Ernie: The Autobiography

2008, Citadel Press.  256 pages, $24.95

Ernest Borgnine

 

Ernest Borgnine recounts the highlights and important episodes in his long career in his new autobiography titled, simply, Ernie.  It is an easy read, for Borgnine is a plain speaker and a plain writer.  He’s also a pretty nice guy, because he doesn’t deliver any juicy details about any of his many costars, or himself, for that matter.  He doesn’t even mention a long-running feud with Mickey Rooney that I’ve read about elsewhere.  He even calmly discusses his brief, tumultuous marriage to Ethel Merman, a union that lasted all of 32 days.

So why read Ernie?  I’ll supply three reasons.  First, Borgnine writes about his life in the speaking manner of a friend you might invite to dinner.  There’s not a lot of recalled exact dialogue (which, in other bios, I sometimes feel must be less than accurate given the passage of time); Borgnine simply and straightforwardly provides us with the facts of his life he feels are appropriate and cogent.  It’s more like a friendly chat than a memoir.

Second, the man has led an interesting life.  From his Italian descendants and childhood through a long stint in the Navy to ultimate fame in Hollywood as an unlikely star, Ernest Borgnine has been involved with fascinating people, visited exotic places and personally witnessed his share of history.  He keeps his personal views on our modern culture to a minimum, but when he advocates a modern version of the WPA, for instance, I happen to wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.

Third, and the most important factor to me, is that he realizes why he is famous and he discusses the movies for which he is known.  All too often in bios (it’s my chief complaint about them), the subject’s work is ignored, yet that work is why we want to learn more about them.  In his autobiography Borgnine not only talks about many of his films, he separates them into brief chapter sections.  If his career interests you at all, then Ernie should be required reading.

This isn’t great literature.  Borgnine rarely says anything negative about himself or his career, which seems somewhat conceited, and sometimes his writing leads nowhere, as when he says “Let me tell you about Wally Cox” and then says nothing about Wally Cox.  Yet even with these quibbles, I enjoyed reading Ernest Borgnine’s autobiography and I think you will, too.  My rating:  Good.

This review was originally written for and published in Filmbobbery, Volume 10, Issue 1 in 2008.