Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  The next day Ava was in her dressing room waiting to be called to the set when Charlton Heston came by and grimly informed her that Nicholas Ray had just collapsed, suffering what appeared to be a heart attack. White-faced and gasping, he had been carried to a car and taken to the hospital in Madrid.

  Ava was shaken, Heston remembered, and her response seemed to him to assume at least some responsibility for what had occurred. Heston didn’t know what to think. Her behavior had been very bad, but he also felt Ray had not been up to the responsibility he’d taken on. Ray, he decided, was a loser. Others were even less sympathetic. Yordan believed there had been no heart attack, that Nick had faked one as an excuse to quit the picture. But Ray did recover and according to some sources was ready to come back, and Bronston said, “I don’t want him back.” In any case he did not return, remaining in his house in Madrid while others completed the picture. Nicholas Ray would never direct another feature film.

  Andrew Marton, generally a specialist in second-unit action sequences, with notable credits on Ben Hur and The Longest Day, took over for the remaining work, except two intimate scenes with the leads for which Heston had them import from Hollywood a director he admired, Guy Green (they had worked together on a scenic melodrama called Diamond Head). Whether Ava had become sobered and focused by the turn of events with Ray or somehow responded better to Green, these scenes were completed without incident. In the last week of September there were still two months of filming left, for Heston and the hundreds of Chinese waiters, but Ava’s work was finally done. On the twenty-ninth she attended a birthday party for one of the Bronston executives and looked spectacular in a white satin evening gown and layers of emeralds. Ava and Charlton Heston found themselves at first awkwardly seated together, watching as others at the party danced. Heston had been exasperated by her for many weeks—he would forever after call it the worst behavior he had ever seen by a professional colleague. But now it was all over and as they sat and chatted, he became aware again of vulnerability and sweetness beneath the sound and fury. It was difficult, he seemed to feel in the end, not to feel sympathy and a certain mystified awe for Ava Gardner’s chaotic journey through life. Exiting the party just behind her, he caught a last, exemplary glimpse of his costar in the Madrid street, beautiful and alone, standing in traffic, looking for a taxi, she had taken up the pose of a matador and was making veronica passes with her red evening cape as the cars rushed by. “It was unforgettable,” wrote Heston. “My most vivid memory of that extraordinary lady.”

  When 55 Days at Peking opened in London in early May 1963, the Daily Express ran a feature by longtime Ava Gardner admirer Leonard Mosley. He had been eagerly charting her career for more than a dozen years: first with barely disguised salaciousness, then with growing respect; now he seemed to have composed her professional obituary. The piece was headlined: is THIS THE TWILIGHT OF A GODDESS? And it began: “I hate to be cruel to a beautiful woman whose proud profile and rich body have quickened my pulses in film after film…my dream and idol of the female at her most exotic.…But yesterday I saw her in a film called 55 Days at Peking and my heart instead of yearning for her, bled. Is this the last film Ava Gardner will ever make as the most exquisitely attractive femme fatale that has been seen on the screen?” Mosley listed a series of physical and spiritual flaws in his favorite sex symbol: There were bags, shadows, folds of flesh, she looked tired, acted tired. “She has a world weary attitude towards her performance,” he wrote, “which seems to say: Oh Lord, if they ask me to do this scene again I shall scream.’ “

  Legendary status is too rare a commodity to be easily dismissed. Despite her age—the big four-oh in December 1962—despite what some observed as a decline in her appearance, despite her costly and debilitating behavior during the production of 55 Days at Peking, still she could not deter more offers of work. Soon after finishing her job for Bronston she was approached about a part in a film Blake Edwards would be shooting in Italy in the coming winter, The Pink Panther, a farce-thriller that would introduce to the world the character of Parisian policeman Inspector Clouseau. Already cast were David Niven, Robert Wagner, Claudia Cardinale, and, in the role of Clouseau, Peter Ustinov. Edwards and producer Martin Jurow wanted Ava Gardner to play the inspector’s chic and chronically unfaithful wife. “All audiences had to do was take one look at Ava’s gorgeous pair of lips,” according to Jurow, “and they’d understand why Clouseau believed every lie they spoke.”

