Ernie: The Autobiography (15 page)

Then Grace Kelly came over and handed me the Oscar. Well, what could I say? I couldn’t say very much anyway because I had nothing prepared. I knew I wanted to pay tribute to my mother and dad. My mom, especially, who stood between me and the relatives and folks in the neighborhood when they asked, “How come he’s down in the cellar practicing? What is this stuff? Why doesn’t he get a job and get married?”

I don’t remember what else I said. I’m sure there’s a film of it somewhere, but I never wanted to see it. If I didn’t want to see myself doing lines in a film, I certainly didn’t want to see myself tripping over my tongue on TV.

Later that night—it had to be about four in the morning on the East Coast—I called my father and asked, “Did you hear?”

He said, “Hell, yeah! And you know something? The first sons of bitches through the door were the guys who always said ‘Tell him to get a job and settle down.’ Now they were saying ‘We knew he could do it.’”

Dad admitted he hadn’t been to bed that night. He was celebrating with the rest of the family and hoping I’d call. I could tell he was just so proud of me. The only thing we regretted was that my mom wasn’t there to share this with us.

Oh, and I heard through channels that the guys in the Bronx were pretty proud of me. No hard feelings there.

But I got my acting award and it sits up there on top of the television set in my home. I’m very proud of it because it shows that my peers thought well of me. The thing I’m still most proud of is that there have been very few character actors to win the Best Actor award. Mostly, it’s leading men…and no one would ever mistake me for one of those!

Yet, thanks to
Marty
and my Oscar, I got to play a wider variety of parts than I ever dreamed of. Though not right away.

I had occasion to meet Kate Hepburn shortly after the Academy Awards. I was on the Twentieth Century-Fox lot and went over to thank Spencer Tracy for sending me a congratulatory telegram. He was shooting
Desk Set
at the time and was preparing to start
The Old Man and the Sea
not long after. I knocked on the door of his dressing room and he answered.

“Hey,” he said, “I sent you a wire and you never even answered.”

Kate poked her head from behind his shoulder and said, “Well, hell, he won the award, not you.”

They invited me in and we had a lovely chat about what they were doing and what I was doing. I was a little embarrassed that I didn’t have a prestige picture in the lineup. See, I had already been committed to several other pictures, mostly supporting roles, before
Marty
so I really hadn’t been able to capitalize on the success. Spence gave me some good advice: he said, “Don’t worry about trying to cash in. Just keep doing good work and the good parts will come.”

He was right, of course. No matter how good you are, or how much attention you’re getting at a particular time, you always run the risk of being last year’s hot commodity, yesterday’s flavor. Truthfully, when I thought back to being unemployed, I felt blessed to be getting as much work as I was.

A couple of months later, I was playing golf with columnist Jim Bacon and this guy came running up with a telegram. It was from my agent. It said that I should stand by to go to Cuba to replace Spencer Tracy in
The Old Man and the Sea
.

I asked Jim what the heck that was all about.

“Hemingway’s working on the picture, too,” Bacon said. “He’s not happy with Tracy. Thinks he looks like a rich Hollywood guy and not a fisherman.”

Apparently, the author thought I’d be better for the part. Well, there was no way in hell I was ever going to replace Spencer Tracy in anything and I said so. Hemingway shut his trap, the picture was finished, and Spence got himself another Oscar nomination.

Chapter 18

A Piece of No Action

N
ot every actor needs all kinds of managers and handlers. But one thing they do need, if they can get it, is a good agent. I haven’t had a lot of luck there. Most of what I got, I got on my own.

I didn’t have an agent when I started out and it was a bear to get into a lot of auditions. With agents, they just make a phone call and you’re in. And not at six in the morning, when you’d have to go to sign up for an audition, go home, then come back later in the day. Agents can get you nice spots in the afternoon.

