Cagney by Cagney Page 5

  “Oh, James, James,” G.K. said in answer to my request, waving a deprecating hand.

  “It would be great for us, G.K.,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much we’d all love it.”

  So I talked him into it. Moss got out a copy of the play, and we all sat down expectantly, no one more full of anticipation than Cagney. I sat down three feet away from G.K. Then he began to speak in his soft, gentle voice, and he had uttered perhaps ten words when the rigors of my working day caught up with me. As I was looking G.K. right in the eye in high expectation, my head snapped forward in deep sleep. However I caught myself, straightened up vigorously—and two seconds later my head fell back the other way. Out. Completely. To show you the kind of man George Kelly was, this utterly delighted him.

  Another thing about George Kelly. Let it be said that I learned from him what a director was for and what a director could do. I have met few really first-rate directors in my life, and those I know, I measure against the very best, George Kelly and John Cromwell. John directed Women Go on Forever, and what he and George Kelly shared is something so rare among directors as to be virtually nonexistent. That something is just this: they were directors who could play all the parts in the play better than the actors cast for them. I’ll talk a bit later about a number of Hollywood folk who were called directors, but for the nonce I’ll say only that working with a master director like George Kelly was an abiding privilege. On Maggie the Magnificent’s first day of rehearsal, he said to us, “Now, boys and girls, we have hired you because we know you are experienced. I want the full benefit of all that experience. We think you know your business. Anything that occurs to you, please let me know—because I can’t think of everything. So—if you would do me the favor of speaking up? All right now, let’s go to work.” Naturally, with such a complete professional in control, there was no need for us to give him anything.

  7. One of the few—perhaps the only Irish actor-able to read this Jewish-directed advertisement for Taxi! (1932) was its star.

  8. With Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh, and Dick Powell. Footlight Parade, 1933.

  9. Two years after the grapefruit, Mae Clarke is still getting a hard time. Lady Killer, 1933.

  10. “Bill” and Jim, 1935.

  11. During the filming of Devil Dogs of the Air (1953), Amelia Earhart paid a visit to the Warner’s lot. Flanking her are would-be flyers O’Brien and Cagney; to the right, unidentified Air Force general in mufti.

  12. The bottomless Bottom. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1935.

  13. The hoofer—high and hard at work. Rehearsing for Something to Sing About, 1937.

  14. In Something to Sing About came the inspiring opportunity to work with the two dancers he most admired, Johnny Boyle and Harland Dixon, left and right of Cagney.

  What we could have used were audiences. It opened the night of the 1929 market crash. The play closed in a very few weeks. It was about this time that my Bill gently withdrew from our profession. One of the best buck dancers I’ve ever seen and a genuine talent all down the line, but the show business thing with her was never very strong. She loved it in the beginning, but when she saw some of the sordidness of it, she backed away. A few words of mine about the daily hubbub in Chasen’s Restaurant years later puts the business in proper perspective from her point of view:

  Loud, above the talk of pictures and taxes,

  One hears the incessant grinding of axes.

  A few months after Maggie the Magnificent folded, I was cast in Marie Baumer’s Penny Arcade, which had all the earmarks of a flop because it lasted only three weeks on Broadway. Yet Penny Arcade was for me a sterling success because it became my clear path to the high road. I was reunited with my new old pal, Joan Blondell, once again playing a smart-cracking gal, and I was a sniveling murderer. We were directed by that good man, Bill Keighley. Our reviews were fine and we were looking forward to a good run when the play closed. But Al Jolson had seen the play, liked it, and took an option on it for pictures. This was the beginning of Hollywood for me, and for Joan too, because on Jolson’s recommendation we were given an offer from Warner Brothers to re-create our original roles. I came out on a three-week guarantee and I stayed, to my absolute amazement, for thirty-one years.

  3

  Warner Brothers had signed me up for three weeks at five hundred dollars a week, quickly followed by a second three-week contract, again at five hundred dollars. Came then a long-term contract of four hundred dollars a week for forty weeks—or that’s what the verbiage seemed to say. Forty-week contract, my foot! The studio had the sole and very handy option of dropping me at the end of any forty-week period, while I was enchained for seven long years.

  I wasn’t aware of this right at the beginning of my stay there in 1930. Many of us who came West then didn’t think we were going to stay. When Clark Gable came to California he was talking to Ralph Bellamy one day in a little coffee shop on Hollywood Boulevard. He said, “Ralph—this thing can’t last, you know. It can’t last.” Ralph asked why, and Clark said simply because of the way they threw money around. “For example,” Clark said, “I’m getting eleven thousand dollars for playing a heavy in my current thing. How long do you think that can go on? As a matter of fact, I’m so sure that it won’t go on that I’m not going to buy anything—anything—that I can’t take back with me on the train.”

  I felt this way, and for a considerable period of time. Sinner’s Holiday was the new title for Penny Arcade, with Joan and me in our old roles. We shot the thing in three weeks. The leading man was Grant Withers, a tall, handsome, talented fella, then married to Loretta Young. With my pale New York complexion, which has no pigment except for my freckles, I looked like a wraith, especially opposite Joan, who has a naturally vigorous color. So they had to pile the makeup on me, almost making me Indian red. One day I was standing without makeup behind Grant as he was playing poker between shots. He looked up at me, did a triple-take, and finally realized who I was. “Holy geeze—” he said, “get a load of him without any eyebrows.”

