Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  With the work done, nearly everyone was eagerly moving on, to return to home, family, the next job. Ava felt nothing, no one, drawing her away. She decided to stay on a while longer, for a little more of the sun, the wa- terskiing, the beachboy.

  One day in December the police came to the villa to tell her that Frank Sinatra’s son—nineteen-year-old Frank Junior—had been kidnapped (a gang of three having snatched the kid from a Lake Tahoe hotel room). How they came to deliver this information to her is not certain. Perhaps Frank himself had wanted her to know. Nelly Barquette, Guillermo Wulffs wife, had translated for her, and now Ava, who was very upset, asked Nelly to stay with her for a little while and talk. Nelly had never liked Ava much, and the two had never become friends. Ava was a wild person and acted too much like a big movie star, Nelly thought—what she would call a diva—always ordering people around as if they were all her servants. But now, in the Casa de la Luna, as they sat together and had some drinks, Ava seemed like another person, more of a human being. She was very upset, Nelly remembered, and she cried because of the boy who had been kidnapped. She cried out, “That boy…he could have been my son“ She had never had a child, she said, and for this she felt much regret. She could have had one with Frank Sinatra, she said. And she cried some more, and it seemed like she was no longer crying for the boy who had been kidnapped but for herself and the things in her life that she had done wrong. And she told Nelly Barquette that she was still in love with Frank Sinatra and it hurt so much to be in love with someone you could not have.

  “Yes, she said this to me many times. She was in love with him. She would always be in love. And it hurt so much.”

  *To reiterate an earlier statement: In our conversation, Herb Jeffries denied any intimacy with Ava Gardner.

  *Almost simultaneously with Ava Gardner’s seeming professional devolvement in Spain, Marilyn Monroe, Ava’s presumed successor as Hollywood sex goddess, working on the Fox lot in California making a movie called Something’s Got to Give, had evidenced a remarkably similar inability to perform. After weeks of Monroe’s disappearances and difficulties, the filming was halted and the actress dismissed. On August 5, Marilyn Monroe was found dead from barbiturate poisoning. Whether her demise was caused by accident, suicide, or murder remains in dispute, though it was certainly at least in part a death by stardom.

  *On the Trail of the Iguana, with Lowell’s color footage of the production, offers a lush contrast to Gabriel Figueroa’s sharp, stark black-and-white cinematography; Huston later concluded that he should have made The Night of the guana in color.

  *Small world that it is: Ava had crossed paths with both JFK, her former swain, and his avenger; Jack Ruby, the assassin of the assassin, in a rambling testimony to the Warren Commission not long before he died, would distractedly recall a morning in Havana in 1959 when he had bumped into the beautiful movie star, Ava Gardner herself, having breakfast right before him; a pointless happy memory of a better day.

  PART FOUR

  TWELVE

  Venus Falling

  She celebrated her forty-first birthday in Hollywood in a brawl at a nightclub called Basin Street West. A photographer bored in on the film star and an unidentified “young male escort/’ said the papers the next day. The camera went off, and the escort grabbed for it, shouting, “You can get your head broken for that!” The two men scuffled, Ava running out, the escort catching up, a Cadillac sedan screaming out of sight. A visit to Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance in Scottsdale, Arizona, for her sins mummified in seven pounds of crystalline paraffin. To New York with Bappie and the corgis, Rags and Cara, a suite at the St. Regis, a limousine at her disposal courtesy of Ray Stark, long nights of Broadway, jazz, and booze, holding court for old friends like Larry Tarr (still running the family photo shops where it had all begun), and new ones like the Birminghams, Stephen and Nan.

  Stephen was a young magazine journalist, one of those sent down to report the goings-on in Puerto Vallarta; he had slipped under the barrier chain she held up to reporters, become a drinking companion, she’d taken him under her wing. “I want to marry you,” he would remember her telling him somewhere. “We’ll worry about your wife later.” Nan was a homemaker and mom in suburban Westchester. “I got the phone call one day, telling me, ‘I’ve been here a week, and Ava Gardner and I have been inseparable,’ “ she remembered. “Well, for a relatively young bride that was a bit terrifying. Ava Gardner: That’s pretty stiff competition. I mean, that was scary. Then he got home. And he’d had a ball, I can tell you that.

