Cagney Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN McCABE

  Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy (1962)

  George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway (1973)

  The Comedy World of Stan Laurel (1973)

  Laurel and Hardy: The Films (with Al Kilgore and Richard Bonn) (1975)

  Proclaiming the Word (with G. B. Harrison) (1976)

  Charlie Chaplin (1978)

  The Grand Hotel (1987)

  Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy (1989)

  The High (1992)

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1997 by John McCabe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  http://www.randomhouse.com/

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCabe, John.

  Cagney / by John McCabe. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83099-9

  1. Cagney, James, 1899–1986. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.C23M27 1997

  791.43’028’092—dc21

  [B] 97-5067

  v3.1

  For

  Linny, Deirdre, and Sean, with many loving memories of The Senator, Lovie the Princess, and The Klunk Kid

  But I have seen a Proteus that can take What shape he please, and in an instant make Himself to anything: be that or this By voluntary metamorphosis.

  Preface to Jealous Lovers, by Thomas Randolph, 1632, in praise of his actor friend Thomas Riley

  In the very nature of acting … there is an essential gaiety. If it isn’t light-hearted, it becomes absurd. You can achieve every shade of seriousness by means of ease, and none of them without it.

  Bertolt Brecht, Der Messingkauf (The Purchase of Brass), 1955

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. CARRIE

  2. THE REARGUARD TOUGH

  3. HARD KNOCKS, HARD KNUCKLES

  4. FARMING DEFERRED

  5. WILLIE

  6. VAUDEVILLE VARIETY

  7. BROADWAY

  8. WARNER BROTHERS

  9. JACK “THE SHVONTZ”

  10. THE MIX AS BEFORE

  11. MORE TROUBLES IN OUR NATIVE LAN’

  12. EASIER TROUBLE

  13. OUT OF THE FACTORY

  14. THE FACTORY GENTRIFIED

  15. IN FUNCTION

  16. A DANDY YANKEE DOODLE

  17. THE WAR

  18. THE LONE CAGNEYS

  19. BACK TO THE FACTORY

  20. OPEN-FIELD RUNNING

  21. ANNUS MIRABILIS

  22. INDIAN SUMMER

  23. NOT THE ENDING

  24. MEMORIES

  25. CAGNEY BY CAGNEY

  26. MARGE

  27. ON ACTING

  28. NEXT TO CLOSING

  29. LAST BOW

  Appendixes:

  Stage Appearances

  Cagney on Radio

  Feature Films

  Short Films

  Cagney on Television

  Select Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgments

  My prime obligation is to James Cagney—his informal reminiscences are the heart of this work—but I am also deeply indebted to Frances Willard “Willie” Cagney for insights into her husband’s character and life that gave me deeper understanding of his extraordinary personality. For much of my basic understanding of him I owe more than I can ever satisfactorily acknowledge to my old friends Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh. Over the years of our comradeship at The Lambs Club, they told me Cagney stories that amply confirmed in interesting detail what I had heard and was yet to learn of his tough sweetness, deep kindness, and exemplary gifts of friendship. Pat said, “He was the best man I ever met in the course of my long life—and I’ve met many and many a man.” Frank echoed this.

  Marge Zimmermann gave me vivid details of Cagney’s last days. She also gave me access to all his personal papers, the most interesting of which was his “composition” book, as he called it—a much-used quarto in which he structured his verse and penned other thoughts.

  Special thanks to Selden West, authorized biographer of Spencer Tracy, for urging me to write this book, and to Robert Gottlieb of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., who gave me the commission to do so, with needed attendant encouragements and incisive editing. Thanks, too, to Ken Schneider, Iris Weinstein, and Abby Weintraub of Knopf. I have a very special obligation to two of the publishing world’s bright stars, Ken McCormick and Sam Vaughan, who during their Doubleday years showed their faith in me by asking that I ghostwrite Cagney by Cagney, a vital step toward my present work.

