Cagney by Cagney Page 3

  Artie was always there for some of my roughest moments, and I’ll go ahead of my story a bit to those desperate years in vaudeville when my wife and I were abjectly, stony broke. On a crosstown bus, who should sit down beside me but Artie. We were so glad to see each other that he changed his plans for the evening and spent it with us in our shabby apartment. He asked if things were rough, and I said they were rougher than that. In answer to another direct question I said, “Yes, I could use some money,” at which he took out his wallet and gave me half his weekly salary. The salary was sixteen bucks a week. At the time he was a Wall Street board boy, the one who chalks up the quotations, then erases them as the changes occur. That eight dollars looked like big money to us, as indeed it was. Every week thereafter for some weeks Artie would show up with eight bucks, half his substance. Not long after, I got a job and sent him a check for the total amount, but he sent it back. I argued with him, pointing out that I had only borrowed the money, but Artie is Hungarian, and the stubbornness of Hungarians is legendary. He would never take that money back, and it was only much later that we were in a position to return his warm good will by having him and his wife as guests at our farm for many summers. You don’t forget rare ones like Artie Klein.

  Nor another friend in that category, a fella who has been close to me for well over fifty years—Jim Fair. He, his wife, and I have been friends all that time. Before the Hollywood days when my wife and I were out in California visiting my mother-in-law, we were comparatively affluent, with a season of vaudeville behind us. But we stayed just a little too long and found ourselves strapped financially. In order to get back to New York we had to reach our only acquaintance then who was really solvent—Jim Fair—he having worked many years at a good salary for the New York Times.

  I sent Jim a wire, and the money came to us immediately. On our way across the country, we got off in Chicago, and I dropped into the Chicago Tribune office where a friend was working. He got on one end of the telegraph wire and reached Jim on the other end at the Times. The very first thing Jim asked me was, “Do you need any more of that California medicine?” Happily, we didn’t, and when I got back to New York and started working again, I paid Jim, and we were in fairly good condition from then on. One of life’s bounties is that the Jim Fairs and the Artie Kleins were there when we needed them, and we haven’t forgotten that.

  But returning to my very early years, another thing I’ve never forgotten is when I was about twelve and my education-conscious mother took me to a lecture on what is now called ecology. It was termed conservation then, and my realizing for the first time that land erosion was an actual living threat to our world was a shock I’ve never really gotten over. This, together with my fervent and unchanging love of the countryside, made me think seriously for a while of becoming a forester or scientific agriculturist. But although I followed neither of these professions, their urgencies and deep concerns are mine and have been mine throughout my life.

  2

  I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working. My first regular job was at fourteen when I got up daily at five-thirty to make my breakfast and go down to Park Row and the old New York Sun, where I was an office boy. I delivered proofs and copies of the newspaper to uptown firms, and off I’d go, all ninety-seven pounds of me, with a heavy roll of newspapers under one arm and a mountainous load of advertising proofs under the other. Off to all the big stores—Bloomingdale’s, Stern’s, Altaian’s, Bonwit Teller’s—and each one got their set of proofs and papers. I was carrying a load that seemed to weigh more than I did, and my reward once a week was a packet containing five bucks, which I handed to my mother unopened. That was, as I say, my first regular job, but before that I had been selling programs in the armories, and for this I got fifty cents an evening. That first fifty-cent piece I handed my mother made us both glow with pride.

  An after-school job was mandatory for us boys. We couldn’t have subsisted otherwise. By the time I was fifteen, the three oldest boys—Harry, Eddie, and I—were working at the New York Public Library. My beginning salary was twelve dollars and a half per month, for which I worked twenty-two and a half hours a week. After a year, I became a custodian at a splendid increase to seventeen and a half dollars a month. Our job was to pick up books left on the table and return them to their proper place on the shelves. On Saturdays, in the kids’ section, this could be and was murderous. This at the time was my day job. At night I worked at the Lenox East Settlement House to pick up some extra bucks, and on Sunday I worked as a ticket seller on the Hudson River Day Line to pick up some extra extra bucks. Let’s say I was busy.

