Cagney by Cagney Read online

  In order to publicize our movie of Halsey, this remarkable man, I had the opportunity to meet two more. I was given the chance to do a brief television appearance with Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Again, two of our very much-needed heroes, two wonderfully charming gentlemen. Just like my encounter with Babe Ruth and Roger Bresnahan, I got goose pimples meeting these two giants of the fight ring. Rehearsing for this television spot was solid laughter.

  There were inevitably the traditional poses of Tunney thrusting his fist out and Dempsey crouching in reaction, and as Tunney did so, Dempsey said to him, “You’re not going to stick that thing in my nose again, are you?” As we were rehearsing our little scene together, we read our lines off the TelePrompTer, and my glasses weren’t doing much for me. Neither, apparently, were Tunney’s. We both called out, “Closer, closer.” Dempsey, on the other hand, could see a gnat at twenty paces, so when Tunney finally said, “I still can’t see it!,” Dempsey countered with, “You guys can’t see; I can’t read!”

  Before I began my next picture, One, Two, Three, I had no forewarning that it would be my last. It was not an easy picture to do because it was unrelieved comedy, a “be funny or else” affair that demanded unrelenting drive throughout. As I’ve said, comedy unadorned has never attracted me especially. When Billy Wilder gave me the script for One, Two, Three, its foreword said in effect, “We are embarking on a job here that requires sixty around the curves, and a hundred miles per hour on the straightaway.” I can see why he thought of me. I’ve been a rat-a-tat talker all my life. But when we went at it, it verified for me that speed is always relative. Something is fast only because something else is slower.

  In shooting a scene as I was going along at a hell of a clip, Wilder asked me if I had ever played anything this fast before. I said yes, Boy Meets Girl, which Warner’s had bought for Pat O’Brien and me. Even in 1938 when we made it, Pat and I had been around many a day, and we knew the absolute need for pacing, letting air in at certain spots to prevent it from being unadulterated rush. We fought the Warner’s brass on this, and at the points where they won, the results for the picture were sad. I explained this to Wilder, and he said, “My God, don’t frighten me.”

  “No,” I said, “but let’s benefit from experience. Let’s take our time for a spiel, then pick it up and go like hell again.” And this is what we did to a degree. I never saw the picture, but they tell me it was funny. I hope so. It was certainly a lot of hard work.

  It is very interesting that not until the very end of my career did I meet an unco-operative fellow actor. As I review the pictures I’ve been in, I realize that each and every actor I worked with had a part in shaping my summary views on acting. We all worked together rewardingly with what I hope was mutual enrichment. I never had the slightest difficulty with a fellow actor until the making of One, Two, Three. In that picture, Horst Buchholz tried all kinds of scene-stealing didoes, and I had to depend on Billy Wilder to take some steps to correct this kid. If Billy hadn’t, I was going to knock Buchholz on his ass, which at several points I would have been very happy to do.

  In such nice contrast to this character was Pamela Tiffin, the ingenue in the picture. Here is living illustration of a point I have often made. The movies keep looking for new talent but so frequently fail to utilize the talent they have. In One, Two, Three, Pamela showed a remarkable flair for comedy, and as far as I know that is the only opportunity she was given. It is so rare to find a beautiful girl who can play comedy well. Carole Lombard, Kay Kendall, Lucille Ball, and you’ve just about gone down the roster. Because of sheer neglect, talents like Pamela Tiffin never come to their majority.

  Retirement comes automatically to most people: age sixty-five, so many years on the job, ill health, whatever. For me retirement came easily and without premeditation. Shortly after it came, my sister, Jeannie, who is a close friend of Bob Hope’s wife, was talking to Bob about it one day.

  “Jeannie,” Bob said, “how in the name of God can he do it? How can he retire after thirty years in pictures and forty years in show business?”

  “What you don’t know, Bob,” she said, “is that Jim has been getting ready for this for thirty years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he bought his first farm in 1936, and he’s been going there every summer and spending six months. So this is nothing new for him. He’s been getting ready for it all that time.”

