Ernie: The Autobiography (11 page)

I said, “Mr. Cohn, sir, I think that’s wonderful and I appreciate it very much. But I can’t take it.”

“What do you mean you can’t take it? How much are you making back in New York?”

“Well,” I said, “in a good week I can make twice that in TV.”

“How many good weeks do you have?” he asked without missing a beat.

“Not enough,” I admitted with a grin. “But my wife is attached to her family and she doesn’t like California. So what am I gonna do?”

“Is she Jewish?” he asked. Cohn himself was Jewish.

“As a matter of fact she is.”

He snorted, “Damn Jews are all alike. When you’re finished with this picture, get the hell out of here.”

Wow
, I thought.
There goes my movie career!

After he’d gone, Arnow came over to me and said, “Listen, don’t worry about it. He throws a lot of people off the lot until he needs them again. If something comes along, I’ll have you back. Don’t you worry.”

I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t worry, but I thanked him very much. In retrospect, though, I’m glad I didn’t take the deal. In those days they put contract players into everything, and you couldn’t say no. It’s true that they taught you all kinds of skills—riding, dancing, swordplay, all of that. But it was difficult to break out, especially with all the stars they had under contract.

Because
China Corsair
was a low-budget production, it actually came out before
The Whistle at Eaton Falls
—so, technically, that was my film debut. Thanks to Arnow, though, it wasn’t my last.

Chapter 13

From Here to Eternity…and Beyond

I
t was 1952 and I was really starting to regret that I hadn’t taken Harry Cohn’s offer. The three movies hadn’t set the world on fire and, ironically, more and more TV work was shifting to Hollywood, where there was a deeper pool of nationally known actors to draw from. The lack of opportunities left me a little depressed. That was when my old buddy Bart Burns saw a picture that he thought I ought to see.

We didn’t have enough money for my wife to go to the movie with me, and we couldn’t afford a babysitter, so I went alone. When I came back I was euphoric. I had seen Charlie Chaplin in
Limelight
. What a picture! It was a love story about an old comedian who couldn’t get work, and a young ballerina whom he saves from committing suicide. It was so full of hope! That film was just the tonic I needed. I had work, we weren’t living in the streets, and if I kept my shoulder to the grindstone things were bound to get better.

They did. Not long before I was ready to take a job at the post office, Max Arnow called.

He asked, “How soon can you get out here to Hollywood?”

I said, “Why?” It was a stupid question; it didn’t matter. It was work and I needed some.

Arnow didn’t know how unemployed I was, though, and actually tried to sell me on the project. He said, “They are interested in seeing you for the part of Fatso Judson in
From Here To Eternity.
”

I almost dropped the phone. I had read the novel almost three years before. It was a massive tome, a huge best seller based on author James Jones’s own war experiences at Pearl Harbor. At the time I remember thinking what a great part the sadistic jailer would be for me. I told Arnow I was free, but asked if they were going to be looking at anyone in New York. I wasn’t trying to play hard to get. I needed to be here to earn a paycheck.

Arnow said that director Fred Zinnemann would be in New York and set up a time for me to go and see him. He told me to bring a monologue; anything, it didn’t matter.

I honestly don’t remember what I read. Truth be told, the audition was a total nothing. By that I mean I felt from the way he looked at me that he had made his decision when I walked in the door. Of course, I didn’t know at the time what that decision was. And to tell you the truth, my heart sank a little when we started talking and he told me that Frank Sinatra was going to be in the picture as Private Maggio, the guy whose skull I would fatally crack in the stockade.

“My God,” I thought, “they’re making a musical out of it!”

I didn’t know Frank at the time, but I figured anything he did was going to have singing and dancing in it. How wrong I was.

No sooner had I got home than the phone rang. It was Arnow.

“There’s a ticket waiting for you at the airport,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

Unlike my first three films, this was a big deal. Based on a hot book and filled with names like Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, and of course, Mr. Sinatra. I was excited and, for the first time in a while, I was terrified.

This was the major leagues.

