Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  We continued walking slowly, her weight leaning against me. “Anyway, Artie hadn’t discarded me at that stage. I was loyal to my husbands.” She was good at ducking questions she didn’t want to answer.

  After a while, she stopped and we sat on a park bench. “Actually,” she said, catching her breath, “John had invited Evelyn Keyes to dinner that evening. She’d played Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister in Gone With the Wind. He was dating her at the time, but the way John told the story it wasn’t anything serious. But she was pretty—and smart. When she heard I was going to be at dinner, she wouldn’t come. ‘I’m not going to compete with Ava Gardner,’ she said. ‘I’m not that dumb!’

  “Anyway, a few days later John ran off to Las Vegas with her and they got hitched! John said it was all her idea. He did seem a bit bemused by it, I must say. Naturally, the marriage didn’t last more than five minutes. And listen to this, Miss Keyes later became Artie Shaw’s eighth wife!” She laughed softly. “A small world, huh?”

  She stood up, she took my arm, and we resumed our walk.

  “But I made three good movies for John. They can’t take those away from me,” she said sadly.

  “Peter Viertel says Huston was a great joker,” I said.

  “The best. Did I tell you the time I played Lily Langtry in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean? John had set up a complicated tracking scene for Lily’s arrival in Langtry, Texas, the town named after her by Judge Bean. I looked piss-elegant, I have to say. I was about fifty then. It might have been the last time I looked truly beautiful on the big screen. Lily is met at the railroad station by a grizzled old-timer, played by Billy Pearson. Pearson was an ex-jockey, one of John’s cronies. John collected characters. Billy takes Lily’s hand and helps her down from the carriage and they start to walk up the high street with the camera tracking ahead of them. It must have been a four-minute take. The train had stopped where it was supposed to stop, right on cue, with the sun going down. I didn’t want to fuck it up. I was hitting my marks and feeling good. We’d almost got to the end of the take, when Billy Pearson says: ‘You don’t know how nice it is to welcome you, Miss Langtry. How’d you like an old man to go down on you after your long journey?’ That was John’s idea of a joke. It broke me up. God knows what it cost the studio. It was half a day’s work done for.”

  We continued our walk very slowly toward the Round Pond.

  “Who else do I miss? Well, Frank—or rather I miss my fights with Frank. We’d better not say that. I miss a lot of things: playing tennis; Spain I miss, of course, and dancing to flamenco music late at night.” She smiled sadly. “Those days are over, baby.”

  We walked in silence for a while.

  “I’m not a quitter, honey. I just get tired, that’s all,” she said apropos of nothing I had said, but I suspected it was to let me know that she understood what was bothering me. “I just felt so awful last week. I couldn’t have worked. I thought I was going to die.”

  “You wouldn’t do that to me,” I said. “We have a bestseller to write.”

  “I’m not a quitter, honey,” she said again. “We’ll finish the goddamn book if it kills me. I was just so low, baby. I brought Morgan [her Welsh corgi] for a walk in the park to try to clear my head. That didn’t work. I had a memory lapse that was terrifying. I couldn’t remember Morgan’s goddamn name. He ran off into the shrubbery, I couldn’t even remember what the hell he looked like, what color he was, nothing. My mind was a total blank.”

  I could understand her forgetting Morgan’s name. I couldn’t get my head around her failure to remember what he looked like, I said.

  “I remembered fuck-all, honey. It was a complete memory loss. My mind was a complete blank,” she said again.

  “Did you tell your doctor what happened?”

  “I didn’t bother. I’ve been forgetting things for years. Anyway, next day I was fine. There are still some things I can’t remember—names, faces, what I had for dinner last night. But for a few hours, I thought my whole memory had been wiped out.”

  “A memoirist without a memory would be a problem for both of us,” I said.

  “I know quite a few people who’d be damned pleased to hear that news, honey.”

  I urged her to talk to her doctor. “You should have a brain scan, at least get a checkup,” I said.

  “Dirk Bogarde said it was hysterical amnesia. He reckoned the same thing happened to him in France last year. He said it was nothing to worry about. He said it was a temporary condition.”

