Cagney by Cagney Page 4

  I went there at once. The act was called Every Sailor, and its personnel was all authentic Navy. Phil Dunning, a New York showman, at the time when he was a chief petty officer had seen this act when it was entertaining Navy men at various bases. Dunning took these sailors right off the USS George Washington and put them in vaudeville as an aid, so he explained, to the war effort. It was a female impersonation act, I found to my great surprise. Six guys in skirts serving basically as a chorus line, and one of the “girls” was quitting. I filled the vacancy and received, of all unbelievable sums, thirty-five dollars a week. That was a mountain of money for me in those worrisome days.

  And that is how I began to learn dancing—as a chorus girl. I faked it to begin with. I would stand in the entrance, catch the real dancers, and steal their steps. Thereafter, in all the dancing shows and acts I did, I learned by watching. In those days except for ballet instruction, there were few dancing schools, no place, really, where one could learn tap dancing. All we ever did was steal from each other, modify the steps to suit ourselves, and in that way develop our individual styles. Over the years I saw such great hoofers as Harland Dixon, Johnny Boyle, and Jack Donahue do their stuff, and each one of them had something I could borrow.

  The Every Sailor act died a natural death in time, and because I knew Mom didn’t really want me in something as uncertain as show business, I got a job at a brokerage house in Broad Street as a runner. I picked up comparison slips, went to the other firms that had made the deal with us, and awaited verification that a sale had been made of the stock. Back then to my office. If that sounds dull, I am here to tell you it was dull, and I hated it with a great intensity.

  Then, from somewhere, I heard there was a chorus boys’ casting call for the Broadway show Pitter Patter. This was a musical (based on The Hottentot, an old Willie Collier farce) that had opened at the Longacre Theatre in September 1920. I got in the show, and all this is fairly unmemorable except for two things: I went from chorus boy to specialty dancer—and in the show I met the great girl who became my wife. I can’t conceive of how lucky a guy can get, but this lady and I just celebrated our fifty-fourth wedding anniversary the other day, and it’s been joy all the way. I call her “Bill” because her given name is Willard. She later feminized that a bit by prefixing a Frances. Frances Willard Vernon. So in these pages when I speak of “my Bill,” I mean my wife; “Bill” solus means brother Bill. My Bill and I hit it off from the beginning, but there was some time to go and some money to make before we could get married.

  To show you how deep-dyed was my habit of holding more than one job, I did any number of things in the Pitter Patter company to make extra dough. Ernest Truex, the leading man, needed someone to take care of his clothes. For the extra, I gladly became his dresser. During the course of the road trip they fired the other seven chorus boys, and I did the specialty spot. I must say at no increase in salary. Also while on the road, I checked all the baggage, which meant climbing up in the baggage car, putting tags on everything, and moving trunks around so they would go to the appropriate hotels where the principals were staying. This put my salary up to fifty-five dollars a week, and it was needed. Financially things were very rough at home, so I sent Mom forty dollars of my weekly salary.

  When the show closed, I got a job with a dancing and singing act, Midge Miller and Her Boy Friends. I was, obviously, one of the four boy friends. Midge had some talent, the boys could dance—also some—but in the main it was not much of an act. I then appeared in several vaudeville sketches, the most memorable being Dot’s My Boy, in which I was a Jewish lad whose parents sat in a theatre box to watch their progeny approvingly. Then when I did my specialty dance and the applause started, my stage mama (played by Sam Jaffe’s mother, by the way) would smile and say loudly, “Dot’s my boy!” This I followed with a poem about mothers, and that, as they say, was the act. Following this exercise in slightness, I worked an act featuring Harry Ormonde, a very good English comedian, and five girls. We were booked for our break-in at the Fox’s Star Theatre, 107th Street and Lexington Avenue, and that one performance was our last. Booted out. The fact is the act wasn’t much, and I don’t think I contributed anything significant to the proceedings.

