Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “It’s unnecessary, honey,” she said softly, and put the phone down.

  At least we were back on “honey” terms. I typed up the conversation, cleaned my teeth, and decided to finish the draft of the honeymoon material before I turned in.

  15

  How much longer is this fucking book going to take, baby?” Ava demanded as soon as I entered the apartment. It was 12:30 P.M., too early in the day to expect her to be at her most winning, but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so disagreeable either.

  “The delay doesn’t seem to concern you anywhere near as much as it concerns me. For you, there will always be another book. For me, this is it. This is my one shot, baby. I’m not asking for a literary masterpiece, fahcrissake. If I’d wanted a literary fucking masterpiece, I could have asked Robert Graves to write it for me,” she said, referring to the late English poet and novelist, a devoted admirer whom she equally adored. “I just want a book that’ll pay the fucking mortgage now, baby, not next year. Time’s not on my side, you know that, fahcrissake. You’re causing me a lot of fucking grief. You and I have a problem, baby.”

  I knew that she was becoming anxious about the time I was taking to finish the chapters to submit to Dick Snyder, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by the frustration and anger in her voice, but I was. I hadn’t regarded the pages I left with her the previous evening as in any way final but I thought at least they would have reassured her.

  Her anger was paralyzing. And when she’s in that kind of mood, Dirk Bogarde had warned me, and so had Peter Viertel, you just had to duck and weave and keep your distance. “Jesus, she can be tough on her friends,” Viertel had said with feeling, concluding a story about her displeasure at a scene he had written for her in The Sun Also Rises. “Just remember, she believes that writers only respond to pressure,” he’d said wryly.

  Forewarned, I didn’t argue with her. When she was in that frame of mind, there was nothing I could say that would not be wrong. I didn’t even remind her that I had written several chapters she had loved, drafted a few more, which I was sure she was going to like, and was continuing to interview her two or three times a week. I’d also been moonlighting on my novel Theodora but, heeding Ed Victor’s advice, I hadn’t told her about that at all.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t planned to do any work with Ava that day. I had simply dropped by to hear what she thought of the new draft pages, and to give her a copy of the final volume of historian Martin Gilbert’s official biography of Sir Winston Churchill. She had met the English statesman aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in the south of France in the 1950s; along with FDR, he was a hero of hers. Gilbert had footnoted Ari, my biography of the Greek tycoon, and I’d hoped that this tenuous link might elicit some odd detail that would unlock a memory Ava could be unconsciously holding back. It was a ploy I’d successfully used before in interviews, and, indeed, it would later remind her of a boozy evening she’d spent with Churchill aboard Onassis’s yacht in Monte Carlo. (“W.C. had had his share of vino and was feeling no pain, I was downing ouzo,” she recalled.)

  But right now, reeling and dazed at her outburst, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I just wanted to get out of the apartment as soon as I could.

  She hadn’t stood up, and I kissed her forehead. “Let’s talk later,” I said.

  She was too angry with me even to tell me to fuck off.

  THAT EVENING, READING THROUGH the transcripts of the interviews I needed for the next chapter, I was surprised and reassured to see how much ground we had covered. Pinned to the top sheet was a heavily underscored note reminding me of her reply when I questioned something she’d said that contradicted the reference books: “It’s my fucking life, hon. I’ll remember it the way I want to remember it.”

  Reading the line again made me laugh as much as it did the first time she said it when we’d been arguing over the infallibility of memory versus the reliability of research. Then she’d stuck to her guns as only Ava could when she was in the wrong.

  It was now eleven o’clock. She still hadn’t returned the call I made earlier in the evening. I had no idea whether she wanted me to continue with the book or not. I wouldn’t have put money on it either way. I didn’t want to call her again that evening but neither did I want to give up hope. It would be a disappointment if she decided to give me the bullet, but if she did . . . well, I’d be devastated and embarrassed; it would hurt my professional pride. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have missed the experience for the world.

  She was infuriating, bawdy, frank, and unreasonable. She was also kind, affectionate, trusting, and often touching.

  And I adored her.

