Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “You remember your father weeping? You were only three.”

  She said, “I remember the flames. I remember Daddy crying. You don’t forget things like that. They stay in your mind, honey. Maybe I didn’t understand the significance of his tears that night until I was older—the fact that he had nothing socked away. No insurance. We were broke, really and truly broke, not just poor, out on the sidewalk broke, honey.”

  Jonas Gardner was used to tragedy in his life. His first son, Raymond, was killed when he was two years old, twelve years before Ava was born. Jonas had been using dynamite to clear a parcel of land of rocks and tree roots; the explosive caps he used to ignite the sticks of dynamite were kept in a kitchen cabinet. One dropped onto the floor one morning when Jonas was handing them out to the blasters; unnoticed, it was swept up and thrown into the fire with the rubbish. The explosion caught baby Raymond full in the face. He died on the way to the doctor in Smithfield.

  Ava lifted the hand of her paralyzed arm onto her lap. “Anyway, somebody up there must have taken pity on us. After the barn burnt down—God bless the kindness of strangers, honey—Mama was offered a job, and a place for us to live, running the Teacherage, the boardinghouse for women teachers at the school down the road in Brogden. Whoever had the idea of getting Ma to run that place was wise as a hoot owl. It definitely saved our skins.”

  Mama’s full name was Mary Elizabeth but everybody called her Molly. “She was always up and doing, she never stopped: she took to that job like a duck to a water pond—she washed sheets, cleaned toilets, scrubbed the floors, and cooked three meals a day for about twenty boarders. We took in field workers as well as the teachers. She was always ironing; the guests paid extra for that, and eventually I got to help. I picked up some pocket money ironing the shirts; I’m still one hell of an ironer. Frank used to say I pressed his collars better than any laundry service. I damn well did, too.”

  I asked about her sisters.

  “Mama was thirty-nine when she had me—that was seven years after Myra was born. Growing up, I was closest of all to Myra. All the others, Bappie—she was pregnant the same time Mama was pregnant with me, only she jumped out of a peach tree and lost the baby—Elsie Mae and Inez were all married and away by this time. I remember Daddy holding me and waving goodbye to Inez and her husband, Johnny, as they drove away in a Model T Ford after their wedding.”

  She stopped and gave me a look. “Is this really interesting, honey?” she asked me again. “I’m skipping. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Is this really the sort of stuff people want to read about?” she asked again.

  I told her that it was exactly what they wanted to read about. There was nothing wrong with her memory, I told her.

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, honey.”

  “How old were you when you started school, can you remember that?”

  “I was three—not to study, to visit. I would just sit there until I fell asleep, and a teacher would take me back to the Teacherage, and put me to bed. The teachers always made a fuss of me. I was a pretty little thing; I had platinum blond curls. I started school proper when I was five, which was a year before most kids in Brogden, probably because I was a familiar figure around the place. But I was never a great learner. When I was eight, there were other distractions—I started to hang out with boys. It wasn’t a sexual thing; at least I don’t think it was. I was a regular tomboy. I could climb any tree a boy could climb, and higher, too—I’ve still got the scars to prove it. I could run as fast as any of them, and cuss even better. The one thing I didn’t catch on to was smoking. It made me sick as a dog. I didn’t start smoking until I was eighteen, when I got to Hollywood. I saw Lana Turner sitting on the set holding a beautiful gold cigarette case and lighter. She looked so glamorous. I went straight out and bought myself an identical cigarette case and lighter, just to carry around.”

  She shook another cigarette from the packet.

  “From there to sixty a day!” she said ruefully.

  She played with the cigarette between her fingers but didn’t attempt to light it this time. “We had two Negro maids living with us at the Teacherage,” she continued after a while. ”One was my best friend, Virginia. I slept with her more than I slept with Mama and Daddy, or my sister Myra; blacks were like family in our house. Sometimes when Mama went in to Smithfield to do the big grocery shop on a Saturday, Virginia and I would go to the movies. She wasn’t allowed to sit downstairs, that was whites only, so I was the only little white thing, a white blond child, up in the balcony with the blacks. I remember seeing one movie with Bing Crosby and Marion Davies. You’ll have to check what it was called and what year that was. [Going Hollywood, 1933.] I must have been ten or eleven years old. Virginia and I came home and acted out the whole thing; one time I’d be Davies and she would be Crosby, then we’d switch around.