  And I heard some of the stories of what went on down there. It was the closest thing to real decadence. The bottles open by eight in the morning. Ava with her Mexican hunks. People banging anything that came by male, female, in between. Two legs, four legs. Then Ava began calling Stephen from all over. She was at the place in Arizona where you went to dry out. She was wandering around. And I took one of the calls and she says, ‘Hey, hon, I'm just dying to meet you!’ Ha! She was coming to New York and wanted to take us out on the town. So, if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em. We went to meet her in Manhattan. And this was very glamorous for me. I wasn’t the biggest square around, but I was a housewife taking care of kids and this was going to be a very glamorous evening for me. My God, glamorous! By the time it was over I’m doing things like lugging the corset off of Ava Gardner’s drunk elderly sister and scooping up dog poop from the floor of the St. Regis Hotel…. The start of what I call the Ava Gardner Period of my life.

  “She was a raging beauty. That was first. I never saw anybody so beautiful. Maybe Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe on a very good day Elizabeth Taylor. She was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing. I’ve known a few women like that. It’s like something’s sprayed, like a bitch in heat. You can’t get to the end of the block with women like this where five guys aren’t following, falling over themselves. Guys and girls following, too. And these women know, they understand it about themselves. I’m not one of them, so I don’t know how it works. Ava had it times a hundred. She could seduce anyone in two split seconds.

  “She was the most charming person in the world. Until she had too much to drink, and then she could be your worst nightmare. We had a fight right at the start. We were in the taxi. She was drunk, and she wanted to go to another club. It was already late. I told her we had to get back and get our car before the garage closed. We had to go home. ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ ‘Ava, I’m not telling you what to do, I’m telling you we have to go home.’ She was furious with me. Nobody told her she couldn’t do something she wanted to do. ‘Take me back to the St. Regis. I’m going to take my dogs for a walk.’ I said, ‘Ava, I hope you take off that emerald necklace first, you won’t last twenty seconds in Central Park.’ We get up to her suite, and she goes stumbling into her bedroom and slams the door. Her sister is stretched out, passed out cold, and there was dog doo all over the floor. I called down to the front desk to have them take the dogs out.

  She came storming out finally in her slacks and loafers. ‘Where are my dogs? What have you done with my dogs?’ I said, ‘I’ve had someone from the hotel come to walk them. You’re in no condition.’ This was too much. This was High Noon time. She was like a tiger coming at me. My husband’s fallen asleep, and she’s coming at me. I thought, if she hits me I’m going to hit her back! I was terrified, actually. She looked ready to kill me. But when she got within a foot the whole rage melted away. She said, “ Oh, hon, ljust love you! And she collapsed against me. And I said, ‘Well, Ava, I love you too.’

  “From then on she was really very very dear to me. Maybe it was the fact that I had stood up to her, I don’t know. I don’t know if a lot of thought went into anything that she did. We became friends. She trusted me, and she didn’t trust a lot of people. I became like the old sorority sister she never had, who didn’t want anything from her, never asked for anything. And she was very generous. Always trying to give you presents. She’d give me a fistful of jewelry. The good stuff. I’d put it b
ack. She’d say, ‘You never let me give you anything!’ A lot of the time I played the caretaker. There had to be somebody in the group who knew where the car keys were or how to get home or what city you were in. You wouldn’t believe how much these people drank. Drunks and total nuts who survive have a knack for finding people to look after them. ...”

