Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “I said, ‘Am I supposed to be flattered by that, Les?’

  “He said, ‘Well, that’s just about the highest compliment L.B. can pay a girl, honey.’ ”

  Nevertheless, the idea that his most profitable star—the hero of the lucrative Andy Hardy franchise, who made more money for him than all his other stars put together, and who had been voted three years in a row the most popular star in the universe—had fallen in love with a hillbilly starlet was intolerable.

  “I swear to God, I had no idea of the fuss I was creating. I had no idea that Mayer—uncle L.B. as Mickey called him—had ordered Mick to stop seeing me. He’d actually forbidden it! That shows you the power Mayer wielded in those days. And it shows the power—and the guts—Mickey had to stand up to him the way he did. I still hadn’t met the man! I didn’t know that he considered me the devil incarnate. I didn’t know that he thought I was going to eat his fucking meal ticket.

  “I had to hand it to Mick. While all this was going on, he hadn’t said a word about it to me. He must have been under enormous stress, poor darling. I still hadn’t agreed to marry him but he was laying his whole career on the line in the hope that I’d eventually say yes. The man must have been fucking insane. Believe me, when L. B. Mayer leaned on you, you knew you were being leaned on. He would use charm, threats, floods of tears to get what he wanted. He could destroy careers. God, he was a piece of work. He was manipulative, cunning, and profoundly sentimental. He treated his stars as if they were his own children. He could wrap them around his finger—especially Mickey. L.B. was the best actor on the lot. He could turn on the tears like a faucet. He and Mickey were the best criers on the lot. I’d have paid good money to be a fly on the wall at those meetings.”

  In spite of Mayer’s efforts to keep the relationship quiet, the gossip columnists—Louella Parsons, who would become Ava’s bête noire, Jimmie Fidler, Sidney Skolsky, Hedda Hopper—eventually got on to the story. “They always mentioned that I was a North Carolina beauty and much taller than Mickey. Their bulb pressers always managed to get pictures that made me look as if I towered over Mickey—which, of course, I did. Mick never seemed to mind, but it embarrassed the hell out of me. The way those press people kept on about it made me feel like a freak. I offered not to wear my high-heeled shoes when we were together but Mick wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I was spending a lot of time in the picture gallery doing ‘leg art’ for Clarence Bull’s people. At least that’s where I was when I wasn’t having voice lessons to get rid of my hopeless accent. Mickey didn’t want me to lose it. He said he was just beginning to understand what the fuck I was talking about! Anyway, Clarence Bull was the man who did those great portraits of Garbo. He shot all the studio’s important stars—Kate Hepburn, Harlow, Grace [Kelly], Lana Turner. Lassie! He didn’t bother with me until much later, after I’d divorced Artie Shaw but before I married Frank. But I was getting a lot of space in the papers and magazines with that cheesecake stuff.

  “Mama must have collected every one of those clippings. Bappie found them in her bedroom after she died. She was my biggest fan. She was my only fan—well, her and Mickey Rooney. She was thrilled when she read that I was dating Mick. She must have known that already, of course—Bappie and I wrote her every week—but reading it in the newspapers made it real for her. It was news to her when she read in a local rag that I’d soon be appearing in a new MGM picture at the local Raleigh movie house. It was news to me, too. I still hadn’t made a single movie at that point.”

  From August to November 1941, Ava managed to keep Rooney at bay and on heat. “I was having a ball. It was a fast life but we were both kids, we could handle it. One night we’d had a nightcap at Don the Beachcomber, which was often our last stop off before Mick took me back to Wilcox Avenue. The Beachcomber had become a favorite spot of mine. They served the best zombies in California. They tasted so good and seemed so innocuous. Have you ever had a zombie?”

  I said I didn’t think so.

  “Oh, you’d remember if you had: Bacardi, dark rum, light rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, apricot brandy, orange juice, a sprig of mint, and a cherry. Only I always told them to hold the mint and the cherry!”

  “Very sensible,” I said.

  She smiled. “I might have been floating a little bit, but I definitely wasn’t drunk. I swear I still hadn’t ever tied one on in my life at that stage. No matter what time I’d gotten to bed I always woke fresh as a daisy. I definitely knew what I was saying that night when Mick again asked me to marry him.