  Meanwhile, using a reporter’s guile to write around the gaps in the interviews, and keeping as many of her epithets as I could, I would try to finish a draft of the chapter that night and show it to her the next day.

  I still hoped that they wouldn’t be the last pages I’d get a chance to show her.

  Slowly, I began to type:

  Mick and I were crazy in love, even though we were still almost strangers to each other when we married on January 10, 1942. We’d seen each other practically every day since I arrived in Hollywood with Bappie the previous summer. But most of that time had been spent in nightclubs and at the Santa Anita racetrack. We had never had a serious conversation about anything. We had never made love. That was no way to get to know a person well—certainly not well enough to marry them.

  I was nineteen. What the fuck did I know?

  The war had been going for a month. Nothing had worsened; that is to say it hadn’t yet touched us, except that Mr. Mayer said that he wanted Mick to go out on the road selling war bonds to show his patriotism—and, oh, by the way, he said, as if it were something that had just popped into his head, Mick could also do a little promotional work for the latest Andy Hardy movie!

  Uncle L.B. never missed a trick.

  But the trip didn’t start out well. We were driving up to San Francisco when we heard the news that Carole Lombard, Clark Gable’s wife, had been killed in a plane crash over Las Vegas. That was when we knew there was a war on. She was on her way back from her own war bond tour, and Mickey was devastated. So was I, although I was never close to her, I was more of a fan than a friend. Mick, of course, was a great friend of both of them, and Clark was beyond grief.

  A few years later, when we made The Hucksters together, and became close, Clark took his wallet out of his back pocket and showed me the last cable Carole had sent him on that tour. It was in a cellophane wrap. It said, HEY PAPPY, YOU BETTER GET IN THIS MAN’S ARMY. He joined the air force soon after that, even though he was in his forties. He was my hero when I was a kid. He was still my hero when we made our first movie together, and until the day he died.

  Anyway, we left Mick’s Lincoln Continental in San Francisco. God, he loved that car; there was a gold plate on the dash saying that it was a personal gift from Henry Ford to Mickey Rooney, which I always thought was a bit chintzy. Ford later gave Clark a similar car. But Mickey was proud of the fact that he got his first. Anyway, as I said, we left Mick’s in San Francisco for the studio to pick up and take back to the studio while we took off on a whistle-stop tour selling war bonds and Mickey’s new movie. Chicago, Boston, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Washington, God knows where else.

  But wherever we went, thousands of screaming bobby-soxers were there to mob him. I swear to you, they were every bit as wild as Frank’s fans when he was at the top. It was phenomenal. Mick called them his San Quentin quail club. But the enthusiasm, the hysteria of those kids made me understand why Mayer was so fucking desperate to keep our marriage off the front pages.

  Les Peterson, who was still with us, never introduced me as Mickey Rooney’s wife, which pissed me off. I knew he was only doing what Mayer had told him to do—as Eddie Mannix was only doing what Mayer told him to do when he put the skids under my dreams of a white wedding. That was another thing that pissed me off: everybody obeyed Louis B. Mayer.
>
  Les said all I had to do was sit on the arm of Mick’s chair at the press conferences and keep looking at him like a fan, like I was one of the bloody bobby-soxers—oh, and I had to make sure the reporters got a good look at my pins! He was incorrigible. “I’m only doing my job, honey,” he’d say whenever I put up a squawk.

  But I was enjoying myself, so was Mickey. We were two young kids having a whale of a time. We never for a minute forgot that it was our honeymoon! We were discovering new things about each other all the time—as I said, there was plenty of scope for that! Like he was athletic in the sack, and I was pretty verbal, and we were both very, very loud!

  It was a hoot, and we made sure there was always time for a quickie. I was seeing and doing things I never thought I would do and see in my life.

  In Boston we had dinner at the mayor’s house. It was a very formal affair, with silverware out to here on this side and out to there on that side. I was on my best behavior but terrified about using the wrong knife and fork.

  There again you see, if I’d been drinking in those days, the shyness wouldn’t have been so bad, and I wouldn’t have gotten into such a panic. At least I’d learned not to wipe my knife and fork on the napkin! I swear to Christ, that’s what I did at the first smart dinner party Mickey took me to in Hollywood!

