Cagney by Cagney Read online

  Years ago in the theatre there was, among a number of actor classifications, the interesting one of the so-called office actor. He was the one who would go to a casting office to try out for a particular role and in the office give one hell of a convincing performance, impressing both producer and director very much. This ability, however, would not extend to the stage when he was actually doing the part. Some essential part of him would wither up when he was before an audience. In direct contrast to him would be the actor—frequently Milquetoastish in demeanor—who had no “office” presence at all but who could, once on stage, astonish everyone with the power of his playing.

  A case in point was William B. Mack, who played Joe Gerson, the self-sacrificing murderer in Within the Law on Broadway many years ago. Nobody meeting Mack, a picture of diffidence, would ever have guessed that he was connected even remotely with show business. He had great difficulty obtaining work in the theatre because he simply was unable to give an “office” performance. Finally, when Holbrook Blinn cast Mack in Within the Law, it was something of a Broadway revolution. Mack, instead of doing the traditional heavy-breathing, glary-eyed villain, did it gently, speaking softly. All by himself, he set a new pattern for heavies, even interspersing some humor. It’s a brand of acting I particularly admire—to the point, non-arty.

  There is, of course, an aspect of acting that gets its share of notice in print and elsewhere and that is the “art” of it. To begin with my bailiwick, our pictures at Warner’s were programmers created purely to satisfy the need of many thousands of theatres and their weekly and frequently semiweekly double-feature bills. Not long ago, Freddie Astaire was in New York to receive an honor, and during the course of it he was asked a number of questions. At one point his interviewers spoke at some length about the art of his dancing. Freddie stopped them cold in their tracks.

  “What do you mean—art?” he said. “Art—my foot! It was just hard, hard work. I broke my back getting those routines done, did everything that was necessary, and the only art in it was work. If it appeared like art, so much the better, but believe me, it was pure labor.” Freddie said it all. Acting is work, nothing more or less than work, and it comes into existence only with work.

  As to any overall Cagney theory of acting, I think back to about 1925, when I had been a professional actor only a short time. I was asked by some people to come down to talk to their drama class. I was supposed to tell these youngsters what I knew about acting and what my theories were. When I stood before them, I said I didn’t know anything about it really. I just made my living at it. On reflection, that seems to have been my philosophy all the way through.

  I realize there is a great deal of theorizing about acting. There are those who speak of the subjective viewpoint, others who speak of the objective viewpoint, and all kinds of shadings between. My personal feeling is simply this: the meaning of acting is implicit in the word itself. Acting means acting, action—and I’m constantly amazed by the behavior of young people today who take up screen time just being there. I’d add only one other thing to these things I’ve been saying about acting from my point of vantage: you should quit when you’re psychologically finished.

  Jim Jeffries once got up in the ring at Hollywood Regents Stadium after a very fulsome introduction. He said his few words and added, “Well, boys and girls, I think I’ll quit while I’m still standing.” Surely that’s the best, the only way to quit. For the ones who hang on hoping it’s all going to strike again—no. It never does.

  Upon retirement, I soon found that there weren’t enough hours in the day. When one begins to give full time to beauty in all its myriad forms, the hours close in. I cannot ever remember not being moved, and I mean most deeply, by beauty. Once I was looking at the charming ballet dancer, Harriet Hoctor. Instead of landing from one of her ascents, she settled to the ground like some ethereal bird. Watching her, I burst suddenly into tears, not loudly but enough for my wife to know something had happened to her old man. She asked me what the matter was and I said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that this thing hit me.” But I cry at horse races, footraces—anything where I’m looking at total effort. It just hits me in the center and I cry.

  I have always appreciated art; whether I could create it or not is open to question. Certainly I can recall in my preschool years copying out of the newspapers, just drawing pictures of shoes and clothing and people the way kids will. One art teacher in grammar school around 1911 took us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where for the first time I beheld the work of that great American master, Thomas Eakins, and in particular his painting “The Thinker,” a man standing with hands in pockets, looking at the ground. I haven’t seen that painting since, but I’ve never forgotten it.

  Over the years I’ve done caricatures of my friends, and when I toured Army hospitals in Europe during the war, I would do caricatures of the wounded kids on their plaster casts in the hope that that would amuse them momentarily at least. Then in the late 1950s I was with my old friend Jack Bailey in a restaurant. Across the aisle from us was a youngster with an interesting face, which I drew. Jack asked me how long I had been doing that, and I admitted it had been for a span of years. He asked me why I didn’t do something about it, and the next day he made sure I did.

  He arrived at our house with a box full of paints and canvas. In time he introduced me to his teacher, Sergei Bongart, a Russian from Kiev—a great painter, a great human being. I’ve rejoiced both in his tutelage and his friendship. My lessons with him are highly beneficial, although I must confess that during them we talk more than we paint.

  When I first came to Sergei, he thought I was just another actor dilettante. He asked me if I was serious, and on receiving emphatic assurance on the point, he began his very interesting teaching process. He drew a square on a piece of cardboard and divided it into four different-shaded parts. “There,” he said, “are your four values: light, halftone, dark, and black. Now, this is what you are going to do first. You’re going to do a still life in black and white.”

