by Lee Server
“Artie Shaw and his mental domination,” wrote Lena Horne, who had known him earlier and became a good friend of Ava’s, “…he liked his women to read a lot of books. And he’d pick the books. But she wasn’t ready for them. It’s kind of like a child of nature being shut up in a room to study.” Shaw, wrote Pete Martin in the Saturday Evening Post, “resembled a man determined to teach a willing but unweaned kitten how to drink milk from a saucer.”
Screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg was one of Artie’s writer friends in this period. He would recall, “The trouble with Artie, he really was a male chauvinist. The only sort of thing he could think to say about her was what a beautiful ass she had. He would praise her physically but never showed much interest in her as a person, treated her like a dumbbell. He’d ask her a question and he’d say, Oh, just forget it, you wouldn’t understand!’ He looked down at her mentally. She was unknowing about politics of the time, things that might have been of interest to Artie. But she was not dumb. She was just very uneducated. She didn’t know much.
“I don’t remember her ever giving it back to Artie. She just kind of took it. And it made her feel bad.”
Ruth Rosenthal, the wife of Ava’s lawyer, remembered a time a group of people had been sitting around talking and Ava had typically slipped off her shoes and tucked her bare feet under her on the chair. She told writer Charles Higham, “Artie looked at her coldly and said in front of everyone, ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing? Do you think you’re still in a tobacco field?’ Well, she went white, she trembled, she cried. It was ghastly.” Rosenthal would say it was in this period that Ava first began to drink in earnest, not for pleasure but for escape. “I think it eased her pain, and she stuck with it after that.”
One drunken night of arguing, needling, and tears, she stormed out of the house, into her car, tearing through the streets of Beverly Hills, trying with a mind spinning from too many insults and shots of Wild Turkey to remember the way to Van and Frances Heflin’s house. The police spotted her speeding and weaving and gave chase. They roared through the posh, sleeping neighborhood, the cops catching up only when she braked her car on the Heflins’ lawn. Van came to the doorway and found Ava Gardner crouched on his porch with a policeman aiming a revolver at her forehead.
“I was so much in love,” she would write of her second husband. “I adored and worshipped him, and I don’t think he ever really understood the damage he did.”
She became, inevitably, a convert to Shaw’s religion, psychiatry. She began seeing doctors and therapists from May Romm’s circle of Freudians. One administered, at Ava’s own pleading, an intelligence test. With great relief she learned that she was not an idiot, was in fact high above average in intelligence, though the doctor suggested that her perfectly good mind had yet to be taken out of the box that it came in.
Less reassuring: Her therapy sessions pried open a vast array of supposed subconscious repressions and psychosomatic disorders. She would now be led to believe that the chronic abdominal pains she had suffered for years and that no physician could diagnose were caused by guilt for abandoning her mother to die in North Carolina while she fulfilled a frivolous destiny in Hollywood; that her anxiety about having children was rooted in a fear of the cancer that had attacked her mother’s womb and had done the same to her grandmother. (Ava would often speak of a desire to have kids and doted on young relatives and the children of friends, but there is no evidence to suggest she ever deliberately sought to become pregnant. Mickey Rooney claimed that after sex with him one night—although in the declining days of the marriage—she had said, “If you ever knock me up I’ll kill you.” Ava would later reprove Artie for not wanting to have a child, but Shaw denied it and told her it had been entirely her decision always to run to the bathroom and insert a diaphragm before they made love.)
In her memoir she would recall her time in analysis without regret. “I found it,” she wrote, “a great help.” But observers of Ava in this period and after, and her own early comments, describe a more complicated and largely negative response. To more than one friend she would say, “The head shrinkers made me crazy.”
In the spring, without warning, Artie told her they were moving. He was selling his Tudor mansion on Bedford Drive, and they were off to live at a more modest house he had leased in Burbank, near Warner Bros. The family that had rented them the Burbank place found themselves unable to occupy their own new home right away as planned, and so for a time Ava and Artie were unlikely housemates with a middle-class suburban family with two young teenage kids (one of them fond of playing records by the dreaded Guy Lombardo at top volume). The move was a giant drop in their comfort level, and Ava claimed that Artie gave her no reasonable explanation for it. They seemed to argue about everything now, and she was frequently in tears. Their sex life had gradually declined in frequency and intensity. She began to believe that he no longer loved her.
