James Cagney will forever remain one of the immortals of the Hollywood pantheon. A veteran of nearly seventy films, many of them classics, he grinned, punched, danced, and sang his way from the lurid underworld of crime and corruption all the way to the summit of American showmanship and patriotism, bringing high energy, good humor, and cavalier grace along in a style that even today seems breathtakingly original.
Born in New York City at the close of the last century, Jimmy Cagney soon found himself on Broadway making his mark in vaudeville. Success and recognition on the fabled Great White Way led him in 1930 out West to the silver screen and stardom during the golden Age of Hollywood. With The Public Enemy (1931) he introduced a new persona to the world of cinema: the bad boy all America loved to hate, hated to love, and couldn't get enough of--no matter what. He would go on to make many more unforgettable films during the Depression, such as Foot-light Parade (1933), Jimmy the Gent (1934), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). But it was his characterization of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), his masterpiece, that revealed him as the consummate talent whose bravura ability as actor, singer, and dancer was unrivaled in the business of show business.
In White Heat (1949), a classic study of derangement, he painted a psychological portrait of the human as an animal, while in Mister Roberts (1955) he showed once again his versatile nature and his gift for cynical comedy. Having worked under many of the greatest directors and in the company of many of the other top stars for three decades, he retired from filmmaking in 1961, only to return as a cult figure of monumental proportion twenty years later in Ragtime (1981), having published his autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, several years earlier. Until his recent death an eldest statesman of the American screen, James Cagney is revered as a dashingly handsome leading man who never gave a damn what others thought of him, and who soon emerged as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.
I met with James Cagney in his Manhattan hotel suite during a visit to town, shortly before his death, and found him to be as modest a gentleman as he was accomplished as a performer. Reluctant to say anything unkind about even the most notoriously impossible of his colleagues from the stage and screen, this legend guarded his memories as closely as his staff has guarded his privacy. To be granted the honor of an audience with this hero of the American dream was a rare privilege, and one which never will be granted again, for this was the last interview Jimmy Cagney gave before his death on March 30, 1986.
Gregory Speck: Growing up in the rough-and-tumble world of turn-of-the century New York City must have been colorful.
James Cagney: It was basically no different then than it is today. It was just everyday living. With me, it was fighting, more fighting, and more fighting. Life then was simply the way it was: ordinary, not bad, not good, just regular. No stress, no strain. Of course, no one had much of anything, but we didn't know that we were poor.
We certainly didn't feel poor. My family lived mostly in a variety of tenement apartments in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, which at that point still had a lot of ethnic flavor: Irish, German,
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