Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Jimmy Cagney in the early 1930s

Produced in 1949, within just a few minutes “White Heat” announces itself as something unlike anything that came before starting with the introduction of Verna Jarrett (29 year old Virginia Mayo), a striking, almost regal beauty shown fast asleep in a close up. Walsh immediately knocks the bark off his perfectly groomed leading lady by having her snore like a sailor after a three day bender. The message is clear: don’t believe everything you see. In just a few more minutes things will move even further beyond normal and straight into disturbing.  

You know something, Verna, if I turn my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there’d be a hole in it.

Verna’s 50 year old husband is Cody Jarrett (Cagney), a thumb-shaped psychotic holed up in the middle of nowhere with a half-dozen cabin-fevered gunsels eager to split the loot they scored in the opening sequence, an audacious train robbery that ended with Jarrett shooting two conductors in cold, grinning, steel-eyed blood. Jarrett’s five-foot-nothing stature means nothing. Swaggering brutality is his currency and though outnumbered he looms over his mutinous gang with the promise that any challenge can only end in death, very likely theirs. They back off.

I told you to keep away from that radio. If that battery is dead it’ll have company.

But the stress of confrontation brings headaches, horrible ones, migraines that throw Cody in a disoriented spin of suffering. He mewls like a cat, bounces off the walls and finds comfort in only one place: the lap of his aged mother (a ghoulish, shark-eyed Margaret Mycherly). Pouty and feeling sorry for himself, he sits there like a toddler with a boo boo as she rubs his ailing head.

Creepy can’t begin to describe the haunting scene of a middle-aged man cradled in the arms of his cold, manipulative mother. The staging of the moment is what makes it so effective and memorable. Nothing prepares you. No score or camera movement announce anything out of the ordinary and the actors play the scene as matter-of-factly as a walk down the street. The net effect is to make you feel like the unlucky witness to something very, very wrong.

Top of the world, Son.
Don’t know what I’d do without you, Ma.

“White Heat” has a whole lot of plot to get through so not much time passes before the cops find Cody and he lands in the Big House. Only thing is that he outsmarted them coppers with a pre-planned alibi to avoid a murder-one rap and the electric chair. Jarrett confesses to a nothing crime he set up in another state and in return receives an air-tight alibi and a two-year stretch. The Los Angeles Treasury Department is on to Cody, however, and arrange for undercover agent Vic Pardo (Edmond O’Brien) to befriend Cody as his cellmate.

And that’s all the plot you’re getting from me.

The Mighty Cagney and The Mighty Edmond O’Brien

Cagney is so good, so overwhelmingly, blazingly good that you have to watch the picture a few times before the greatness around him can come into focus and receive the appreciation deserved, starting with an outstanding story loaded with exciting, unpredictable turning points and paced with precision. Much of the production is filmed on location with a number of impressive shots of downtown Los Angeles.

It’s always “somebody tipped them.” Never “the cops are smart.”

Better still, ‘White Heat” takes you deep into the gears of the then-modern world of investigative procedure and does what great movies do, shows you around on a tour of how things work. The Treasury Dept. uses all kinds of interesting stuff to locate and track Jarrett: Fingerprinting, facial casts, this coolio gizmo called a spectrograph, and this even cooler thing called an oscillator that’s about the size of a toaster and works as an automobile tracking device.

Yes, on top of all that flinty dialogue, elaborate heisting, a visit to the Big House, and Cagney at his menacing, charismatic best, you’re watching “CSI: Fedora.”

You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, would ya?
No, I’ll let ya warm up a little.

Max Steiner is his usual genius setting the proceedings to a score that enhances without ever getting in the way and as Verna, Virginia Mayo gives the performance of her career as the worst of the bunch. Other than her own pleasure, Verna is loyal to nothing and no one – just a beautiful, dangerous, not very bright, bundle of relentless need.

Edmond O’Brien – an Oscar-winning character actor who deserves more recognition – plays it cool and professional, an excellent plan for any actor hoping to not get swamped by a Jimmy Cagney who excelled at scene stealing, and was never above using a prop to do so. One of my favorite actorly moments is a scene where as soon as his lines begin Cagney grabs O’Brien’s prop (a stick). Believe me, Cagney understood the power of an actor fiddling with something, which brings me to that chicken leg…

There are three unforgettable scenes, my personal favorite being Jarrett’s cavalier revenge-killing of a man locked in a car trunk.

