Chapter 39
Tova and I were shopping one day about 1974 and we decided to have dinner at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. In case you don’t know, that’s the place where Hollywood movers and shakers used to go to be seen and see others. We didn’t call it networking in those days, we called it brown-nosing.
The Polo Lounge is a pretty elegant place with good food, and chances are good you’ll run into old friends there.
We were just leaving when along came John Wayne with his wife Pilar. We knew each other socially a little, and the two ladies got started talking. I thought, “There goes the afternoon.” John and I decided to go into the bar to get a drink. As soon as we had ordered, John said to me, “Ernie, it looks like we’ve known each other forever. How come we’ve never worked together?”
I’d had a couple of drinks, maybe too many, and I said, “We’ve never worked together because you’re afraid to work with good actors.”
I thought he’d fall down. The minute I said it I bit my tongue, but the Duke just laughed uproariously. He knew I was kidding deep down. Something about my manner makes a lot of what I say seem good-natured. We talked about the “old days” and mutual friends and how there were fewer and fewer of us as the years passed.
The next time I saw Duke Wayne was when he was being made a 32nd degree Mason at the House of the Temple on Wilshire Boulevard. Boy, could he take a joke and ribbing with the best of ’em.
He took a lot of flak in his later years because of his open patriotism. I never saw that as a bad thing. Remember, there was an ocean of movement in the other direction during Vietnam and after, with guys like Burt Lancaster and Greg Peck playing for the liberals. America needed guys like the Duke and, later, Chuck Heston to balance the scales.
I’m sorry we never worked together. But I’m sorrier that people didn’t get to know him for the sweet guy he was.
Bob Mitchum was another actor I really liked on camera and off. I got to work with him in a TV movie called Jake Spanner, Private Eye in 1989. I always loved the way he handled himself in front of a camera, natural like Cooper but with a little bit of quiet menace to him. I’d watch him like a hawk on that shoot because, believe me, you can learn so much from watching the real pros.
And stories! He had a million of ’em. We’d do a scene and immediately after they said “Cut, print,” he’d start telling great stories about things, like his friendship with Howard Hughes (“he liked me because he never really got to know me”), his time in rehab (“I did it because producers couldn’t get insurance on me otherwise”) and how he made George C. Scott a superstar by turning down Patton. (“That picture needed someone who was willing to fight the tanks and big battles for screen time. I didn’t care enough about Patton to do that.”)
I’ll never forget, we were right in the middle of a scene where I’m chasing him or he’s chasing me. Okay—that part I forget. But he had just told me some story or other and, for some reason, we couldn’t stop laughing. That was one of the few times in my career I had to take a time-out before being able to continue.
Before Bob passed away, his son called and asked if I would lend my support toward getting him an honorary Oscar for all his great work. I went to the top guy and said, “Please—here’s a man who doesn’t have long to live. He’s got an amazing body of work. Why can’t we give him the ultimate gift of an Oscar?”
They turned me down. I didn’t know why, but to this day I’m not too happy about it.
If anybody ever deserved some kind of lifetime achievement Oscar, it was Bob Mitchum.
I mentioned my friend George Lindsey back a ways, and I want to say a little more about him. He’s a character who came into my life in the 1970s. My marriage to Donna was on the rocks and I needed to get out of the house for a while. One day I took my car and I was so upset, I almost went over a cliff in the Hollywood hills. I needed to calm down, so I went to my gas station at the foot of the hill and said, “Oil, grease it, do something, I’m going to go for a cup of coffee.”
While I was having my coffee, in walks this guy.
He said, “Hello, how are you? My name is George Lindsey. I play Goober on The Andy Griffith Show.”
I knew of him, of course, though we’d never met. We started talking and the first thing you know we were on a golf course. The next thing you know we were out in his car driving around the mountains and talking. By the end of the day, when I went to pick up my car, it was like I had been to a psychiatrist. From that day, whenever George had a problem with his marriage or I did with mine, or if we were down about work or life in general, we’d get together, we’d go out. We’d play golf, we’d have lunch or dinner, we’d shop. We even went out to watch farmers grow parsley. We became really great good buddies.
To this very day I think that George Lindsey is one of the greatest guys in the world. I can’t say too much about that old boy and how he used to keep me in stitches talking about his home in Alabama, how he gave up being a science teacher to act, and how—my hand to God—he turned down the part of Mr. Spock on TV’s Star Trek, the role that made Leonard Nimoy famous. He even convinced me to do a guest appearance on a TV show he was working on at the time, Hee Haw, with Roy Clark and Buck Owens and all those Hee Haw honeys. I don’t get to do as much comedy as I like, so I had a helluva time.