  All this while I was going to Stuyvesant High School, where I also picked up a little education with my fists. My street fights weren’t wild scrambles. I knew how to box from the age of six, when a mature neighborhood boy showed me how to jab, feint, hook left, cross with a right, and a hook—the business. I used to work out with real fighters, and one pro gave me extended training in things I already knew basically.

  Then I learned that a friend of mine had made ten dollars in a preliminary bout, so without saying a word to my mother, I began to train for a pro encounter. I’d get up very early before school, run a couple of miles, and come back in. With the loss of rest and a training diet that forbade sugar, I was very quickly the shape of a rail. One morning Mom took a look at me and pointedly asked about my going out so early, and what did I think I was doing to myself? I explained eagerly that I could make ten bucks easily in a preliminary because I could lick most of those fellas without strain. “Well, that’s just fine,” Mom said, “but can you lick me?” “No, and I’m not even going to try,” I said. She explained that’s what I’d have to do before I could do any professional fighting, so just at its genesis my ring career came to an end.

  But the non-professional battles never seemed to stop. One night I was doing my homework and a kid rushed in to say that a marauding gang from Eighty-third Street had arrived. I ran down to the street to behold a surging broomstick fight, so I grabbed one of them out of the hands of an Eighty-third warrior and charged into battle. Big brave me, and you can spell that d-o-p-e. As I went swinging and banging right and left, out of the blackness came a brick, which caught me in the left side. I went to my knees and stayed there. I crawled to the curb, violently sick, and for years after, those lower ribs would spasm and hurt like hell.

  The biggest claim to fame in our neighborhood was when you could throw a punch. Anybody who couldn’t was in a bad way. To establish a reputation, to be respected by the other lads in the area, one had to take care of oneself with the fists. This is why I emphasize all the street fighting we did. The fights were simply an extreme attempt to call attention to oneself as “a hell of a fella.” Need I say that this is also a pattern of history—the American Indian, the warriors of the Masai in Africa—and so many more?

  In our neighborhood, we continually had to prove ourselves. My friend Bootah, for instance, hung by his fingertips from the copings of roofs five stories high to show what a brave guy he was. The boys who had no talents or little intellectual equipment took the best available shortcut to the forefront: they became prize fighters. Some of our neighborhood boys who did that had no talent at all. With no skill, just guts, they went deliberately into the fight business and became club fighters. This meant most of them wound up with cauliflower ears and noses to match. But those scars were the badges of their trade and occasion for pride. The boys had to some tangible degree proven themselves.

  About all this street fighting I’ve discussed, it’s important to remember that the Cagney kids conformed to the well-established neighborhood pattern. We weren’t exceptional. We weren’t battling phenomena or hyper-aggressive. We weren’t anything more than normal kids reacting to our environment—an environment in which street fighting was an accepted way of life. And in reacting to that environment we had what I suppose could be called colorful young lives. Some while back I visited Ninety-sixth Street again and knocked
on the door of a family who had been on the block since our years there, 1909, 1910. I identified myself to Mrs. Fisher, the mother of an early pal of mine. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember you. You were the boy who was always fighting.” I must say I was surprised at that. I never realized I was always fighting.

  For much-needed recreation I played baseball with a team sporting the glamorous monicker of the Yorkville Nut Club, a title that described at least a few of its members. For much-needed income not long after I graduated from Stuyvesant High School, I got a job in an architect’s office. At that time my brothers were working their way through college at Tiffin’s Tea Room on 114th Street. I had three free evenings a week, so I asked my brothers if they could get me a job at Tiffin’s, which they quickly did. We had a merry time of it because with all of us looking so much alike, the average customer was baffled as to the identity of his waiter. When one of us would be called, the gracious reply was, “My brother has your table.” A very efficient arrangement—for the Cagneys.

