Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  If I had paid more attention to those Freudian manuals he was always laying on me, I might have smelled a rat. But I had no idea at all. A couple of months after our divorce, I fell apart when he married her. But it taught me a lesson. It taught me that hypocrisy isn’t just the province of movie producers.

  Anyway, let me finish the story about Howard Hughes. Bappie still thought I was mad for turning Howard down. She adored him. “Think of all that money, honey,” she’d say wistfully.

  She was now stepping out with Charlie Guest. Charlie started out as one of Howard’s tennis cronies and ended up running his Beverly Hills property portfolio—which meant taking care of the houses in which Howard stashed his women, including Lana, of course, Ginger Rogers, me, Jane Russell, a whole bunch of us down the years. Charlie drank too much but he was a gold mine of information and gossip about Howard’s girls.

  Anyway, our relationship was volatile, let’s put it that way. It was never as violent as my affair with GCS, that’s for sure. But once Howard took a swipe at me and dislocated my jaw—that was the night I felled him with the fucking ashtray. I thought I’d killed the poor bastard. There was blood on the walls, on the furniture, real blood in the bloody Marys. I panicked. I think I phoned Mickey first. When I couldn’t reach him, I called the studio. It was late, I don’t know who the hell I talked to but I must have been hysterical and whoever it was they quickly got the message.

  Someone contacted Ida Koverman. She was always the studio’s first port of call in an emergency when they didn’t want to disturb L.B.

  Anyway, L.B. was disturbed. He sent his boys round to clean up the mess. They got me out of there so fucking fast my feet didn’t touch the Orientals. I’m sure Mayer thought it was going to become a murder scene! I don’t think he gave a damn about me, but he didn’t want any scandal attached to his studio.

  Fortunately, probably miraculously, Howard recovered—and again asked me to marry him.

  But the mix was too volatile. Our chemistry was the stuff that causes hydrogen bombs to explode. Till death us do part would have been a whole lot sooner than later if we had tied the knot.

  Howard was a control freak, and I was too independent to take his crap. He was out of his mind most of the time even then, and he got crazier through the years. He died in 1976, twelve years ago. But in a funny sort of way, I still miss him. I still think of him.

  24

  You’ve got to get rid of more of that language, honey. She still swears too fucking much,” she said. Referring to herself theatrically in the third person threw me for a moment. “Why does she have to swear all the goddamn time? It makes her sound like a goddamn tramp.”

  “Ava, good morning,” I said.

  “I thought you were going to clean up her mouth,” she said. Her voice was friendly enough but I caught the disapproval in her words.

  “We can still do that, if that’s what you want,” I said guardedly. That was the last thing I wanted to do; without the epithets and profanities, her voice would lose its gritty individuality. Anyway, I relished the feistiness of her conversations. Without that, she wouldn’t sound the same at all.

  “I told you, it’s a first draft. There are a few things I need to change. I just want you to check that I haven’t made any factual mistakes.” I was playing for time. “Anyway, why are you calling so early? We’re not on studio time again, are we?”

  “I might just as well be. I’ve been awake since four o’clock, waiting to call you. I was going to call at six. I thought that would be a little too early. Seven’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Seven’s fine,” I was grateful for her unusual thoughtfulness.

  “I’m trying to cut down on the booze. What do you say to that?”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure about that, honey. Not drinking fucks up my head worse than a hangover sometimes. I can feel my mortality, baby.”

  “If you’re not sleeping, it’s no wonder you’re exhausted.”

  “What I feel is more than exhaustion, honey. I am dying, Egypt, dying.”

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat.”

  “Have you shown this stuff to Ed Victor yet?” she asked.

  I had, of course, but her sudden change of tone made me wary. “Don’t you want me to?” I vacillated.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “What is there to think about, Ava? We’re on the same side, aren’t we? You must tell me if there is anything you’re not happy with.”

  “No, it’s fine.” She sounded hesitant.

  “But something’s worrying you, I can tell,” I said. If there was a problem it was better to get it out in the open and deal with it now.

  “I’m not sure about some of the things we say about Mick and Howard, honey,” she said slowly. “You’ve used an awful lot of personal stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  “Like saying Mick and I continued to sleep together after our divorce.”

  “Well, you did, didn’t you? That’s what you said.”

  “I know. I just don’t know if we should spell it out so plainly.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  She changed the subject and her diffident manner gave way to something much harder. “The stuff about Howard, did I say that? I don’t remember saying all that.”

  “You did, Ava. Maybe not word for word—I’ve used material from earlier notes but it’s essentially what you said. I’ve kept the same feeling, the same line. That Howard taught you lovemaking didn’t have to be rushed, how he talked to you like a horse whisperer,” I said, grateful that I had discreetly omitted her remark that Mickey always woke up with an erection, and Howard never did. But I still had no idea of what the problem was, or its scale.

  “The thing is, it could open up a can of worms,” she said.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I was also sleeping with Howard after I split with Mick.”

  “You mean you were sleeping with Mickey and Howard at the same time?”

