Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  She paused for a moment. “I must have lost six, seven, eight pounds,” she said reflectively. “I was beginning to look good naked again. I decided to have some new dresses made by my darling friend, Franka . . . then came the fucking strokes,” she said.

  “That must have been devastating,” I said.

  “It was the last thing in the world I expected. I was so happy. Work was coming in. My name meant something on the marquees. Producers liked to use me for the name. I did a nice turn as an art patroness in Priest of Love. I was in William Faulkner’s The Long Hot Summer with Jason Robards, and Harem with Omar Sharif. I’d played his mother, I’d played his wife. I said maybe next time I’ll have a face lift and play your daughter. He said don’t bother with the face lift! He is a nice man, a charming man, but he won’t leave the gambling alone. What else? I had a run in Knots Landing, I played Agrippina in A.D. with James Mason. It was television and they weren’t the biggest roles, but they were important parts, important character roles, and the money was good.”

  “You’d come a long way since the early days at MGM,” I said.

  “I was still afraid that people were going to catch on to me. But at least I was fucking fit. Those fucking strokes turned my life upside down. Didn’t I cover most of this stuff last night?”

  “No, this is new,” I said.

  “I don’t want to sound sorry for myself,” she said.

  “You won’t.”

  “I don’t sound full of shit, do I? I don’t want to sound full of self-pity.”

  “You are the gutsiest woman I know,” I said.

  “Franka’s dresses are still hanging in the closet. They are beautiful but I still haven’t been able to wear any of them. They probably don’t fit me any longer. If I were the crying type, I would sit down and cry like hell. There they hang and here I sit,” she said. “It’s a bitch thinking back over your life, having to remember things you’d rather forget.”

  “I don’t want you to forget a thing—not until we’ve finished the book,” I said.

  “I have a few more notes. Do you want to hear them?” She sounded hesitant.

  “Of course I do. They have your voice in them,” I said.

  “It’s my fucking voice, honey,” she said dryly.

  “Unmistakably,” I said.

  “These are the notes I wrote up before I thought of doing the book. I was very low. These were just for me, a kind of journal. It was probably my lowest point.”

  Hesitantly, she began to read: “Now it is 10:30 at night and I’m going to bed. After having various vitamins, and cider and honey, which is supposed to be good for the arthritis in my neck—which is a perfect drag. They told me that I would have to have an operation, but there is no real assurance that an operation will do the job. And certainly they can’t operate until I stop smoking, which is about the only pleasure I have left in life.

  “So I go to bed after an injection to stop my left side jumping and driving me crazy, which will last me five or six hours. Then what will I do? Go mad. Kill myself? I don’t much care. [The swelling in] my arm will go down after a few moments in bed. But this is not something to give anyone hope or courage after a stroke.

  “Being left in a semiparalyzed condition, with the threat of emphysema at any time if I continue smoking, scares the hell out of me. Even if I stop now, most of my lung power has gone. I’ve certainly lost all courage, something I always had, no matter what. I have no hope. No hope from my doctors and certainly none for myself.

  “I wake reluctantly every day, thinking, Now what? Another day of pain and therapy—and, after one year and a half, no progress. Why bother? Why bother to get out of bed? I suppose I should be grateful for all the sixty-five years of health and fun and complete life. But I’m not. I’m bitter and I’m angry. And I wish to God I’d died. There is no joy and no happiness in the future. Shit. But that’s the way I feel. I don’t want to be half a person. I don’t want to be.”

  She stopped reading. I could feel her despair. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. After a long silence, she said: “It’s such a bore, Pete. Life is a bore.”

  “When did you write that, Ava?”

  “I don’t know. It’s undated. I guess when I thought I was going to kiss myself goodbye,” she said.

  “I’m pleased you didn’t,” I said.