  “ ‘Okay, Mick,’ I said.

  “ ‘I asked you to marry me,’ he said. He sounded stunned.

  “ ‘I know you did, and I said okay—but not until I’m nineteen,’ I said.

  “I think I was a bit stunned myself. Maybe I’d heard what a rough time L.B. was giving him over me. Maybe I felt guilty about that. I really can’t remember. I just remember thinking: why the hell not? Mama was saying marry him, Bappie was saying Do it, do it! He’s a nice guy! What’s keeping you?

  “So I said okay. But I still had this thing about being a virgin on the day I was married—and nineteen years old. I don’t know why I wanted to wait until I was nineteen, perhaps because Mama was nineteen when she married Daddy, and it always seemed like it was the right thing to do.”

  It had been a good session and we both knew it.

  “I must try a zombie next time I’m passing Don the Beachcomber,” I said.

  “But you must get them to hold the mint and the cherry,” she said. “That’s the secret of a good zombie.”

  13

  When I showed Ava the revised first chapters of her memoir, more than twenty thousand words, she read them at a single sitting in complete silence. I sat in an armchair opposite her, sipping a glass of wine, watching her facial expressions, trying to judge her reaction to the pages. I knew there would be passages that she wouldn’t like and things she would want changed; some she would definitely cut.

  She was a slow reader. She wore a gray track suit, her legs tucked beneath her. Some pages she went back to and read again. Once she read a whole chapter twice. Her expression never changed. Based on our interviews, her asides and ad-libs, the gossip and thoughts we had exchanged in our middle-of-the-night telephone conversations when her defenses were down, the copy was funny and frank, a God-honest read. She was candid about herself and others. I had ignored her request to tone down her profanities, which she said made her sound like a “fishwife.” Her expletives had a kind of eloquence of their own and I’d let them fly.

  I knew I had betrayed her confidences and repeated many of her funny but strictly off-the-record remarks. It was a deliberate risk I had taken to make the book as honest and edgy as she was herself. I knew I had gone too far in places, but this, I told myself, was to be my bargaining chip—when push came to shove, I’d be prepared to forsake a certain amount of vulgarity to keep one indiscreet revelation. It would be an interesting game to play.

  But the torrent of invective I expected her to unleash any moment at the liberties I had taken never came. She continued to read on in absolute silence, the rustle of the read pages falling to the floor the only sound in the room.

  Her sustained concentration eventually began to unnerve me. The idea of bargaining chips went out the window. I began to think of what I would say when her anger finally erupted—what lines would I fight for? which would I sacrifice? And if she fired me as her ghost, what would be my parting shot then? Several excellent exit bon mots went through my mind. “Fuck you, Ava!” was my favorite.

  She finished reading the revised chapters. The discarded pages were scattered around her, on the sofa, across the floor. She removed her glasses, and began cleaning the lenses with a Kleenex. I was now sure she was preparing to give me a severe scolding before she let me go.

  “It’s good, honey,” she finally said.

  The sense of relief—and surprise—went through me like a shot of adrenaline. I couldn’t believe that she
hadn’t objected to a single four-letter word, nor complained about the amount of material I had lifted from our private conversations and her off-the-record stories.

  “I’m pleased you like it,” I said.

  “I didn’t say I liked it, honey,” she said. “It’s too fucking close for comfort, honey.” After a pause, she added: “But I’m sure the publishers will love it.”

  “It needs polishing,” I said out of sheer relief. She had read it as carefully as I had seen her read anything and I couldn’t believe she had accepted it without a fight. She sipped her glass of wine that had remained untouched by her side. “You okay with the language?” I said.

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “I’ve used a few words you asked me not to use,” I said.

  “So I noticed,” she said dryly.

  My first response was to laugh. “And you’re happy with all that?” I said. I knew I was pressing my luck but I didn’t want her to have second thoughts after we delivered the copy to the publishers. “If you have any doubts, it’s best you tell me now,” I said.

  “I think it’s got to be all or nothing, don’t you, honey?” she said.

  “I’m sure that’s right, Ava,” I said.

