Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “On the other hand, although he could be pretty rude about individuals, Artie didn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body. He was the first white bandleader to employ black musicians. Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, the trumpeter—they called him Little Jazz, I loved Little Jazz. Before the war, I used to listen to him and Artie on the radio—with Coleman Hawkins, and Teddy Wilson on the piano.

  “I went on the road with some of those guys for a while. That was the best time I had with Artie, touring with his band before we married. Louis Mayer wasn’t happy about it. Although we’d been divorced a couple of years, my name was still linked to Mickey’s, at least in the public’s mind, and the studio was putting pressure on me to break off the romance with Artie, or at least make it legal. Uncle Louis was still on his high moral horse about actors ‘living in sin.’

  “My affair with Artie was hardly discreet, it was no hole-and-corner thing that’s for sure. I’d moved into his place in Beverly Hills the minute he asked me, which was about five minutes after we’d met. MGM was pissed off with me. At least they weren’t offering me much in the way of movies, although they didn’t can me either. I knew that was supposed to be a punishment. Boy, did they get that wrong!

  “I did one film in ’45, a loan-out: Whistle Stop, with George Raft. MGM got five thousand dollars for me that time. I didn’t mind. I liked George. He was coming to the end of his career, and mine still hadn’t got started, but we dated a few times. He was a wonderful dancer—for his age! He must have been in his late forties at that time but he still had a good figure. I had to slap him down a few times to keep him in line. He still thought of himself as a lady-killer, a bit of a Casanova; apart from that he was okay. We had some laughs together. I told you, I first met him with Mickey when we used to go to the Friday night fights in L.A. He was going steady with Betty Grable in those days. They were a hot item for a while.

  “Whistle Stop was my first leading role. I was very nervous, and I wasn’t very good. I still didn’t know my ass from my elbow acting-wise. But there was one scene that got me noticed. I kissed George with my mouth open! It was a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it. It was forbidden by the Breen office, but it had the guys in the audience hanging on the ropes. [“With the dynamics of Gardner and Raft in it, Whistle Stop is certainly not a dull place,” Variety noted.]

  “Fortunately, it slipped by the Production Code people. They were very hot on what they regarded as lustful kissing in those days. But John Huston spotted it. He said it was the scene that got me the role in The Killers, my breakthrough movie as they call it today. It made me realize you didn’t have to be an actress to sell tickets at the box office!

  “I was still as happy as Larry traveling with the band, hanging out with Artie and his literary pals. Guys like Sid Perelman, Bill Saroyan, John O’Hara. They were all bright, funny, interesting guys.

  “Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. I was happy to do that. I was comfortable with all those guys. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. ‘You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now,’ he’d scream. He had a real phobia about me and tobacco fields.

  “Ten days after he got his divorce from Betty Kern, we were married by the same judge who handed down his decree.

  “For the first couple of months our marriage was fine, at least as far as I was concerned it was, although I was unhappy when he broke the band up. He said he didn’t want his wife on the road with a bunch of musicians. He said it wasn’t dignified. He was very hot on dignity. He once told me he couldn’t respect a woman who made a living as a movie star—‘movie acting has nothing at all to do with talent, it’s all about key lights and cheekbones,’ he said. I think he said that when I beat him at chess after he’d hired a Russian grand master to give me lessons. I guess I must have learned too well.

  “I was already living in his house in Beverly Hills when we took the plunge. It was a beautiful big mock-Tudor place on Bedford Drive, full of books, records, pianos, harpsichords. I was twenty-two. I wasn’t up to it. I was still a kid. I still identify with that little girl. The cook, the gardener, my maid were all black. They were like family to me. Living with Artie was like going home in that sense. He wrote the number ‘Grabtown Grapple’ for me on Bedford Drive.

  “Contrast that with Howard Hughes, the racialists’ racialist,” she said. “Howard wouldn’t piss on a black man to put him out if he was on fire. That’s a fact, nothing I say can change it, and if I’m going to remember things as they really were, I have to face it. I told you about the doctors Howard flew to Mama’s bedside when she was dying, didn’t I?”

  I said she had.

  “Anything Ava wanted,” she said, “Ava got. Anything.”

  “You should have married him,” I said.

  “Marry Howard Hughes? Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m kidding you,” I said, backing off.

  “Artie played the clarinet the way Frank sang. They both knew how to bend a note, stretch a phrase. They could do that stuff better than anyone alive. Frank once told me he used to practice by singing to Artie’s music on the radio in Hoboken, although he said it was Tommy Dorsey who taught him about breath control. But Artie and Frank never played together, which is music’s loss. They were at the top of their game at the same time.”

  “They were about the same age, weren’t they?”

  “Frank was five years younger. He was born in 1915.” She yawned. “What time is it, honey?”

  “Ava, it’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll get on with the stuff I have on Mickey and Howard. With luck, I might even make a start on Artie. This is good stuff, by the way. It’s been a wonderful session.”

  “I hope you can make sense of it. It’s awfully muddled, honey. I must have covered the waterfront. You’ll have to sort it out.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” I assured her.

