Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  xx Peter

  This is what I wrote about the conclusion of Ava’s first marriage:

  It had been a civilized divorce as Hollywood divorces go. I’d taken Eddie Mannix’s advice that things might not go well for me at MGM if I tried to take Mickey to the cleaners. Well, he had been a damn sight blunter than that; Eddie had a way of giving it to you straight, but with a smile on his face that always had a hint of sympathy in it—if you looked hard enough, that is, and did what he wanted!

  Even so, I liked the old gangster. I know he liked me, too. Not in the way some of the front-office suits liked new starlets—as a regular supply of pussy. I’m sure he gave the bedroom eye to some of the other girls but he played it straight with me. Being married to Mickey gave me certain privileges on the lot—like not being hit on by lecherous producers.

  Anyway, Eddie kept his promise to find me a decent role if I took Mick back after I kicked him out of the house the time I found a lady’s hairpin in our bed, and discovered she’d been using my douche bag while I’d been in the hospital recovering from the operation on my inflamed appendix. Good old Eddie came up with the role in Ghosts on the Loose, for which I got my first screen credit. It was a nothing part in a rinky-dink movie but some things you don’t forget.

  I kept my side of the bargain, too. I hadn’t demanded half of Mickey’s dough and property (“Mickey’s treasure,” as Louis Mayer called it), as I was entitled to do under California law. I settled for $25,000, a car—it was the Lincoln Continental that Henry Ford had given to Mick, but with the silver gift plate discreetly removed from the dashboard. I also kept a few nice pieces of jewelry, and the mink jacket Mickey had given me for my nineteenth birthday—and hadn’t taken back when he was in extremis with his bookies.

  For those of you who like a touch of irony in their stories about movie stars, the dark blue suit I wore for the divorce hearing at the Los Angeles City Court was the one I got married in. I’d hardly had any wear out of it, and I was still a thrifty North Carolina gal at heart.

  Thurmond Clarke was the judge—why the hell I should remember the name of the guy who divorced us but have forgotten the name of the preacher who joined us together I have no idea; Dr. May Romm would have had a field day with that one! She was the shrink Artie Shaw sent me to when he became concerned about my drinking. A fat lot of good that did me!

  Anyway, I told the judge that Mickey didn’t want a home life, he stayed out at nights with the boys, he wasn’t attentive enough, da-de-da, de-da. I was careful what I said: nothing bad, nothing too damaging. Nothing the press could pounce on and make into a headline. I could feel Uncle Louis breathing down my neck, right?

  The final decree came through on May 21, 1943. It couldn’t have been a sadder day for me because it was the day my mother died. My tears were for her, of course, although a few were shed for the end of my marriage, too.

  Mickey called me as soon as he got his copy of the legal paperwork—and before he’d heard my news about Mama. He said, “Thanks for going easy on me in court, babe. I really appreciate that. So does Uncle Louis!”

  “That’s okay, Mick,” I said lamely. I wasn’t expecting to be thanked. He sounded so humble. But neither was I prepared for what was coming next.

  “Well, I hope it’s what you really want, kid! It’s not too late to change your mind, you know?” he said, reverting to his old bumptious, egotistical self. “I’ll be more than happy to take you back, kid. No questions asked!”

  Normally, that would have got my rag. He probably knew it, too. But I was feeling low, and just for a moment, a nanosecond, on hearing his cocky, confident voice, I wondered if it really was what I wanted. We had both behaved badly and said appalling things but perhaps that just showed how much we cared for each other. We knew each other so well, we both knew where to strike without leaving a mark.

  Anyway, I didn’t rise to the bait. I said, “I’ll probably miss the good times, Mick. I might even miss your lousy jokes.”

  “So you’ll come back?” he said.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” I said.

  “We can still make a go of it,” he said. He was relentless.

  “I don’t think so, Mick,” I said.

  “We’re still great in bed together, aren’t we? Let’s give it another try, baby. I promise you won’t regret it.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Mick,” I said firmly, although he had a point about how good the sex still was between us. We hadn’t found a downside to it yet.

  “Then how about a farewell fuck?” he said cheerfully.

