Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  IT WAS A SUNDAY evening and I was about to call Ava to discuss the material we would need for the next chapter when, at eight o’clock, the phone rang.

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Ava, hi,” I said, surprised by her call at that hour.

  “What are you up to?” she said.

  I’m thinking about how I can ask you about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock, would have been the honest answer. But I ducked it.

  “I was just about to call you,” I said.

  “I’m going to try to get an early night, honey,” she said. “I’m beat to the chops. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”

  “Go to bed now!” I said sternly. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “There was a time when I never wanted to go to bed. Not to rest anyway,” she said.

  I said I believed her and laughed.

  “I had stamina in those days. I could dance all night, go straight to the studio at six. After a nap in Hair and Makeup and a glass of champagne, I’d be ready for my close-up at nine, thank you Mr. DeMille. I don’t know how I did it. I sure couldn’t do it now. The makeup man would say, Oh boy you went to bed early last night, didn’t you? I puffed up with sleep; I never puffed up with alcohol. But I was never late, I always knew my lines. I’d learn them on the way in. But I figured that was all I had to offer: to be on time and know the words. Because once I got there, I wasn’t much of an actress! But sweet Jesus, I loved those days!”

  “They must have been fun,” I said, although I had my doubts. “You should sleep well tonight.”

  “It’s got to be better than last night, honey.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I said. She sounded low, and I really meant it.

  “What good would it have done, honey? I’d have just kept you awake, too. It’s bad enough I can’t sleep,” she said. “Anyway, I need you fit and well and writing.”

  “Insomnia’s not contagious. You should have called me,” I said.

  “The small hours are a bitch. Thoughts get stuck in your head and go round and round. They haunt you all fucking night.”

  “What kind of thoughts, Ava? Tell me about your ghosts,” I said cheerfully to encourage her.

  “God, you’re a prying bastard. You sound like a fucking shrink. I know practically nothing about you—and you want to know everything about me.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Asking about my ghosts?”

  “The things that keep you awake at night,” I said.

  “I don’t know, honey. It’s usually shit that goes straight out of my head the next morning. Thank God.”

  “You can’t think of a single thing that keeps you awake at nights? Nothing stays with you, nothing sticks? I can’t believe that, Ava,” I said.

  After a silence, she said: “All kinds of fucking things keep me awake at nights: thoughts about dying, how much it hurts to breathe, thoughts about why I don’t have any sexual energy anymore. And this fucking book keeps me awake at nights, too. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t started it.”

  “Writing a book is damn hard work, Ava. But just think of the money,” I said.

  “I should have thought of that last night,” she said, and laughed. The laugh became a cough, as it increasingly did at this time. I heard her take a drink. “I don’t know why I’m laughing, honey, but I like the way that sounds.”

  “Just think of the money,” I said again. It would be a disaster if she backed out now. The book was beginning to have a definite shape in my head. I was even beginning to enjoy working with her. It was fun discovering little things she wanted to hide, and finding ways of slipping them into the copy, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. It was a game we played. I’m sure she knew that as well as I did.

  Several moments passed, her coughing stopped. She said reflectively: “You are right about the ghosts. Last night I couldn’t get the picture of Daddy dying out of my head. I kept thinking how bloody lonely he must have been in that hospital ward in Newport News, waiting for me to visit each day when I got home from school. Fifty years ago and it was as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday. The way his eyes lit up when he saw me come into the ward. The way he said, ‘You make this place feel like I’m home, Daughter.’ I guess that was the first time I realized he was dying.”

  “How old was he then, Ava?”

  “Fifty-nine. Younger than I am now, fahcrissake. He must have known he’d never make it to sixty.”

  “That’s no age.”

  “He was born in 1878.”

  “It must have been a hard life,” I said.

  “He was just waiting for it to end. He was burnt out. Life had burnt him out. He knew he was dying.”

  “You really think so?”