  “For God’s sake, Dirk’s not a doctor, Ava.”

  “Yeah, what the fuck does he know?” She grinned.

  “Ava, I’m serious. You should get a checkup.”

  She squeezed my arm reassuringly. “When he fell down the stairs, he told people he’d had a stroke. He was just pissed out of his skull. I love Dirk, he is such a drama queen.”

  “Will you talk to your doctor? I think you should.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s not talk about this anymore, honey. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “When I couldn’t reach you last week, I was afraid you might have changed your mind about the book again,” I told her, obediently changing the subject, and immediately regretting it.

  “That’s still a possibility,” she said dryly.

  Ava never made it easy, and I didn’t want to be goaded into another argument about whether she should go ahead with the book or not. “You know how to keep a fellow guessing,” I said.

  “You can’t teach an old broad new tricks, honey.”

  I laughed but I knew that she probably meant it—her throwaway lines, especially the funny ones, always contained a grain of truth.

  “Anyway, I’ve been beating my brains out trying to think of things that’ll make my childhood interesting for you. Maybe that’s what started off the goddamn headaches,” she said, giving me an accusing look.

  I said that I didn’t want the book to make her ill. “Writing an autobiography should be fun.” I lied, of course. An autobiography is never easy and always painful to write truthfully.

  “Well, I’d enjoy it a whole lot more if . . .”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “If what, Ava?” If I had been wise, I wouldn’t have pressed her. She had, after all, a gift for getting to the point when she needed to. But her hesitation made me curious. “It’s important. What would make you enjoy it more?”

  “Honey, we’re getting in awful deep with some of the personal stuff,” she said, after a long pause, as if she were still trying to sort out her feelings. “Is it really necessary to put down exactly what Mickey Rooney said, what I said, what Frank Sinatra did next, and all the rest of that stuff? My own bad behavior, I can live with that—some of it, anyway. I have no choice. I’d just rather not have to remember all the shitty things people have said and done to me. I’m happier not remembering, baby. Little of it seems pertinent now, anyway. Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember? You can make it up, can’t you? If I had lost my memory, you would have to have made it up, most of it, wouldn’t you? The publicity guys at Metro did it all the time. Who the fuck knows the difference anyway? The difference can just be our little secret, can’t it, baby? Let’s make it easy on ourselves. We can do that, can’t we?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m tired, honey.”

  “It’s a terrible idea, Ava.”

  I was astonished at the suggestion, especially after our last session a couple of weeks earlier which had gone so well. So far, I had gone easy on her. I hadn’t pressed her about Mickey Rooney, I never had to. That stuff just flowed out of her; she needed no prompting at all. Since my faux pas about Frank Sinatra the night she first called me, I had barely mentioned his name. He was always going to be a tricky subject and, unless she brought him up, I’d decided to leave that phase of the book until I had the rest of it pretty well wrapped up.

  I said, “I thought you wanted a truthful book, Ava. I thought th
at was the deal.”

  “The truth is trickier than I thought, honey.”

  “You’ve had a great life, Ava, an incredible life—the men you’ve loved, the incredible people you’ve known. You are more than just a movie star—”

  “Being a movie star’s only half of it, honey,” she said.

  “That’s my point, Ava. You shouldn’t settle for just another Hollywood bio, full of lies and hype. You deserve better than that.” I was surprised at how passionate I felt about it, and how protective of her I had become.

  It was nearly closing time in the park when we reached Rutland Gate, where we came in. She held on to my arm tightly. “Trying to cross this road is about the most exciting thing left in my life,” she said.

  6

  The Barefoot Contessa,” she said when I picked up the phone. There was no “hello,” no “good morning, honey.” Just the peremptory question: “The Barefoot Contessa—you saw it, didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. I was still half asleep. “You and Humphrey Bogart.”

  “And?”

  “And what, Ava?”

  “And did you like the movie, honey?”

  Being woken from a deep sleep at three in the morning, I found it hard enough to recall the plot, let alone give a critique of it. Nevertheless, it was the movie—or maybe it was simply the title—that her fans remembered best. “I haven’t seen it in a while. It’s one we’ll have to see again when we write about it,” I said cautiously. “They called you The World’s Most Beautiful Animal,” I said, remembering the advertising slogan.

