Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

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  For my family.

  ––Peter Evans

  Prologue

  Her phone calls in the middle of the night had fallen into a habit. I picked up the receiver on the first ring, an old newspaperman’s trick.

  “Did I wake you, honey?” she asked softly, without preamble.

  “It’s 3 A.M.,” I said, checking my watch. “Of course you didn’t wake me.”

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “I know it’s you, Ava.” No one else in the world sounded like Ava Gardner. Nobody I knew anyway. There was always a sense of weariness, a hint of a recent bender in her voice, even when it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning, even when she was stone-cold sober.

  “You said I could always call, no matter what time it was,” she reminded me. “Were you sleeping, honey?”

  “Just dozing,” I lied. She sounded low. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “I miss Frank,” she said after a small silence. “He was a bastard. But Jesus I miss him.”

  “Was? Is he dead?”

  “Not as far as I know, honey.”

  Sinatra would outlive her, she said. “Bastards are always the best survivors.”

  We talked for a long time, as we always did when she called me in the night. We talked about the films she had made, her mistakes and missed opportunities, one of which, she said, was turning down the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. We talked about bullfighters; John Huston, whom she adored; restaurants; her favorite dogs; her lovers. She told me about the days when she swam like a champion, played tennis, and could dance all night. She talked about the lousy prices secondhand dealers were offering for her dresses and couture gowns. “I could hoist the price if I put my name to them, but that’d be telling the world Ava Gardner’s hanging on in there by the skin of her teeth,” she said.

  “You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey: She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life. But she never made jam,” she said.

  She could make me laugh even when she woke me up at three o’clock in the morning. She could make me laugh even when I would have liked to throttle her.

  She had pulmonary emphysema, or feared she had, the lung disease that had recently carried off John Huston, and I knew that she was afraid of dying painfully and slowly as he had. So much of her life had been caught up with his. “Huston had all the courage in the world. I told him he should just put a gun to his head—he loved playing with fucking guns—and pull the trigger when the pain got too much. But the stubborn bastard wanted to die game. He always had a cruel streak in him even when the cruelty was directed at himself,” she said.

  I heard the clink of a bottle against a glass.

  “You know this thing called Exit, baby?” she asked, after a long silence.

  I said I had but she ignored me.

  “They help you switch off the lights when you’ve had enough,” she said. “There was an old lady, Mrs. Chapman, a neighbor of mine. She’d had a stroke and didn’t like it one bit. She belonged to Exit. I’d go up and sit and listen to her once in a while. She was a classy old broad, full of piss and vinegar. She must have been quite pretty once, too. She said that when you get to the point you can’t take it any longer, these people help you close your account, and make sure you do it right first time—they give you pills, a bottle of brandy, or Scotch, if that’s your poison.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Her mind was always full of surprising twists and turns but this was the first time she had told me that she wanted to kill herself. Not straight out like that anyway. No matter how smart you think you are, there are times when you don’t know what to say, because there is nothing wise or comforting you can say.

  “Ava, I hope you don’t mean that,” I said.

  “I’m getting close to that point, honey. I’m so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner,” she said.

  There was pain in her voice. I still wanted to say something reassuring but I knew it would be a lie and she would spot it at once. I said nothing.

  “When I don’t want to be around anymore, I don’t want any retakes. I don’t want to recover next day and find myself the lead story on the six o’clock news. I’d like to do it in one take,” she said. It was, she said, and began to laugh, something she had never managed in her whole movie career. “I never missed my mark but I didn’t always manage a scene in one take either. It would be nice to finally break the habit of a lifetime,” she said.

  When the time came, she said, would I take her to the people at Exit? “I’m not afraid of dying, baby. I just want you to hold my hand, I want you to be there when I go, that’s all,” she said. “Will you do that for me, when the time comes, baby? Will you promise to be there for me, honey?”

  “I won’t help you die, Ava. I can’t do that,” I said. I knew she scorned cowardice as much as she despised disloyalty, and she made me feel guilty on both counts. I almost told her that I was a Catholic, but caught myself in time. “I’m sorry, Ava.”

  “I thought you were my friend,” she said.

  “I am, Ava,” I said.

  “I thought you loved me,” she said.

  “I do, Ava,” I said.

  “Obviously you don’t love me enough. You don’t understand friendship at all. If you loved me, if you were my friend, you’d help me die when I want to go. Fahcrissake, honey, my body’s failing every which way, you know that. I’m falling apart here. And you refuse to help me the one way you can. You don’t love me at all, baby.”

  She said that she wanted to go to sleep now. “Shit, I’m going to have a peach of a head in the morning, I know that,” she said, perhaps to let me know she was angry at herself, too.

  I told her that I loved her, whatever she thought.

  “The thing is, honey, I’d have helped you. If you came to me and asked, I’d have done it for you, baby,” she said, and put the phone down.

  I went to my study and wrote down everything she had said, as I always did. I knew that she was always at her most honest at that hour.