  “I loved the movies, but I never had any interest in being an actress. One time, I tried out for a play in high school. I was the first kid to be eliminated. Out! Don’t call us! We’ll call you! Fuck, I was bad. I was so bad, honey. But that was after the Teacherage closed in the Depression. Mama had found a job running a boardinghouse in Newport News, Virginia. It was a big navy base and shipbuilding town in the North.”

  She began massaging her arm, a sign that she was getting tired. “Honey, I don’t want to talk about me anymore. Not tonight. I’m exhausted.” She finished her wine and put the glass down. After a small pause, she tapped the empty glass with her forefinger. “Okay, just one more,” she said, and began to laugh. “Just one more—Jesus, how many times have I said that in my life?”

  “I’m not surprised you’re tired. You’ve been up since dawn,” I reminded her, and poured the last of the wine, which wasn’t very much, into her glass.

  “Did I wake you this morning? Oh Christ, I woke you, didn’t I? I’m sorry about that, honey,” she said, and laughed again.

  “You should laugh more often,” I said.

  “When I was young I laughed a lot—that’s because I liked to laugh in bed,” she said.

  “We got through a lot of good stuff today,” I told her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You did all the heavy lifting,” I said. “My turn comes when I’ve typed up what we’ve done today, and I can start work on the manuscript.”

  “Did any of it make sense, honey?”

  “It will have to be expanded in places,” I said truthfully. “But basically I’m thrilled. You covered a lot of ground.”

  “I can remember all those things a hundred years ago, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday. When I called you this morning, I was going to call the whole thing off,” she said. “I had one foot out the door.”

  “I’m pleased you changed your mind,” I said.

  She asked me what plans I had for the next day. If I were free, we could have another session, she said. “I’ll be ready to talk about me, if you’re willing to listen,” she said.

  Absolutely, I said.

  “I like working with you, honey. I like having somebody to dance with,” she said.

  5

  Ava canceled our appointment the following day, and was incommunicado for several days after that. I caught up on my reading, including a slim, skin-deep biography of her written in the early 1960s by a film unit publicist. I transcribed several of the interviews I had taped; I wrote up the notes of our telephone conversations, including her nocturnal calls, which were often the most interesting and were becoming more frequent. She seemed to have forgotten the argument we’d had the night I told her I wouldn’t help her to die. At least she hadn’t mentioned it again, and neither had I.

  It was over a week before I finally reached her on the phone, and my euphoria, following the promise of the last interview, had turned to a sense of unease again.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls, honey. I promise you, you’ve been in my thoughts,” she said, as soon as she heard my voice.

&n
bsp; “I hope the book’s been in your thoughts, too,” I said, and regretted it immediately. A Sinatra record was playing in the background, one of his slow numbers, a sure sign that she was feeling low.

  “I had a real bad week, honey. I felt just godawful. I wouldn’t have been any good to you.”

  “What was it? Flu?” There had been a lot of it about.

  “I don’t know, honey. I had blinding headaches, like the worst goddamn hangovers ever. And not just in the mornings either—before you ask. How is Ed Victor making out? What’s happening there? Any sign of a deal yet?” She ran the sentences together, in the same tone, closing off one subject and starting a new one before I could ask another question about her headaches.

  It was the first time Ava had asked what was happening with the publishers. She had shown no interest in the business arrangements since her acceptance that Ed would handle the book for both of us. I told her truthfully that I didn’t know what the current situation was, although I understood the proposal was attracting a lot of interest in New York. I also knew that Ed was talking to a couple of the major publishing houses in New York, but I didn’t want to tell her that; he liked to announce those developments to a client himself. “Are you ready for some good news?” was his favorite opening line when he had a deal lined up. I didn’t want to spoil his surprise.