  To be able to see the values in stark black and white is quite a trick, and I worked on that for two months, producing some of the most horrendous things ever to sully a canvas. But I kept after my homework, and one day I flashed a still life on him that, heart-warmingly, he applauded. It was the first thing I ever did that he labeled as professional, and this led on to the next plateau: color. Once again I churned out some lively horrors, but gradually I began to come up with some meaningful relationships of form, color, and perspective. I think the first thing I learned is that although certain skills are attained and stay with one, you never have all the answers. You keep plugging away trying to learn something.

  Since childhood, a certain fella has been on my mind. This is the fighter who goes through his career as a terrific puncher but also as a terrific receiver. He winds up with a flat nose; cauliflower ears; thick, protrusive lips; proud flesh over his eyes; cuts on the cheekbone; slashes around his mouth—a human caricature. I’ve seen these fellas come out of fights with everything hanging loose—ears, lips, eyes—but victorious. This kind of guy has stayed in my mind for years. I have been making sketches of him with arm held high by the referee although his legs are folding under him; his eyes are almost sightless from the pounding—but still he stands, a battered hulk, victorious. From these sketches I did an oil painting I call “The Winner” and took it into Bongart.

  “Jesus Christ, Jimmy! Who’s that?”

  “I’ve been thinking of this poor guy. He’s numbered by the thousands in the fight racket.”

  “Very spooky, very spooky.”

  And infinitely sad as well. When I did the fight movies I always used the smallest gloves we could get. They would cut, but I’d much rather be cut than have a concussion headache for twenty-four hours or longer. For years I’ve been advocating total removal of gloves for fighters. With bone against bone, flesh against flesh, they would, for example, hit somebody on top of the head with the bare fist just onc
e. Thereafter they’d become sharpshooters or body punchers, aiming at vulnerable points with considerably less danger involved. I’ve always contended this is the only way to stop boys dying in the ring from cerebral hemorrhages.

  I remember a boy being killed this way at the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles. I told my friend, Jim Richardson, then city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, that he really should start a campaign to take the gloves off those kids. I explained to him that it was the damned glove that caused those murderous concussions. After determining that I was perfectly serious about this, Richardson assigned his sports editor to interview me over the phone. This goddamned clown evidently thought I was looking for publicity because he made a joke of the entire thing. He said, “I expect to hear any day now that Cagney’s going to do a new fight picture called The Return of Jim Plague, Bare-knuckle Fist Fighter.” This little witticism reached the public a few days before a boy in an amateur bout, wearing a headguard, was killed in a Los Angeles ring.

  I have long cherished a bronze pair of fighters, a sculpture with an interesting history. Before these two were cast, they were in wax model form—the work, I hoped and believed, of Charles Russell. If they were from his hands, it was the only non-Western piece he ever did. I bought this model from a chap named Britsman, a biographer of Russell’s, who had been in contact with Russell and his wife over the years. Britsman gave me the opportunity to subscribe to a projected casting of a number of Russell’s Western pieces. Almost to one side in the mass of material Britsman had collected was this wax model of two fighters in combat. The model was unsigned, hence its authenticity as a Russell was very moot. Because I’ve been interested in fighters all my life, I was attracted to it, and Mr. Britsman told me to take it, saying he had no use for it. Appreciatively, I kept the fighters through many years, but of course, being wax, they began to deteriorate, and I realized they should be cast for preservation.

  Authentication was a difficult business, however. Then one evening on television I saw Milburn “Doc” Stone, talking with real assurance on Russell paintings. I got in touch with Milburn, whom I did not then know, and during a pleasant evening together he told me about Frederick Renner, who is the expert on Russells. Renner was able to come out to see my wax model, and he said that even though there was no signature, it was undoubtedly a Russell. At the same time he explained that he couldn’t authenticate it officially because if, in the very faint likelihood that it turned out to be a fraud, he, Renner, would be held responsible for misauthentication. This I quite understood. He told me to get in touch with Joe de Young, an old friend of Russell’s, who was himself a sculptor/painter. Perhaps Joe could help me.

  I took the model to Joe. Joe is deaf and, interestingly, although he can speak, he always writes down what he wants to communicate. When Joe saw the model, he smiled broadly, looked at me, and reached for his pencil. He wrote, “I was there when he did it.” I had always wondered who the two fighters might be, and I asked Joe. Joe said he was in Shelby, Montana, when Russell did the model in July 1923, and the fighters were Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbon, who had fought a memorable heavyweight championship bout there that month. Joe said he watched Russell craft the piece, and it was from Joe that I obtained written authentication that I did indeed own an original Russell. I had it cast in bronze and now it lives forever, gladdening my heart and the heart of anyone who sees it.

