by James Cagney
So, in my retirement, I have steadfastly refused to come back, until just recently, and that was only a one-night stand. It was a last bow I was induced to make by reason of a strong cultural need. Movies have been around just a comparatively short time, really, in terms of all the other art forms. When you consider the fact that the theatre is over two thousand years old and that movies were first presented commercially in New York just four years before I was born, the contrast in longevity is startling.
Yet movies are undoubtedly the most potent art form of our day, and despite some of the miserable slop that is being dished out these days, the film is still a great force and will undoubtedly go from strength to strength. It’s astonishing that in the film’s comparatively short life so very, very many movies were made. One reliable historian estimates that there were a quarter million of them across the world, which is no small number. Naturally, most of those were programmers, good for giving the pleasures of the day, and little more. But a surprisingly large number of these pictures were works of art, or close thereto. Another not inconsiderable proportion of these films tell the story of their time so vividly that they bear out most accurately Shakespeare’s assertion that the players are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.
The American Film Institute was founded to preserve the great heritage of our films, many of which have just been thrown away after their brief runs as just so much wastepaper. Both in order to preserve vital films of our past and also to encourage young people to become creative film-makers, the AFI, like any other new and growing cultural institution, needs ample funding.
Candidly, I have never given a damn about awards, but when the AFI suggested that I receive their 1974 Life Achievement Award, I realized they weren’t doing it all altruistically, and understandably so. They have a need for some person to hang this yearly fund-raising event on, and without the yearly event they would have a very rough time of it financially. I was happy to be of some use.
In preparing for the banquet on March 13, 1974, when I was to get the award, I was asked to help publicize the affair in the weeks just prior to it. For a guy who had hoped that a happy anonymity was to be his permanent lot in life, this was quite some doing, but of course I was determined that once I had made the decision, I would do the job all the way. So it was that I welcomed the guys and gals of the press on several occasions, and I took ample care to sell the AFI message. One day during this period while waiting for the TV Guide photographer to come over, it occurred to me that if anybody had forecast such a thing a year ago I would have told them they were perilously close to mental dysfunction.
The evening was thoroughly satisfactory, seeing old friends, watching clips from the old films, and it gave me and mine a great feeling of warmth and pleasure. How could it be otherwise when one heard such kind words from people like John Wayne, Bob Hope, Doris Day, Mae Clarke, Cicely Tyson, George C. Scott, Frank Gorshin (who sang and danced an imitation of me with Kirk Douglas and George Segal), Ronnie Reagan, Frank Sinatra (who emceed beautifully and sang me a song in the same style), Shirley MacLaine, and Jack Lemmon?
One of the really amusing things of the evening was furnished by my little niece, Terry, and my sister Jeanne. Terry said to Jeannie, “Now, Mom, you’ve got to understand something. This is one evening you are not supposed to cry.” The source of that remark is that every time I do a dance routine, Jeannie starts to cry, and Terry was emphasizing that tonight it wasn’t to be done. So came the moment when they flashed on the screen the tabletop routine with Bob Hope from The Seven Little Foys. Jeannie, remembering her daughter’s admonishment, looked over at her—and there was Terry watching it, gulping, the tears running down her cheeks. Then Jeannie, of course, gave way too, but not visibly.
By the time I got up to speak, I must admit to a certain expenditure of nerves. This is part of what I said:
“I’m a wreck. You know, when my friend A. C. Lyles told me of the plans that the AFI had for this evening, it gave me pause. And I said to him, ‘You know, this is not the kind of thing I do every day. What will they expect of me?’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, all you have to do is “Uhm uhh uhm.” ’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘All you have to do is “Uhm uhh uhm.” ’ So I’m saying to you right now with a little necessary emphasis, ‘Mmhm, mhmm, mhmm.’
“And about the award, I’m very grateful for it. But why don’t we just say for now that I’m merely the custodian, holding it for all those wonderful guys and gals who worked over the years to bring about this night for me? I really mean it. I’m thanking you for them and for me.