  “When he said I made him feel like he was home, the way he looked at me. He knew all right. He wanted to reassure me he was going to be fine. He was telling me he was ready to go, and I mustn’t worry. He was very good at telling you things, making things clear, without spelling them out.

  “I remember telling him I wanted to be a good daughter. I wanted him to be proud of me. He said, ‘You’ve done fine, Daughter.’ I don’t think they were his last words, but they’re the last words I remember.”

  “We must use that in the book,” I said, already making a note of it.

  “Don’t you dare! Don’t even think about it!”

  The vehemence in her voice surprised me. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to that’s why not, honey. Jesus Christ! That’s just between the two of us,” she said.

  It was a poignant moment and I didn’t want to lose it. It was the kind of detail that gives a memoir substance and authenticity.

  “But this is wonderful material, Ava. It’s the kind of stuff that makes a book a page-turner. I can see it as a number one bestseller now.”

  “I don’t want you to mention it, okay? Push it, I promise I won’t ever trust you again.”

  “But it tells us so much about your closeness to your father. It’s a wonderful insight into your relationship with him. It hits exactly the right tone. It explains the kind of remarkable man he was.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what a remarkable man Daddy was,” she said.

  “But people don’t know that, Ava. It’s the kind of detail that will distinguish your book from the cut-and-paste jobs that most movie stars settle for in their memoirs. I think you should talk about the sleepless nights, the things that keep you awake,” I said.

  “My ghosts?”

  “We all have them.”

  “Most women are close to their fathers. I think of my mother, too, I was close to her, but Daddy’s the one I see in my dreams.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Ava. It’s such an intimate detail. The clarity of that memory after fifty years, isn’t that worth mentioning? I think it’s extraordinary.”

  “I wish I hadn’t mentioned it,” she said, but there was hesitancy in her voice.

  “Don’t you think it would give a kind of closure to your childhood? I think it would,” I said.

  After a silence, she said: “It’s mawkish.”

  “Not in this context,” I said.

  “In any fucking context, honey. It’s schmaltzy.”

  “A little sentimental maybe,” I said, giving a little tactical ground. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Let me write it up. You can see how it reads. You might like it better on the page. Let’s think about it?”

  “I don’t want a sentimental book. I hate sentimental books,” she said. “Daddy was never sentimental. Neither was Mama. They both dealt with what life threw at them and moved on. Let’s move on, honey.”

  “Nothing is too sentimental if it reveals genuine feelings. Not if it’s true,” I said.

  “Let it lay, baby.” There was a sudden abruptness in her tone, a dogged finality. “Jesus, you want to louse up my image? Forget it,” she said.

  I decided not to ask what she t
hought her image was. Later I would use the incident, write it up, and see what she said then. Perhaps next time around she wouldn’t feel so strongly about it; she might not even comment on it at all. It had happened before. I kept forgetting how important it was to write around her moods.

  “Ed Victor told me a lovely story about his dad,” I said. I didn’t want to end the discussion about her father on such a negative note. “The night before Ed was to meet you for the first time, he called his dad in the States. His dad was about to have an operation for colon cancer. Ed knew he was a fan of yours and told him that you were a new client of his. He said he was going to have dinner with you the next day. He knew it would cheer him up.

  “His dad said, ‘You’re having dinner with Ava Gardner?’

  “ ‘Tomorrow,’ Ed said, knowing it would impress him.

  “His dad thought about that for a moment, and said, ‘Well, just be careful, son!’

  “ ‘Why should I be careful, Dad?’ Ed said, puzzled.

  “ ‘She’s a very beautiful woman, son. She might try to seduce you.’ ”

  Ed’s story made her laugh, as I knew it would.

  “Ed’s dad sounds like a very nice old boy,” she said. “I hope the operation was a success?”

  “He never woke up from it. He was in a coma for about a month and then passed away.”

  “Oh my God, that’s so sad. He obviously loved his son very much,” she said. I could see she was moved by the story.

