Ernie: The Autobiography (10 page)

They told him they couldn’t take him because he was not eligible under the new rules.

“What ‘new rules’?” he demanded.

They explained that he had been hanging around with a few actors and writers who had an affiliation with communist causes. Mind you, they never said he was a communist himself. Only that he hung out with them.

Bart was furious. He went to the studio with his medals and his captain’s bars from the Marines. He put those on the table and said, “Does this look like I’m a goddamn communist?”

They didn’t answer. They still didn’t use him.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how unjust these witch hunts were. At the time, no matter how much you hurt for the people who were affected, there was nothing you could do about it. I suppose it might have been different if everyone banded together and said we’re not going to take it. But there were a lot of folks who believed in the cause, who were afraid of the Red Scare. It was just something that had to work itself out. In a way, that’s one of the strengths of this country. No matter how far we swing one way or the other, the pendulum always returns to the middle. It’s just too bad the human toll is always so high.

But you don’t always realize you’re in the middle of world-shaping events. Sometimes you’re too busy trying to survive. I know I was. On stage, I got myself a job with the great Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin in a play called
Mrs. McThing
. Julie Munshin went on to play with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in the movie version of
On the Town
, among many others. Also in the cast were Professor Irwin Corey, a very funny guy, and Fred Gwynne, who would go on to star as Herman Munster on TV.

One of the best things that ever happened to me occurred during the run of the show: my daughter Nancee was born. I’m sure that what I felt wasn’t new, but it was new to me. I was now responsible for guiding and supporting a new life. That was a different kind of responsibility than any I’d had before. No new parent is ever quite ready for it. However, I did have one advantage that most people don’t: Helen Hayes said to me, “I’m going to be the godmother.”

When Miss Hayes spoke, no one argued. Anyway, it was a great idea. She became Nancee’s godmother, remembering her on birthdays and holidays and writing her letters from the road. Miss Hayes took that role as seriously as she took every other one. I was glad for her interest because I had my hands full! I was working on Broadway and doing television work. Somehow I made enough money to support my little family. I was promised a certain fee, but the show wasn’t getting the kind of advance sale they’d hoped so I got a pay cut. The way I found out was just plain lousy. Just before I was ready to make my entrance, one of the producers came over and said, “We can only afford to give you $125 a week. Take it or leave it. If you don’t want the job, we’ve got your understudy waiting to go on.”

Well, where the hell was I going to get $125 a week? I still had it better than my poor buddy Bart and I took the deal, but I swore that if I ever made good and worked for that bastard again I’d charge him a million bucks.

I learned a lot about the art and craft of acting from Miss Hayes, who had the kind of concentration that actors strive for. She could get into character in a heartbeat, and stayed there till the curtain came down. Then she was Miss Hayes again, charming and warm and great to be around.

Meanwhile, with plays running only a few weeks or my parts in them being relatively small, television proved to be my real bread and butter. My name was not well known but people in the street would occasionally look at me and say, “Didn’t we see you on television?” It was nice to hear that. Unlike the theater, you worked in a studio, live but without an audience. It was nice to know people were seeing my work! I was doing okay, even if I wasn’t Charlton Heston, who was the leading man in television at that time. Given his stature—six-foot-four—his chiseled good looks, and his sonorous voice, he was perfect for the new medium. He broke through that fuzzy black-and-white screen and tinny audio and in short order—by 1951—he made the same impact on the big screen. I had to wait a little longer.

The show that kept me going during this period was
Captain Video and His Video Rangers
. I owed that gig to a woman named Elizabeth Mears, the casting director for the short-lived DuMont network. It was a raggedy thing, but it paid. If you worked every day you got $300 for the week. Captain Video, played by the square-jawed Al Hodge, zipped around in a jet, aided by super-advanced TV recon capabilities. He battled bad guys with futuristic-sounding names like Mook, Nargola, and Clysmok. One of his cohorts was played by Don Hastings, brother of Bob Hastings, who worked with me later on
McHale’s Navy
. I played a variety of parts in the show, usually bad guys.