  He said to me afterward, “You made a little faux pas at dinner, sweetheart.” I was too dumb even to know what a faux pas was. But I learned pretty fast.

  From Fort Bragg we took a little side trip to Raleigh to visit Mama. I hadn’t seen her since Bappie and I took off for Hollywood the previous August. She had been too ill to go to our wedding. She was bedridden, and we all knew it was cancer by that time. My sister Inez and her husband had set her up in a little den next to the front room. This was the first time she had met Mickey, and she’d gotten herself dressed up to the nines. He made such a fuss of her. He was marvelous. My whole family turned out for him: my brother, all my sisters, nieces, and nephews. And Lord, when Mick had an audience was he good. He did his impersonations, he sang, he danced. He clowned. He was the complete movie star and Mama loved her movie stars! He made her the center of attention. It was probably the last truly great day of her life, although she survived for another year. I’ve never been able to express my gratitude for the things that touch me deeply and nothing had ever touched me as deeply as Mickey’s performance for Mama that day. He treated her like a queen.

  Driving up to Washington that evening—we had been invited to President Roosevelt’s sixtieth birthday party at the White House—I tried to tell Mick how much his show for Mama had meant to me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get the words out. Finally, I just said, “I’m so pleased I married you, Mickey Rooney.”

  He said, “Of course you are, sweetheart. Who wouldn’t be?”

  He made a joke of everything, but I meant it. I don’t often blub, but I wept twice that weekend: once for Mama, because of her joy; and once for Daddy, because I missed him so. He would have been so proud to see me at the White House, having dinner with his hero, FDR. We watched the president give one of his famous Fireside radio broadcasts and all I could think was, Daddy would have loved this, he would have been so proud of me.

  I was still working when the phone rang. It was 2 A.M. I knew it would be Ava.

  “Why are you still up at this hour?” I said, picking up immediately.

  “I can’t sleep, honey.”

  “What’s troubling you?”

  “I have such a fucking headache. It’s not even a hangover either.”

  I said I was sorry to hear that.

  “What are you doing up, hon?” she said.

  “Working on your book,” I said nobly. Encouraged by a “honey” and a “hon” on the trot, I wondered whether she would say sorry for having accused me of dragging my feet. “I work better at night,” I said.

  “How far have you gotten?” she said.

  I wasn’t going to get an apology. But neither, apparently, did she plan to fire me on the spot.

  “I’m wrapping up the story of your honeymoon, you and Mick visiting your mother in Raleigh,” I told her.

  “Have you written about going to the White House for Roosevelt’s sixtieth birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’ve covered the highlights of that marriage, honey,” she said philosophically.

  I knew she was deadly serious, but I laughed anyway.

  “It went downhill so fucking fast from there.” She laughed, too. Nobody could laugh the way she did. But the disintegration of her first marriage always seemed to fascinate her, as if she still couldn’t figure out why it had gone sour so quickly. “If the sex hadn’t been so good, it wouldn’t have lasted as long as it lasted. It’s a pity nobody believes in simple lust anymore,” she said.

  I started making notes. Although I suspected that she had said it before, or something very much like it, I wanted to make sure I remembered it. I would certainly use it. After a longish silence, she said wearily: “Oh Peter, I’m so depressed. I’ve made so many fucking mistakes in my life, honey.”

  “Christ, we all make mistakes, Ava.”

  “Do you love me?” she said. “The truth.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “It doesn’t matter . . . as long as you’re still my friend.”

  “I’m still your friend.”

  “I wake up at night thinking of all the fuckups I’ve made. I wish I could turn them into funny stories. The way Dorothy Parker used to. Maybe you can do that for me? Make me sound witty and not so fucking dumb every time I open my mouth?”

  “You’re not at all dumb. You make me laugh.”

  “I may have to marry you,” she said.

  “It’s a pity nobody believes in simple lust anymore,” I repeated her line, but she didn’t seem to recognize it. She didn’t seem to find it funny, anyway.

