In the prison mess hall, James Cagney as the murderous Cody Jarrett hears of his mother’s death and goes berserk in one of the most memorable scenes from Raoul Walsh’s annihilating masterpiece White Heat (1949), probably the last great gangster film of the golden age.
He was different from most of the great stars of the golden age in that he often played villains—even late in his career—comically in Mister Roberts (1955), with unsentimental pathos in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), with complicated and disturbing psychopathic ambivalence in White Heat. His essential persona was as fixed in the public’s consciousness as Bogart’s or Cooper’s or Gable’s but—being a more resourceful and versatile actor—he could express ambiguities in a character even if they weren’t written into the script or featured by the direction. Because he was innately so sympathetic, his heavies created an intriguing, even alarming, tension in the audience. As a result, White Heat, as an example, contains a decidedly subversive duality: in the glare of Cagney’s personality—though his character is in no way sentimentalized—the advanced, somewhat inhuman technology of the police and the undercover-informer cop (Edmond O’Brien) become morally reprehensible. As a result, I remember Welles and I hissing the law and rooting for Cagney like schoolboys. That rarest of actors—who could totally transcend their vehicles—and in common with a number of other stars of the movies’ greatest period, he was indisputably one of a kind.
During the course of my single evening with him, Cagney also proved to be an absolutely brilliant, riveting, and often hilarious raconteur. He didn’t just tell a story, he got up and acted it out, playing all the parts with remarkable precision and an economy of movement that was as subtle and revealing as his screen appearances. He gave us that night some memorable impressions of people he’d worked with, like the gentle Hungarian director Charles Vidor, who had directed him in the Ruth Etting biopic, Love Me or Leave Me (1955), and whose accent Cagney had down perfectly; he pantomimed holding a cigarette very thoughtfully from below with thumb and forefinger, which immediately caught the flavor of the man.
Then he did the anything-but-gentle Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, a tyrannical martinet of the old school, who directed him in two of Cagney’s biggest successes, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and the Oscar-winning Yankee Doodle Dandy; this involved a couple of outrageous anecdotes, and one that summed up the director’s apparent heart-lessness. On a period seafaring picture called The Sea Hawk (1940), Cagney described how Curtiz had been working on the deck of a huge mock-up of a ship that rose high above the sound-stage floor. Everyone was scared of his rages, so all the actors and extras tried to stay out of his way as much as possible. Unfortunately, Cagney explained, during one setup, a bit-part player in the role of a minister found himself behind Curtiz as the director moved this way and that, trying to decide where to put the camera, his right hand up to his face like a frame, stepping quickly backward and forward and sideways. Cagney played this all out quickly and vividly, doing both roles, the minister fearfully dodging Curtiz’s erratic movements. The poor guy eventually became so rattled that he accidentally backed off the edge of the deck and fell twenty-five feet to the cement floor below. When Curtiz heard the commotion and glanced downward over the edge to see what the problem was, grasping it in a second, he rapidly turned back to his task, Cagney said, yelling out as he did with slight impatience and strong accent, “Get me another minister!”
In another sharply observed story, Cagney played out the absolute essence of John Ford, also a famously crusty and truculent director, during the filming of a sequence from What Price Glory (1952), in which Cagney starred along with veteran supporting actor William Demarest. Ford, Cagney said, was standing on a small hill overlooking a road on which Demarest was supposed to drive off in a motorcycle with Cagney in the sidecar. Ford was puffing on his pipe and, at one point, called Cagney, gesturing for the actor to join him. Cagney did, he said, pantomiming Ford on his pipe: “Puff, puff, puff, puff, puff.” Then he imitated Ford’s gruff delivery, “You gonna ride in the sidecar with Bill?” Cagney looked puzzled, answered, “Yeah. Sure.” Cagney imitated Ford with the pipe again, “Puff, puff, puff, puff, puff,” after which the director had asked, “Why?”
