TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86capmil.4

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                                                                                April 14, 1986

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 objection, 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 a 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.

--By Richard Lacayo