“Young George Stevens in a letter to me early on told me that one of the fundamental aims of the AFI was to establish it firmly as an art form. Art. Now, I’m a little bit hipped on the thing myself and have been for a long time. And it brought to mind a work written by John Masefield, the English poet laureate. He wrote it with a pen dipped in a bit of vitriol. Im going to read it to you now.
What is the hardest task of art?
To clear the ground and make a start
’Midst wooden head and iron heart;
To sing the stopp’d adder’s ear
To fill the tale with none to hear,
And paint what none else reckon dear;
To dance or carve or build or strive
Among the dead or half alive
Whom greeds impel and terrors drive.
Now you, my English dancers, you
Began our English joy anew
In sand with neither rain nor dew,
Dance with despised and held in shame
Almost something not to name
But that lovely flower came.
Oh, may you prosper till the race
Is all one rapture at your grace,
And England beauty’s dwelling place.
Then you’ll know what Shakespeare knew
That when the millions want the few
They can make heaven here—and do.
“I like that.
“I have a great many thanks to spread about this evening. We all know an event like this doesn’t get itself on. It is the result of a lot of dedicated people working at peak pitch for a great many days.
“So, Frankie—Frankie Sinatra—one of the neighbors’ children. Thanks for the song. How many copies it will sell, uhm uhh uhm. And Ted Ashley, George Stevens, Sue Taurog, Chuck Heston, Mr. Scott, dear Doris Day, Bob Hope, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon, Miss Tyson, Frank Gorshin—oh, Frankie, just in passing: I never said, ‘Mmm, you dirty rat!’ What I actually did say was ‘Judy! Judy! Judy!’ And thank you, Mr. Segal, big Duke Wayne, blessing—and Kirk Douglas. Oh, and one more thing, Frankie Gorshin, that hitching of the trousers, I got that from a fella who hung out on the corner of Seventy-eighth Street and First Avenue. I was about twelve years old and he was most interesting to me because that’s all he did [the gesture] all day. When somebody would greet him, he didn’t deign to say hello, he just stood back and did this: [the greeting twitch]. Now, let’s face it. We are all indebted to that fella. He was a type—and we had them. Oh, how we did have them.…
“And the names, the names, the names of my youth. Lager-head Quinlavan. Artie Klein. Pete Leyden. Jake Brodkin. Specs Torporcer. Brother O’Meara. Picky Houlihan. Were all part of a stimulating early environment which produced that unmistakable touch of the gutter without which this evening might never have happened at all.”
And that was the end of a wonderful evening.
Everything went along beautifully, and as far as I could tell, I made only one slipup—the great number of people I didn’t mention. In retrospect, what I should have said was that—inasmuch as there were so many people who were such a vital part of my thirty years in the business—mentioning a few would be a mistake. What I did instead was to try to mention quite a few. I worked hard at it, and I had a large number of names at hand. I had this big list of people on the back of one of the shirt cards on which I had written my speech. I had intended to use my re
ading glasses when speaking, but I was asked not to. I don’t care one tinker’s damn if anybody sees me in glasses or not, but I was asked to refrain, and since I wasn’t running the show, I did what was required. As a result I had to print my speech in large block letters on the shirt boards with a black-felt pen. In flipping these over at appropriate points, I misflipped—and I “lost” one whole side, and with it a bunch of names I very much wanted to cite.
But everybody in my working life knows who they are, I trust—and to them I am deeply, deeply grateful, because this is one business where the phrase “no man is an island” is so strongly applicable. There are some people in pictures who thought they had done it all by themselves, and as I look back at such people, they seem to me so very sad. Motion pictures always were, and still very much are, a collaborative enterprise.
CBS telecast the banquet a few days later to an audience of close to fifty million, they tell me, and gratifyingly the response to Charlton Heston’s appeal over the air for AFI contributions was fulsome. Nearly forty-five thousand dollars in contributions to support the institute’s educational and historical programs came in. There’s nothing as nice as a rewarding happy ending.
