Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “An occasional cuss word might be fine, honey. But this stuff is full of fucking cuss words. Anyway, I hate foul-mouthed women.”

  I managed not to laugh. There was a long silence on the line.

  “Am I still going to see you this evening?” she eventually said, abandoning the argument, convinced she’d had the last word.

  “I hope so. That was the plan, wasn’t it?” I said tentatively.

  “We have to get on with it. We’ve wasted enough fucking time on this book. Say hi to Ed for me, by the way. I like him,” she said and put down the receiver.

  I ARRIVED AT HER apartment at 7:30. The wine had already been opened and left to breathe on the coffee table beside a couple of glasses. It was a bottle of Berry Brothers’ Good Ordinary Claret, the wine I had introduced her to a few weeks earlier. I saw it as a peace offering. “Where do you want to begin, baby?” she said, all business. “We’ve really got to move our asses. We’ve got to finish this goddamn book. Where did we get to? Where shall we start?”

  “Why not pick it up with you waiting for your decree absolute from Mickey,” I told her. I switched on the Sony VORs, a tape for her, one for me.

  “Do you have to use those bloody things? They inhibit me. I start thinking twice about everything I say. Can’t you just take notes? If I say anything interesting you can just jot it down, can’t you?”

  Perhaps it was a kind of reprisal for not being at her beck and call that afternoon, or for not wanting to clean up her language. But I was not bothered. “I’m okay taking notes,” I said easily. “In some ways I prefer it.”

  “Really?” She sounded surprised. She had no idea that I made notes of nearly all our telephone conversations. “But isn’t a tape easier for you?” she said. I didn’t know whether she was being awkward or unduly solicitous of my time.

  I said, “Transcribing a tape takes twice the work, but it does have its advantages.”

  “What advantages are they?” she said.

  “Well, for starters, next time you question the number of swear words you use, I’ll just play you the tape and we can count them,” I said.

  She smiled sweetly. I think she was genuinely amused. “Okay, I’m waiting for my decree absolute,” she said as she filled my glass thoughtfully, “but still screwing the ass off Mickey—”

  “I didn’t write that,” I said.

  “And you’re not going to use it either,” she said.

  “That’s a shame,” I said. “I thought that is what you said.”

  “I said I was sex mad—at least with Mickey I was.” The idea seemed to amuse her.

  “So it’s a matter of semantics: I can’t say you were screwing the ass off Mickey but I can say you were sex mad?” I said seriously, pretending to make a note of the distinction.

  “Mick was still the only man I knew in a biblical sense,” she said, ignoring my feeble joke. “I never cheated on any of my husbands. Until I got that legal piece of paper in my hand, I wanted to remain faithful to Mickey. What bloody sentimental things kids are.”

  “Well, I think it would be a shame to lose it. It’s a titillating fact, but it’s your call.”

  “What’s a titillating fact, honey?”

  “That you and Mickey continued sleeping together while waiting for your divorce to come through. But it’s your call,” I said again to show how reasonable I was being.

  “That’s right,” she said flatly. “It is my call.”

  “But you did say you wanted an honest book. To admit you continued sleeping with Mickey . . . that’s honest, isn’t it? I would love to use it, of course I would,” I said again. “I think it’s important, but no matter.”

  “Why is it important?”

  “Well, maybe not important per se, but it’s a lovely insight,” I said.

  “How is it an insight? Insight into what, fahcrissake?”

  “It tells us a lot about you at that age.”

  “Don’t be so fucking obscure, Peter. What the fuck does it tell us?” she said, no longer hiding her impatience.

  “That you and Mick were still good friends, still close, in spite of the divorce,” I said, but I knew that was pussyfooting around the point I really wanted to make. “It tells us that you were a young woman who liked sex a lot,” I added bluntly.

  She was never careful about hiding her disapproval when I said anything she considered to be out of line and I didn’t know how she would react to my bluntness. I was surprised when she said mildly: “You could say that, honey.”

  “So it’s all right to say that you and Mickey continued to make love while you were waiting for your divorce to come through? You wouldn’t mind if we said that?” I was pushing my luck. “It was a long time ago, nobody’s going to complain. It’s not a hanging offense, for God’s sake.”