  Karen Lee Hodgson was a much-valued research assistant, as was Veronica Cullen. I am especially grateful to Ned Comstock, director of the Cinema/TV section of Doheny Library, University of Southern California, and to Stuart Ng, for easeful access to the Warner Brothers Collection there. Thanks also to Sam Gill and his efficient staff at the Library of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And as always through the years I am grateful to Charles Silver and his associate Ron Magliozzi of the Film Study Center of The Museum of Modern Art for their kind help. I am also grateful to Mary Corliss and Terry Geesken of MOMA’s Film Still Archive, Bob Cosenia of the Kobal Collection, and Christel Schmidt of the George Eastman House.

  For their Cagney memories I am indebted to: Richard Erdman, Harry Flynn, Milos Forman, Shirley Jones, Harris Laskawy, Perry Lafferty, Jimmy Lydon, Virginia Mayo, Don Murray, Brigid O’Brien, Floyd Patterson, Joseph Sargent, James Sherwood, Burt Solomon, Peter Turgeon, Ben Welden, and Roland “Rolie” Winters. I am grateful to Professor Jack Morrison, husband of Jeanne Cagney, for giving me a penetrating look into Cagney family mores. Ray Wemmlenger, librarian of The Players, showed me correspondence between various Players officers and Cagney through the years. Peter Bogdanovich supplied me with a merry account of his wonderful luncheon with Cagney. Special thanks also to the following: Peter Ballante, Steve Cardali, Victoria Cullen, Arnold Karolewski, and John Mainelli for access to their precious Cagney press books purchased at the Doyle Galleries auction, and to Joanne Porino Mounet of Doyle for information about the Cagney memorabilia auction. Robert Costello, lawyer for the Cagney Estate, gave me vital information on the wills of both James and Frances Cagney.

  Also thanks to: Peter Boutin, Richard W. Bann, Michael F. Blake for his comments on Lon Chaney and Cagney and for a rare copy of You, John Jones, Ron Borst, Paul D. Colford, John Carroll for essential irrelevancies, Frank Carroll, Bill Erwin, Robert Frye (producer of the fine “Biography” treatment of Cagney for A&E Channel), Thom Forbes, Richard Frank for some Hollywood history and a rare photograph of the Cagneys at play, Chuck Gustafson, Madeline Hamermesh, Howard Hays of University of California at Los Angeles for wonderful Cagney newsreel footage, Julio Hernandez-Delgado, Roger B. Hunting, Janis Johnson, Larry Kasha, Lincoln Kirstein for an encouraging phone call, Linny McCabe, Chuck McCann and Betty Fanning-McCann, Pete McGovern, Stephanie McGreevy, Mrs. Frank (Dorothy) McHugh, Lisa Mitchell, Robert Montgomery, old friend Max Morath for insightful comments on White Heat, Ruth Neveu, Ann Nunziato and Fr. Tom McSweeney of The Christophers for their help in tracking down A Link in the Chain, Donald O’C
onnor, Elizabeth Plowe, W. T. Rabe, Eulalie Regan, Steffi Sidney for information about her father, Sidney Skolsky; Philip Truex, Peter Turgeon for friendship and two Cagney stories, Whit Vernon, Arthur Weisenseel, M.D., old friends Rube and Liz Weiss for augmenting my Cagney-stimulated knowledge of Yiddish, and Jordan Young.

  Introduction

  In 1973 Doubleday and Company asked me to ghostwrite the memoirs of James Cagney. I knew him only through correspondence and tales of him by mutual friends. He had kindly contributed to my book George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway because of his affection for and admiration of the man he portrayed in so sprightly a manner in Yankee Doodle Dandy. The autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, duly appeared in 1976 to generally good reviews, the only critical reservation being that Cagney did not tell “all.” It was a charge he accepted gladly. “Goddamned right I didn’t tell all,” he said. “All would be boring, boring, boring—and I’m in the business of entertainment. And if I choose to remember only the best parts of my life, I don’t know why in hell I should apologize for that.” He warmed to the subject. “Some of these film scholars mail me their requests to learn every jot and tittle about a guy’s life and work. The average reader—and that’s the one I’m interested in—doesn’t need or want to know these things.” When reminded that he, Cagney, wanted to know jot and tittle about virtually all he was interested in—poetry, conservation, animal husbandry, painting, farming, and more—he smiled and said, “Jot, yes; tittle, no.”

