Ernie: The Autobiography (12 page)

Before leaving the subject of
From Here to Eternity
, I want to mention one other actor who was in the movie: George Reeves. I was sorry I didn’t have any scenes with him. George had played one of the Tar-leton Twins in
Gone With the Wind
and was on his way to becoming a big star when he went to fight in the war. By the time he returned, his window of opportunity had passed. He took low-budget movies and had spent a couple of seasons as TV’s Superman before being cast in the key role of Stark in
From Here to Eternity.
Sadly, this was not to be his comeback, as he hoped it would. As soon as he came on-screen with that distinctive voice and profile, preview audiences said, “Hey, there’s Superman!” His scenes were cut to a minimum and a few years later he put a bullet to the brain. Or so the story went. (Some claimed he was knocked off by a jealous woman. But either way, dead is dead.)

I don’t know if it’s this business and a life in the public eye that does strange things to people, or if actors as a lot are just more sensitive to emotional hardships than others. All I can say is that I feel blessed to have been pretty grounded throughout my life, something that comes, I think, from having been raised in a close-knit family that never judged me or made me feel odd or unwanted. They took Ernie Borgnine as he was, and for that I am more grateful than I can ever say.

Chapter 14

Go West, Young Family

N
o sooner had I finished
From Here to Eternity
and gone home to New York than,
bam
, I was asked to come right back again to shoot a western,
Stranger Wore a Gun
, with Randolph Scott, Lee Marvin, and Alfonso Bedoya, who had played Gold Hat, the head of the thieves who killed Humphrey Bogart in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

There was no such thing as frequent-flier miles in 1953, just loud, nine-hour trips by prop plane. They were wearing me out and, besides, it was clear that film was where my future lay.

I said to Rhoda, “Honey, you’ve got to make up your mind one way or the other, We should move out to Hollywood because they want to use me.”

She agreed to go, but I sensed—and she did, too—that she was never going to be happy there. Still, she was a trouper for a while.

My first western proved to be a great experience. Alfonso was quite a character. He had these awful-looking teeth, but that was his character and it was one of the reasons why everybody used him. After we finished shooting, he went home to Mexico and got a complete new set of teeth. At the premiere, he said “Look at me. I got all my teeth fixed.”

His agent, who was standing nearby, was horrified. “You dummy!” he yelled. “That is exactly what you’re
not
supposed to do!”

The Stranger Wore a Gun
was the picture where I met a lifelong friend, Lee Marvin. Rhoda was still back in New York and I was living at this hotel for men. The studio sent a stretch limo to pick me up for a location shoot in Lone Pine, California. When the car arrived, I had two great big suitcases, which they put into the trunk. I got into the stretch and saw this long-legged guy with a little overnight satchel and a funny look on his face.

He looked at me and he said, “What the hell’s with the suitcases?”

I told him, “Well I can’t leave them down here because nobody knows me and I don’t know where to put them. I’ve got to go back to New York and pick up my family after the picture’s over.”

“Uh, huh,” he said. He looked me over with those steely eyes of his. “You serve?”

I knew what he meant. “Navy,” I replied.

He grinned. “I thought so, way you’re all packed up for a long sea voyage.”

I learned that Lee had been in the marines and those boys like to travel light. I also found out that he was wounded in the Battle of Saipan—shot in the ass by a bullet that severed his sciatic nerve. He used to joke that of course they put him in pictures like
The Wild One
or westerns where he had to ride.

“I can be kicked in the backside by a mule and I wouldn’t feel it,” he said.

We talked back and forth and we smoked back and forth. (I gave up the cigarette habit a few years later.) We were getting along pretty good by the time we reached Lone Pine.

The director was André De Toth, who wore an eye patch, having lost an eye as a kid. But here he was, directing a movie in 3-D! For those of you too young to remember, that was a short-lived craze where you put on cardboard glasses with red and green paper lenses that made it look like spears and lions and the Creature from the Black Lagoon were coming off the screen and right into your face.

