Ernie: The Autobiography by Ernest Borgnine

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.”
    I said, “Mr. Cohn, sir, I think that’s wonderful and I appreciate it very much. But I can’t take it.”
    “What do you mean you can’t take it? How much are you making back in New York?”
    “Well,” I said, “in a good week I can make twice that in TV.”
    “How many good weeks do you have?” he asked without missing a beat.
    “Not enough,” I admitted with a grin. “But my wife is attached to her family and she doesn’t like