Cagney by Cagney Read online

  When Mae Clarke and I played the grapefruit scene, we had no idea that it would create such a stir. This bit of business derived from a real incident in Chicago when a hoodlum named Hymie Weiss was listening to his girl friend endlessly yakking away at breakfast one morning. He didn’t like it, so he took an omelet she had just prepared and shoved it in her face. Repeating this on the screen would have been a shade too messy, so we used the grapefruit half. I was not to hear the end of that little episode for years. Invariably whenever I went into a restaurant, there was always some wag having the waiter bring me a tray of grapefruit. It got to be awfully tiresome, although it never stopped me from eating it in the proper amount at the proper time.

  A little-known sidelight to the grapefruit scene is that Mae was then married to Monte Brice, Fanny’s brother. Mae and Monte had divorced, and apparently with a little rancor, because every time I’d push the grapefruit into Mae’s face at the Strand Theatre, there was a guaranteed audience of one—Monte. He would come in just before the scene was shown, gloat over it, then leave.

  Public Enemy was one of the first low-budget million-dollar grossers in the business. I’m usually not too much concerned with business details, but in this instance I know just how much the film cost because Bill Wellman told me. The whole thing came in for $151,000, and it took us just twenty-six days to make.

  After Public Enemy was released, Warner’s gave me star billing, which was pleasant enough but hardly compensation for the lack of compensation. I kept grinding the pictures out, working at a swift tempo, and seeing everywhere about me the rough-handed treatment of actors by management. Actors were considered to be expendable material, just like props or makeup. I watched this, and I was to remember.

  Meanwhile, the quickies rolled on. In my second Hollywood year, 1931, came Smart Money, the only picture I ever made with that fine gentleman and splendid actor, Edward G. Robinson. Again Eddie was a gangster, again I was a pal—his pal. It seems to me I was playing an awful lot of pals those days. I saw Smart Money not long ago because I was curious about it. A solid number of my pictures I’ve never seen, and some of the ones I have seen satisfied my curiosity about them in a single showing or even halfway through. Anyway, looking at Smart Money gave me the pleasure of seeing Eddie as his usual sharp self, that always solidly reliable self.

  Next came Blonde Crazy, in which I played a red-hot bellhop loaded for larceny, sharing it all as ever with Joan Blondell. This was the first time I had ever worked with Louis Calhern, a very suave gent and excellent light comedian, who made a very interesting observation to me at the time. He said, “You sawed-off fellas have to make it. When I went into the business, they needed tall leading men for those strong, forceful leading women—Ethel Barrymore, Margaret Anglin, and the like—all tall gals. I was six foot four, and that’s what producers wanted. Guys a few inches under six feet wouldn’t get the roles; you fellas have to make it.”

  But 1931 wasn’t all push and rush. There were some very tangible personal rewards, the nicest of them the arrival of my brother, Bill, in California. He hadn’t been feeling too well back East so he came out to get some rest as well as visit us. RKO saw him, said he looked like Jim Cagney, which he sure as hell did, and they tested him. It was a success, and he did a few pictures, but his heart wasn’t in them. So with that astute business mind at hand, and my needing very badly an astute business mind, he became my business manager, and we haven’t looked back since.

  Also that year, I joined The Players. That venerable club on New York’s Gramercy Park has been a continuing source of friendship and laughter for me down through the years. Always when I go there, I find a lively Stammtisch of good talk and highflying wit, most frequently featuring the delightful insult. Not long ago, I was sitting there with my old pal Roland Winters, chatting away, when a friend of ours—St. John Tyrell, pronounced “Sinjin”—dropped by to join in the conversation. Only “inundate” might be more fitting than “join in.” Also at our table were Davie Doyle and a few others. Rolie and Davie were trying to get in a word or two, but our fast-talking friend was having none of it. He was, he is, a perfectly wonderful guy but, as the old phrase has it, he does go on. Finally, Rolie looked at him and said, “I’ll pee on you!” To which Davie Doyle replied, “No—his book is filled.” The Players always freshens me each time I get back to New York.

