by Lee Server
Sinner reunited Ava with Robert Siodmak, but this would not be the swift, stimulating experience that The Killers had been. There was a doorstopper of a screenplay to begin with, which Siodmak complained would run eight hours as written, though producer Gottfried Reinhardt insisted he shoot it all. The great number of scenes within the turbulent casino, filled with extras and incidental movement, caused endless delays and retakes. Siodmak seemed strained, only adding to the problems with a seemingly uncertain perfectionism. The long, tedious shooting and the continual repetitions drove everyone to distraction and exhaustion. Peck, for a scene in which he was supposed to be lying unconscious with fever, spent so much time in the sickbed that he fell asleep for real. George Folsey, the cinematographer, recalled one simple scene being shot and shot again. “After sixty-some takes, in front of everyone Ava Gardner asked sweetly, ‘Bob, may I go to the bathroom after the eighty-first take?’ “ Siodmak was to be found for long periods of time on the camera crane, raised high up to the rafters, and some members of the cast believed he was not planning shots but simply hiding out.
Some of the many European emigres who had small parts in the film often gathered around a chessboard during the long wait between setups. Ava would sometimes hover over the players with interest and was finally asked if she wanted to play. She wouldn’t mind, she said, and to everyone’s pleasure she played a very good game. Ava explained that when she had been married to Artie Shaw he had wanted to play chess with her, so he had hired the Russian grand master Stepan Vronsky to give her lessons. Eventually she and Artie played their first game, she won, and he had never asked her to play again.
The Great Sinner struggled through postproduction. “We cut and cut until it came down to three hours,” Siodmak would recall. “But it was still too long, terribly slow, and with the additional disadvantage that now the story didn’t even make sense.” The director washed his hands of it, leaving others to whittle away another hour and shoot a new, happy ending. The finished film was certainly imperfect, but it was also unique, in part a result of a quirky blend of opposing intentions—Reinhardt’s pompous desire for a highbrow literary adaptation running head-on into Siodmak’s zesty, sardonic take on degeneracy. Though middlebrow critics would be put off by its perceived middlebrow pretensions, for some there was great fun to be had in seeing all those expensive production values and Metro tradition of quality supporting a tale of vice, addiction, and gambling psychos. For Ava Gardner The Great Sinner was a watershed, a professional advancement or at least a revelation. Her smooth, convincing performance in the part of a worldly nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat would have been inconceivable just twenty-four months earlier. Her uncertainties about her abilities and her ambivalence about acting in movies remained, but there was no doubt now that she was up to the job.
Gregory Peck, who would become a lifelong friend, gave her an inspiring pep talk about her need to gain some experience on the live stage. Ava said she had not tried out for a play since high school, and that then she had been eliminated at the first audition. Peck rhapsodized about the theater, and Ava reckoned that she was terrified at the thought of being in front of a live audience but that perhaps in that terror was a challenge she needed to confront. Peck spoke to his connections at the La Jolla Playhouse, and an invitation was extended. Ava nervously agreed to get her feet wet with a very small part. Relaying the invitation to the bosses at MGM she was told, “Of course you can’t do that.” Ben Thau explained that it just would not do to have an MGM star treading the boards as the third spear carrier from the left. “We can allow you to play the lead or nothing.” Ava told Peck and the playhouse thanks but no thanks.
Another watershed moment: Ava bought her first house. She had become sick of apartment living and the noise and the traffic and the sense of impermanence. For many months she went looking at properties, finally settling on a place high on a hill above Nichols Canyon, a modest pink house surrounded by a picket fence. She spent every weekend for months putting it in shape, shopping for fabrics, furnishing one room at a time. She spent all day at a gallery just to find the right images she wanted to hang in her bedroom, choosing a series of Degas prints of dancing girls. To proudly display the hard-won collection of books—many of them actually read— she had amassed since receiving that first syllabus from Artie, she filled the walls of the den with a set of huge antique walnut bookcases, now at last a proper resting place for Buddenbrooks and Babbitt.