How ya doin’, Parker?
It’s stuffy in here, I need some air.
Oh, stuffy, huh? I’ll give ya a little air.

As Jarrett gives Parker a little air with four bullet holes through the trunk, he munches a chicken leg – the kind of touch that adds a vibrant dynamic to the scene whether you consciously notice it or not.

Remarkably, Cagney wasn’t even nominated for his now-iconic work here. Not to begrudge those who were but did any one of these nominees carry off a moment even close to this?

Or this?

“White Heat” remains as powerful and entertaining sixty-years on because the goals of its creators are grounded in the modest, timeless idea of gathering together the most gifted of artists to tell the best story possible. That might sound like an old-fashioned concept among the sophisticates, but long after the intellectual fad of postmodernism joins the hula hoop and the lava lamp, Cody Jarrett will live on.

It’s in the walk.

Think of Mae West, hands caressing her Rubenesque hips, head tilted, not just sauntering, but oozing forward, the exaggerated female.

Elbows cocked and angled at his hips, moving with concentrated energy, Jimmy Cagney looks like a coiled spring about to explode.

Joan Crawford, leading with her linebacker shoulders, like a tank on the battlefield, determined, dangerous, unstoppable.

Spine rigid, arms glued to his side, plum straight steps—no motion in the hips or shoulders—eyes nailed to the distant horizon, Henry Fonda’s walk is a combination of cool reserve and righteous indignation.

Bette Davis, nervously wringing her hands—William Wyler once threatened to chain them down—as she paces back and forth in her pathologically unstable world.

Rapid fire mincing steps, hips and shoulders swaying, Marilyn Monroe is the archetype of the sexually charged woman, and yet simultaneously a little girl who is innocent of her immense power.

And then there is John Wayne.

His walk is odd.

Distinctive, but odd.

It’s a complex, disorienting, and ultimately elegant forward propulsion: long manly strides, elbows bent and poised—like a boxer locked into position—a distinctly feminine swooshing of the hips, and a pronounced case of pigeon toe.

Was Duke’s walk natural?

Or was it part of the John Wayne image, a carefully constructed bit of acting business?

Harry Carey, Jr., in his fascinating memoir, Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company, provides invaluable and deeply private insights into the famous John Wayne walk.

First, Harry Carey, Jr. sketches in some background on John Wayne’s intimate relationship with the great character actor Paul Fix (1901–1983) Carey’s father-in-law:

…Paul Fix had almost as much to do with Duke’s success as a screen actor as did John Ford. Paul Fix literally taught John Wayne what John Wayne knew about acting. He was the man who gave Duke his first insight into forming the mold which was to be his persona. Most people give Uncle Jack [John Ford] the credit for this, but the first man to put the John Wayne image into John Wayne’s head was Paul Fix.

Carey, Jr. discusses the early days, the B westerns, and journeyman actor John Wayne’s stage appearance that turned disastrous:

Paul first worked as an actor with Duke in those early westerns. In those days, Paul had a sort of slinky, haunted look about him, like a man who might steal or lie, so of course he was usually cast as a heavy; not the head honcho, though, the sly henchman. He played a lot of gangsters, along with Sheldon Leonard or Barton MacLane. Paul was very serious about acting, and he wrote many plays. He was always putting them on in the little theaters around Hollywood. He cast Duke in one of them, but Duke was so frightened of live theater that he overdosed on booze and made a total ass out of himself. His wife, Josephine [Alicia Saenz], was so furious she screamed from the audience, “You’re a bum—a drunken bum!” What a night in the theater! Little did they know that they were looking at the man who was to become the biggest movie star of all time.

Harry Carey, Jr. reveals how Paul Fix worked behind the scenes as an acting coach to John Wayne during the most important film of Duke’s career.

Duke used to tell Paul that he felt awkward in front of the camera. He said he didn’t know what to do with his hands; that he didn’t feel natural. Not too many years later, Duke got his big break when John Ford cast him as “The Ringo Kid” in Stagecoach. Duke was overwhelmed by this good news but paralyzed with fear that he wouldn’t be able to carry it off. He went to Paul for help. Without John Ford’s knowledge. Duke went to Paul’s house every night to go over the next day’s work while they were shooting in town.

Private and not so private acting coaches are not unusual in Hollywood. Montgomery Clift was so dependent on his acting coach Mira Rostova, that he put her on salary while shooting some of his most famous films. And much to the chagrin of his directors and co-stars, Clift, after every take, would anxiously look to Rostova—not the director—for approval or disapproval of his line readings.

