It Was All Big – and It Worked:James Cagney: 1899-1986

He was the embodiment of big-city scrappiness, a mean-streets survivor who got ahead on a good grin, good moves and better hustle. To a generation of comic impressionists, Jimmy Cagney’s mannerisms became part of the standard repertoire: the tough-guy, tommy-gun chatter, the feinted jab to convey affection (first aimed at Loretta Young in Taxi) and the square-shouldered bantam-cock strut. Public Enemy, White Heat and his other classic gangster movies traded on what he fondly called “my gutter quality.” But in more than 60 films, the last of them a made-for-TV movie that aired in March 1984, Cagney stood a head above any mob of imitators. Last week he lammed out for good, dying at 86 on his upstate New York farm.

Cagney’s widow Frances reportedly turned down an offer to hold the funeral in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It would have been too grand for a former street kid. His last rites were held instead in a more modest setting, the church of St. Francis de Sales in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, where he once served as an altar boy. His pallbearers were like a sampling of Cagney’s many sides. They included Boxer Floyd Patterson, Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Actor Ralph Bellamy and Director Milos Forman.

It was Forman who directed Cagney in Ragtime, the 1981 film that brought him back into the public eye after two decades of retirement. After completing Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, Cagney vowed to quit filmmaking. Content in the company of his wife and a small circle of friends, he divided his time between two farms in the East and a home in Beverly Hills. He dabbled in painting, bred horses and collected antique carriages. But with the help of Cagney’s associates, Forman lured the actor out of retirement to play Ragtime’s canny police commissioner, a man whose final ruthlessness was like a congealed residue of Cagney’s youthful pugnacity. Cagney was rediscovered and in the years that followed treated to a flood of public affection, tributes and honors. Though age had undone his hoofer’s dexterity, he made a last proud turn in the Hollywood spotlight.

It was a properly luminous finale for a man whose energy could light a city block. Born on New York City’s Lower East Side, Cagney was the son of a hard- drinking bartender who was frequently absent from home. He was raised mostly by a strong mother who could cheer him on in a barefisted street brawl but stood resolutely in his way when he toyed with the idea of a professional fight career. She made no objections, however, when Cagney fast-talked his way into a $35-a-week vaudeville dancing job when he was 20.

“I didn’t know the Highland fling from a sailor’s hornpipe,” he said later. “I watched the fellow’s feet next to me and did what he did.” He quickly graduated to Broadway musicals, then in 1930 was brought to Hollywood as a contract player for Warner Bros., the studio that had ushered in the talkies a few years earlier with The Jazz Singer. Many silent-film stars’ careers were destroyed by the triumph of sound; Cagney’s was ensured by it. He was one of the first actors to grab an audience by sending dialogue special delivery, with a style of high-speed utterance that could animate even the most inert exchanges.

The proletarian music of his voice was also perfectly matched to the trademark settings of the Warner films of the 1930s–the working world, where it was a struggle to keep a firm footing, and the underworld that waited for those who wavered and fell. By the end of his first few months in pictures, Cagney had made a name for himself with The Public Enemy. It was the movie in which he concluded the most famous breakfast scene in cinema history by squashing a grapefruit in Actress Mae Clarke’s kisser.

Throughout the ’30s, Cagney enjoyed stardom in a series of feisty, defiantly urban parts: a street-smart swindler in Blonde Crazy (1931), a slum-bred cop in G-Men (1935), a ruined bootlegger in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). By late in the decade he was one of the highest-paid actors in the country, a status he achieved partly by walking out repeatedly on Warners to press for higher pay and protest its grueling working conditions and bumper-to-bumper production schedule. For all his fame, Cagney had little taste for Hollywood night life. He liked best the company of a permanent band of actor buddies, including Pat O’Brien, Spencer Tracy, Ralph Bellamy and Frank McHugh. In private he could be shy and gentle. O’Brien called him a “faraway fella.”

Cagney’s pugnacious, straight-from-the-shoulder style and his genuine modesty (“I was always a journeyman actor,” he once said) belied both his professionalism and his artistic versatility. He could portray protean Actor Lon Chaney in the film biography Man of a Thousand Faces as easily as the irascible ship’s captain in Mister Roberts. His performance as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired Director Max Reinhardt to label him the “best actor in Hollywood.” White Heat contains a typical bit of Cagney , business, less a trick than a nuance. He had the killer Cody Jarrett sit, for just a second, in his mother’s lap. It was a gesture worth pages of exposition, mined from the same instinct that made Cagney what he would never admit he was: a consummate actor.

His own favorite film was Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a black-and-white musical biography of George M. Cohan that seemed to pop into color whenever Cagney laced on his tap shoes. “Once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and- dance man,” said Cagney, who won his only Academy Award for the role. “Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.”

He used the fast-changing rhythms of a hoofer to orchestrate a characterization. Like all the best actors, he always made it look easy. Like Spencer Tracy, he seemed a natural force: everything seemed to flow out without calculation. Tracy, however, made chamber music; Cagney was a marching band. It is probably this particular blend of effortlessness and theatricality that moved Orson Welles to marvel, “You’re supposed to be scaled down and subtle in movie acting. But look at Cagney–he’s big. Everything he does is big, and it works.”

Cagney’s own acting technique was not concerned with size or scale. “Want some advice from the old man?” he once inquired of a desperate newcomer. “Walk in, plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth.” That’s big.