  “What the hell. The publishers are going to love it,” she said again after a thoughtful silence.

  I still had to be certain. “You don’t want to discuss it with Spoli, or with Paul Mills?” I said. I regretted it immediately.

  She turned the question over in her mind. “Do you think I should?” She looked at me steadily.

  I said I’d rather she didn’t. I knew what they’d say, and so did she.

  “They’re wise old birds,” she said. “Especially Spoli.”

  “They’d still be second-guessers,” I said. We’d had this discussion before, I reminded her, and I really didn’t want to get into it again. “They have already made their views plain, Ava.” I knew that the more people who become involved in a manuscript, especially when they’re friends, well-meaning friends, with their own prejudices and ideas about the story line, the more muddled it can become. But if she wanted a second opinion, it was up to her, I said.

  “It wouldn’t bother you?” she said.

  “Apart from the fact it’ll add months to the schedule? No, it doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  “Balls,” she said.

  “I don’t want to write anything that would hurt you, Ava.”

  “Then you’d prefer me not to show it to them?” she persisted.

  We were going around in circles. I said, “It’s your decision, Ava.”

  She poured herself a second glass of wine, then another for me. “I trust you,” she said after another thoughtful silence. She sounded unusually hesitant and I didn’t comment. “Anyway, I agree, too much discretion would bore the pants off people, right?” she said eventually.

  I lifted my glass in a toast. “I’ll drink to that,” I said.

  “What happens now, honey?” she said. She put a cigarette in her mouth but didn’t light it.

  “I don’t want to show anything to Dick Snyder until we have another couple of chapters in the bag. Now I know you’re okay with what we’ve done, we should be able to move ahead much faster,” I said.

  She removed the cigarette from her lips and crumbled it in an ashtray. “Just remember, I’m not getting any fucking younger, honey,” she said.

  ALTHOUGH IT CONTINUED TO be impossible to get her to express her thoughts in any coherent order, we settled into a successful, if occasionally tetchy, working relationship. I would spend a session digging into a period of her life, sometimes into a particular incident I thought was interesting; the following session, preferably the next evening, we would discuss the reasons for her behavior and why she had reacted in a particular way. I’d then write a first draft for her to read and see if there was anything we could add.

  For example, a few months after her marriage to Rooney, Peter Lawford, another young MGM contract player—who became a somewhat mischief-making confidant—told Ava about the little black book of girls’ telephone numbers Mickey still kept and continued to use. She hadn’t wanted to expand on this in our interviews; in the draft, I had her conclude tamely: “I was pretty angry when I found out!”

  “Pretty angry? Are you kidding me? I was fucking furious, honey. Goddamn fucking furious, baby. What young bride wouldn’t have been? I was spitting blood. If we’re going to use that story, let’s use all of it, honey,” she said.

  That night, she said, she had gone through Rooney’s pockets while he slept and found the little black book. “Most of the names were starlets and bit players. I knew some of them. They were the regular studio pushovers—Bappie says back home they were called sharecroppers. Others were the kids I told you about, the ones who had to put out at the end of the month when the rental was due. Anyway, I set fire to his fucking little book. But I always used it against him whenever we had a fight: What about Lana, was she a good lay? I never fucked Lana, he’d insist. Well, her name was in the fucking book, I’d say. And so was my fucking bookie’s, sweetheart, and I never fucked him either, he’d say.”

  A week had passed since she told me about the night Mickey again asked her to marry him and she had at last said yes. I suggested we pick it up from there.

  “Once he’d recovered—and realized that my acceptance didn’t mean I was going to make out with him that night—Mick was all business. We’d announce our engagement on Christmas Eve at a birthday bash for me at Romanoff’s, he said. Then there was this odd sort of silence. I wanted to hear violins play but there was just this awful silence.

  “ ‘Is there something wrong, honey?’ I asked.

  “He said, ‘There’s a problem, sweetheart.’

  “He sounded so fucking serious. I thought he might be having second thoughts about the marriage thing. ‘What’s the problem?’ I said.

  “ ‘Who are we going to break the news to first—Ma or Uncle L.B.?’ he said.

