Cagney by Cagney Read online

  Well, nice little Alice wanted to make sure that she wasn’t doing the wrong thing, so she got everything in the sequence of action correct except the last bit. Instead of pulling away slightly, she stuck her chin out and I really goaled her. “Cut!” And there was poor little Alice down on the floor of the car, crying her heart out. I asked her why she had stuck her chin out. She didn’t answer that but sobbed, “And I thought Talbert could hit!” Now, Mr. Talbert was her sweetheart or perhaps her husband at the time, and it didn’t seem tactful to continue that particular line of conversation. I was mighty sorry to have hit that cute little kisser.

  Our director, Lloyd Bacon, was a great guy to work with. On receiving a script he wasn’t one of those directors who’d say, “When? Where? What? How?” Lloyd would just say “Who?” “Who?” translates to “Who have I got?,” and usually who he got was who he wanted to get—his gang, the stock company: Pat O’Brien, McHugh, Cagney, Allen Jenkins, and others of us who worked so well with each other and with him. It didn’t matter what the hell the story was; when we went to bat, we did the best we could.

  It was great going to bat for Lloyd, and that’s a phrase he’d appreciate, because his most vivid directorial instruction was also taken from baseball. He used to tell us, “Run out your hit!” In professional ball, if a player got a scratch hit that might be fielded easily by the other team, and he failed to run like hell anyway, failed to run it out—he could be fined or fired. The sense behind that rule was that you never know what is going to happen to a baseball once it leaves the bat. The opposing player might muff an easy catch, letting it go through his legs; the ball might bounce over his head—any number of possibilities. So if you don’t run out your hit, you haven’t done your job to the limit.

  Lloyd might have learned his persistence and thoroughness from his father, that tremendous actor, Frank Bacon, who after years of work in the small time finally made a great Broadway success with Lightnin’ in 1918, a performance I saw and admired. Lloyd used “Run out your hit!” advantageously any number of times. A scene might be developing very well, and suddenly because it didn’t please one particular player, he would turn his back on it and say, “It’s all wrong.” Lloyd would shout, “My God, run out your hit! Once you get going, run it out.” O’Brien and I, old ballplayers, knew immediately what he meant.

  Picture Snatcher was my first picture with that fine boyo, Ralph Bellamy, and in one scene it was required that he hit me. Ralph has arms from here to Ashtabula, and he was worried as hell about what he’d do to me. I indicated my chin, told him to aim for it and not to worry. “You won’t hit me, so help me,” I told him. “You won’t hit me.” “But I’ve never thrown a punch in my life,” he said, still very worried. Lloyd Bacon called for the camera to roll, and Ralph threw the punch. Well, he certainly aimed at my chin, but he had no control over that far-reaching arm of his. It was simply too long for him to control, and he hit me on the side of the cheek with a closed fist. I went flying across the room, slammed into a chair, pulverized it completely, and in the process broke off another tooth. You have yet to see a more disconsolate man than Ralph Bellamy that day. “I told you I’ve never thrown any punches,” he said, “I’ve never hit anybody in my life.” “You sure as hell have now,” I told him, “so don’t worry about it.” “I’ll never do it again,” he said—and as far as I know he never has.

  Making pictures then was a fatiguing business, and in my next, Mayor of Hell, it was the old mixture as before, only more so. As a crook who helped reform a reform school, I was kept plenty busy, and I mean literally to all hours. Frequently we worked until three or four in the morning. I’d look over and there’d be the director, Archie Mayo, sitting with his head thrown back, sawing away. He was tired; we were all tired. This kind of pressure the studio put on us because they wanted to get the thing done as cheaply as possible. At times we started at nine in the morning and worked straight through to the next morning. This pounding drive we kept up during my time at Warner’s from 1930 to 1934 on a pretty unvarying schedule.

  The same thing held for Footlight Parade, where I at least had the pleasure of dancing. That film brings to mind a question frequently asked of me: Did my height ever give me trouble with leading ladies? Only with one—Claire Dodd, in Footlight Parade. She was the tallest of all the ladies I’ve ever worked with—a tall, handsome gal—and in close shots opposite her, they had to slip a two-inch apple box under me. Which brings me to the subject of my height. For reasons unknown to me, people are always interested in my exact height. The literal truth is, I don’t know what it is. I haven’t measured for years, and I’m really not interested enough to do so. I do know my wife is five foot one, and I tower over her by a good seven inches.