  As indeed I was. Bob is a remarkable man, year after year going on with all the enthusiasm he had at the start, all that talent in perpetual high gear. He told Jeannie he could never retire, and of course that is understandable. A fella learns his trick and does it over the years with ever-increasing expertness. He’s not going to give it up easily. But acting was always a second choice with me; I was always aiming at the farm. Not long ago I drove down Ventura Boulevard past Warner Brothers where I made over forty of my sixty-two movies, and I didn’t turn a hair. It didn’t interest me one damn. In thinking about all my reasons for quitting, I can boil them down to one: when I stopped caring, I stopped acting.

  I can almost pinpoint the moment it all stopped for me. Now, this moment was not the cause, it was just the occasion, the moment when I realized that I was going to pack it in. I was in Munich, making One, Two, Three. During my stay there, I had given my boat to Rolie Winters, who is also a good sailor man, to use over the summer because I knew he enjoyed it. On this particular day, I had just received a letter from him with a picture enclosed. The photo was of Rolie and his wife and of a number of other friends sitting in the boat raising their glasses to the camera and me. At the bottom of the picture Rolie had written, “Nice you are gainfully employed!”

  As I looked at the photo I savored their enjoyment. At least for this one moment I was sharing some of their pleasure: I was out in the sun, and the green was green as green, and the air was clean. I was experiencing this part of my day with pleasure. Then the assistant director came and said, “Mr. Cagney, we are ready.” So inside the studio I went, and as they closed the giant doors behind me and I found myself in that great black cavern with just a few spotlights dotted here and there, I said to myself, “Well, this is it. This is the end. I’m finished.”

  I knew at that moment that I would never bother about acting any more. It was the logical conclusion of my long-continuing, deeply felt instinct to separate myself from all the stresses I had found in the picture business. I had always put as much distance between those stresses and myself as I possibly could. Now came the inevitable ending. After One, Two, Three was completed, I didn’t even bother to see the picture, and I don’t think I ever will. All this for the simplest of reasons: I’m just not that much interested. I had the career—it was fine, I enjoyed it, but it was over.

  26. Brother Bill and Jim.

  27. Cagney at rest.

  28.… at exercise …

  29.… at sail …

  11

  After a lifetime spent as an actor, I would be odd indeed if I didn’t have a few thoughts about my profession. In talking to Pamela Tiffin about it all once, I think I summed up a few of my basic positions. I told her that for me acting begins with an awareness that the audience is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m acting for them, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can. Arthur Johnson, the stepfather of my good friend Albert Hackett, was D. W. Griffith’s leading man in the old Biograph days, and a first-rate actor he was. A tall, lank man with a commanding mane of hair, he looked as if he had authority, and he acted as if he had it, too. He gave his stepson some acting advice, which in turn was passed along to me, advice that I treasure. Johnson’s advice on how to play a scene was affirmative: “You walk in, and plant yourself squarely on both feet, and then say what you have to say.” I remembered that.

  When we were making One, Two, Three, I told Pamela Tiffin that because we had an awful lot of things to say to each other in our first scene, it would help if we got our heads together and talked it over. She agreed, and as we w
orked on the scene I noticed she just couldn’t look me in the eye. Self-conscious, ill at ease. I wanted to help a bit.

  “Want to listen to a minute of old-man talk?”

  “What is it?”

  “Rule 1.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You walk in, plant yourself, look the other fella in the eye, and tell the truth.” She asked me to repeat it, and I did. I told her the source of that advice, and I explained my little addition to Johnson’s sound instruction: “I also tell you, ‘Look the other fella in the eye and tell the truth’ because you weren’t looking at me.” So may I say, bless her, she did just that, never wavering for a moment.

  In a later scene, however, her eyes did begin to wander again. But this is quite common among inexperienced players. They glance from your left eye to your right eye almost in Ping-Pong fashion.

