Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “There was a launch party for the film at a lovely restaurant in Covent Garden, and that was where I met Ava Gardner for the first time. She had that legendary very beautiful face and an extraordinary presence, a bearing that I can only describe as regal. She had a long body her legs were not long, but with this long body and the wonderful carriage she had she appeared very tall when she was sitting down. There was a quality about her, this poise and elegance that told you at once she was a star. Just to see it commanded your respect.”

  The principal location, where filming began in mid-July, was in the wooded lowlands of the Tweed Valley in southeastern Scotland. Arrangements were made to shoot on the grounds of the tenth-century Traquair House, former home of the Scottish kings. Cast and crew were put up nearby at the Peebles Hydro Hotel, a capacious Edwardian health spa, a rather staid establishment in those days, full of dour old Scottish ladies who had come every year since they were children and who regarded without cheer the arrival of Ava Gardner and an international film unit. (“They were quite unable to cope with us,” Billy Williams would recall. “At the restaurant we all ordered off the à la carte menu, and I don’t think they had ever gotten an order off the à la carte in sixty years.”)

  It was at the spa hotel the first night where one of Tam Lins young cast members, Joanna Lumley, met the American movie star. The twenty- three-year-old Lumley was a beautiful blond actress at the beginning of what was to be a notable career, her own stardom on television a few years away. “I was just starting out, and it was a small part, but I was very happy to be in this exciting film,” Joanna Lumley would recall. “I was to play one of a coven of twelve, who all had one or two lines, some parts slightly larger than others. All of us in this younger group traveled up to Scotland together, and we’d all made friends with each other. We were staying at this tall, grim hotel called the Peebles—I’m sure it’s lovely now, but it was fairly Spartan in those days—and Ava was there. And there was this tremendous tension and excitement about meeting Ava Gardner and seeing her for the first time ever, the sense of extreme excitement that we were going to be working with a Hollywood diva. And she was quite tense about it, too, I learned that later.

  “It was the evening before the first day’s shoot, and I went out walking on the hillside and it was summertime and there were briar roses on all the hills, and I picked a mass of wildflowers to bring back to my room. When I got back I thought, Don’t be selfish, give some of them to Miss Gardner. So I knocked on her door and her maid, Louise, came to the door and I handed her the flowers, saying, ‘Would you please give these to Miss Gardner and say they’re from Georgia’—which was my name in the film. I went back to my little room and hardly got inside before the phone rang. It was Ava Gardner’s voice on the line, and she said, ‘Georgia, this is Big A. Won’t you come down and have a drink with me, honey?’

  “I went back down immediately just as I was. Her maid, Louise, showed me in and I met Reggie, Ava’s secretary then, and he was a darling man, and beyond was Big A—as she had us all call her on the film—sitting with bare feet, legs tucked up under her on the sofa, with her face completely unmade-up, hair just pushed back from her face, and looking marvelous. She greeted me warmly and gave me a drink and we talked in that typical hopeless-new-person-to-madame-film-star way. We had a drink or two. She loved gin, and I remember one thing she said, ‘Gin tasted better from the bottle.’ That was one of her sayings I remembered and treasured, and another was that she said she liked men hot and sweaty from the bullring! Then she asked if we could read some lines from the script so she could hear them. She said, ‘We’ve got this scene tomorrow, darling. I’d so like it if you and Reggie would read through it.’ So Reggie read Ian’s lines in a wonderful, slightly camp voice and me sounding completely English, read Ava’s. And when that was done she said, ‘Wonderful. Now let’s go for a swim.’