  “You’ve had all the fucking you’re going to get from me, Rooney,” I said. It was a nice try but I was determined not to let him laugh me into bed again.

  “How about one for old times’ sake?” he tried again. He knew my weak spots, and there was nothing subtle in his approach. “How about dinner tonight, seven o’clock, the Vine Street Derby?” he said.

  “I have other plans, Mick,” I told him. It was true, I was seeing Howard. Anyway, I knew Mick’s game. The Derby was a short walk from the American Legion Stadium where we used to go to the Friday night fights with his Irish Mafia pals—Pat O’Brien, Spencer Tracy, the Paddywhack crowd, Mick called them. Betty Grable and George Raft, they were another couple of Friday night regulars. I knew he was playing the nostalgia card.

  “Get it into your head, Mick, those days are over. We’re finished. We blew it, honey,” I said, but I felt like shit saying it. In spite of his bravado, I knew how deeply he would feel the brutal finality of those words.

  “I should have taught you how to shoot.” His voice was suddenly hoarse. “Then you could have shot me through the heart. It would have been far less painful,” he said.

  “For both of us,” I told him.

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I still loved him. I loved him even more than on the day we married. It sounds like a cliché when I say that now, but that was always the way it was with me and departing husbands: I just couldn’t help myself. It was as if I had a compulsion to punish myself for walking out on them. Well, Artie Shaw walked out on me, actually. He didn’t waste any time doing it either—that marriage had lasted just about a year when he called the cab on me—but I loved him just as much as I loved Mick and Frank at the end of those marriages.

  “You were the perfect first husband, Mick Rooney,” I told him.

  I meant it as a joke but it made me sad saying it. I remembered all the good times we’d had together. They came back to me with a clarity that was overwhelming: the first night we’d danced at the Cocoanut Grove, the time he’d run Captains Courageous and Boys Town back-to-back for me at MGM’s private screening room, after I told him I hadn’t seen either of them; the evening we’d dined at the White House with President Roosevelt on his sixtieth birthday, and watched him give one of his famous radio broadcasts to the nation; the first day I took Mick home to meet Mama in Raleigh—she’d been too sick to come to our wedding—and the fuss Mick made of her. She had such a good time. It was probably the best time of her life. The whole family was there, and all the neighbors came by; word had gotten around that Mickey Rooney was visiting.

  Mama had put on her glad rags, a green silk dress, with silver appliqué at the neck, which I knew Daddy had always loved her in. She had lost a bit of weight, I thought. That was the time Inez told me Mama had the big C.

  Does she know? I said. I was shocked. “Of course she knows, honey, just as sure as anything in this world, but she doesn’t want us obsessing over her. She’s dying, but she refuses to let on, and neither must you,” Inez said.

  I didn’t tell Mickey about Mama’s condition, not right away, but he was marvelous anyway. He couldn’t have been nicer, kinder, or more attentive. He might have been playing a command performance for the Queen of England. He sang to her—“Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” which was one of her favorites, “Carolina in the Morning,” “You Do Something to Me,” he did a whole bunch of those numbers, “The Bells Are Ringing”�
�he clowned, he told her funny and mildly scandalous stories about her favorite movie stars: Judy Garland, Gable, Spencer Tracy. Mama had such a good time, the years just rolled away. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

  When we were getting ready to leave, she held me in her arms. “Ava child, you’re a pretty woman now, and you’ve sure filled out nicely, but you’ll always be my little girl,” she said.

  “I know that, Mama,” I said.

  “If only your Daddy was here to share this moment with me. He would have been so proud of you.”

  Remembering that moment, I began to cry. All those happy days came flooding back to me. Imagining that I was weeping over the failure of our marriage—he was a conceited little sod but I suppose, at least partly, so was I—Mickey said: “Hey, what’s with the sob stuff, honey? Don’t let a little old divorce between friends spoil your day, sweetheart. It happens all the time in Tinsel Town. It means nothing.”

  When I told him that my Mom had died that morning, he broke into tears, too. He could cry at the drop of a hat. I told you that. He and Louis Mayer were the best criers on the MGM lot. But that was the first time I knew his tears were as genuine as mine.