  And Ava needed a lot of looking after. She could lose her shoes in two minutes. Has anybody seen Ava’s shoes? If she went to the bathroom someone had to go along or you didn’t know if she would ever come back. The Birminghams would get the call when Ava hit town. What are you kids doing? Come on over! It was like a trip through the looking glass when you went to visit Ava. You never knew what would happen, who you were going to meet. There was one afternoon at the Regency Hotel— she’d been banned from the St. Regis by then—Ava in bed with the flu, her room covered in blackout curtains, not a splinter of light, Bappie tiptoeing in the dark. Ava, honey, are you feeling any better? Can we get you anything? and Ava moaning, Oh, she was so sick, just bring her a big glass of vodka. And all day long the visitors popping in. Tony Curtis. James Baldwin—Jimmy wanted Ava to come and join him picketing outside Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall because it was so mean to Marilyn Monroe. Salvador Dali dropping by. Dali brings a rhinoceros horn at the tip of which is a candied violet for Ava. Some of that surrealism. Ava takes the candied violet and eats it. And so on through the afternoon. Ava at last well enough to get dressed. Then downstairs to the bar. Ava says she’s feeling like a Manhattan. That sounds good to me, Bappie says. Manhattans for everybody!

  “Then there was the time,” Nan Birmingham remembered, “we’re all together at the hotel and Ava says, ‘Francis is coming.’ Just like that. Sinatra! He’s coming by. And this was a magic night. Five or six of us are there. And he arrived. By himself. Just came over to see Ava. He brought her some flowers and one of his new record albums or something. And there they were. Their relationship with each other was just charming. They were so cute together it was hard to imagine what I had heard about them, the fights, the crazy arguments, throwing ketchup at each other and all this stuff. The two of them sat together and Sinatra told stories. He told some story about how he’d been out at Lake Tahoe with the Rat Pack. And they’d gotten somebody dressed up in a bear costume, somebody’s valet or somebody, so they could scare the drunky one, Dean Martin, and the bear jumped out and chased Dean Martin screaming into the woods. It was pretty damn silly, but it was Frank Sinatra telling the story with these big blue eyes, and this guy had a magic about him that was unbelievable (I mean, when he looked at you it was like you were sure you were the cutest thing that ever came down the pike; I mean it was a very heady trip being in his presence, even with his ex-wife in the room). But they were something together. And when he was leaving, she was seeing him to the door of the suite and he put his arms around her and pulled her really close to him. And he slides his hands down into her trousers to her backside. And I heard him say, ‘I love your ...’I don’t remember what word exactly but the message was clear. And he said, ‘There’s one more reason we should get back together.’ You could see he was still mad for her.

  “Oh, Ava. God she was fun. Not just the decadence. Ava had a great sense of fun. She was funny and fun and exciting. But exhausting. It was a strenuous job being around her. I scooped up a lot of dog doo during my Ava Gardner Period. I couldn’t go on with it for long. I said, ‘Stephen, if you want to go, take Ava out, she needs an escort, do whatever you want, I can’t handle it.’ Who had the energy? I had to get three kids off to school every morning at seven.”

  In May, Ava accepted an invitation from Betty and Ricardo Sicre for a Mediterranean cruise on their motor yacht Rampager. It was foremost a chance to get to know one of her heroes, the brilliant, twice-defeated candidate for U.S. president and now ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson. A day late, missing the departure, she joined them at Capri, coming by helicopter from Naples. “She admired Stevenson, talked about him many times and how he should have been president,” Betty Sicre would say. “They got along well, became real friends, though she didn’t stay with us long. He liked her, too. They talked about politics, literature. She was at her most personable with him. No, there was no hint of romance. She was on her good behavior. They did turn some heads when we were in port. I remember Ava and Adlai were walking a bit ahead of us and an American couple passed them, and they both sort of fell over when they saw them. And by the time they passed us I heard the wife saying, ‘That was Ava Gardner with Adlai Stevenson!’ and the husband saying, ‘No, it couldn’t be.”‘

  They swam, lay in the sun, anchored off Stromboli with its smoldering volcano. Stevenson kept a journal. He was intrigued, a little perplexed by the admiring movie star. One night in port he awoke, long after midnight, and he saw her outside, all alone, walking away toward the sleeping village, disappearing in the dark. The next night he wrote this in his journal: “Dinner a splendid pasta with sausages and meat balls and glorious sauce very piquante cooked by Ava, who then went to bed afraid, anxious about our reaction! Strange, lovely, lush girl.”

