Baryshnikov and Cagney
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I met James Cagney through a
twisted chain of events that started with Mikhail Baryshnikov. I'd met Misha
through our mutual friend Marina Vlady, the French actress, shortly after his
dramatic defection from the Kirov Ballet. I liked him immediately, and we
quickly became friends. We ate a lot cholesterol-bomb dinners together, downed
barrels of fermented grapes, and even double-dated, so when Misha bought a
manor house in the country, he would often invite at there for a weekend, and I
discovered Connecticut. Its rolling hills, leafy forests, and lakes reminded me
of the Czech-Moravian Highlands of my youth, and, to my surprise, I found
myself looking forward to my days in the country.
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Ever since I had come to Prague
as a teenager I'd been a city dweller. I loved the crowds, the lights, the
streets, the bars, the ideas, the women, the conversations, the newspapers, the
energy, the encounters of city life. I loved the possibilities and the scale
and the economies of scale that made things like theater and music and movies
viable. I never went on vacations by the seaside. When I had some time off, I
stayed in Prague or New York. But now I could hardly wait to leave the city and
get to Connecticut. I started thinking about buying a place of my own in the
country.
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Misha was very happy when I told
him this. He was working hard to surround himself with friends, so he took me
to some old property not far from his house. Its barn had been turned into a
painter's studio by its last owner, Eric Sloane, and Misha himself had come
very close to buying the place before he settled on a larger, more stately
house nearby. The farm was still for sale.
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I fell in love with it at first
sight ?- the large space in the old barn
and the window looking out on a pond with turtles, geese, and herons. I didn't
yet know that on summer evenings deer came to graze, and I hadn't yet seen the
beaver dam below.
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As soon as I bought the farm,
Misha sold his house, so we were not neighbors after all.
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In Connecticut I met Marge and
Don Zimmerman, the caretakers for a couple of distant neighbors, James Cagney
and his wife, Willie. Marge asked for my help in finding someone who could play
Cagney in an upcoming Broadway musical about his life.
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Cagney had a rare personality,
but I knew of two men with his range of dramatic and dancing talent, though
Treat Williams was a good head taller and Misha Baryshnikov had an accent. They
were never going to be Cagney. Still, I brought Treat and Misha to dinner with
the old gentleman, figuring I'd let Cagney decide for himself if there was
anything to my unorthodox casting notions.
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When we all gathered at a local
restaurant, it was the first time I met James face to face. Cagney's health had
been failing rapidly. He had a bad case of sciatica and could barely walk. He
didn't remember a lot of things, and his hearing was shot. He had closed the
acting chapter of his life some twenty years before and didn't care to talk
about it or even remember it anymore. I got the feeling that he was just
waiting to die.
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He hadn't been in a movie for
twenty years. I knew that Francis Ford Coppola had badly wanted him to be in
The Godfather, that he'd flown in on a Learjet with a fat contract, and that
Cagney had rebuffed him. Nevertheless, at the end of the dinner, I made a joke
that I felt was almost obligatory: "I've got a role for you, James, if you
ever get bored with your life here."
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Cagney laughed and I laughed and
nobody took it seriously.
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James never did say whether he
thought Treat or Misha could portray him, but the musical never materialized
anyway. The only thing that came out of the dinner was that I got an invitation
to James's farm.
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Three weeks after the dinner, I
went to visit James. It was purely a social call, but it did come after Jack
Nicholson had declined to kill an architect after all, so in a fit of insomnia
it occurred to me that if Cagney could somehow be persuaded to act in our film,
Dino's financing problems would vanish. I'd sensed that Cagney was firm in his
decision to put movies behind him, so I wasn't even going to bring up this
dead-of-night notion. I'd resolved merely to get to know my illustrious
neighbor.
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I knew from our dinner that
Cagney didn't care to talk about old movie memories, and when I got to his farm
I saw that he didn't have a single photograph, poster, or any other memorabilia
on the walls. James was not only through with his glorious past, he had cleaned
up behind it. He seemed an old man beyond all earthly matters when Marge took
me to see him. He peered at me without recognition or interest.
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"So who are you?" he asked.
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"Well, I'm a film director," I said tentatively.
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"You made any movies that I might've heard of?"
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"I don't know. My last movie was called Hair. It was a
musical."
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James' face came alive, and he stared at me for a beat in
consternation.
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"So now I know, now I see why," he muttered.
"I never saw the thing . . . I never wanted to see the thing . . . It
didn't interest me in the least, so I could never figure out why the dickens
it's here . . ."
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He got up, shuffled to a wardrobe, groped behind it for a
long minute, then pulled out what had to be the only poster in the house.
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"Here," he said, handing me a poster from the
first off-Broadway run of Hair, a poster for the very performance that I'd seen
in 1967 in New York.
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James had for some mysterious reason kept this poster from a
show he'd never seen. And Marge, who stood there watching, immediately picked
up on the implications:
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"James! That's an omen! You know what the doctors told
you, James! They said if you don't get up off this chair and do something with
yourself that you'll die before the year is out! This is an omen! Milos here is
a director, and he asked you to be in his picture!"
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Cagney peered at her a moment, then gave a little laugh.
"Well, what would I play?"
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"James," I said, "I'll send you the script
and you can pick any part you want. You want Evelyn Nesbit, you got it!"
James gave a big laugh and changed the subject.
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I sent him the script. It had a role for a grandfather,
which was very small, but James would have been perfect for it. I was a little
worried that he might ask for the role of the father, which he was indeed too
old for; I know how uncritical some actors can be about their age.
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I shouldn't have worried. The next time I visited Cagney, he
had found the perfect role for himself.
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"Well, I could play the police inspector, I suppose . .
." he said.
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James, you got it!"
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"Wait a minute now! I'm not signing anything," he
said.
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I didn't think that Dino could live without a contract, so
it took me a few seconds to answer him: "Okay, James."
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"Wait a minute! I'm not saying that I'll do it for sure
either," he said.
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"James, you have until two days before we shoot your
scenes to change your mind," I assured him. That calmed Cagney down and
had Marge Zimmerman smiling.
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Milos Forman, "Turnaround: A
Memoir" (1993)