  Various newspaper accounts of my career have pegged my height at different levels, and I think the reason they never agree is because in any fight scene I have always insisted on having an opponent bigger than myself. This came about by a discovery early on that any time I hit anybody my own size it looked as if I was taking advantage of them. I probably was one of the few fellas in the business who had done any degree of boxing and street fighting and who looked as if he had done it. My physical deportment made this clear. I have seen lots of leading men then and now who throw punches like a handful of confetti. Really ridiculous. I have always thought if they sign a guy to do a rugged part, they should get him into the gym and just get him used to throwing punches.

  Footlight Parade was one of those fluffy musical incredibilities, pure fantasy all the way, but it gave the song-and-dance people a chance to be employed. Little Ruby Keeler danced her heart out, and she knew what she was doing. And as for Dick Powell—people never realized what a good voice that boy had, and a lot of nice things to go with it. I was terribly fond of this nice, nice guy all the years I knew him. When that throat cancer took him, we were devastated because he was a rare one. One of the remarkable people, and Warner’s was full of them.

  One of many I met there was Lowell Sherman. I had seen Lowell years before in a 1919 Broadway show, The Sign on the Door, by Channing Pollock. Lowell was starred with Mary Ryan, and he played the heavy. He was a big, bad, bold seducer who ultimately got his comeuppance in the form of a bullet through the heart at the curtain. But he was so amusing and charming all the time he was being this “dirty despicable dog” that the audience applauded fervidly even after he was shot, so fervidly indeed that he came out and took a bow! That seems a little ridiculous now, but that’s what happened those days in the theatre when an actor had a winning way.

  So when I saw Lowell in The Sign on the Door, I said to myself, “Onh-huh! That’s how it’s done, that’s the way to do it.” In 1919 I knew nothing about, cared nothing about show business, but this actor I remembered. So years later, when I got to Warner Brothers, Lowell was working there. He didn’t know me even faintly, and all I knew of him was that here was one hell of an actor. A mutual friend of ours, an agent, got talking to him about playing heavies. Lowell told my friend, “There’s a little guy at Warner’s now with kind of a funny name. I like the way he does it. He gets his quota of laughs, and at the same time gets in all the nasties.” The agent asked him if he meant me, and Lowell said yes. When the agent told me this, I asked him to tell Lowell that I got my first acting lesson watching him play The Sign on the Door with Mary Ryan and Lee Baker. I added, “And tell him I thank him now for that lesson.”

  This was communicated, and Lowell asked to meet me. The agent gave a party for me to meet Lowell, and as I was standing in the middle of the room with a group of people, the doorbell rang. The door burst open and there, flamboyantly, was “Himself.” Lowell was a handsome man and there he was, wearing a very expensive Eddie Schmidt suit, handmade shirt, flowing tie, silk handkerchief up the sleeve, plus a monocle. I looked at him, he looked at me, and as he strode toward me, he bellowed, “Baaaaaabeeeeee!”

  We became good friends, this remarkable man and I. I actually saw him do an almost impossible thin
g—make a straight man of that incomparable actor, John Barrymore, in a 1929 picture, General Crack. Lowell did this by subtly making his straight role, that of a king, into a comedy character. Lowell died in 1934 of throat cancer, the clear result of his chain smoking. A great loss, and he was only in his forties.

  I think I partake of his general approach to acting. Margaret Hamilton, that wonderful character actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, said when asked about me, “Oh, well—although he became known for other things, he’s essentially a comedian. I’ve always called him a comedian.” This I admit to. I’ve always tried to drop a comic touch here and there in virtually everything I do, I hope with success.

  I have, incidentally, a little poem on success. I read a newspaper article about a number of gals interviewed on the subject of masculine sexiness in various walks of life. These ladies agreed generally that good-looking men were sexy, well-dressed men were sexy, but by far the sexiest men were the successful men with lots of money. So I wrote:

  From the lowest pimp to the U.S. prexy,

  The broads do find success is sexy.

