Ernest Borgnine is known worldwide as the Oscar- and Emmy-winning character actor who starred in Marty, From Here to Eternity, McHale's Navy, and 139 other motion pictures and 44 television shows. Before that—from 1935 to 1945, he was a Bluejacket—an experience that he says shaped his life. His 2008 autobiography, Ernie, has been a best-seller. Here's former Gunner's Mate First-Class Borgnine's own story.
It was just like in the movies.
The year was 1935, and I was right out of high school, restless, and bored with my temporary job working on a vegetable truck. One day, on a delivery run through New Haven, Connecticut, I spotted a sign on a storefront that said "JOIN THE NAVY—SEE THE WORLD." Hey, I thought, I ought to look into that. So I stopped in to see the recruiter. Two days later, I was on a bus to the U.S. Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island.
I was a green kid, but the Navy and I took to each other pretty well. Right after boot camp, I was assigned to the USS Chaumont (AP-5), a double-ended troop carrier. Then came the USS Lamberton (DD-119), a four-stacker destroyer whose mission was to tow targets for the Fleet. Promotions were frozen back then, and one day a boatswain's mate came over and said they had an opening for a cook, where advancement was faster. I took it in a flash. A few months later, I acquired a hacking cough and they wouldn't let me near the galley, so I became a gunner's mate instead. Eventually I made first-class.
I finished a six-year hitch in September 1941—before the Japanese dropped their bombs on Pearl Harbor—but I got back into uniform a few weeks after that, serving on the Sylph, a one-time yacht in New York that was used to train college kids from Columbia University. We hopscotched up and down the East Coast from Rhode Island to Florida. I got out of the Navy after the war, in 1945, drifted for a while, and finally tried my hand at acting. And I've been at it ever since.
The Navy has stayed a part of my life all along. It taught me how to be part of a group, imbued me with discipline and stick-to-itiveness, and showed me how to concentrate on getting the job done, no matter what I did. It even taught me how to say please when I asked for the bread at chow-time. The first time my folks came to visit me—I hadn't even gotten out of boot camp then—they looked at me and saw a different fella from the kid who'd left home a month before. I had grown, in their eyes, and I would continue to do so throughout my career.
My experiences in the Navy helped me shape the way I played many of my movie and TV parts. In From Here to Eternity, I modeled my role of Army Sergeant James R. "Fatso" Judson after Andrew Babcock, a boatswain's mate I'd known in the service. The real-life Babcock wasn't cruel, but he had a rough demeanor that commanded respect, and I remember it well to this day. (Like the character that Montgomery Clift played in that movie, I'd also had a brief stint as a Navy boxer, and had decided to give it up. I knocked a guy out in four swings, with blood pouring from his nose and ears, and I never got back into the ring. I knew very well how Clift's Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt felt.)
I loved playing Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale in the 1960s TV show McHale's Navy. McHale's exploits were zany, and I did everything that you couldn't do in the real Navy. At one point, the young lieutenant whom the Pentagon had assigned as a technical adviser for the program confronted me. "Ernie, what are we shooting here? This isn't the way the Navy is," he said. I told him, "This is McHale's Navy." But something must have worked. A couple of years into the show, John Warner, then Secretary of the Navy, called me into his office in Washington and thanked me. "You've been the greatest recruiter the Navy has had," he said. I was flabbergasted. But I couldn't have been more pleased.
In 1958, while I was on location making The Vikings, I got to show my Navy stuff. When I got to the set, the big Viking boat was waiting for us, and one of the crew asked jokingly whether I'd like to take the oars and help them row. They were all professional seamen, hired to help propel the vessel, and they expected me to flake out after a couple of minutes. But they didn't know I'd been a Bluejacket. I kept up with them throughout the day, and by the end of the movie they considered me one of their own.
To this very day, I've always remembered what I learned in the service. Many times, when the going is pretty tough, you just lay back a moment, and you'll see how things can change. The Navy also taught me how to "hurry up and wait." Movie sets work the same way, and I was fortunate that I'd learned to use my waiting time, in between takes, to study my parts and think about my technique. Use your spare time, you become a better actor, I found. I've always had a sense of pride in what I did.
In many ways, the Navy has changed since my days as a gunner's mate. A few years ago, I was invited to visit the USS Monterey (CG-61), a guided-missile cruiser, out in the Persian Gulf, and I spent some time talking with the officers and Sailors. There I was, over 80 years of age, running up and down and all over. I was tickled pink to be back on a ship.
The technology was stunning. The weaponry was mind-blowing. The Sailors were highly skilled, doing jobs that we never even could have imagined when I was in the Navy. And the living conditions were fantastic. Instead of hammocks, as we had when I was serving on board ship, they had honest-to-goodness bunks. They even had ice cream aboard—they didn't have to cumshaw it from a nearby aircraft carrier!
But the Sailors' love for the Navy hadn't changed. A few months later, I was invited to a change-of-command ceremony for the Monterey in Norfolk. The skipper, Captain Peter Squicciarini, was leaving the ship and I could see the sadness in his eyes over the fact that he'd never be going to sea again. He loved the sea, he loved being the skipper of a ship, and his crew loved him. As a former Navy man, I knew how he felt.
I haven't lost touch with the Navy over all these years. I've done a lot of work in veterans' hospitals—they're people I think need and deserve our support—and I've stayed close to Navy families, too.
In 2004 I was given one of the most important awards that I've ever received—the honorary rank of Chief Petty Officer, sponsored by the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington—for my support of the Navy and Navy families. The reason it means so much is that it came from a group I consider part of my own family: the Navy. I may have left my Navy "home" in 1945, but I've never forgotten my Navy roots.