  Both 1918 and 1919 were years of great change for my family as for many others. I had been making tentative stabs at art work from the age of six, so the Student Army Training Corps at Columbia University interested me because it encouraged those who could draw to enlist in their camouflage unit. So at one fell swoop I became art student, soldier, and college boy. Because of my long-felt interest in sketching, I settled down to my studies with anticipation. One of my non-art classes was in oral reading, and I was perfectly fine in it except that my rate of speech was so rapid fire that the poor professor couldn’t understand me. Very patiently he would explain the proper tempo to me, and I knew exactly what he meant. The difficulty was that when I tried it, I’d rush along with the old rat-a-tat-tat. I daresay he had adequate reason to flunk me. Also at Columbia, I was in the band as a drummer, a function I enjoyed very much. I think I was the only one in the group who couldn’t read music.

  I was at Columbia when my dad died. I got a message he was about to leave for the hospital, so I hurried home to accompany him, but he had gone. I took the streetcar, and when I arrived at the hospital I went to the desk nurse and said, “I want to see Mr. James Cagney.” Her face fell.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “He died this morning.” The flu epidemic was then raging, and caskets were piled six or seven high outside the cemeteries, so many people were afflicted. Mom was carrying Jeannie at the time, and Dad was sent to the hospital so that Mom would be safe from infection. So quickly had my sunny, charming old man left us. Old! He was just forty-one.

  I returned to the Army and Columbia, but with war’s end and the birth of Jeannie, the need to keep the family exchequer in good shape came back as strongly as ever. As respite from my various jobs, I played a lot of baseball on Sundays with the Nut Club, and this was an endeavor right in harmony with the times. In those days our idols weren’t movie stars or ham politicians. We revered the great men of baseball, and how wonderful those names sound even now all these years after: John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Hooks Wiltse, Larry Doyle, Fred Merkel, Roger Bresnahan, and Art Fletcher! Not long ago my wife was going through some old trunks and found the baseball uniform I wore with the Nut Club. I also managed to save my old catcher’s mask; it’s hanging on a nail in my dressing room today.

  My favorite baseball memory is of the time when the prisoners’ association at Sing Sing, the Mutual Welfare League, invited our ball team up to play. Numbered on their teams were a few ex-minor leaguers, so a game between us was not going to be Amateur Night by any means. When we arrived on the field, as catcher, I naturally began to warm up our pitcher. Then, right next to me, a voice said, “Hello, Red.” We had been warned not to speak to the convicts so I pretended not to hear, but the voice continued, “What’s the matter, you getting stuck up?” I looked and there was a kid who had sat next to me in school. “Bootah, how are you?” I said, and shook hands, another violation of the rules. I asked him what the rap was, and he said, “Five to ten. Shot a cop. Russell’s up here on the same rap.” There beside Bootah was a kid I knew named Russell, a fine-looking boy. They had nicked a cop during a stick-up and were sent up for assault.

  The first inning began, and who should step up to the plate but another old neighborhood boy, “Dirty Neck” Jack Lafferty. He had been a particular chum of my dad’s, and he told me how sorry he was to hear of his death. I remember my dad telling me that Lafferty at a very young age felt sure sometime somewhere he was going to kill someone. My dad told him not to be silly. Lafferty was the first saloon brawler my dad ever saw break a beer mug on the bar and carve another man’s face with it. Later, Lafferty tried to steal an automobile belonging to a guy named Bull Mahoney, who came along in time to prevent the theft. Lafferty stuck a gun in Mahoney’s belly and blew him wide open. So Lafferty’s instinct as a youngster that he was bound to kill came sadly true, and for the Mahoney murder he was sentenced to twenty years-to-life. My old man, using some Tammany Hall connections, went to bat for Lafferty, and the sentence was reduced to fourteen years. And now here he was with my other neighborhood pals, playing baseball in Ossining.