  “The people at Peebles Hydro had this big old-fashioned indoor swimming pool in the basement—for an American I’m sure it looked very grim. And because it was Ava Gardner, the manager immediately went and opened the pool, and we went down. We went down, the three of us, Big A, me, and Reggie holding the towels. And she had her little dog with her, her corgi, Cara. And Ava and I jumped in the pool. Ava dived in and she swam beautifully. And then the dog came in, and the dog paddled and yapped and splashed about with us. And we got out and Ava by mistake took my towel, and she used it to dry the dog. She said, ‘Oh, darling, don’t you have a towel?’ I said, ‘Oh, no, no.’ I couldn’t say, ‘You used it to dry the dog.’ So I chucked on my clothes on my wet body, and we went upstairs and had some more to drink. Eventually, very reluctantly—because I didn’t know how you excuse yourself from royalty—I left her and went to my room, walking on air, because I’d made friends with her. And, you know, in a funny way, I think she was also pleased because you get a case of the nerves when you’re starting, and she got to see a familiar face among the crowd of strangers she was working with next day. (I remember her first line for the camera, as she stood on a parapet sipping champagne; it was one word directed at all of us lounging below her: ‘Scum!’) Anyway, everyone soon became her friend and just magnetically enthralled by this extraordinary, legendary woman.”

  It had been almost two years since Ava had last* gone before a camera. When she viewed some of the first day’s work on Tarn Lin she was dismayed to see how much older she now appeared, a condition she thought only accentuated by the on-screen proximity of so many healthy, attractive young people.* “I thought she looked wonderful,” said Billy Williams. “But she was forty-seven years old [in December], and there was no question that her skin texture wasn’t anything like as lovely as it must have been when she was younger. And drinking also showed in the skin tone and color. I had never worked with a big star who was aging like that. It became obvious to me that she would need particularly careful lighting. I had to light her very carefully and use quite a lot of diffusion on the lens. I was able to do this easily in the studio because in the studio you can have absolute control of the light. But on exteriors, with changing weather conditions, particularly with overcast light, this was more of a problem. Quite early in the shooting I was made aware that Ava was not happy about the way she was looking in exteriors. I did want her to look her best and to be happy. So what I had to do was find a way to stop the natural light overhead and fill in with a more favorable illumination. I was quite a young cinematographer, you know, just kind of finding my feet then. It was a learning process for me. What I did, when I could shoot her close enough to do it, I began putting up a canopy over the top of her head, black, twelve feet square, which cut out all of the top light, and then I lit her from over the top of the camera, which smoothed things out very nicely It was the first time I’d had to go to those lengths to protect someone. And she saw how that looked, and she was happy with it. But now and again as we went on, she would say something, and you knew she was quite conscious of the fact that the years had gone by. It was rather sad.

  One day she said to me, out of nowhere, ‘You know, I was very beautiful once.’ I didn’t know what to say. I thought of her earlier films I’d seen. I said, ‘Yes, Ava, I know.’ “

  From the outset McDowall as director lavished his star with interest and affection, but he found his efforts at first undermined by her self-doubts. “She was a wonderful actress,” he wrote, “and she never believed it.” She was also clearly bored with the moviemaking process. It was her living, it gave her money, she would say. He worked to awaken her interest, to make her feel a part of the entire creative endeavor. He would sit with her in her dressing room and talk about his ideas for the film while she smoked one of her sixty cigarettes for the day and played with the corgi, or he would walk her around the set and behind the camera and explain the shots he was trying to make, something she could not remember any director ever before taking the time to do. It was a show of respect for her talent and intelligence to which she began to respond warmly, as Roddy hoped, giving h
im her concentration and devotion.

  The part of Michaela was not an easy one, wriggling as it did from realism to theatricality and fantasy, requiring large shifts in style and extravagant emotional displays. There were scenes for which she needed much coaching and many takes and many glasses of champagne. The part also called for her entry to the brave new world of cinematic permissiveness, something about which—inculcated with Papa Mayer’s Old Testament views—she had great reservations. In Tam Lin the veteran sex symbol at nearly forty-seven had to perform her first (at least vaguely) coital love scene and appear en suite with an unclothed Ian McShane. The day of filming the latter sequence she was extremely nervous in advance, and she complained to Roddy: Was it quite necessary for the boy to be actually bare-assed naked? When they did finally get to shoot the scene, however, she rather seemed to enjoy it. (Ava grew fond of the twenty-year-younger, darkly handsome actor who played her on-screen lover. “He looked beautiful then, like a black-eyed Gypsy, and Ava quite fastened her eyes on him,” recalled Joanna Lumley. “I don’t know that anything happened between them or not, but we all at the time assumed and hoped that it did!”)