  “Thirty goddamn years ago I was, honey.”

  “You were stunning,” I said. I felt on safer ground talking about her beauty than the merits of the picture. I had reservations about Joe Mankiewicz’s script; I suspected that its literate, cynical banter would have dated badly. His attempt to do a similar hatchet job on the movie business as he had done three years earlier on the theater in All About Eve—which won six Academy Awards including Best Picture—was not as incisive, or nearly as witty. “You were beautiful,” I repeated dully.

  “It didn’t hurt to be photographed by Jack Cardiff. That’s the God-honest truth. I could be having the worst goddamn period, the worst goddamn hangover in my life, and Jack could still make me look good at six o’clock in the morning. He was a fucking magician.”

  “John Huston said he could photograph what you were thinking,” I said.

  “He’d photograph your soul if he could find enough light, honey.” She laughed softly at her own joke.

  “Mankiewicz always got great crews around him, people he could count on,” I said.

  “Mankiewicz was a sonofabitch,” she said. She nearly always said that whenever his name was mentioned. “I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me. [Costar] Ed O’Brien said it was a failure in our chemistry. It was more than that, baby. The sonofabitch hated me.”

  There was a long pause on the line. I switched on the reading lamp, found my notepad and pen on the bedside table. You never knew what she was going to say from left field—that was part of the excitement of her calls, especially those in the middle of the night.

  “But the sonofabitch was some writer, I’ll give him that,” she said, ending the silence on a forgiving note. “He wrote great parts for women; his women were up there with Tennessee’s and Papa’s. All those guys—Williams, Hemingway, Mankiewicz, the sonofabitch—they all wanted me to play their women. I played three of Papa’s—Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; Cynthia, the ex in [The Snows of] Kilimanjaro; and that lapful in The Killers. I was Maxine Faulk in Tennessee’s [Night of the] Iguana. I really brought that broad to life. And then there was Maria Vargas for Mankiewicz.

  “Maria was a part we both knew I could kick into the stands. That role fitted me like a goddamn glove. I understood Maria Vargas”—the promiscuous café dancer who ended up as the Contessa Torlato-Favrini and a movie star—“I knew that lady inside out, in bed and out of bed. Especially in bed.” She started to laugh. “Why the hell wouldn’t I? The sonofabitch based the dame on me.”

  The next hour seemed more like a debriefing than an interview. I barely said a word or asked a question. She told me stories about Mankiewicz, The Barefoot Contessa, Humphrey Bogart—another sonofabitch, apparently—and the first time she met Howard Hughes. She told me about her short-lived marriage to, and divorce from, the constantly unfaithful but passionate Mickey Rooney, and what fun Hollywood was in the 1940s if you ran with the crowd who could afford to frequent Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Mocambo’s, where she loved to dance, and the Brown Derby, preferably the Beverly Hills branch. She said she loved to swim, and play tennis at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. She talked about the mobster Benny Siegel, a regular at the movie colony restaurants in those days. She said, “I dated him once or twice, so did Lana [Turner]. But she liked gangsters. I mean, she really liked gangsters.” A lot of young actresses and starlets did, she said. You couldn’t avoid them if you were young and cute and worked in movies. Siegel was tall, nattily dressed, and a member of the toney Jewish Hillcrest Country Club. She said, “He could have been a movie star. But he didn’t get to first base with me.” George Raft introduced her to Siegel at Santa Anita, the track out at Pasadena, when they were making Whistle Stop in 1945. She said, “George loved to play the horses. All those guys did—George Raft, John Huston, Mickey, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Durante, Errol Flynn. Louis Mayer stabled his horses at Santa Anita. So did Fred Astaire.”

