Ernie: The Autobiography (18 page)

De Toth changed his plans.

Kerwin was just a honey of a guy. Some of you may know him for his three big fantasy films,
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver
, and
Jack the Giant Killer
. He liked acting but never got the breaks that you need to become a star. Not long thereafter he retired and opened a flower shop in San Francisco. He died a few years back.

Soon after we shot our picture the Russians put up their wall. When I returned to Berlin some years later, I climbed a ladder to look over. It was a horrible thing. They had put rollers along the edge so that would-be escapees from East Berlin couldn’t get a grip on the edge They added ball bearings on top in case someone did get on top, and past the barbwire there. The minute you hit the ball bearings you’d make a racket. If you didn’t get shot, you’d slip and fall back.

Seeing that, I swore to myself I’d never complain about the hardships of my chosen profession. And if I haven’t said it before now, let me state for the record: God bless America.

Pay or Die
(1960)

This was another true story, about Giuseppe Petrosino, who had been a lieutenant in the New York police force. He had done such a good job cleaning up the Mafia in New York that Teddy Roosevelt and the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, thought that they’d like him to take on the Mafia in Palermo.

It’s funny how little things can undo you. Here was this guy who was so careful while he was undercover. He wore a disguise and the gangsters didn’t know what he looked like. Well, evidently, he was heading for the post office box to send off a message to the United States and these Mafioso knew that he was in town. They carried shotguns and went around yelling “Petrosino, Petrosino.”

Without thinking, he said, “yes,” and they shot him full of holes on the Piazza Marina in March of 1909.

The highlight of
Pay or Die
—which were the words the Italian Black Hand (the forerunner of the Mafia at the turn of the twentieth century in America) would print on a piece of paper and hand to their extortion victims—was when I get pushed in front of a subway train barreling into the station. People still ask me about that scene today.

Pay or Die
was one of the great pre-
Godfather
Mafia movies.

Go Naked in the World
(1961)

This melodrama starred Tony Franciosa and Gina Lollobrigida. Tony was all right, but we hated Gina. She was difficult to work with. It got to a point where, one time, Tony ran her right into a post at the bottom of the stairs. I mean, he ran her right into it.
Kaboom!

That poor director, Ranald MacDougall. He wanted to make a shot of her walking on the beach as the sun was going down. Everyone kept saying to her, “Come on, come on, the sun is setting.” But she said, “I have to paint my toenails first.” Of course, they lost the shot. And they never would have seen her toes. I guess she needed that to get in character or something.

Gina didn’t know that I could speak Italian. Her husband was telling her in Italian, “You have to give it more, this guy’s got too much balls for you.” But as she cranked it up, so did I. I knew exactly what she was doing.

I never said a word. Then one night after work, I said to her in perfect Italian, “
Senora, di buona notte, era il mio piacere funzionare con voi!
”—“Good night, senora, it was my pleasure to work with you.”

She turned white down to her painted toes.

Barabbas
(1961)

I hadn’t worn a toga in a while. I guess producer Dino De Laurentiis thought the world needed another dose of that when he phoned and asked me to appear in his biblical epic starring Tony Quinn as the criminal who was freed when Jesus was sent to the cross.

There wasn’t much of a part for me. They already had Jack Palance as the bad-boy gladiator and Arthur Kennedy as Pontius Pilate. My then-wife Katy Jurado had been cast, and my old buddy Richard Fleischer was directing. Those were all good reasons to do the picture. I told Dino I’d consider it.

He said, “We’ll give you $25,000.”

That was damn good for what amounted to three-quarters of an hour’s work. I could tell Dino really wanted me, and I decided to push it. I happened to be thumbing through a magazine that had pictures of Ferraris.

Man
, I thought,
that’s a good-looking car
.

I said, “I’ll do it for $25,000 and a Ferrari.”

I could hear Dino gulp over the phone two or three times. But, you know, it meant a lot to pictures in those days to have an all-star cast looking out from those big billboards like the one in Times Square. I was betting he’d bite. And he did.

