Ernie: The Autobiography (28 page)

The industry he’d loved and given so much to had broken his heart. Knowing Irwin, though, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He was a master showman, the kind Hollywood doesn’t build anymore.

Escape from New York (1981)

One day in late 1980 I got a call from John Carpenter.

John had a big youth following thanks to the horror movie he’d made three years earlier,
Halloween. Escape from New York
is a futuristic story in which Manhattan island is a maximum-security prison and breaking out is impossible. When the President of the United States is taken prisoner after a plane crash, Kurt Russell is sent to rescue him.

I received the script from John, who said, “I’d love to have you play the cabby in this picture.” I read it and I admit I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. I was one of the convicts imprisoned there, an old-time New York taxi driver. I played a hack in
The Catered Affair
, so I figured it wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

I had a meeting with John Carpenter and he said, “I want you to play the cabby.”

I said “I don’t want to play the cabby. I want to play the warden.”

He said, “I’ve already got the warden cast.” He’d given the part to Lee Van Cleef. “I wrote the cabby especially for you.”

I said, “I can do this standing on my head.”

“I know you can.”

We shot in St. Louis because the city had had a really devastating fire in one section of town and it was perfect for the kind of destroyed landscape Carpenter wanted. Kurt Russell was fantastic as always as the one-eyed Snake Plissken who is sent to rescue the President. When I saw Kurt a couple of years later, he had just moved with his girlfriend Goldie Hawn and their kids to a huge ranch outside of Aspen. Hunting and riding and living the life of the cowboy and having a burger with the locals at a greasy diner was something that Kurt said had always appealed to him.

When filming on
Escape from New York
was finished, we went to see the picture at the Screen Actors Guild and don’t you know that everybody sat on their hands until it came to when I get killed. The audience went, “
Awww
.” They hated to see me die—my cabby is the one lovable character in the picture. I thought it was a heck of a tribute.

I’ll say this about John Carpenter. He was right when he said, “It’s the best thing I could do for you.” I thank him very much because he was a good director and
Escape from New York
was a good popcorn movie that introduced me to a new generation of moviegoers

I’m Going to Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse

One day when we are in St. Louis, on location for
Escape from New York
, I was watching television while waiting to be called to the set. I saw a show about the human brain and how little we actually use of it. About 10 percent, they said. Now, at this time I was worried silly about doing this one-man show that Sam Gallu had written for me. It was a Mafia piece called
I’m Going to Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse
, a dissertation on the United States as seen through the eyes of a capo Mafioso, and I was worried stiff. I’d promised to do a reading—“ off book,” which means without the script—in a few weeks. Problem was, the lines weren’t sticking in my head. Maybe Don Rickles had put a curse on me or something. More likely, I was feeling the long hours on the last two shoots plus my sixty-four years.

The program about the brain happened to mention hypnotism. I wondered if it would be possible for me to find a hypnotist to put me under and order me to get my lines into my head. That may sound silly, but I was desperate. And tired. That’s a dangerous combination. I called Tova back in L.A. and asked her to see if she could find someone. Tova’s a great gal—she didn’t think I was crazy. She’s pretty open-minded. She has to be, being married to an actor.

She found a hypnotist, and when I came home I went to see him. The first thing he asked was, “Do you want to know everything that goes on?”

I said, “Of course.”

He explained, “Not everyone does. Some people have to go really deep to remember events from their past. They rely on me to take notes.”

I didn’t want anyone I didn’t know putting me to sleep, so I told him to keep me close to the surface.

He said okay and, leaning close, he said in a very soothing voice, “Watch that clock up on the wall, the way the pendulum is swinging back and forth.”

I did. It was like out of some cornball horror movie. But I watched and my mind started to wander here and there. He later explained that was the point: to uproot you from the “now” and let your mind float freely. That is what makes it particularly responsive to the hypnotist’s voice and open to suggestion. After a minute or two or three—it could have been a half hour, I was kind of daydreaming—he said, “When I say count to five you will be under.”

I said, “Sure I will, yep.”

So he said, “One, two, three, four, five,” and I was supposed to be under.

I didn’t feel any different, but I continued to watch the clock. We talked about my family, my this, my that and everything else—more of that freeing-my-brain-from-restraints, I later learned—and there was a point when I decided to uncross my legs, which I’d crossed at the ankles. I tried but I could not move them. I realized that, sure enough, nothing was working except my brain and my answering him. Eventually he got around to telling me to let go of my fear of the one-man show and learn the lines.

When I got home, I opened the script and believe it or not, within a half hour I had thirty-seven pages of dialogue in my head. Within a week, I gave a performance in front of people in my home.

I went out on the road for about three months with the show, but it was badly promoted, though people who came liked it very much. Still, I didn’t come away from the experience empty-handed.

Years later, when I was doing the TV show
Airwolf
, my costar David Carradine came up to me looking really distracted.

I said, “Something bothering you?”

He said, “Oh God, I’ve got this one-man show to do and I’m scared spitless.”

I said, “I know exactly what you’re talking about and also what to do.”

“You do?”

I said, “Go see this hypnotist I know.”

He went to see the guy. When I saw Dave later, he said, “It was absolutely incredible.”

We never put the mob show on for the public, though I did get to put the hypnotism to good use two years later. My publicist, Harry Flynn, kept asking me if I would like to do a one-man show called
Hoover
, about J. Edgar Hoover, the onetime head of the FBI.

I kept putting him off, because Hoover was not a very likable guy. And that’s tough to sustain onstage, alone, for ninety minutes.

But he kept after me and kept after and I finally agreed to do it down in Florida. Later that year we did a version of it for TV called
Blood Feud
, but with a full cast that included Robert Blake, who snagged an Emmy nomination as Jimmy Hoffa. But back to the stage.