  “Ed’s such a good agent,” I told her. It was no more than a casual remark, an en passant comment, but she picked up on it.

  “You think so? Really? Better than . . .” She hesitated as if thinking of a suitable agent with whom she could compare him. “. . . Swifty Lazar, for instance?”

  In his day, Irving Paul Lazar—Humphrey Bogart dubbed him “Swifty,” a name Lazar detested, after he arranged three deals for Bogie in a single day, on a bet—was considered one of the best agents around. He had made deals for Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Clifford Odets, Truman Capote, Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, and dozens of other big-name celebrities of the past. He sold ideas and people as well as books and plays. He put together a lucrative television deal for Richard Nixon with David Frost when Nixon was still in the wilderness after Watergate. He would move in on any deal that took his fancy—“with or without the author’s permission.” (“Everybody who matters has two agents: his own and Irving Lazar,” a Hollywood wit once said.) But, according to Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief, who knew him well and dealt with him many times as a publisher, Lazar never claimed to be an agent at all. “He described himself as a deal maker and thus did not feel bound by the normal rules of agenting. Sometimes, he took his 10 percent from the buyer, sometimes from the seller—sometimes it was rumored, in the old days, from both,” said Korda in amused awe at Lazar’s legendary chutzpah.

  By this time, however, Lazar was over eighty years old and clearly past his outrageous prime. I didn’t want to say that to Ava. They were old friends—he had known her since before her marriage to Sinatra—but surely it must have been as obvious to her as it was to me.

  “Swifty Lazar! That’s a name from the past,” I said.

  “He’s still in the game, honey, believe me,” she said. She told me about the fabulous deals he had done, his amazing energy, the money he had made for his authors! “He knows about our book, by the way,” she said, eventually coming to the point. “He loves the idea of it. He thinks it’ll make a fabulous movie. He’s very interested.”

  “I bet he is,” I said as noncommittally as I could. “How does he know about the book, Ava? Have you talked to him?”

  “He called me last night from New York. He said Peter Viertel told him about it. He knows you, by the way. Has he called you yet? He said he was going to. He said he had lunch with you at Claridge’s.”

  “It was a long time ago. I’m surprised he remembers.”

  “He remembers everything. He doesn’t forget a thing. So what do you think, honey? He says he got $350,000 for Betty Bacall’s book and that was ten years ago [Lauren Bacall: By Myself, published in 1979]. We should talk to him, don’t you think?” The question was wary, testing; she obviously sensed my unease. “At least let’s find out what he has in mind. It can’t do any harm, can it? He’s still full of piss and vinegar.”

  Whether Ava wanted Lazar, or thought she needed him, or whether her suggestion was to test my loyalty to Ed Victor—or perhaps Lazar’s intrusion had raised questions in her mind about Ed—I had no idea. Maybe I was becoming paranoid, but Ava’s suggestion that I call Lazar seemed to me to be dangerous. Apart from the fact that his intervention in a deal was always likely to cause complications—later to be told as hilarious anecdotes by Lazar himself—apart from that, Ed was my friend as well as my agent, and I wouldn’t go ahead with the book without him.

  But was Ed a better agent than Lazar? That was what Ava had asked. Both were über-agents—one past, one present, one chalk, one cheese, one a straight arrow, the other Swifty Lazar. In their own way, both were giants. Ava knew all this perfectly well. She was too smart not to have checked out Ed before she agreed for him to represent her in the first place. So what more could I say about him that she didn’t already know?

  Finally, I said, “Ava, there are three things you must remember about Ed Victor. One, he’s a big fan of yours; two, he loves to make money for his clients; and three, he’s determined that your book is going to make you very rich, indeed.”

  “Has he put a figure on that, honey?” she asked quietly. “I’d like him to get a little more than Swifty got Betty Bacall for her book. Can Ed do that for me?”