  “One more thing,” I told her. “Look in the downstage eye.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The one nearest the camera.” Which is what she did thereafter.

  The best kind of authentic talent has a fundamental quality that I can only identify as courage. Be it boxing, baseball, or acting, the ones who come up through the ranks—the Dempseys, MacFarlands, Ruths, Barrymores—all need courage in great degree, because without it, they couldn’t endure those rough, tough conditions. When these champions began their life work there were no guarantees of any kind. Not like today where, to use that stupid and ridiculous word, a superstar is created overnight. When the champions I admired began their working life there was no unemployment insurance, or other aids. If they had no job, they were on the borrow, trying to patch their way from one engagement to another.

  The Barrymores were fascinating. I had contact with them just a few times. On a radio broadcast of J. M. Barrie’s The Old Lady Shows Her Medals for the Motion Picture Relief Fund, Lionel Barrymore played J. M. Barrie, Ethel played the old lady, and I did the young soldier in the piece. In talking to her beforehand, I said, “What accent are you going to use, Miss Barrymore?,” intending to follow her lead.

  “You are listening to it, James. You are listening to it!” she said in that thrillingly resonant Barrymore tone.

  When the Screen Actors Guild honored Lionel on one of his birthdays, as Guild president, I had to make the presentation. It was a pleasure to meet this completely charming old gentleman, and his courage was evident in the fact of his total naturalness. Despite the wheelchair and his crippling arthritis, there were no apologies or implied need for sympathy.

  As to the youngest of the Barrymores, he had courage in his own way. Never wanting to be an actor, John was forced to go on the stage by his family, thereby frustrating his desire to become an artist. He had to continue with the theatre and Hollywood because he knew no other profession. It was the sad story of a man who could not do what he wanted with his life, but even in his last sad days of alcoholic self-parody, he complained to no man. One evening I was in the Brown Derby with Ed McNamara and Sidney Skolsky. We were in the end booth by the door when I heard a hissing sound coming to us from four or five booths down. Ed was on the outside of the booth, so he stuck his head out and looked down toward the source of this odd sound. Then we could hear the words, plain and clear: “Piss-ant, piss-ant!”

  McNamara saw who it was and said, “It’s Jack Barrymore. He’s saying ‘Piss-ant!,’ and I think he means you, Cagney.”

  “Well, we’ll find out,” I said, and I walked down to the Barrymore booth. I had never met him, but I came up and said, “You sent for me?”

  “Yes, I sent for you.”

  “What have I done?”

  “That’s just it. It’s what you haven’t done. Play it, goddamn it, play it!”

  “Play what?”

  “The Playboy of the Western World. You were born to play it. Play it! Goddamn it, why don’t you do it?”

  “Well, nobody ever asked me.”

  “Oh, so that’s the kind of piss-ant you are!”

  This little episode points up a key aspect of my grounded view toward acting. For the big roles, the classics—I just never had any interest. I’ve known any number of actors who have always yearned to play the big roles, and as much as I applaud that kind of dream, I never had it for myself.

  Indeed, my aim was never stardom. I never gave it a thought in my early years, and after I was given the designation, I didn’t think about it then. With me, a career was the simple matter of putting the groceries on the table. I’ve never thought of myself as anything but a journeyman actor, going where the job happened to be, doing the job, and making my way back home. I see youngsters these days specifically program themselves to be stars in a set time period. This surely is a mistake. One shouldn’t aspire to stardom, one should aspire to be doing the job well.

  But, and how vital this is, if you don’t have the inborn quality the audience buys, you will get nothing, or very little. You can be a very limited actor like Errol Flynn in his early days and still make it because of that quality the audience wants. Errol developed flair and technique as the years went by, but he always had that quality people bought at the box office.

  One lady I knew briefly, a former European star, speaking of my career, said to me, “You must be very proud, Mr. Cagney.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had nothing to do with it. If whatever I had to sell was acceptable to the audience, where did it come from? You can’t take bows for your having red hair, you can’t take bows for having blue eyes. The things I am were passed on to me from someone else. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the fella who makes the big splash ever did anything on his own.”