  The evening my divorce was made final, I had dinner with Howard Hughes. We had been seeing each other on a regular basis since he read in the newspapers that I had started divorce proceedings against Mickey. I didn’t know it at the time, but Howard had a weakness for newly divorced women. He’d moved in on Kate Hepburn immediately after her divorce from Luddy Smith, he pursued Lana Turner straight after she split with Artie. I’m sure there were plenty of others. “Wet decks,” Johnny Meyer called us, God knows why, although knowing Johnny, I’m sure it had some sexual, if not downright dirty, connotation.

  Howard’s appeal was the opposite of Mickey’s. He was an older man and he was infinitely more serious and smarter and sophisticated than anyone else I’d dated up to then. He was richer, too, of course.

  He was still seeing plenty of other women but that didn’t stop him proposing to me all the fucking time. The fact that I had said yes to him once—the time he wanted me to get a quickie divorce from Mick in Nevada before my California one became legal and I succumbed to his flattery and said I would—only encouraged him. I told you, Louis Mayer talked me out of that, thank God. “It wouldn’t be fair to Mick,” he’d said. The hypocrisy of the man! Or maybe he was just sticking to the routine double standards of Hollywood in those days.

  Anyway, that night, my first night back in circulation—at least officially—Howard took me to dinner at the Players, an exclusive private club on the Strip. I liked the Players. It was owned by his friend the movie director Preston Sturges. I never worked for Sturges but he ran a great club. Howard had taken it over—complete with its dance orchestra—just for the two of us. The events in Sturges’s films often bordered on the surreal—he made Sullivan’s Travels, a satire on Hollywood—and he must have loved the irony of his usually jam-packed club being exclusively possessed for the whole evening by two people.

  By now, I was used to Howard’s excesses, and this was not the first time he had persuaded Sturges to hang a “closed” sign on his restaurant when he didn’t want to be disturbed or seen by other diners.

  The first couple of times were amusing—although dining a deux in an empty restaurant can lack a bit of atmosphere, even if the service was great—probably because I knew that he wanted to seduce me with his wealth, and I was determined not to be impressed. That probably sounds blasé, but by this time there was no surprise, only a feeling of routine. It felt as if we were a couple of actors being served by other actors on a candlelit stage.

  “Howard,” I said, up front, “you really don’t have to try to impress me. You know my answer is still going to be no.”

  He looked puzzled. “I haven’t asked you the question yet,” he said.

  “Yes you have, several times. By the time we get to the lamb chops, you are going to ask me to marry you—again.”

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “You couldn’t have made it more fucking obvious. Couldn’t you have invited a few extras along to cheer the place up a bit—or at least look happy for us? Waiters’ smiles are a poor fucking substitute for genuine happiness, Howard,” I said.

  He didn’t like me swearing, or drinking too much. He didn’t drink himself. He definitely didn’t like me making fun of him. Both of which I enjoyed immensely. I often did it just to annoy him. I knew there was no way I was going to marry him. I don’t know why I ever said I would the first time. Perhaps I just wanted to put distance between Mickey and me. At least it helped me to ease my way out of Mickey’s bed.

  Although Howard was crazy about me—this was before I realized that he was just plain crazy—we still hadn’t slept together. I enjoyed the power I had over him. I enjoyed his frustration.

  I knew that he had a reputation as a cocksman, but I always suspected that was a story Johnny Meyer had put around town for him. The powder-room scuttlebutt was that he was no great shakes in the sack—or he shtupped like a snake! Or he liked to make it with a couple of girls at the same time. Or he was a fag. You got all sides of the story in the powder room.

  Anyway, I am not going to go into any details here, but I’ll say this: he knew how to take his time with a lady. At least with this lady he did. He was a patient sonofabitch, the complete opposite of Mickey Rooney. In fact, Howard and I didn’t get it on—I don’t think he even tried to kiss me, apart from the mildest kiss-on-the-cheek good night—until after my final decree from Mick. I gave in to him—or my curiosity finally got the better of me—a couple of nights after our dinner at the Players, actually.