“Not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk.”

And now Carey fills us in on the birth of the legendary John Wayne walk:

Because Duke was kind of heavy-footed and used to trudge more than walk, Paul told Duke to point his toes when he walked, and the “John Wayne walk” was born. Try it yourself. Take a step and point your toe, like you’re stabbing it into the ground—left foot, right foot. Your shoulders automatically move back and forth, and the hips follow, not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk. When Duke first did it, it was ballsey as hell. As the Wayne legend began to form, the walk became more pronounced. Rio Bravo or any of the “Rios” are good examples.

Hollywood stardom is a mysterious thing. In the days when the studio system dominated, the moguls consciously searched for the key to a players potential image. And then, once identified, the studio system—at its best, an incredible make-over machine—created, polished and ruthlessly exploited that star’s specific persona.

No wonder L.B. Mayer alternately broke down in rage and tears when he discovered that Andy Hardy/Mickey Rooney ran off in the middle of the night and married the young and sexy Ava Gardner. Mayer was terrified that the public would reject the incredibly profitable Andy Rooney series—innocence and apple pie—when they realized that small town, all American Andy/Mickey was actually something of a dog, hooking up with a hot 17-year old actress—not to mention a host of chorus girls, hookers and vulnerable starlets.

With Clark Gable it gradually became clear to the executives at MGM that he was a man’s man, possessed of a humorous glint in his eye that turned women to jelly. For Jean Arthur it was her sandpaper voice and hesitant delivery that conveyed a woman desperate for control, but on the edge of a melt down. Jean Harlow was perfect as the sexy, vulnerable, wise-cracking tootsie who didn’t take herself too seriously.

But since the demise of the studio system, Hollywood stardom has morphed into an eerie kind of tabloid celebrity. Movie stars no longer have an identifiable movie persona, in fact most work hard at subverting a fixed image. They take pride in grabbing movie roles that go against type. Contemporary actors want to prove that they have range, that they are versatile. Hence, absent a fixed address, the post-modern actor is, with rare exceptions, fated to be excluded from the pantheon of Hollywood immortals.

For John Wayne, after a long Hollywood apprenticeship, his stardom was defined and exquisitely refined as a particular kind of rugged American individual; a man, no matter how conflicted, who recognized the difference between good and evil—and strode across the silver screen like a colossus.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Most actors are remembered for their unique personae. Clark Gable was a man’s man. The humorous gleam in his eye sent daggers to the knees of women everywhere. Bette Davis practically cornered the market on the deeply neurotic woman clawing at the boundaries of love with Baroque fury. Gary Cooper was the classic taciturn American, a solid, self-confident Yankee who spoke eloquently through his silences. Marilyn Monroe is still the paradigm of the woman as vulnerable child waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor.

Of course Fay Wray, who played in over eighty motion pictures, is only remembered for her role in King Kong. Thus she is, for better or for worse, the shrieking woman, for all time.

Less common is the actor who is identified and remembered for a single brief scene.

No doubt, Mae Clarke, (1910-1992) real name Violet Mary Klotz, a superb actress who unfailingly revealed complex layers of character in her naturalistic performances, would prefer to be remembered for her finely tuned portrayal of the doomed Myra Deauville, the sweet chorus girl turned desperate prostitute, in the 1931 pre-Code, Waterloo Bridge. But the 1940 version with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor made Clarke’s film all but invisible. This is a shame for Clarke’s version, directed by James Whale, is excellent, combining gritty realism with lyrical impressionism.

Mae Clarke, a vaudeville headliner in New York, arrived in California in 1929 under a short term contract to Fox studios. She planned to make a few movies, pick up the easy money Hollywood offered, and then return to the stage, her first love.

Clarke ended up staying for sixty-three years.

During that time Clarke appeared in, among other films, Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, The Public Enemy, Lady Killer, and Pat and Mike. She worked with such eminent talents as Lewis Milestone, Tod Browning, William Wellman, William K. Howard, Dorothy Arzner and Ernest B. Schoedsack.

Never a stunning beauty, but rather a compelling and distinctive actress of great depth, Clarke’s career was hampered by three failed marriages and an almost disfiguring auto accident. Bouts of mental illness led to cruel treatment in snake pit institutions where she was doped up, restrained and subjected to electric shock therapy.