  1

  In the first week of January 1988, Ava Gardner asked me to ghost her memoirs. Since I had never met Ava Gardner, the call, late on a Sunday evening, was clearly a hoax. “Sounds great, Ava,” I played along. “Does Frank approve? I don’t want to upset Frank.” There was a small silence, then a brief husky laugh.

  “Fuck Frank,” she said with a faint but still unmistakably Southern drawl.

  “Are you interested or not, honey?” she said.

  Only Ava Gardner could have made the ultimatum sound both threatening and so full of promise. She had been called “the most irresistible woman in Hollywood,” and “the world’s most beautiful animal.” Such encomiums were typical of the hype that was de rigueur in the Hollywood marketing machine of the 1940s and ’50s, but they were not inappropriate. Ava Gardner’s whole life had been defined by her beauty and the many and various lovers it ensnared—and she famously devoured. In another age, in another world, she would have been a grande horizontale. She had seduced, been seduced by, married to and divorced from, lived with and walked out on, some of the most famous names of the twentieth century. She had toyboys before Cher had toys, although it was unlikely that any of them remained boys for very long in her company. “Are you interested or not, honey?”


  I should have said no right there. I wasn’t a ghostwriter. I was working fifteen hours a day to finish my third novel; an interesting biography was on the stocks; I really didn’t need this kind of distraction. But this was Ava Gardner calling me. Only a fool would say he wasn’t interested. Or not be tempted. Although we had several mutual friends, the closest we ever got was the twenty minutes between my departure from, and her arrival in, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, during the filming of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana in 1963. Richard Burton, who was playing the unfrocked minister T. Lawrence Shannon opposite Gardner’s man-hungry Maxine Faulk, told me that I should stay on a couple of days and meet her. “She’s not a movie star; she’s a legend. She’ll either love you or hate you. Either way, you won’t forget her,” he said. But I had to go.

  Twenty-five years later, I still hadn’t met her, and had no idea why she had asked me to ghost her story.

  “It’s okay, I checked you out, honey,” she said, anticipating, but not answering, my unasked question. She gave me her London telephone number. “Call me tomorrow evening, after six, not before. I come awake after six,” she said. She apologized for the late hour, said good night, and replaced the receiver. I made a note of the conversation, and the time: it was 11:35 P.M.

  The following morning, before I called my friend and agent, Ed Victor, I read everything about her I could lay my hands on. “Ava Gardner has seldom been accused of acting,” wrote the film historian David Shipman in 1972. “She is of what might be termed the genus Venus, stars that are so beautiful that they needn’t bother to act. It’s enough if they just stand around being desirable.” But even after she had acquired a reputation as a neurotic drinker, with a pathological urge to self-destruct, her sensuality continued to animate nearly every part she played. Her taste for matadors, millionaires, and wholly inappropriate men had become notorious. She believed that sexual freedom was a woman’s prerogative. Her affairs had brought her final husband, Frank Sinatra, to the brink of suicide, taken her lover Howard Hughes beyond the edge of madness, and provoked George C. Scott to bouts of near-homicidal rage.

  She undoubtedly had a life worth writing about, and of course I was interested. Nevertheless, I knew that a couple of years earlier she’d had a stroke and hadn’t worked since. The question was: how much of her tumultuous life would she be able to remember—or prepared to own up to, even if she remembered plenty? But by the laws of the game that publishers play, Ava Gardner was still a catch. It was not every day that a Hollywood legend offered to tell a story that was so full of history, scandal, and secrets.

  I called Jack Cardiff, a friend of mine. He was one of the finest cinematographers in the world. He had photographed Ava in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and The Barefoot Contessa. They had known each other for forty years and were Knightsbridge neighbors. I explained the situation.

  “She’s always sworn that she’d never write a biography. How the hell did you get her to change her mind?” he asked, with incredulity in his voice.

  “I didn’t get her to change her mind. I didn’t get her to do anything. And I haven’t agreed to write it yet,” I said.

  “Don’t kid yourself, pal. If Ava Gardner wants you to write her book, you’ll write it,” he said.

  I said that it could be a very short book, indeed, if the stroke had loused up her memory.

  “She might occasionally forget where she put her car keys, but she’ll remember what she needs to remember,” he said. “But let me give you a word of advice. Nobody becomes a movie star by putting all their cards on the table—and there’ll be plenty she’ll want to forget. She’d be mad not to keep the lid on some of the things that have happened in her life. She’ll give you plenty of problems, with Ava there are always problems, but sure as hell amnesia won’t be one of them.”

  The timing of the book was a more immediate problem. The late hour of her phone call on Sunday evening might have given her offer a greater sense of urgency. I definitely had the feeling that she wasn’t prepared to be kept waiting. A sexagenarian, in poor health, she had lived extravagantly, drunk to excess. It was unlikely that she had much of an income coming in from her old movies. It was rumored that Frank Sinatra, thirty-one years after their divorce, still picked up her medical bills, and maybe other bills, too. Even so she was probably still feeling the pinch.

  I told Ed Victor what had happened, and about my talk with Cardiff. I’d still like to give it a shot, I said, but I didn’t think I’d be able to stall her until I’d finished my novel.