  “I was just thankful he didn’t throw in old Louella [Parsons], too. Anyway, we tossed a coin, and Ma won. I had a feeling she always would!”

  Ava’s first meeting with her formidable future mother-in-law was one of her favorite stories. “I would replay it in my head whenever Mick did something so outrageous I wanted to kill him. I only had to think of that meeting to make me laugh, and all was forgiven. You had to forgive any boy who had a mother like Mick’s Ma,” she said.

  “I was nervous and very shy. Ma was sitting cross-legged on the sofa with the Racing Form across her lap, a bottle of bourbon by her side, and a big glassful in her hand. Did you ever see the comic strip Maggie and Jiggs?”

  I said I hadn’t. It was an American strip.

  “Well, Ma was a dead ringer for Maggie, even the tight, little curls were the same—like carroty Ping-Pong balls. The scene was bizarre. It’s something I’ll never forget: Ma sitting in this big, beautiful house Mickey had bought her in the [San Fernando] Valley, sipping her whiskey, and studying the horses. She had divorced Joe Yule; she was married to Fred Pankey, a cashier at the studio.

  “Mick said, ‘Ma, I want you to meet Ava. We’re going to get married.’

  “She looked at me for a second or two, her expression didn’t change. She was as calm as custard. ‘Well,’ she said, these were her first words to me: ‘I guess he hasn’t been in your pants yet, has he?’ ”

  This was always the starting point to Ava’s story about her future mother-in-law. She loved telling it. “God Almighty, what a meeting that was. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. Today I would think it was one of the funniest opening remarks I’d ever heard, but then I just wanted to curl up and die.”

  On the way back from the Valley that evening, Mick asked Ava what she thought of Ma.

  “She certainly knows her son,” Ava said, who rather liked her once she had gotten over her embarrassment and the shock of meeting a woman who could cuss better and more often than she did.

  “That wa
s the easy part,” Rooney told her. “Wait till you meet Uncle L.B.”

  THE PLAN WAS TO announce their engagement at a party at Romanoff’s on Christmas Eve. But after Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, Rooney jumped the gun and gave the story to Hedda Hopper. “It was a slap in the face for Mayer. He’d gone down on his knees and begged Mickey not to marry me. The story of Mick’s defiance was the talk of the town. Not many people stood up to L.B. and lived to tell the tale.”

  Ava still hadn’t met Mayer but a few days before her nineteenth birthday, Rooney told her that Uncle L.B. wanted to see them both in his office the following morning.

  “I didn’t want to go. Mick said Uncle L.B. wanted to give us his blessing. I doubted that. He wouldn’t touch Mickey, of course, not right away, but men like that have long memories. I felt much more vulnerable. Old Uncle L.B. could make me disappear in the middle of the next scene, if he wanted to!”

  Ava and Rooney arrived at Mayer’s office together at eight o’clock the following morning. Mayer summoned Rooney in first. “While Mickey was talking to Mayer, I sat in the outer office with Ida Koverman. She’d been Mayer’s secretary forever. If L.B. dropped dead tomorrow, she could have run the whole show,” Ava said.

  Koverman had been Herbert Hoover’s secretary before he became president. It was through Koverman—a widow rarely known to smile, it was said—that Mayer became interested in politics and began making big, fat donations to the Republican Party. “It was Mayer who made me realize that I could never be a Republican. He would call you up if you voted the wrong way, or went to the wrong rally. God knows how he knew but he always did. Later, I became a great Henry Wallace fan when he ran for president against Harry Truman on an independent ticket [for the Progressive Party]. Jesus, did I get a lecture for that! Mayer’s idea of a Red was any liberal; anybody who was not an out-and-out Republican was a dangerous pinko.

  “Anyway, there I was, sitting in Ida Koverman’s office, scared half to death, waiting to meet Uncle L.B., wondering what the hell was keeping Mickey so long. Ida was giving me the silent treatment. I remember her first words to me were, ‘You know, young lady, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.’ Between that and his Ma saying ‘so he hasn’t been in your pants yet,’ I should have been warned. I should have walked out of there right then. In fact, I was just about to do just that when Ida said, ‘You can go in now, young lady.’ ”