One of those bad-guy roles was Captain Neptune. They photographed me through a goldfish bowl to show the fish swimming by. I would go around with my mouth looking like a fish going, “wa wa wa wa.” It was the craziest thing you ever saw. It was a popular show and when I’d come home at night the kids would throw stones at me because they watched the show that afternoon and knew who I was. That kind of recognition I could have lived without!

Talk about recognition. Let me tell you about Wally Cox.

The Copper
was the name of a TV show I did with Wally. It was a
Goodyear Television Playhouse
episode and he was playing a New York cop. His character wanted to marry my character’s daughter. Only problem was, I was in Sing Sing, where I was due to die in the electric chair. Somehow, Wally had to save my hide before he could marry my daughter.

Once we started rehearsing—which we usually had no more than a day or two to do—we realized we had to make numerous cuts to fit the slot. Delbert Mann was directing, and he was frustrated at how we were literally gutting the show. Finally, as airtime approached, he sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s go ahead and see what the hell we can do.”

Delbert continued to work on the script, and in all the confusion he forgot to tell us that not only were we going live, but we’d be seen coast to coast, for the first time. Back then, live shows were literally filmed off a television screen for viewing in other time zones. This meant we were going to be seen by at least twenty million people.

He added, “So give it all your best.”

We finished that show with time to spare, enough so that we could do a complete crawl of credits at the end of the show. That didn’t always happen.

Wally Cox was a funny little man. Most of you probably remember him from the Salvo laundry detergent commercials in the 1960s or later on the original
Hollywood Squares
. Back then, though, he was a real up-and-comer. He used to ride a motorcycle through Manhattan with his roommate and best friend, Marlon Brando. They made quite a sight, the scrawny Wally and the brooding Marlon pulling up to this diner or that theater. Marlon was appearing in A Streetcar
Named Desire
. They got a lot of press at the time. You need that to survive in this business, too.

Chapter 12

Escape to L.A.

W
e lived in South Queens for quite a while, near the ocean. One day my hand was hanging off the bed and I suddenly felt water there. The ocean had come up too high and we’d been flooded—no joke! We were practically underwater. So we got the hell out of there fast and found another place in Jackson Heights, not too far from the site of the 1939 World’s Fair.

The new place was even worse. The woman upstairs wore the highest heels in America. She sounded like a big hailstorm every time she walked. Seven dogs lived in the apartment with her. When she left those dogs were by themselves, and the place stank. I was so mad I put my fist through the wall. It was a hellhole. I didn’t want my wife and daughter living there.

But better days were around the corner.

Through the grapevine, I heard they were casting a picture called
The Whistle at Eaton Falls
and were looking for people. I decided to go to the production office and see what it was all about. I walked in like I belonged there—which was the only way to do it without an appointment—and asked the nice lady sitting behind a desk, “Do you think there’d be anything for me in this picture?”

She looked up and said, “Just a moment.”

I thought she was going to get a security guy. Instead, she came back with a gentleman who had a thick German accent. Turned out he was the director. His name was Robert Siodmak, and he had made some great pictures, like
The Killers
with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner and
The Suspect
with Charles Laughton.

Siodmak looked me up and down and said, “You come see me tomorrow. I’ll give you a screen test.”

I was the very last person to be shot. By the time they got to me they were hurrying things along so it was “MOS,” which in Hollywood lingo meant without sound. The original director who used the phrase was European, and with his accent it came out “Mitt Out Sound.” Hence, “MOS.”

Mr. Siodmak said, “Smile.”

I asked him, “What should I say?”

Since there was no sound on the film, he said “Just say ‘shit’ over and over!”

Later, when the producer looked at my face on the screen he said, “Gee, he’s got a nice smile. What’s he saying?”

I’m told the director replied with a little smile of his own, “I don’t know, but whatever it was made him smile.”

