At the peak of success, self-doubt kept Quinn teetering between calm and fury.

Fifty years ago, the Academy Awards ceremony was handing out its Oscars to a remarkable crop of films—including big winners such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Miracle Worker, and To Kill A Mockingbird. Although Hollywood’s big-name actors were noted for memorable performances, several 1962 Post articles also pointed out that they were showing a trend toward rebellious, temperamental, and selfish behavior.

Rising stars like Anthony Quinn, Marlon Brando, and Peter O’Toole were becoming increasingly hard to work with, and were threatening the survival of the studios.

For example, an article about Anthony Quinn often described the actor as “volatile, unpredictable,” alternately gracious or bitter. A director, who had recently worked with Quinn in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, said, “I found Tony has great selfishness as a performer. He thinks how each scene can best serve him. Of course, when he’s good, he’s brilliant. He just makes it hard as hell for everyone around him,” [“Anthony Quinn, Unsettled,” October 13, 1962].

An article about Peter O’Toole, star of Lawrence of Arabia, mentioned the rumors among actors that O’Toole was brash, irresponsible, a braggart, and a drinker. The producer of Lawrence of Arabia believed the rumors, O’Toole said. “It hardly helped matters when a fifth of whiskey tumbled from my pocket during our first meeting,” [“Oscar Winner,” March 9, 1963].

Fellow Brit Richard Burton was becoming well known for his wild rages. While filming The Robe, he deliberately ran his head into a wall after failing to perform a stunt called for by the script. The year before, while performing in the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, “he got so carried away during a fight scene that he lifted [Michael] Redgrave and hurled him against the scenery, nearly bringing the set crashing down,” [“Actor With Two Lives,” January 27, 1962].

Robert Mitchum, who had just finished Cape Fear with Gregory Peck, instinctively fought any type of authority. His impatience often led him to lose his temper. When a studio phone failed to work, he destroyed his dressing room and walked onto the set to announce, “If they treat me like an animal, I’ll behave like an animal,” [“The Many Moods of Robert Mitchum,” August 25, 1962].

Newcomer Warren Beatty had starred in only three movies by 1962, but he was already making demands on the studio. He insisted on complete silence on the set while he was acting. He also demanded, and was given, the best dressing room on the lot, normally reserved for Gregory Peck, [“Brash and Rumpled Star,” July 14, 1962].

But of all the troublesome actors, none was more difficult or demanding than Marlon Brando. Lewis Milestone, who had recently completed Mutiny On The Bounty, told Post contributor Bill Davidson that Brando’s attitude—argumentative, uncooperative, and easily offended—“cost the production at least $6 million and months of extra work.”

The petulant superstar turned paradise into a moviemaker’s nightmare.

Co-star Trevor Howard said Brando’s behavior had been “unprofessional and absolutely ridiculous,” and Richard Harris said working with Brando had made “the whole picture a large dreadful nightmare.”

According to Milestone and other members of the cast, Brando rarely knew his lines and would fumble his way through as many as 30 takes of a single scene. He constantly used “idiot cards”—pieces of paper with his lines written on them—which he concealed on his person or somewhere on the set.

Says Director Milestone, “It wasn’t a movie production; it was a debating society. Brando would discuss for four hours, then we’d shoot for an hour to get in a two-minute scene because he’d be mumbling or blowing his lines. By now I wasn’t even directing Brando— just the other members of the cast. He was directing himself and ignoring everyone else.

“Did you ever hear of an actor who put plugs in his ears so he couldn’t listen to the director or the other actors? That’s what Brando did. … I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. … Whenever I’d try to direct him in a scene, he’d say, ‘Are you telling me, or are you asking my advice?’ [“The Mutiny of Marlon Brando,” June 16, 1962].

While Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hoped to recoup the cost overruns of Mutiny on the Bounty, Twentieth Century Fox was starting to see similar budget problems on its production of Cleopatra.

Robert Wise, an Academy Award-winning director, predicted Hollywood would have to change to survive. Hollywood, he said, had built up its stars in order to compete with television. In the process, it had created monsters. “Brando’s behavior has made us realize how far out of hand the situation has gotten. More and more of us are saying. ‘The hell with the star. I’ll make little black-and-white pictures with good scripts and unknown actors.’ We must do that to survive. A few more mutinies by stars and we’ll all be out of business.”

Yet the Post editors seemed to expect actors to be demanding, difficult, and hard to work with. Movie stars had to be bigger than life in everything they did. The stars of Hollywood’s golden era, like Gable and Bogart, were “exciting personalities … every gesture and mannerism set them apart from ordinary men, creating about them the aura of a star.

