Cagney by Cagney Read online

  It was around this time that I joined Screen Actors Guild, joined it in fact during its first months of existence. What most moviegoers of the time did not realize was that actors as a group got less than two cents out of every dollar taken in at the box office. Many actors were lucky to earn sixty-six dollars for a six-day week, and they were forced to work almost every Saturday night and often into the early hours of Sunday. Getting off for a national holiday during the week meant they would have to work the following Sunday without pay to make up for that holiday. The actor was not only low man on the totem pole, he was practically buried in the ground.

  So when the Screen Actors Guild came into being in 1933, one thing the producers did not want was for any featured players or stars to come into the group. Therefore they resorted to the hoary old technique of divide and conquer. Their emissaries would say to a Gable, “Aren’t you a good friend of Bob Montgomery’s?” and Clark would admit it, asking why the question. “Oh, nothing, nothing,” would be the answer, and the matter was “dropped.” This, of course, stimulating Gable to think, “Now, what the hell did Montgomery say about me?” The studio people would then go to a Tracy and ask him if he was on good terms with Gable, thus working the same game—the whole point of it being to engender mutual suspicion among all the players. When they pulled that on Bob Montgomery, he was a little smarter than the producers thought. Realizing this whole thing was too pat, Bob went to Tracy and Gable and asked them if the producers had been feeding them the same question.

  When this was verified, Bob said, “You know, these unprincipled sons-of-bitches are going to do everything they can to keep us at odds with each other.” Those divisive tactics were overcome, and the Screen Actors Guild became a potent force in the motion picture industry. The need for the Guild was dramatized for me by that very gentle gentleman, Boris Karloff (Boris playing monsters, by the way, was type casting in reverse). Boris came to me one day saying, “Jim, I’m having a terrible time. Every morning I have to report three and a half hours before work commences in order to put on these fanciful makeups. By day’s end, I’m thoroughly exhausted, and then it’s another hour getting the damned stuff off. Sometimes they keep me working through to eleven or twelve o’clock at night. It’s terribly, terribly trying.” I said, “Boris, this is exactly what they’re doing at Warner Brothers, too.”

  They were squeezing as much out of us as they could—eleven-, twelve-hour days—frequently working nights right through to sunup. This didn’t bother the studio heads because they were home with their families having dinner at the appropriate hour. When the Screen Actors Guild demanded an eight-hour day, the producers screamed. Then I discovered a startling statistic: the average actor with screen credit—which means he was something of a name player—worked in the course of one year only an average of three and a third weeks. Incredible. So it was pretty thin for a lot of good people all the way, and I personally felt this to be part of the producers’ overall plan: keep actors poor so they can’t argue about anything. But we did, and we won.

  In 1935 I moved into a category some performers prize very highly—the first ten players in box-office popularity. But that kind of thing I found essentially meaningless. I was asked once if I suddenly woke up one day to realize I was famous, a star. Nothing of the sort! I never gave it a thought, never thought of it at all. Whatever was going on in my Hollywood life I regarded as completely transitory. I looked on it only as doing a job, and that job happened to work out. And the answer to all that is, where did I go nights? I sure wasn’t going around picking up the kudos—or the kiddos. I just stayed home. I once saw a very well-known playwright at “21” (I was there twice in my life) who came in while I was having dinner with Warner’s head publicity man. This writer just had a Broadway hit, and as he walked from table to table, shaking hands and receiving congratulations, I thought how sad it was. He needed that support, all the praise and adulation. He needed it badly, sought it avidly. He savored every bit of that temporary eminence instead of just buckling down and furthering his job. That, I think, is what I did. Just going along year by year, doing my job, nothing more than that.

  By 1935, the job was becoming fairly predictable. It was then I did G-Men, which was a step up the ladder artistically. There was a great deal of interest at the time in these forceful and thoroughgoing champions of the law, and there was an effort to make the film as authentic as possible. Once again, as in Taxi! and The Public Enemy, a machine-gun spray was needed, and also once again they used real bullets. At one point in the story, I was behind a wall of fireplace logs. I had some little misgivings about this because the logs were loose, and with the fusillade of bullets due to hit them, anything might happen. So I experienced—and expressed—for the first time at Warner’s my misgivings about being shot at. Bill Keighley, the director, said, “I promise you, Jim, the guy firing that gun will not do anything that will injure you.” His promise held.

  By this time I was referring to these pictures as “cuff operas” because a number of the things in them were ad-libbed, dialogue contributed by the actors and directors right off the cuff. I recall The Irish in Us and a scene where Frank McHugh comes in, having been to a formal affair at the Firemen’s Ball. He returns home at midnight wearing a full-dress suit and a white cap. Pat O’Brien looks at him and says, “You didn’t wear that cap to the ball?” to which Frank improvised the great reply, “Oh, I know, it should have been black?”