When they called to tell me I’d booked the film, I thought I was going to do a couple of days’ work as an extra. In fact, I was playing a featured role, the foreman of a factory. I was in some pretty good company: Lloyd Bridges, Dorothy Gish, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton, Anne Francis, and Arthur O’Connell, with whom I’d reteam twenty-two years later in
The Poseidon Adventure
. Not a bad way to start! Even though I was new to the medium, I understood how a camera worked thanks to my experience in television. I don’t mean mechanically, I mean what it saw. For example, I had learned that if they were only shooting your face, you had to be expressive without using your hands. No one was going to see them. Likewise, I couldn’t be as broad as I was onstage. The camera saw everything and then blew it up forty feet tall.

I must have done okay because I was asked to read for another movie after that,
The Mob
, starring Broderick Crawford. Unlike the Siodmak film, this one was going to be shot in Hollywood. I went to the casting call, saw the other actors, then walked over to the casting director, a man named Maxwell Arnow.

I said, “Do you mind very much if I don’t watch the others, sir?”

He said, “No, no, that’s okay. Just wait in the hall.”

I walked out and sat on a hard wooden bench and waited. I wasn’t being a snob or anything: I just wanted my interpretation to be fresh. I didn’t want to be watching Mr. Arnow or anyone else as they reacted to things. Their expressions would color my own audition.

Finally, the last actor walked out and I was brought in.

I had noticed the position of the chair was different than when I’d come in. It had been sat in. I figured I’d do something different.

I said to Mr. Arnow and his panel, “Would you mind very much if I sat on the edge of the desk?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Arnow said. “In fact, that’s a good idea.”

So I cleared a space and sat on the edge of the desk and I looked at an imaginary character as the script girl started reading the other lines off-camera.

During the course of the scene I leaned over and swatted the character that I was supposedly looking at, smacked him one across the puss. And I said the line—I’ll never forget it—“Now, are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”

When I finished, the director laughed and said “Okay, cut, print. I’ll see you in Hollywood.”

Two weeks later Arnow called and made it official. Leaving Rhoda and our daughter with her parents, I went west to play a union thug named Joe Castro. I hadn’t been to Los Angeles since my navy days, and it had changed a great deal. The world markets had been partly closed to Hollywood during the war. Now they were open again, and everyone wanted Hollywood films. Studios, independent producers, and even the fledgling TV networks with their filmed half-hour crime shows and situation comedies were keeping soundstages humming.

I enjoyed working with Crawford, who had won an Oscar for
All the King’s Men
the year before. He was a very nice guy personally, very unassuming, and he had an amazing photographic memory. I really envied him that. He could look at a page of script once, then turn around and do it perfectly.

I don’t remember much else about the film, except that this intense, wiry kid named Charlie Bronson had a small, uncredited part as a longshoreman. Talk about paying your dues: it would be another ten years before he achieved stardom in a picture called
The Magnificent Seven.

After finishing
The Mob
, Columbia wanted to get full value for their airplane ticket. So they put me in
China Corsair
, where I played Hu Chang, a Chinese shopkeeper. At four in the morning I used to show up at the makeup center in Columbia Studios on Gower Street and they’d put on adhesive strips to hold my eyes back. I wore them all day long. I could hardly see where the hell I was going, and when I sweated under those lights the tape had to be reapplied.

I remember one scene where I was supposed to go into the water. They had a stunt guy standing by, ready to jump in for me, but I didn’t want any part of that. I was a sailor. I’d been in the drink before, as you may recall. So I jumped. Everybody hurried over to get me out before I drowned, but I was already climbing the ladder. They just thought that was tremendous, and Arnow wanted to give me a seven-year contract on the spot. The only catch: I’d have to move to Los Angeles.

I thought about that overnight and I knew it’d never fly. My wife would never come because she wanted to be close to her parents, who were in New York. When I politely—and regretfully—declined the offer, the head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn himself, came down to the set to see me. He was every inch the ferocious Hollywood mogul, with his coat thrown over his shoulders (in those days that was considered real chic, very European ) and a couple of secretaries in tow. He glared at me and said, “We’re going to give you $150 a week and you’re going to make pictures for us.”