Not so enthusiastic, though, that he did not think he could improve on it. Despite his illness and his depression over the July 1941 death of his old friend and partner Sam Harris, Cohan showed his typical speed and mettle by turning out a two-hundred-page screenplay, which he sent to Warner’s in August. Buckner and Wallis had to be dismayed, for it almost completely ignored their Hollywood formula of professional and romantic difficulties. Cohan was making it clear that this story was going to be told his way, and while Buckner had gone to great lengths to honor the old man’s wishes, he had not gone far enough for Cohan. The showman didn’t like the treatment of his parents, the fabrication about his professional failure, and most particularly the treatment of the romantic interest. In Buckner’s version, George meets Agnes on page 43 of the screenplay (or roughly forty-three minutes into the movie). He gives her one of his songs to sing in her act, and their relationship begins as a professional, platonic one, generating no romantic spark until late in the story. Buckner hoped this would placate Cohan. It did not. In his version George and Agnes meet, on page 125, aboard a ship after George has retired, as he is sailing to Europe with his mother!

Time now became a factor because Warner’s option on the Cohan story expired unless a filmable screenplay was produced, and approved by Cohan, by October 11. Wallis, Buckner, and William Cagney, representing his brother, presented a united front in a long, gentle but firm letter to Cohan in which they politely explained the requirements of Hollywood dramatic convention. Buckner redrafted, incorporating many details from Cohan’s script, but keeping his basic structure. Cohan, weakened and uncertain of recovery, gave his approval.

Hal Wallis now had his script and approval to begin filming (though Cohan still retained veto of the final picture, a fact that maintained his influence and worried Warner Brothers, right up to the release date). Then ,Cagney refused to do the picture. He said the script was dull and humorless.

James Cagney was born in New York City in 1899, just as George M. Cohan was about to conquer the city. Both names, Cagney and Cohan, are Americanizations of Irish names: O’Caigne and Keohane. Cohan

The Cagneys moved a lot too—from tenement to tenement. Cagney’s father, James, Sr., was charming but utterly feckless. He drank sixty shots of rye every day, his namesake later recalled, and he died in the flu epidemic of 1918. His widow, Carolyn, kept the family together and her kids in school through the toughest times.

Cohan and Cagney were opposites in many ways. Cohan’s basic character was exuberant, egotistical, and stubborn. Though one of the leading actors of his day, he led the producers in their 1919 fight against the formation of the first New York actors’ union and remained intransigently anti-union thereafter. In the twenties and thirties he was celebrated more as an actor than a composer or dancer; indeed he was called “the First Actor.” But he was one of the few actors on Broadway who did not belong to Equity. Cohan did not imitate his father by bringing his own children into his shows. He had outgrown a family act, and no offspring could be expected to match his fire. In fact, despite his loyalty to family themes as a playwright and composer, his career prevented much of a family life for himself, and he spent much of his free time at two New York theatrical men’s clubs, the Friars and the Lambs.

Cagney, on the other hand, was very liberal and a forceful president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild. He had an extremely prickly attitude toward his own producers at Warner Brothers., especially Hal Wallis. His autobiography is full of complaints of how “the front office” ruined the good work that the actors and creative people were trying to do on a picture. Though a great natural actor, he suffered from pre-performance butterflies. His basic demeanor was reserved and sensitive. He was a poet and painter, an early environmentalist, and an earnest student of the human condition. His close friend Pat O’Brien called him “the faraway fella.” Though he participated in boisterous weekly dinners of Hollywood’s Irish mafia in the 1930s, he was essentially a sober, devoted family man, a frustrated country squire who fled Hollywood whenever possible for one of his farms in the East.

Professionally, though, Cagney was Cohan’s godson. Cohan not only had helped create the thriving theatrical industry that had given Cagney a career but also had transformed the role of the “song and dance man,” the job description Cagney claimed as his own. Before Cohan this was a minor act, in the words of Cohan’s biographer

But Cagney’s entire screen persona also owed something to Cohan. The young male, streetwise, fresh, and above all American, was the character Cohan originated as his own role in his early plays. This newcomer was breezy, self-confident, true to his roots, but determined to make America his own. It was a style that came from the streets, not from theatrical tradition, and after Cohan, it became a kind of stock character in a thousand plays and movies. The version Cagney played in his 1931 breakthrough movie, The Public Enemy, was cynical and dark, the underside of the archetype, but still the same basic creature (compare him to the square, stolid older brother who serves in the war and comes home to a nothing job as a streetcar conductor).

Cagney also inherited a tradition that Jerry Cohan had passed on to his son, George, in a poem. It contains advice for a hopeful songwriter—or anyone setting out to entertain an audience.

George Cohan also called this magic ingredient “the jingle” or “the dressing”—entertainment value born of a combination of experience and creativity, an utter identification with the audience, and manipulation of it. James Cagney worked as an actor to get the “listen” into every film he made—something extra, something memorable for the audience to take home. It was the thing that made him such a lousy factory worker. And, in 1941, he was just about to quit the factory.