  “How’s your head?” I asked. We had been talking for about an hour.

  “I’ve taken a tablet.”

  I heard her yawn. “You should try to get back to sleep,” I said.

  “I will. A drink might help. But I can’t be bothered to get out of bed.”

  “You shouldn’t drink, not if you’ve taken a tablet,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah. Good night, hon,” she said quietly and put down the receiver.

  I made a few more notes, and went to bed. The next morning I typed up the notes of our conversation and went back to her story.

  It’s a shame that it didn’t work out with Mick. The idea of being married had always appealed to me, and I was hopelessly in love with him by this time. We lived in a tiny apartment on Wilshire and Palm Drive in Westwood that we’d rented from Red Skelton. One bedroom, living room, kitchen, and a tiny dining room. (There’s a big high-rise there now.) We were out all the time, all the time. Oh God, Mickey and I were out practically every night of our lives together. We danced, he drank a fair amount—I was catching on pretty fast. But Mick was working every day, too. He was carrying the weight of the studio on his shoulders. I don’t know how he did it. We had a damn good goosefeather mattress, I suppose that helped the boy!

  I wasn’t working. I wasn’t doing a fucking thing. I had no talent, I had no training. I went to classes—dance classes, which I loved. But the drama classes were a joke. I spent a lot of time doing photographs—which are rolling in all the time now—leg art. They’d say, “Who’s got good legs and nice tits and isn’t filming? Okay, Ava, you’ll do; report to the stills gallery.” I was always available for pinups. I was nineteen. It wasn’t such a bad life, if you didn’t have ambition. I slipped into it real easy.

  For a couple of months anyway I had no doubt that Mick was going to be my mate for eternity. We were seen everywhere together, Hollywood’s most devoted couple. Well, that’s what I believed, anyway. We were madly in love. Well, we were screwing a lot.

  A week or so after we got back from our honeym
oon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most godawful pain in my stomach. I was in agony. Mickey drove me to the Presbyterian Hospital. Like everybody in my family, I had a misplaced appendix, and they diagnosed a tubal pregnancy. Thank God, they had a wonderful surgeon there who realized, when they started to cut, that it wasn’t a tubal pregnancy at all but an inflamed appendix.

  In those days you stayed in the hospital for three weeks after even a minor operation; now they have you up and walking the next day. So I came home and the first night I found evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed. On the fucking goosefeather mattress! That ain’t a very nice thing for a nineteen-year-old bride, quite pretty, too, to discover. I’d been away for three weeks and he’d already dragged somebody into our bed. I don’t know who the hell it was but I knew somebody had been keeping my side of the bed warm.

  I remember it had something to do with a douche bag—somebody had been using my douche bag. I had what they called a tipped infantile uterus and I always used a vinegar douche. Except one time with Mickey I experimented with a rubber. I didn’t like it one little bit. No, no, no. But I never got pregnant, not until I was married to Frank anyway.

  Anyway, I knew that someone had been using my stuff. I called Bappie. She said, don’t you dare touch it! Get the little bastard to clean up his own fucking mess. He denied it, of course. He played the little innocent. Nobody could pile on the applesauce like Mickey. He was the best liar in the world—well, Frank Sinatra can tell a good story, too. He sawed off a few whoppers in his day, but I don’t believe he was ever unfaithful to me. I’m leveling. I really believe that.

  Anyway, Mickey tried to make up for that rotten douche bag business. In his fashion he did. He bought us a small house in Bel Air, which I helped to choose and decorate. It was my first taste of real film-star living. Metro renewed my contract, and gave me a small raise. I was getting small, walk-on parts but nothing to write home about. The first line I ever said on screen—I played a carhop girl in a drive-in—was “What will you have?” I did a lot of things like that. I played a hat-check girl, I did a lot of club scenes, I danced with a man in a ballroom scene. I’ve forgotten the name of that first film, except that it was also Fred Zinnemann’s first [American feature-length] movie. He became one of the great Hollywood directors; he put Frank Sinatra right with From Here to Eternity. Frank wouldn’t mess around with Zinnemann.