Cagney by Cagney Read online

  “A very good friend.”

  “Exactly who is this good friend?”

  “Jim Cagney.”

  After taking a beat, Jack said, “He’s an actor, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s an Irishman, isn’t he?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, the truth isn’t in him!” And with that, Jack clutched his canvases in his arms and ran out of the store.

  12

  Not long ago I was at a party where I met a young actor, a charming fella, seemingly confident and well-poised, a pleasure to talk to. Unexpectedly, he asked me if I had ever been in therapy.

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Well,” he said, “everybody I know has been in therapy at one time or another.”

  “Not I.”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  I tried to help him understand by pointing out that I was too busy trying to keep the groceries on the table to take time out to lie down on anybody’s couch. After having had an awful lot of early jolts, when another came along I was able to shrug my shoulders and say, “Oh, what the hell.” I have met so many people like that young man in our business who have spent so many precious and life-wasting hours on the psychiatrist’s couch. I think people who do that are taking themselves too seriously and are just self-absorbed to the point where they are completely miserable. If they could just love something outside themselves, life would ease up for them. This self-absorption gives one an added and totally superfluous personality. Of course, at times an added personality is externally imposed. As I wrote of one (among many similar) Hollywood lady:

  She walks in a beauty so proudly paradable

  It’s hard to believe that it’s biodegradable.

  Absorption in things other than self is the secret of a happy life, I’m sure. May I ramble on a bit about some of the absorptions of my later years? In addition to my love of the land, there is my love of the sea and for any ship under sail. I favor the traditional Chesapeake Bay bugeye. Years ago I saw a topsail schooner being built at the Crane Shipyard in Ipswich, Massachusetts. As I walked into the yard they were putting the decking on its classically beautiful hull, and I fell in love with this entrancing lady, a replica of the Baltimore Clipper. After she was launched, I kept track of her until a point when she was in Florida; thereafter I couldn’t trace her.

  A bit later I was cruising around Newport Beach Harbor with Spence Tracy in a little putt-putt, and I looked up to behold the Swift of Ipswich, my beautiful topsail schooner. They had brought her out to the West Coast to sell. At that time I had an old standard-type schooner, the Martha, eighty-six feet overall and about fifty-six on the water line. She was a great old boat, launched in 1907, and she’s still afloat, with full-length planking and not a butt in her anywhere. The Martha sailed like a dream, and I certainly didn’t need or want another one. But the little motion picture company we had at the time was contemplating filming the story of Port Royal, the infamous pirate city that disappeared beneath the sea presumably because it was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Western world. I asked brother Bill to buy the Swift of Ipswich because it would fit beautifully into any such story of the sea.

  But not long after we bought the boat, Paramount did a big pirate epic, Frenchman’s Creek, and shortly after, Bob Hope did The Princess and the Pirate, in which he kidded all pirate stories. All of this made it very inauspicious for us to do the picture, so it was dropped. However, we kept the Swift from 1941 to 1956, chartering it out to other companies who wanted a boat of that type. She was a very colorful vessel, and I loved her very much. When we sold her, because I hadn’t anything to sail in the East I ordered a forty-three-foot Chesapeake Bay bugeye designed by Chapell, the man who created the Swift. This is a ketch rig job that sails in shallow waters, and it has been wonderful for me and for my friends and family. This boat draws only three feet, nine inches, and on the East Coast there are so many places she can put into, exciting little inlets that she can traverse comfortably.

  It’s a different story on the West Coast for sailing. There in conventional waters, when I used to sail to Catalina, down to San Diego, and up to Santa Barbara, I didn’t have too much fun. I am inclined in any case to seasickness, and I never know when it’s going to hit. I’ll be out on a day when it’s very rough and no sign of mal de mer, and then go out another day when the weather’s not bad at all and I’ll heave for hours. The West Coast sailing is predictable; in the East there is always the unknown beckoning just beyond the next headland.