William Cagney had been involved in the picture from the start, working with Buckner to placate both Cohan and Wallis. Nevertheless, James read Buckner’s script, he recalled, “with incredulity. There wasn’t a single laugh in it, not the suggestion of a snicker. And this was a script purporting to be about a great American light entertainer, a professional humorist.” But a compromise was still possible. James would agree to do the picture if the script was turned over to Philip and Julius Epstein, the Warner Brothers, masters of “dressing,” who had already improved a couple of Cagney films and would shortly go on to serve as coauthors of Casablanca.

Cagney’s biographer the film historian Patrick McGilligan has detailed the changes wrought by the Epsteins. They threw out the contrived period of failure and largely ignored the “struggle against adversity” formula beloved by Wallis. The central feature of early script drafts, the failure of Popularity , was shrunk to a passing incident, and the accompanying character flaw was transformed into

But the Epsteins also ignored Cohan’s desires by making his romance with the composite sweetheart-wife (now named Mary) an integral part of the picture, beginning on page 23 of the script and striking romantic sparks (still thoroughly innocent and gently comic) right away. Perhaps by way of compensation they also wrote Jerry Cohan’s moving death-bed scene: “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you …” (though its emotion came mostly from Cagney’s performance). But the Epsteins’ main contribution was in details, as McGilligan notes: “Scene by scene, they added jokes, colloquial dialogue, period references.” When they began writing, the film was already in pre-production. Sets were being built, costumes sewn, and props gathered. They continued writing during the first month of filming, with William Cagney delivering new script pages directly to the sound stage. Under these pressures Cohan was not consulted on script changes.

An unexpected strain was added a few days after production started. The actress Rosemary DeCamp, who played his mother, Nellie Cohan, described the cast and crew standing around before shooting started on Monday morning, December 8, 1941, listening to the radio while President Roosevelt delivered the “date which will live in infamy” war message to Congress. A staticky “Star-Spangled Banner” followed, and some of the shaken group rose to their feet. At the end of the broadcast, James Cagney added, “I think a prayer goes here… .” Director Michael Curtiz spoke: “Now, boys and girls, we have work to do. We have had bad news, but we have a wonderful story to tell the world. So let’s put away sad things and begin.” DeCamp goes on to describe the whole company in a fever of worry and patriotic pride, “as if we were sending a last message from the free world.”

If there had been any sense of cynicism or irony among the filmmakers toward Cohan’s old-fashioned patriotism, it was erased by the news during that worrisome winter, as Allied forces retreated all over the globe. The patriotic elements of the film are presented with utter sincerity, and they remain strong in a very different America more than half a century later. Particularly stirring is the scene recalling the country’s entry into

It was a line Cohan probably never said, but surely would have loved, and it summarizes the film’s approach to biography. This movie is certainly not a documentary, yet many efforts were made by many people to ensure that characters, events, and an era were portrayed with accuracy and integrity. On the other hand, as in all biopics, all those involved admitted they were changing facts to juice up the story, simplify the characters, or avoid legal problems. Much of the authenticity is visual and seen in passing or around the edges of the frame. It’s in a brief glimpse of a program, the decoration of a dressing room, snatches of dialogue. Strictly as a biography Dandy is silly. (Cohan’s daughter Georgette said, “That’s the kind of a life Daddy would have liked to have lived.”) As a memoir of a public career, however, and of Cohan’s theatrical world, it’s pretty good. Because Cohan was so well known, and his theatrical world still survived (vaudeville, for example, actually enjoyed something of a comeback in the 40s), the people who made the film probably could not appreciate how quickly that world would fade away.

Aside from the stories and demonstrations that Cohan provided to Buckner for the script, some of the showman’s closest associates in the theater were brought to Hollywood to assist in the production. William Collier had first starred on Broadway in the 1890s. In 1914, he had appeared in a Cohan revue in which he wandered in and out of scenes carrying a hatbox said to contain the evening’s plot. Cohan was kidding his own weakness in giving in to the then current rage for revues. Collier was on the Warner’s payroll during rehearsals and the early filming, helping shape, among other sequences, one that showed that turn-of-the-century favorite “Peck’s Bad Boy.” He earned a credit as technical adviser on the film. Still more important was Johnny Boyle, another Broadway veteran who had both danced with Cohan and staged dances for him. He came in at the start of rehearsals and stayed till the final day of shooting, working with Cagney to perfect Cohan’s style and routines.

But the major force at work, once filming began, was James Cagney himself. Wallis and Warner’s conceded him and his brother unprecedented power; that their ideas worked, as Wallis could see from the daily production rushes, no doubt had a lot to do with it.

Cagney might not have had to act the part of a song-and-dance man, but he did have to impersonate Cohan. He

Other contributions by Cagney are less definite, but it is certain that he shared much of Cohan’s old-fashioned sensibility about light entertainment. He was in complete agreement with Cohan in hating “gooey” (passionate) love scenes; in fact, the quintessential love scene of his movie career may be the scene in Dandy in which he sings “Mary” for the first time to his future wife, played by Joan Leslie, and serves her coffee while she plays the piano. This was one of the little additions that were not in any script, but that bear Cagney’s unmistakable stamp. Another is the brief and very funny encounter between Cohan and the actor Eddie Foy in front of the theater. As usual, there is truth around the edges of the frame— the street and posters are detailed copies of the real thing—but the dialogue between Cohan and Foy never appeared in any script, and Cagney is clearly delighted by the jousting with Eddie Foy, Jr. (playing his father), which comes right off the vaudeville stage. There is no evidence that Foy ever played any role in Cohan’s life, and in fact all Cohan’s real pals except Harris had been whittled away as the script was refined.