Cagney told us he was confused. “Well, that’s what it says in the script,” he said to Ford, “I get in the sidecar and Bill takes off.” Cagney again did Ford puffing the pipe, then imitated his terse, “OK.” The actor looked even more puzzled, then was called to shoot and so, he said, got into the sidecar and Demarest took off. “Took off!?” Cagney exclaimed. “The motorcycle careened up the road at full speed, went off onto an embankment, swerved around, and smashed into a wall. I was thrown out, and Bill walked away, just limping slightly. When I looked up the hill, Ford was still there, puffing away on his pipe. So while they were getting another bike ready to try it again, I walked back up to him. I was a little dazed, but he just stood there—puff, puff, puff, puff, puff—and then he said, ‘Didn’t I tell ya?’”
We all laughed, and Cagney tied it up for us: “There’s one word that sums up Jack Ford—and the Irish,” the actor said with a dark smile, being Irish himself, and enunciating the one word with great relish, letting the final syllable hiss for a beat: “mal-ice.”
Cagney played out several other memorable characters for us that evening, including a “hop-headed pimp” he had observed in his Yorkville (Manhattan) childhood (a section of East 91st Street is named after Cagney) standing on a corner, nervously cracking his knuckles and jacking his pants up with the sides of his arms—a mannerism the actor would immortalize in Angels with Dirty Faces. One of the guests asked how he had developed his habit of physically drawn-out death scenes, probably the best coming at the conclusion of The Roaring Twenties, where he runs (in one continuous shot) along an entire city block, and halfway up, then halfway down, the stairs in front of a church before finally sprawling dead onto them. In answer, Cagney described a Frank Buck documentary he’d once seen, in which the hunter was forced to kill a giant gorilla. The animal died in a slow, “amazed way,” Cagney said, which gave him his inspiration, and which he played out for us in a few riveting moments of mime.
It was a strange feeling to watch him being so brilliant and to know that he had given up acting. I asked what it would take to get him into a movie again. He leaned back on the couch, smiled gently and said, in characteristic fashion, with a tiny shake of his head, “I have no in-ter-est.” Then he sat up and leaned forward. “That’s not a line ei-ther—I really mean it.” So Jimmy and Billie Cagney divided their time between Los Angeles, where they had a house, and Martha’s Vineyard, where they had a farm; he owned a lot of land and cattle, and they seemed contented. The Cagneys had been married for something like fifty years and still seemed very much in love. Billie looked at him with great affection while he told stories she must have heard numerous times. After eighty pictures, I suppose there were very few things left to challenge him, but still I couldn’t help feeling he was just too good not to be acting all the time.
James Cagney with Gladys George on the church steps where he falls dead in Raoul Walsh’s memorable gangster film The Roaring Twenties (1939); to the cop’s question about who Cagney was, she answers, “He used to be a big shot.”
Yet there were probably a lot of reasons why, which Cagney couldn’t—or wouldn’t want to—put into words: so many of his old pals had passed away and certainly Hollywood was no longer the fresh, exciting and intimate place it once had been. If some of us who hadn’t lived through the golden period felt a keen sense of loss for those incomparably better and more creative times, how could we calculate the feelings of people who had actually experienced them? Late in the evening, Cagney gave a hint of this: “When I drove through the studio gate, and the thrill was gone,” he said, “I knew it was time to quit.”
James Cagney as George M. Cohan in the actor’s own personal favorite among his pictures, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), one of the great star-turns in movies. Michael Cur
tiz directed efficiently, and Don Siegel supplied the tight and effective montages. Cagney dancing, however, simply requires the camera to be turned on, and he becomes uniquely electrifying.
As it turned out, Cagney broke his retirement about a decade after our dinner, on doctors’ orders to be more active, by accepting a small role in Milos Forman’s Ragtime (1981), and then doing the lead in a TV-movie, Terrible Joe Moran (1984). Neither added much of anything to his legacy. In 1974, he became the first actor to receive the AFI’s Lifetime Achievement award; in 1980, a similar salute from the Kennedy Honors; and in 1984, the Medal of Freedom from the U.S. government. Three years after our dinner in Brentwood, he published his autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, in which he said the “best directors” were the ones like Walsh, who, “If I don’t know what the hell to do, can get up and show me.”