  “You don’t have to be coy, honey,” she said, and laughed. “I slept with them on and off for a while. Well, pretty much right up until I met Artie. It was only for sex. But we’re not going to say that either, honey.”

  “Did Mickey and Howard know they were sharing you?” There was no point to the question except prurient curiosity, and I knew it was a mistake the moment I asked it.

  “Jesus Christ, Peter!” she said angrily. “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not,” I said sheepishly. “Anyway, we don’t say that you were sleeping with both of them after your divorce from Mickey? We don’t spell it out, do we?”

  “And we’re not going to,” she said flatly.

  “Then I don’t see how it can open a can of worms. No one is going to know unless you tell them,” I said.

  “People have dirty minds, honey. Some smart-ass reporter is sure to put two and two together,” she said. “It’ll make me sound like a fucking puta.” Puta was her favorite word for a slut. She despised putas.

  “People aren’t going to think that at all,” I said.

  “Bull-shit. You know exactly that’s what they’re going to think.” I heard her take a deep breath. “Where we talk about what Mick and Howard were like in the feathers. Do we have to go into that?”

  “You’re complimentary about both of them,” I said.

  There was a silence on the line and I knew she was reading the copy again.

  I had been scrupulous about quoting her exactly and her squeamishness surprised me. She had been inordinately discreet, even generous to both men. After quite a long silence, she said: “Yeah, I guess that’s okay. I haven’t said anything shitty about them, have I?”

  “You’ve been sweet to them.”

  “But I thought it was just between us—not between you, me, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry who is going to buy the book.”


  “You want a bestseller, don’t you?” I said.

  “Telling how Howard measured up to Mick in bed—do we really have to use all that stuff, honey?”

  “We don’t have to but it’s what you said, Ava,” I reminded her again. “It sounds fine to me. Do you want me to lose it? We can do that but it would be a pity.”

  “I thought all that stuff was between us, honey,” she repeated, avoiding my question.

  “All what stuff? We’re talking about maybe a dozen lines, probably less. Anyway, you knew the meter was running,” I said. I hoped she remembered it was her phrase.

  “I don’t want a kiss-and-tell book,” she said stubbornly. “I thought we agreed on that.”

  “But we want an honest book. This is honest. Emotionally it’s honest to the bone. Only you could say these things the way you say them. Readers will love that.”

  “Fuck the readers.”

  I decided not to argue with her any further. “Fine, if that’s what you want,” I said. “Fuck the readers.”

  “You think?” she said, and laughed again.

  “I told you what I think, Ava.”

  “I know.”

  I could hear the caution in her voice and tried again. “I truly don’t see what the problem is, Ava. It’s an exaggeration to say that you compare Mick and Howard as lovers. We are talking about no more than a few lines in the whole book. I don’t think that makes it a kiss-and-tell book.”

  I heard her turn the pages of the chapters I’d sent her. “Am I right?” I said.

  “It’s ten lines,” she conceded after a while.

  “That’s nothing. It’s an aside,” I said. “Blink and you’ll miss it.”

  “You don’t think it puts me in a bad light?”

  “Why should it? It’s honest. Women will certainly understand the truth of it.”

  “You don’t think it makes me sound like a goddamn tramp?” she persisted.

  “Ava, you are talking about something that happened more than forty years ago—you were just a kid, a baby! Your words, not mine. Moral attitudes have changed. There’s been a whole sexual revolution since then. The whole world has turned.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said bleakly.

  I felt her resistance weakening. “Sexual mores have changed. Nobody is going to be hurt by it. Mickey isn’t going to complain, is he?” I said. It was hard to believe that this apparently uninhibited woman whose sexual appetite at the height of her fame had been legendary, who had unashamedly taken matadors, big-game hunters, passing hunks, and leading men to her bed, whose romantic life had mirrored that of her most famous screen character—the lovely and amoral Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—was now fretting about minor indiscretions half a century before.

  She said, exasperated, “Who the fuck knows what Mickey will say? He’s got religion now.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s got religion coming out of his fucking ears.”

  “I still think he’s going to be flattered that you continued to want him physically even after you were divorced. No man’s going to complain about that, especially forty years on.”

  “It makes me sound like a goddamn tramp,” she said again, truculence in her voice. “It makes me sound as if I was there just for Mick to get his ashes hauled.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, although it made me laugh.

  “I don’t want to have to watch every fucking word I say to you, Pete,” she said.

  “You don’t,” I said. It was too early in the morning to get into an argument about what was on and off the record. As far as I was concerned everything she said was grist for the mill, although I knew that when push came to shove we’d always do it her way.

  I said, “Look, let’s not get hung up on words. When we get to the end, we’ll go back and look again at anything you’re still not sure about. We’ll rework anything you’re not comfortable with.”

  “I think we should concentrate more on the career,” she said. “Let’s talk more about that, about the movies I made. I must have made over a hundred fucking movies if you count all the early quickies, the turkeys I did, when I was learning my trade.”