  She thought about it for a moment without smiling. “We’ll see, honey. Let me think about it,” she said, and changed the subject. “Anyway, I was determined to keep my nose clean, when Howard Hughes arrived on the scene.”

  “I thought Artie Shaw came next?” I said. The more I could keep her on some kind of track the easier it would be for me.

  “Artie was my next husband. Howard Hughes was the next man in my life. He was the first thing to come around after Mick. He came around about five minutes after I filed for divorce, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did you know him?” I said.

  “I knew of him, of course. He was one of the most famous men in America. But I’d never met him.”

  “He called you out of the blue?”

  “Yes and no,” she said.

  “What does that mean, Ava?” Pinning her down could often be a struggle.

  “Nothing was ever an accident with Howard,” she said. “He had people meeting every plane, train, and bus that arrived in Los Angeles with a pretty girl on board. He had to be the first to grab the new girl in town. It was a matter of pride for him. When he read the story of my divorce in the papers—it was all over the papers, on the radio; Mickey’s name made it headlines, not mine—Howard decided I was the new girl on the loose.”

  “Okay.”

  “On the phone I thought he’d said his name was ‘Howard Hawks.’ That was another thing about Howard Hughes: he mumbled a lot. But Howard Hawks was famous, too. He was one of the most important directors in Hollywood. He had directed one of my favorite movies, Bringing Up Baby. It was a wacky screwball comedy with Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant. I thought he must have me in mind for a new picture.

  “I was thrilled. Mannix had renewed my contract for another year, and given me a small pay raise to encourage me, but there was no such thing as security at MGM. At least if you were me there wasn’t! Louis Mayer could still drop me in a heartbeat for going ahead with the divorce. Nobody thought I would. Not even Bappie. Anyway, Howard Hawks’s invitation was wonderful. Who needed Mickey Rooney when you had Howard Hawks knocking on your door?

  “Anyway, the night he was supposed to take me out, Johnny Meyer turned up instead. I opened the door and this fat, bald guy was standing there, grinning from ear to ear. He said, ‘Miss Gardner, Howard has been called away on urgent business. Like Miss Otis, he sends his regrets—and asks will I do?’ Well, I just burst out laughing. It was such a funny line.”

  Johnny Meyer was her first date since she split with Mickey. “The photographers were all over us like a rash. They all wanted to get a picture of the new guy in my life. It was just fun in those days. The snappers wanted you to look pretty. Today they can’t wait to get you with a finger in your nose, up your ass. They’ve hit the jackpot if they get you looking looped. In the old days, if they got a bad photo of you coming out of a nightclub they’d tear it up. Hymie Fink was a little Jewish guy who had the biggest nose I’ve ever seen in my whole life. He had little squinty eyes and big thick glasses; it was a face you could never forget—but he was a dear. I loved him. He did all the nightclub pictures and would burn the negatives rather than use a bad one. That’s why the magazines were fi
lled with beautiful, glamorous women in those days.

  “Oh, another thing about Johnny Meyer, he had nice hands. He polished his fingernails with a pale varnish. Not many guys did that in those days. Today, people would think he was my ‘walker.’ But he wasn’t a fag. He wasn’t a bit faggoty. In fact, I think he had quite a few wives in his time.

  “Anyway, he took me to dinner at Chasen’s. Johnny took me to plenty of dinners after that, as a matter of fact; Howard got called away a lot on business! At least that was his excuse, and Johnny was his regular stand-in. I didn’t mind, Johnny was always fun. That first night, he let me do twenty minutes on how thrilled I was to be asked out by Howard Hawks before he told me I had the wrong Howard.

  “My date was Howard Hughes, not Hawks, he said. They both made movies but Hughes also owned TWA, the airline. That seemed to mean a lot more to Johnny than it did to me at the time. He said Howard was loaded, and also as deaf as a post, only he didn’t want people to know that. If Howard grinned at me like an idiot, I’d know he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Best advice about Howard anybody ever gave me,” she said.