  “Sitting around, just waiting. If I were a great intellectual, I’d sit and read and study, but I’m not. I’m just a very ordinary woman. I don’t want to paint. I don’t want to write. I want to go out and play tennis, I want to swim. I’m purely a physical piece of machinery. Or I was.”

  “I think we should use it just the way it is,” I said.

  “Not until we take the ‘poor little me’ stuff out of it,” she said in a tone I knew was nonnegotiable.

  21

  Ed Victor mentioned it casually over lunch: had I asked Ava about the size of Frank Sinatra’s penis yet? He knew I hadn’t, of course. I said it was a difficult subject to introduce into a conversation. “I can hardly say, ‘Oh by the way, Ava, I heard that you told John Ford that Frank’s penis is enormous. One hundred and ten pounds of it. Can we talk about that?’ ”

  Ed gazed calmly at me while he mused over the problem. Finally he agreed there was no easy way to broach the subject. “But you’ll think of something. You’re the writer,” he said. It was his usual solution to a problem when he couldn’t think of an answer.

  “Some help you are,” I said.

  “She’s your friend.” He grinned.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, I slipped a copy of His Way, Kitty Kelley’s biography of Sinatra—in which Kelley reported Ava’s story of Frank’s impressive phallus—into my bag. I still had no idea how I was going to bring the subject up; but I was sure it would be after a few drinks.

  Ava was in a mellow mood when I arrived. An opened bottle of red wine was on the table. A record of early Sinatra was playing softly.

  “Is that the Dorsey band?” I said.

  “He was great, wasn’t he? Frank sent me a few of his early recordings when I had the stroke,” she said.

  “They must bring back a lot of memories,” I said.

  “For both of us, honey.”

  They had been divorced for more than thirty years but I stepped warily around the subject of Sinatra. She became defensive every time his name came up. She would treat the most well-meaning question about him as if it were the third degree. “What’s this? A fucking witch hunt?” she once turned on me when I asked a question that could not have been more innocuous. After that, I had decided not to get into their marriage and the Sinatra years until I had the rest of the story wrapped up.

  Nevertheless she seemed to be in a good mood.

  “Was that the last time you and Frank talked? When you had the stroke?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “No, we talk, honey. Not all the time, but two or three times a year. He always calls at Christmas. He never forgets my birthday,” she said affably.

  “He always calls on Christmas Eve?” I said.

  “He’s a sentimental man,” she said in an amused voice.

  “Do you ever call him?” I said.

  “Never,” she said.

  “Never?” I said, trying to keep a sense of interrogation out of my voice.

  “He’s a married man, honey,” she said, straight-faced. She continued to listen to the track, nodding her head gently to the music. “I love this number. [It was “Stardust.”] I think Frank did some of his best work with Dorsey. They must have recorded it in the early forties. They didn’t have the equipment and technology they have today. Frank would have done it in one take. If the vocalist or a musician hit a bum note they had to start the track all over again. Frank never sang this one again after he left the Dorsey band. I think it was a copyright problem with Tommy. But they got on very well.”

  She poured a glass of wine for me, and refreshed hers.

  “Did you and Frank ever have a special song?” I a
sked offhandedly.

  “You mean that we thought of as ‘our song’?”

  “That sort of thing,” I said.

  “Jesus, there could have been so many, honey. I can’t pick out just one—not for the book anyway. It would be too fucking schmaltzy. Too fucking . . .” There was a kind of amused contempt in the unfinished sentence. “Frank would hate it if I said that,” she said.

  Her voice was still friendly. This was the first time she had talked with any ease about Sinatra and I felt the euphoria of being trusted. “Okay, can you remember the first words you exchanged when you first met Frank?” I went into interviewer mode.

  “You sound like a fucking reporter.”

  “I am a fucking reporter, Ava. Indulge me.”

  She looked pensive, and sipped her drink. “I was with Mickey in the studio commissary. We had just gotten married. Frank came over to our table—Jesus, he was like a god in those days, if gods can be sexy. A cocky god, he reeked of sex—he said something banal, like: ‘If I had seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.’ I paid no attention to that. I knew he was married. He had a kid, fahcrissake! He was a terrible flirt. He couldn’t help it. That was the first time we met.

