Ernie: The Autobiography (25 page)

Yeah, I know. Poor me, having to jump into bed over and over with a beautiful lady!

Little House on the Prairie
(1974)

In 1974 I was approached by Michael Landon’s casting director, Susan Sukman McCray, to do an episode of
Little House on the Prairie
. I read the script and said, “This is too sappy.” Shows you what I know! I didn’t want to do it at first, but they talked me into it. I’m glad they did, because it was one of the greatest experiences in my life. It was nice being back on the Universal back lot—boy, it had grown since the days of
McHale’s Navy
, and the tour was now organized with military precision and was real big business! After being over at Fox, which had shrunk, this was a real shocker. Plus, I loved working with Mike Landon, who was one of the nicest and most generous men I’ve met in this business. What a loss when he died so young.

The episode was entitled “Old Man of the Mountain.” On the show, Michael’s daughter, played by Melissa Gilbert, had run away. She made her way to a mountain and met up with a mountain man—who was me. Her family was going crazy because they didn’t know where she went and Michael started following a stream to see if he could find her. In the meantime, I taught her how to take care of a wounded dove and how to make a little cross and all kinds of stuff to survive in the wilderness.

The cross accidentally—or maybe on purpose—fell into the water and went down the river. Sure enough, Michael saw it and followed the stream and found his daughter. As he looked around, she said, “Dad, the man who helped me was here.” But no one was there.

Who could it have been?

The Devil’s Rain
(1975)

What I was saying before about the Hollywood attitude of if-it-works-do-it-again certainly applies here.

The Exorcist
was one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time and with its success came a lot of imitations.
The Devil’s Rain
was one of them. Not that it was a cheap rip-off like some of the others. It had solid production values and a decent script. Producer Sandy Howard, for whom I did
The Neptune Factor
, assembled an amazing cast: William Shatner, Ida Lupino, Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, Keenan Wynn, and an unknown Italian kid from New Jersey making his film debut, John Travolta, who played my son.

The story started three centuries ago, when my character, Jonathan Corbis, led a coven of witches. Ancestors of the Preston family had betrayed Corbis and his Satanists by concealing their sacred book. For hundreds of years, the Prestons have been able to keep the book, without which Corbis is unable to deliver the souls to Satan. The title refers to the inundation which the witches use to melt people. In the end, it causes me to go the way of the Wicked Witch of the West.

The thing I remember the most is putting on the devil makeup for the climactic scenes. It took about four-and-a-half hours to make me up. A little Mexican boy in the film took a liking to me. He thought I was the greatest, like his favorite uncle or something. I told him the first day that we were going to put on this makeup and I couldn’t be distracted, so I said, “Now you come back in about four hours, okay?”

So he came back and I turned around. You know, in my own head I’m still Ernie Borgnine. Well, he looked at me, let out one scream, and went running. And he never came back to see me.

I’ll never forget that makeup, because I didn’t have a lot of mobility. While it was on, I could only fork in a little rice and peas and beans, stuff like that, for lunch. Even so, food would drop into one of the nooks and crevices without my knowing it. So I’d be shooting a scene and doing dialogue and there would be a rice grain or two that would come flying out.

Bill Shatner was a hoot. He has a kind of florid style, as do I, and he’s just so entertaining to watch on the set and on the screen. At the time, he was trying to slip out from under the shadow of the character he played on
Star Trek
, Captain Kirk, and not having a lot of success. The show was a huge hit in syndication and that was how he was known. Guys like him and Adam West, who was
Batman
, became icons who were hired
because
they reminded audiences of beloved characters and personalities.

John Travolta had a relatively small part, but he had star quality. Six-foot-two with boyish good looks and a great smile, he was pretty shy, but that’s okay—a lot of actors are. But when the camera was on, he just lit up. I’m so glad for his success, and I appreciate the fact that unlike some stars who make it big, he doesn’t go around bad-mouthing the kind of odd movies they often make when they’re starting out (like me as a Chinese man). He’s a class act all around.

Shoot
(1976)

We went up to Canada to make this film about a National Guard group who go hunting together and have a beer fest. While they’re out there, they encounter another band of hunters. One thing leads to another and the groups end up at war.

It was a mess from the word go. The picture was never shown in this country. According to the producer, the National Rifle Association paid the distributor not to release it. Who knows? Not me. I was just a hired gun, so to speak.

Cliff Robertson was my costar, and we had fun talking about his passion, which was flying. Cliff was another guy who started out in TV and made it big and we bonded over that. We had something else in common: he’d won the Best Actor Oscar in 1968 for
Charly
, and it hadn’t done him a lot of good, either. Here we were, in the boonies, making this silly thing. But I’m not complaining. We cashed the checks and did our best. Cliff’s still at it, too; he played Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man movie. I like Cliff.

I’ll never forget one of the funny things that happened.

Some manufacturer had come out with a series of stones that had sayings on them. You were supposed to carry them around or put them in your pocket and remind yourself how lucky you were, or not to miss an opportunity, or some such.

I happened to be walking to the set one day out in the wilderness and I saw this perfectly round stone. I picked it up and decided to introduce it as my personal advisor, Harry.

They looked at it and then at me like I flipped. But pretty soon, everyone was coming over and asking Harry for advice on how to play this scene or that, or where to invest their money. And they’d listen and pretend he was answering.

I was carrying Harry in my pocket in a scene where we were supposed to investigate a shed of some kind. But we were afraid there was a minefield, so we had to trip the explosives.

The director was trying to figure out the perfect thing to use, and I said, “I’ve got it! Harry.”

He said, “Who’s Harry?”

I said, “Him”—and pulled out the stone.

In the picture you will actually see the stone being thrown, which is Harry. Goofy? Hell, yeah. Goofy is what movies are sometimes all about!