  “Johnny wasn’t the handsomest man in town, he was no Clark Gable, but he wore nice suits, he always smelled good. The opposite of his boss. Howard Hughes never cared much about what he wore, or what he looked like. Maybe on our first dates he did—or sometimes when he had to be presentable he would make an effort—but he went downhill pretty fast after that. He was never really aware of his personal hygiene even then, and I’m told it got worse. He definitely got crazier, that’s for sure.”

  That evening, Johnny plied her with flattery and questions about her life: where was she born, what did her parents do? Questions about her brothers and sisters, and what she wanted out of life. “I liked being the center of attention. I was flattered. I didn’t feel he was coming on to me. I didn’t know he was just checking me out for Howard. Checking out girls for Howard Hughes was one of Johnny’s regular chores.

  “Anyway, I must have passed the test because next day Howard Hughes called and apologized for standing me up. He was very charming. He must have been because I invited him around for a drink—I had a little place on Franklin Avenue. That was where I still occasionally entertained Mickey after we split.

  “With hindsight, I should never have gotten involved with Howard. He could be damn nice but he was seventeen years older than I was. He was a low-key guy sexually. He was a real slow-burner romantically. Well, after Mick he was. Mick and I were still kids. You have to remember, I was eighteen when I met Mick, nineteen when I married him, and twenty when we split. With us, everything was fun and games—and fast. It was always Party Time.

  “Howard could sometimes be heavy-going, except when he talked about planes. His passion was flying—he was always trying to break some airspeed record or other—and women, of course. He was passionate about them. He always liked to have a few on the go at the same time. He had them stashed all over town. Lana Turner told me he was once engaged to her and Linda Darnell at the same time. She thought it was hilarious, but I couldn’t have put up with that shit.

  “He was filthy rich, of course. He inherited a fortune from his Daddy. Daddy owned the Hughes Tool Company in Houston. When Daddy died, Howard got the lot, the whole kit and caboodle. I think he was twenty, twenty-one when his father passed. ‘That’s when I realized that women found me attractive,’ he once said to me. I still haven’t figured out whether he was that naive about women! I don’t think he was being funny.

  “Anyway, he always had plenty of women to console him. Lana, she did a good job for a while; she really expected to marry him. Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers. Jean Peters—he married her. Kate Hepburn. Linda Darnell. Oh my God, he had so many women. Jean Harlow, Jane Russell. They were all beauties, too. Kate Hepburn wasn’t a great beauty but I’m told she could turn guys on. Kate’s what now? She must be at least eighty?”

  “About that,” I said. “Apart from Howard’s wealth, was he attractive?” I didn’t want to be sidetracked.

  She thought about that for a while before answering.

  “He was a skinny guy, not bad-looking, tall, well over six feet, maybe six-foot-four. He reminded me a lot of Daddy,” she said slowly. “He had a kind of remoteness about him like Daddy had, and that’s always attractive in a man. He was partially deaf, of course. That may have accounted for the longueurs in his conversation, and probably explained his shyness, too. Anyway, he never talked much. He was no raconteur; I called him the Quiet Texan.

  “I’m talking about a time before he became that crazy basket case holed up in a Las Vegas hotel surrounded by fucking Mormons, and as mad as a hatter. I never knew that Howard Hughes, thank Christ. That Howard made me sad. I’m pleased I never met him.

  “When I first knew him, he’d made Hell’s Angels, a helluva picture about pilots in World War I. It was the blockbuster of its day. I bet it still stands up. He was a pilot himself; he had an obsession with flying; he was what they’d now call an ‘action hero.’ He was badly injured showing the stuntmen on Hell’s Angels how it should be done. I think quite a few pilots died on that picture, too. He was a demanding sonofabitch. But he had plenty of guts, you have to give him that.

  “A couple of months after we started stepping out together, he was in a serious plane crash in Nevada. I’d flown to Las Vegas with him and some of his people. He was going to pick up an amphibious aircraft he’d designed to put it through its water trials. He dropped me off in Las Vegas and went on to Lake Mead, where the plane crashed, killing a couple of the engineers on board.

  “Howard was badly injured. He called me from the hospital to tell me what had happened. ‘I want you to know I just killed a couple of my guys,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, kid, I’m going to be okay.’