  “Sure,” I said, happy to change the subject.

  AROUND SEVEN THAT EVENING, we met at Ennismore Gardens. She wore a plain oatmeal sweater and a matronly plaid skirt that fell just below her knees. It wasn’t the most flattering length for her marvelous legs—legs about which director George Cukor once remarked, “When she crosses the screen, you’re bound to follow her.” And he was gay. She poured the wine. “Who was the young man who delivered the pages yesterday?”

  “My brother,” I said.

  “I thought he might be. He looks like you. What’s his name?” Michael, I said. She questioned me about Mike, my family, my wife. “Are you faithful to your wife?” she asked, looking straight at me as she handed me my drink.

  “None of your business,” I said, surprised by the question.

  “I don’t see why not. You know everything about me. I know fuck-all about you.”

  “You checked me out didn’t you?”

  “Only professionally,” she said.

  “Who did you ask?”

  “None of your business, kiddo.” She gleefully repeated my own riposte. She knew I was aware of the people with whom she had checked me out: Dirk Bogarde, Peter Viertel, Deborah Kerr, Spoli and Paul Mills, and Bill Edwards, an MGM marketing executive—the same mutual friends I had questioned about her!

  “I didn’t know you had a brother but you know all about my brothers,” she said with feigned petulance.

  “I’m your ghost, I’ve got to know these things.”

  “A girl has a right to some privacy.”

  “That’s not the way it works, Ava.”

  “Okay, what else can I tell you? I’ve told you everything, for fuck sake. You know about my sisters, my Mom and Dad, my ex-husbands, my lovers. You know about my first period, fahcrissake. You even know about my Grandpa in the crazy farm. I’ve never told anyone about Grandpa Gardner, fahcrissake,” she said, but there was a hint of humor in her petulance.

  “That’s because the book is about you. Next time, you can write a book about me and ask the questions.” It was a joke but she didn’t laugh.

  Even so, it was true what she said: she knew almost nothing about me. She had scarcely ever asked me anything more inquisitive than would l like a drink? Like many actors, especially those who have become legendary movie stars, she was almost without curiosity about other people. Did being at the center of a world where others are peripheral—planets circling the star—create, bit by bit, a dividing line between reality and make-believe? Between the person you pretend to be and who you really are? Can such a woman ever be sure which side of the divide she belongs on?

  Like most actors, Ava told outrageous and exaggerated stories about herself and other actors in order to entertain and amuse her friends; a story that started out as a risqué anecdote, told over and over, in time became accepted as fact even by Ava herself. “Is that true, Ava,” I asked her after one of her booze-fueled late-night recollections about an incident involving a young actor with whom she’d reputedly had a torrid affair. “Probably.” She shrugged indifferently.

  Since the 1940s, when she was getting started, and discovered her power over the opposite sex, she had only to snap her fingers for men to come running; there was Sinatra, of course, John Huston, Howard Hughes, Hemingway, bullfighters—an indication of how demanding she was can be judged in bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín’s reply when asked, just before his death in 1996, whether he regretted not marrying her: “No. She would have left me no time for the bulls!”—and just about every movie star she had played opposite from Clark Gable to Robert Taylor and Bob Mitchum.

  Naturally, I was dubious about some of her stories. Did she really turn down the role of the predatory Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate? I’d heard stories that director Mike Nichols never felt that
she was right for the role—it was said that he always saw Anne Bancroft in the part, which she finally played—and reluctantly agreed to meet with Ava at her hotel in New York only after she called him and announced peremptorily, “I want to see you. I want to talk about this Graduate thing.”

  When Nichols arrived at her hotel, the St. Regis, Ava was surrounded by a group of admiring young men whom she promptly dismissed (getting rid of lovers, she told me once with some pride, was a skill she had perfected at an early age). Nichols recounted, “Theatrical and over the top, she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, ‘All right, let’s talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.’ ”

  It sounded right. It sounded exactly like Ava. “I never was one of those actresses whose clothes fell off all the time—at least not on camera, honey,” she said. When I eventually asked her about the episode, she at first claimed not to remember it.

  “You don’t recall meeting Mike Nichols at all? At the St. Regis, in New York?”

  “I might have done. It was a long time ago.”

  “It was 1966.”

  “Oh, I remember,” she said, suddenly changing her tune. “He made me cry.”

  “Why did he make you cry, Ava?”

  “He wasn’t very . . . simpatico.”

  “Was that why you turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson?”

  “I told him I couldn’t act,” she said. “That was the same thing as turning it down. I said I was no actress. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” she said, running the sentences together to avoid a response. It was a politician’s trick, and made me smile.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “I thought you said Dirk Bogarde told you I wasn’t,” I said.

  “He said you weren’t a faggot. There’s a difference. I can’t stand faggots, I get on well with gays.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Gays make the best ‘walkers.’ They are good company. You can tell them your secrets. They are useful to have around. They bathe a lot. A woman can even go to bed with a gay. At a pinch.”