  “The next time was when we had that famous Metro group picture taken. We were all congregated on Stage 29, the studio’s biggest stage, before a big lunch for the press and the theater owners of America. I was wedged in between Clark and Judy, which was pretty good company. All the Gs. Frank flirted with me then. We were leaving the studio in our cars; he overtook me, slowed to a crawl, I passed him, he passed me. That was Frank all over,” she said. “He could even flirt in a car.

  “Another time, I met him at a party in Palm Springs. I hadn’t seen him for about a year. He was having a tough time. MGM had dropped his contract. He asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘The usual. Making pictures. You?’ He said, ‘The usual. Getting my ass in a sling.’

  “He was kissing the bottle at that time. We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town—Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were—with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.”

  She had really opened up. It was so unexpected I didn’t know what to say. “But you never had a song you thought of as ‘our song’?” I said inanely.

  “Practically every song he recorded has a memory for me,” she said. “ ‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’ that’s one that stands out. He wrote some of the lyrics himself.”

  She hummed the tune. “ ‘I’m a fool to want you/To want a love that can’t be true/A love that’s there for others too,’ ” she murmured the lyrics. “They were very personal,” she said. “He wrote it the year we married. It was a lousy year, wretched. Kicking our heels, waiting for his divorce from Nancy to come through, was hell. We were fighting all the time. Fighting and boozing. Breaking up, getting together again. It was madness.

  “I dated other guys just to punish him. Frank was doing his share. He was seeing girls. I know he was seeing Marilyn Maxwell again. He’d been sweet on her for years. She was one of his regulars when he married Nancy. I wasn’t surprised that she was still hanging around.

  “I took off for Spain to make a movie [Pandora and the Flying Dutchman]. I had a fling with the bullfighter [Mario Cabré] who played my lover in the picture. My mistake was telling Frank about it. He was always banging on at me about guys he suspected I’d slept with. I’d slept with Mario once. He was a handsome devil. It was a one-night stand.”

  “A one-night stand?” I tried not to sound incredulous.

  “For the book it was, honey.” She didn’t smile. “I was drunk. He was handsome. It was a terrible mistake, period,” she said.

  “You mean telling Frank about it?”

  “Doing it—telling Frank about it wasn’t too bright either. He followed me to Spain. He wanted to kill the poor bastard.”

  “He has a temper,” I said.

  “Bob Mitchum told me that he was afraid of only two things—and one of them was Frank Sinatra! I can’t remember what the other thing was, it could have been spiders, but he said Frank was the only man he wouldn’t ever want to cross.

  “That was around the time I made a picture with Bob [My Forbidden Past, 1951]. I was dating him when my affair with Frank was starting to become serious. Bob was a tough guy. He had a bad-boy reputation. He’d been a hobo, a drifter, served time for marijuana possession. He did sixty days in the county slammer. He said it was like Palm Springs without the riffraff. He didn’t give a shit about anything. I adored him. He was outrageous. On the set, in front of reporters, he’d call to his makeup man: ‘Hey, bring me some of that good shit, man.’ He didn’t give a fuck.

  “Out in the Valley working on location one day, he said, ‘Sugar, have you ever tried this stuff?’ He was smoking a joint. I said no, I never have. There was plenty of it around when I was with Artie but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He said I got high enough on booze. Anyway, Bob said, ‘I’ve got some great shit, really great. I want you to try it.’ So we went into this old van where they carried all the equipment. I smoked a couple of sticks. Bob taught me how. You take a little air with it, deep, deep down and you hold it and hold it and hold it—no wonder they now say joints are much worse for you than ordinary cigarettes.