James Cagney and the director Michael Curtiz, each a strong-willed obsessive in his own way, fortunately got along well. But many more people were involved in bringing the story to life. The first dance director for the film, Seymour Felix, feuded with Cagney, according to studio memos. Was the conflict personal, professional, or creative? At any rate Felix was replaced by Leroy Prinz after three weeks of shooting. In a memo during the rehearsal period, William Cagney noted that the choreographer Moe Jerome had been “quite busy rehearsing players and dancers in the proper technique of the period” but was not yet under contract. Jerome and Jack Scholl also wrote a lot of incidental music and several brief tunes that were interpolated into the movie. Cohan’s contract had required that all the music in the film be written by him (a particular problem in scenes of his birth and childhood), but ultimately, popular non-Cohan tunes from John Philip Sousa to “Jeepers, Creepers” were incorporated. Rodgers and Hart’s “Off the Record” was also used but not credited. Cohan provided “one of my father’s own songs,” for the

But the sets, costumes, and props were minutely investigated and brilliantly re-created. The research department put together a huge scrapbook containing stills, programs, and reviews of Cohan plays, photos of every part of a dozen Broadway theaters and of the street itself, and portraits of all the principal figures represented. The scenes in dressing rooms and theatrical offices are mostly pure invention and represent to some degree a transposition of stage business into the “real life” story of the film, but the rooms they take place in are authentic. A stage platform was built on the sound stage and redecorated to represent each of the dozen or so theaters shown in the film, from the gaslit Colony Opera House of 1878 Providence to the thirties Deco Alvin Theater set of I’d Rather Be Right . Leroy Prinz’s staging of “Grand Old Flag,” the visual highlight of the film, utilized a stagewide treadmill to improve the troupe’s marching and a puppet effect to create the illusion of hundreds of marching men with flags in the finale. In his plan, Prinz noted that this was not a “Busby Berkeley effect” created by the camera but “legitimate stagecraft” that could have been developed at the time and place being portrayed.

Even the heavily rigged story does not do too serious violence to the historical world of Cohan, except in a few places. The raucous feuding of Cohan with Rodgers and Hart during the previews of I’d Rather Be Right, an episode still fresh in the minds of the New York theater crowd, is completely papered over. And the idea that Cohan ever really retired is grossly sentimental; the screenwriters’ central problem all along had been that the man had no notable life outside his work. Cohan may have run out of fresh ideas after more than thirty years of writing, but he never stopped trying. The fact that he could, as an actor, still deliver hits for other authors only increased his frustration. His whole life experience fought against the idea of his being only an actor.

The contentedly hammocked retirement portrayed in the film has on it the stamp of Cagney, not Cohan. If Cohan retired anywhere, it was to the Lambs Club or the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, where he held forth, swapping theater stories with his pals and plotting one more project. After cancer surgery in October 1941, he wrote out a longhand version of the “Peck’s Bad Boy” routine and sent it to the studio. It arrived after the scene had been filmed. In the last few months of his life, he wrote one last play,

A rough cut of Yankee Doodle Dandy was shipped to New York and shown to Cohan, while Warner Brothers, lawyers nervously watched for reaction. His first comment, referring to Cagney, was, “My God, what an act to follow!” As McCabe points out, the film fits its subject absolutely: The pace is relentless, the book is thread-bare and sentimental, and the performance is thrilling.

The film was also a redemption of Cohan. As an author, he has faded into the mists of history. He had never made the transition to the classical form of the musical play, though it could not have happened without him. Unfortunately for Cohan, it was this classical era that became the one we know today.

Berlin, Kern, the Gershwins, Porter, Rodgers, Hart, and Hammerstein all went to Hollywood in the 1930s, and their work there is preserved on film. Not so Cohan. He is remembered as a character, a legend, a set of colorful routines and witty cracks, in a play by someone else in which the star actor ran roughshod over the producer, hired his own writer, and inserted his own business. Yet its style and content showed how thoroughly Cohan’s influence had been absorbed by Cagney and almost everyone else who worked on the movie. It was probably the truest collaboration of his career.

The film made its premiere on May 29, 1942, at a special war-bond benefit. That summer, George Cohan, now quite ill and confined to his Fifth Avenue apartment, persuaded his nurse to accompany him on a car trip down Broadway. The theater district had changed. From 1900 to the Great Depression—the years of Cohan’s reign —the Broadway theater had been the most dynamic commercial art form in the city’s most dynamic and glamorous era. On this tour, Cohan must have seen the many theaters that had been closed or converted to movie houses. He and his nurse slipped into the Hollywood Theatre to watch a few minutes of Yankee Doodle Dandy, then went home. It was Cohan’s last trip to Broadway. He died a few months later.