Cagney by John McCabe

Author:John McCabe [McCabe, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83099-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

Thereafter Jim treated Oberon just as he had before, with the greatest cordiality and friendship, and she continued to be one of the Lahr-McHugh-O’Brien-Cagney coterie. But there was no more leg flashing, and he successfully avoided being alone with her.

“All these people,” said Jim, “added up to a real troupe, reminding everyone of the good old days. Once on the train we had no towels for three days, so four of us used one of my old sweatshirts. The hotel rooms were small, stuffy, and noisy.… Lahr said every room we slept in was an iron lung.” The dressing rooms were even worse, reminding Jim of the verminous ones in old vaudeville theaters. In San Francisco he and his pals were in a dressing room abutting the stage, and everyone had to walk through it to get onstage, “even when we were only partly dressed,” he said. “Some girl came around with free sandwiches and orangeade, but we never found out who she was. The camaraderie was wonderful, though. When it was all over, we just looked at one another and knew that there was never a troupe like that and never would be again.”

The Victory Caravan’s great success was due to the opportunity it gave average folk not only to see famous stars in the flesh but also to see these people provide first-rate entertainment. Pat O’Brien called it

Your Show of Shows years before they invented that name. Imagine, on the same stage in one evening, Bert Lahr singing one of his great songs with Cary Grant as his stooge, Groucho Marx doing an insult routine, Charlotte Greenwood with her high kicks dance, Bing Crosby singing “Blues in the Night,” then trading ad-libs, funny ad-libs, with Bob Hope, Jim Cagney with a line of those pretty girls doing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Laurel and Hardy doing one of their great routines. It was one of those occasions, those three weeks, that really in my lifetime deserved that much-overworked adjective “fabulous.” It really was, nothing less. Fabulous.

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