I got a place near Columbia Studio, a hotel that catered to struggling actors. When I reported to the studio the first thing I was told was to get a haircut. There was a barbershop around the corner, so I went and got a crew cut and came back.

“No, no, no,” Zinnemann said. “Much shorter, much shorter.”

I got a total of nine haircuts that day until Zinnemann finally approved.

Mind you, I had very little money at the time, so I went over to the first assistant director and said, “Who do I see about getting paid back for my nine haircuts?”

He said, “No one. You did that on your own.”

I said, “No, I did it for the studio.”

“Then you should have gone to the makeup department and had them do it,” he said.

You live and learn. But years later, when I went back to Columbia for my first starring role in
Man on a String
, they asked how much I wanted for the film. I named my fee, then added, “That, plus the price of nine haircuts.”

They said, “What?”

When I told them the story, they laughed. And Columbia finally paid for my haircuts.

Even before the cameras rolled, it was like being back in the navy. I don’t just mean the short haircut. Producer Buddy Adler had to give final approval of how I looked. He wanted the movie to be true to life and true to the Jones novel. I stood outside the door with Henry Helf-man, the gentleman who had dressed me.

As we waited, Henry looked at me kind of funny.

“Something wrong?” I asked. I was anxious enough and didn’t need him fretting beside me.

He said, “It just doesn’t look right.”

“What doesn’t?” I asked. “Can you be more specific?”

“Your stomach’s too flat. Can you do something about that?”

That was the first time anyone had ever said anything like “you’re not fat enough” to me! I said, “You mean like this?” and I pooched it out.

His eyes opened wide. “My God, that’s perfect. Can you hold it?”

I said, “Sure.”

So we walked in. Buddy Adler took one look at me and said “Oh, my God, that’s my Fatso Judson!”

I exhaled with relief. So did Henry. It was a great moment, and he and I are still buddies, fifty-five years later!

That first day of work I was sweating bullets—more than they fired during the course of the movie. Everyone was there. All the stars came that day to see the commencement of the picture. I was in full costume and was introduced as the guy playing Fatso Judson. They stared at me a couple of seconds before saying anything. Everyone had a lot riding on the success of this picture. Expectations for a world-class film and a big hit were high. If it flopped, all the big names would be splashed with mud. Burt’s look was especially analytical. That was the way he was; the man studied everything in every movie he ever made. I’ll talk more about him a little later. Finally, the ladies kissed me and the men shook my hand. They all seemed to approve.

I had rehearsed some with Frank, but I was scared stiff. It was a scene in the New Congress Club, a brothel in the novel but a kind of USO hangout in the film. I started playing the piano—faking it, as they’d taught me—when Sinatra’s character looked up from the girl he was dancing with and said, “Why don’t you knock it off, buddy, and put a mute in that thing?”

I stood up from the piano stool and turned to face him. The way the set was constructed, Sinatra was down in a sort of pit to make me look a little larger. As I stood up he said, “Jesus Christ, he looks ten feet tall!”

Everybody broke up, including me. We did the scene a few times until the director had what he wanted, but let me tell you—I swore allegiance and everything else to Frank Sinatra. All of my scenes in the film were with him, and a few with Monty and Burt. Frank was scared, too, he told me later. His film and recording career had kind of hit a slump and this was an important comeback film for him. Despite the pressure he was feeling, he did everything he could to make sure I was comfortable and that I looked good.

Monty and I got along pretty good. He didn’t socialize much with the other actors, but he always knew his lines and was focused on the work. He just oozed sincerity in all his scenes, and that really helped me and the other actors get to the top of our game. Funny thing, but true: he was actually an inch taller than me, but the way he hunched over to suggest his character’s basic shyness, you’d swear I had about half a foot on him.

One day we were sitting in an empty stage, running our lines and waiting to be called. We figured we had it down and put the work aside—you don’t want it to get stale—and we started talking about where I came from, where he came from, and so on. He was really interested in my navy days. He had tried to sign up during the war but had been rejected for chronic diarrhea, of all things. And I was fascinated by his professional history: he’d made his Broadway debut at the age of thirteen and never looked back.

