Ernie: The Autobiography (16 page)

Janssen said, “Maybe you’re right. I’ll stick around. I’m going to work hard.”

Sure enough, one day he got that TV series
The Fugitive
and became Number One on the hit parade. Not long after that I happened to pull up alongside him on Wilshire Boulevard, sitting in his Rolls Royce. I was sitting in my little old Mercedes and I said “Hi, David, how are you?”

He said, “Oh, hi,” and roared off.

So much for gratitude.

Jubal

This was a great picture with Glenn Ford. I played a rancher who takes a shepherd in out of the cold and my wife falls in love with him. He ends up killing me in order to save his own life. Charlie Bronson was in the picture, along with Jack Elam and Rod Steiger, who had played
Marty
in a shorter television version before I did the movie. We had a great time. Rod didn’t seem annoyed that I’d won an Oscar for a role he originated.

“I had
On the Waterfront
,” he said. “I’m not greedy…and you were great.”

I talked a little about Charlie Bronson before. This was about twenty years before he made the smash hit
Death Wish
and became the rage of Europe as well. He became a multimillionaire and was working like a son of a gun. His ability to “look,” but not to say too much differentiated him from everyone else. My God, it paid off

You could always count on Charlie to give a good performance even if he had little or no dialogue. He’d mumble something or stumble or do something and always made it work. He never let his success go to his head. He never forgot his roots.

One day, about six years ago, I was working on a picture. A young man came over and said, “I want to introduce myself. You know my father.”

I said, “Who’s your father?”

He said, “Charlie Bronson.”

I actually had tears in my eyes because he was such a nice young man, polite and respectful. I said to him, “How’s your Dad?”

We’d been exchanging Christmas cards over the years, and I hadn’t heard from him lately.

He said, “I’m sorry, but my dad is dying. He’s got Alzheimer’s disease.”

That really took me by surprise and it hit me hard. But he’d had a good life, a great career, and in the end that isn’t a bad thing.

The Catered Affair

Bette Davis. Now there’s an actress. She had already won two Best Actress Oscars by the time I met her in 1956. She was definitely Hollywood royalty, but didn’t act like it.

Most of the time.

This one was written by Gore Vidal based on a play by Paddy Chayefsky—whose work had been good for me in the past—and directed by Richard Brooks, who went on to direct Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winner
Elmer Gantry
. I didn’t know it at the time, but Brooks ate and digested actors for breakfast. If things weren’t working, he let you know it, and not gently.

I’ll never forget the first morning I reported for the picture. It was the first time I’d met Bette Davis and Debbie Reynolds and I was a little bit in awe. We started rehearsing our scene on the set and things didn’t seem to be working out.

Brooks said, “All right, work on the goddamn thing. I got to go behind camera and see what’s happening there. I’ll come back and we’ll work it out.”

So he went back to the camera and I said to Bette Davis, “Miss Davis, I think that I know what’s wrong.”

She said, “What is it?” She may have had a reputation for being tough, but she also knew how to play it soft and rally the troops.

I said, “It’s a matter of timing and emphasis. Let’s do the scene and I’ll show you what I mean.”

We did and it worked like a charm.

Brooks came back and said, “Awright, let’s see if we can do this goddamn scene.”

We ran through it and Brooks liked it.

Bette said, “You weren’t watching, were you, Richard? Ernie here figured it out.”

He took a look at me and said, without a hint of levity to suggest he might be kidding, “goddamn thinking actors.”

We shot it, one take, and it was over.

We moved on to another set where I was going to be getting into bed with Bette. She was running her lines about giving her daughter a big wedding. Brooks got everybody around the bed and said, “All right, Mr. Borgnine. What do you have in mind for this scene?”

I blanched—what do I do now?—and looked at the bed.

I said, “Well, sir, I thought Miss Davis and I could do a variation of the wonderful story about a salesman who had been lugging these heavy suitcases all day long, just pulling and pushing and trying to sell things to the farmers. He finally got to this one farmer at night.

“He said, ‘Please, I’m so tired. May I sleep in your barn tonight?’

“The farmer said, ‘No. First you’ll have dinner with us and then you’ll bunk with my boy, who has a big bed.’”

By now the whole cast and crew is listening and watching.

I went on, “After dinner this man got up, excused himself, went right up and got into bed. Pretty soon the little boy came up and he got down by the side of the bed and bowed his head.

“The salesman opened one eye and thought, ‘Gee, look at that. I haven’t done anything like that since I was a young man. I’m going to get down on my side of the bed and pray.’

“The kid looked up at him and said, ‘Mister, what you doing?’

“The man said, ‘I’m doing the same thing you are, son.’

“The kid said, ‘Gee, Mom’s gonna be awful mad. The chamber pot’s on this side!’”

Bette Davis let out a whoop. Richard Brooks never bothered me again.

Bette was “one of us,” but she also had a sharp side. I was going over my lines while I was being photographed for some publicity shots by a well-known Sicilian photographer with one name. These were pictures studios give to newspapers and magazines to promote films that were in production—back in the days before stars were being photographed in unflattering positions by passersby with cell phones.

We were running a little late and as we were sitting there, a horseshoe of beautiful pink roses was brought over to me by a stagehand. I read the card. It said, “Congratulations, Ernie. Now why don’t you Italians go home?” It was signed “BD.”

I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I sought her out on the set and said, “Okay, let’s go to work.”

She replied, “Let’s.”

Working with her was one of the best experiences I’ve had on a film. She was a tiny thing, just five-foot-three, and always in motion. Smoking, shifting her shoulders this way and that, her eyes moving like little machines here and there missing nothing. You know, an actress in the 1930s didn’t become as big as she was without having some steel in her backbone. But she never, ever used that muscle against her ensemble.