  I said, “Ava, that’s it for this evening. You really sound exhausted. I think you should take a few days off. I have plenty of material I can be working on. I’ll wrap up your divorce from Mickey, and I have plenty of material on Howard Hughes I can use.”

  “How long is that going to take, honey?”

  “Maybe four or five days,” I told her optimistically. “Let’s say a week?” Surprisingly, she didn’t argue. “We’re getting there. I might even be able to cover some of the Artie Shaw years,” I said.

  “The Artie Shaw year, honey,” she corrected me with droll precision. “We married in ’45, October 17. He dumped me one week after our first anniversary. The bastard broke my heart.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to encourage her. It was getting late. I wanted her to go to bed.

  “Jacob Ben-Yitzhak Arshawsky,” she mused. “Don’t you love that name? His mother called him Arthur. Arthur! That has no music in it at all. His mother was always a problem. His parents split when he was a kid. His mother, Sarah, was Austrian. She was a Jewish albatross around his neck all her life. She was crazier than a quilt. He could barely stand to be in the same room with her.

  “He had issues with his father, too. He had issues with most people but he really disliked his father. He was a Russian. But it was his mother who drove Artie into the arms of the shrinks, although Lana [Turner]—a couple of wives before me, she was wifey number three; I was number five, there have been eight of us altogether, so far—didn’t help.

  “He’d just come out of the navy when he met Lana. He’d served in the Pacific. He was deaf in his left ear from when he was bombed at Guadalcanal. He’d had a nervous breakdown when he was discharged. I think Lana did, too. They were two messed-up people. Lana was eighteen. The classic MGM starlet. Artie had an IQ of—I don’t know what it was. It was right up there. The intellect isn’t connected to the pelvis, he told me once when I asked what had attracted him to her.

  “Mickey reckoned he made her pregnant when she was seventeen. Before he knew me. He probably did, although Lana always denied it. She had to, of course. She was in an Andy Hardy film with him. He said she had great knockers. First Mick, then Artie . . . she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too. Even so, I liked her. We became good friends. She’s a couple of years older than me. I thought she was so sophisticated. I started smoking because of her. I told you that story, didn’t I?”

  “The slim gold cigarette case and lighter,” I said to let her know I remembered the story. It was late, she was tired, and I really didn’t want to encourage her. I again suggested she turn in. She said she would, as soon as she finished her nightcap.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “A little glass of red,” she said. “It’ll help me sleep.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Artie was difficult, he was complex, but I was stuck on him. I was crazy about him. I had it hard. He was smart as an apple. He always knew what I was going to say next. To tell the truth, I was always a little afraid of him. Not physically. Not the way I was scared of GCS [George C. Scott]. When GCS was loaded, he was terrifying—he’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea next morning what he’d done. I’d be lying next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding, and he couldn’t remember a thing. He just had no recollection at all.

  “Artie was another kind of bully. He was always putting me down. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating sonofabitch. I don’t know which was worse: GCS’s physical violence or Artie’s mind games. He used to put me down so much I lost complete confidence in myself. When I went into analysis—that was something else he made me do—I insisted on taking an IQ test because I was at the point where I thought there was something seriously wrong with my mind. He had me thoroughly convinced that I was completely stupid.

  “The analyst advised me not to take the IQ. I guess she feared the worst! But I took it anyway. Well, it turned out very well indeed. I didn’t have an enormous IQ but I did have rather a high one. I had a good head but I didn’t use it enough. I didn’t like studying. It was the same at school. I’m not a bookish person. Artie got through a book at least every two nights.

  “This is nice wine, by the way,” she said.

  “Finish it and go to bed,” I said.

  “Am I boring you?”

  “Not at all, but you said you were tired,” I said. “I’m only thinking of you.”