Not long after the AFI proceedings and as a pleasant afterpiece to it, Jack Lemmon came over to visit, and he told us a story that I can’t forbear giving—not because of the subject matter certainly, but because it’s so wittily, typically Jack. He is the only one qualified to tell it.
JACK LEMMON:
“I had a meeting here in Los Angeles with Jason Miller one day. He was sort of fresh from New York, having done only two pictures and still living back East. So he was kind of getting his feet wet in California. At the time of our meeting he was deeply engrossed in the casting of the film to be made from his play The Championship Season. We met at the Hideaway Bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. As we sat at the bar itself, we did the ‘Hi!,’ ‘How are you?’ routine, and commenced chatting.
“We had been talking no more than two minutes when suddenly he turned to me with a topic that was clearly predominant in his mind. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this casting business has been driving me crazy, but I’ve got one obsession about it. What do you think of Jimmy Cagney?’
“I turned to him and said, ‘What do I think of Jimmy Cagney?’ And at that point—precisely at that moment—there was an earthquake tremor.
“It was a ripper. Perhaps a three or a four on the Richter scale. The bar shook, the ashtrays bounced around, the drinks were sloshing, the chandeliers were swaying. I knew exactly what it was. Also, somewhere in the back of my mind that little light bulb went on, and I realized what a dramatic moment this was.
“So I just kept staring straight at him. I didn’t swerve, didn’t move a muscle. Jason grabbed the bar. Panic set in his eyes, he stared straight ahead. Then as the earthquake stopped just a very few seconds later, he turned and looked at me.
“And I said very seriously and quickly, ‘That’s what I think of Jimmy Cagney!’ ”
I think that’s an utterly charming story.
So—after all the interviews and the great evening itself, the American Film Institute event is set firmly in my mind as one of the pleasantest memories of my life, and I now go back to irrevocable retirement in pleasant fettle.
There have been some interesting attempts in recent years to get me out of retirement. I was tempted only once. When George Cukor was preparing for the film of My Fair Lady, he called Katie Hepburn to make a connection, and she obliged, calling me to ask if it was all right to give Cukor my phone number. Agreed. He called, offering me the role of Doolittle, a great part if there ever was one, in a great show with great numbers. I must say that although I’d been out of the business five or six years with no thought at all of returning, for a brief moment I thought—maybe. Maybe I’d like to do this last one. My Fair Lady has so much richness, everything about it is so fine.
But then I told George, “Oh, what the hell, I’ve committed myself to retirement and I’ve down deep no interest in going back.” He wouldn’t take no for an answer and I gently tried to discourage him, but he wouldn’t stay discouraged. He said to hold off making a decision at least until I had returned to California (I was then East). When I got back, I called him.
“George, I want to save you the ignominy of calling the actor again.”
“Will you do it?”
“George, no.”
“Oh, goddamn, Jim, come on. It would be such fun.”
“Yeah, I suppose it would. But I just can’t summon the interest. I really can t. The idea’s attractive, the part would be a hell of a part, and exciting to do—all those wonderful numbers—but I think we’d better forget it.”
So they went on without me, and that was fine, because Stanley Holloway is a wonderful entertainer, and he was great. That, then, is the only time I’ve ever had a slight tug to go back, and the tug was there only because I’m a song-and-dance man, and My Fair Lady was one hell of a song-and-dance picture.
Recently Francis Ford Coppola asked me to play a part in his Godfather II, but I told him I had no interest, that I wasn’t coming out of retirement to do anything. Then, on his own, he flew his jet plane to see me at the farm. I picked him and his young son up at the airport and drove him out to the house. I think Mr. Coppola expected a mansion instead of my simple little stone house, and I suppose when I started to cook his breakfast (it was 7:00 a.m.), he may have wondered if it was the cook’s day off. But my Bill and I are the only two cooks at our house, and the chief dishwashers too.
