Ernie: The Autobiography (19 page)

I have to admit, one thing I never expected was the joy of working day after day with a brilliant ensemble. Tim Conway is a comic genius and in no small way one of the reasons
McHale’s Navy
was so successful. He was always ad-libbing and coming up with comic bits that kept the show fresh and the cast on our toes. You had to be sharp to act with him. Gavin MacLeod is also a great talent who went on to great fame on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, where he was a standout, and later as the captain of
The Love Boat
. Joe Flynn, a lovely guy and TV veteran, brought a lot to the show as well. I was shocked when he died a few years after we went off the air, drowning when he suffered a heart attack while swimming. He was just forty-nine. Then there was Bob Hastings, whose brother Don I mentioned earlier, having worked with him in New York in the fifties. Bob also popped up in a film I did,
The Poseidon Adventure
, where he played the emcee counting down the new year as a big wave raced toward the ship.

We had a great time on
McHale’s Navy
. We got to know each other and the routine so well, in fact, that one time we could have finished an episode in a day and a half instead of three days. I said, “No, let’s come back and finish tomorrow. Otherwise, Universal will have us shooting each show in a day and a quarter!”

The people behind the camera loved working on our show because we had so many laughs. Crews would fight to be assigned to us. Let me tell you, that never happened on any feature film I ever worked on before or since!

There’s a tradition, after the first season, for the stars to buy something for the cast and crew. So I got everyone personalized red, white, and blue sweaters with
McHALE’S NAVY
written on the back. Everybody went nuts and started wearing them around the studio. One day, Lew Wasserman, the head of the studio, came up and said, “All right, where’s mine?” So I had to run around like crazy and try to get one, then had one of the wardrobe gals sew “Lew” on it. I never saw the son of a gun wear it, but he had one.

The only unpleasant memory of the show was when our producer, Edward Montagne, would come down to see the dailies, the raw footage shot the day before. He got the job because he’d been a supervising producer on the
Bilko
show. For the first part of the first season, I’d ask Ed what he thought. He’d grumble and not really answer. One of the writers, a sweetheart named Si Rose, would watch the same dailies and when I asked him he’d always say, “Great—you guys are doing a hell of a job.” That was important, because we hadn’t gone on the air yet and had no idea how people would react. All actors need feedback, and producers should be willing to give it. Usually, they do. In fact, it’s tough to keep them from interfering.

So one day I approached this producer. I said, “Why don’t you come down to the set once in a while and tell the guys they’re doing a good job? It’d mean a lot to ’em and they do work hard.”

He looked at me like he’d swallowed a bug. “I don’t kiss anybody’s ass,” he said.

I said, “Hey, I’m not asking you to kiss any ass. Just pat ’em on the back a little.”

He said, “Insecure actors. Jesus,” and walked away.

Well, I grabbed him to turn him back around and we really got into it. I ripped his shirt and he ripped mine. We almost came to blows. Luckily we didn’t. This producer directed us a few times, at the very beginning. It was a disaster, because this guy didn’t know how to direct his way out of a toilet. We’d finally work it out on our own, when he was busy doing something else, and he’d say “Okay, let’s do it that way.” As if he’d thought of it!

McHale’s Navy
ran four seasons. It could have gone on a lot longer, but the producer insisted that we move the crew of PT 73 from the fictional Pacific island of Taratupa to Italy in order to give us fresh storylines. You know, that kind of move is always a disaster, like marrying two characters like Jeannie and Col. Nelson or Lois and Clark. Introduce new characters, send ’em to Italy or Hawaii or wherever for a two-parter, but don’t fix what ain’t broken! Fans didn’t like the new approach and we were canceled a lot sooner than we should have been. Still, we made 148 episodes and had a great time with every one of them. As I write this, early in 2008, I still get letters from people who grew up with the show and—believe it or not—forty years later Tim Conway and I still work together, doing voices on the kids’ Saturday cartoon show,
SpongeBob SquarePants
! I bitch from time to time, but this
can
be a great business. How many people do you know who are still working with old colleagues after so many years?