When we arrived, Mr. De Toth looked at me with this kind of sideward glance and said, “You ride, don’t you?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

I didn’t, but I’d learned that you never said “No.” That could cost you a job.

After we’d gotten into our costumes—I was playing a tough gang member named Bull Slager—Mr. De Toth said, “You see that man standing up there on that little hill?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “I want you to ride up there, turn your horse around, and when I drop the handkerchief, you come down here lickety-split, grab your gun out of your holster, say ‘Take cover, men’ and go out of the scene.”

After surreptitiously watching how the other actors mounted their horses, I did the same and rode up to where some stuntmen were slipping and sliding on what little snow that was left. I rode slowly, because the snow was treacherous and there were boulders all over the place.

The horse got me where I needed to be, but when I turned around, what had seemed like a little hill now looked like a mountain, straight down. I must have looked a little green around the gills, because a wrangler nearby asked, “Ernie, what’s the matter?”

I said, “Ah…I didn’t expect the hill to be so steep.”

He said, “Tell you what. Just give the horse his head, he knows what he’s got to do, which is get down from here. If he drops his head any, just yank ’er up, because then he won’t trip.”

Sure enough, the handkerchief dropped and off I went. I had that horse’s head in my lap all the way down. I came in with a flourish, yelling, “Take cover, men!” Then I drew my pistol, jumped off the horse, went out of the scene, and nearly fainted.

Randolph Scott came up to me, took off his spurs and handed them to me. “Kid,” he said, “that was a helluva stunt. You earned ’em.”

But I looked over where some of the crew was standing and there was Lee Marvin, wagging a finger and tsk-tsking. He gave me a kind of amused look that said,
I know you ain’t no rider, but I’m not gonna rat you out.

We became great friends. I have a picture of him dressed as the hobo in another film we did,
Emperor of the North
, and I asked him to sign it. He put down “To Ernie, love, Randolph Scott.”

That rascal.

My next picture was a new experience for me. It was another western,
Johnny Guitar
—starring Joan Crawford, of all people, as the “Gun-Queen of Arizona”—and it was the first film I made for a studio other than Columbia. It was produced by Republic, a small operation, but there was nothing else in the offing and I wanted to work. Besides, it was being directed by Nicholas Ray, the brilliant young firebrand who made
They Live by Night
and
On Dangerous Ground.
After directing my film, he went on to do
Rebel Without a Cause.

Along with Joan we had Mercedes McCambridge, Sterling Hayden, Royal Dano, and Ward Bond. We went out into the wilds of Sedona, Arizona, which was a tiny town in the fifties. It was an okay film, but the real drama was all behind the camera, where Nick Ray was playing both sides against the middle: both Joan and Mercedes were vying for his charms. To make things worse (or better, since it played well on screen) Joan hated Mercedes with a passion. She called her all kinds of insulting names, and poor Mercedes would fall apart. She’d literally go weak in the knees and collapse, she was that frightened of Joan Crawford. I’ll never forget the day that she was supposed to shoot Joan. Joan just looked at Mercedes and the pistol practically fell out of her hands. But as I said, their unhappy relationship on-screen was really credible since neither woman was acting.

On one of the last days of shooting we finished early, so several of us went to look around the town. Things appeared to be pretty quiet, so we headed back.

As we were passing her trailer, Joan Crawford happened to open the door. Seeing us, she called out, “Hey, guys, how are you? Come on in, let’s have a drink.”

Well, you didn’t refuse Joan and stay on her good side, so we went in for a drink. We were all talking back and forth. It got to be a pretty raunchy session with everyone telling jokes, even Joan.

Mercedes wandered in. Obviously wanting to bury the hatchet, Mercedes thanked Joan profusely for the gathering.

Well, Joan thought she was mocking her. Suddenly, that famous face darkened and she let fly a fusillade of insults like I’ve never heard, not even in the navy. We flew out of there in a hurry, Mercedes leading the way. I don’t know if she ever recovered from that picture, but I can sort of guess who she was channeling when she did the voice of the possessed Linda Blair in the movie
The Exorcist!