King Vidor, the great American director, when musing on the mystery of great actors stated:

[Spencer] Tracy as a man had many personal and emotional problems but that is not what came through on the screen. This is a paradox I won’t attempt to explain here. Perhaps the answer is one of successful compensation. I do know that actors who have some sort of emotional problem going on underneath seem to give a more interesting performance on top.

Sadly, Vidor’s theory seems borne out in the life and career of Mae Clarke. For most of her young adulthood, Clarke was financially responsible for her father, mother and younger brother. It was a heavy burden for such a fragile creature.

By 1937, after appearing in over forty movies, Clarke was exhausted in body and mind. She retired from the screen and married Capt. Stevens Bancroft, settling in Rio de Janeiro with her handsome, aviator husband. Clarke looked forward to having children and living a solid middle-class life. Tragically, emotional instability, alcohol, and her husband’s serial infidelity conspired to destroy the marriage and the dream.

Mae Clarke returned to Hollywood after just three years. She had no agent, little money, and was all but forgotten. But like the old vaudeville trooper she was, Clarke picked herself up and made the rounds taking whatever parts were offered.

Today, Mae Clarke is remembered—most don’t even know her name for she was uncredited—for having half a grapefruit shoved in her face in the 1931 classic The Public Enemy.

This is probably one of the most famous scenes in movie history and when clips of great Hollywood films are compiled, the grapefruit scene is almost always included.

Having just played the role of the doomed streetwalker, Molly Malloy, in The Front Page 1931, Clarke was making a name for herself in Hollywood. Her Molly Malloy is unforgettable, a tortured soul who desperately wants to mend, in Clarke’s words, “another bleeding soul.”

Soon after shooting wrapped on The Front Page, Clarke’s agent called and told her he had another Molly Malloy role for her, “another whore.” Clarke, a faithful Catholic, was wary, but when told that she would be playing opposite the rising young star Jimmy Cagney, and William Wellman was directing, Mae wisely accepted the offer to play the role of Kitty in The Public Enemy.

In the film, vicious but charismatic gangster Tom Powers, an electric Jimmy Cagney, and his sidekick Matt Doyle, the dreary Edward Woods, pick up good time girls Mae Clarke and Joan Blondell in a swanky night club.

When next we see Cagney and Clarke they are shacking up in a hotel room. Cagney has already built up huge reservoirs of contempt for Clarke’s Kitty and is picking a fight, looking for any excuse to sabotage the relationship. It is in this hotel room, during breakfast, that Cagney smashes the grapefruit in Clarke’s face.

Cagney then moves on to the brassy, sharp tongued tootsie, Jean Harlow, and Mae Clarke, after just two sequences—two days of work—disappears from the storyline.

How did the grapefruit scene come about?

It was not in the original novel or screenplay.

Mae Clarke spent two years being interviewed by James Curtis. The transcript was published as Featured Player, An Oral Autobiography of Mae Clarke, an invaluable and endlessly fascinating glimpse into the actresses life and career, and the Darwinian politics of the studio system.

Here’s Mae Clarke on the grapefruit scene:

We shot the scene! That’s all there was to it. He [director William Wellman] said, “All right, that’s a wrap.” It ended just short of the grapefruit where he [Cagney] says, “Oh, I wish you was a wishing well.” That was enough. That showed his hatred of me. That was all there was to do, so I went to my dressing room on the set and got ready to tie things up, when Jimmy [Cagney] appeared at the door.

“Can I come in a minute?”

“Yes, come on.”

He came in and he said, “Bill [Wellman] and I have been talking this thing over and we thought of a heck of an idea. We’d like you to do it again to give the guys a kick. This is really something you won’t forget.”

And he told me.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I said, “You’re kidding!”

He said, “No, come on back, we’ll do the scene again, just like we forgot something and we want to improve on it. The guys’ll come back. They haven’t broken the set yet. The lights are still there. And then I’ll pick up this grapefruit and push it in your face and the guys will go crazy.”

I didn’t want to do that, but all I had done to meet the new man and be at the new studio and work with Wellman was all out the window if I said no. I’d be a lemon. So I knew I had to do it. The only thing I could have done is get my agent on the phone and let him be the one to say no. But I couldn’t get to a phone. Jimmy was sitting right there being very persuasive.

I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll do it—once. I’ll trust you not to hurt me, and that’s all. Just for the guys, okay?” So that’s what we did, and we did it just once. Didn’t hurt me.”