It’s kind of funny, though. I’m still working with Tim after four decades. But when it comes to women…

Chapter 23

Everything’s Coming Up Roses—Not

T
here’s no business like show business.

You’ve all heard that famous song lyric, right? As I just said about
McHale’s Navy
, it’s been pretty great for me. Sadly, the marriage business took me a lot longer to get right.

I met Ethel Merman in the spring of 1964, after the show’s second season had wrapped. I was at a party where everybody was begging some woman to get up and sing. I had heard of her, of course, from her Broadway triumphs
Annie Get Your Gun
and
Gypsy
. But I hadn’t seen them and I didn’t recognize her.

I was standing by the piano listening. She started singing and my eyes lit up. I said, “My God, she’s got a voice! It’s incredible!” She was singing Cole Porter and other standards.

When she was finished, we happened to end up standing side by side at the bar. She looked over and said, “You like that?”

I said, “I loved it. That was marvelous!”

She asked, “Who are you?”

“My name is Ernest Borgnine.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You’re that funny guy on
McHale’s Navy
.”

“That’s right.”

I was a little miffed that she hadn’t recognized me from
Marty
, but then, I hadn’t recognized her, either.

We talked for hours and the first thing you know the twice-divorced Ethel Agnes Zimmermann and I were an item. It was wonderful—at first. She lived in New York and I lived in L.A. She had to return east but we were always on the phone to each other.

It was ridiculous. We decided she’d move to Los Angeles and we’d get married. Ethel had recently had a hit with her costarring role in the comedy
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
, and since nothing was brewing on the stage, she decided to try and build on that.

We had a big wedding in my backyard in Beverly Hills. It was quite beautiful and everybody had a great time. Lovebirds were released from cages and flew all over the place. Everyone was enthralled.

Biggest mistake of my life. Maybe I thought I was marrying Rosemary Clooney, who knows?

For our honeymoon, we decided to go Hawaii, Japan, and Hong Kong. It was June and I didn’t have to be back for the third season of
McHale’s Navy
for another six weeks. So off we went to Hawaii.

It was a disaster.

Everybody in Hawaii seemed to know me. It was, “Hey, Mr. Borgnine, how are you?” and “Ernie, how are you?”

Nobody said a thing about my wife, and I was always saying, “This is the great Ethel Merman.”

Only a few people seemed to care. It was embarrassing for me and humiliating for her.

When we got to Kyoto, Japan, the same thing happened. She became more and more distant as the trip went on. By the time we got to Hong Kong she was hardly speaking to me—just because I was more famous than her. I tried to understand. As I’ve said, it’s tough for women in this business. When they’re strong, when they stand up for themselves, they’re called “bitches.” It isn’t right, but that’s the way it was back then…and today, too, though a little less so. Ethel wasn’t a bitch, but she was just naturally competitive in a very competitive business. She reacted strongly and emotionally to what she suddenly viewed as a contest between her and me.

In Hong Kong, an unfortunate thing happened. I caught the
tur-ista
real bad. She got a little dose of it, but, man, I was really out. An agent from Cooks Tour, who had arranged our trip, came to see me. Ethel was lying in the big bed all by herself. I was in the sitting room next door, flopped across a couch, sicker than a dog. He came in and said, “Mr. Borgnine, you’ve got to get packed. You’re due on the plane back to Hawaii.”

I looked up at him and said, “I don’t think I can make it.”

He said, “I’ll help you, but you’ve got to go. This room is booked.”

He knocked on Ethel’s door and went in. She said she was well enough to leave and he started to help her pack. Then he saw this vial of medicine she had for her sickness.

“Would you like to give some to your husband?” he asked. “He’s really badly off.”

She said, “Why should I? It belongs to me.”

I heard that. It was enough to get me off the couch and out of Hong Kong. That pretty much did it as far as I was concerned.