The hypnotism obviously “stuck” because I had no trouble learning the script, though they supplied me with big offstage cue cards that I could read from if I got into trouble. It was almost like a live television show.

Doing research for the play and then the movie, trying to find a human side to Hoover, I found out that he was an honest person. Whatever his methods—and some of them weren’t very nice—he believed he was protecting America. This country meant everything to him. I could relate to that. People said he was a cross dresser and a homosexual because he had a good male friend. But you know, when you’re in a position of power you’ll always find jealous people saying things that aren’t true. I found out that he was quite a gentleman and a good friend of actress Dorothy Lamour. He lived with her for years and then later on when she passed away he lived by himself. When I mentioned that to someone, he cracked, “Yeah, maybe he wanted to borrow her sarongs.” Even if it
was
true, so what?

See what I mean? When you’re in the public eye, you become a target. All too often jokes that are made about you, like the gossip written about celebrities, are taken as gospel, they get passed around. Most of it isn’t true.

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Crazy thing about Hollywood. When you’re in a hit, you become typecast in that genre, like Chuck Heston in biblical epics and Clint Eastwood in westerns. But I’d done a successful western, a successful disaster picture, a successful horror picture, and an example of just about every other genre under the sun. So I was accepted by audiences in many genres and was brought in as a familiar face—“insurance,” they called it—to help make sure those audiences turned up.

Thanks to
Willard
and
The Devil’s Rain
, I was “insurance” for horror pictures—that is why I was asked to do this one.

Wes Craven had become “the” horror guy, having directed
A Nightmare on Elm Street
and, later,
Scream
. I found him to be a laid-back but articulate and knowledgeable director. Later I found out he had started as a crewman in porn flicks. Maybe that explains why nothing rattled him.

Deadly Blessing
is set in Amish country at a local farm, where a woman’s husband is mysteriously killed by his own tractor. My character is the evil Isaiah Schmidt, the family patriarch, who is protecting a nasty old secret.

It was a pretty routine shoot, except for the time when Wes tried to persuade Sharon Stone to film a scene with a very large spider. Sharon wanted the spider’s pincers removed before she agreed to do the scene. Since someone from the ASPCA might be reading, let’s just skip what happened next. I’ll tell you this: no one knew in 1981 that she’d become a big star.

Chapter 37

Going Home to TV

I
n 1982 I was invited to do a two-part episode of
The Love Boat
playing the husband of Shelley Winters. After fifty years they decide to get a divorce. The children had grown up and their feelings for each other had faded. But I ended up singing love songs to her in Italian on a gondola in the Grand Canal in Venice and we rediscovered our love.

This is a case of life not imitating art.

It was the first time I’d worked with Shelley since
The Poseidon Adventure
ten years earlier. There were choppy seas on
The Love Boat
.

When we were on location it was fine. When we returned to the studio in Los Angeles it got to the point where I just couldn’t stomach her anymore. She was the damnedest woman you’ve ever seen in your life.

She’d come in after being out half the night, and say, “Oh, Ernie, I feel terrible. Could you help me with my lines?”

I knew my lines and, like most actors, knew the gist of what the other person had to say, so I helped her. But I would have to go over it again and again. Of course, when she came to the set the stuff was fresh in her memory and I’d forgotten my lines.

Exasperating is a good word for her. She said at one point, “You better be nice to me or I won’t put you in my autobiography,” which she was writing at the time.

I said, “Thank God.”

Before we get to one of my most disappointing work experiences, there’s a sort of prelude story. Ages before, in 1960, Sam Gallu, the author of
I’m Going to Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse
, had written a documentary about the Blue Angels. They’re the navy’s famous aerobatic team, made up of some of the best pilots on earth. He asked me to do the narration, and it was an honor to do so. After that, we went to meet the team in Pensacola, Florida. Of course, we all went out and got blasted.

The next morning these guys got up and flew like crazy while I watched with a blazing headache. The Blue Angels made me an honorary skipper and I’ve been their skipper ever since. It’s been a tremendous pleasure to watch these young pilots—who are drinking a lot less, these days—who are part of the team for two years, then they move on to make room for the boys coming up.

I’ll never forget my first trip on one of the planes. It was about five years later. I came down from Alabama where I was making a picture. No sooner had I got there than they welcomed me and put me right into a flight suit.

“Come on,” they said. “We’re going to give you a ride.”

As soon as I was belted in, the pilot, Lieutenant Mike Nord, said to me, “Mr. Borgnine, we’re going to go straight down the runway.”

“Okay.”

“Then we’re gonna go straight up into the air.”

We did. We went up and my neck hit my backbone and seemed to travel down to my butt. I couldn’t move my head for a month. He told me to turn so I could see Pensacola. Well, I couldn’t turn my head at all because of the Gs we were pulling.

While we were up there, he called one of the aircraft carriers that were having maneuvers out in the Gulf, and said, “Listen, I got a VIP aboard, can we make a pass?”

They wanted to know who it was and he told them. They said, “McHale? Give us ten minutes.”

So we went along the coast. He knew a nude beach where all the naked ladies were. Talk about torture. I still couldn’t turn my head, I couldn’t see for nothing.

But there was one thing I could see. The pilot made sure of that. We made a pass by the ship and I’ll never forget this as long as I live. They had called all hands on deck to salute Ernest Borgnine, Lieutenant Commander McHale. I got the biggest lump in my throat you could imagine.

What a wonderful honor.

I mention this now because my next TV project was about fliers. Only it turned out not to be such an honor or very much fun.

In 1984, Don Bellisario offered me a part in a pilot he was doing called
Airwolf
, about the crew of a hi-tech helicopter. I was thinking that audiences would have a great time if we could capture some of that “right stuff” Blue Angels spirit I had experienced.