  The pressure to perform, to impress, grew too strong for her. On edge, she had a row with someone over something one day, and in a sulk she abandoned the Rampager at the next port of call. Stevenson was evidently not put off by the whiff of temper, inviting her to visit him at the UN later that year, a very happy occasion for Ava. “We saw her after she left him,” recalled Nan Birmingham, “and she never looked so proud and thrilled. She really adored Adlai Stevenson.” She looked forward to the friendship blossoming, Stevenson becoming another wise man-father figure like Robert Graves, but it was not to be, the sixty-five-year-old ambassador dropping dead of a heart attack in London the following summer.

  Ava returned to New York to attend the July 10 charity premiere (one hundred dollars per seat) of Night of the Iguana at the Philharmonic Hall, bringing as her guests the Birminghams and a visiting relative and two friends of the family from Johnston County In the auditorium Ava sat beside Tennessee Williams, whose guest was his beloved mother, Edwina (wearing a startlingly weathered muskrat stole). Soon after the lights went down, Tennessee—or it might have been his mom—produced a bottle of Wild Turkey, and the two of them and Ava passed it back and forth in the dark, sipping the Kentucky nectar till the movie’s end. The audience responded to the film with enthusiasm, and perhaps most happily of all to the raucous, poignant performance of Ava Gardner. For many among the social and media elite in attendance who had not gotten out to catch such less-than-de-rigueur entertainments as 55 Days at Peking or obscure vehicles like The Angel Wore Red, there was the exciting feeling of seeing a legend returned from what seemed like limbo, older and a little haggard now, but with an increased honesty and depth to her work. (The image of the actress seen in the film was mitigated by a glimpse of her in the flesh that night, stunningly glamorous in an aqua satin creation by Balenciaga.) A long roar of applause greeted the film’s fragile happy end, the fade-out on a moment of tenderness and hope: Iguana’s battered souls, Shannon and Mrs. Faulk, agreeing to try and make a life together, him tentative, her yearning, the pair in a two-shot against the open window, the hotel keeper suggesting they go down to the beach for a swim before it gets too hot.

  “I can…get down the hill, Maxine, but I’m not too sure about getting…back up.”

  “I’ll get you back up, baby…“I’ll always get you back up. “

  After the screening there was much praise for her performance, and Ray Stark declared that they would do what was needed to get her an Academy Award nomination. Ava dismissed the compliments. She’d thought she had done a good job, she told people, until she saw the goddamn thing. “I was embarrassed—I was false and fidgety.”

  She skipped out on the clamorous premiere party—the buffet featured Beef Puerto Vallarta—and led her entourage to a club downtown to see Miles Davis.

  Whether or not her disappointment in her Iguana performance was genuine (o
r merely the usual defiant professional self-deprecation), Ava appeared only pleased when offered another chance to work with the man she now called her “favorite and only director.” While still in Mexico, John Huston had agreed to take on a project of Italian mogul Dino De Laurentiis, The Bible, a large-budget filming of a half-dozen stories from Genesis i—xxii. De Laurentiis had originally planned for each segment of the screenplay by Christopher Fry (with additional dialogue by the Lord Almighty) to be given to a different major director—Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles were consulted—but in the end Huston alone got the job (and then assigned himself additional employment as an actor in the role of Noah—after the part was turned down by Chaplin and Alec Guinness—and as the mellifluent, baritone voice of God). The last and lengthiest story in the film would be that of Abraham and his wife, Sarah, the barren woman who with God’s blessing gives birth to a son at the age of ninety, becoming “mother of the Jews,” “matriarch of all nations.” It was the role of Sarah that Huston offered to Ava Gardner.

  “Whatever else, it would be another adventure for us,” he told her. “It’s not just that I think you can speak the lines beautifully—but I’d get to see you on the back of a racing camel all swathed and bedizened…. No, on reflection I don’t suppose that’s the real reason, either. The truth, dear Ava, is simply I want you to be in every picture I ever make.”

  Shortly after receiving the screenplay she reported back with enthusiasm. She felt such sympathy for Sarah, she joked to Huston’s assistant Gladys Hill, “I almost believe in circumcision. And by God I’m beginning to think that—at forty-one—I can produce a child.…Please tell our boss I love the script but more than the Bible and the script I love him.”