  As my first months in Hollywood rolled on, the work schedule continued very much as before, and clearly the nicest thing about it all was working with some very talented and very personable people. There were exceptions. I am thinking of one actress who had reached the top, not a very strong talent, and who possessed a presence that constantly reassured you of her eminence. I didn’t like her because once on a set she had been nasty to a friend of mine—a warm, gentle person. After she blasted him, I wrote a few lines about her.

  THE ARTISTE

  One views the form and finds it fair,

  The face decided comely,

  Though without a jot of stick and pot

  They say she’s rather homely.

  Performancewise there’s ne’er a change,

  No matter what the part is.

  When one perceives so spare a range,

  One wonders where the art is.

  By dint of constant labor,

  She parlayed little into much:

  There were stocks and bonds, annuities,

  Real estate and such.

  She handled each transaction

  With shrewdness and with tact,

  But she’d give it all up happily,

  If only she could act.

  Still, her number was in the distinct minority among my working companions.

  One of my nicest working companions I met in 1931 when I was doing Taxi!. This was George Raft, who shared with me the New York street background and professional dancing experience. In Taxi! there was going to be a dance contest featuring that intricate step I knew so well, the Peabody. Georgie was newly arrived in town, had done little in pictures, and I felt sure he was the only other one in California who knew the Peabody well. So I told the assistant director to find George for my rival in the dance contest. This he did, and that was a most effective little scene.

  It was also in Taxi! that I had an adventure bordering on misadventure. From my taxi I had to fire two shots out of the window and duck; then a machine gun would cut loose and take the window out over my head. The scene was played as called for with one exception: one of the machine-gun bullets hit the head of one of the spikes holding the backing planks together. It ricocheted and went tearing through the set, smacked through a sound booth, ripped across the stage, hit a clothes tree, and dropped into the pocket of someone’s coat. I was young enough not to consider this pretty dangerous activity.

  My next picture, The Crowd Roars, was a pretty vigorous Howard Hawks production in which I played a race driver. My buddy on the tracks was Frank McHugh, who soon enough became my buddy in real life. This was the first time I worked with Frank, although I had met him previously a few times back East. Now I got to know him well, and that friendship has been one of life’s real joys.

  After our first day of shooting on The Crowd Roars, Frank and I shared a suite at the Santa Barbara Hotel. We were just getting acquainted, so to speak, and we spoke. We stayed up the entire night and talked. We talked until we had to go to work the next morning. Which will give some idea of the many things we had in common. We worked the next day through without sleep, but we were young and thought little of it.

  One delightful incident in Frank’s early life in pictures then occurred when he ran into an old character actor called Forrester Harvey. Frank mistook him for another Hollywood old-timer, Joseph M. Kerrigan. At the same time Harvey more understandably took Frank for his brother, Matt McHugh. As Frank and Harvey reminisced about past shared experiences, they both became aware that somehow their conversation wasn’t making much sense. Nevertheless they went manfully ahead, recalling shows they thought they had do
ne together. After they said goodbye, Harvey said to himself, “Matt is drinking too much.” Frank said to himself sadly, “Poor old Joe is getting old.”

  One time, when I was doing a picture with Frank, an interviewer was researching a piece on me, and I said, “For God’s sake, there’s a story on this set that nobody touches. It’s a great story—the story of the McHugh family.” But as far as I know no one has ever written in any detail about that wonderful bunch of people. They were all in the theatre. Frank’s mother and father were traveling actors—with five progeny all in the same troupe with them. Jim, their eldest, was a leading man, and the others-Matt, Kitty, Ed, and Frank—played supporting roles. They did musicals, dramas, melodramas, farces—they did it all, and nothing was left out of their theatrical background.

  So when the McHnghs came into the picture business, they had unparalleled experience to draw on. Frank was the youngest of the family, and he played everything, every conceivable sort of role. Put Frank into a scene with a newcomer, and he would make that newcomer look much better than he had any right to look. This was what made Frank so important at Warner Brothers.