He said, “Okay, and a Ferrari.”

My American agent said to me later, “Jesus Christ, I think I’m going to have you as
my
agent!” Yeah, well—you know what I think of agents.

Barabbas
came out at the tail end of the biblical cycle, after
Ben-Hur
and
King of Kings
had covered that territory in big, hugely popular style. There was no room for an epic but reverent, relatively subdued film about this tortured man who finally discovered Christianity. The movie was a box-office disappointment. I felt bad for Tony, who did some great work, and particularly for Katy, since a hit would have bumped her up a few notches in terms of popularity.

That’s show business. Sometimes, even God can’t help you.

After
Barabbas
I stayed in Rome to do another Italian-language picture starring Vittorio Gassman, the Italian actor who was married to Shelley Winters. It was called
I Briganti Italiani (The Italian Brigands
was the American title).

Life imitates art—Katy played my wife in the picture. Our marriage was starting to disintegrate around this time. The pressures of trying to sustain a marriage when both of us were off working were taking their toll.

My most vivid memory, though, had nothing to do with us. One day I was doing this big scene, giving this impassioned speech to a bunch of people under a tree. Suddenly, I stopped.

The director, a pleasant man named Mario Camerini, said, “Why did you stop?”

I said, “When he gets through picking his nose, I’ll go ahead.”

So help me Christ, Gassman was actually picking his nose on camera!

Chapter 22

At Sea Again: McHale’s Navy Is Launched

O
ne thing I hate is downtime. I get fidgety and cranky when I’m not working. It goes against that work ethic my parents instilled in me.

During the ten-year period when I was making pictures, there were lulls—and I hated them. Whenever I had a little free time, and whenever there was a good project, I’d return to TV. From 1951 to 1961 I did a bunch of things, mostly anthology shows, which have since gone the way of the dinosaur—
The Ford Television Theatre, Fireside Theatre, The O. Henry Playhouse, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars
, and
The Zane Grey Theater
. The ones that spelled theater “theatre” were a little snootier. Unlike a lot of actors, I had no compunction about jumping from one medium to the other. I didn’t feel television was a comedown. Hell, more people saw me on one of those shows in a single night than saw any one of my movies during its entire run.

So in late 1961 when Universal asked me if I’d do an hour drama,
Seven Against the Sea
, I said, “Sure.” It was a pilot for a possible series—meaning that if it was good it would be picked up for a year’s worth of episodes. There was going to be an ensemble cast—well, seven—which meant that if it became a weekly show and I had to go off and make a movie, I could. If the pilot was bad, they’d air it once in the small hours of the night just to recoup some of the costs. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out too well. It was telecast on April 3, 1962, on
Alcoa Premiere
, and that was that.

Jennings Lang, a former agent and now a producer at Universal, saw it and had an idea. Now, not all of Jennings’s ideas were good. For instance, there was the time in 1951 when he supposedly had an affair with actress Joan Bennett. Joan’s husband, producer Walter Wanger, found out about it and shot Jennings right in the crotch.

But this idea happened to be good. Lang said to the suits at Universal, “Why don’t we turn this thing around? We’ve got the boat, we’ve got the lake at the studio. Why don’t we take this same basic concept, turn it around, and make it a comedy?”

That’s how
McHale’s Navy
was born. I played the Commander of a PT Boat in the South Pacific during World War II.

People assume that because I was in the navy during World War II, the show must’ve been my idea. I wish it was. I’d be making a lot more trips to the bank. See, I don’t get any royalties—back then, the rules said they stopped after seven reruns—but the creators still do. I was just a working stiff.

Edd Henry, a bigwig at Universal, was the one who called me and made the offer for me to star.

At first, I was kind of cool to the idea. Not that it was a
bad
idea. Phil Silvers had done okay for himself playing
Sgt. Bilko
on TV.
McHale’s Navy
was in many ways a knockoff of
Bilko
, which had been a huge hit. But I had other considerations.