  These pages will inescapably contain a number of Cagney tittles offered to help us understand better this forthright man who was nothing if not thorough in all his life processes.

  Cagney by Cagney is indeed all he wanted to tell, and he had to be strongly persuaded by Doubleday to tell even that. The reticence about his professional life flowed directly from his deeply quiet nature, his loner instincts, and his honest belief that there was not a lot to say about what was to him “just a job.” It was a phrase he used—indeed, overused—constantly. But he meant it. More, most of his personal life was so joyous—he had married his dream girl at twenty-three, thereby earning long, uneventful decades of happiness—that he could not understand why anyone would really be interested in “just” that. He was a strikingly modest man and truly could not comprehend why people wanted to see the man behind the performances.

  But he honored his Doubleday commitment by chatting long hours with me and was not reticent in response to many questions stretching out over two years of interviews. Indeed he was voluble. Twenty years later things were different. Richard Schickel in his excellent overview James Cagney: A Celebration (1985) says of his subject: “He was not, and never had been, an easy man to interview. Colleagues who had encountered him the last time he had made himself generally available to the press, when he was presented with the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1974, had told me that though Cagney was polite, pleasant and obviously trying to be as helpful as he could, his memory was strangely selective. And so it proved to be.” Part of that selectivity was not so strange. He was then under contract to Doubleday to tell all he wanted to remember in the pending autobiography. In 1980 Schickel spent several days interviewing Cagney at Shepperton Studios, London, during the making of Milos Forman’s Ragtime. Schickel found Cagney easily responsive to questions about his early life and the years of adolescence. But, writes Schickel:

  of the texture of his life during the three decades he worked in the movies he had almost nothing to say. That he has a perfect right to guard his personal life closely, no one can dispute. But there are purely professional matters one would like to know more about, something that would give a sense of the quality of his working days. What ambitions did he harbor that were frustrated? Which ones did he exert himself heavily to attain? What projects did he care about passionately?… If he didn’t want to talk about the directors he came to dislike, could he at least try to recall those he came to trust and admire?… What gave him a sleepless night? Or sent him into rage or sulk or rebellion? More than that, since he had another two decades to contemplate in comfortable tranquillity those years of great and greatly loved stardom, it did not seem unreasonable to seek from him some summarizing sense of what the experience meant to him, looking back on it.… But no, that was not to be.

  Schickel goes on to speculate why it was not meant to be, and his reasoning is accurate. He guesses several things that indeed were fact: that Cagney as an octogenarian suffering a recent stroke, and as one with a parental-imposed sense of modesty, fell inevitably into this reticence. Yet granted all this, Schickel argues, Cagney in most interviews was always content to let his screen persona be generically the tough guy, someone he could portray instinctively given his East Side New York street education. In such interviews he was saying, “You needn’t try to pluck out the heart of my mystery because there is no mystery; that street guy, even as G-man, journalist, or pilot, is the man I always basically portray.”

  Schickel cannot accept this. It leaves him, as an observer, “dissatisfied, edgy. ‘Hoodlum.’ ‘Tough guy.’ Implicitly agreed-upon descriptive conventions.” No, asserts Schickel, this is not all that Cagney was, despite his saying it was. “The fit of these phrases is too loose.” Whereupon he aptly quotes Norman Mailer on Cagney: “Cagney was a gut fighter who was as tough as they come, and yet in nearly all the movies he made you always had the feeling, this is a very decent guy. That’s one of the sweetest and most sentimental thoughts there is in all the world, that tough guys are very decent. That’s what we all want. There’s nothing more depressing than finding a guy as tough as nails and as mean as dirt.”