  Higgledy-piggledy, she covered a lot of ground. She recalled scenes from her school days in Newport News, juxtaposed them with memories of her father’s death, and her awe at Artie Shaw’s intellectualism. She said, “I fell in love with Art’s mind in a heartbeat. We made a damn fine-looking couple.” It was a pity that he was a lousy dancer, but so was Frank Sinatra. Mickey was the best of the three. “But you can’t dance with a midget!” She was telling me stories I knew I could never have winkled out of her in normal interviews. She told me things I didn’t know enough even to suspect, let alone ask about. I must have had enough material for four or five chapters.

  I switched to speakerphone, went into the kitchen, and made myself a pot of tea while she continued to talk. All of it was good stuff, some of it was priceless. I continued listening, sipping my tea, making notes.

  Gradually, the humor, then the vehemence, started to go out of her voice.

  I knew the signs.

  I said, “You must be very tired now, Ava?”

  She admitted she was.

  I said it was late. She should try to get some sleep.

  “Isn’t this interesting, honey?” It was a familiar question when she was losing the thread of a story, or the point of an anecdote. Or when she simply wanted an interview to end.

  I said, “Ava, it’s very good. I just think you must try to get some sleep.”

  “You don’t think people will think I’m settling old scores, telling tales out of school?”

  “Some might,” I said. I stopped myself from saying, I hope so.

  She said, “I’m just trying to be honest.”

  “That is why your book is important, Ava. It is honest. It’s Hollywood history.”

  “That puts me in context, baby,” she said dryly.

  It was daylight outside. I knew she’d still be in bed with the curtains drawn tight, total darkness being the only way she could sleep at night.

  “So you think The Barefoot Contessa was shit,” she said. There was accusation as well as amusement in her voice.

  “I didn’t say that, Ava. I don’t think that at all. It’s flawed but it’s still an interesting picture. I’d like to see it again before we deal with it in the book.”

  “I thought it was a piece of crap,” she said.

  “You just don’t like Mankiewicz,” I said, and we both laughed.

  She said, “Okay, Barefoot Contessa, The Killers—which do you prefer?”

  I preferred The Killers, I said.

  “Th
e Killers was a better movie, you’re right. Making it was more fun, that’s for sure. We must say that in the book somewhere. Make a note to say what a good script it was and what fun I had making it.” After a long pause she said, “What did you think of the way Mankiewicz started Barefoot Contessa?”

  I knew what she was getting at. I said that the opening scene of her funeral in a rain-drenched Rome graveyard was beautifully shot, but it was a cliché. Anyway, didn’t she think it would be a bit surreal to begin her autobiography with the narrator’s death?

  She said, “We don’t start with my death, honey—we start with my stroke, and the death of my career. We both know I’m never going to work again. Not in movies. Not in television. You could make that work in a book, couldn’t you?”

  It wasn’t the first time Ava had acknowledged her professional decline, nor was it the first time she had suggested starting the book with her near-fatal stroke—although this time her proposal was more sensible than the Lucille Ball episode she had come up with earlier.

  “We can think about it, Ava,” I said. I was tired, too, and as irritable with her as I knew she was with me.

  “What the fuck is there to think about, honey. My career’s finished. It’s over, baby. Now I’m exhausted and I want to try to catch some shut-eye. Good night, baby,” she said and replaced the receiver.

  7

  I would sit by his bed and read the newspapers to him but poor Daddy was so weak from coughing, he couldn’t stay awake. But the moment I stopped reading he’d say, ‘Go on, Daughter, don’t stop, I’m listening. My eyes are closed that’s all.’ He’d squeeze my hand and I’d continue reading, and I’d read till my eyes burned a hole in my head. He loved to hear stories about President [Franklin] Roosevelt. Roosevelt was his hero. How I wish Daddy could have lived to see the day the president invited me and Mickey to the White House on our honeymoon. Everybody wanted to know Mickey in those days. I was a nobody, an MGM starlet, not even a nobody. He was such a star. Mickey Rooney was the biggest star on the MGM lot—and about five inches shorter than me! That never stopped him. Mickey was always on, and loving every minute of it. Everybody wanted to know Mickey. But nobody wanted to know Daddy when he was dying. He was so alone. He was scared. I could see the fear in his eyes even when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to . . . I don’t know . . . they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer. Not like I meant it anyway.