  Ava, of course, could not simply be hired for the role. She had to be wooed. Jurow was dispatched to Madrid and put through days and nights of cajoling, flattering, begging, led on a chase through the city’s nightlife, picking up the bills for Ava’s hungry, thirsty entourage, drinking with Gypsies and doing an improvised flamenco with a restaurant tablecloth tied around his waist. At last, after much annoyance at the fact that Blake Edwards would not relocate his production to Madrid instead of the dreaded, paparazzi-ridden Rome, and with Jurow’s consent to a list of costly perks demanded—a villa and staff in Rome, a twenty-four-hour limousine and two drivers, a particular private cook from a certain small Italian village, hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff flown in from Hollywood— Ava agreed to do the movie. Further sweetening the pot, Jurow arranged for French couturier Yves Saint-Laurent to provide her a custom wardrobe for the film, though she expressed aggravation on hearing that Saint Laurent would not abandon his spring collection to come to Madrid for her fittings. She flew to Paris, where Jurow and his minions had already done much to try and make her visit a luxurious one—a suite at the Plaza- Athénée, flowers and champagne awaiting her arrival. Unfortunately word had leaked to the press of Ava Gardner’s visit, and the presence of photographers at the airport set off a temper tantrum of such foul- mouthed intensity that it left Jurow feeling stained. “There was Ava…with swiveling hips and vulgar expletives.…She cursed the photographers, only to be jeered at in return. She cursed me prolifically…she cursed the driver and the luggage carriers, who were simply doing their jobs and had nothing to do with what she perceived as a betrayal.”

  Jurow escorted her to the hotel without speaking to her and then called Blake Edwards and apprised him of their star’s performance. They were only two weeks from the first day of filming. But the portents of a troublesome shoot ahead were too plain to ignore. Jurow waited till the middle of the night, then tiptoed up to Ava’s suite and slipped a note under her door: Thanks, it more or less said, but no thanks.

  The next day she would make furious phone calls, fifteen hundred dollars’ worth, to the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, demanding her salary, threatening to sue. But the matter fizzled. A few columnists took brief notice of the veteran actress’s dismissal. For The Pink Panther she was quickly replaced by a starlet from Charles Feldman’s stable, one of his many sometime bedmates, Capucine, whose obscurity relative to Ava Gardner led Peter Ustinov (apparently under orders from his real wife) to withdraw from the production, which led in turn to the last-minute hiring of Peter Sellers for the role of Inspector Clouseau—and thus, one might say, a legendary franchise was born, thanks to the lost temper and colorful vocabulary of Ava Gardner.

  “I ran into her one day in Madrid at the Hilton,” recalled Marc Lawrence, the actor and veteran Hollywood tough guy, who had moved to Europe in the blacklist period and in the sixties worked for Phil Yordan in Spain. “She was gorgeous, oh, Christ! She had nothing better to do and we were having a party, so I invited her to come up. We were going to have American hot dogs, and she liked that. You couldn’t always get that kind of shit from back home. So she came. She didn’t stay long. There were a lot of younger women at the party, and I don’t think she liked the competition. We were talking, bullshitting. She was drinking a vodka or something. I said to her, ‘How’s your love life these days, kid? You in love with anybody?’ She says, ‘Love!’ And she swallows the rest of her vodka. She says, ‘Honey, love is nothing but a pain in the ass.’ “

  She had tried to avoid another seriou
s romance, like an addict trying to stay clean. It was bad for her but it felt so good. There were brief flings, people she met—a Spanish film producer, a medical officer from the American air base—people she let pursue her for a few days at a time. There were one- night stands here and there: in Los Angeles with a young Steve McQueen—he complained to friends that she had all but assaulted him. In New York a one-week reunion with Walter Chiari who was making a disastrous debut in a Broadway musical. There was Sinatra, once in a long while in person, mostly on the phone, their conversations a mixed blessing. They were supposed to act like buddies, could tell each other anything, that was the deal, but sometimes there would be a hint of cruelty in the way he’d mention some chick in passing, some funny thing she’d said, and Ava knew that he wanted her to know that he and the chick were lovers and all the fun he was having without her. She would think about him and wonder about the possibilities, and then something would remind her that it was never going to work, and it would leave her upset for the rest of the day.

  Friends and relatives sometimes tried to find her a new boyfriend. “I remember Bappie had somehow arranged a date for Ava with Rock Hudson,” said Betty Sicre. “Nothing came of it, but Bappie was hopeful. Bappie and I were together then, and Bappie said, Oh, they make such a nice couple.’ “

  When Ava went to visit Princess Grace in Monaco, the princess wanted to “fix her up” with the Greek shipping magnate and her husband Rainier’s patron, Aristotle Onassis. Grace—who Ava felt had grown bored in the confines of her little principality and was desperate for some thrills like in the old days, even vicarious ones—excitedly confided that Ari had a reputation as a very forceful lover and the rumor was that he enjoyed whipping his women before he had sex with them. A meeting was arranged, an intimate dinner party at the palace. Ava found the saturnine, late-middle-aged Onassis highly unappealing, whispered to Grace that not even a good whipping could make her change her mind, and slipped away.