I said, “You know, a commitment like that would really limit the amount of time I have to make movies.”

He said, “True. But you’d make more money if the show is a hit and there are toys with your face on them. Then you’d be even more valuable to a movie producer.”

He had a point. I told him I’d think about it

As I said, I hate being idle—which I happened to be, at the moment. Living in Mexico with Katy had kept me off the Hollywood radar, so we had moved back to Los Angeles. She was working on TV in a lot of westerns and I was waiting for the phone to ring. I hadn’t made a picture since returning from Italy, almost a year. I should add that after a distinguished film career of nearly twenty years, Katy wasn’t happy to be doing TV. She
did
see it as a step backward. With her unhappy and me unemployed, getting out of the house seemed like a good idea. Especially since we were living on Mulholland Drive and Universal was a short hop down the hill.

The next morning, as the good Lord would have it, a kid came to the door selling chocolate bars from a school out in the San Fernando Valley.

As I was digging through my pocket for money, the kid said, “Mister, your face looks awfully familiar. What’s your name?”

I kidded him and said, “My name is James Arness.”

The kid frowned. “Naw, he does
Gunsmoke
.”

I said, “You got me. I’m really Richard Boone.”

He said, “He does
Have Gun Will Travel
.”

I thought,
Son of a gun, this kid knows them all, doesn’t he?

I told him, “My name is Ernest Borgnine.”

That got no response. Absolutely nothing!

He said, “I know I’ve seen you somewhere.”

“I won an Academy Award for
Marty
,” I told him.

“Anything else?” he asked.

I said, “Yeah—buncha things you may have seen. Probably on TV.”

I paid for the chocolate bars, put them on the table, went to the telephone, picked it up.

“Edd,” I said, “that part still open?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “Good. I’ll do it.”

He said, “What changed your mind?”

I said, “Richard Boone,” and let it go at that.

The next year, after the first season of
McHale’s Navy
—which was a smash beyond all our expectations—I found myself up in Oregon somewhere looking for a place to stay for the night. Katy and I had separated and I was looking for a place to hide from her—and her divorce lawyers. I poked my head into this cabin and the guy looked at me and said, “McHale! What are you doing here?”

Thank God for that kid and his chocolate bars.

I have to admit, I had a lot of fun that first season. I felt really kind of decadent getting up at a reasonable hour each day, driving three miles to the lot, spending my free time in a real dressing room with a real telephone to conduct business, shooting till dinnertime, then going home. It sure beat getting up before dawn to drive to Lonesome Pine, freezing my ass off, and waiting around to say a line or two and get punched.

Plus, there was something in the air at the time. TV was becoming big business. Up till now, a lot of shows had been made by independent producers who had been making low-budget movies in the 1940s and 1950s and just moved their crews and talent into low-budget TV. Universal was one of the first studios to see that there was a fortune to be made in this new medium, and the studio was just starting to make that transition.

By the time
McHale
ended its run, we’d be doing the episodes in color. Color TV really caused the medium to grow. In fact, it was during this time that Universal built the infamous “black tower” on the back lot. That’s the office building on Lankershim Boulevard—since dwarfed by an even larger black tower. The scuttlebutt on the lot was that the accountants were moving in and taking over, and that proved to be the case. The actors didn’t feel it, but the producers did. They could no longer call someone like a Louis B. Mayer or a Darryl F. Zanuck or a Walt Disney and say, “Chief, I need another two weeks and an extra million bucks to finish this picture” and get a yea or nay that day. Now it had to go to a committee and, more often than not, you were turned down.

Also, during our four years on the air, Universal started conducting studio tours. The back lot was always abuzz with activity and the smiling faces of fans as the trams came through. Back then, the tour actually visited working sets like ours. In fact, the studio hired one of my costars, Bob Hastings, to meet and greet the fans. It was a real thrill for them, and for him. We used to pop out of the bushes with spears in our hands and scare the tourists. That was fun for us, till one day a big old fat lady fell out of the tram. The front office said, “No more attacking the tourists!”