Thanks, buddy. Thanks for everything.
There are two more people I have to tell you about briefly.
Ever since I first enlisted in 1935, the navy’s been part of my life. It’s afforded me the opportunity to meet some wonderful people. One day, a really close navy friend, Captain Kathy Dugan—the one-time head of the Philadelphia Navy Yard—called me and said, “Listen, would you do me a favor?”
I said, “Anything.”
She wanted me to send a pep talk via e-mail to the crew of a cruiser that had been in the Persian Gulf for six months.
I was a little hesitant at first, not sure what to say and less sure that most of the kids would know who I was, but I took the bull by the horns and wrote a long e-mail, one finger at a time, because that’s the way I do it. I plugged away and finally sent it off.
Lo and behold, I had a note back in no time at all from Captain Peter Squicciarini. “I have posted your e-mail up on the bulletin board,” he said. “The guys are just crazy to meet you.”
When they came back to Norfolk, Peter Squicciarini was on the list to be relieved as the skipper of the Cruiser USS Monterey. They invited me to go to Norfolk for the change-of-command ceremony.
Peter and his crew showed me an incredible time. There I was, over eighty years of age, running up and down and across and over that whole ship. I saw the engine room, the gunnery department, the whole thing from the bridge to the bilge. Believe me, that’s one big ship.
But it still wasn’t as big as its skipper. On the day that Peter Squicciarini was relieved of his command, I saw it in his eyes: the realization that there would be no more going to sea for him. He loved the ocean, he loved being the skipper of a ship, and his crew loved him.
I knew that feeling and I told him so. Afterward, he said how much it meant for me to say that. My own example reminded him that ending a long career in the navy was just the start of the next phase of his life.
That had nothing to do with me being an actor. It had to do with me being a former navy man. I don’t think enough of us realize how, in big ways and small, we have the ability to touch other people.
This would be as good a time as any to suggest, by the way, that you get out and do what you can for our veterans. I was on The Larry King Show one night and I started crying while we were talking about the war in Iraq.
I said, “Please, for heaven’s sake, if anybody lives next to a hospital, a veteran’s hospital or something, take a half hour, take an hour, take two hours, and go down there and visit our veterans. They would love to see you. Bring ’em flowers or something. Just to say hello. Believe me, they’re hungry for people to come and see them.”
More than that, they deserve our thanks, in person. I’ve gone many times, around the country, and it’s never failed to move them, and me. We owe our freedom and opportunity to them. It’s the least all of us can do.
The last guy who needs mentioning here is Bobby Herron. When I first started in pictures, I did all my own stunts. In westerns, they’d say “Get on the horse” and I’d be in the saddle in a minute. If I was in a war picture, they’d say “Stand by that explosion” and I did.
While we were making the 1953 western The Stranger Wore a Gun, Bobby Herron came up to me and said, “You know, mister, you’re taking the bread out of our mouths.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “When they tell you to jump on the horse, you have the right to use a stuntman for that.”
I said, “I thought they’d think I was a scaredy-cat.”
He said, “No. They’d think you were smart. When they ask you to do that stuff, they’re just trying to get out of paying us.”
You may recall how frightened I really was doing the run down the hill with that horse, the one that had Lee Marvin tsk-tsking. I gathered up the reins and said, “Please take them. I am so happy to know this.”
What I didn’t know about riding horses was in proportion to what Bobby Herron did know.
Bobby and I have been together in just about every picture where I needed a horseman or somebody to do a “gag”—a stunt trick—for me. As a matter of fact, he did a stunt in Convoy that could’ve killed him. I played a cop who was supposed to be chasing a truck. The way that the script read, my car was supposed to go off the cliff, right through the middle of a signpost, and into a building full of chickens.
There weren’t any instruments in these cars, and the way Bobby was strapped in he couldn’t have read them anyway. There was no way of knowing how much velocity he’d achieved. And, honestly, no way to stop, either, since the brakes were mostly disconnected. The whole thing about a stunt car is that it gets stripped down so that parts aren’t dislodged in the crash and become projectiles.
When he went through the signpost, he not only went through the top of this house where the chickens came flying out, he landed about two-hundred feet even farther. There was a camera mounted in the car filming him as he did it.
He tore every bit of cartilage off his ribs. Before he passed out, he turned off the motor and the camera. Watching him sail through the air, I thought for sure that he’d killed himself.
Did I mention that these stunt guys are tough? Two weeks later, we were playing golf together.
That’s why, when critics say, “Convoy was a so-so picture,” don’t you believe it. Audiences aren’t as jaded as critics. And none of them knows just what stuntmen go through to make pictures look real.