  I’d heard a figure of half a million dollars mentioned, and if she delivered the goods, especially about her time with Sinatra, I’d also heard that it could go as high as $800,000, even more. But I didn’t want to tell her that. Instead, I said: “A fourth thing you must remember about Ed Victor is that he likes to see the look of surprise in an author’s eyes when he tells them what the offer is. I think you’re going to be very surprised, Ava.”

  There was a long silence on the line before she said in a low voice: “I like surprises, honey.”

  Her suggestion that I contact Irving Lazar was forgotten. At least, she never brought up Swifty’s name again, and naturally neither did I.

  A WEEK LATER, AVA asked me to go for a walk with her in Hyde Park Gardens. I picked her up at her flat in Ennismore Gardens and we walked through the quiet afternoon streets of Kensington. She leaned into me as she held on to my arm; her weight made me aware of her limp. She wore a gray woolen coat and hat; a Burberry checked cashmere scarf was pulled high across her mouth as if she was determined not to be recognized. Although, in black horn-rimmed glasses, and her eyes devoid of makeup, she looked more like a smart Knightsbridge matron than the Hollywood icon she was. We crossed the busy Kensington Road into the quiet of Hyde Park Gardens.

  “Before the goddamn stroke, I often used to run around this park before breakfast, the whole nine yards,” she said. “It was the best cure for a hangover there was. I used to run a lot in those days,” she added with a sly smile.

  “I’m impressed,” I said.

  “You should be. It’s no spitting distance. I once bet Grace Kelly that the park was bigger than her spread in Monaco. I had no idea whether it was or wasn’t but I bet her twenty dollars it was. She got one of her palace flunkies to check it out—and I was right! The park’s bigger than the whole of her old man’s principality.”

  “Did she pay up?”

  “Grace was tight with a buck but she always paid up. She sent over the twenty dollars—with a magnum of Dom Perignon from Harrods, and a note pinned to an almighty pack of aspirins saying they were for the hangover I was going to get! She knew me too damn well. I do miss her. There aren’t many people I miss, but I do miss Gracie Grimaldi.”

  “Who else do you miss, Ava?”

  “I miss John Huston—especially now the sonofabitch is across the river. He knew me better than anyone alive, better than I knew myself. The world is an emptier place not having him at the end of
the line.”

  “You said he made a serious pass at you once,” I said.

  “More than once, honey,” she said, with a nostalgic smile.

  “Do you want to talk about that?” I said.

  “It might make me cry,” she said. “God, I miss him.”

  “Well, you knew him a long time,” I said.

  “Since 1946,” she said, “just after the war. John had written The Killers, which was based on Hemingway’s short story. They would call it my ‘breakthrough movie’ these days. John had written the screenplay with Tony Veiller, although John’s name wasn’t on the credits. He was still in the army. He’d probably been moonlighting, I guess that was the reason they didn’t use his name. Anyway, I’d been invited to dinner at his house near Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. I went with a friend of his, Jules Buck, who’d worked on The Killers, and Jules’s wife, Joyce.

  “John must have been forty then, I was twenty-four, he was already a successful screenwriter at Warner Brothers. He was tall and rangy. He had a craggy, Irish face—one of his wives said it was full of cruelty. I don’t think cruelty was the right word, although he did have a cruel streak in his humor. He had women eating out of the palm of his hand. He was divorced, and on the prowl the night I went out to his place at Tarzana. I fell for him at once.”

  “At the dinner party?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. But he made a pass at me first. I was twenty-four, I had divorced Mickey Rooney after only a year, I’d had an affair with Howard Hughes, and was in a bad marriage to Artie Shaw—I couldn’t blame him for thinking I’d be a pushover. He chased me around the bushes. I was as stewed as he was. But I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Do you mean that evening—or you never slept with him?” I said. It was probably the most direct question I had asked her about her intimate relationships.

  She stopped and gave me a long quizzical look. “I was still married to Artie Shaw,” she said, then smiled. “John was pissed when I wouldn’t stay the night with him. We’d been fooling around. But I wasn’t going to jump into bed with him on our first date, as much as I wanted to. I don’t think many women said no to Johnny. He was a spoiled sonofabitch.”