  As a lover, I still only had Mickey to judge him by, of course, but let’s say Howard Hughes was a pleasant surprise. He didn’t have Mick’s vivacity, his cheerfulness between the sheets—nor mine, to be honest. But Howard’s timing was nearly always perfect. He taught me that making love didn’t always have to be rushed. “Slow down, slow down, kid. We’ll get there!” he’d say. He was like a fucking horse whisperer. We usually had a good time in the feathers.

  Once, when I told him how satisfying he was in bed, he said: “That’s because I don’t drink, kid. Especially when I’m with a lady I intend to please.” It took me a while to work that one out. That shows you how innocent I still was!

  Although I never loved him the way I loved Mickey, nor the way I would love Artie, and Frank, he was a big part of my growing up and I loved him for that. We fought all the time, but I fought with all my men. It was my way of life, my way of loving, I suppose. But whatever it was, our intimacy never deepened. It never grew. We had no sense of complicity at all. We didn’t even share a sense of humor. I could laugh with Mick, I could cry with Frank, but with Howard there was always this kind of . . . shortfall, I suppose you could call it. Something wasn’t there. It wasn’t just the age gap thing between us, because that wasn’t really so bad, especially the longer it went on, but there was always something missing.

  Bappie blamed it on me for taking his generosity for granted. He treated me like a princess . . . jewels, furs, suites at the best hotels. Limos and planes at my disposal. When Mama died and Bappie and I couldn’t get a flight back to Raleigh for the funeral, Howard bumped a couple of four-star generals off the plane and gave us their seats. He said they were only flying desks in Washington anyway. Even so, in the war, bumping four-star generals off a flight was still something.

  There were plenty of advantages in being wooed by the man who owned TWA—and, according to Johnny Meyer, had half of Washington, D.C., in his pocket. And Johnny should have known: his main business in those days was to make sure that the government didn’t forget Howard’s aircraft plants when they were handing out defense contracts. “I don’t know where all the bodies are buried,” Johnny liked to say. “But I do know where most of them are sleeping—and that’s even better!”

  Maybe I never appreciated all the things Howard did for me. Bappie
said I was an ungrateful bitch the way I treated him. She had a soft spot for Howard. She always took his side when we argued. She thought I was insane not to want to marry him. But she said the same thing about Mick when I first stepped out with him. She was always a little starstruck.

  She never saw Howard’s faults—for example his jealousy. He was an insanely possessive man. He had a private detective watching me around the clock, 24/7, as they say now. His jealousy was petty and hilarious. He hated the Lincoln Continental Mickey had given me as part of our divorce settlement. I loved that car but Howard made me get rid of it. He bought me a Cadillac instead. When the Caddie needed its first service, he told me to take it to his aircraft workshop in Burbank. He said his mechanics would do a better job on it than the dealers. I thought that was nice because we’d just had a tremendous fight over something or other—I had actually blacked his eye. I wasn’t expecting any favors from him until at least the swelling had gone down.

  But when I picked up the Caddie, I’d only driven it a couple of miles when the engine fell out in the middle of Coldwater Canyon! That was Howard’s idea of a practical joke. It was his money, so what the fuck.

  He had a weird sense of humor, I must say, although I’m sure there was an element of revenge in it, too. It took me years to see the funny side of that prank.

  I don’t know why Howard stayed around so long. He stayed around a long time after it was clear that I was never going to marry him. I just couldn’t shake him off. It was a strange relationship. I don’t think he ever put his arms around me out of affection, or to comfort me. He’d only take me in his arms if he wanted sex—or to stop me from hitting him.

  When I told him that Artie had asked me to marry him, he said: “Go ahead, kid, if that’s what you want, but you’ll regret it. It won’t last five minutes. He doesn’t love you—he just loves the idea of screwing you. Lana Turner didn’t last five minutes, and neither will you, honey.”

  He was right about that. He had Artie pegged from the word go. Maybe he’d had him followed, I don’t know. Anyway, in less than a year, Artie had tired of me and was sniffing around Kathleen Winsor.