The Boy from Avenue D
James Francis Cagney Jr. was born on 17 July 1899 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His biographers disagree about the exact address, whether it was a top-floor apartment at 391 East Eighth Street, the address on his birth certificate, or a spot near Avenue D and Eighth Street. They agree about the neighbourhood: crowded, loud, poor and tough, a place where Irish, Jewish and Italian families lived on top of one another.
He was the second of seven children of James Francis Cagney Sr., an Irish-American bartender and amateur boxer, and Carolyn Nelson, whose family was Irish and Norwegian. Two of the seven died within months of their births. The surviving children grew up in rooms that were never quite big enough, in a household where money was always short and pride was never in short supply.
He was a bright boy, and he won a place at Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1918. He went on to Columbia College, where he intended to major in art. But his father died during the influenza pandemic of 1918, after only one semester, and Cagney left college to help support his family. He never finished the degree, but he never lost the artist’s eye.
Learning to Dance
Cagney’s first job in show business was not acting at all. In 1919 he joined the chorus of a musical revue, and he spent the next several years in vaudeville as a dancer and comedian, a hoofer in the chorus line. It was hard, unglamorous work, eight shows a week in theatres across the country, and it taught him the two things that would define his screen acting: rhythm and discipline.
A dancer cannot be late, cannot be sloppy, cannot fake it. Every step has to land exactly where the music says it should land, and the audience sees everything. Cagney learned to move with a precision that later made his gangsters so frightening, because a man who can control every muscle can also explode without warning. Watch him cross a room in any of his films and you are watching a dancer.
In 1920 he was in the chorus of a show called Pitter Patter, and among the other chorus performers was a young dancer named Frances Willard Vernon, known to everyone as Billie. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl with a dancer’s poise and a mind of her own, and Cagney fell for her at once. The show ran for thirty-two weeks, long enough for the two of them to know this was not a passing theatre romance.
His first major acting part came in 1925, and his first real success on Broadway came in 1929, when he played opposite Joan Blondell in the musical Penny Arcade. It was a rough, slangy show about a carnival arcade, and Cagney was so good in it that Warner Bros. bought the film rights and took him and Blondell to Hollywood. He was thirty, a song-and-dance man from the chorus line, and about to become the most famous gangster in the world.
Billie: Sixty-Four Years
On 28 September 1922, James Cagney married Frances Willard Vernon. He was twenty-three, she was twenty-three, and they had very little money and no idea what the future held. What they had was each other, and it turned out to be enough. The marriage lasted until his death in 1986, sixty-four years, one of the longest and most faithful marriages in Hollywood history.
Billie was not a Hollywood wife in the usual sense. She had been a dancer herself, so she understood the work, the hours, the insecurity and the strange business of being applauded by strangers. She did not chase the spotlight, and she did not want it to chase her. When Cagney became a star, she stayed out of the gossip columns, and at home they were simply Jimmy and Billie.
In the early 1940s the Cagneys adopted two children, a son they named James Francis Cagney III, adopted in 1940, and later a daughter, Cathleen, known as Casey. Cagney was a private man who kept his family out of the public eye. The family lived first in California and then, increasingly, on the farm in upstate New York. It was not a perfect family life, and in later years there were painful estrangements, but the marriage never wavered. Billie outlived him by eight years, dying in 1994 at ninety-five.
The Farmer
In 1955, after shooting three films that year, he bought a 120-acre farm in Stanfordville, in Dutchess County, New York, for 100,000 dollars, from the show-business and army veteran Lanny Ross. He named it Verney Farm, taking the first syllable of Billie’s maiden name, Vernon, and the second of his own surname, Cagney. The name itself was a small love letter. It was about seventy-seven miles north of the Lower East Side where he had been born, and in every way that mattered it was a world away.
