At his birth on July 17, 1899, James Cagney put in an uncharacteristically frail appearance for the small but wiry human tornado who swept through his entire 86 years without impediment. It was lucky his weakness was so fleeting because turn-of-the-century New York, where his parents raised their brood, was no place for fools or those who couldn’t defend themselves.

Cagney’s Irish saloon-keeper father was a gentle joker and gambler who drank his way into an early grave, so it was left to his mother, an indomitable Irish Norwegian, to hold the family together. From her, the young Cagney inherited bright red hair and a temper to match. If survival meant fighting, and it usually did in Manhattan’s teeming Lower East Side, Cagney was ready and willing. He learned to box when he was six, and might have become a professional had not his mother had other ideas.

According to his autobiography Cagney by Cagney, Cagney lived in his youth in the Ridgewood area of Brooklyn where he was the grammar school spelling champion. His love of the countryside began in childhood when the family spent two weeks at the house of a great-aunt way out on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn (site of part of the present Floyd Bennett Field).

At 14 Cagney was an office boy at the New York Sun, at 17 a bellhop in the Friars Club, and in between, a bundle wrapper at Wanamaker’s, a ticket seller for the Hudson River Day Line, a waiter, and a page. His first turn in show business was in a vaudeville show called Every Sailor. In the show he played a “chorus girl� but it was more exciting and paid better than tying bundles at Wanamaker’s. “We had a lot of fun and it never occurred to any of us to be ashamed of it,� he said later. “I lost all consciousness of that fellow, Jim Cagney, when I put on skirts, wig, paint, powder, feathers and spangles!�

In 1920, Cagney appeared in Pitter Patter, a musical, and managed to find time to court another member of the chorus, Frances Willard Vernon, whom he married in 1922. This marriage was one of the wonders of Hollywood — a lifetime of love and mutual devotion. He called her “Bill.�

Cagney’s hoofing skills acquired on Broadway were the ones that remained dearest to his heart. In 1929 he appeared in a Broadway show, in which Joan Blondell also had a part, Penny Arcade. It ran only 3 weeks then he went to Hollywood where his film debut was in a 1930 film Sinner’s Holiday. Cagney quickly became a major star. Primarily cast as a gangster, he also performed in comedies and musicals. He won an Oscar for his portrayal of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (’42). After a 20-year retirement he returned to the screen with a role in Ragtime (1981) and a movie made for TV Terrible Joe Moran (1984). In 1984 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government’s highest civilian award. James Cagney died on March 30, 1986, in Stanfordville, NY.

— Vernon Parker

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