They’re also—if they’re good—pretty fearless. An actor might be afraid to say no to a low fee for fear of losing a part. Agents have no such qualms. Also, if they can’t build you into a top moneymaker, they’re not going to make enough at 10 or 15 percent for you to be worth their while.

Unless, of course, they have so many clients that a little from many is the same as a lot from one. For a while, I was stuck in that former situation.

Paul Wilkens was my agent because he had offices in New York and Hollywood, so he had first crack at whatever was being developed on either coast. I was also his first client to win an Academy Award, yet he didn’t know what to do with me.

After
Marty
he continued to take what little money I’d been offered as before. He was satisfied, but I wasn’t. I left him and went to somebody else, but it was all just the same mishmash with a different spin.

One time this producer/writer approached my agent and said, “I’ve got to get ahold of Borgnine. I want him for my picture.”

My brilliant agent said, “What picture?”

He said, “I’m gonna make
The Shoes of the Fisherman
, a great big thing all about the Pope and the Vatican.”

My agent said, “You can’t have Borgnine.”

“What do you mean I can’t have him?”

“If you want him, you’ve got to take six other guys with him.” See, this was that agent’s way of using me to build the rest of his stable.

The producer, rightly, said, “I don’t want six other guys. All I want is Borgnine.”

My agent said, “Well, he’s busy.”

Morris L. West, the distinguished author, saw me later and said, “Dammit, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

I asked him what he was talking about. He told me what my agent had done. I said, “Mr. West, I never even heard about this offer!”

Anthony Quinn got the part, and the opportunity to work with an amazing cast that included Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. I was heartsick. I lost all faith in agents. Signing with the renowned William Morris Agency didn’t bring it back. One of the heads of the agency said to his team—with me in the room—“I want the best for this man, because he’s a wonderful actor.”

Everybody said, “Yes, sir!”

So they assigned a hotshot agent to me for one solid year. I kept asking, “When do we get working?”

This guy would say, “We’re looking for the greatest part in the world for you to start our relationship with.”

I said, “I don’t want the greatest part in the world. All I want to do is work so I can make enough money to feed my family.”

He said, “Okay, Ernie, I’m on it.”

I left William Morris after a year. I got my own jobs through networking and still had to pay them a commission. Unless you’re on their tail all the time, unless you’re working on something high profile that keeps you in the trades and in their faces, you’re on the back burner.

Funny but true: the one job they
did
get me was for a big picture that was supposed to come with a big paycheck. That movie never got made.

That’s why, if you remember back, I took the deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster.

Unfortunately, as I said, that didn’t work out. What happened there was Burt was in New York filming
Sweet Smell of Success
—a brilliant film, one of the best American movies ever. Lancaster said there was a part for me in the film. I said okay. It was going to be an important film, about the corruption of a powerful newspaper columnist, loosely based on Walter Winchell. Tony Curtis was playing the suck-up who was always trying to get his clients in Lancaster’s column.

That was late in 1956, seven months after the Oscar win, and I really wanted to be in another prestige picture. So I went to New York with my business manager to get the script from the headwaiter at the 21 Club. What he was doing with it, I have no idea. Maybe because they’d been shooting there they left it with him when they went to some other location. I don’t know. Anyway, he gave the script to me.

My manager and I went back to my hotel. I read the script and found I had about twelve lines. They were damn good lines. I’d be playing a corrupt police detective.

Well, my manager absolutely wouldn’t let me do the part. He said Hecht-Hill-Lancaster was using me, putting me down. We returned to Los Angeles, where the producers’ attorneys informed me I was being put on suspension for breach of contract.

I was sick over that, and tried to figure out something that would lift my spirits. An idea hit me. I said, “Christmas is around the corner. I want to go to the five and dime, get a job selling things.”

My manager and my wife both said, “You can’t do that!”

I said, “Why not?”

“Because it would leave a bad impression.”

“Bad impression?”

“It would look like you can’t get work.”