  “But such a man exerted himself; he had to extend himself,” the lady replied.

  “Yes,” I said, “but where did that capacity for extension come from? Did he generate the thing? Not at all. It was there.”

  Not long after this discussion, I read a biography of that tremendous artist and human being, Charlie Russell. Of his work he said, “I count myself lucky. I happened to have the ability to put stuff on canvas, or to do it in clay, or whatever, but I had nothing to do with it. I had it to start with, and where it came from, who knows? But I happened to be able to put it together and make a living with it.” Russell summed it all up: “Cash in my checks now. I’ve been a lucky man.” Yes. So I say about my long years of work.

  Undue self-concern is tied into this. Unremitting self-interest can only hurt one. During the making of a picture directed by Charlie Vidor, I noticed him come into the studio one morning looking very low and disconsolate. I asked him what the matter was.

  “Ah, Jimmy, everybody hurt me, everybody hurt me.”

  “How do you mean, hurt you?”

  “They say things. I don’t think they mean to hurt me, but they do. They say really cruel things, and it weighs on me the whole day.”

  “Do you want to get rid of that, Charlie? Well—just ask yourself one question and the hurt will disappear that fast. The question is this: just ask yourself, ‘Who the hell do I think I am?’ And you’ll see the hurt will disappear.”

  “Ah, Jimmy, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think I’m somebody.”

  And with that view, inevitably, comes insecurity and frustration and unhappiness.

  To me the very essence of show business is change, variety—and one often very neglected and little-touted element: idiocy. I remember saying to a particularly beautiful actress, “Look, pet, you are intelligent; God knows you’re beautiful. Everything about you is fine. There might be just one thing lacking: you don’t have that very necessary quality of idiocy.”

  On this idiocy matter, my old chum Rolie Winters and I have aphorized the word to come up with a favorite expression, “God Bless Idiocy.” We find that most of our laughs derive from some ridiculous thing he or I said or heard. After forty years we still get a chuckle from the classic show business story of one acto
r meeting a fellow thespian on Broadway. The first actor says, “Oh, I tell you, when I went over to Campbell’s Funeral Parlor and you were bidding goodbye to your wife—well, I want to tell you—in all my life I’ve never seen anybody so affected, hit so hard by the loss of a loved one.”

  “At Campbell’s Funeral Parlor?”

  “Yes, that’s where I saw you.”

  “Oh, hell, that was nothing. You should have caught me at the grave!”

  That kind of unbounded and artless egoism is almost endearing in its idiocy. And yet there is one part of the story that hits the truth: you’re only as good as the other fella thinks you are. The reason for that is simple. He buys the tickets. In any aspect of creativity one would care to name, the one who thinks he has all the answers is finished, through as of that moment. One time my artist friend Ralph Armstrong was on the set. We’d just finished a shot, but I looked at the director and said, “Let’s go again.” We did it again. Afterward, Ralph said, “What was wrong with the first one?” I said I wasn’t sure, it just wasn’t any good. Ralph said it looked good to him, but I told him that if something says, “Look out. It’s no good,” one better listen to that little voice.

  “It seems to me, Jim,” Ralph said, “that if you’ve been doing it for as long as you have, that when you do it, it’s right.” I had to explain to Ralph again that one must at least be sure when one’s not right. As soon as you’re sure about everything in acting, I told him, you’re through. “I really mean it,” I told him. “When you’re positive you’ve got all the answers, you haven’t got any answers that are worth anything.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ralph said.

  At that time Ralph had great success with his painting. He was a good craftsman, drew superbly, and his pastels of perfectly beautiful gals were showpieces that the magazines bought avidly. Then the magazine world started to diminish, and Ralph had rather a rough time thereafter. It may well be, too, that a man who is sure that everything he does is right is really not going to be able to stay the course.