Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “But not with a faggot?”

  “Faggots . . . they’re something else. They are cruder.”

  “I’ve never heard that definition before.”

  “You have now. So, we’ve established you’re not a faggot . . . are you gay?”

  No woman had ever asked me that before. Was she softening me up for a confession? The idea offended my masculine pride, but I was curious. “Do you think I am?”

  “You can never tell these days,” she said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  I didn’t mind, I said. No, I was not gay.

  Bisexual? she asked, playfully.

  Not bisexual, either, I said.

  “I’ve known plenty of guys who are, you’d be surprised,” she said. “In Hollywood, a lot of guys don’t know whether they’re Arthur or Martha.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but later—in an interview published shortly after Ava’s death in 1990—Artie Shaw recalled how she had showed up at his apartment in New York late one night saying she needed to ask him some questions. “When you and I were in bed together, was it okay?” Shaw assured her that he had no complaints. According to Shaw, “She heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, then there’s nothing wrong with me?’ ” Shaw said, No, of course not. What did she mean? He said she told him, “With Frank it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me.” Shaw said he always thought Frank was a stud. Ava told him, “No . . . I just wanted to know that it’s not my fault.” But the episode probably affected the rest of her marriage to Sinatra. Though there may have been a touch of irony in her tone when, in 1966 when he married Mia Farrow, she said: “I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy,” there was also perhaps a hint of justification, too.

  “Anyway, I’m straight,” I told her. I probably sounded stuffy but I didn’t mean to. Did she really think I was gay?

  The other night when I left, she said, she had kissed me on my mouth. Did I remember that? Of course, I remembered, I said. Wasn’t I surprised? she asked. Who could forget it, I said. You didn’t react, she said reproachfully. Well, I won’t forget it, I assured her.

  She had been standing with her back to the door as I prepared to leave. I’d leaned in to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face, meeting my lips with hers. Then she opened her mouth. I felt that kiss in every bone and fiber of my body. She must have been aware of it, too. Her breath was short and audible. The width of her mouth, the sensual fullness of her lower lip, that bold, feline stare and the assurance that came with her history—I was being kissed by a Hollywood sex goddess. How many thousands of men had fantasized about her as they made love to their wives or girlfriends?

  But there were a dozen different reasons why I had not responded to her kiss. Ava had not kissed me out of love—though perhaps out of affection. I was certain that she was impelled by desire, but not for me. What Ava wanted was what she had once had: the adulation that came with stardom; her ability to incite men’s lust; the admiration she aroused as, draped in furs, she descended the steps of a plane on the arm of Frank Sinatra, or stepped bejeweled from a limousine beside Howard Hughes. What Ava wanted was a reminder of the power she had relished then, a reassurance that even after two solitary, sexually barren years, she was still desirable. Ava past her prime was still something else.

  So now when she said I hadn’t reacted, there was no petulance, she was simply registering that it was unusual. “Weren’t you excited? Men usually react when I kiss them.”

  “That would be a terrible mistake, Ava,” I said. “We have a professional relationship that’s far too valuable to complicate with . . . you know.”

  It was a lame finish. The look she gave me was wry—and amused.

  “You’re not afraid of comparisons, then?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No hard feelings, then?”

  “No hard feelings,” I said.

  That made her laugh. “Good. I want you to be happy,” she said.

  “You’ve made me very happy,” I said. She had kissed me. But she did so out of loneliness and out of need, maybe nostalgia, too. And I think we both knew it.

  Later, when she told Spoli Mills about the incident—she told Spoli everything—she changed the story sufficiently to protect her self-respect: I had made the move on her! She had told me it would be a mistake.

  Her reputation and ego were intact.

  25

  We hadn’t talked for a couple of days, not about the book anyway. On the third evening, she called and was all business: “We haven’t talked about Mogambo yet, have we?” No, I said, we hadn’t. “Well, that’s important. I think we should talk about that. I got an Oscar nod for that one.”

  It was the first time she had mentioned her Academy Award nomination for her role—playing the original Jean Harlow part—in John Ford’s remake of the 1932 Red Dust. There was I thought a hint of pride in her voice when she acknowledged her nomination, although she didn’t dwell on it.

  “What about the marriage to Frank?” she hurried on. “We need to talk about that, don’t we? We’ve covered most of the other Frank stuff, but I don’t think we’ve dealt with the actual wedding in Philly, have we? We don’t have to dwell on it but we should at least mention it.”

  “We must.”

  “It was a circus. We went to Philadelphia to keep it quiet. The press found out, of course. My God, it was a circus.” After a thoughtful pause she said, “What else? I suppose we’ll also have to talk about the abortion, too.”

  “I think so,” I said, although the question surprised me. She had mentioned it once before but not in any detail. I knew she had probably had a couple of abortions, but this must have been the one she had in London during the making of Mogambo. The one she’d told me John Ford, a curmudgeonly Catholic, had tried desperately to talk her out of.

  “Okay. Wedding, Mogambo, abortion,” she said briskly, like a chairperson setting an agenda. Her serious tone amused me, and surprised me, too. Her sense of commitment had been . . . well, coquettish to say the least, and I told her how pleased I was that she was determined to get on with it.