Ava had hardly worked a day in the seven months since finishing Whistle Stop. She had gone to a preview screening and had wanted to walk out; the picture and her performance seemed to her equally bad. She was twenty- three and she felt faded, her opportunities slipping behind her and nothing ahead. Her studio did not know what to do with her after five years. Her husband seemed to be tiring of her. Instead of making movies she was taking extension courses at UCLA, trying to improve her mind, trying to impress Artie that he had not married a dunce. They were living in a crummy little house now, and she didn’t understand why. Her stomach pains had returned, and she often felt the need to vomit. She lost weight. Three times a week she saw her psychiatrist. She couldn’t bear to read another page of Buddenbrooks. She drank.
One day Metro called. It wasn’t a part, only someone who wanted to talk to her about a part. And of course it was nobody at MGM. His name was Mark Hellinger, and he was making a picture at Universal called The Killers.
Hellinger: one of the great reporter-mythologists of New York City, a rival and comrade of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, a son of Orthodox Jews become the caricature of a Broadway sharpie, perennially dressed like a comic-strip gangster, with his dark serge suits and dark blue shirts and white ties. He drove around Hollywood in a bulletproof I sotta Fraschini limousine that had belonged to the racketeer Chink Sherman (whose body would be found in a Catskills lime pit). His wife was Gladys Glad, a legendary showgirl from the Ziegfeld Follies. He wrote wry and sentimental columns and short stories about the Manhattan demimonde, the same guys and dolls as Runyon, but Hellinger was a nicer guy. Prohibition ended, the Depression began, and New York lost some of its Arabian Nights luster, so Hellinger went West to write movies. He had a flair for pictures and became an associate producer at Warner Bros., working with production chief Hal Wallis, overseeing such Warner’s hits as The Roaring Twenties, They Drive by Night, and High Sierra. Then, not wanting to miss out on the biggest story of the century, Hellinger left town, sending himself to the South Pacific as a war reporter. Back in Hollywood in 1945 he refused to return to work with the unbearable Jack Warner, who fully recognized Hellinger’s special talent for moviemaking and still treated him as if he had just caught him stealing his wallet. Instead Hellinger formed his own company in a production and distribution alliance with Universal-International, and in the summer of ‘45 he was ready to make his first picture.
Hellinger wanted to make an impact with that first one. He wanted it to be a sensation, to make a fortune, and to put him on the map as the new big name in town, the postwar David O. Selznick, only a snappier dresser. He gave Universal a few ideas. They were ready to move ahead with an adaptation of a play called The Hero, and a script was being prepared. It was a cynical character study ultimately produced and released under the title Swell Guy, starring Sonny Tufts, and it was Hellingens only failure as a producer. Soon, though, he realized that The Hero was not going to put anybody on the map, and he turned back to an idea he had been nursing since before he left Warner Bros.: an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 sh
ort story “The Killers.” Hellinger’s experience and strength had always been in tough-guy melodrama, and Hemingway’s famous story was one of the touchstones in the history of hard-boiled literature, the brief, brutal account of two hired gunmen terrorizing the occupants of a small-town diner in their attempt to locate and murder a local resident known as “the Swede.” As strict narrative—leaving aside the haunting overlay—it was no more than a single situation, the scope of a two-reeler in Hollywoodspeak. But Hellinger saw it as a springboard, Hemingway’s compelling scene out of which a feature-length story could be drawn. Plus it was Hemingway, and a famous and memorable title. “The exploitation values,” Hellinger told Universal executive Bob Sparks in September 1945, “are little short of gigantic.”