  “Anyhow, I didn’t feel a goddamn thing, nothing whatsoever. Bob was flying. He was fine and dandy. On the way home we stopped at a bar—dry martinis were the thing in those days—and once I’d had a martini, I felt as if I was sitting about two feet above the stool. Everything I reached for I reached a little off, a little to one side. It took the martini to bring on the feeling of the pot. Bob did his best to convert me to marijuana, I tried, but I never got into it. It never became a habit.”

  “What happened to Mitchum?”

  “Our affair, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was crazy about him. I know he was pretty gone on me, too. But the truth was—it still is—he was committed to his wife, Dorothy. She was a saint. She was devoted to him. I once proposed to him, kind of kidding on the square. He said, ‘It’s okay with me, baby. But you’ll have to clear it with Dorothy first.’

  “When I told him I was also seeing more of Frank, that’s when he told me Frank was the only man he was afraid of. He said, ‘Get into a fight with him and he won’t stop until one of you is dead.’ He didn’t want to risk it being him, he said.”

  I could believe it. I’d had my own run-in with Sinatra, but I didn’t want to tell her that.

  “You must have been mad telling Frank about your fling with Mario. You knew how jealous he was. You must have known it would mean trouble,” I said. “Why did you do it?”

  “He kept on at me. I fell for the oldest con in the world. He said it didn’t matter a damn if I’d slept with Mario or not, it was in the past. He just wanted me to be honest with him. He said if I told him the truth, it would all be forgotten. So I told him the truth and, of course, it was never forgotten. He brought it up every goddamn argument we had. Even when we weren’t arguing, he’d bring it up. He never forgave me.

  “You know, his eyes do the most incredible thing when he’s angry. They turn black. I swear to God, they become as black as the ace of spades. It’s frightening. It makes your blood creep the way he does that. He never forgave me,” she said again.

  “But he still married you,” I said.

  “November 7, 1951. A day that will live in infamy.

  “Only days after his divorce from Nancy became final. It was too soon, but that was Frank all over,” she said again. “He was always in such a fucking hurry. He insisted he had left Nancy years before: physically, emotionally, you name it. He said that except for the kids, she was out of his life. I believed him. Like I believed him when he said he’d forgi
ve me for screwing Mario.

  “Plenty of people told me I was mad to marry him. Lana Turner had had an affair with him after she divorced Artie. ‘I’ve been there, honey,’ she told me. ‘Don’t do it!’ I should have listened to her. The girl had been around.

  “The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. Bappie said I was Frank in drag. There was a lot of truth in that. He was the only husband I had that Bappie didn’t approve of straight off the bat. I’m not saying she disliked him. On the contrary, she thought he was great—but not for me. I should have listened to her.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I said.

  “He was good in the feathers. You don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers,” she said.

  “The fighting always began on the way to the bidet. Didn’t you say that?”

  She laughed. “It sounds like something I might have said. It sounds about right. Let’s say I said it.”

  It was the perfect opening. “Didn’t you also once joke that there was only ten pounds of Frank but there’s one hundred and ten pounds of cock,” I said.

  She stopped laughing. Abruptly. “Who said that?”

  “You apparently,” I said.

  She looked stunned. “I never said that. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “On Mogambo, didn’t you say it to a visiting British dignitary?”

  “It’s sick.”

  “John Ford apparently encouraged you,” I said to jog her memory, and offer her a way out—and get me off the hook.

  “It’s vile,” she said. “I would never say anything so disgusting. Ford would never have encouraged me to say such a thing.”

  “It’s in Kitty Kelley’s biography of Frank,” I said.

  “I’ve read that book. It’s a piece of shit.”

  “Nevertheless, I think it’s in there,” I said.

  “I’d remember it if she’d written something as disgusting as that. It’s smut. It’s sick. It’s fucking obscene.”

  I had the Kelley book in my bag with the passage and her quote underlined but I decided not to embarrass Ava by confronting her with it. “I’ll read it again. I’m sure that’s where I saw it,” I said.