  You can’t fight it, boys.

  4

  I said the subtitle of this book could well be The Remarkable People. Well, one of my remarkable people supplied an alternate subtitle—The Far-Away Fella—meaning me. He is about the least far-away fella I know. Pat O’Brien. One would think that someone like me who feels he has something to offer in show business would enjoy the limelight. But of a social evening, especially years ago, I’d never care to get up and entertain because I had no confidence in myself to do that sort of thing. One night when the Masquers Club was giving a pipe night for Frank McHugh, Pat O’Brien called and asked me if I was going to be there. I said I would, but Pat said, “Aw, come on now—you didn’t say that very convincingly.” I assured him I’d be there, and I asked him why he doubted me. “Because,” said Pat, “because you’re one of those far-away fellas.” One of the things he meant by those words is that I don’t follow the cocktail party circuit or do the talk show thing. Certainly in that sense, and perhaps some others, I am a far-away fella, and most people who’ve been around me for any length of time have come to the same conclusion.*

  Pat definitely isn’t a far-away fella, and he’s remarkable in more than one way. He has, for instance, more durability than anyone I’ve ever known. He would arrive on the set in the morning, having been up all night—clear-eyed, knowing all his words—and step cheerfully in front of the camera. At day’s end, home, have dinner; then he and Eloise would go out and would again stay up all night. I am strictly an eight-hours-a-night boy myself.

  And by 1934 at Warner’s, I sure wasn’t getting it. During this time there was Jimmy the Gent, my first with a good director I was going to see a lot of, Michael Curtiz. I murdered Mike the first day of that picture with a little incident. When I heard I was going to play another one of those guys, I said to myself, “They want another of those mugs, I’ll really give them a mug.” So I had my head shaved right down to the skull except for a little top knot in front, and I had the makeup man put bottle scars all over the back of my head. The opening shot was of my back to the camera, with all those scars in sharp focus. The phone rings, I turn around to speak—and Mike Curtiz damn near fainted when he saw that shaved head. Hal Wallis, who was running that part of the studio at the time, took my haircut as a personal affront. “What is that son-of-a-bitch trying to do to me now?” he said. To him, for God’s sake.

  My leading lady in Jimmy the Gent was Bette Davis, the first time we appeared together. She was unhappy doing the picture because she was waiting impatiently to go to another studio to do Of Human Bondage, which was to turn out so well for her. Her unhappiness seeped through to the rest of us, and she was a little hard to get along with. But she was still a pro and did her job beautifully, as she always did and always has done. Years later when I saw her in All About Eve, I wrote her a fan letter to end all fan letters. One of the last times I saw her was at an Academy Awards do, where I was presenting one of the awards. The whole business was a cataclysmic foul-up.

  Bette was furious. “What is the matter with these people, Jimmy? Why don’t they put this thing on like professionals?” I looked at her and said, “Ah, Bette, you still care, huh? You still care?” “You’ve got to care,” she said, “everything has to be done right. If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.” “Ah, it isn’t worth worrying about, sweet,” I told her. “Just forget it.” But of course she was right. Years later when she wrote her autobiography, I was happy to write a little blurb for it. I said, “One thing you have to understand in all this so-called creative business—all the way from the producer down: the person doing it has to care and care deeply. The artist (that’s a much-abused word) cares—he cares, he cares. And the producer-artist, the writer-artist, the director-artist, the actor-artist, the cameraman-artist, each one must care. Caring is the thing. And Davis had that to the utmost. She cared about it every second. And for that I had to admire her.”

  To return to Pat O’Brien—this was always a fella with the cheeriest kind of upbeat optimism. When we were on location making Here Comes the Navy, he and I went down to Rancho Santa Fe to see Bing Crosby’s home there. (On location we had one day a week off; back in Hollywood it was frequently seven days a week working in the old Warner’s tradition.) Bing wasn’t home, but we made ourselves known to the caretakers, who graciously let us wander about that beautiful adobe house. Walls three feet thick keeping it cool inside—exquisite rose gardens, superb bougainvillea trees everywhere, tennis courts and swimming pool—the entire treatment.