Verney Farm was a working farm, not a gentleman’s retreat, and Cagney worked it. He kept horses and cattle, grew crops, mended fences and worried about the weather like any farmer. Friends who visited were struck by how completely he belonged there, in work boots and an old shirt, talking about soil and feed prices with the same intensity he had once brought to a script. He liked to say that farming was honest work.
The Painter
The boy who had wanted to major in art at Columbia never stopped being an artist. Cagney painted all his life, quietly and without fuss, and he took it seriously. He was not a celebrity dabbler showing off at parties. He worked at it, studied it, and by the accounts of those who saw his work, he became genuinely accomplished. Painting was the private side of a very public man, the one art he practised for himself alone.
During his twenty years of retirement, from 1961 to 1981, painting filled the hours that acting had once filled. He turned down film after film, including a substantial part in My Fair Lady, and spent his days instead learning to paint better and tending his farm. It was a deliberate choice, and it tells you what he valued. He had spent thirty years being told what to do by a studio, and now he would do what he wanted.
The Citizen
Cagney’s politics were the subject of more gossip than almost anything else in his life, and the plain facts are worth setting out. As a young man in the 1930s he was a liberal supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he worked on Roosevelt’s campaigns, including the 1940 election against Wendell Willkie. He gave money to liberal causes, including a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, and he supported the defence fund of the labour activist Thomas Mooney.
It was also a position that brought him trouble. He was accused of being a communist sympathiser in 1934, and again in 1940, accusations that in those years could end a career. Cagney denied them, and he was cleared by Representative Martin Dies Jr., chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, then known as the Dies Committee. He was never a member of the Communist Party, and the clearance was a matter of public record, but the rumours followed him for years.
After the war his politics changed, gradually and openly. He became disillusioned with President Harry S. Truman, and in the 1948 election he voted for the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, his first vote for a non-Democrat. In later years he moved further in that direction, and by 1980 he was contributing to the Republican Party and supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency. He described himself in his autobiography as having become more conservative with age.
The Family Man at Home
For all his fame, Cagney was a fiercely private man. He gave interviews and posed for photographs when the studio required it, but he spent his personal time out of the public eye, and he liked it that way. He did not court publicity, he did not collect famous friends, and he did not live the Hollywood life. His pleasures were simple ones: his wife, his children, his farm, his painting, his horses, and the company of a few old friends.
He was also, by all accounts, a man of strong opinions and a short temper when he thought he was being treated unfairly. His long battles with Warner Bros. over pay, roles and working conditions were legendary, and he walked out on the studio more than once. He was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors’ union, and he served as its president from 1942 to 1944, during the war years, when he also made morale-boosting tours to entertain American troops.
The Long Goodbye
Cagney retired from films in 1961, after Billy Wilder’s comedy One, Two, Three, and he stayed retired for twenty years. He was sixty-two, he had made more than seventy films, and he had had enough of Hollywood. He went home to Verney Farm, and for two decades he painted, farmed, and turned down every offer that came his way. It was one of the longest and most complete retirements any major star has ever taken.
The honours came to him anyway. He received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1974, only the second person to be so honoured, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 1980. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States. The American Film Institute later ranked him eighth among the greatest male stars in American film history. He accepted these honours graciously, but he did not let them lure him back to work.
His health began to fail in the late 1970s, and after a stroke his doctors suggested that returning to work might help his recovery. Encouraged by his wife, he came out of retirement once, for a small but pivotal role as Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo in Milos Forman’s Ragtime in 1981, twenty years after his last film. He gave one more performance after that, in the television film Terrible Joe Moran in 1984, and then he retired for good. He died at his farm in Stanfordville on 30 March 1986, Easter Sunday, of a heart attack, at eighty-six.
James Cagney is remembered as a gangster, and he was a great one, but the gangster was only one part of him. He was a dancer who became a star, a farmer who happened to be famous, a painter who kept his art to himself, and a husband who stayed married for sixty-four years. The tough guy on the screen was real, but so was the man who named a farm for his wife and spent his last twenty years painting and mending fences.