  He agreed. “But it would be a pity to let her go. She’s got one of the greatest untold stories in movies. Her very name epitomizes Hollywood in its heyday,” he said. “I think we should do whatever we have to do to move it on, don’t you?”

  To further complicate things, the heroine of my novel Theodora was a movie star of the same vintage as Ava. He advised me not to mention this to Ava. “Actresses are never comfortable knowing they have a rival, even if she’s only a character in a book,” he said. He proposed that I work with Ava in the evenings, and continue to write Theodora during the day—“or whichever way round she wants to play it, but it sounds as if she might be at her best after dark,” he said cheerfully.

  I CALLED AVA THAT evening, after six as she had suggested, and, as Jack Cardiff had prophesied, I got my first surprise.

  “I have to tell you, I have a problem with this book idea, honey. I’m in two minds about the whole goddamn thing.”

  The sense of accusation in her voice, the implication that the book had been my idea, stunned me. Before I could remind her that she had approached me, she explained that she had remembered a conversation with John Huston when he was writing his autobiography, An Open Book. Her favorite director, Huston had cowritten The Killers, the movie that, in 1946, rescued her career after a dozen forgettable B movies (Hitler’s Madman, Ghosts on the Loose, Maisie Goes to Reno) and set her on the path to stardom.

  “I loved John. God, I miss him. He had a great life. He lived like a king, even when he didn’t have a pot to piss in. His entire life was a crap shoot. He even loved foxhunting, fahcrissake! I hope to Christ there are hounds and foxes wherever the old bastard is now.”

  The problem was she had recalled that Huston once told her that writing his book was like living his life all over again.

  “Second helpings was perfect for John. He even got a kick out of remembering the bundles he’d dropped at Santa Anita, the poor bloody elephants and tigers he’d shot in India—reliving all that stuff, the drunken brawls—was no end of fun for Huston. But do I want to go through the crap and mayhem of my life a second time just for a book, honey? The first time, you have no choice. Lana Turner says that life is what happens to you while the crow’s-feet are fucking up your looks. Lana has a name and a story for every goddamn wrinkle in her face. I’m not saying my own looks don’t give the game away. Nothing I can do about that anymore. A nip and tuck ain’t gonna do it. The thing is: do I have to put myself through the mangle again?”

  It sounded like something she had thought about a lot. I was only disappointed that she hadn’t thought about it a lot before she involved me. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary tirade: cynical and anguished as well as sad and funny. It made me want to write her book more than ever. I had no idea whether it was a game she was playing to test me. All actresses liked to be cajoled and wooed a little, of course; I remembered what John Huston had said when she was having misgivings about playing the role of Maxine in The Night of the Iguana: “I knew damned well that she was going to do it; she did, too—she just wanted to be courted.”

  If that was what she was doing now, I decided to play along. I told her that I understood her anxieties; her apprehension was normal. “I don’t blame you, Miss Gardner,” I said. “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Writing about yourself must be like looking at your reflection in a mirror when you’re nursing a God Almighty hangover.”

  To my surprise, she burst out laughing
.

  “Well, let’s not beat about the bush, honey,” she said. Her laugh became a racking cough. When she stopped there was a long silence. I heard a lighter click a couple of times, followed by a deep intake of breath as she drew reflectively on a cigarette. “How long would it take to write this stuff, honey?” she asked. I said that it would depend on many things—how long the interviews took, how good her memory was, how well we got on together.

  “I’m told we’d get along fine, but who the hell knows? You’ve been a journalist; I hate journalists. I don’t trust them,” she said. “But Dirk Bogarde says you’re okay. So does Michael Winner. Dirk said you deal from a clean deck, and you’re not a faggot. Don’t get me wrong. I get on fine with fags, I just prefer dealing with guys who aren’t. Dirk reckons you’d break your ass to get the book right. That’s what I need—a guy who’ll break his ass to please me.”

  As she became more relaxed, her uncertainty about doing the book seemed to lessen. I asked whether she had read anything of mine. She said that she had read one of my novels and Ari, my biography of Aristotle Onassis. She had known Onassis, and been a guest on his yacht Christina. She said that my book was “on the money, but the horny little fuck had other attractions beside the dough.”

  What are they? I asked. I was genuinely curious.

  “If he hadn’t had a dollar he could have snapped a lady’s garter anytime he liked. I understand what Jackie Kennedy saw in him besides the fortune. She never fell for him, like Maria Callas. He was a primitive with a yacht. Mrs. Kennedy would have appreciated that. A primitive with a yacht,” she repeated. “For some ladies that’s an irresistible combination.

  “Did Ari ever tell you his views on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata—about the morality of broads who bargain with their pussies? He might have said ‘cunts’ I can’t remember. He probably said ‘cunts.’ He was always trying to shock me. It became a game between us. I tried to shock him, he tried to shock me. I don’t think he ever shocked me, although I think I managed to surprise him once or twice,” she said with evident satisfaction.