“Each of these old-time stars was a vibrant personality with his own distinctive style. He snarled, fumed, raged, stormed, fought, loved, bled and died with a gusto that today’s pallid actors cannot match.” The editors compared the “glittering greats” of the past with the young stars of that year and concluded, “much of the excitement has gone out of the movies.”

Bad Boys of Hollywood, 1962 The Saturday Evening Post

Actor Alan Alda exhibits what he calls his “very strange form” in a Central Park touch-football game that won him the Plimpton part in Paper Lion.

In 1963, Sports Illustrated journalist George Plimpton wanted to write a piece on what it was like to be an NFL quarterback. He convinced the Detroit Lions management to let him attend training camp undercover, pretending to try out for a spot as a third-string quarterback.

In 1968, future M*A*S*H star Alan Alda played George Plimpton in the Stuart Millar film Paper Lion chronicling Plimpton’s experience as he learned the sport, bonded with the players, and experienced the roughness of the game firsthand. Alda wrote about his own experience during the filmmaking for the Post‘s November 16, 1968, issue. Read the full story here.

Famous Contributors: Alan Alda The Saturday Evening Post

In celebration of this versatile actor’s life, below is an abridged version of writer Dean Jennings’ 1955 article, which was published in the Post just eight months before Borgnine won the Oscar for his performance in Marty. To read or download the entire article, click here.

August 27, 1955—In a rented bungalow on a side street in North Hollywood there lives a 215-pound, bearish man who started life with the improbable name of Ermes Effron Borgnine.

Variously called “Ernie,” “Duke” or even “Bugs,” he is a shaggy-haired, paunchy man of thirty-eight with a relief-map face that is not apt to raise the blood pressure of young, lovelorn maidens. He drives an old car, and wears ready-made suits. His conception of pleasure and comfort is to sprawl on the floor every night with a can of cold beer, and gape at his television set. His wife picks out his neckties, and his closest friends are a plumber and an insurance salesman.

He has a tendency to doze off in soft chairs after a heavy meal. When his wife is out, he doggedly mops the floors, cooks up a batch of spaghetti or yaks over the back fence with the neighbors. He doesn’t know any movie stars, and when he sees one he is likely to feel self-conscious. Thus, except for his size, he is more or less the average man.

It is surprising and perhaps a little aggravating to some that plain and homely Ernest Borgnine is already being mentioned for an Academy Award as the result of a classic performance he gave as a kind but bumbling butcher in “Marty,” a picture which won the Cannes Film Festival award last spring.

No one in Hollywood can put a definitive finger on the elusive quality that makes Borgnine’s villains so remarkably real. When he impales a man on a pitchfork in “Violent Saturday” the fury shows in his eyes, and the customers gasp and recoil in their seats. In “Bad Day at Black Rock” he forces Spencer Tracy’s jeep over a cliff, and his face has the chilly blankness of every murderer since Cain.

Actually Borgnine is an intensely shy, sensitive, and often lonely man who is never satisfied with his work, and who is not convinced that he has great talent.” Ernie’s just a big St. Bernard who wants to be patted,” one acquaintance says. But among his nonprofessional friends the feeling persists that his screen violence is really a safety valve for a rebellious nature.

[However] Borgnine is not entirely subdued and permits himself an occasional outburst. Some time ago, while he was pacing the floor in his New York apartment and trying to memorize a role, a pianist began pounding the keys in an adjoining flat. The walls were thin, and with each fortissimo Borgnine stepped up his furious pacing. His patience finally ran out and with a mighty swing he drove his fist through the apartment wall. The startled pianist fled to the safety of the street. Borgnine later fibbed to his wife, Rhoda, that he had fallen off a ladder, and it was more than a year before he sheepishly told her the truth.

“Ernie has always learned the hard way,” says [his agent] Paul Wilkins, “but he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. When he first came to Hollywood, my secretary called him one morning and told him he had fifteen minutes to be at Columbia on a rush call. ‘Well,’ Ernie told her, ‘you advise Mr. Wilkins for me that I have no car, and if he wants me at the studio he’d better come and get me.’ I called him right back. ‘Look, boy,’ I said, ‘ I’m not a cab company. It’s tough enough for an agent to get jobs for actors without having to carry them there too. Let’s get that straight right now.’ Ernie was silent for a moment and finally said, ‘Oh, I guess you’re right.’ He was at Columbia in fifteen minutes and he got the part.”

Borgnine himself can laugh at these once-thorny episodes now and credits an old friend, a New Haven plumber named Joe Simone, with providing the Philosophical clincher. Not long ago he and Joe were driving along a country road in the latter’s car, which, as Borgnine puts it, was “rattling and shaking like a bucket of bolts.” “Joey, Joey!” Borgnine protested. ”How can you stand all that terrible noise? Aren’t you afraid the heap will fall apart?”

