King of the streets
Philip French
CAGNEY by John McCabe Aurum Press, £16.95, pp. 439 James Cagney, the centenary of whose birth will be celebrated next year, is one of the screen's half-dozen greatest actors. 'He had no superior as a film actor,' his friend and biographer John McCabe remarks, `and very few peers: Brando, Robert Donat, Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Edward G. Robinson and Spencer Tracy. Possibly Fredric March.' To this list one must add James Stewart, whose iconic sta- tus as the emodiment of small-town Ameri- ca complements Cagney's role as the essential man of the city. He was ill at ease in costume, whether playing a cowboy or Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he turned down Chaplin's invitation to appear in a life of Napoleon.
His pre-Hollywood life having an uncan- ny resemblance to a double-bill of Angels with Dirty Faces and 42nd Street, Cagney was made for, and part of the making of, Warner Brothers. He was raised in a Man- hattan slum, his devoted, hard-working mother part Norwegian, his charming alco- holic father wholly Irish. The shriek that Cagney's Cody Jarrett, the gangster hero of White Heat, lets out when a fellow convict conveys news of his mother's death was apparently a recapitulation of his father's piercing cries when experiencing DTs. Shorter than his contemporaries (as a grown man he was under five foot eight inches), he became a scrapper and wise- cracking fast talker to get back at his antag- onists. The boxing led to the dancing 'it's all footwork', as he said — and in his youth one can see the screen persona in embryonic form, the graceful tough guy bobbing confidently down his asphalt stage, king of the streets. It is almost too good to learn from McCabe that Cagney, a natural loner, had only one close school friend, who went to the electric chair in 1927 for killing a cop in the course of an armed rob- bery.
There was, however, something extraor- dinary about the Cagneys. With no assis- tance from her husband (who never held down a job and died in the 'flu epidemic of 1918), Carrie Cagney saw that all her chil- dren got a good education. Two of Jimmy's brothers became doctors, the third was called to the bar, and his sister (20 years his junior) graduated from New York's Hunter College in 1918 before entering drama school. Even Jimmy had six months at Columbia, where he studied German under the father of Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz before drifting into a stage career via various jobs as doorman. It was the money rather than the glamour of show business that attracted him, and after his first paid job, performing in drag in a male chorus line, he replaced Archie Leach (the future Cary Grant) in a third-rate vaudeville trio. He attracted serious critical attention at the age of 26 in his first straight play, Maxwell Anderson's Outside Looking In, playing that characteristic part of a two-fisted hobo protecting an abused whore. But good notices didn't lead to good parts and for a while his wife Frances (known as Willie), a Middle-Western dancer (and Protestant), supported the Cagney household though they never accepted her as part of the clan.
Shortly before the coming of sound Jimmy and Willie made an abortive trip to Hollywood. They returned there perma- nently in 1930 when Jack Warner signed up Jimmy and bought the movie rights to his current Broadway hit. The following year, as the Depression was beginning to bite, Warner Brothers cast Cagney in The Public Enemy and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, and the first great stars of the sound era were created, both playing a new kind of violent urban hero seizing his share of a tainted American Dream. Cagney's achievement was immediately recognised by critics, most eloquently by Lincoln Kirstein, future director of the New York City Ballet. The actor himself had a proper sense of his box-office value and there began a battle over money and scripts with Jack Warner (whom he always called 'The Shvontz', Yiddish for prick) that continued for over 20 years. On the money front Cagney usually won and he became immensely rich through real estate. But as his natural radicalism was eroded by time, experience and wealth, he moved steadily to the right, and in 1951 he cravenly acqui- esced when Warner demanded that a white actor be cast in a role written for a black.
At the end of McCabe's book Cagney remains something of an enigma — a con- vivial man who spent most of his evenings at home, a teetotaller whose best friends were heavy drinkers, a devout Catholic who never set foot in church (except for funer- als and christenings) after a priest failed to show up for his father's funeral. He was also rather less congenial than the kind, caring, big-hearted person McCabe claims he was. He was scathing about virtually all the directors he worked with and spoke grudgingly of the few he admired. When one of the Dead End Kids tried to upstage him on Angels with Din), Faces, he quite lit- erally laid him out. Except for one dubious incident (alleged coitus interruptus with Merle Oberon in a railway sleeper during a World War Two savings drive), he was a faithful, devoted husband throughout his life. Sadly the Cagneys couldn't have chil- dren, so they adopted a boy and a girl who were lodged in a separate house on the Cagney estate, were kept at arm's length and inevitably turned against Jimmy and Willie with mutually unhappy conse- quences.
The performances, however, are more important than the career, and there are over a dozen that stand up well, though after his Oscar-winning appearance in Yan- kee Doodle Dandy in 1942 (which he is said to have made to demonstrate his patriotism in the face of right-wing attacks) he made only three or four pictures of interest. McCabe has nothing really illuminating to say about the pictures, though he quotes from people who do, among them Graham Greene in The Spectator and Ken Tynan in Sight and Sound. He's good on background detail, however, and I was particularly fas- cinated to learn that every line spoken by Cagney in his final appearance, the TV film Terrible Joe Moran, made when he was 84, was dubbed by an anonymous Cagney impersonator and nobody knew or noticed.
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