  There wasn’t much ad-libbing allowable in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my only excursion into Shakespeare. A year before we did it, there had been a successful Hollywood Bowl presentation of the play directed by Max Reinhardt, and Warner’s Hal Wallis decided to re-create it. I think he wanted to do something that had some value to it, something other than the knock-’em-drag-’em-outs we’d been doing for so long. Since he had the Warner’s stock company at hand to draw from, people like Joe E. Brown, Dick Powell, Frank McHugh, Olivia de Havilland, Victor Jory—he did it. This was a Max Reinhardt production, but because Reinhardt was essentially a spectacle director not able to appreciate professionally the necessity for minimum movement that film demands, he remained largely on the sideline while Bill Dieterle directed. Reinhardt, so used to broad stage gestures, made some of the actors do things that were, I thought, ridiculous for the screen. We used to stand back, watching him, and say, “Somebody ought to tell him.” In any case, Reinhardt was a very nice man, and what with my bum German and his bum English, we managed to communicate.

  The best part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for me was getting to know that tremendous Viennese composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He had been brought over by Reinhardt to arrange the Mendelssohn score for the film, and fortunately for Warner Brothers, he was to remain and write scores for some of their best pictures. It happened that Reinhardt had rented Dolores Del Rio’s house in Hollywood Hills where he was staying with all his entourage. One day in the studio Dolores walked by, a copper-skinned vision of beauty in crisp white, wearing beautiful red gloves, stunning all the way. Erich, who knew almost no English, turned to me and said, “Cagney!”

  “What?”

  “Who?” he said, pointing.

  “That’s Dolores Del Rio.”

  “Del Rio?” he asked. “Reinhardt house?”

  “Yes,” I said. His eyes widened and he said incredulously, “Wizzout her?”

  There was one scene in the film, a process shot, showing the fairies riding moonbeams, and Erich had missed the first screening. On his arrival he was told that he really should go and see this fairy sequence, which he promptly did. When he returned from the viewing room, we all asked, “So, Erich?”

  “Ah—Wunderbar! Terrific—tremendous—stupendous—but bad!”

  Right in the middle of shooting Dream, our Puck, Mickey Rooney, went up to Big Bear or Arrowhead, got aboard a toboggan, and in descending a slope tried to slow himself down by sticking a leg out. He broke it. Ten days later he was well enough to come back to the set with the le
g in a cast, and all subsequent scenes of his were shot from the waist up. For the long shots they used a good double, a boy named George Breakstone, and it worked out satisfactorily.

  As Bottom, I simply had another job to do, and I did it. There was no feeling at the time that we were doing anything special, and I think the whole enterprise was a box-office disaster, although since then I believe the picture has taken on an aura of culture. One delightful thing happened during shooting. In the scene where I awaken with the ass’s head on, I look in a pond, see myself, and recognize the sad truth. Thereupon I burst into song, all the while weeping copiously. I was rehearsing this when a new shift of stagehands came on the set, and one of them whispered to the chap whose place he was taking, “What’s he crying about?”

  “He just got a jackass’s head.”

  “Oh, that’s what he’s cryin’ for?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Touchin’.”

  I followed up Dream with Frisco Kid, one of those catch-as-catch-can affairs Warner’s put out purely because they had to be put out. By that I mean Frisco Kid had already been sold to the exhibitors even before a foot of it had been shot or conceived. This will give you some idea of its inherent artistic flavor. The picture was built just the way a Ford sedan might have been.

  It was around this time that Will Rogers died, a man I had just gotten to know a bit. A most likable and decent person, he appeared at all the benefits, always with the good routine fully à propos of the occasion. Once I was at a dinner being given for Bill Robinson when Will was master of ceremonies, and I was called on for a word or two. Will introduced me by saying, “Now I’m going to call on someone who, every time I see him work, looks to me like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.”

  I got up and said, “Well, I certainly don’t feel like any firecracker or bunch of firecrackers at this point. After all that’s been said before, I feel like kind of a wet blanket. But I do want to pass on the good wishes for a very happy birthday from a bum hoofer to another.” What I had wanted to say was, “… from a bum hoofer to a great one!” I was trying to be modest, and in a slip of the tongue I had fouled myself up for fair. At that time I was very self-conscious at public events. I never had any real poise, any assurance.

  It was a great loss when Will Rogers was killed on his 1935 Alaska flight. I remember going into the Green Room at Warner’s the morning we got the news, and a former much-decorated member of the Lafayette Escadrille was there—Bill Wellman, the director. I asked him if he had heard the news, and he said, “Yeah. We just don’t belong up there. You couldn’t get me into a plane now for anything.” I echo his sentiments about planes. I hate the damned things myself.

  In 1936 I attained one of my best and fondest dreams—I bought a farm. Martha’s Vineyard then was uncluttered with developers (which is too gracious a designation for those gentlemen; developers actually develop nothing but their own bankrolls). I couldn’t think of anything more satisfactory, more life-fulfilling, than living on a farm surrounded by salt water. This is what Martha’s Vineyard allowed me to do. The old, old house we found there—its building deed reads 1728—met my expectations wonderfully, and everything about the land and its situation charmed me right out of my shoes. Moreover, the taxes were thirty-nine dollars a year, which made it an ideal place to land if the movie business ever dropped me. I figured one way or another I could always manage to pick up thirty-nine dollars in the course of a year. I used to lie in my California bed and dream of that old house in its very happy state of quiet decay. I loved it beyond words, and at the time I said to myself, “If I had just six months to live, I’d spend them at the Vineyard.” The Vineyard represented for me the place where I could always go to find the freedom and peace one didn’t find prevailing on the Hollywood turf.