  “I read that he grew a mustache while recovering from the burns—he said the burns on his face made shaving too painful. That was probably the truth of it, but he told me he grew it because I was a fan of Clark Gable, and Clark had a ’stache! I’m sure that was a load of applesauce, but it did make me laugh, and old Howard didn’t do that too often.”

  She stopped and smiled at me. “What else can I tell you?”

  “I don’t know? What else can you tell me?” I said. It had been a good session and she was looking tired. I didn’t want to push her. I was happy to wrap it up for the night.

  “We shared the same birthday: December 24. We were both Christmas Eve Capricorns,” she said. “Apart from that, we didn’t have much in common. I was a good dancer, he was bloody awful. I don’t know why he always insisted on dancing with me. I dreaded it. In fact, apart from Mick, who wasn’t bad but a bit lacking in the height department, none of my husbands was any good on the dance floor. Frank and Artie both had two left feet.

  “What else? He was born rich. I wasn’t. He was a WASP. I definitely was not. He was a racist. You know I’m not. When I told him that my closest childhood friend, Virginia, was black, he didn’t call me for about six weeks. I think he was sulking! He could be a sulky bastard. I didn’t give a damn. Fuck him! He wouldn’t employ blacks in his aircraft plants? Fuck him! Fuck all bigots.”

  She lifted her glass in a toast to scorning bigots.

  “To hell with all bigots,” I said, and raised my glass.

  “Is any of this stuff usable?” she said, suddenly serious again.

  “Of course it is. You mustn’t have any doubts. I’ll hardly need to touch it.” It was not the first time she had questioned the value of her story, or how she was telling it.

  “I ramble too much,” she said. She checked the wine. It was nearly all gone; she poured a little into her glass, then the rest into mine. “I’m all over the place.”

  “I can pull it together. That’s my job. It’s good stuff,” I told her again. “I promise you, it’s all there.”

  “The amazing thing is, Howard was in my life, on and off, for more than twenty years but I never loved him. I don’t think he ever really loved me, althoug
h he was a dogged sonofabitch. He wanted me to marry him so much. He was driving me crazy. I thought, Shit, I’ll marry the man and be done with it. I mean it was not a bad move marrying Howard Hughes, the richest man on the planet. I was still waiting for my California divorce from Mickey to come through. That was going to take a year, I reckoned.

  “Howard didn’t want to wait that long. He wanted me to go to Nevada to get a divorce. I went up to see Louis Mayer—I was still a good little MGM starlet—and told him I wanted a quickie divorce. It was no skin off his nose. But he was still in his Catholic phase and gave me another stern lecture on marriage being sacrosanct. ‘Wait the year, show some respect to Mickey!’ he said.

  “Anyway, we never did tie the knot. He stayed loyal and generous. He was always keen. But I eventually drifted out of the marriage zone, I guess.

  “It’s a pity—we might have had such a damned good time together,” she said, paraphrasing Lady Brett with a smile.

  It was late. She was tired, and I had to go.

  “It’s time for bed,” I said.

  “Oh, I wish it were, honey,” she said.

  19

  The size of Frank Sinatra’s penis had been on my mind for weeks. I don’t know why it was bothering me so much, but it was. It went back to an incident several years earlier in Kenya during the shooting of Mogambo. John Ford, the crusty, hard-drinking director with whom Ava had an erratic and feisty but strictly professional relationship, had asked her to explain to a visiting English diplomat what she saw in Sinatra—“that one-hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married to,” as Ford referred to her husband.

  “Well, there is only ten pounds of Frank,” she said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but there’s one hundred and ten pounds of cock.”

  It was one of the many outrageous anecdotes told about Ava, and whether it was true or apocryphal, it was now part of her legend.

  Snyder was keen to get her to repeat the story to me, so that we could include it in the book in her own words. I certainly wanted to use it. It was a classic Ava Gardner story, and I happened to believe it was true. Spoli Mills had assured me it was, so had Dirk Bogarde. My problem was that there seemed to be no easy way to bring the subject up without sounding coarse or inappropriately inquisitive.