  The reality and life I see in Russell, Beierstadt, Remington, and all the other great Western painters is literally glorious, and I am much amused by the boys who have condemned them as corny. The wise boys in the critical hierarchy have recently elected Andrew Wyeth, that solidly, richly human painter, as the current corny one. To me such nonsense points up the essential bankruptcy of those who throw out the rules. One works or plays without rules at real peril to function, and when in art I see abstract and non-representational work that defies the sound basis of painting aesthetics, I know that I am looking at nonsense, and pretty pretentious nonsense at that. There isn’t a human endeavor you can name—baseball, government, boxing, education—in which common-sense rules aren’t essential and profitable. If one freewheels his way as total self-arbiter, one loses one’s way.

  One thinks of Fauvism. Les Fauves (The Wild Beasts) were young French painters at the beginning of this century who revolted against nature as a source of art’s truth. A fundamental rule in painting, many centuries old, is that in exterior landscaping the light is warm, the shadow cool; in an interior, of course, the shadows are warm, the light is cool. This is so because it is inevitably a north light used to light up the subject. The Fauves, however, changed the rules to suit themselves, and one can see their heritage in modern abstract art, with its consequent burden of chaos. In this nonsense I see nothing to intrigue the eye or the heart—which in my view is what art is all about. As to what art is not about, there are, among others, the works of Picasso, which I consider glamorous chunks of garbage, daubs of brilliant, uninhibited fakery.

  A very practical instance of the need for rules was the Dempsey-Willard fight in 1919, which I saw on film not long ago. Dempsey beat Willard very badly, and as he knocked him down, Dempsey stood over Willard, waiting for him to rise and continue. The film’s commentary was interesting for what it didn’t say. Evidently the people who put the film together didn’t realize that they were witnessing the last prize fight ever that allowed the man who knocks a fighter down to stand over his victim. It was just after this fight that the rule of the neutral corner was instituted, the rule that requires a fighter after making a knockdown to go to a neutral corner before the referee begins the count. By an interesting irony, it was this very rule that cost Jack his championship. Seven years later, when he was fighting Gene Tunney, Dempsey knocked him to the canvas and completely forgot the neutral-corner rule. The referee had to stop and insist that Dempsey go to a far corner, and by the time the count was started there was enough delay for Tunney to gather his strength and come back to win. The neutral-corner rule was necessary because it made a prize fight a genuine contest rather than a primitive exhibition. It is another verification that rules are essential in keeping order in any sort of effort.

  In defining art, one can’t do better, I believe, than citing the view of William Ernest Hocking, professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard, who wrote the stimulating book The Strength of Men and Nations. I have heard many definitions of art, but Professor Hocking’s seems to me the best. Art, he says, is life—plus caprice. Thus, a simple declarative statement grows into a Shakespearean line, or several notes brought together become the theme of a Brahms symphony. Caprice, that element over and above life itself, operating under the artist’s structured guidance, creates beauty where before there was only ordinariness.

  Caprice, of course, is an undefinable thing, summoned whence no one knows, creating its own kind of tensions. Patricia Steinke, a fine painter, wrote kiddingly of her feelings when facing a virgin canvas:

  Whenever I see a canvas stretched

  It makes me feel, oh, so wretched!

  I wrote her back:

  You felt what others were made to feel:

  Rembrandt, Homer, and Charley Peale

  When they face the pallid, tortured tightness

  A need to impose a diviséd brightness—

  That need strong part of the artist’s store

  To create a life where there was none before.

  My bent for art has been obvious since early childhood, and if my father and mother had been more aware of it all those long years ago, it would probably have been well if they had steered me in that direction. I might not have been as materially successful as I was in show business, but, taking it all in all, I might have been a lot happier.

  I can’t leave the subject without hearkening back to my introduction to active art tutelage through the agency of Jack Bailey. Jack, for so many years the master of ceremonies for “Queen for a Day,” is a remarkable fella. A former alcoholic, he has been an AA activist for over two d
ecades, and besides his work there he has studied trombone, the piano, and music in general. He is a serious artist, in addition, and does an excellent job there too. I was talking to another old friend, Ralph Wheelwright, about this many-sided man. I told Ralph of how Bailey would do his daily show, take his wife out to dinner, go to an AA meeting or an art lesson or a trombone lesson or a piano lesson. And to top all these accomplishments off, Bailey made his own picture frames and stretched his own canvases. I detailed to Ralph just how tremendous a fella Bailey was and how dedicated he was to living.

  Some time later Ralph was walking into a Beverly Hills art shop, and who should be walking out but Jack Bailey, arms full of manufactured blank canvases. As it happened, Ralph knew Jack by sight, but Jack didn’t know Ralph. Ralph, I must explain, has a very cold blue eye, and his myopia requires him to wear thick glasses. With this intimidating appearance in his favor, he stopped Jack dead in the door with the words, “Mr. Bailey, I must say this. I must say this. You, sir, are a liar and a fraud.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Jack, properly stunned by this style of address from a total stranger.

  “Yes, you know what I mean. A good friend of yours—and I mean a very good friend—has been boasting to me about you as long as I’ve known him: what a remarkable man you are, how you do this, do that, and among other things how you make your own frames and stretch your own canvas. Yet here you are, coming out of a shop with your arms full of everything he described to me as homemade. And I repeat to you, sir, that you are a liar and a fraud.”

  “Just a minute,” Jack said. “Who said this?”