From Here to Eternity
had sparked enough interest in me that I was able to get seen for a lot of parts. I wanted very much to play Pancho Villa in the Brando picture
Viva Zapata!
I read for it and. I don’t know how close I came, but director Elia Kazan took Alan Reed instead. Alan had been around for quite a few years longer than I had and was terrific in the part. You win some, you lose some. At least I was in the arena. (And as for Alan, his name might not be familiar, but his voice earned him worldwide fame as a little cartoon character named Fred Flintstone.)

Speaking of which, next up for me was another big prestige film:
Demetrius and the Gladiators
, which was a sequel to a very popular film,
The Robe.
I had to try out with a whole bunch of guys to play head of the gladiator school. They let the crew pick, and the crew all voted for me. So I got the part, with Victor Mature and the wonderful Susan Hayward heading the cast.

It was a good experience—what boy, even one who was thirty-seven, didn’t like playing with swords? It was even better because I finally had my family with me. By this time Rhoda had moved to California. We rented a little place across the street from Harry Carey, Jr. It was owned by Gene Autry. I remember thinking, the first night we were there, how often I’d watched the singing cowboy on the screen…and now I was living in his house!

“You did okay for yourself, kid,”
I chuckled to myself.

Susan Hayward was a doll—beautiful, funny, talented, about as unaffected as a superstar could be. Mature was all right. He had been a leading man for five or six years, most famously as Samson in the Cecil B. DeMille picture. He was pleasant and easy to work with, but I don’t think he took movie acting all that seriously. He had started on the stage at the Pasadena Playhouse. And it’s easy for stage actors to be a little cynical about movies. Instead of doing a show from start to finish, you do it in little pieces. You psych yourself up, the camera rolls for a few minutes, then you go back to your trailer or dressing room and read the paper. It’s serious work, but if you screw up, you can do it over again. There isn’t the same kind of pressure. A lot of actors don’t enjoy film as much as they do the stage, but you get paid so much it’s tough to say no. I think Victor was one of those guys. He also had a “me vs. them” attitude toward the studios, which I found out about a year later when we did a picture called
Violent Saturday
. Lee Marvin was in that one, too. One day, Richard Fleischer, the director, asked if Mature would dive underneath a car. The actor said, “No way!”

Fleischer was a little taken aback. “What if we dig a hole underneath there, would you dive then?”

“I’m not going underneath that car!” Victor replied.

He told me later that he refused because he had once done a scene for Columbia and broke his leg on a motorcycle. He wasn’t compensated for it, so his attitude was to hell with them all—he wasn’t doing anything dangerous.

Lee and I thought he was being a little prissy about it. I mean, this was a different situation for a different director and not really that dangerous. It’s part of what an actor is supposed to do. But Victor had his own view, and I guess he was entitled to it.

That year, 1954, turned out to be a really busy one for me. I did some episodic TV—a fun little drama called
Waterfront
—and a rather forgettable film for Mr. De Toth called
The Bounty Hunter
. You know, when you’re hot you like to cash in on the demand because you never know when it will fade. And I got to work with some of the greats to boot! The absolute highlight of that period was when I went down to a beautiful little place outside Mexico City called Cuernavaca to make a western about revolutionary Mexico called
Vera Cruz.
It’s a place of eternal springtime. In later years that’s where I also lived for a while with my second wife, Katy Jurado.

Vera Cruz
starred Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Jack Elam, Charlie Bronson, Denise Darcel, Cesar Romero, George Macready, and me. It was quite an event. They pulled out all the stops, renting a castle in Mexico City where you’re not allowed to shoot anymore. We had to be very careful that we didn’t break anything. We even had to make sure that the wheels of the stagecoach didn’t ruin the stones of the old castle.

One day while we were shooting, Charlie Bronson and I ran out of cigarettes. We had time between takes, so we decided to go down to the local store and buy some Mexican cigarettes. They were a pretty harsh smoke, but that’s how hard up we were.

We started out the gates and were going down the road on our horses when a whole truckload of soldiers went by, all armed. We said,
“Hola. ¿Cómo esta usted?”
—How are you?”