Chapter 23
There’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!