Ernie:. Ernest Borgnine
but now I’m married very happily, thank you very much.”
The temperature dropped about twenty degrees for me.
I was heartbroken, but what are you going to do? We actually did stay in touch, and some years later I was doing the play Harvey on the road with my then-wife Rhoda. We were booked into Minneapolis-St. Paul, where Millie lived. I invited her and Vincent Lang’s wife—because he’d been lucky enough to marry his girl—to come see the show.
I remember Rhoda and Millie talking and looking at me and occasionally laughing. I guessed they were bonding over the crazy guy one had ducked and one hadn’t. We’re good friends to this day, which is more than I can say for most of the women I loved and married.
Upon reaching Honolulu we tied up in Pearl City. They put us in the backwaters of Honolulu Harbor and there we stayed. We discovered this was not a good place for us. If the wind was just right, our ships would be black in the morning from the residue when the sugarcane fields were burned. That was a process which started many years before, when one sugarcane farmer took a dislike to another and set fire to the other guy’s sugarcane fields. But the plan backfired when the victim discovered that the fire burned off all the leaves, saving the harvesters extra work. From then on they all burned their fields.
When the ships were black with soot, guess who had to clean them up?
If you ever wanted to hear unvarnished naval swearing—and I can’t imagine why you would—that was the place for it. The burnt sugar mixed with the salty air and formed a hard substance that clung to the hull like plastic. I used to think, “Where are those misguided spotter planes when you need ’em to blast something?”
Apart from that, Hawaii was great. The climate wasn’t as chilly and misty as San Diego. We all knew our jobs so well by this time that work didn’t always feel like work, and leave was like a real vacation. We would go ashore and catch a bus going into downtown Honolulu. They paid us all on different paydays—the army was one week, the navy another—so that never the twain should meet. Because if we all went drinking on the same night, there would always be a fight over a slur or a girl or somebody’s home state.
There was an ambitious young gentleman, a Japanese guy, who started selling beer on the corner where you caught the bus. First thing you know he was making so much money just selling beer to the sailors that he opened up a big place with a dance floor. We later came to find out that it was also a great place for spies. They could hear exactly where we were going, what we were doing. I’m sure they had spies all over the place telling them what to hit when they fired on Hawaii.
When we were on ship, the commanders started a routine of having our planes fly over for what they called a drill. Everybody went to their general quarters battle stations. Our guns would follow these airplanes. We did that for a half to three-quarters of an hour and then they’d go away. We’d secure everything and go back about our business. That was done six days a week. Things were dicey in Europe—this was 1940—but we didn’t really think we were at risk in Hawaii. And if anything did happen, we felt we were prepared.
But the Japanese were a little smarter. They came on a Sunday, December 7, 1941, when everybody was resting. The rest is history, of course.
I wasn’t there when it all came down. I had finished up in September, 1941. The Lamberton also missed that initial action. When Honolulu was attacked, my girl was out at sea pulling targets for the fleet. In fact, most of the firing ships, the aircraft carriers, had stayed at sea over the weekend to prepare for target practice Monday morning. But word reached me at home in Connecticut that the Lamberton actually saw those airplanes coming in toward Honolulu. They radioed in and said “There are a bunch of planes coming in with red balls on their wings.”
The guys on the radar reported it and heard back, “Oh, yeah, that’s fine. Those are our planes coming in from the States.” But they weren’t coming in from the States, they were coming in from Japanese ships to the west. It’s easy to second-guess decisions with hindsight, but I wonder how many lives could have been saved if the boys on the other end of that call had bothered to look at a map.
The executive officer who was on board when I left the ship was kind of a nasty guy, and Italian to boot. He was real mad because I could speak Italian and he couldn’t. I used to call him names, but he couldn’t do anything about it because I said them nicely and he didn’t know what they meant. When he knew I was leaving, he said to me, “What do you think you’re doing? We’re practically at war and you won’t re-up?”
I said, “No, sir. I want to go home. My mom isn’t well and I want to spend some time with her.”
He looked at me and said, “Well, enjoy marching in the rear rank while we’re marching up front holding Old Glory.”
That hurt, because no one loved the United States more than I did. But I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to spend my last enlisted days in the brig. But that wasn’t the last time I saw him. Years later, I was in Norfolk, Virginia, doing something with the Barter Theatre. I was in this paint shop buying paint for the show. I looked up and there was this old exec of mine.
I said, “Well, sir. How are you?”
He glanced over. “Oh,” he said. “You’re Borgnine.”
I said, “That’s right, sir. I’m the guy you said would be marching in the rear rank.”
In fact, I hadn’t been—not exactly—but we’ll get to that in a moment.
He said, “Well, Borgnine, I had three ships shot out from under me. Can you match that?”
I told him I couldn’t and said that I was glad he’d made it. Then I told him that I’d been acting and gave him tickets to the show.
He said, “Okay, I’ll be there.”
I never did see him again. Still, I don’t think ill of him. I can’t. Not of a man who served his country the way he did.
Chapter 8
Home Again…but Not for Long
I left the Lamberton and was transferred home. They sent me to New London, Connecticut, which was about an hour from my house.
I hadn’t been there for years. The last time I’d gone had been a sad occasion. Not long after I signed up, my ship was docked in Guan-tánamo Bay, Cuba. This was long before Castro. Cuba was full of friendly, generally happy folks who used to make good rice bread. It was miserably hot and humid there and most of us slept on deck. We’d bring our mattresses up from their swinging hooks and lay them down. You’d have to deal with the flies, but that was better than the heat belowdecks.
Anyway, I was on watch one night and somebody came to me and said, “Borgnine, we just got notice that your grandmother has passed away.”
That’s the military for you: unsentimental and to the point.
While I waited to see if I could get leave to go home, I started thinking about my father’s mother. I’m sure you’ve experienced this: the passing of a loved one brings about all kinds of wistful thinking. The tears would come at some point, probably at her funeral. Then and there, on that dark deck, was a time for remembering.
My grandmother lived nearby and during the summer I would spend a few weeks at her house, helping with her garden and washing and sterilizing bottles for the root beer she made and sold. Like Mrs. Simone and her pizza, my grandmother could have gotten rich off her root beer.
I had a friend in that neighborhood, Spenny Holtz. One time my grandmother caught us smoking in the bathroom. Not cigarettes, which we couldn’t afford, but corn silk that we saved after eating corn on the cob in some poor farmer’s field. Well, this little old lady just tore down the house.
“Out!” she screamed, grabbing me by the hair and hauling me all the way home. I knew she wouldn’t tell my mother, because she didn’t want my mother to worry about anything, since her health was fragile. But she laid the law down. She said “From now on, you don’t do that.”