  I did specialty dancing jobs for the next few years, winding up in a vaudeville three-act that needed a replacement for one of their number. This act was Parker, Rand, and Leach, and Mr. Leach was Archie Leach, now known to history and admiring film fans like myself as Cary Grant. When he left, it became Parker, Rand, and Cagney, an act that toured for the best part of six months. Then back once more to the discouraging job hunt. Still, one learned. There I was, a kid, ham-and-egging it around New York, standing on the Forty-seventh Street corner we vaudevillians called Panic Beach, listening to all the theatrical gossip and rumors of jobs surfacing here and there. Most of the people on Panic Beach would wait for the job call that featured their particular specialty as dancer, singer, or whatever. Me, I went to them all. The result was work in a wide variety of acts even though I knew I was taking a good chance of being fired (as I was occasionally) because I had exaggerated my abilities. But each one of these little jobs built up in me not only priceless experience but also a healthy resilience to the inevitable hard times in a tough and demanding profession.

  But in the midst of all that hardship of jobs gained, jobs lost, jobs deferred, jobs lousy, jobs few, there was always the wonder of my Bill. I married her in 1922, absolutely the smartest thing I ever did in the whole course of my life, and I am still crazy about this lady. When talk of doing this autobiography began, she said, “Leave me out of it.” I wish I could accommodate to this very honest modesty, but leaving her out is like leaving the wick out of the candle. I am obliged by sheer facts to say that the rock-solid honesty and sterling character of this little gal made possible our going comparatively unscathed through the years when we were in dire straits. And when I say dire straits, I mean “dire” and I mean “straits.” It was rough. At times no food in the larder, big holes in the shoes. When I didn’t have a penny, she was out working. Life seemed just a never-ending sequence of damned dingy, badly furnished rooms with a one-burner plate.

  There were many times when I was sorely tried and decided to get out of the acting business, to go out and get any kind of job that would bring in the weekly paycheck. But every time I mentioned it, my Bill told me with pleasant firmness, no. I was to do what it seemed clear my innate abilities had prepared me to do. And I’m only pleased that I’ve been able to make up to her in some degree the material lacks of our early life.

  On one of our up-grades on the career roller coaster, my Bill and I got jobs together in a show called Lew Fields’ Ritz Girls of 1922, which played across the country until it reached St. Louis, where the money dried up. Lew Fields was a gent who almost made a profession of owing people money, and in this instance his creditors had seized the players’ salaries. We refused to go on until we got our money, and there was much confused talk until the Brothers Shubert gave the management instructions that we were to be given enough to get back to New York. That we did, and back to another weary time of making the rounds.

  The following year we appeared in something called Lew Fields’ Snapshots of 1923, which wasn’t a marked improvement on its predecessor. And on and on with more vaudeville. It is vital for me to say that outside of my Bill it is vaudeville that has had the greatest single effect on my life, both as an individual and as a performer. I still think of myself essentially as a vaudevillian, as a song and dance man. The vaudevillians I knew by and large were marvelous people. Ninety per cent of them had no schooling, but they had a vivid something or other about them that absolutely riveted an audience’s attention. First of all, those vaudevillians knew something that ultimately I came to understand and believe—that audiences are the ones who determine material. They buy the tickets. It’s only in their opinion that a thing is good or bad. Vaudevillians realized that one’s opinion of oneself wasn’t the determinant
of value in entertainment. I remember Dr. Johnson’s couplet: “The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give; and we who live to please, must please to live.”

  Vaudevillians by persistent trial and error and unremitting hard work found out how to please. When they said something, it was generally funny and genuinely funny. If it was a nonspeaking act, it was usually something extraordinary in the way of physical achievement. They spent years perfecting those acts so that they knew their jobs and they did their jobs without slighting either their talent or their audience. I learned much from them because I studied them all and tried to take away from each something of the skill and persistence that characterized their best work. Frequently in coming into a new theatre to rehearse, I’d work out with the acrobats. I was simply trying to learn something about all phases of the business, even though it was the dancing that principally intrigued me.

