Chapter 18
Not every actor needs all kinds of managers and handlers. But one thing they do need, if they can get it, is a good agent. I haven’t had a lot of luck there. Most of what I got, I got on my own.
I didn’t have an agent when I started out and it was a bear to get into a lot of auditions. With agents, they just make a phone call and you’re in. And not at six in the morning, when you’d have to go to sign up for an audition, go home, then come back later in the day. Agents can get you nice spots in the afternoon.
They’re also—if they’re good—pretty fearless. An actor might be afraid to say no to a low fee for fear of losing a part. Agents have no such qualms. Also, if they can’t build you into a top moneymaker, they’re not going to make enough at 10 or 15 percent for you to be worth their while.
Unless, of course, they have so many clients that a little from many is the same as a lot from one. For a while, I was stuck in that former situation.
Paul Wilkens was my agent because he had offices in New York and Hollywood, so he had first crack at whatever was being developed on either coast. I was also his first client to win an Academy Award, yet he didn’t know what to do with me.
After Marty he continued to take what little money I’d been offered as before. He was satisfied, but I wasn’t. I left him and went to somebody else, but it was all just the same mishmash with a different spin.
One time this producer/writer approached my agent and said, “I’ve got to get ahold of Borgnine. I want him for my picture.”
My brilliant agent said, “What picture?”
He said, “I’m gonna make The Shoes of the Fisherman, a great big thing all about the Pope and the Vatican.”
My agent said, “You can’t have Borgnine.”
“What do you mean I can’t have him?”
“If you want him, you’ve got to take six other guys with him.” See, this was that agent’s way of using me to build the rest of his stable.
The producer, rightly, said, “I don’t want six other guys. All I want is Borgnine.”
My agent said, “Well, he’s busy.”
Morris L. West, the distinguished author, saw me later and said, “Dammit, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
I asked him what he was talking about. He told me what my agent had done. I said, “Mr. West, I never even heard about this offer!”
Anthony Quinn got the part, and the opportunity to work with an amazing cast that included Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. I was heartsick. I lost all faith in agents. Signing with the renowned William Morris Agency didn’t bring it back. One of the heads of the agency said to his team—with me in the room—“I want the best for this man, because he’s a wonderful actor.”
Everybody said, “Yes, sir!”
So they assigned a hotshot agent to me for one solid year. I kept asking, “When do we get working?”
This guy would say, “We’re looking for the greatest part in the world for you to start our relationship with.”
I said, “I don’t want the greatest part in the world. All I want to do is work so I can make enough money to feed my family.”
He said, “Okay, Ernie, I’m on it.”
I left William Morris after a year. I got my own jobs through networking and still had to pay them a commission. Unless you’re on their tail all the time, unless you’re working on something high profile that keeps you in the trades and in their faces, you’re on the back burner.
Funny but true: the one job they did get me was for a big picture that was supposed to come with a big paycheck. That movie never got made.
That’s why, if you remember back, I took the deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster.
Unfortunately, as I said, that didn’t work out. What happened there was Burt was in New York filming Sweet Smell of Success—a brilliant film, one of the best American movies ever. Lancaster said there was a part for me in the film. I said okay. It was going to be an important film, about the corruption of a powerful newspaper columnist, loosely based on Walter Winchell. Tony Curtis was playing the suck-up who was always trying to get his clients in Lancaster’s column.
That was late in 1956, seven months after the Oscar win, and I really wanted to be in another prestige picture. So I went to New York with my business manager to get the script from the headwaiter at the 21 Club. What he was doing with it, I have no idea. Maybe because they’d been shooting there they left it with him when they went to some other location. I don’t know. Anyway, he gave the script to me.
My manager and I went back to my hotel. I read the script and found I had about twelve lines. They were damn good lines. I’d be playing a corrupt police detective.
Well, my manager absolutely wouldn’t let me do the part. He said Hecht-Hill-Lancaster was using me, putting me down. We returned to Los Angeles, where the producers’ attorneys informed me I was being put on suspension for breach of contract.
I was sick over that, and tried to figure out something that would lift my spirits. An idea hit me. I said, “Christmas is around the corner. I want to go to the five and dime, get a job selling things.”
My manager and my wife both said, “You can’t do that!”
I said, “Why not?”
“Because it would leave a bad impression.”
“Bad impression?”
“It would look like you can’t get work.”
“Well,” I said, “unless I work things out with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster and go out hustling, I won’t get work. Not in my business. So, what the hell, I’ll go to a five and dime. That’ll probably get some publicity and maybe an offer for a picture.”
They talked me out of it, but I still think it would’ve been a good thing to try. Something different. For me, “different” ended up being basically running my own career without all kinds of representatives. And thanks to guys like Lee Marvin, who always brought me in on movies he was working on, and directors like Robert Aldrich and John Carpenter who just got a kick out of my work, I’ve done okay.