  Later in the game I went down to coach first base, and a man there said, “Hey, Red! You go down to the East Side House any more?” Another old chum, and before the game was over, I had met two more. Everybody on our team knew somebody there. That is proof, if proof be wanted, that our neighborhood produced something more than ex-vaudevillians. I will always remember July 21, 1927, a night some years after that Sing Sing ball game, because that was the night Jack Dempsey fought Jack Sharkey, it was the night I was playing in a Broadway show, and it was the night that Bootah died in the electric chair.

  A question people have asked me through the years is why the Cagney boys didn’t get involved with guns and crime the way my old Sing Sing pals did. The answer is simple: there wasn’t a chance. We had a mother to answer to. If any of us got out of line, she just belted us, and belted us emphatically. We loved her profoundly, and our driving force was to do what she wanted because we knew how much it meant to her.

  In Sidney Kingsley’s play Dead End, one of the kids says to his mother, “Look, Ma, Im dancin’,” as he puts a hand on his head, the other on his behind, and cavorts around. This got a big laugh on Broadway, but not from me. It was a vital, sobering line because it reminded me that in our mother we always had somebody we could show off for. Whatever impressive things we did, we were saying in effect, “Look, Ma, I’m dancin’,” hoping to be as big as the big men she thought us to be. We loved the great staunchness of her, and at times we four brothers together would impulsively put our arms around her, hold her, and hug her. She’d look at us, her nose would get red, and she’d start to cry. She just couldn’t take all that love.

  She had a wonderfully practical way of showing her love and concern for us. For instance, she introduced us to the Lenox Hill Settlement House, with all its many activities and varied advantages for people young and old in the neighborhood. Typically she thought it would be good for a future doctor’s speech skills if Harry joined the dramatics club at the House. This came at a time when I was working there, running the switchboard, racking pool balls, and serving as an unofficial 130-pound bouncer. Harry was duly cast in a play, but he became ill suddenly and I had to jump in for him. This was my real introduction to acting, but that was by no means the reason for my going into show business. The dramatic club wanted some scenery designed and I did that, working under the guidance of a man named Burton James. I painted the scenery, I drew dance posters, and I designed the cover for the House’s magazine.

  It was around this time that an interesting personality change came to me. When I was very young, I was very much the showoff—always doing the fancy things in catching a ball, for instance, and I suspect that’s what made me a catcher. Catcher is a flashy position, with the chance to do all kinds of acrobatics—like catching those high foul balls, for one thing. But when I was about sixteen or seventeen I began to get shy and self-cons
cious. I mentioned this to Burton James at the Settlement House. I told him I wasn’t sure of myself anymore, and he looked me right in the eye and said, “Well, maybe you’re getting some sense.” Which I think was a very sound observation.

  But I didn’t have much time to think about it because always, always, there was work. The need for that never stopped. I went on to Wanamaker’s to wrap packages endlessly, and it was there that I met a fella who had some interest in show business. Inevitably he talked of it a great deal, and in the discussion I pointed out two things: I wanted a job that would pay some good money, and Wanamaker’s was an unlikely place to get it. My friend and I talked about vaudeville acts and one of their prime attractions, dancing. I couldn’t dance at all except for that marvelously intricate step, the Peabody, named I think after its inventor, a Boston cop. The Peabody is a dance virtually impossible to describe, but it is challenging to do and intriguing to watch. I had been shown its complicated maneuvers by a kid, Joe Hevron, at the Settlement House, and I had it all down quite pat. Incidentally, whenever these days I see those two very good professional dancers, George Murphy and George Burns, they insist I get up to do the Peabody. I haven’t forgotten it. But in my Wanamaker days that was the only step I had mastered, and I felt very secure in it. My friend at the store told me that if I could dance a little bit, I might get a job with a vaudeville act then up at Keith’s Eighty-first Street Theatre.