At dinner, Cagney had told us that only once in the ten years since his retirement had he been tempted to return: when director George Cukor offered him the Stanley Holloway part in My Fair Lady (1964). “That was inviting,” he said, “but I’d made up my mind.” It’s not insignificant that this was a song-and-dance role because, although he won his only Oscar for playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cagney is associated by most movie fans with gangster roles. But when someone asked during dinner which of all the movies he’d done was his favorite, he answered without a moment’s hesitation: “I guess it’d have to be the Cohan picture.”
Of course, he was like no other dancer: his straight-legged, cocky, constantly surprising way of hoofing—which is how he started in show business—was seen only in a couple of other films, not really very good ones. Footlight Parade (1933) is the best of these, yet his manner as an actor and his grace as a performer no doubt owe quite a lot to his dancing days. He just moved eloquently, and therefore could easily have been a great silent star. However, he arrived with the talkies, and gave even the least of them a large measure of his boundless panache.
Born James Francis Cagney, Jr., July 17, 1899, Manhattan, NY; died March 30, 1986, Stanfordville, NY.
Selected starring features (with director):
1930: Doorway to Hell (Archie Mayo)
1931: The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman); Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth)
1932: Taxi (Del Ruth); The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks)
1933: Hard to Handle (Mervyn LeRoy); Picture Snatcher (Lloyd Bacon); Footlight Parade (Bacon); Lady Killer (Del Ruth)
1935: “G” Men (William Keighley)
1936: Ceiling Zero (Hawks)
1938: Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz)
1939: Each Dawn I Die (Keighley); The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh)
1940: City for Conquest (Anatole Litvak)
1941: The Strawberry Blonde (Walsh)
1942: Yankee Doodle Dandy (Curtiz)
1945: Blood on the Sun (Frank Lloyd)
1947: 13 Rue Madeleine (Henry Hathaway)
1949: White Heat (Walsh)
1950: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Gordon Douglas)
1952: What Price Glory (John Ford)
1953: A Lion Is in the Streets (Walsh)
1955: Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray); Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor); Mister Roberts (Ford and LeRoy)
1956: Tribute to a Bad Man (Robert Wise)
1960: The Gallant Hours (Robert Montgomery)
1961: One Two Three (Billy Wilder)
18
MARLENE DIETRICH
“Marlene Dietrich’s taken your seats.” The assistant director was a little out of breath. “You don’t care, do you? She likes to sit in the first two on the right. They moved you guys behind her.” It was September 1972, and Ryan O’Neal and I were at Los Angeles International Airport with a few others of the cast and crew of Paper Moon, which we were flying to Kansas to shoot. I said we didn’t mind.
Ryan was incredulous. “Marlene Dietrich is on our plane going to Kansas!?”
No, it turned out she was flying to Denver (we had to switch planes there) to give six concert performances at the Denver Auditorium. Hard to believe, but sure enough, there she was, sitting across from us at the gate, all in white—wide-brimmed hat, pants, shirt, jacket—looking great and also bored and a little suspicious of the noisy good spirits around our group.
We went over to say hello. I introduced myself. Ryan said, “Hello, Miss Dietrich, I’m Ryan O’Neal. Love Story?” He grinned.
“Yes,” she said. “I didn’t see it—I liked the book too much. I won’t see The Godfather for the same reason—Brando is too slow for it anyway—why didn’t they use Eddie [Edward G.] Robinson?” She had that deep voice and distinct German accent.
There were several people I knew who had worked with and loved her, and I mentioned a few of them, trying to get a conversation going, but she was a little frosty, so we slipped away after a few moments. Ryan said, “I think we did great,” but I didn’t.