  The work in hand will try to verify Schickel’s hypothesis that Cagney was more than the tough guy and will offer some answers to his questions about the Cagney career. Some will be tentative answers, some emphatic, but they will come at least mostly from Cagney. In large measure these pages are autobiographical biography. After our work on Cagney by Cagney was finished, Cagney and I talked together through the years, particularly in 1980, when we were contemplating a theatrical project based on his life. In those talks, what were background, almost throwaway addenda are now the chief underlay of this book, in which the phrases “Cagney said” or “Jim said” appear in extenso. In almost all these phrases the added words “to me” should be understood. These comments are the well-remembered essence of matters discussed during these years. I found James Cagney a rigorously honest man, gentle but firm in his policy of telling me the truth about his life. Like us all, he could be mistaken in his assessments, but they were conscientiously rendered, and his verifiable memories are incisively accurate.

  I use the words “Cagney” and “Jim” somewhat interchangeably, but usually the former refers to the performer in action and the latter to the man. “Jim” was the name he always used in personal reference. He did not care for “Jimmy,” a Warner Brothers locution.

  In preparing Cagney by Cagney, we concentrated chiefly on his work. I told him I would seem to be asking questions in excess of need but they would not be irrelevant. For example (I told him), as we discussed a film, I needed to know not only what he thought of it substantively but also his feelings about fellow cast members, director, and script—not (I assured him) that these would become part of the text but that knowing these things would deepen my understanding of the film’s creative atmosphere. Since he had total approval of what went into Cagney by Cagney, this was a promise easily given. I for my part promised I would never go beyond the limits of confidentiality he occasionally set. I keep that pledge.

  He liked most people. The people he did not care for make up a meager list because in his working life Cagney enjoyed his fellow actors (two exceptions, an old actor in Yankee Doodle Dandy and a young one in a late film), easily tolerated almost all his directors (some of whom he thought dreadful but efficient hacks), and without exception treasured the technical crews. He saw no difference between him and them. Just people doing a job.

  So I shal
l strive “to give a sense of the quality of his working days” as he thought of them, this mostly from his, the actor’s, point of view. (It helps to some degree that I am one.) No earthshaking revelations spring from all this because, as Schickel says, Cagney made a tremendous show of saying it “was just a job,” that cliché which he utterly and truly meant. His career, he was fond of saying in similar vein, really existed “to put groceries on the table.” Also profoundly true, but it was a job he dearly loved, set in a milieu he found comfortable and with a goal he found heartwarming: the entertainment of millions.

  Remembering my conversations with Cagney and rereading my notes have been a deeply moving experience because they confirm all I ever thought about him or learned about him: this was a great artist and an even greater man.

  From all this I hope a psychological picture of the “very decent guy” Norman Mailer finds behind the Cagney screen hoodlum will emerge. This guy existed, and was greatly loved by his friends. “A sweet, sweet man,” Pat O’Brien called him. “And a faraway fella.”

  1 • Carrie

  Tiny Jim Cagney sat at the family dining table, transfixed.

  His father, James Francis Cagney, his tousled blue-black hair in almost comic contrast with his magenta complexion, his brain half rotted with alcohol, sat facing his son, staring at him. Jim looked at his dad with fear and compassion. The man rocked slowly from side to side.

  Then the older Cagney began a low keening, that Irish form of lamentation virtually ceremonial in form, a repetitive wail that begins in the bowels and rises into a near shriek. Whenever little Jim had heard this sad, savage cry before, his mother had always attended to her husband’s needs, standing behind him and massaging his neck and forehead. This almost always helped, and the sound would diminish. The family called these episodes “Dad’s fits.”

  This time little Jim was alone in the apartment, his mother having gone shopping. Quickly the boy pulled a chair beside his father, mounted it, and massaged his father’s head.