When we got to Hawaii, Ethel ran right to a telephone to tell her mother and dad how badly I treated her. I hadn’t done anything to her. I hadn’t touched her. When we got home, we were invited to her lawyer’s home for dinner. She was still mad at me, now I was mad at her, and we weren’t talking at all. It was stupid, in a way, because I hadn’t done anything. But there we were.

While we were eating she started telling the story of how I had mistreated her by hogging the limelight wherever we went. That was it. I looked at this woman and just shook my head. Then I got up and walked out.

The next morning she said, “What do you mean by leaving?”

“Madam,” I said, “as far as I’m concerned, this marriage is over. You call your people and I’ll get my people and we’ll come to a settlement.”

Well, she was furious.
Furious!
It was so over the top it was like she was playing a scene.

“How dare you?” she screamed. “What do you mean? You can’t do this.”

I said, “What do you mean I can’t? You want to live like this for the rest of your life?”

She said, “No! So just stop being a publicity hound!”

That was it. I went to work and lived in my dressing room at the studio.

One day on the set, her lawyer showed up—a nice man, actually. He said, “She’d like to have you come back to her.”

I said, “Well, that’s very nice. But would you like to hear exactly what happened while we were away?”

He said, “Okay.”

So we had lunch together in a quiet corner at the commissary and I told him exactly what happened from the time we got married until the day we returned from the wedding trip. When I was finished, he looked at me and I looked at him.

I asked, “Would
you
go back?”

He smiled. “No.”

So Ethel packed up all her things and shipped them home and I paid for it. She went back to her apartment in New York and that was the end of that.

Almost.

Cut to thirty years later. I was doing a show called
Ernest Borgnine on the Bus
with my son Cris. It was a fun documentary where we drove across America, talking to people and telling stories. A buddy of mine, Hugo Hansen, had come along and we ended up in Iowa on the 4th of July. It was a nice, clear day after several days of rain.

After the 4th of July celebration, Hugo and I started walking around this little town. We walked into a storefront that had been turned into a kind of makeshift museum. There were some old things there including World War II uniforms and a lot of books.

Hugo picked up a book and said, “Hey, look at this. It’s written by Ethel Merman.”

I had heard that she had written a memoir, but I had never seen it. Ethel had been dead for about twelve, thirteen years at the time and I was in a forgiving mood.

I said, “Let’s open it and see what it says.”

There was a chapter heading that read “Ernest Borgnine.” It was a blank page. That was it!

I said, “At least she didn’t say anything bad about me.”

Poor gal. Ethel was a very, very great talent and a wonderful person…when she wasn’t married. What happened to us is a lesson in the downside of fame, which is one reason never to pursue it as a goal in itself. If it comes, okay, you deal with it. If it doesn’t, then—like the kid who sold me chocolates that time—you roll with it. Besides, being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Yeah, you never have to wait for a table at a crowded restaurant. But you can’t take your kids to Disneyland, either. It’s a wash.

In the end, life and love and career are all hard enough without adding fame into the mix!

Chapter 24

The Fourth Estate

T
his might be a good time to pause and discuss gossip, because Ethel and I generated a bunch of it when we split.

You may find this difficult to believe, but a lot—not everything, mind you, but a lot—of what’s written about celebrities is bull. You say, “So why don’t you sue?” Well, there are two reasons. First, it’s expensive. Lawyers charge you a grand just to say “hello.” Second, it’s a grueling process. You have to get deposed by the opposing side, which can take days. They ask you all kinds of personal questions that become part of the public record. Very often, people sue the tabloids, then end up dropping the case after a few weeks. They make their big public show, protest that the stories aren’t true, and then everything goes away, booted aside by the next big story.

So many of the women I worked with, in particular, have gotten a bum rap. It’s not true, for example, that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were enemies. I worked with them both. They had days when they were up and days when they were a little down. They were competing for the same roles. And for women of a certain age, those parts are pretty rare. Of course they were rivals. But enemies? They were both part of the Hollywood social circles and were photographed a lot and—well, newspaper people have to write something to go with a picture. Kate Hepburn didn’t go out a lot and no one ever wrote that she hated, I don’t know, Vivien Leigh or Barbara Stanwyck.