  “I won’t see you for at least a week?” She sounded disappointed.

  “A break will do you good,” I said. “You really sound as if you need one.”

  “Are you losing interest?”

  “You don’t think that, do you?”

  “You’re getting bored with me! I’m fucking boring you!”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s a foolish thing to say.”

  “Christ, when even your biographer gets bored with you! What kind of fucking book is this going to be,” she said.

  “It’s going to be a wonderful book, Ava.”

  “It had better be, baby. I’ve given it my best shot,” she said with a final touch of her old acerbity, and replaced the receiver.

  I rang her straight back.

  “Good night, Ava. Sleep well,” I said, and put down the phone.

  And I still hadn’t asked her about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock.

  20

  I’m sorry, honey. You said it’d be all right to call you.”

  “Ava, are you okay?” I said automatically. I’d been in a deep sleep. I checked the time. It was just after two o’clock, less than a couple of hours since we’d said good night. “Can’t you sleep?”

  She sighed unhappily. “I went off like a baby as soon as my head hit the pillow. I woke up gasping for a cigarette.”

  I reminded her of what the doctors had told her about her not smoking anymore.

  “Fuck the doctors. They’re all quacks anyway,” she said. Her voice was so husky as to be barely audible. “I just can’t sleep, honey. If we could talk for a while, it would help,” she said.

  I said of course we could, although I was surprised that she had anything new to talk about so soon after our marathon session earlier. What did she want to talk about? I tried to sound cheerful and encouraging but it wasn’t easy.

  “Don’t be angry with me for waking you, honey.”

  “I’m not angry with you,” I said.

  “I had a panic attack,” she
said. “I woke in a cold sweat and a sense that—” She didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t know, honey, I’m a fucking wreck.”

  “I think you should get a checkup. Let me book an appointment for you in the morning?” I said.

  “What’s the point?” She laughed bitterly. “I had checkups last time. I had checkups coming out of my ears. They didn’t find a damn thing wrong with me. A couple of days later, bam! Strokes are as unpredictable as fucking earthquakes, honey. I was lucky I was already in hospital when they happened. I would have died if I hadn’t been where I was.” After a pause, she said: “Do you want to talk about that time?”

  “Do you?” I said, hoping she didn’t. I just wanted to go back to sleep.

  “We haven’t discussed it yet, and I can’t sleep,” she said. “Is it all right with you if we talk for a while?”

  I switched on the tape that I now kept by my bed. “I’d better make some notes. What year are we talking about? Eighty-six?”

  “Nineteen eighty-six. October 9,” she said precisely.

  “You were admitted to St. John’s, Santa Monica, with double pneumonia,” I said.

  “A few days later, a couple of strokes were thrown in for fun,” she said and did not stop talking for nearly an hour.

  “They kept me in for three months. The irony is I’d kept fit all that year, swimming, playing a lot of tennis. I was sixty-four. I was in damn good shape for an old broad. I’d even been going to a hypnotist to help me give up smoking. It didn’t do much good, but I was trying.

  “It started with a cold that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t unusual. Everyone in London had the same thing. For two or three days you’d feel pretty good again and suddenly, bang, forget it! This went on for three or four months. Being as strong and fit as I was, I didn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t go to bed. I just put up with it. Then something happened that really worried me.

  “One morning, I took a deep breath, and felt a terrible burning pain in my chest. I’d never felt anything like it before. It frightened the hell out of me. I was still smoking like a chimney although I knew all about emphysema. I’d seen old chums die of it—my friend Nunnally Johnson. He was a wonderful writer. I knew Huston was dying of it.

  “I called my doctor, he called in a specialist. We did X-rays here in the flat, a bunch of breathing tests. The specialist said I had a heavy cold. I’d get over it, he said. I told him about my fear of emphysema. ‘One thing is for sure, Miss Gardner, you’ll never have emphysema. You have extremely strong lungs. There is nothing wrong with you. You have a nasty cold, that’s all,’ he said.

  “Bullshit. I knew I was sick. I knew there was something wrong with me. The next day, I got on a plane and went home to my doctor in Los Angeles. I never have a temperature; that’s one thing that runs in the family—low temperatures, even if we’re dying. On the plane my temperature just soared. They cleared some seats in the back of the plane so I could lie down. They gave me oxygen, and called ahead for an ambulance to meet the plane. I was taken straight to St. John’s.

  “The next few days I was out of it. I had double pneumonia. My temperature kept rising. I think it got to one hundred and six. My brain was cooking. My arm was filled with needles and tubes of every antibiotic they could think of. They finally hit me with sixteen milligrams of cortisone. That may have saved my life, although I also think it could have caused the strokes. It’s a fucking dangerous drug, I can tell you that.

  “But it did the trick. My temperature started to come down. I was still having inhalations four or five times a day but the chest pains had eased. I was moved to a private room, with a little sitting room attached. I was sitting there after dinner one evening watching a Laurel and Hardy film with my nurse when I felt the tingling sensation I told you about. Like tiny pinpricks in the palm of my left hand, on the side of my face, down the side of my nose.

