Chapter 19
Now we can get back to the reason many of you are probably here: my film career.
Picking up in 1955, right after Marty, I’m going to run through so I can give you the highlights. Some of them were hits that you’ll probably remember; some of them were turkeys that I barely remember. But even in those, there were people and places that stand out all these years later.
Run for Cover
Acting with James Cagney was a special treat. He was so easy to work with. He did his work, knew his lines, and winked at you as we went along, to show that everything was fine. In the evening, when we’d finish, people would congregate around his dressing room. After he’d changed, he’d bring out a little square piece of wood and tap-dance on it. Everybody would hum a tune and he’d dance like crazy.
I only had a small role in the film, but it was more expensive to send me back from the New Mexico location than to put me up, so I stayed the whole shoot and enjoyed several weeks of free entertainment!
Violent Saturday
I almost killed one of my best friends making this movie.
I was playing an Amish farmer. Lee Marvin and a crew of desperados were holding my family hostage in our barn. They tied us up, along with Victor Mature.
In one dramatic scene I was supposed to stab Lee Marvin in the back with a pitchfork. While we were rehearsing, they put a big X on his back. I was supposed to put the tines of the pitchfork right on this X, which was padded underneath so he wouldn’t be hurt.
We rehearsed it fine, but when it came time to shoot, they’d removed the X so it wouldn’t show.
I said, “Lee, I’m not sure about this.”
He said, “I have faith in you. You’ll hit it.”
I said, “That’s nice, but what if I miss?”
“Don’t miss,” was all my tough-guy pal said.
I didn’t, but I was sure nervous when it came time to poke him. I mean, you’ve really got to put your muscle into it, or it’s not going to look real. Later, instead of the usual “Tsk, tsk,” he complimented me on my marksmanship.
“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what were you thinking about when you did that?”
“Well,” I said, “I caught sight of myself in the beard and overalls and I imagined I was John Brown—a fellow Connecticut native, as it happens—at Harpers Ferry fighting off the soldiers of Robert E. Lee.”
“My” Lee, Lee Marvin, said he was glad I hadn’t told him that before or he’d have been scared stiff.
The Last Command
I have to say, they may not have been highfalutin, but there was nothing I had more fun doing than westerns. This one had Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens, among others. It was a retelling of the battle of the Alamo, and Sterling Hayden was a great Jim Bowie. I died with a bayonet stuck into me, in a pool of my own blood. It was a pretty dramatic death—but they cut it out because the picture was too long.
The Square Jungle
This movie is another reason that exclusive contracts are no damn good.
After signing that crappy deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, we squared things away by having them loan me out. That meant they told any studio that wanted me to pay, say, $100,000 of which I got to keep roughly a quarter.
So along came The Square Jungle, which starred Tony Curtis. I played a fight manager. Despite the fact that I was getting ripped off, we had a lot of fun. An actor by the name of David Janssen in the film—kind of big ears, looked like Clark Gable—took me aside one day and he said, “I sure wish I could talk to you.”
I said, “What’s the matter? Talk to me.”
He said, “I’ve got a contract here with Universal, but I’m not happy.”
I laughed. “I want to tell you something. You’ve got a contract with a company that puts you in pictures. You may not be satisfied with what pictures you’re getting, or the pay, but you’re working and you’re sharpening your tools as you go along. You know, they’re selling me down the river, and I’ve won an Oscar. I’m hanging in there. You should, too.”
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.