Hemingway hated Hollywood, but Hellinger fancied himself an old pal of the great writer, and when he wrote to ask about the price of screen rights for the famous story, he wondered if Hem might extend him the courtesy of a discount. Hemingway’s lawyer, Maurice J. Speiser, wrote back saying that Hemingway had “withdrawn all contact with the outside world” and was working on his tan, but because Hellinger was such a close and very old friend, the author was willing to sell him “The Killers” for fifty grand (which in 1945 dollars was no favor for twelve pages of prose). Beseeching cables were dispatched to Idaho, to Cuba, to New York. Hemingway jerked him around. RKO wanted to buy it, maybe Hemingway didn’t want to sell it to anybody, and so on. At last a deal was struck: Hellinger would pay $36,750 but agreed to say for the public record that he had paid the fifty grand, and then Hellinger went and said he had paid seventy-five grand, since that would get even more press (even the real figure made it the most expensive short story in Hollywood history). Late in October the contract was signed, granting motion picture rights to the Property known as The Killers, complete with various (and odd) restrictions, such as: “Owner agrees no version thereof shall ever be presented in vaudeville.” On November 24, 1945, Universal officially agreed to proceed with Hellinger’s project.
The exact genesis of the story line, the expansion of a vignette to a feature-film narrative, would be inexact, an amalgam of spitballed ideas, random conversations, scotch-and-water lunches at the Brown Derby, all in advance of the serious business of writing something down. Hellinger held to the notion that Hemingway’s enigmatic sketch revolved around a robbery gone wrong, a double-cross by one member of the gang, making off with the loot, and how the killers finally tracked him down and he was tired of running. Writer Richard Brooks, back from the war and having written the novel that would become the controversial noir thriller Crossfire, had come on the payroll to adapt The Hero (and would later write Hellinger’s prison drama, Brute Force). “Hellinger worshipped writers,” Brooks recalled to interviewer Pat McGilligan. “At the end of the day you’d gather in his office for a drink.…He liked nothing more than to sit with a writer and have a drink. Hellinger was a good man.” Hellinger pumped Brooks for ideas, and Brooks came up with some, like making the protagonist a determined insurance investigator and the story line in part a chase after the missing money. Brooks claimed he had also tracked down Hemingway and asked him what was the rest of the story, and Hemingway said, “How the hell do I know?”
Hellinger tried to give the screenplay assignment to Irwin Shaw, a consciously Hemingwayesque writer and author of the first big novel of the war, The Young Lions. Then Hellinger renewed an acquaintance with a colleague from Warner Bros., John Huston, who had coauthored the script of the Hellinger-produced gangster picture, High Sierra. Huston was a magnetic and mercurial personality and a dynamically creative talent, whose directorial debut four years before, The Maltese Falcon, had been a groundbreaker in style and attitude, a reinvention of the crime drama that set the course for the genre that came to be known as film noir. An ex-boxer, newsman, now a veteran of battle (his filming of the San Pietro attack, under fire, was perhaps the most remarkable cinematic product of the war), Huston was another “son of Hemingway” type and. Hellinger was sure, the perfect man for the job at hand. Huston had formed a loose writing partnership with Tony Veiller, a skilled Hollywood veteran, the son of playwright Bayard Veiller and actress Margaret Wycherley (Cagney’s malevolent mom in White Heat). Huston and Veiller had worked together on a Why We Fight propaganda film for Frank Capra’s unit and had hit it off. But Huston was still in uniform, and after that he was tied by contract to Warners, so his part in the job had to be done on the QT. Veiller was first to be demobilized from the army and would take sole credit for the script. The only indication of Huston’s sub rosa involvement was a clause in the contract allowing Veiller to employ a collaborator to advise him in the writing and to assist in research. Veiller took Hellinger’s money and handed half to Huston, and in two months in the winter of ‘45—’46 they wrote the screen story and script of The Killers.