“Well,” I said, “unless I work things out with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster and go out hustling, I won’t get work. Not in my business. So, what the hell, I’ll go to a five and dime. That’ll probably get some publicity and maybe an offer for a picture.”

They talked me out of it, but I still think it would’ve been a good thing to try. Something different. For me, “different” ended up being basically running my own career without all kinds of representatives. And thanks to guys like Lee Marvin, who always brought me in on movies he was working on, and directors like Robert Aldrich and John Carpenter who just got a kick out of my work, I’ve done okay.

Chapter 19

Talkin’ Pictures, Part One

N
ow we can get back to the reason many of you are probably here: my film career.

Picking up in 1955, right after
Marty
, I’m going to run through so I can give you the highlights. Some of them were hits that you’ll probably remember; some of them were turkeys that I barely remember. But even in those, there were people and places that stand out all these years later.

Run for Cover

Acting with James Cagney was a special treat. He was so easy to work with. He did his work, knew his lines, and winked at you as we went along, to show that everything was fine. In the evening, when we’d finish, people would congregate around his dressing room. After he’d changed, he’d bring out a little square piece of wood and tap-dance on it. Everybody would hum a tune and he’d dance like crazy.

I only had a small role in the film, but it was more expensive to send me back from the New Mexico location than to put me up, so I stayed the whole shoot and enjoyed several weeks of free entertainment!

Violent Saturday

I almost killed one of my best friends making this movie.

I was playing an Amish farmer. Lee Marvin and a crew of desperados were holding my family hostage in our barn. They tied us up, along with Victor Mature.

In one dramatic scene I was supposed to stab Lee Marvin in the back with a pitchfork. While we were rehearsing, they put a big X on his back. I was supposed to put the tines of the pitchfork right on this X, which was padded underneath so he wouldn’t be hurt.

We rehearsed it fine, but when it came time to shoot, they’d removed the X so it wouldn’t show.

I said, “Lee, I’m not sure about this.”

He said, “I have faith in you. You’ll hit it.”

I said, “That’s nice, but what if I miss?”

“Don’t miss,” was all my tough-guy pal said.

I didn’t, but I was sure nervous when it came time to poke him. I mean, you’ve really got to put your muscle into it, or it’s not going to look real. Later, instead of the usual “Tsk, tsk,” he complimented me on my marksmanship.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what were you thinking about when you did that?”

“Well,” I said, “I caught sight of myself in the beard and overalls and I imagined I was John Brown—a fellow Connecticut native, as it happens—at Harpers Ferry fighting off the soldiers of Robert E. Lee.”

“My” Lee, Lee Marvin, said he was glad I hadn’t told him that before or he’d have been scared stiff.

The Last Command

I have to say, they may not have been highfalutin, but there was nothing I had more fun doing than westerns. This one had Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens, among others. It was a retelling of the battle of the Alamo, and Sterling Hayden was a great Jim Bowie. I died with a bayonet stuck into me, in a pool of my own blood. It was a pretty dramatic death—but they cut it out because the picture was too long.

The Square Jungle

This movie is another reason that exclusive contracts are no damn good.

After signing that crappy deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, we squared things away by having them loan me out. That meant they told any studio that wanted me to pay, say, $100,000 of which I got to keep roughly a quarter.

So along came
The Square Jungle
, which starred Tony Curtis. I played a fight manager. Despite the fact that I was getting ripped off, we had a lot of fun. An actor by the name of David Janssen in the film—kind of big ears, looked like Clark Gable—took me aside one day and he said, “I sure wish I could talk to you.”

I said, “What’s the matter? Talk to me.”

He said, “I’ve got a contract here with Universal, but I’m not happy.”

I laughed. “I want to tell you something. You’ve got a contract with a company that puts you in pictures. You may not be satisfied with what pictures you’re getting, or the pay, but you’re working and you’re sharpening your tools as you go along. You know, they’re selling me down the river, and I’ve won an Oscar. I’m hanging in there. You should, too.”