During breakfast and until about ten, Mr. Coppola and I chatted about the picture business, but we never got around to talking about Godfather II. Then I called Tom Fitzpatrick, the wonderful fella who cares for and supervises the breeding of the horses, and asked him to hitch up a pair for a drive through the woods. So away into the beautiful fall foliage we went, Mr. Coppola, his son, and I, for an hour or so. When we got back to the house, I said to the little fella, “Would you like to see some pretty horses?” He would, so down to the barn to see the lovely Morgans—horses that particularly appeal to youngsters because they are generally small animals with beautiful heads.
We spent almost an hour there, and then I said to Mr. Coppola, “Do you think you ought to be getting back to your plane?” He said he thought so. We got back into the car, and Tom drove us to the airport. Just before we got there, Mr. Coppola said, “Mr. Cagney, I came here hoping to talk you out of retirement, to come and do this thing with us. But—what am I going to tell them that I haven’t talked you out of retirement—you have talked me into it?” This was, of course, a very gracious thing to say, and a fine finish to our visit. I saw in this young man sterling talent and a humble, sensible point of view. I was glad I met him and I’m looking forward to the next time. But not behind a camera.
So I live my retirement busily every day, only getting really lazy, I must confess, once in a while at the Vineyard. Frank McHugh tells a classic story about me that he gave at a Pipe Night at The Players for Bob Montgomery, Frank, Rolie Winters, and me. Frank is a great observer and he was telling all assembled about his trip to visit me at the Vineyard.
As Frank tells it, I said to him, “Want to go down to the boat, Frank?” He said yes. We fixed lunch, got in the car, and drove down to the boat. We got out and walked leisurely down to the dock. We got in the boat, then I looked over the side into the water. Then I looked up at a flock of geese going by. Next, I looked over the side into the water again and observed a school of fishes. Then I shifted the lunch package from one arm to the other. Then I looked over at Lonesome Charlie the Cormorant sitting with his wings outspread, drying out on a mooring float. Next I looked at some ducks and gulls, then I looked down into the water again. I saw a bait trap, pulled it up, and said, “Well, I’m going to have to clean that out one of these days.” Then I turned to Frank and said, “How about a nap?”
Frank killed them with that at The Players.
Some while ago I was
asked by an eighty-six-year-old fella who in his youth had driven around in carriages just why I was so interested in them. I said, “Well, it seems to me that Chauncey and I have been trying to escape into the eighteenth century all our lives.”
Chauncey, my neighbor and a horse and carriage devotee also, was standing with us. He corrected me quickly. “Seventeenth century,” he said. And he was quite right. Not only were the times then less strenuous, but I think people were more innocent too. Today one can see an inordinate number of people who, in Bernard de Voto’s phrase, suffer from an advanced case of ambition.
I’ve seen so many of them in the picture business. “Shrewd ignoramuses” I call them, and that’s not a contradiction in terms. Truly shrewd, truly ignorant of the worthwhile; talentless people who prosper at the expense of the talented. Never really sure what their aims are, they can never truly be happy. They are totally amoral and ruthless and apparently don’t give that a thought. After all, does a cancer realize it’s a cancer? I wrote two lines about them:
These disciples of greed, born without fear, find no release from tension.
They spend their hours in a permanent state of miserable apprehension.
A part, are they, of what seems to be man’s permanently inbuilt need to hurt?
In looking at my own flaws, I am duty bound to report that they have often been a source of irritation to me. One time, typically, I had mislaid something; indeed, I’d mislaid a number of things that morning, and I couldn’t find anything. My own damned carelessness. I stopped dead finally, and standing in the middle of that room, thoroughly frustrated, I snapped through my clenched teeth, “My God, I’m sick and tired of being me.”
But only under those conditions. Otherwise, it’s been rewarding indeed, and now at seventy-six, one doesn’t know the life expectancy, but the point is not to worry about it. Just assume everything is going to go on as is until whatever comes—and let it go at that.
I wrote a piece about an old man and a young woman who says to him: