money, the public’s money, and in this very tangible way the public is participating in the destruction of its own environment. When the chap at Martha’s Vineyard bought acres and acres along the shore with the plan of putting up high-rise condominiums; when the man to the west of me at the Vineyard bought the acreage and started to put up houses cutting into the beautiful hills all around—and the beautiful stream, Roaring Brook, became as it now is, yellow and full of clay; and when the people to the east of me cut fifty-three lots out of the hills, and that soil was also washed down into Roaring Creek—all of these ravages were caused initially by money. We are all directly responsible in a very real sense.

  The wasting of the world and the inner spirit of man that fights that despoilment I can only sum up this way:

  If God is the ideal quite unattainable

  And Nature’s fierce logic is most unassailable;

  If we observe with great care the human condition

  As we hurry in haste down the road to perdition,

  One phrase is large on mankind’s scroll:

  All is ephemera—except soil and soul.

  10

  Tribute to a Bad Man came in 1956 at a time when I was up on Martha’s Vineyard. I had been working early in the summer, and I went up to take my ease there when Spence Tracy, then on location up a Colorado mountain, became ill. He couldn’t go on with Tribute to a Bad Man, so Nick Schenck, the head of MGM, called and asked if I would jump in for him. There were some eighty people in Montrose, Colorado, waiting to get the job done. I was about as interested in working as I was in flying, which means a considerable level below zero, but after much gab, I agreed. I specified that I would need at least two or three weeks between jobs, and then I would come out and do it. Agreed, and I went out. The result was all right, I guess.

  Also in 1956 I did one of my very few television appearances. I have only been on three or four times. There was a brief Mister Roberts scene on “The Ed Sullivan Show;” also on Bob Hope’s show to introduce some beauty-contest winners; and a show for Bob Montgomery. The Bob Hope thing I did because an old friend, a makeup man, called to say that if I introduced a few young ladies, the makeup men’s charity fund would get ten thousand dollars. With that spur, I did it, and a little song and dance with Bob. It worked out well enough, but I’ve had no real interest in television at any time. I simply couldn’t work up any kind of enthusiasm for it.

  My stint with Bob Montgomery was for his “Robert Montgomery Presents,” a show called Soldiers from the War Returning, about an Army sergeant detailed to escort the body of a dead buddy home from Korea. I played it because I promised Bob that if ever I did any work on television, I’d do the first with him.

  I get frequent questions about what kind of fella Bob Montgomery really is. I have tried very hard in these pages not to overuse superlatives about my fast friends, but this Montgomery man is just plain extraordinary. He is a chap raised with a silver spoon in his mouth who on ability and guts alone became the leader of the Screen Actors Guild, and in their first big fight with the Producers’ Association, laid his career right on the line. Without hesitation.

  He has more than proven his mettle over the years by tackling the big guns of the television networks. Single-handedly, too. But beyond the gutsy determination he evidences when a question of principle is at stake, he’s a deeply read, wonderfully intelligent man with a great social flair. And he’s humorous, God bless him, and when we’re together, the laughs are incessant. He was, of course, a fine light comedian, doing all those things with Norma Shearer, Greer Garson, and those lovely ladies at MGM when it was the studio. But when Bob moved into the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, he incurred great enmity, an enmity that still persists. He has been labeled by the high powers as “difficult” and “rebel.” Or put it as it really is, when he feels something is right, he damned well stands up for it.

  Example. He produced his “Robert Montgomery Presents” for many successful years, and in going to the 1956 season he told me the networks were trying to dump him, and if I did the soldier-returning-from-Korea production, it would get the Montgomery season off to a healthy start. Of course I was happy to oblige. I learned from Bob that the networks would not give air time to anything they didn’t own part of, a part usually in the neighborhood of 51 per cent. This sharp little practice insured the networks’ control of everything going out over the air.

  Bob defied them. He went to bat by appearing before the Federal Communications Commission and by denouncing this kind of monopoly before Senate committees. Without any hesitation he said everything that needed to be said. Inevitably, perhaps, he was beating his head against a stone wall, because one man against a power structure that entrenched is the battle of the one against the many. He couldn’t win. But that single stand of his had an ultimate payoff. In the past few years the FCC and the Senate have made the networks give up some of their monopolized time. Bob Montgomery started this ball rolling years ago.

  A few months after the Montgomery television show, I addressed myself to a complex task. In doing the life story of such a great screen artist as Lon Chaney it belabors the obvious to say that I found it a challenge. The Chaney family was a fascinating one, and in preparing Man of a Thousand Faces for shooting we came across several stories about the Chaneys that for one reason or another we felt constrained from using. Now that the son, Lon Chaney, Jr., has gone, it is possible to tell at least this fascinating and truly pathetic anecdote. Lon Chaney, Jr., was simply the professional name of that talented and very nice gentleman. His actual name was Creighton Chaney. It seems clear that his mother deserted the family, leaving Lon and Creighton alone. But the boy very doggedly persisted in trying to find his mother.