Working mostly in New York, at Huston’s rooms in the Weylin Hotel in the east Fifties, Veiller’s mother’s apartment at 10 Perry Street, and at various watering holes in between, they worked up first the elaborate, complex flashback structure moving back and forth between the present and the past and in effect unfolding two stories at once. The “theory we have evolved for telling the story,” Veiller told Hellinger on December 2, afforded “tremendous possibilities for something really off the beaten track.” The storytelling method was clearly influenced by the innovative screenplay of Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles for the film most admired by every ambitious movie writer and director in 1940s Hollywood: Citizen Kane. Huston and Veiller may-also have been thinking about the much-admired Eric Ambler thriller A Coffin for Dimitrios, filmed in ‘44 as Mask of Dimitrios, with its multiple narrators and in which past and present stories ultimately, violently dovetail.
By early February the first draft of the script was turned in. Hellinger requested a number of revisions and added a few touches of his own. He eliminated some of the “trick names” of the gangsters, which struck him as too much Runyon cliché. He decided that the killers should arrive by automobile and not, as in the script, by train (generally, unless one is very good with a schedule, not a practical method for making a quick getaway after a murder). The Huston and Veiller screenplay kept the Swede unseen in the opening sequence, but Hellinger felt it would be more effective to show the audience the hopeless look on the face of the man who knows he is about to be killed. Hellinger added a few more touches from his own reporter’s notebook: For instance, he wanted Blinkie’s deathbed confession to take off on the surrealistic ramblings he had heard from the dying lips of gangster Dutch Schultz, shot down in a Newark chophouse.
But this was a great screenplay, more than Hellinger could have hoped for: Hemingway’s short story nearly intact in the first reel, then opening up in a brilliantly “off the beaten track” way, first a detective mystery, then a gangster story, a love story, and in the end the detective story again tying everything together. Taking off from the prologue of the Swede’s murder, the script introduced Riordan, the dogged insurance man, following a trail that uncovers the secret history behind the killing, revealed in a series of flashbacks: the corruption of a washed-up boxer mixed up with a gang and a gorgeous moll, a spectacular robbery, a double- and then a triple-cross over the girl and the loot, a final retribution for the remaining bad guys (and girl). Hemingway’s existentialist tease became Huston/Veiller’s grandly elaborated thematic question: What could bring a man so low that he would surrender himself to violent death? The scripted answer was above all a woman, a slinky underworld Circe whom Huston and Veiller had named Kitty Collins.
A beautiful script, Hellinger thought, and a ballsy one. He sent it off to the movie industry’s independent censoring body, the Breen Office, for approval, and hoped it would not come back gelded. On March 5, the response from the censors arrived:
First, [they suggested] remove as much as possible the present overemphasis on violence and murder [underlined]. Also emphasis on illicit sex. These will meet with bad public reaction.
&
nbsp; Detailed showing of the robbery should be omitted.
Furthermore…(page 8) there should be no showing of sawed-off shotguns in hands of criminals. Also (page 13) change showing of gun blasting straight into camera.
Page 21 There should be nothing offensive about the showing of the corpse.
Page 30 Swede should not be shown stripped to the waist. Furthermore, even though he is drunk, please omit any liquor or drinking in scene.
Page 32 Please get technical advice as to Queenie’s use of the Hail Marys.
Page 41 Make this prizefight less brutal.
Page 45 There must be no exposure of Swede in this scene in the shower. Also omit liquor and drinking.
Page 51 Omit drinking.
Page 52 Care will be needed with this low-cut gown worn by Kitty.
Page 59 Avoid disrespect in burial sequence.
Page 60 Omit the liquor.
Page 64 Omit liquor.
Page 65 Avoid showing unmade bed.
Page 68 Liquor.
Page 70 Omit reference to Candy having been a drug addict. Too much crime and violence already present.
Page 76 Omit detailed method of payroll robbery.
Page 91 No sawed-off shotgun for criminals.
Page 92 No flaunting of loot.
Page 102 No use of dum-dum bullet, illegal missile.
Page 106 Avoid undue brutality.
Page 115 Change line “she and Swede shacked up together in an Atlantic City hotel.”
Page 119 Liquor.
Page 124 Liquor.
Page 125 Should be played elsewhere than bedroom. Kitty and Swede should be fully clothed and end of sequence should be no suggestion of sex.
Page 130 Sign should read “Ladies Lounge” and no sawed-off shotguns with criminals.