  On one of those occasions when I was absolutely stony broke in the winter of 1923–24, I took a job as assistant property man with the prestigious but poor-paying Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. For three dollars a night, I swept the stage and did all the little dirty jobs required—and I was happy to get it. The company manager, a wealthy amateur down from Harvard who took his job a mite too seriously, was my supervisor. This guy was simply playing at theatre. One night when the subways ran late, I got down to the theatre much after my time. “Where have you been?” he demanded indignantly. I explained the subway trouble, but he wouldn’t take any excuse, and he bawled the living hell out of me. I just looked at him. “Now, get that broom and sweep the stage!” he said in his best Neronic tones. I picked up the broom at once, jammed it at him and said, “Sweep it yourself, you son of a bitch!,” and walked out.

  But there was relief the following year, and it came because of my hair. Maxwell Anderson had written a play, Outside Looking in, based on the autobiography of writer-hobo Jim Tully. One of the leading characters was “Little Red,” and because there were virtually only two actors in New York with red hair, Alan Bunce and myself, there wasn’t much competition. I assume I got the part because my hair was redder than Alan’s. The show opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on Seventh Avenue in September 1925. One of the producers was Eugene O’Neill, and he came backstage one night, looked at me, and said nothing. I suspect that was because he had nothing to say. In any case, the play got fine notices (Charles Bickford played the lead), and from the tiny 299-seat house in the Village we moved uptown to the capacious Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, where I had no trouble projecting my voice because of my ample vaudeville experience. After the first act in the new theatre, Maxwell Anderson came backstage and said, “Gather around, boys, gather around.” We gathered. “Now I want everybody here to speak twice as loud and twice as fast. You hear?” Then, seeing me, he said, “Everybody, that is, except you.”

  Outside Looking in ran about four months, and then my Bill and I trekked back to vaudeville. In 1927, we did an act written by Paul Girard Smith called Lonesome Manor, a comedy routine about a city hick and a country girl. The scene is Forty-third Street and Broadway, where the out-of-town papers are sold. I come on and the newsboy asks me to hold down the stand for him while he goes to get a cup of coffee. When I’m alone, this little girl from Kokomo, Indiana, (my Bill) comes on, wants to buy the hometown newspaper. And the city hick, true to his city style, has to give her a nickname, so he says, “Well, Koke—tell you what to do.” And such-like palaver with a crossfire of jokes and then I sell her the paper, followed by both of us going into a dance—she singing “There’s No Place like Home” as her homesick counter melody to my

  Oh, there’s no doubt about it

  And I cannot live without it,

  So I simply want to shout it night and day;

  There’s just one place I want to be

  And that’s the place that’s haunting me—

  taunting me—

  And that’s Broadway.

  Oh, a million lights, a million sights,

  A million ways to spend your nights.

  And when I die, I surely want to go

  And join that gang below,

  For there’ll be a bunch I know

  From old Broadway.

  We wound up with a dance that got us off nicely. My Bill was a fine dancer, and I worked very hard to learn my job so that we could make it into the better theatres. We worked the bill with people like Van and Schenck, Bill Robinson, Ken Murray, and Buster West. I was simply a hard-working hoofer who worked at it because he loved it—a dancer at heart.

  That was why I felt so good about my next step-up. Or what I thought would be a step-up. In the 1926–27 New York season, George Abbott and Phil Dunning’s play Broadway was the biggest hit in town. Its leading character was Roy Lane, described by the authors as “a typical song and dance man.” When William A. Brady thought of producing the play, I had been the first one under consideration for the role. But then Jed Harris bought the play and hired that very good actor, Lee Tracy, to play Roy Lane. Lee could act the part beautifully—and did—but he was no dancer and certainly knew nothing of vaudeville firsthand. Because both these things were in my bones, I felt that I had an approach to Roy Lane somewhat like a homing pigeon’s to his coop.

  I was, however, cast for Roy in the upcoming London company of the show (my Bill was to be a dancer in it), and as rehearsals began, I was made very uncomfortable by the managemerit’s insistence that I imitate Lee Tracy. I couldn’t imitate Tracy because, fine actor though he was, he was kind of an ungainly fella. The day before sailing for England there was a dress rehearsal of the show with approximately a thousand actors in the audience, one of them a man who was to become an old and much-valued pal, Bob Montgomery. I was terribly uncomfortable through the performance because I had the nagging feeling of an invisible someone tugging at my coattails. Do it this way, do it that way. What was tugging at me was the specter of Lee Tracy’s performance. But I got through it well enough, and apparently my very discriminating audience approved. But Jed Harris told me I couldn’t play the role in London after all. My Bill withdrew from the London company, and because we both had run-of-the-play contracts, remained in New York—I as Lee Tracy’s understudy.

