Actress Savors Film Career Sweetened by a Grapefruit

Mae Clarke made more than a hundred movies, but a single grapefruit made her famous.

A radiant 75, Clarke is still being asked what Jimmy Cagney's "citrus massage" in "The Public Enemy" felt like. "Wet," she answers.

As to how the immortal moment came about, she lights up a cigarette and pauses theatrically for a moment before telling the tale one more time. In its own way, what happened on that day in 1931 is as memorable as what happened at Shiloh. Clarke knows it and is a somewhat coy witness to history.

"I have five different ways of telling it," she said at her home in Woodland Hills.

She has to, she said, because the public has heard it so often.

What Didn't Happen

"I got tired of myself telling it, so I began varying it a bit."

First she reports what didn't happen.

The breakfast-food assault did not cause her nose to bleed.

And she most emphatically did not say afterward, as one might read in numerous standard film-reference books, "Oh, you son of a bitch, look what you did to me!"

She wanted to sue the reporter who concocted that one.

She would never have spoken to Cagney that way. "I revere him," she said. "I did at the time. I knew I was working with a pro."

Actually, she recalled, "I didn't say anything. I did my job. I knew what he was going to do."

The citrus shove was not in the script, it's true, and it's also true that she would have declined the honor had she known it was going to be in the finished film. "I just did it for the crew to laugh," she said, recalling that she first learned that director William Wellman had left the scene in when the picture opened.

Fruit Instead of Eggs

"Jimmy's story is that he knew a 'gink' who had lived in his Hell's Kitchen neighborhood who had a fight with his wife at breakfast and picked up a plate of scrambled eggs and let her have it," she said. Gink, she explained, was slang for a hood, as was "gazebo." Being neither gink nor gazebo, Cagney opted for fruit instead of eggs.

"Wellman's got his version, and Jimmy's got his, but I've damn well got mine. I really think what I told you is the truth, but if Jimmy says it happened his way maybe I'll buckle under," she said with a laugh.

Since 1980, Clarke has lived in one of the cottages at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Country House and Hospital. Stepin Fetchit is there, and so is Mary Astor, but neither retired actor is well.