  In Paris at the time of the Pink Panther misunderstanding, she had gone one night to La Tour d’Argent on the quai de la Tournelle, the fabled four-hundred-year-old restaurant considered one of the finest in the world. Oblivious to normal dining hours observed outside Madrid, she had arrived at close to midnight, asking to be fed. The restaurant was empty, the cooks had all gone home. It was Ava Gardner, though, and deference was paid. The restaurant’s owner and host, the tall, dashing Claude Terrail, came forth to greet her.

  “Do you remember me, Claude?” Ava said. “I came here once long ago.”

  “I remember very well,” said Terrail. “You came with Frank Sinatra.”

  He explained the unfortunate circumstances of the hour, the cooks all gone, but if she would care for a steak, Terrail told her, he would turn the stove on and cook it for her himself. And so he did, a filet mignon with fresh herbs.

  When she had finished her meal Terrail returned again to the table. Ava looked up at him, sighed, smiled.

  “Claude,” she said, “that was without doubt the worst steak I have ever had.”

  They agreed to go out for a drink. They sat somewhere and talked and drank till five in the morning, then strolled along the Seine and back to Terrail’s apartment below the Tour for a nightcap.

  “Just for a drink,” recalled Claude Terrail. “But we met again the next day. And again. And she returned to Paris a week later and then…for seven months, eight months, all over the world I went with her. My fantastic time with Ava, the most divine person I have ever met.”

  Claude Terrail was no naif, no stranger to glamorous women or to the eccentric lives of show-business celebrities. He was a playboy of some renown and for a time a resident of Hollywood, where he had been the son-in-law of mogul Jack Warner. He had known every sort of person in the course of his colorful life and he had never—in Paris forty-one years later, his assessment remained the same—known anyone like Ava Gardner. Everything about her would prove to be formidable, exceptional, extreme: her beauty, her generosity, her passion, her anger, her fears.

  “Such highs and such lows, this was Ava. Nothing between. Like a queen one moment, a scared child the next. At times so romantic, so sweet, like a girl of seventeen years old. For my birthday a check on which she has written words: ‘foryou…in the amount of a million kisses. ‘ Such lovely thoughts she had. Late at night, coming home to find these small notes she has written and left in a trail—it was like the story of the boy who leaves the stones that lead him home—notes of love across the floor leading to where she is waiting.…She was very romantic, a strange, romantic creature. The things she did were not those of an ordinary person. For instance, she was still very close to Frank Sinatra. She still had the greatest praise for him, and she would do something I found to be extraordinary. She would put one of his records on and have a private talk with him, as he was singing. She would sit and listen and say, ‘Yes, yes, I know…‘ or another song and she would say, ‘No, don say that…you must forgetē . / She would have a talk with the record itself. It was something almost mystical. It was really something to see.”

  Terrail would remember a “dream girl”—from breakfast to nightfall. But then the drink and everything could change. A dream could become a nightmare. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Terrail would recall it. The alcohol made the difference. Voilà! Then came the fighting, the suspicions. Imagining that everyone was after her, the newspapers were her enemies— everyone, the chauffeur, or some strange man walking on the street. There were fits of fury. She would throw anything at hand: “Rare porcelain and fine crystal would meet the same fate.” Being a person of discerning tastes as she was, said Terrail, the destruction of such beautiful objects would leave her all the more upset when she regained her temper. “In the night she could behave very badly. But if you waited, if you remained faithful, the Ava you loved would return; if you could stay awake to four or five in the morning she would come back from this angry place, back to being the sweetest woman again and saying the most tender things in the world.”

