Ernie: The Autobiography (21 page)

Like
The Guns of Navarone
and
Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra
was based on a best-selling novel by Alistair MacLean. It wasn’t as big a hit as those other movies (it’s a little hard to follow the plot at times), but it made a pot of money and nabbed a couple of Oscar nominations. I made
Ice Station Zebra, The Legend of Lylah Clare
, and an unremarkable western called
Chuka
back-to-back after the cancellation of
McHale’s Navy
in 1966.

I guess I was still employable.

The Split
(1968)

In 1968, I made one more film with Jim Brown. It was also my last film with him.

The Split
was directed by Gordon Flemyng and the all-star cast included Diahann Carroll, Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, and Jack Klug-man. It was based on a good Donald E. Westlake novel about a robbery during a big football game, after which the money goes missing. The thieves each think one of the others has the cash. Not a bad premise, right? Unfortunately, the characters are paper thin, scenes seem to be missing, and the movie is generally predictable.

I have two vivid memories of the movie. One is a scene where Jim Brown and I slugged it out. I actually got my head bashed in because he took things a little too seriously. Well, okay. Even Spence knocked out Clark Gable’s teeth. The other memory is when I hurt my foot.

We were working on a ship down at the harbor in Los Angeles. I had complained about an electrical cable laying across the path where we had to run. I said if I tripped over this thing I was liable to get hurt. I did it a couple of times, running up a gangplank and hiding behind the deck house, and everything was fine—on my end, anyway. Jim was supposed to be coming after me.

The director kept calling “Cut.”

I finally asked Mr. Flemyng, “What the hell is wrong?”

He said, in his very Scottish accent, “Well, Mr. Brown is trying to get his thing together.”

I said, “Jesus, all he has to do is run after me!”

Well, Jim was famous for running when he played in the NFL. Maybe he wanted to find a way of doing it differently, so people wouldn’t think of him as Jim Brown the fullback. I don’t know. All I know is that we did the scene again and again until finally I did step on this cable the wrong way and broke a bone in my left foot. I had to go to the hospital and Mr. Flemyng had to settle for a take that was already in the can. I had to do the rest of the picture in a cast, which the director artfully shot around so people wouldn’t see it.

Echoing my own sentiments, Mr. Flemyng—who was a wonderful, decent, human being—went up to Jim on the last day of shooting.

“If you were the last actor on Earth,” he said, “I would never work with you again.”

Directors are people, too, you know.

Chapter 26

Back in the Saddle, Big-Time

T
alk about a western!

The Wild Bunch
, which I made in late 1968, ended up being one of the all-time greats, though it was not much fun to make. It was my first picture for director Sam Peckinpah. His vocabulary had increased beyond “okay,” though there were times I wished it hadn’t. Still, the results were worth it.

The story is simple: a bunch of bank robbers shoot up a town and are pursued to oblivion by the law. In Peckinpah’s hands it became a masterpiece, an illustration of how the age of the gunfighter was giving way to civilization, and—of course—slow-motion bloodshed. And what a cast—William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Edmond O’Brien, Strother Martin, and L. Q. Jones.

At the age of fifty-one, I got to do more action scenes in this film than in any of my previous pictures.

At one point, after we had robbed this railroad office, we were supposed to make a dash for the horses under a rain of gunfire. My foot was still recovering from being busted in
The Split
, a fact that Sam had known for a while but only now addressed on the set.

“Shit,” he said. “How the hell am I gonna get you through the field of fire to your horse?”

I said, “I can run a little bit.”

He waved that idea away, but didn’t have one to replace it.

I said, “What if I roll and shoot at the same time?”

Without another word, he went back to the camera, rolled, and said, “Action!”

I guess that meant “yes.” So I threw myself to the ground and rolled across the street,
bam, bam
.

When I got onto the horse he said, “Okay, cut.” Then he came over to me. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I should have thought of that.”

As with many—actually, most—pictures, we never realized how great it would be while we were making it. I’ll never forget the first time the picture was shown. It was in Jamaica at a big film festival that Warner Brothers threw. They flew in film critics from around the world to see five pictures. It was first class all the way, from fancy hotels to banquets.

One night they showed
The Wild Bunch
. The next morning they held a symposium where reporters could ask us questions. As we sat on this stage, the very first question out of the box was “Why was this picture ever made?”

We were astounded because we thought we’d done something pretty good.

Bill Holden asked, “What do you mean?”

The reporter said, “This is the blood-thirstiest film we’ve ever seen. It’s terrible!”

We tried to explain that violence with a purpose is not gratuitous, it’s art. We explained that Peckinpah was just portraying what really happens when people get shot. He was the first to do this, in fact. He was the first to show how people get shot from the front to the back, or the back to the front, and how the bullet comes out the other side in a spray of blood.
Pow!
It tore through you and you fell dead

(I don’t dispute that
The Wild Bunch
was extremely violent—the climactic shootout took twelve days to film and more blank rounds were discharged than live rounds were fired during the Mexican Revolution of 1914. In total ninety thousand rounds were fired, all blanks. The onscreen body count is more than 150.
The Wild Bunch
was even bloodier than
Bonnie and Clyde
, which had been criticized harshly in 1967 for its violence.)

But it was no use. They’d already decided that the work and the people who made it were pretty much worthless.

We thought it better to just shut up and take our lumps. Well, the picture opened in the United States and I was astounded. Most of the critics—even some who had lambasted us—wrote, “This is one of the greatest westerns ever made.”

Often, a viewer needs to let a picture sink in before making up his or her mind about it. That’s one reason I’ve always been opposed to opening-night reviews of plays: sometimes a work of art needs to be digested before it is embraced or dismissed. It’s not always like food, where you know right away that something is to your liking or not. Hell, how many years did it take for critics to decide that
Citizen Kane
is one of the greatest American films of all time? It didn’t even win the Best Picture Oscar the year it was released.

