And Another Thing

Do the sources disagree? Of course. And so they should. One of the mysterious aspects of human perception is the way in which eye-witnesses disagree about what they have seen. Not just many years later, when memory has had ample time to weave its fantasies, but soon, even immediately, after the event. An interesting case concerns Jimmy Cagney’s masterpiece, The Public Enemy. This brilliant and horrifying movie, with a spectacularly gruesome ending, is now chiefly remembered for one bizarre sequence, in which Cagney, playing the top gangster, is having his room-service breakfast in a slap-up hotel, and is annoyed by his tiresome moll. Suddenly he says ‘Aw, shuttup!’, snatches up a half-grapefruit, and screws it into her face.

I remember it vividly. I saw the movie in the mid-1930s, when I was only six, and how I was allowed to go I can’t imagine. Grapefruit were new in England then. I had just made my First Communion, and at the posh convent breakfast afterwards I was given a grapefruit, the first I had ever had. Thus Cagney’s use of the thing struck me as sacrilegious as well as everything else. It caused outrage at the time. The actress, Mae Clarke, set up a squawk, and claimed she had been abused. Actually, said Cagney, she had been spared a worse fate. The shot was based on a real incident, in which a Chicago mobster called Hymie Weiss squashed an omelette in the girl’s face. He refused to do this, saying it was too messy and degrading, so the grapefruit was substituted. Originally he threw the grapefruit. Then William A. Wellman thought the squashing would be better. He asked Mae if she minded. She said she would allow it to be done once, but no retakes. Another version has it that on the day Mae arrived with a terrible cold and her nose was sore.