  There is in his acting a very warm and methodical determination that is really a reflection of the man he is in real life. He lives happily now in retirement at Cos Cob, Connecticut. Not long ago he went into his bank there, and in the window saw a sign announcing the gift of a free cookbook with each new hundred-dollar account. What an opening for Frank! He walked in promptly, made out a check for a hundred dollars, and opened a new account, or so he thought. The girl behind the wicket, knowing him as a valued customer, said, “Thank you, Mr. McHugh. I’ll file that.” Very seriously Frank asked for his cookbook, and the girl was startled, explaining that cookbooks were only given for new accounts, not to old customers. Frank explained patiently that he had just given her a hundred dollars for a new account. “But you don’t understand—” the girl said. “I understand very well,” said Frank. “I understand that the old money is no good. That’s what you’re telling me. And you’re telling me that only the new money gets a cookbook.”

  She tried to explain it very carefully to him, and he just as carefully explained to her that he was following the letter of the bank’s law about new accounts, thus warranting him the cookbook. Wearily the girl called over the manager who said, “Well, Mr. McHugh, you see—” “Please don’t give me the ‘you see,’ ” said Frank. “Give me the cookbook. I’m now beginning to wonder whether what you’re doing is just trying to stay in business, because whenever we had trouble in the picture business, we gave away dishes. Are you having trouble? I can go down the street, make a hundred-dollar deposit in another bank, and get a cookbook down there.” Frank was having a ball, asking for the cookbook as they tried to outtalk him. He didn’t get the cookbook, but he had a lot of fun—and who knows? Maybe he was right. The payoff to this story came some time later when his bank had another ad in the window. This time it was for a fountain pen, to be given for availing oneself of a particular bank service. The same girl Frank had talked to before saw him reading the new ad, so when he stepped up to her window, she said quickly, “Here, Mr. McHugh,” and handed him the fountain pen.

  In and around the time I was making The Crowd Roars with Frank, my troubles with the studio front office became more persistent. These troubles surfaced when I realized that there were roughly two classes of stars at Warner’s: those getting $125,000 a picture—and yours sincerely, who was getting all of $400 a week. And that $400 soon stopped because I walked. After that little squabble was patched up, Warner’s some while later gave me another solid reason to walk out. They ignored my contract by billing another name over mine at the Warner Theatre in Hollywood. This reaction was no flowering of Cagney vanity: top billing is an entitlement that means money in the bank, and I was protecting my entitlement. A photograph was taken of the offending marquee, and in the ensuing lawsuit, the judge found for me.

  I did an entire series of these walkouts over the years. I walked out because I depended on the studio heads to keep their word on this, that, or other promise, and when the promise was not kept, my only recourse was to deprive them of my services. I’d go back East and stay on my farm until we had some kind of understanding. I’m glad to say I never walked out in the middle of a picture, the usual procedure when an actor wanted a raise. Moreover, I got solid support from people in my profession. Freddie March, for instance, came to testify for me in one of my suits against Warner Brothers, and I have been told that outside the courthouse, Freddie was warned by a prominent director that such testimony would be very bad for his career. It took guts and real staunchness for Freddie to appear and say all he had to say.

  It wasn’t until some of us began to do a little walking out that the studios’ total dictatorship over talent began to diminish. The standard employment formula was this: long-term contracts, many of them for seven years, with the studio having the option to drop or employ periodically during that time—and if a player walked, the time he was out would be added on to the term of the contract. This is what happened to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis; and the studio, having tremendous clout in the courts, usually won, forcing the actors back to do films they despised. What is usually not realized is that most of the scripts we were forced to do were acutely dreadful. Once I got such a script and asked the producer if he had read it. “Of course I’ve read it,” he said. Genuinely incredulous, I said, “Do you really want to do it?” He said, “We’ve got to do it. The picture is already sold. We’ve got a million-dollar profit in the kitty already—before the first camera rolls. What are you going to do—argue with a million bucks?”

  The picture turned out to be a miserable thing and I didn’t enjoy it, but at that early point in my career I was doing it for a living, which means you do as required, and what the hell? Around this time a Boston exhibitor told me that I was carrying quite a load. Naïvely I asked him what he meant, and he broke the facts of life about block booking to me. The exhibitor explained that he bought some pictures from my studio, and in his words, “I had to take five dogs to get one Cagney film.” This was block booking—the shenanigan by which an exhibitor was forced to take a lot of what he didn’t want in order to get what he did want. Gradually when I began to understand more and more of these cute studio devices, my education began!