William Holden, who did have a drinking problem, kept the boozing to a bare minimum, at least during the shoot. And he never came to the set inebriated. Part of that, he told me, was because he wanted to marry his girl, but she refused unless he gave up the bottle. He would stop for a while, but he couldn’t control it. It was just too much for him, I guess. He died a dozen years later, falling and hitting his head during a bout with the bottle. What a useless, stupid way to go.

We had some great veteran actors on that film. Edmond O’Brien, who played crusty old Freddie Sykes, was half-blind at the time he made the film. He really had to work hard to hit his marks, but the old pro did it.

Like John Wayne, Ben Johnson was a real-life cowboy who’d knocked around the industry since the 1940s. Also like Wayne, John Ford discovered him and had took him under his wing and put him in almost every movie he did. He could ride a horse. I mean, he could really ride a horse! He’d do anything the director asked and never complain no matter how long the hours were. A couple of years later, when he got his Academy Award for
The Last Picture Show
, he said, “You know something? I deserve this.”

It brought down the house.

Warren Oates was someone Sam Peckinpah really liked, and he used him whenever he could. Like Lee Marvin, he was a former marine who was damn convincing in these all-man kind of roles. He was lean and wiry and very active, and I was stunned when we lost him to a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.

I’d worked with Robert Ryan before on
The Dirty Dozen
and in 1956 on
Bad Day at Black Rock
. Ryan was a stone-cold pro (and former marine). You’d never believe it looking at his weathered mug and six-foot-four frame that he’d once starred in
Antony and Cleopatra
with Kate Hepburn. You’d also never believe it, watching this two-fisted guy on screen, that he was a real pacifist at heart. He had guts: he stood up to McCarthy during the Red Scare, he marched for civil rights, and he was opposed to nuclear proliferation. It’s usually the case, isn’t it? The guys who have been to war understand why it’s a last-resort kind of thing.

Jaime Sánchez was Angel, the youngest of the Wild Bunch. He was barely thirty at the time, and he was like a kid in a candy store. He just loved playing with his gun and he got to be a real fast draw. But it got to be irritating, having him constantly pull his six-shooter on us.

One day while we were waiting for Sam to call us, Holden stood up, took him by the neck, and said, “Put the goddamn thing in your holster and keep it there.”

I backed him up, but poor Jaime had no idea where that was coming from. I think we were just privately pissed that he had more energy than the rest of us.

There’s a scene near the end of the movie, right before the big shoot-out, where Bill Holden, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson are enjoying one last fling in a whorehouse. I’m sitting outside, whittling a stick. I don’t know how many people have asked me, “How come you weren’t in the whorehouse, too?” I always respond, “How do you know I wasn’t? Maybe I was finished.”

It was a strange “bunch” of actors to be thrown together, but somehow our different methods and backgrounds all meshed on-screen. It’s gratifying when that happens. It’s even more gratifying when audiences respond.

Chapter 27

Things Go Downhill for a While

The Adventurers
(1970)

I
t’s not always fun and games. In fact, sometimes you think about giving it up and becoming a bricklayer.

The Adventurers
was a big-screen soap opera directed by Lewis Gilbert, an Englishman, from the best-selling novel by Harold Robbins. Gilbert went on to do a bunch of James Bond films, and he had better luck with them.

The playboy son of an assassinated South American politician discovers that his father was a pretty rotten guy and decides to devote his life and fortune to saving his country. The key part was being played by a Yugoslavian actor named Bekim Fehmiu. I heard that he had been cast by the director’s wife, who seemed to take a liking to him. He was pretty green, but he’d be getting strong support from people like Charles Aznavour, Alan Badel, Candice Bergen, Rossano Brazzi, Olivia de Havilland, Leigh Taylor-Young, John Ireland, and a bunch of others. We were loaded with talent. At least, where the cast was concerned.

To begin with, we were not exactly living like kings. We were shooting in Colombia, South America, and I had a little hut that was barely large enough for the four-poster bed. The bed’s legs were stuck in cans filled with water so rats couldn’t climb up.

Gilbert gave us a great pep talk when we started, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re all in this together and we’re going to get this picture done right.”

Yeah, great. We were living like pigs while he was living in a fourteen-bedroom house with servants.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. This was the first time I was ever thrown off a picture. I would occasionally make suggestions to this young man, Bekim, who didn’t know his onions from anything. I was trying to be helpful but he just didn’t understand the language and had apparently learned his lines phonetically. I mean, he obviously didn’t understand when they asked him if he could drive, because he said, “Oh, yes.” He took the car and wrecked it. And before you say, “Hey—didn’t you do that with horseback riding?” there’s a difference. I had a lot of help from the horse. This car couldn’t drive itself.

I kept trying to work with him, but he was obviously getting frustrated. Finally, he went to the director and said that I was being difficult. The director said to me, “What have you done?”

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Bekim said you were giving him direction.”

I said, “Are you nuts? I was trying to help him along in the scene!”

At which point—having gone from angry to livid because I’d called him “nuts”—the director said, “Get off my picture, get off my set!”

I walked off the set. I didn’t want to go home because I’d never been fired from a movie. I went to my dressing room and stayed there.

Thank God for a very fine English actor by the name of Alan Badel, who went to Mr. Gilbert and cleared it up. I finished the film and was happy to get out of there. It was my worst experience in nearly twenty years of filmmaking.

The picture was shown for the very first time on the maiden flight of the first 747 that flew from New York to L.A.—and loaded with a bunch of newspaper columnists and an open bar.

Everybody got pissed to the ears. The next day the studio had to show the picture again because nobody remembered seeing it. I got some good notices, Bekim got fewer, and today the picture is kind of a camp classic.