She took particular interest in the yard and garden. She was still a farm girl, no matter what they said of her, still her father’s girl. Whatever anyone said about her acting, she knew how to plant and grow, how to weed and prune and dig. The soil proved difficult, as hard to prepare as that damned red clay back home. She and Bappie and her maid and some reluctant volunteers struggled to bring it to life. Visitors said, “Get a landscaper, for God’s sake! You’re a movie star!”
She filled the sandy hillside that ran below the backyard with purple and yellow ice plant. She had yellow roses run all around the picket fence. A trellis was put up at one side of the house and against it petunias and giant honeysuckle. Nearby she created a drying yard. On the first day they did a wash and put the yard to use, she stood outside and looked at the sheets and towels and blue jeans hanging on the line, she watched the laundry whipping in the breeze, and it looked like a scene from home, long ago, bringing memories of Brogden and the Teacherage and her mother.
Ava had been hiring part-time and live-in maids for years. For a while the job had been held by an efficient young black woman from the Midwest, and when she had suddenly needed to return home for an indefinite period she recommended her younger sister to take her place. Mearene Jordan was a slim, sweet-faced African American with a pleasant manner, a good sense of humor, and a sympathetic ear Ava responded to at once. Soon Mearene—Ava dubbed her “Reenie”—became more than a servant, in time a pal, a sounding board, a drinking buddy, and a member of the family as much as Bappie. Reenie would remain in Ava’s employ, off and on, for close to thirty years and be her trusted friend forever, a bumpy ride at times, full of fights, feuds, and separations, but one that lasted till the end. “As good a friend as I’ve ever had,” said Ava. Even before the friendship, Reenie would realize that Ava was no ordinary employer, no average white lady. The prejudiced attitudes that were as common as air in those days never entered Ava’s head for a minute. “You were either nice or you were not nice,” Reenie would say. “Ava was not color conscious at all.”
Racial divides were genuinely absurd to her. She expressed her lack of concern for such things in what was then disarming if not outright daring behavior. George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s African-American valet in the 1950s and a friend to Ava, recalled: “The most down-to-earth movie star you could ever imagine. She always told me she was part black, that ‘poor white trash’ always had some black blood in them.”* Ava came to have a number of friends among the black showbiz community in Hollywood, including Dorothy Dandridge, Herb Jeffries, Lena Horne, and musician and vocal coach Phil Moore. These were not relationships with an asterisk attached, guilt-ridden or condescending, but simple, real friendships. She went to their houses and they to hers, they socialized, argued, got drunk. With her black friends she would be seen at the bebop clubs in the ghetto neighborhood of Central Avenue, her regular appearances incurring the wrath of the LA Vice Department, made nervous by too much race mixing, especially any involving famous, beautiful white women.
Lena Horne, who lived not far from Ava’s Nichols Canyon house, would come to call Ava her younger sister, her spiritual kin. “She didn’t feel she was born to rule,” Lena wrote. “She felt that life was crappy and that a lot of people got mistreated for weird reasons and she liked to see people like each other.” They shared a similar taste in men, said Lena. “Musicians mostly, black and white.…We were both regretful that frequently the finest lovers were not the ones you really loved” The two would sit together high above the canyon for long hours di
scussing men and women and love and the ironies and inequities of it all.
The sorry state of racial relations in America and his call for strong civil rights legislation were among the things that drew Ava to the 1948 presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace, FDR’s onetime vice president, now running a third-party campaign against Harry Truman, the man who had taken his job and become president on Roosevelt’s death. Ava’s first visit back home in two years coincided with Wallace’s tumultous campaign swing through the South. As he moved from state to state giving speeches, demanding integrated audiences wherever he spoke, proponents of the Jim Crow status quo greeted him with catcalls, tomatoes, violence. A young campaign worker was stabbed in the chest. When Wallace came to Raleigh, North Carolina, Ava agreed to join the candidate on the dais at a luncheon at the Sir Walter Hotel. Wallace spoke passionately of the struggle at hand against prejudice and intolerance in the South. “I know we cannot legislate love,” said the Progressive Party candidate, “but we most certainly can and will legislate against hate.”