  They shot for two weeks in Peebleshire, then returned to London and Pinewood Studios for the interior sequences. There was a great deal of hard work and in Ava’s mind an uncertainty that the film itself was adding up to anything good, but Roddy and the people she’d come to know on the production had made it a pleasure. The young people in the cast she had initially feared for their youth and unsullied flesh became her beloved brood—”my babies,” she called them. She had grown so fond of the dozen guys and girls in Michaela’s original “coven” that when they came to a scene that called for her to administer to them a brutal verbal thrashing, she was filled with dread. “I can’t tell them off,” she pleaded to the director. “I love them!” When he had seen how their energy and the familial ambiance kept Ava happy and up, Roddy encouraged the group to hang around the sets for the duration, long after there was anything for them to do. “I used to cram all of us ‘children’ into my ancient 550-quid RollsRoyce,” Joanna Lumley would recall, “drive down to Pinewood and everybody would tumble out. And we’d spend all day with Big A. It was like a gang, and she was our leader. She was so much fun, the opposite of the grand star, so easy to talk to, but we all respected her hugely, and nobody ever took liberties with her.

  “At the very end of the shoot I decided to give a party at my flat. The party was going to be just the ‘children’ and some of the second assistants, but none of the ‘grown-ups’ as we called the important people on the film. I mean, I had a very tiny, very humble place two stories up in a very old house, not a place to which you would invite film stars and directors. Well, Big A found out about it, and she said, ‘Hon, ain’t you inviting me to your party?’ I said, ‘Oh! Of course, Big A, of course!’ And then Roddy wanted to come, and this one and that one, all the grown-ups ended up coming. Once the party started I realized that the drinks were going to run out. And the people were running up and back to the local pub and the off-license to bring back more drink, and we were never keeping up with the demand. And finally there was a ring of the bell, and it was Big A downstairs. She came up the stairs with her secretary, Reggie, before her, and Reggie carried a basket in which had been put every kind of drink you can imagine, brandy, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum—you name it. And Reggie arrived with this basket and behind him came Ava, dressed like a Spanish princess with a cinched eighteen-inch waist and a great flower in her hair and smelling just like paradise with the scent of tuberose all around her. And she entered this fourteen-pounds-a-week humble little place and she made it look like a palace. She said, ‘Do you have some kind of big bowl or big jug or something?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and I pulled out this big old- fashioned Victorian jug from a bath set. And Ava started pouring in all these bottles she brought, everything mixed together, rum, whiskey, gin, vodka. ‘Mommy’s Little Mixure,’ she called it. It was the most lethal kind of cocktail. And everybody got a tooth mug of this mixture. We all drank with Ava, and the party just took off, it was just fantastic. I don’t know what kind of party I had expected it to be, but I didn’t expect it would go on until six the next day.

  “I really speak with unreserved affection for her. Knowing her, making the film, was really one of the happiest experiences in my life. It came at a time when I was just beginning my career and at a terribly impressionable age. And I learned from Ava; she set an example for me. And it so affected me that I’ve gone out of my way always to make sure I respected and spoke to people who had the tiny parts or the extras because I can’t ever forget how it made me feel that she treated all of us like that.

  “I saw her only once more many years later. It’s a terrible thing about this business, really, you don’t keep up. We get so close to each other in such a short period of time, depend on each other, share the long hours and the lack of food, get trucked around like cattle, do amazing things and see beautiful places together. And then it ends, and we look in each other’s eyes and exchange addresses and kiss each other like best beloveds, and then everyone heads in different directions and we’re like terrible old tarts, in someone else’s arms the next day.

  “It’s a bittersweet business.”