  By the end of 1935 it became apparent to me and brother Bill (in his capacity as my business manager) that the studio was still consistently interested in paying me only a very small percentage of the income dollar deriving from my work. Therefore I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I walked away until they could make a better arrangement. We filed suit against Warner’s to rectify the inequities.

  While waiting for that to straighten itself out, I went to work for Grand National Pictures, a fairly small studio that had been using Warner’s for distribution of its product. Here I made a musical, Something to Sing About, a particular pleasure to do because it meant working with Harland Dixon and Johnny Boyle, two great dancers I had admired for years in vaudeville. I must cheerfully admit that I had stolen all kinds of steps from them both down through the years, and it made me very proud to think that I was literally following in their footsteps and with their footsteps. It was warming to feel that I was one of their kind—a song-and-dance man working in the great tradition set by the head of our clan, George M. Cohan.

  Johnny Boyle became my instructor and very good friend for many of my Hollywood years. He knew more about dancing than anyone I ever met. He could do Irish jigs and reels plus every conceivable kind of buck dance, hard-shoe dance—any dance. Personally, Johnny had an awful lot of trouble laughing, and he had reason. He was sent into the mines at age eight as a breaker boy. This meant sitting in a cold, dust-filled room, picking slate out of the coal as it passed under him. Breaker boys were bent over the entire day, and whenever they tried to straighten up, a foreman was always there to force them back with the clout of a shovel. This was Johnny’s childhood, and I understood why he tended not to be merry.

  Harland Dixon was also a superb dancer and teacher. He was a great dancing innovator, creating such things as shoulder twists and knee snaps, all now standard hoofer techniques. He and Johnny helped considerably in livening up Something to Sing About. One time Johnny showed me a pair of miniature gold dancing shoes, and on one sole was engraved: “To Johnny Boyle, the World’s Greatest Hoofer; signed, Jack Donohue.” This was no faint praise because Jack Donohue had been Marilyn Miller’s partner in many Ziegfeld shows and was a musical comedy star of the first rank, a Broadway legend. Johnny was naturally very proud of these gold shoes, and when he showed them to me I noticed that there was nothing inscribed on the other sole. I asked him why Jack had left it blank. “Oh,” said Johnny, “that’s just in case we’d get an argument from Dixon.”

  With Johnny’s expertise at my beck, I would call on him when I needed to take off some weight before getting into a picture. I’d put on my old sweat clothes and go down to his house. There’d be a dancing mat in the parlor where he’d teach me a routine that I’d employ to sweat my lard off. I had never been taught to dance. As a youngster I’d watch a dance, steal it, change it, usually giving it a little eccentric twist. I was always trying to improve the steps I stole, striving to make them more showy—and Johnny helped me do that. Years before I had done the same thing for my Bill when I put our act together. I would teach her the steps, but then she did them better than I ever thought of doing. Some things I could never do easily—wings, for instance. I never did them well, probably because they didn’t pay off; it took an expert to realize how difficult they were. I chose the other route—the more flashy stuff the audience could see—flash, with always a dash of the eccentric and a bit of humor.

  Many people think I learned to dance for Yankee Doodle Dandy, the prevailing impression being that when a fella gets up and does a dance routine, he learned it the day before yesterday. Not so. A song-and-dance man, which is what I am basically, becomes one over many years of unrelenting work. I’m amazed by reading reports of actors who say, “I’m studying voice and dance now, and I’m going to do a musical comedy next season.” Unfailingly, it never happens. To become a dancer, initially you’ve got to be a little bit off your chump in order to put up with the pain—the sprained ankles, torn tendons, and bumped knees. A person dedicating himself to that kind of hardship needs a particular attitude. I think dancing is a primal urge coming to life at the first moment we need to express joy. Among pre-language aborig
inals possessing no music and the most primitive rhythm, I suspect dancing became their first expression of excitement. And an extension of that idea is imbedded in my belief, quite applicable to myself, that once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and-dance man.

  After Something to Sing About, the difficulty with Warner Brothers was straightened out, and I returned in 1938. The work was all the more pleasant in that two close chums were involved in my first picture on return. They were Pat O’Brien and Ralph Bellamy; the picture was Boy Meets Girl, a reworking of the Sam and Bella Spewack hit Broadway farce about the motion picture business. Also in the cast was that very savvy gal, Marie Wilson, who was very adept at giving an impression of naivete. Like any number of my films, I never saw Boy Meets Girl. Years later I saw part of it on television, and it was so much better in the TV version than it seemed to be when we did it that I can’t quite understand it. It’s the same film, but I sense that the years have done something for it—what, I don’t know. While we were making it, Pat and I were harassed by the producer’s insistence on more speed. So Pat and I went mostly our own way; we were fast when we needed to be, and let air into it as required for the most part. In a farce you’ve got to give the audience a chance to get their breath.