Capturing the Life of James Cagney on Stage       BACK
Notes from the Playwright
by Peter Colley

Peter Colley

When I started this adventure I had pretty much the same knowledge of James Cagney as anyone else. I knew him as a great tough-guy actor who surprised everyone with his amazing singing and dancing in Yankee Doodle Dandy. I was soon to find out that there was much more to this amazing man than that...

Robert Creighton - who plays Cagney - got me involved in writing a show about this great movie icon. I had seen Robert perform in a tour of a musical of mine and after the show he came up to me and said: "You've got to write me a show about James Cagney!" It was obvious why: Robert bears an uncanny resemblance to Cagney and, like Cagney, Robert was also a very talented actor, singer and dancer.

It wasn't a hard sell. I had become fascinated with Cagney back in the 1980s when I took a story course at USC film school with screenwriter John Bright, the man who wrote Cagney's breakthrough hit The Public Enemy. John Bright told me fascinating stories of how he based that film on his early life in gangland Chicago, and he also had many stories to tell about James Cagney, for whom he had great admiration. I screened The Public Enemy with John Bright and was amazed by Cagney's surprisingly modern acting style. It had a timeless quality. While other actors of the period can look mannered or dated, Cagney always looks fresh. Also the film was ahead of its time with its use of high contrast lighting and innovative camera angles, all evoking a hard-edged realism that was rarely seen in 1931. This very "film noir" style pre-empted classic noir by over a decade.

In fact John Bright was also a screenwriter for several subsequent Cagney movies including Blonde Crazy (1931), Smart Money (1931), The Crowd Roars (1932), Taxi! (1932), and I delighted in his backstage stories, particularly about the infamous grapefruit scene which more than any other scene in The Public Enemy helped imprint Cagney in the public consciousness. I wish I had taken notes, but I recall Bright telling me that almost everyone on the picture wanted to take credit for that idea (I think he said it was in the script, but then he was the screenwriter).

There are many versions of who came up with the idea for the notorious grapefruit scene. One is that Cagney and Mae Clarke did it as a practical joke just to see the reactions of the film crew and that it was never intended to be in the film. Of course, once everyone saw the shot, it stayed. The director, William Wellman, claimed it was his idea. He said it was something he had fantasized about when he had fights with his icy wife, just to get some emotion out of her. We'll probably never know the truth.

The Public Enemywas also Cagney's first movie where real machine gun bullets were used for "reality," but Cagney tripped and almost got killed as the spray of bullets barely passed over his head. This near-death incident was one of the reasons why he was so active in trying to create the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure other actors had better safety regulations on the set. Needless to say, the studios hated the idea of an actor's union.

In fact the more I learned about Cagney, the more I admired him. In one of those "degrees of separation" coincidences, my wife Ellen - a physical therapist - was treating an elderly woman and mentioned my work on this show. The old lady said: "Oh, I knew James Cagney." She then told a story about a train trip she and her husband took from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania back in 1930s. She had two small children and the family was too poor to afford a sleeper cabin so they would have had to sit the whole way, no small feat with two toddlers and a trip that lasted days. James Cagney and his wife Willie were also on the train and saw their predicament, and Cagney told them that he had booked two sleeper cabins and let them stay in one. The old lady said Cagney was a lovely man and a true gentleman, and they all enjoyed talking with him as the train crossed the country.

However, if you asked movie mogul Jack Warner about Cagney, you'd get a very different response. Warner called his biggest box office star: "A Professional Againster" as he felt he was against everything, but that wasn't true. Cagney was against injustice and unfairness and fought against that everywhere he found it. He championed very unpopular causes such as the striking Mexican cotton pickers in the San Joachim Valley and the Scottsboro boys - nine black teenagers who he felt had been framed for rape. Cagney never cared about publicity, good or bad; he only cared about doing the right thing. In that way he was the quintessential American hero, despite his "bad guy" image.

Once Robert and I got involved with Lou Tyrell and Nan Barnett at the Florida Stage, the show went from a play with some songs to a much more musical incarnation. Robert had already written some great songs and Christopher McGovern added some more wonderful songs, while Bill Castellino expertly pulled the whole thing together.

Cagney is one of those men who everyone thinks they know, but they really don't. And if there's one thing I came out of from the years of research over Cagney is an increasing respect and a very deep admiration for the man. If I'm ever in a tight situation, I often think now: "What would Cagney have done?"

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