  The result of Roddy McDowall’s first—and only—directorial effort was an elegant curate’s egg; dreamlike, imaginative, at times inane. It captured on film a last gasp of swinging England, an air of instant curdled decadence, and in Ava Gardner’s full-throttle performance a strange, memorable portrait of a sacred monster, arrogant, vulnerable, terrifying, deepened by the resonant echoes of the star’s real life. No one saw it. Not for years, anyway, and then in a considerably diminished version. The production company found itself in financial difficulty and Tam Lin went into limbo. Ava was forced to take legal action to obtain her unpaid salary. The film remained on the shelf until 1972, by which time its mod mannerisms already looked vintage. A.I.P. (American International Pictures) in America gave the butchered cut a brief release; most of the few who saw it then did so from behind the windshields of their automobiles at drive-ins in the Southwest.

  She spent the last night of the 1960s at home, cooking New Year’s Eve dinner for herself and Reenie and getting “quietly pissed.”

  She had come to London for a more orderly existence, and she had gotten it. And now: What to do with it? She walked her dog. She went to the theater. She hosted small dinner parties and larger ones at Christmastime and on the Fourth of July. Most nights she was in bed by midnight, with a book and a bag of Maltesers. She would sit in the park and chat with pensioners and Jamaican nannies. When she went around in simple clothes and no makeup, few people recognized her. It was nice to note the English respect for privacy, but she could sense that a part of it was her fame slowly fading away.

  “I went to see her in London after she had settled there,” Budd Schulberg would recall. “I was passing through town and I went to see her. We sat, and she drank champagne, and we talked about people we knew. I sensed a loneliness in her. I know that when other people would come through London she would sort of grab onto them and say, ‘You’ve got to come right over.’ She wanted to reminisce. She was becoming very nostalgic, wanted to talk about the old days, the glamorous days of the past.”

  Eloise Hardt, Huston’s friend, was another American in London in the early seventies, having abandoned Hollywood after a terrible personal tragedy. She had taken a job with a public relations company, trying to lose herself in work. “I would run into her. I remember there was a publicity party at a hotel. She was alone; she was looking kind of sad. That seemed to be her state of affairs then. There had been no normal in her life for so many years that now I think she was paying a price. She seemed to have a dim view that it had all gone wrong, but there was no way to fix it. I don’t doubt that she wanted to get off the bandwagon and have a quiet life. But there was no one left to build a life with. She didn’t know many people in London. She seemed to me like s
uch a complete Americana and here she was in England and had been there for a while. I said, ‘Why don’t you just go home?’ Well, she wasn’t up for that kind of discussion, and we quickly changed the subject.”

  “She was lonely at times and unhappy, yes, but we all have those times in our lives,” Spoli Mills would say. The daughter of the Russian composer Mischa Spolianski and the wife of Paul Mills, the former publicity chief at M G M’s London office, she had known Ava since 1957 and would become her closest friend in the later years, in some ways taking the place of Betty Sicre in Spain as the wise, level-headed chum and confidante. “Paul and Ava had known each other since Mo gambo, and he had sometimes been her escort,” Spoli Mills recalled. “And I remember after we met she said to me, ‘I was prepared to hate you for taking away my escort. But I find that I like you. We’re going to have a lot of fun together.’ And we did. When she moved to London we became the best of friends right to the day she died. Ava was such a funny, fascinating person and a joy to be with, and when she wasn’t—well—you had to get through it with her because she was worth it.

  “She had regrets in her life, of course; we all do. You get in a melancholy mood, and you think about the mistakes. She would have liked things to have lasted with Sinatra. But it didn’t work. She said that together they were like bringing a lighted match to TNT. Or to find someone else to take his place. But, you know, you reach a point of no return. She just never found anybody who she could love like that again.

  “She would occasionally say to me, ‘Jesus, honey, you’ve got everything I would have loved to have had.’ I had a husband and two children, and she felt very close to my two sons. But how serious she was I don’t know. Sometimes she would admit, ‘I wouldn’t have been a good mother anyway, with my life, wouldn’t have been able to cope.’