She ran into a career downturn during the late 1950s, until
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
—directed by my buddy Bob Aldrich—boosted her back to the top in 1962. I used to run into her over the years, when I lived up on Mulholland Drive and she lived alone in a small apartment building off the Sunset Strip. She was still feisty, still working into her late seventies, still a queen.

The Best Things in Life Are Free

It happens at least once to every actor, even the great ones like Marlon Brando.

They star, one time each, in a musical. My turn came in 1956.

Let me say, first of all, that this was my own choice and not a loan-out dictated by Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. We’d managed to settle that matter, which also enabled me to keep my whole fee for every picture I’d made. Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had showed me I could command $100,000 a film and that’s what I continued to ask. I didn’t want to go down but, at the time, I didn’t want to price myself out of the market, either.

The Best Things in Life Are Free
was a biography of the songwriting team Buddy De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson. I was asked to play Brown, with Gordon MacRae as De Sylva and Dan Dailey as Henderson. The main appeal for me was the chance to work with director Michael Curtiz. He may not be as well known as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, but he is, in my estimation, one of the most amazing directors who ever worked in film.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
with Errol Flynn.
Yankee Doodle Dandy. Casablanca
. Need I say more?

Actually, I do need to. He was a Hungarian. He had high heels. He always walked slanted forward. He was an eccentric. But boy, was he brilliant. The crew told me a story about when he was making the football picture
Jim Thorpe
—
All American
with Burt Lancaster. He came on the set, looked at the football field, and asked, “Where are all the men?” He was acting like this was
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, another of his classics.

They said, “That’s all the men there are, Mr. Curtiz. Eleven on one side and eleven on the other.”

He said, “That’s not enough. Double it.”

They said, “But sir—that’s how American football is played!”

He said, “Double it, nobody will ever know the difference.”

They doubled it and nobody ever knew the difference. He had men all over that field and it’s the greatest football picture you ever saw.

One day we were doing a scene where Norman Brooks, playing Al Jolson, asked us to write him a song for a movie. He wanted to call the song “Sonny Boy.” Now, Jolson was known for heart-wrenching
schmaltz
and the three songwriters made up the corniest song you could possibly imagine.

“
Climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy, though you’re only three, Sonny Boy
…”

We actors knew it was corny, too. But let me tell you, when we saw the finished film and Brooks/Jolson finished singing it, everybody cried. Somebody in the audience said, “Jeez, this is the greatest song ever written.”

It wasn’t. It was still corn. But Jolson, and now Curtiz, made it work for the audience. And even though I was playing a songwriter in this musical, I was still required to throw a couple of punches in a scene where I confront some gangsters. Once a tough guy, always a tough guy.

After filming was completed, Curtiz presented me with a gold money clip. On it he wrote “To one of the finest actors I have ever worked with. Lovingly, Mike Curtiz.” It was one of the most touching things that I had ever received, and from a director who, in my estimation, could do no wrong.

Just before he started working with us, Gordon MacRae had completed the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel
. He invited us to come to the screening with him. This was a picture that was supposed to star Frank Sinatra, but Frank had walked off because every scene was being shot twice: once in CinemaScope and once for theaters that weren’t equipped to show that widescreen process. He complained that he wasn’t being paid for two movies.

I was very impressed with Gordon. He had a beautiful voice that came with no effort at all. He just let it all out. To think he died the way he did, cancer of the jaw in just his mid-sixties It was also a shame that drink got to him. He finally beat it and spent a lot of time counseling other alcoholics, but his problem also robbed us of a lot of the great work he might have done.

Fortunately, doing a musical didn’t hurt my career as a serious actor—though, as you’ll see in a while, getting up to sing a few years later nearly did me in.

Chapter 20

Talkin’ Pictures, Part Two

Three Brave Men
(1956)

T
his one was a true story in which I played a man named Bernie Goldsmith, who was accused of being a communist simply because he thought it would be all right for blacks to live in a certain neighborhood with whites. Ray Milland was playing my lawyer, Joe. The third brave man was played by Frank Lovejoy. He played a captain who stood up for Goldsmith when he was dishonorably discharged from the navy.

I was doing a scene one day and asked my stand-in—someone who looks like you and stands there while they light the scene, so your makeup doesn’t run and your energy doesn’t flag—if he could find a record player and some 45s.

“Something spirited,” I said. I wanted music we could play between shots because these scenes were so dramatic and down. We had to do something to lift ourselves up. He came back with a portable player and some Elvis records. We’d finish a scene and,
bam
, put on “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Hound Dog.”

One day, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, happened to be on the lot. He heard the music and walked over. He said, “I understand you like my boy Elvis.”

I said, “Yes, I do, Colonel Parker.”

He said, “I’d like to put you under contract.”

I said, “I already have a contract, but thank you.” I wasn’t quite liberated from my old deal just yet.

He pulled out a contract; it must have been about six feet long.

He said, “Sign on the bottom line. I’ll get you out of your contract.”

Considering what he did for Elvis’s career, maybe I should have gone with him, so help me. Either way, Colonel Parker was quite a character.

One day we were doing a scene in which my character had come home after being dismissed from the navy. I closed the door, pulled down the shades, and started to cry. Before we were finished I heard “Cut,” then I heard somebody sobbing.

The director called me over and said, “Ernie, would you mind doing that scene over again?”

“Sure. Anything I can do to help?”

He said, “No, let’s just do it again.”

So I did it again and I got to the same place and I heard the sob again.

I stared into the lights and said, “What the hell is wrong?”

The director called me over and introduced me to this man, who turned out to be the real Bernie Goldsmith. Through tears, he said to me, “How did you know what I did when I came back to my house that day?”

It hadn’t been written in the script, but I told him it was the most natural thing in the world to do. You shut yourself off from the world. You hate the world. You hate everything.