  It was a jet-set romance: each weekend a flight to one or the other’s city, getaways in Europe, America, the Pacific. “Always she liked to go,” said Claude Terrail, “to run, run, run. Keep on running.” Travel with Ava Gardner, whatever the destination, was no ordinary holiday, more a journey to a surreal landscape where Ava alone possessed the road map. A trip to the south of Spain in her big American car. Ava, Claude, a maid, and chauffeur, a long drive to the coast, to Marbella. In bed at the hotel, Ava suddenly frightened, angry. A shadow in the garden outside their window. She was certain it was a photographer, slithering around in the darkness. They were out there, after her, nothing could convince her otherwise. Everyone had to awaken, pack their bags, they were leaving Marbella at once! They would go to Seville instead, hours on the dark roads, the chauffeur nodding off with his foot pressing the accelerator pedal to the floorboard, the car weaving across lanes, Ava in the back drinking an entire thermos of gin. Arrived in Seville, directing the driver to a club she knew, Ava wanted a flamenco, demanded they bring out the singers, but everyone had gone to bed, even the Gypsies. They drove on to the Alfonso XIII. The night clerk refused to find them rooms. The others could go find another hotel if they liked, Ava said, but in Seville she could stay only at the Alfonso, and then, barefoot, gliding through the lobby, curling up on a plush couch like a child, and going to sleep.

  “I would sometimes say to myself, ‘Enough!’ “ Claude Terrail remembered. “But I was too much in love, and she was too beautiful. One time she had been drinking all night and mad at everybody. I thought, I will awake early and I will look at her. I’m going to have a good look at her in the morning, no makeup on her face, after a night like tonight, and I will see the true Ava and that will be enough for me to say, ‘Forget it!’ Not at all! I looked at her in the morning and she was the same—gorgeous, gorgeous. There was no escape from it.”

  They traveled to Hawaii together. “We stayed at a villa. In Waikiki. A lovely house. A great time and also t
errible. There is a wonderful drink in Hawaii—a mai tai. She loved mai tais. One is perfect. Two, okay. Three, four, too many. She would become unhappy, always fighting. We would be in front of the ocean. She said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to be nice to me, I’m leaving!’ ‘Where are you going?’ I said. And she looked at the ocean. She said, ‘I’m going to China. Leave me alone, I’m going to China.’ I said, ‘Well, all right, go to China!’ She tried to get on the raft that was there, and of course she sank. And she said, ‘See! See! You want to kill me!’Y said, 7 don ‘t want to kill nobody /’I said, ‘7just want my life to get back to normal!’

  “In Hawaii every night Frank Sinatra called. It was difficult. He did not speak well of me. He would say to her, ‘What are you doing there with that son-of-a-bitch? Do you know what I have heard about him?’ There is something funny about that part. Later, back in France, I learned that my best friend, Porfirio Rubirosa, and his wife had been a guest of Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas at that time while he was saying such bad things about me to Ava. Sinatra asked him about me, and Rubirosa said, ‘Who?’ ‘You know, your friend Terrail.’ And Ruby said, ‘Oh, let’s not say friend. Let’s just say I know him.’ In Paris I went to him. ‘Ruby, why did you not defend me in front of Sinatra?’ He said, ‘Oh, Claude, think. I am just starting my wonderful time in Las Vegas and suddenly you are starting problems with my host. I did not want to ruin my vacation!’ So I said, ‘Okay, Ruby. That’s all right, then.’ “

  The holiday in the Hawaiian sun continued on its lyric and explosive course until one more terrible argument. A sudden accusation: Terrail was having an affair with the maid, she was sure of it! The restaurateur turned and started packing. “I said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, I’m leaving.’ And I left. It was over. I went to a big hotel in Honolulu and I began to call people, friends in Hollywood, New York. I said, ‘I’ve left her. I’m coming back. Please, let’s get together for some good times, introduce me to some new people.’ And in the middle of my conversation to Hollywood the line was cut off, and suddenly Ava’s voice was there instead. ‘Claude,you have to come back.’I said, ‘No, I’m not going back with you. You are too rowdy, you’re just a drunk.’ Etc., etc. I hung up. I called a friend in New York. Same thing. The line interrupted, and Ava is speaking. I don’t know how she did it—she had the telephone operator cut into the line for her each time. It was extraordinary. And then! A knock on the door. It is the hotel manager with two very large Hawaiians. The manager says, ‘Please, sir, will you pack your bags. I must ask you to leave the hotel at once.’ No explanation. I had no choice. I packed my bags, and they took me downstairs. When I crossed the lobby the people looked at me leaving with these two big men at my sides. ‘Jesus, he must be a gangster or something. They are arresting him.’ And they take me outside to a limousine and open the door. And there is Ava, sitting inside the limousine smoking a cigarette in a long holder. ‘Now, Claude, do you see you can’t get away?’ She had kidnapped me!”