  In pondering the durable beauty of the land, it has always been a dream of mine to build a stone house with my own hands. On my New York farm I started to do just that with the guidance of Gerald W. Papendick—“Pappy” to me—who can build anything. Pappy, a builder and contractor and man of many talents, lives in Joshua Tree, California, but he comes to my place in Dutchess County and works there summers. When I designed the very simple house I live in, I got Pappy, who on top of everything else is an excellent stonemason, to give me moral support when I began to work. But, as it turned out, every time I went to pick up a stone to fit in a particular place, Pappy would say pleasantly, “No, not that one—that one.” I had the talent for picking precisely the wrong stone every single time. He would pick the right one unerringly. I’m damned glad I deferred to him because the result is an interesting-looking house, simple, sturdy, no nonsense.

  Our family always gets a good laugh when the newspapers talk about the Cagney “estate” in Dutchess County. Some people near us at the farm were astonished at the little house I have. “This guy’s nuts,” they said. “Why would Cagney build a house like this in a place like our area where it’s all so plush and so very fancy?” The plain truth is I don’t like plush houses, I don’t like fancy houses. I like to be able to sit down and put up my feet whenever I feel like it. Big, handsome places to me are a burden. So my Bill and I live in our simple little place overlooking a six-acre lake, which was the reason I bought the farm in the first place.

  I have always had a thing for horses from just about as far back as I can remember. When I was a tiny kid, a friend of my dad’s named Jimmy Hogan drove a two-wheeled cart for Blank’s Meat Store on Eightieth Street and First Avenue. As I was playing on the street, he would come along with his horse-drawn cart, put me on the seat next to him, and take me on the rest of his deliveries. His horse was a big gray, almost white, with a huge behind. That horse looked like a giant to me as it clop-clop-clopped along in front of us. I was absolutely enchanted, loving it totally, and from that time on I’ve had a love for horses that has really marked my life.

  My mother and the family had been riding horse-drawn streetcars from childhood, of course, and so it was a very emotional experience for her, my grandmother, and for me when we took a ride in 1907 on the last horse-drawn cars that traveled First Avenue. There is a beauty and a gallantry about horses that I have always felt deeply. They have always been my first love among animals, and I am an animal lover. My favorite horse is the Morgan, so functional, so beautiful with that small head, dish nose, arched neck, short back, and broad chest. They are perfect as either a working horse or a family horse, and anybody can ride them or drive them. They have a turn of speed as needed, too. I have been raising them off and on for the past thirty years, and along the way getting into trotters and pacers for a bit, which proved a mistake. One time I bought an Arabian stud to cross and hopefully fine up the Morgan heads, but that didn’t work either. Now I am content to just breed my Morgans and to love them. I don’t kid myself that I’m in it to turn a buck. The unvarnished fact is that the happiness I get out of just being around animals is literally indescribable. Seeing a gallant horse on the turn giving everything in him to win can make me choke up.

  Also I can exult inwardly just by looking at a herd of cattle in a field when I drive by. At one ti
me I went into cattle in a rather big way. For some time I had been hearing of the fine attributes of the Scotch Highlander, so I asked Rolie Winters if he’d go with me to take a look at some of them in a place in Pennsylvania. At that time Rolie was willing to get on a train and go anywhere, so off we went to Pittsburgh, where we were met by a Colonel Stetler, who drove us out to a farm that he chose to call his ranch. The colonel, wearing a ten-gallon hat and the high-heeled boots, took us out to see the cattle.

  Scotch Highlanders have long red hair, and the red was about the color of mine when I was younger. Moreover, their eyes are rather sleepy and droopy. Winters looked at the cows, looked at me, and said, “Are these beef cattle?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That means you’re going to kill them and eat them?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they look like your relatives!”