She was right behind us as we waited to have our hand baggage searched, not a common event then, and I can’t recall why it was done. We tried again; she was nicer this time. “I saw The Last Picture Show,” she said to me; the film had opened a year before. “I thought if one more person stripped slowly, I would go crazy.”
Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola, the role that made her an overnight international star, in Josef von Sternberg’s Berlin-made The Blue Angel (1930), shot simultaneously in German and English. This was the first of seven Dietrich-Sternberg collaborations; all but the last two were very successful.
“Did you see What’s Up, Doc?” Ryan said. “We did that together.” The picture was still in theaters at the time.
“Yes, I saw it,” she said and nothing more. I changed the subject—told her I’d recently run a couple of her older pictures—Ernst Lubitsch’s Angel (1937) and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). She made a face at the first and said the second was “so slow now.” I said I assumed Sternberg wanted it that way—he’d told me he had. “No, he wanted me slow,” she said. “On The Blue Angel [1930], he had such trouble with [star Emil] Jannings—he was so slow.” For some reason the luggage inspector was especially thorough on her bag—and she looked disgusted. “I haven’t been through anything like this since the war.”
On the plane she sat in front of us, with her blond girl Friday, and by now, she had obviously decided we weren’t so bad; she spent almost the whole flight turned backward and leaning over the top of her seat, on her knees, talking to us. She was animated, girlish, candid, funny, sexy, with her baby-talk “r” (that becomes “w”) and everything.
I told her I was trying to stop smoking again. “Oh, don’t,” she said. “I stopped ten years ago and I’ve been miserable ever since. I never drank before—and now I drink. I never had a cough when I was smoking—now I cough. Don’t stop—you’ll get fat and you don’t want to do that.”
We talked about movies she had been in and directors she had worked for. After a while, it became apparent to her that I had seen an awful lot of her pictures. “Why do you know so much about my films?”
“Because I think you’re wonderful, and you’ve worked for a lot of great directors.”
“No,” she said dubiously. “No, I only worked for two great directors—Sternberg and Billy Wilder.”
“And what about Orson?”
“Oh, well, yes, Orson—of course.”
I guess she wasn’t so impressed with Lubitsch or Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh or Tay Garnett or René Clair or Frank Borzage. She looked amazed when I told her I liked Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), amused that I enjoyed Walsh’s Manpower (1941), confused that I was fond of Angel. I had read somewhere that her own favorite performance was in Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).
“You still feel that way?” I said.
“Yes. I was terrific in that. I think I never said a line as well as the last line in that movie—‘What does it matter what you say about people …?’ Wasn’t I good there? I don’t know why I said it so well. And I looked so good in that dark wig. It
was Elizabeth Taylor’s. My part wasn’t in the script, you know, but Orson called and said he wanted me to play a kind of gypsy madam in a border town, so I went over to M-G-M and found that wig. It was very funny, you know, because I had been crazy about Orson—in the forties when he was married to Rita Hayworth and when we toured doing his magic act [The Mercury Wonder Show, benefits exclusively done for servicemen]—I was just crazy about him—we were great friends, you know, but nothing … Because Orson doesn’t like blond women. He only likes dark women. And suddenly when he saw me in this dark wig, he looked at me with new eyes: Was this Marlene …?”
“Well, he certainly photographed you lovingly.”
“Yes, I never looked that good.”
Welles had once told me, I remembered, that Marlene was a lifelong worshipper of Greta Garbo but had never met her, so Orson arranged the meeting to happen at a little party at Clifton Webb’s house. He drove Dietrich there and she was as nervous and excited as a young girl. Garbo was about an hour late and when the two were introduced, Dietrich praised her, but Garbo just nodded blandly and moved on. Marlene, Welles said, was crushed but said nothing. Driving back, Dietrich was silent for a long time and then, finally, said, “Her feet are not soo big …”
“You have great legs,” Ryan suddenly said.
“Yah—great!” She grinned. “Great thighs!” She slapped one of them behind the seat.
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