Chapter 33

Back in the Sandals Again

Jesus of Nazareth (1977)

I
went back to the distant past for my next project. Not in a toga, but as a Roman centurion in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 epic
Jesus of Nazareth
. Franco is the man who gave us the classic
Romeo and Juliet
, among other great films.

This was my first TV miniseries. It was shot in Tunisia and we had an amazing cast. Robert Powell was Jesus, and we also had Tony Quinn, Anne Bancroft, Laurence Olivier, Claudia Cardinale, James Mason, James Earl Jones, and Christopher Plummer—in other words, “the works”! It turned out to be one of the best pictures of its kind. It was pious without being like a Sunday school class, and powerful without being over-the-top-bloody, if you catch my meaning.

Franco was a terrific director. He didn’t do much direction. He just made a little adjustment here or there, mostly toning things down. He trusted his actors. He also loved Tova’s soap. My wife had started a cosmetics line that was heavily advertised on TV and turned into a real industry. Franco liked the soap because where we were shooting the water was so hard that you couldn’t get up lather. Tova’s soap would foam up in the hardest water you could imagine.

Working in a foreign location with actors who often have thick accents is a chore. Local regulations require that local actors have to be used for smaller roles, but their English usually isn’t up to snuff and they have to be dubbed later on. For that reason, to save money, producers don’t bother recording sound on locations. They just have us come in and dub it later. Because there’s no recording, the sets tend to be very noisy with people yelling and construction workers hammering and trucks coming and going. It is incredibly difficult to concentrate.

One thing that stands out vividly on this shoot were all the animals we had, and all the animal smells. It was pretty awful. I know the beasts gave Franco a hard time, all the donkeys, giraffes, elephants, and things you wouldn’t believe. It seemed like every time you turned around, one animal wanted to attack another. (The well-endowed donkeys were ready to go at it with the giraffes.) Franco was yelling in Italian “
Vada, eliminili!
”—“Take them away!” and he would push them. No wonder he needed soap at the end of the day!

My first scene in this picture was when I, a great Roman warrior, went to ask Jesus to cure one of my servants, who was dying. As I started to beg, an extra ran up and said, “You should see your man, he’s well, he’s alive, he’s happy.” I looked back at this man, with his piercing blue eyes, and for a moment I was literally transported. For that second, he was Jesus Christ. It passed quickly, but it was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had on a shoot. Not
the
most incredible, however. That was still to come.

I had a scene where I was looking up at Jesus after he’d been nailed to the cross. My preparation for this was pretty soul-searching. My feeling as the centurion was, “I’ve been in the army for a long time, but I don’t like what I see. This man actually saved my servant, and now look what they’re doing to him. I’m going to get out of the army.”

The shot required the cameras to be looking down on me. Jesus was not in the frame. But it was important and Franco wanted me to get it right. So he said, “I’m not going to put the actor up on the cross.”

I said, “No, just put a dot up there. I’ll be able to work from that, Don’t worry about it.” I didn’t want Powell to have to go up there.

So they put a mark where I was supposed to look and they had a camera right alongside it. They had another camera over on the other side, another camera behind me, looking down on me, and a fourth one behind the cross. Some directors like to have a lot of choices when they get in the editing room. It’s better to have too much footage than not enough.

When everything was set, I said to Franco, “Would somebody please read what Jesus said on the cross: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’”

Franco said, “I will say it.”

So we started. I was looking up at this dot on the cross as Franco said the words and, so help me, I actually saw the face of the Lord. A moment later his face dropped down over his shoulder and he was dead.

Tears as big as teacups came from my eyes, I swear to God. I started bawling like a baby. I just stood there with the tears coming down. Finally I heard “Cut.”

I came back to reality, to the realization that we were actually making a picture.

Franco said, “Ernesto?”

I choked out, “Yes.”

He said, “That was wonderful. Now, Ernesto, do you think you can do it one more time with less tears?”

I wanted to kill him. He had something real on film, and now he wanted me to fake it. Well, he was the director. In the finished film viewers see pieces from both takes. Though they almost didn’t see any of them.

General Motors was sponsoring the show for Easter and when they saw the picture, they didn’t want to show me crying. I don’t know why. Maybe they thought it was a knock at the military, having a soldier cry. Or maybe they thought it was a little too reverent. I don’t know. But the Vatican came back and said, “If you don’t have the part in, we won’t sanction the picture.”

It stayed in the film.

The Greatest
(1977)

I got to play another real-life sports hero in my next film, a biography of Muhammad Ali (starring Muhammad Ali) called
The Greatest
, which we made in 1976. I played his loyal manager, Angelo Dundee.

Ali was a strange, unpredictable guy at first. At our first meeting, I put my hand out to introduce myself, but I never got the chance. When he saw me coming, he just looked at me and asked, “Is it true that you worked with Randolph Scott?”

I said, “Yes, it’s true.”

He said, “What kind of a guy was he?”

I said, “He was a hell of a man.”

With that he smiled and walked off, never shook my hand, nothing. Too many shots to the head maybe? Who knows. I will say that he was the most natural acting talent I’ve ever seen.

Tom Gries, the director, was a brilliant young man who tragically dropped dead of a heart attack after finishing this film. Also in the cast were Robert Duvall, Ben Johnson, James Earl Jones, and John Marley, who a couple of years earlier woke up in bed with a horse’s head next to him in
The Godfather
. (I tested for the part of Don Cor-leone, by the way. So did Burt Lancaster. Neither of us had a shot, really. Francis Ford Coppola wanted Brando—despite the fact that he was considered box-office poison at the time—and fought the studio until he got him.)

Ali had his entourage with him, and people taking pictures, and sometimes he wouldn’t come to work until 11:00 in the morning because he didn’t feel like getting up. He was the star, so that was that.