  Pat said, “Pretty nice, huh, Jim—pretty nice?” But it was better than pretty nice. Pat and I each owned a house, practical but nothing fancy, so I said to Pat, “Well, yes. It’s lovely, it’s fine, but it’s going to be a whole lot harder to give up than ours.” He looked at me and said, “Why, you killjoy bastard!”

  “Face some facts,” I said. “This is one of those businesses when you go to the job, the job stays for a while, and then you’re on your way.” Pat could never accept my cautious attitude about Hollywood—that house built of cards, as I considered it. Ever the optimist, he felt it was going to go on forever, and for him it did. Pat is still keeping himself busy at seventy-five.

  In those early days, I was always the cautious one. In our more serious moments, I’d say, “Pat, stop and take stock. Where do we stand? Is this going to give us security for the rest of our lives?” But Pat never listened. He was for the jokes, the laughter, the nightclubs. The wonderful payoff is that it didn’t disagree with him in the slightest. He’s my age and looks wonderfully well—still enthusiastically going around the country playing summer theatres, doing his one-man show at colleges and nightclubs, telling the stories, and doing very well indeed. By high contrast, I couldn’t care less for this kind of activity. In that sense too I am the far-away fella, far away from the madding crowd as I can get, loving the countryside, the sea, the horses, the cattle, and everything that goes with it.

  Two interesting things happened when Pat and I were making Here Comes the Navy. One was funny, the other not funny at all. Warner Brothers had some clout with the Navy, and we were allowed to film the battleship Arizona with the entire Pacific fleet fanning out behind it. This was a tremendous shot, of course, and when we first saw it on the screen in the rushes we were all just knocked over. Then out of the darkness we heard the screenwriter’s voice: “Some piece of writing, huh?” He was serious.

  The other incident involved Pat and me. He was a chief petty officer in the picture and I was a gob, assigned to the lighter-than-air group. In one scene Pat is supposed to be handling a rope dangling from the great dirigible Macon, when he is hauled off the ground unexpectedly, and must hang on for his life. The script also had me up in the Macon, and I was to go down the dangling rope to him and throw another line around his waist, binding him to me. This was being shot from the ground up against
the sky, giving the illusion that Pat, the rope, and I were well up in the air. As he was dangling there and I came down the rope, I put my legs around him and suddenly he completely lost his grip. I couldn’t support his weight and mine, too, so we both went straight down. Somebody said they could see the smoke coming from my hands as I slid. They put medication on both our hands. Pat’s were burned, too, but mine looked like hamburger because I was hanging on tighter. Once more the hazards of the trade.

  Speaking of hazards, my next picture, St. Louis Kid, in which I was a fighting milk truck driver (whatever the role, I was always fighting), had me at one point encounter a very formidable actor, Robert Barrat. Bob was a physical culturist in real life, and he had a solid forearm the size of the average man’s thigh. As I always say to anybody throwing punches at me in a scene, “Just go ahead and throw. I won’t be there, I’ll be inside it.” After saying this to Bob, he threw an overhand right, and I stepped inside it. But I reckoned without that big forearm, which hit me on the side of my head, damn near taking it off. It would have been a hell of a lot easier if he had belted me with his fist.

  By the time I was ready to do St. Louis Kid, I was so fed up with walking in and punching people again and again that I called in the makeup man and had him wrap my hands in bandages. In the picture’s opening scene I come out of a courtroom with my hands in this mummy wrap and let it be known to my perennial sidekick, Allen Jenkins (who was always getting me in trouble in the film), that I was through hitting for him. I had just walked down the courtroom steps, Jenkins had bumped someone’s car, and as that driver started to hit Jenkins, I was to step in. Instead of punching, however, I just whipped my head around and hit the guy between his eyes with my forehead. Down he went. For the rest of the picture I went around hitting people with my head, all of this in a specific attempt to vary the old punching formula. I can still hear the reedy voice of St. Louis Kids producer, “When are you going to take those bandages off and start punching right?” This gentleman rather failed to understand what I was trying to do. In his book, I was simply trying to foul up his living.