  I didn’t buy any of the colonel’s cattle, but later I discovered a Scotch Highland farm in western Massachusetts. From there I bought a bull and four breed heifers and shipped them to the Vineyard. They needed no help; with all the grass and water they had, they flourished. When I bought the New York farm I sent them there. Then from South Dakota I bought almost a hundred head of Western Scotch Highland cattle, and the reproduction rate was very good indeed. Came then time for marketing them, and I found to my great sorrow that there was no such thing as a lively interest in Scotch Highland cattle. I shipped some of their steaks down to Ralph Bellamy, then in a New York play, and he took a couple of them to a friend who ran a fancy steak house on Canal Street. The man ate one and said it was the best he’d ever tasted.

  The Highland has a way of putting the marbling inside the beef without laying it in great layers on the outside, which the Hereford and the Angus do. Thus the marbling is in the Scotch Highland at an early age, giving it an extra deliciousness. At an arranged meeting, I met a man who was also a friend of Bellamy’s, and he gave me something to consider.

  “Mr. Cagney,” he said, “you don’t know me and I don’t know you. But you’re a good friend of Bellamy’s, and that’s good enough for me. Now, I’m a meat buyer for many of the plush restaurants in town, but I’m also a lawyer by trade. I buy beef on the side. And I want to give you some advice. When you take the beautiful hide off a cow, there’s meat remaining, that’s all. What the cattle looked like with the hide on interests no one. Butchered, they are just food. Now, I’m advising you to sell all those beautiful cattle of yours, and put your money in blue-chip stock, because this is going to be a losing game for you.”

  I thanked him very much, and he said he was happy to be of help if indeed he had. He had. On my return to the farm, I called the market men and made a deal with them to take all my herd-all, that is, except for about a dozen, because it is quite true they are beautiful animals, and they are mightily eye-pleasing as they graze on a rich green hillside.

  In enjoying the farm and my retirement, I have had to be aware of the need to maintain my health against the encroachments of age as best I can. My doctor tells me that if I want to be as active in my eighties as I am now in my seventies, twenty pounds must go. My living pattern in general is exemplary, but I must confess to one really pernicious habit: a consuming, racking passion for root beer floats—large size. My prime way to keep fit is to get out the old dancing board. When I did The West Point Story I was fifty-one, and in that I did a number with sixteen boys with a finish calling for a lot of hard dancing. The last bit consisted of doing a knee slide from the back of the stage down to the apron. This is a pretty vigorous business. Unknown to me, while we were doing the number, Gregory Peck was behind the camera. We shot this exhausting number five times and Gregory, then in his early thirties and knowing my age, mumbled to himself, “My God, how does he do it?” But he knew only my age; he didn’t know that having been a hoofer I was reasonably well equipped to go on.

  After my brother Harry died suddenly in 1964, I realized that a definitive health check was in order, so I got one and a clean bill of health from a bright young doctor. He asked me afterward to come down to Good Samaritan Hospital for some special tests. It seems they were intrigued by the fact of a sixty-five-year-old being in such good shape, and they wanted to find out why, particularly in view of the fact that I had been a professional athlete—a dancer—for forty-five years. I don’t know if they ever found out for sure why I have stayed in such a state for so long, but it surely has something to do with keeping active. At times, though, my Irish-Norwegian stubbornness has driven me to dangerous antics with my health. Many years ago I’d done something to my left arm, and bursitis came in with everything flying. One day I was sitting alone on the deck of my boat with the pain really taking off the top of my head. I was rocking back and forth in full-scale agony when I decided I’d had enough of it. “The hell with it,” I said, and I got up and swung my arm twenty-five times one way, twenty-five times the other. Then I sat down. Interestingly, that did it. No more pain. When I told my doctor brothers about it, they were properly aghast. “Do you realize what you could have done?” they asked. I told them at that moment I didn’t give a damn. In any case, I haven’t had bursitis in that arm since.