Ava chatted with Wallace afterward, promising to help his campaign in any way she could. “He is a fine man,” she told reporters. Some found Wallace to be a naive idealist and a Stalinist appeaser, including Louis B. Mayer, who summoned Ava to his office and advised her to stay away from such “radical” engagements. “I warned Katharine Hepburn as I’m warning you, and she wouldn’t listen to me and look at her, she’s destroyed her career!”
What in fact concerned Mayer and the men on the third floor far more than Ava’s progressive politics was her radical social life. The gossip filtered through to Mayer like so many dispatches from a war zone. She drank too much, she used foul language in public, knew too many men. There were rumors, stories told—raucous behavior, a prurient interest in sex—taking off her clothes for that bearded artist at Universal, and the time, at a barbecue at William Holden’s house, Ronald Reagan had come upon Ava, the black model Maddy Comfort, and artist Paul Clemens all splashing around together, all three stark naked; Reagan had nearly fallen into the pool himself he was so startled—stories like the one of her night in San Francisco on a publicity appearance for The Hucksters, a drunken night on the town when Ava had coaxed an old hack journalist to take her to see the town’s most notorious brothel and she’d mingled with the whores, looked through two-way mirrors, and god knew what-all had gone on. Stories, rumors of aggressive seductions, group sex parties, an interracial romance—with another woman. With Ava, Metro fretted, there was at any moment the potential for a career-destroying scandal— now, Mayer and his boys moaned, after all the time and money they had invested in making her a star, all the money that was to be made, what a painful irony it was.
But what could you do? She was defiant, this girl they had nurtured since she had come out of the woods seven years ago. Threats fell on deaf ears with Ava. She would threaten right back—say she was thinking of leaving the business, quitting to get an education, going back to North Carolina, crazy things. All they could do was keep a close watch and try to keep her from destroying their valuable property. What a business we are in, they would grumble—where the merchandise went off on its own at night and might not come back in one piece in the morning.
One evening the studio had set her up on an important interview with some reporters from Time. Visiting from the New York office, Henry Grunwald (the magazine’s future managing editor), along with the head of the LA bureau, sat quizzing the star over dinner at an Italian restaurant. As Grunwald recalled the scene, Metro publicist George Nichols had planted himself firmly between the reporters and the star to referee the interview and to make sure Ava behaved, which in no time at all she had refused to do. Grunwald found her altogether “fantastic.” Yes, she told him, she certainly did have a reputation as a sexpot, and yes, it was pretty fucking well deserved. Eyeing a young member of the waitstaff standing nearby, she said, “People think I am the type who would take the busboy out back. And”—the young man trembled as she looked him over—”I just might.”
“Fantastic,” breathed Grunwald.
Nichols tried desperately to change the subject, to which efforts Ava responded with hostility. In another moment, fed up with the flack’s interruptions, she excused herself to go to the ladies room. Grunwald sensed she was ditching them and gave pursuit, catching up with her in the parking lot. Without saying a word Ava let him into the car and sped off. “She was the most reckless driver I have ever known,” he would write. “After a hair-raising ride we arrived at her home and proceeded to attack a bottle of Courvoisier. She had just kicked off her shoes and started dancing on the coffee table when Nichols arrived, panting and fuming.”
In the autumn of 1949 Metro had loaned her out once more, this time to RKO, the studio now owned and run by her old friend Howard Hughes. Hughes had yet to set foot on the lot, though he was in every other way a hands-on mogul, screening tests and dailies of every production, involved in scripting, casting, and editing, as well as directing the wiretapping of dressing rooms and demanding oaths of loyalty to the United States and signed denials of Communist affiliations from his employees.