  “The nurse must have had a suspicion of what it might be. She called the doctor. He gave me some tests: hold your hand out, close your eyes, touch your nose. My hand was weaving all over the place. It was going here, there, and all over the place. It just made me laugh.

  “I went to sleep that night. No problem. I went out like a light. Maybe they gave me something, I don’t know. The following morning, my whole left side was paralyzed: the leg, the arm, the side of my face, they had no feeling at all. I couldn’t see out of my left eye. The strange thing was, although I realized immediately I’d had a stroke, I wasn’t frightened. There was no Oh my God, I’m paralyzed moment. You’d think I’d have panicked, but I didn’t. I was perfectly calm.

  “Maybe if there is such a thing as a God, maybe He saves another part of your brain to protect you from the terrible shock to your system when something like that happens to you.

  “I remember I did a lot of laughing in those early days. I told you how it also hit my bladder, which meant I had no control. I giggled and laughed and wet my pants a lot. I certainly had nothing to laugh about. I didn’t realize how sick I was, or just how paralyzed I was.

  “The seriousness of what had happened didn’t hit me until later. I’d been concentrating on how to walk again; I had a marvelous Egyptian therapist who got some feeling back into my leg. He literally gave me the will to walk again. I had a wonderful young woman speech therapist who got my voice back. I think she shined up my Southern drawl a little, too. Although it was still nowhere near the way it was when I first went out to Hollywood—when Mr. Schenck sent my screen test to the coast without the soundtrack because he was afraid that my North Carolina accent was too thick for anyone to understand a damn word I said.

  “The tragedy is my left arm. It still doesn’t work. But because I use my right hand, and feed myself, I didn’t realize how badly it was damaged. It didn’t get as much early attention as my leg. I kept being told the arm was always the last thing to recover, and I wasn’t to worry. The arm and the face usually repaired themselves without therapy, they said. It was a dreadful thing to say because they don’t, honey. They just don’t. This is it, this is as good as it gets. And the part of the brain that feels pain and hurt and anger that’s still intact—just as that part that feels happiness is gone.”

  “I hope that’s not true, Ava,” I said.

  “I can’t help it. That’s the way I feel, honey,” she said.

  After a silence, she said: “Anyway, enough of this.” I sensed she was close to tears. “I’m ready for bed now. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  SHE CALLED THE FOLLOWING evening, just after nine.

  “What I was saying yesterday about the stroke, and the part of my brain that still feels anger and hurt—I was never daunted by it, you know. I want you to say that in the book. You must make that clear. I don’t want it to sound like one long sob story,” she said.

  “It won’t, Ava,” I said.

  “I don’t want to sound like old Mother Machree,” she said. I had no idea who Mother Machree was but guessed she might have been one of her father’s Irish sayings—or Mickey Rooney’s. I said she had never sounded like Mother Machree to me.

  “Good,” she said with satisfaction.

  “It’s going to be an extraordinary book, Ava,” I said reassuringly. “You will be proud of it.”

  She hesitated. “Do you want to hear something?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I made some notes at the time. I fished them out this morning. Do you want to hear them?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “You must tell me if they’re boring,” she said. After a pause, she began to read slowly: “Nineteen eighty-six, before the stroke, was one of the best years of my life. I’d lived sixty-four years of great activity: work, play, and a bit of mental activity as well, but mostly physical. I loved sports and was good at almost all of them.”

  She stopped reading, and said thoughtfully: “Even as a little girl on a farm—and nobody knew about gymnastics and all that jazz—I won a blue ribbon doing very simple exercises. I lost the ribbon in my Da
ddy’s cotton gin, or his sawmill, I forget which. I loved gymnastics. Had I had the training I might have been an Olympic star instead of a movie star and been a much happier human being. Another thing I loved was music. I used to go to Selma, North Carolina, near where we lived, to watch my sister Myra have piano lessons. She was never keen on the piano, but I was. It was a shame, Mama and Daddy couldn’t afford lessons for me, too. At first I kept my disappointment to myself. But one day, I couldn’t hide my frustration or jealousy any longer. I bit the keys off the teacher’s piano. I had a terrible temper as a child.”

  “You bit the keys off the piano?” I said incredulously.

  “I had strong teeth.”

  “That’s very funny, Ava.”

  “It’s true. You could see the tiny teeth marks in some of the keys. I wanted to dance, too. But again, Mama and Daddy couldn’t afford the lessons. It’s really terrible being poor as a child. But if you’re going to be poor, be poor on a farm. I told you that before, didn’t I?”

  “I think so. But it’s good to be reminded,” I said.

  “I played baseball with the boys and outran most of them and climbed higher trees and towers and God knows I have the scars to prove it. To get back to 1986,” she said, and slowly resumed reading from her notes:

  “It was a really healthy year. No booze, few cigarettes, I cut right down—actually I was still smoking like a fiend—but I had a very healthy diet. I was really getting myself together. I played tennis twice a week, swam every day, no matter the weather. I walked my little dog, Morgan, in the park for at least an hour a day.”