A door opened on the far side of the stage and this man and woman walked through. We didn’t pay any attention because we were so into talking to each other. Suddenly I was embraced from behind by the man who had entered. He said in a deep voice, “You’re absolutely the son of a bitch I wrote about.”

It was James Jones, the book’s author, and a PR gal from the studio. Mr. Jones congratulated me and said, “I didn’t think we could have ever found anybody better than you. You’re great. Keep it up.”

Talk about an ego boost! Monty just smiled and winked at me. He knew what it meant.

Later on, Monty and I had to do our big knife-fight scene at the Columbia Ranch out in San Fernando Valley. They’d built a set to look like a back street in a small Hawaiian town. Zinnemann had been working with two stuntmen to stage the fight scene. When we arrived, he had them show us the moves—the lunges and slashes that would make it look authentic. It was a night scene, and we worked on it from four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon until five o’clock the following morning. We pushed and pulled and pounded and pretended to cut each other till we were black and blue. But we finally had a fight in the can.

At the end of it, after Monty had stuck his switchblade in my belly, I was supposed to say, “You’ve killed me. Why did you want to kill me?”

Well, I had literally been working on that line for seven weeks. If I didn’t say it with the right mix of astonishment and horror—after all, I was supposed to be big and mean and he was supposed to be some punk horn player who didn’t even want to box on the regimental squad—it was going to seem silly. I could just imagine some guy coming up to me after seeing the movie and kind of mincing, “
Oooo, you killed me. Why did you want to kill me, you bad boy?
” like I was a coward.

You never know how the public will take a line like that.

Well, cut ahead a few months. Back in New York, I went to see the movie for the first time at a private screening. As I watched Monty standing over me with that knife and staring down at me, I waited expectantly for the line, to see how it played with an audience. Well, it never came!

They had cut the line after all my work.

As I sat there boiling, I thought, well, of course they cut it. They left me the bad guy till the end. Had I said that line I might have sounded sad and sympathetic. By cutting that line they did me a favor. They made me the biggest heavy in Hollywood.

Cut ahead a year. I was back in Hollywood, and had gone down Ventura Boulevard to pick up a pizza. I made a big U-turn as I left the pizza place and suddenly I heard a police car behind me. Two officers approached the car. I guess they had seen that there was a big, tough-looking mug behind the wheel.

I took out my driver’s license and said as graciously as possible, “What’s the matter, officer?”

He said, “You can’t make a U-turn from one side of the street to the other side.”

I pointed to my license and said that I was from New York and didn’t know that, but he didn’t care.

So he took my license and looked at it, then he looked at me and looked at the license again, and he said to his partner, “Hey, Joe, guess what? I caught the son of a bitch that killed Frank Sinatra.”

Being recognized didn’t help me any. He gave me a ticket while he was laughing.

Back to the shoot. When we finished shooting the fight, Monty and I went up to his room, at the Roosevelt Hotel. We sat there waiting for Frank, who was supposed to show with booze and some broads but never even made it himself. Well, that was Frank. He was a great guy when you were around him, all kinds of fun and good humor—when you could pin him down.

So Monty and me, we sat there talking about cabbages and kings and watching the sun rise. It was the most interesting, inspiring,
fun
talk I’ve ever had with a man in my life. He was a wonderful, loyal, quiet, self-effacing young man with more talent than anyone I ever met. Years later, when I was told he was gay, I really was surprised. The only thing I could figure was that, if it were true, maybe he was having a problem coming out of the closet. That could also explain his alcoholism, which would take a heavy toll on him, both mentally and physically. In those days, coming out wasn’t as easy as it is today. I mean, I worked with Rock Hudson years later on
Ice Station Zebra
and his homosexuality was a kind of big, open secret. Since Monty’s not here to answer one way or the other, I’ll leave it for others to speculate. He never made a pass at me, but maybe that was just me. All I know for a fact is that he died too young at the age of forty-five.