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.