  But in the early 1930s I was still learning, and I went along making what was given me. In 1932, I did a fight picture, Winner Take All, which gave me the chance to meet one of the few Hollywood characters ever to merit that misused and overused word, “fabulous.” This was Wilson Mizner, the great raconteur and adventurer in living, who helped write the picture. Bill Mizner was fascinating to hear, fascinating to see. He had a high, reedy voice, wore loose dentures, and obviously had seen and done much in his life. During the picture I did my fights and trained with an ex-welterweight, Harvey Perry. Once when we were taking off our bandages, Bill piped, “How’re your hands, Jamesie?” I said, “My hands are all right, Bill. I broke one hand when I was about fifteen or so, but they’re fine now.” Next Bill asked Harvey how his were, and they were fine, too. Then Bill said, “Look at mine.” I have never seen such hands in my life. They looked as if someone had battered them with a sledgehammer—all the metacarpals busted—both hands. I said, “In the name of God, Bill, how did you get those?” “Oh,” he said, “hitting whores up in Alaska.”

  Some people are called characters and don’t merit the designation. Wilson Mizner was a genuine character. We would go in to have a story conference for the picture but there’d be no conference. We’d sit and listen—and all of it was delightful.

  While we were shooting Winner Take All, a professional fighter who had been watching me in the ring at the studio came up to me and said, “So you know how to use your dukes, that’s possible for an amateur to do. But where’d you get your footwork? Don’t gimme that amateur crap now. You say you wasn’t a professional—with that footwork?” When I told him I had never been a
pro, that I had been only a street fighter and the closest I ever got to the ring was as a kid watching my idol, Packy MacFarland, this fighter refused to believe it. So I explained. I said, “Tommy, I’m a dancer. Moving around is no problem.” “Oh,” he said. “I get it. When I first saw you doing your stuff, I said this son-of-a-bitch has been at it. Now I get it.”

  Not long after Winner Take All was Picture Snatcher, with its fairly interesting title, which designated my job in the film. I played a former crook who “straightens out” and takes up work as a picture-snatcher. This was a man hired by a newspaper to steal photographs of people who are trying to keep those photographs out of the paper. By this time—1933—we were shooting movies in seventeen days, eighteen days, twenty-one days. Hell, we could have phoned them in. Lloyd Bacon actually shot Picture Snatcher in fifteen days. I used to kid him by saying, “What are you doing—getting a bonus for bringing it in ahead of schedule?”

  One of those fifteen days I was just walking through a scene with Ralph Bellamy, laying out what I was going to do. I stood outside a door waiting for my cue, bounced in, and went to Ralph’s desk. We did our words, there was also a phone call during it, and then I had some more words, and then out of the room. Suddenly I heard Lloyd yell, “Cut—print it!” I said, “Hey, you—I was rehearsing!” “It looked fine from here,” he said. That was the ultimate efficiency—shooting a damned rehearsal!

  There was another unhappy moment for me in Picture Snatcher. That cute little gal, Alice White, played one of the girls, and inasmuch as I now had a reputation in pictures as a woman slugger, the following was set up: Alice was supposed to come at me as I sat in an open car and say, “Hello, Danny,” while I was waiting for Patricia Ellis, who was my girl. Alice then climbs into the car, says, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” and I reply, “Get lost, will ya?” Then she reaches over, starts to kiss me, I push her away, she slaps me hard on the face. The projected business then was for me to hit her in retaliation, but of course I never hit anybody with a real punch. I never closed my hand into a fist. It might have looked closed to the audience, but it wasn’t. So, getting ready for this shot, I said to her, “Now, Alice, don’t you do a thing.” Lloyd Bacon reaffirmed that: “Alice, don’t you do a thing. Jim will not hit you. We want to get a good shot, and Jim will make it look good. From the camera angle we’ve got now, everything is going to be fine. So don’t pull too far away—Jim will let his fist go right by you.”