  Health, it seems to me, depends in many ways on being able to preserve one’s sense of wonder, to maintain an interest in all of life. I remember years ago telling my children, Jim and Casey, how completely necessary it is never to lose one’s sense of wonder, never to take things for granted, never to assume anything is commonplace. The alternative is disinterest, boredom. This can kill, and once I saw it happen.

  A friend of mine was involved. In the words of someone who knew him, our friend was “dying out of it.” This man was having trouble at home, and discouragements were building up. I could see it happening—the weight loss because of lack of appetite, the growing disinterest with life. I said to Ralph Bellamy, “Come on, we can’t let this happen to him.” Our friend was literally dying out of his whole life scheme. So Ralph and I went out, picked him up, took him for a long drive, made the talk, and told the jokes. Not long after, we did it again, once more in order to rekindle his interest in living. It didn’t work. He died. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him; he no longer maintained an interest, and so he just finished living.

  By contrast, there was another friend of mine, living in New Jersey, who had had several strokes and was in terminal condition. At the time I was in Goshen, New York, driving an exhibition race for the U. S. Savings Bond Drive. I heard that my pal in New Jersey was dying, so I drove down at once and I asked the nurse, a gal I’d known previously, how my friend was doing. “Well, it’s all over, Jim,” she said. “He’s really bad. Unconscious.” I asked if I could go in and she said there would be no harm.

  So I walked in, and here was my old friend, lying there, with hiccups racking his body and the sweat just pouring off his body. Death was in the room. I stood at the end of the bed and called him, “Will?” No answer. “Will?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “It’s Jim. Jim Cagney.”

  “Mmm-huh. Hello, Jim.”

  I started to talk. I told him about going to Goshen and driving the race and who I’d heard from recently and all the things I could think of that might interest him. Within a half hour or so, the hiccups had stopped, the sweat was over, and his right arm, which had been lying uselessly across his chest, was up behind his head. He was talking to me. Even with the slurred speech from the stroke, he talked and talked. It wasn’t many days before he was up and around, and he lived four years longer. And all of this because an interest was started again, a connection with life was begun and sustained.

  That interest and wonder in things comes in all forms and from every sector of life when it is stimulated. One would hardly expect young people of unique vision to emerge from my rough old neighborhood, but I think of the Torporcer boys among several of my old friends. There is George, who loved baseball bu
t was afflicted with very poor vision. Notwithstanding, his interest in the game was so strong that it ultimately led to the big leagues, where he maintained a career batting average of about .295. They called him “Specs” for obvious reasons, and the gallant perseverance of this man in the face of an almost insuperable physical obstacle testifies to his involvement with life. In 1952 George developed detached retinas and went completely blind. This stopped him not one solitary whit. He has kept going, and is presently writing and lecturing—doing many things sighted people would love to do if they had the gift.

  Then there is George’s younger brother, Bill Torporcer, who of course also shared those early days on the East Side of New York. Somewhere along the line Bill heard of my interest in verse, and recently he sent some remarkable poetry. In one of his sonnets Bill re-creates a picture he and I wondered at all those years ago—the picture of beauty seeking to maintain itself in the midst of turbulent squalor.

  As a kid, I was constantly amazed at a place on Second Avenue where the elevated train turned into Twenty-third Street and went south, then west again, and down through the narrow confines of Allen Street. How they managed to get that el structure between those tortuously close buildings I’ll never know. I used to marvel at it as I went to work each morning. I’d stand there, looking at that ingenious workmanship, almost waiting for the train to plow into one of those corner buildings. And in those corner buildings, dingy, heavy, and stolid, one could see even further evidences of man’s ability to reach up out of his confinement. Bill Torporcer put all of this into a sonnet:

  30.… at the oars …

  31. & 32.… with some friends …

  33.… and on the trotting track.

  34. The Victor—“chronic progressive fibrotic encephalopathy” (punch drunk). Oil portrait by Cagney.

  PLANTS ON THE FIRE ESCAPES OF THE SLUMS