“No,” said Joe. “I just turn up the radio louder.”

[His career began when his mother] said casually one day, “you always liked making a darn fool out of yourself. Why don’t you take up acting?”

Borgnine still considers her proposal a provocative non sequitur. He went along with her quaint reasoning, took his GI benefits and enrolled in the Randall School of Drama at Hartford. On his first day in class, he was asked to read aloud a passage containing the word “diamonds.”

“Mr. Borgnine,” the teacher scowled, “how did you pronounce that word?”

“Dimonds,” he grinned.

“The word, Mr. Borgnine, is d-i-a-m-o-n-d-s. Pronounced dye-a-monds.”

Borgnine’s blurting reaction to that was a common cuss word frequently heard aboard cruisers and destroyers.

The classroom rocked, but the teacher didn’t blink. ” Mr. Borgnine,” she said, “if you apply such strong feeling and pronunciation to all your reading, you will have no trouble as an actor.”

To download the full version click here.

“From Here To Eternity” The Saturday Evening Post

Spring 1977

by Rembrandt Peale
The Country Gentleman
Spring 1977

By kind permission of Coe Kerr Gallery in 1977, we were able to reproduce this painting by Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860). It was of his brother, Ruebens (do you think the parents might have been art buffs?) and shows him here “with the first geranium brought to America in 1801.” The editors further informed us that “the Peales ran what amounted to a portrait factory where they painted Indians, patriots, still lifes, landscapes, miniatures and themselves–in great abundance.” And apparently with exquisite skill.

June 1953

by Robert Addison
The Country Gentleman
June 1953

Since it was a magazine for farmers, Country Gentleman covers were frequently of livestock or farm scenes. This peaceful June scene was in the heart of dairyland in Jefferson County, Wisconsin. The artist was Robert Addison. As serene and picturesque as it appeared here, this was a working dairy farm of 197 acres. But wait…I found a great painting of a movie star and a cover painted by a former President…

Winter 1976

White Church in the Country
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Winter 1976

From a peaceful summer scene to a peaceful winter scene – and can you see the artist’s signature? White Church in the Country was painted by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 “amidst the stifling one-hundred-degree heat of the Palm Desert in California.” Eisenhower loved golf, but “daubing,” as he referred to his painting, was his second-favorite hobby. A very fine portrait of Eisenhower by Norman Rockwell appeared on a Saturday Evening Post cover in 1952. And speaking of Rockwell…

Spring 1979

by Norman Rockwell
The Country Gentleman
Spring 1979

This 1979 cover was a repeat – it originally appeared on Country Gentleman magazine in 1922. It was the result of a contest to find the most representative “Country Gent” salesboy. The winner got to pose for Norman Rockwell! “The response was overwhelming,” editors informed us. “500,000 young entrepreneurs mailed in their photos, and one George Hamilton of Binghampton, New York, was chosen as the lucky model.” George’s mother had sent a photo of him holding four fox terriers. “Never mind that the puppies had somehow switched their breed…to beagles,” the editors noted, “for Norman Rockwell transformed the ordinary into magic.” This we all well know.

Spring 1978

by Robert Abbett
The Country Gentleman
Spring 1978

What movie buff wouldn’t love this cover? The handsome cowboy, of course, is Jimmy Stewart. He was painted by artist Robert Abbett for the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Stewart had great appreciation for the Hollywood Western. “It saved my career, after the war,” he is quoted as saying in this issue, “and everybody knows what it did for Gary Cooper and Duke Wayne. Naturally, I’m grateful.” And we’re grateful for such a beautiful way to remember a beloved actor.

Fall 1976

by George Stubbs
The Country Gentleman
Fall 1976

For a magazine named Country Gentleman, this must be the quintessential cover. Known as a “sporting painter,” George Stubbs (1724-1806) painted horses, dogs, hay wagons, and harvesting activities against the English countryside. This gem is called Sir John Nelthorpe Out Shooting.

Spring 1976

by Edward Hicks
The Country Gentleman
Spring 1976

Seems I’m always discovering a new artist. Okay, so this “new” artist was born in 1780, but renowned primitive painter Edward Hicks was new to me. This is a portion of a stunning painting of James Cornell’s Pennsylvania farm circa 1848 on an Indian summer day. The farm won a five-dollar prize for the “best cultivated farm over 100 acres,” which the editors informed us was “five years before the Genessee Farmer and The Cultivator combined to create the first Country Gentleman magazine.” Not as old as The Saturday Evening Post, but Country Gentleman sure went back a fer piece. If you hunger to see more Country Gentleman covers, or have a question about Saturday Evening Post covers, feel free to comment and let us know.

Classic Art: Forgotten Country Gentleman Covers The Saturday Evening Post