  Thirty years later when I was at a dinner party given by my old friends Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, Jed Harris came in. He said, “Jim, I’d like to have a sit-down with you to tell you about my situation that time with Broadway.” I said, “Jed, for God’s sake, here we are, old men virtually. Who cares at this point? Actually, Jed, even when it happened, I never gave much of a damn.” That surprised Jed, but I was being honest. It was the old in-built Irish don’t-give-a-damn speaking.

  After Broadway, I got into an item called Women Go on Forever, starring Mary Boland. Burns Mantle described the show as an opportunity for Miss Boland to forget farce for a while and be joyful over her chance to act a bawdy rooming house keeper who “fights fate, her boarders, and her passions for thirty-six hours.” It was around this time that my Bill and I opened a dancing school in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This, one of my great life mistakes, I was inveigled into by a chap who said he would finance it because he considered me a good teacher. (I had previously taught part-time in a New York dancing school.) I would work hard on the teaching in Elizabeth, drink two giant containers of pineapple juice, and then race over to New York to do Women Go on Forever, something I wasn’t able to say about Cagney. It was all exhausting and financially unrewarding as well—although I did have some awfully nice students. One of our seventeen-year-olds went on to become an undertaker, and he moved to Florida, where a year or so ago a man started to go around impersonating me in order to promote real estate. It was my old friend, the undertaker, who sent me clippings to case this pseudo-Cagney down there, and with the clippings he enclosed a short note: “Dear Jim—Just say the word and I’ll ship him to you in one of our bye-bye boxes.”

  My next Broadway show was a successful topical revue, The Grand Street Follies of 1928
, in which I did some hoofing and a few sketches. This led more or less naturally into The Grand Street Follies of 1929, more of the same, and in which I danced briefly to the music of Noël Coward and played a dancing traffic cop. The 1929 revue didn’t last long, and I was fortunate on several scores to be cast in George Kelly’s play Maggie the Magnificent, which opened at the Cort Theatre in October 1929. I say several scores because during this show I met that tremendous gentleman, great playwright, and superb director, George Kelly—and I also met that delightful trouping lady, Joan Blondell. In the show I played a young heel, and Joan was the character comedienne, all gum-chewing and wisecracks and sidelong glances. I also must say I noted at the time that she had a perfectly beautiful body—something my bride knows I’ve said a number of times. I never knew until some time later why George Kelly cast me in Maggie the Magnificent. I was standing outside the theatre with a lot of other actors when he was doing the casting, and he seemed to single me out quite directly and without hesitation. Months later I asked him the reason. He said, “I looked out through the stage door, saw you in that crowd of actors waiting there, and I asked that you be sent in directly. You were just what we were looking for—a fresh mutt.” He probably hit it right on the head.

  I’m glad to say I got to know George Kelly well. Years later when Moss Hart was visiting Hollywood, he told me of his great admiration for this charming and intelligent gentleman. Moss knew that George Kelly was not only one of America’s best playwrights but a delight socially, so one evening he invited Joan Blondell, my Bill, and me, together with other friends, to a dinner in honor of “G.K.” I was most pleased to be there, although I had been in the boxing ring at the studio all day under very hot lights shooting a fight picture. I was bushed, although I tried valiantly not to show it, and after dinner I didn’t realize it but I was ready for a two-day nap. Moss at this point got me to one side and said, “Jim, would you ask G.K. to read the first act of The Torchbearers for us?” I felt more than a little diffident about asking Kelly to read his riotously funny comedy, which immortalizes the travails of all amateur theatricals everywhere, and I said so to Moss. But Moss insisted that Kelly wouldn’t do it for anyone but me. Finally I agreed.