My Forbidden Past—originally titled Carriage Trade—was an accursed project long before Ava Gardner arrived at the studio to begin filming— and indeed it remained an albatross of a production long after she was gone. Hughes had alienated the producer, Polan Banks, and fired the originally scheduled star, Ann Sheridan (who successfully sued him for damages). Set in 1890s New Orleans, My Forbidden Past was a plot-heavy, convoluted melodrama about a vindictive heiress seeking revenge on her former flame, and nearly sending him to the gallows for a murder he did not commit before her final, self-sacrificing change of heart. It was a strong part for Ava, a passionate, self-absorbed villainess of the sort that had made Bette Davis’s reputation a decade before, and she performed it well. But the film, as released, defied enjoyment; it was slow and unlikable and lifeless. There was something rough, unfinished about it all, the blame for this probably lying with Hughes, who personally fussed over the film, reediting and trimming it month after month, to what end no one could fathom. It would not be released for nearly two years after principal photography had concluded, and after its brief run in the theaters was written off as a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar loss to the stockholders.
Ava’s costar was RKO’s broad-shouldered, hipster workhorse, Robert Mitchum. It took little time on the set for these two to find common cause. They were birds of a feather in many ways. Ava felt a strong surge of attraction for the insolent, amusing, smoldering actor. She flirted and teased him outrageously in their romantic scenes, bringing Mitchum to the very edge of losing his cool, a thing theretofore impossible to imagine. Ava took to hanging out in his dressing room because hers was “way over there on the other side of the lot” or something; she’d sit around with Mitchum and some of his cronies, Ava in her high-necked wasp-waisted 1890s costume and barefoot, swapping stories and swigging cocktails. Ava asked him for a lift home one night, and they stopped somewhere for a drink. It might have been a few drinks. In Ava’s mostly decorous, often whitewashed memoir, she wrote regarding Mitchum: “Let me make a frank admission: if I could have gotten him into bed, I would have.” The line (italics her own) may be read as pointedly ambiguous. Mitchum, in his comments to pals regarding Ava, left less room for interpretation: She could get him into bed, and she did. Mitchum would tell people for years to come that Ava was the most beautiful and exciting woman he had ever known.
“That was when I first met Ava, when she was going around with Bob,” recalled Herb Jeffries, the tall, handsome singer (formerly of the Duke Ellington Band) and actor in movies (“the Bronze Buckaroo,” the first black cowboy star). “I was working in a club called El Morocco. And he was doing a picture with her, and he brought her in to hear me sing. Several times they came in to see me. They were having a fling, yeah, yeah. Robert was a great club carouser, and I think the both of them were redecorating some of the clubs on Sunset Boulevard. The
y were having a lot of fun. I’d go over to the table with them and have a drink. And Ava and I got along very well, we became friends. She came to see me sing by herself as well. She was always very warm, very friendly, like somebody that wasn’t even in the business. No big ego on her at all. She was far above that. And Bob was the greatest guy. Yeah, they were having some fun.”
They would slip out the RKO gate each evening when filming for the day was concluded, headed off on a long nocturnal adventure among the bars and jazz clubs and after-hours hangouts of Los Angeles. Ava thought she knew the town’s nightspots pretty well, but Mitchum would introduce her to places, whole neighborhoods, she had never known existed, a hep underground ten strata deep, filled with amiably unsavory characters, each of whom seemed to be Bob’s best friend. Mitchum was only a few months out of prison, where he had served time on a conspiracy-to-possess- marijuana charge—caught by the cops in a Hollywood Hills bungalow with some reefer and a pair of brassy blond starlets. Mitchum had managed to survive a scandal that might have ended almost anyone else’s career. Nonetheless, and despite still being on probation, he was far from on his best behavior. He was still smoking dope, some nights as frequently and openly as tobacco. Ava had little to no interest in drugs, had once snorted some cocaine off the fingertips of Errol Flynn (he’d sworn it would help her get to an early morning hairdressing call in tiptop form), and had smoked a little grass during her marriage to Artie, and neither experience had impressed her. Bob, a proselytizer for pot, thought she had perhaps gotten some inferior product and suggested she give it another try, offered a joint from his shirt pocket, and lit her up. Mitchum had the pedigree of all his weed: This, he explained, was from the crop of a one- eyed Dutch farmer on one of the lesser Banda Islands in the South China Sea. Ava smoked away, and later that night, after a disconcerting period of what felt like uncontrollable lévitation, she swore off grass for good.