  The role of my mother in Sinner’s Holiday was played by an old gal, Lucille LaVerne, a kind of farm-woman type. Lucille had forearms rather like Jim Jeffries’, and at one point in the film she was required to hit me. I explained to her that the easiest way to make it look authentic without hurting either of us was for her to hit me with her four fingers, thumb excluded. She agreed, but didn’t control it, and the heel of her hand hit me on the jaw, belting me to a fare-thee-well. This was the first of a number of on-camera clouts I was to receive through the years, all to be filed under “hazards of the trade.” There was a great vogue then for pictures with “holiday” in the title, and Sinner’s Holiday was a part of that trend. That title had as much to do with the picture as Winnie-the-Pooh.

  A thing that made equal sense was Lew Ayres being cast in the leading role in the next job, Doorway to Hell. At the time Lew, in his midtwenties, was one of the prettiest guys in all Hollywood. Notwithstanding, this fine-looking lad was given the role of a latter-day Capone, a ruthless, murdering gangster baron—and I played his quiet pal. That will indicate how they did things at the studios then. Lew was hot at the box office.

  While we were shooting, Warner’s came to me with a long-term contract. But even then I didn’t for a minute think this was going to be my future. As nearly as I could see, the only permanent people at Warner’s and other studios were those in the production departments. This was quite a different show business world from the one I had known on Broadway. People in the picture business were of a different stripe entirely from stage people. In the theatre we had our sharpies, but when you got to Hollywood you knew at once you had arrived in the big league for con men and frauds. My very first impression of Hollywood was the same for any other town I had encountered in vaudeville—just a place to do your job. But after a while, I began to realize how sadly obsessed these Hollywood people were with their careers.

  I remember one gal who absolutely cast her dinner
parties. Quite openly she said, “Nobody ever darkens my door who can’t improve Sam’s business situation.” There was also a typically ambitious girl at a dinner party seated opposite a man named Jimmy Kern. She laid on the graciousness by the shovel load for over an hour, and when a pal came over and called him “Jimmy,” she was startled. Wasn’t he, she asked him, Jerry Kern—Jerome Kern? No. With that, she hauled off and belted him right in the puss. He had been wasting her time. Objectivity had no room in her life.

  One of my anchors to objectivity in both my work and my life has been poetry. Over the years I’ve gotten in the habit of putting in verse many of my reactions to the world as I’ve encountered it, and I must say I’ve had a lot of fun doing so. Indeed,

  Making verses I cannot help,

  As a pregnant female her brood must whelp,

  Each will come in its given time,

  So there’s naught to do but write and rhyme.

  My poetic range of interest is pretty broad. One of my Bill’s favorites is called Feet, which stemmed from the continuing complaint of a friend of ours about her feet, my feet, everybody’s feet. This lady hated feet because she thought them ugly in every particular. So I wrote this to her:

  Feet are most unhappy things,

  Encased in leather, tied with strings;

  Made to conform at an early age

  From passing fashion to current rage.

  Painted one year, rounded next;

  By corns and bunions ever vexed.

  Toenails dreading the toenail clippers,

  Seeking only the peace of bedroom slippers.

  One of the concomitants to my fairly well-developed imagination is the ability to see the oddest things in every shape and shadow. In fact,

  Wherever I look, I see a shape.

  A moving shadow can be an ape,

  A horse, a cow, or a vinegaroon.

  Can it be that sanity’s leaving me soon?

  The last one looked like good St. Michael

  Going like hell on a unicycle.

  Maybe sanity’s gone, and I don’t know it;

  Though generally speaking a person will show it

  In voice or eye or eccentric motion

  To give the viewer a kind of notion

  That something has happened within the brain—

  A possible scar from some bygone strain.

  One just passed! A two-headed figure:

  One head was big, the other bigger.

  A Proteus came and I sought to show him

  The wonderful things my eye perceives,

  But he had changed and gone

  Before I could know him—

  His place quick taken by Eves without leaves.

  And Kim and Marilyn sans breek or clout

  Are all right here when I’m far out.

  I’ve been writing verse of sorts since my Broadway days, a habit triggered by reading Stephen Vincent Benét’s magnificent John Brown’s Body. I was also much stimulated by Hugh Kings-mill’s Anthology of Invective and Abuse and its gems like Blake’s onslaught on a gentleman named Kromeck, who was reputed to have made passes at Mrs. Blake:

  A petty sneaking knave I knew—

  Oh,—Mr. Kromeck, how do you do?

  Which I should think took care of Mr. Kromeck thenceforth. Robbie Burns was also good at this sort of thing, and I suspect it was Blake and Burns who gave me food for thought when I became fed up with one Hollywood character. This congenital yes-man earned a very high salary by making a profession of soft-soaping. I said of him

  Where once were vertebrae is now a tangle,

  From constant kissing at an awkward angle.