So: Cagney presented the addition of the grapefruit as a gag to amuse the movie crew.

I have my doubts. “Wild Bill Wellman” was a demanding director, a man who walked heavily and carried a big stick. In fact, James Woods was originally cast in the Tom Powers role, but after watching dailies Wellman realized that Cagney was lightning in a bottle and handed Cagney the leading role, relegating Edward Woods to the lesser side kick.

Thus, Cagney carried the weight of the starring role and he must have been acutely anxious to do everything possible to ensure the film’s success.

After twenty years writing and producing film and TV in Hollywood, I have seen every sly, sneaky and underhanded manipulation by directors, and, ahem, writers, in order to elicit superior performances from, often, frightened, temperamental and brittle performers.

To me, it’s obvious that Wellman and Cagney always intended to use the grapefruit scene in the finished film. But sensing that Mae Clarke, a vulnerable day-player, might not cooperate, they cooked up the gag story in order to gain Clarke’s cooperation. Obviously, once the film was exposed, there was no recourse for Clarke, a powerless bit player.

Cagney was the messenger because, as Clarke explains, Wellman paid her no attention whatsoever. He never gave her a word of direction, just blocked the young actress, leaving her to her own instincts. Though never close, Clarke and Cagney, did have, at least, a cordial and respectful professional relationship.

Clarke concludes:

I thought that was the end of it, except they said, “We’re going to show it in the projection room tomorrow.” That was supposed to be the end of it. They had no right to put it in the picture without my permission. I gave no permission. I signed no release. I could have sued and won.

It’s highly doubtful if Clarke could have sued and won. After all, when you’re an actor in a movie it is understood that whatever is shot can be used in the film. This was especially true under the old studio system where actors were, in essence, highly paid indentured servants. Here, I think Mae is being a bit fanciful. And in truth, Cagney and Wellman’s dramatic instincts were on target. Ending the scene with Cagney’s dialog would have been soft. The cut to the next scene, flabby. The unexpected grinding of the grapefruit in Clarke’s face is shocking and cruel, yet it provides the perfect, if horrifying, exclamation point to the scene.

Clarke’s stunned reaction to Cagney’s display of violence is as authentic a display of humiliation as any committed to celluloid. Certainly, Clarke knew the grapefruit was coming, but the impact—physical and psychic—is simply overwhelming. Clarke, dissolving in tears, burying her face in her hands, appears naked, terribly vulnerable. Every time I view the scene I feel a wave of sadness, revulsion and shame.

The entire scene is just 41 seconds long. But it lingers in the memory for all time.

It’s a testament to the unearthly power of the movies.

The Public Enemy was a huge hit and when it was first released ran twenty-four hours a day at a theater in Times Square. Clarke’s ex husband, Lewis Brice, entered the theater just to watch the grapefruit scene. Brice delighted in his ex-wife’s public mortification.

Like all good actors, Mae Clarke constructed an elaborate and thoughtful inner life for the character of Kitty. All good actors become proprietary about the roles they play, falling, to some extent, in love with their fictional selves. It’s the only way an actor can successfully inhabit another skin. Mae Clarke, in a deeply moving passage, ponders the inner life of the young woman who had a grapefruit shoved into her face:

…That girl was pretty shocked and hurt. She hadn’t done anything that bad to him. She’d stayed to keep him warm. She gave. What did she get? She didn’t show any money. She didn’t show a new dress or anything—nothing, just bad treatment. And she stayed. But, of course, there again, why did she take that? It didn’t show her with an extreme love for him, either. She was just a I-hope-this-turns-out-all right-dumbell. And yet I didn’t play her quite like a dumbell. She was weak-willed—there wasn’t much justification for what she did. But it wasn’t so malicious that she needed to be treated like that.

Clarke should have had a brilliant movie career. Alas, talent alone is no ticket to success in the movie business. Toughness, resilience—the ability to accept endless rejections and not take them personally—and personal relationships are crucial to survival in Hollywood.

A generous interpretation of her characters and an instinctive understanding of the craft of movie acting characterize Clarke’s performances. Sadly, at a time when her career should have been flourishing, Mae Clarke was pretty much finished as a leading lady. Through the mid-sixties, she was reduced to bit parts in movies and television, almost always uncredited.

Mae Clarke died at age 81 in the Motion Picture Home, Woodland Hills, Ca.

Mae Clarke and Kent Douglass in Waterloo Bridge, 1931.