  She had an unusual and distinctive name—Cleva. Creighton went to great lengths to find her and finally got a lead to her whereabouts. He made his way to a remote ranch somewhere out on the desert, full of anticipation that his long search was at last near its end. He knocked, and a woman came to the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello. My name is Creighton Chaney, and I’m looking for Mrs. Cleva Fletcher.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Cleva—Cleva Fletcher.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “No one here by that name.”

  Then, directed to the woman, came a voice from inside the house: “Who is it, Cleva?”

  This infinitely sad story we were unable to use. The agonizing pathos of it—a desperately needed mother talking to a son she wanted no part of—that story seemed both crueler and larger than life itself.

  One might think that my most striking memory of doing Man of a Thousand Faces would be the various makeups I assumed to duplicate Chaney’s amazing skills, but actually the first thing I think of is Hank Mann. Hank, one of the original Keystone Cops and a key supporting player in the Charlie Chaplin troupe, had been in my first Hollyw
ood effort, Sinner’s Holiday. In meeting him again in 1957 during the Chaney picture, I was struck once more, as I always am, by the fact of total professionalism. Hank, and another authentic comedian from the golden age of comedy, Snub Pollard, did a scene in the picture as comic waiters.

  Inevitably they did a pie-throwing scene, and anyone who thinks there is no art in the throwing of pies has not seen Hank and Snub at their finest moments. I learned much from them, one law of slapstick being that a real pie-tossing artist doesn’t just stand there and take the pastry deadpan. I noticed, in a lesson I’ll not forget, that Hank and Snub mugged royally when anticipating the pies coming their way, Hank, for instance, crossing his eyes and dropping his mouth. It was a great pleasure to watch those two consummate farceurs doing the thing they knew so well.

  With some Hollywood years under my belt, I have obviously had quite a series of experiences with directors. Directors, like human beings, come in all sorts: very talented, talented, quasi-talented, untalented. It is a profession I have never envied. So when my old friend A. C. Lyles came to me in 1957 and asked me if I would direct his Paramount production of Short Cut to Hell, I was moved to do so out of friendship only. I said I would do it if he wanted me to, and he asked me how much I’d charge. “How about nothing? Is that too much?” I asked him. We shot this updated version of Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire in just twenty days, and that was long enough for me. Directing I find a bore; I have no interest in telling other people their business.

  And doing just that is the heart of the director’s job. Some directors tell you your business quite competently; others are unbelievably inept. As I’ve said, I have worked with really only two absolutely superb stage directors—George Kelly and John Cromwell—men who not only knew their business but the actor’s as well. During most of my Hollywood time the directing business was not overcrowded with geniuses. My idea of a director was theatre-derived: one who could get in and show the actor all the specifics if needs be, all moves, all intonations. In other words, a director, one capable of directing you to do just what was required. With the exception of Billy Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Bill Keighley, and their kindred, there were few directors I met who knew what they were doing when they got in front of a camera to demonstrate. There was no reason why they should, of course. They probably never acted in their lives. But I always felt safer somehow with a director who knew at first hand what the actor’s job was like.

  One of my directors, Mike Curtiz, had been an actor in the Hungarian and German theatre. He arrived one day on the set with a very specific idea of how a particular scene should be played. I said, “Go ahead, Mike. Show me how you want it.” He went in and played it with all the old fancy European techniques—brushing off the cuffs with a flick of the finger, reaching fussily for a cigarette and lighting it with a flourish, then putting his foot up on a bench, and proceeding to talk with one hand on the hip.

  “All right, Mike,” I said, “now I’m going to do just as you suggested. I want you to watch closely.” I’m a fairly good mimic, so I got before the camera and did it exactly as Mike had worked it out. When I finished, I asked him what he thought.

  “I guess I’m a pretty lousy actor, huh, Jimmy?” There was nothing further to say.

  One time having heard that I was a bit difficult (something I admit to being when I strive to get a thing right), a director I know decided to put me in my place. After I finished the scene, I noticed he was looking at the ground. He had paid no attention to what we were doing in the shot. I said, “Let’s go again,” and we did. Same as before. He sat there, eyes on the ground. “Uh huh,” I said to myself, “I see. All right.” The next time I played the scene just as written without adding an iota of imagination to help it along. We went through that day, and the next day, in the same fashion. I did nothing more than say the words and do action only as required in the dialogue. On the third day, Darryl Zanuck appeared. He asked me what the matter was, and I said, “Nothing.”

  “Come on, now. There is something the matter.”

  “No, no. I’m just doing it as required. I’m playing the script just as written.”

  “Now, that isn’t what we want,” Zanuck said, in unconscious revelation. “Get with it, boys.”

  He left the set, and next day the director came in nice as pie, and there was no further trouble. This director and I became good friends and we worked together several times after that without the slightest difficulty.