  Which describes that lad thoroughly. My brother Ed used to call them the avec type. They were always with somebody.

  I’ve had a marvelous good time through the years doing these bits, and they principally spring from matters of the moment. Once I was standing talking to Bob Montgomery when a pheasant sounded in the woods, and Bob turned to say—very, very affectionately—“I hear you, I hear you.” That made me write

  A pheasant called in a distant thicket,

  And lovingly my old friend said,

  “I hear you, I hear you.”

  And he loved that bird, till he gunned him dead.

  Very few of my verses are written down, but I’ve got quite a number stored in my memory. They go the whole gamut of life. There’s

  A lady spider met a fella

  And made all haste to date him;

  She loved him with a love sublime,

  Up to and including—

  The time, when in ecstasy,

  She ate him.

  And also there was the time years ago when I was driving down Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills, came to a red light, and saw Bogart there in a brand new Porsche or some singularly fancy sports car. I have to preface this by saying that Bogie had a nervous habit of picking his nose wherever he was. So there I saw him, stopped for this red light, in this very fancy open car, picking his nose with great industry, little realizing I was watching him. The next day I wrote him this little note:

  In this silly town of ours,

  One sees odd primps and poses;

  But movie stars in fancy cars,

  Shouldn’t pick their famous noses.

  I never got an answer.

  At times, of course, anger can move me to verse. My Bill and I were in Rome with the Ralph Bellamys when the shocking news of Clark Gable’s death came. All of that wonderful vitality ceasing so early so suddenly made me think of his stature in the movies and of the powerful men at MGM who controlled his destinies:

  The King, long bled, is newly dead.

  Uneasily wore his crown, ’tis said;

  Quite naturally, since it was made of lead;

  On those who gathered about his throne,

  Y-clept Mayer, Mannix, Katz, and Cohn

  He spat contempt in generous doses,

  But whatever he gave, they made their own.

  Unhappy man, he chose seclusion,

  To the unremitting crass intrusion

  Of John and Jane whose names meant dough

  To Louie, Eddie, Sam, and Joe.

  The Hollywood whirligig was getting to me, too, in my early movie days when it seemed as if the Warner boys were confusing their actors with their race horses. The pace was incredible. I think I did about six pictures in the first forty weeks. There were professional compensations, of course, like working with a master actor, George Arliss—a most pleasant, very dignified man with an imperturbable manservant named Jenner. Jenner was the very model of the perfect English valet. Mr. Arliss worked diligently from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, but come four o’clock, Jenner would appear on the hour’s stroke, walk right into the set in the middle of a shot if need be, and remove Mr. Arliss’ hat or outer garment. Then Jenner would walk off with the item, and this signified the absolute end of shooting for the day. That became an Arliss tradition.

  In The Millionaire, my only picture with George Arliss, I played a fast-talking insurance man who has to sell a policy and warn Mr. Arliss that he is getting nothing out of life in his retirement. That was my only scene with this great star, and it lasted just two minutes. I wanted it to be good. In the scene, he sits with a shawl about his shoulders, and during the rehearsal, I said, “Mr. Arliss, may I adjust your shawl if it falls down off your shoulders?” He said, “Young man, you do anything you like. I trust your judgment implicitly.” Which I thought was awfully nice coming from a grand old trouper to a young guy just beginning to get warm in the business.

  Then came The Public Enemy. The story was about two street pals—one soft-spoken, the other a really tough little article. For some incredible reason, I was cast as the quiet one; and Eddie Woods, a fine actor but a boy of gentle background, well-spoken and well-educated, became the tough guy. Fortunately, Bill Wellman, the director, had seen Doorway to Hell, and he quickly became aware of the obvious casting error. He knew at once that I could pro
ject that direct gutter quality, so Eddie and I switched roles after Wellman made an issue of it with Darryl Zanuck.

  The picture had its hazards, among them real bullets. This was before the special-effects boys learned how to make “exploding” bullets safe as cap guns. At the time Warner’s employed a man named Bailey who had been a machine gunner in World War I, and this boy knew how to make that instrument perform. He sat with the machine gun on a platform above as I skittered along and then ducked down the street behind a “stone” wall. Seconds after I did this, Bailey opened up on the edge of the wall. It crumbled to sawdust, and so would I, had I been there two seconds before.

  Another little uncomfortable moment came when that good actor, Donald Cook, who was my brother in the film, had to display his war-shattered nerves by hauling off and hitting me in the mouth. I think he had some coaching. I’ve always suspected that Bill Wellman said to him, “Go ahead, let him have it. He can take it,” because when Donald belted me, he didn’t pull a thing. Instead of faking it as one always does, he just punched me straight in the mouth, broke a tooth, and knocked me galley west.

  Public Enemy had a fine cast: Eddie, Donald, Mae Clarke, and the unforgettable Jean Harlow. Borrowed just for that picture, she was a very, very distinct type of gal. Brand new in the business, she didn’t much know the acting end, but she certainly was a personality and very pleasant to work with. I never saw her after Public Enemy, but I was saddened at her death, a needless death as I understand it, because she neglected a serious gall bladder condition.