  “I owe Artie plenty. He made me get an education. We must say that in the book. Give the guy credit where credit’s due. I enrolled in the University of California because of him. I more or less didn’t work for a whole year because of him. I was always happy to quit work. I never liked acting anyway. I took correspondence courses. I was doing very well. My God, I was doing well. B-pluses.”

  “What year was that, Ava?”

  “Forty-five. I also started hitting the bottle when I was with Artie. I drank with Mick, but that was kids’ stuff. Those rum drinks that seemed so innocuous, and tasted so good. With Artie I’d get properly drunk. I got drunk because I was so insecure. I was completely out of my depth. Artie was very well read. He was completely self-taught. He was an auto-something—what’s that word?”

  “Autodidact?”

  “An autodidact,” she said slowly, as if determined to remember it. “He always had his nose in a book. I had to get an education to keep up with him. He was mixing with a bunch of pseudointellectuals. I thought they were the real thing at the time. Most of them were Reds. I went to all those political meetings with him. I got seriously into socialism. Some of the books are still on my shelves. We’d go to the Russian consulate. We’d sit down to dinner and the vodka bottles would appear, and the caviar. We’d drink the vodka down the hatch. In one gulp, you know? That’s when I got a taste for the hard stuff.”

  She paused. “People won’t think I’m settling old scores, will they?”

  “Some might. But it’s honest,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s honest, baby.”

  “This is Hollywood history,” I said.

  “That puts me in context, honey,” she said.

  I wondered if I had said something to offend her and didn’t laugh.

  “Artie was very conscious of being a Jew, you know,” she said. “He once told me a story that showed how vulnerable he was. I don’t know whether he was married to Jerome Kern’s daughter at the time, or who, because he married everybody, but he was at a posh Hollywood dinner party when they started talking about Jews. It turned out that they were all anti-S
emitic. He said he sat there in silence for a while—apparently nobody knew he was a Jew—then he joined in with their snide remarks about Jews. He said he’d never forgive himself for his cowardice.

  “I felt such sadness for him when he told me that story. All my protective instincts came out. I really felt his pain. It made me love him even more. I was still mad about him at that time. I decided I wanted his baby. But he was very wise. He was protecting me—and I’m sure he was thinking of himself, too—he said this is not the time to have a child.

  “I don’t think in my heart I genuinely wanted a baby at all. I don’t think I really did. I just thought: I’m going back to school, I’m getting an education, I’m being the good wife, to make it perfect I’ll have a child. Maybe I was playing a part, who the hell knows?

  “What the fuck, a few months later, he ditched me and married Kathleen Winsor, the woman who wrote Forever Amber—a fucking potboiler, he’d called it. He snatched it out of my hands and tore it to shreds when he caught me reading it. It was part of my self-improvement program. What did I know?

  “Later I lost respect for him completely. He did a dreadful thing. He was called up before the Un-American Activities Committee in Washington and ratted on his friends. You just don’t do that. There was a writer who was very, very far left, but a wonderful man, Hy Kraft. He wrote Stormy Weather, the all-black Twentieth Century-Fox musical which starred my friend Lena Horne. Hy was Artie’s best man at our wedding. That’s how close they were. It didn’t stop Artie giving up Hy’s name to the Un-American Committee. Can you believe that? His own best man! I still to this day don’t understand how he could have done that. He suddenly became a super American patriot: I love America, I love the flag, I love this country. I think he was full of shit.”

  She continued to talk in a reminiscent tone maybe for another twenty minutes, almost as if I wasn’t there.

  “ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Frenesi,’ ‘Stardust.’ Remember those? ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You.’ You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing an Artie Shaw number being played. He was pulling down sixty thou a week in those days. That must be practically a million in today’s money. The money was pouring in. But that didn’t stop him watching the kopecks. He probably still has the first one-spot he ever made. If only his thrift had been contagious, believe me, I wouldn’t be talking to you now, baby! I didn’t take a penny from him, by the way. Not a fucking sou. I even paid for my own divorce.