  Direction, I’ve always held, is implicit in the writing. One doesn’t go to the post with a bad script if he can help it. If the script is right, the direction is all there, implicit in the writing. Consequently, whenever I hear much ranting and roaring about this, that, or the other great director, I will admit there are some directors who are imaginative, who can get the most out of their material. Hawks, Wellman, Walsh, Keighley, Curtiz, Del Ruth, Ford, and others were all expert and did their job to the fullest. But many directors are just pedestrian workmen, mechanics. Ostensibly they choose camera angles and on occasion they do, but I’ve often seen cameramen take over when needed. The director would indicate where he wanted it, and quietly the cameraman would indicate to his assistant a spot one good foot off the director’s mark. Then the cameraman would turn to me, wink, and walk away.

  There are some directors I’ve seen, and with great reputations, who couldn’t direct you to a cheap delicatessen. One fella, a faker of the first order, developed a highly workable technique to impress the front office. Having at least the shrewdness to get a best seller for a start and the best actors available, he’d let them do all the work, and fine work it would be. Then, to associate himself tangibly with all this, this “director” as the cameras were turning would walk into the set and say, “All right, now come on, kids—give me lots of heart!” Then he’d turn around, walk out, and say, “Action.” The action promptly ensued, and very good action it would be. Then, just before he said “Cut,” he strolled back into the scene again to say, “All right, that’s fine. Very good scene. You gave me everything I needed, kids. Just what I wanted. Cut!” The big bosses would look at these rushes with this gentleman’s self-serving little prologue and epilogue, and come to the conclusion that he was quite a guy. This man, by the way, who was in my view a distinct failure as a director, failed himself right into a fortune. He, too, was wonderful. Negatively—but wonderful.

  Like him, many of these so-called directors just stood by and watched. In some cases, it was because the person they were filming would have to be in complete charge in any case. Who, for example, would tell Freddie Astaire where to go in any of his dance numbers? Once I visited him on the set, and just after I arrived, the director yelled “Cut!” in the middle of a dance, and walked over to talk with Freddie. I thought this odd, and at lunch I said so, asking Freddie if the director had ever done this before. “No,” said Freddie. “Pretty strange, isn’t it?” I got the distinct flavor of the director showing off for the visiting fireman.

  The best movie I made overseas was, fittingly enough, one with an Irish locale. It is not hard to be objective about the beauty of Ireland: it speaks unarguably for itself. Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), an account of the 1921 “Troubles,” was made memorable for me by shooting it at Bray in the beautiful countryside close to Dublin. Getting to know and love that lush greenness, I was appalled a few years later to read that rural Ireland stood in danger of being mined and industrialized. I sent on to the Irish Times a few words capsulating my reaction to that chilling news, but not identifying myself. I used the pseudonym of Harley Quinn—Harlequin.

  You want to see the Shannon like the Hudson

  Or the Liffey just as filthy as the Seine?

  Bring in the arrogant asses

  And their garbage and their gasses—

  The pollutants plunging poison down each drain:

  Killing everything that’s living

  For which nature’s unforgiving,

  And the punishment will certainly fit the cri
me.

  Where man, the creeping cancer,

  Will have to make the final answer

  As he smothers ’neath his self-created slime.

  I don’t know if they ever published it, but fortunately my apprehensions vanished with the news later that the Irish Government had canceled the impending mining contracts. Practical foresight.

  In 1960, Bob Montgomery and I got together to do The Gallant Hours, a labor of love, a tribute to that wonderful man, Admirai William F. “Bull” Halsey. Bob as co-producer and director deliberately steered away from big battle scenes and roaring guns. We concentrated on Halsey himself, trying to convey some of the tensions of high command.

  One Halsey incident put me strongly in mind of all the young people I grew up with. After a big battle where Halsey had sailed with all his ships right through the Japanese fleet, he did so in face of the most potential danger any navy was ever in. But he came out victoriously. At a board of inquiry later, when he was asked just why he endangered everything he had, he gave an absolutely great answer. He said, “One goes in with what one has, doesn’t he?” That was the heart of the story of the young people I grew up with: they were going in with what they had. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. And the same thing applied to people in this very chancy show business—going in with what one has is just about the entire story. I’ve watched really talented people do that and then drop by the wayside. It’s saddening because they were really so very talented, but perhaps there was lacking a fullness of that competitive instinct needed to hold one’s own in this high-risk business.

  Deep down, of course, in show people, in all people, is that basic drive for recognition, for identification with something of value. In preparing the Halsey story we came across the incident of a chief petty officer on leave who got drunk. The Shore Patrol caught up with him, and by that time he was in very rough shape, a falling-down drunk. The Shore Patrol asked him what ship he belonged to. The sailor didn’t identify the ship; he didn’t identify his unit. All he said—with great pride—was, “I’m one of Halsey’s men.” How true of us all; to be a part of the best is everybody’s search.