  “Sometimes I don’t know whether I want to get on with it or not, honey. That’s the God’s truth. I’m tired of remembering. I’m sick of trying to remember what he said, what I said. What he did, what I did. I’m sick of trying to explain myself all the time. Don’t you get tired of asking the same fucking questions all the time?”

  “It’s my job,” I said.

  “Are we nearly there, do you think?”

  “I told you writing a book isn’t easy or quick.”

  “Thank God I didn’t have kids.”

  We hadn’t discussed her feelings about not having had a family, although she had now put her abortions on the agenda, so I knew it was on her mind. “Do you regret not having had kids?” I said casually, suspecting it would still be a touchy subject.

  “Oh Christ, Peter,” she said wearily. “More fucking questions. What do you want me to tell you? I regret not having had a family? I’m sorry I partied too much? Is that what you want me to tell you?”

  “That wasn’t—” I started to say.

  “How many people do you know who haven’t made mistakes in their lives, who’ve lived completely without vices, baby?” she said fiercely before I could answer, then immediately apologized: “I had a lousy night,” she said. “I nearly called you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  After a moment of hesitation, she said, “Let me ask you something. What happens if we don’t finish the book?”

  “I don’t get paid, for one thing,” I said in what I hoped was an amused tone. But she wasn’t amused.

  “I have to tell you, honey, I’m at the lowest ebb of my life right now, and it’s worse every day. It’s been nearly a couple of years since I had those strokes. I’m a whole lot nearer to dying than living. I feel th
at. There’s almost no corn left in Egypt, baby,” she said grimly. It was the line she had used at one of our earliest interviews, and reminded me of how far we had come since then, and how much further we still had to go. “We must finish this fucking book before they put me to bed with a shovel,” she said with sudden anger.

  “I hope you’re joking.” I tried to assuage her worries. “Nobody’s going to put you to bed with a shovel,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound like a joke to me,” she said.

  I felt rebuked.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, WE had dinner at Ennismore Gardens, cooked by Ava’s longtime housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, who ate with us. Ava, in bare feet, and wearing her familiar gray track suit, seemed in no hurry to start work in spite of her assurances the previous evening. She entertained us with stories about her friend Charles Gray, a notoriously camp and bibulous English actor who lived a few doors down. His aura of suave insincerity was eminently suited to villains—he played Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the boss of SPECTRE, in Diamonds Are Forever—and Ava adored him. Although one sensed that Carmen did not share her enthusiasm—he undoubtedly encouraged Ava’s consumption of alcohol—and may have been responsible for banning him from the apartment. (They continued their relationship from their nearby balconies, often drinking into the night.)

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Salvador Dali came calling in Madrid?” Ava eventually asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. He must have been about fifty,” she began contemplatively. “Although fuck’s that got to do with anything. I was running away from Frank, we’d been married a year, and I was desperately trying to break up with him. I knew I just couldn’t live with him anymore, I still loved him, Jesus, I loved him. But the marriage was never going to work. Financially, emotionally, physically, every fucking whichway it was never going to work. I told you about the time at the Hampshire House in New York? When he said he couldn’t stand it any longer and was going to kill himself? I heard this fucking gun go off? Haven’t I told you about that night?”

  “Not yet,” I said. She was off on a tangent. I didn’t try to stop her. A word, a name, the mention of a place or a time, could open a whole new vein of memories and anecdotes. Scenes and conversations came back to her in short rushes of recall. Piecing her stories together was always a challenge.

  “We were still waiting for his divorce to come through. Nancy kept changing her mind about whether she wanted to go through with it or not. Meanwhile, her lawyers were trying to screw Frank for every penny he had. I was commuting between the studio in California and Frank in New York. It put a strain on both of us.”

  She had landed the part of Julie, the black girl who was passing for white, in Metro’s remake of Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat. She collapsed during costume fittings and was rushed to the hospital in Santa Monica.

  “I know some people said it was an abortion that time, too, but it wasn’t, I promise you. To be honest, I don’t know what the hell it was—a viral infection, a nervous breakdown, exhaustion—but it wasn’t an abortion. All I know is that I was bloody sick. I was kept in for nearly a month. I must have been genuinely ill because I was in St. John’s and they don’t fuck around. St. John’s is the same joint I was in when I had the strokes thirty-odd years later. A small world, huh?

  “Anyway, I heard this gun go off. We’d been fighting, of course. And drinking. Every single night, we would have three or four martinis, big ones, in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon.

  “It was another one of those nights I ended up refusing to sleep with Frank. I was half asleep in my room across the suite and heard this gunshot. It scared the bejeezus out of me. I didn’t know what I was going to find. His brains blown out? He was always threatening to do it. Instead, he was sitting on the bed in his underpants, a smoking gun in his hand, grinning like a goddamn drunken school kid. He’d fired the gun into the fucking pillow. What a night that was!”

  She seemed amused at the memory. “At least his overdoses were quieter.”

  “Overdoses?” I pretended to be surprised, although the stories of Sinatra’s mock suicides, now well documented, were familiar to me, along with the incident of his attempt to gas himself at record executive Manny Sachs’ apartment in New York. My feigned ignorance on a subject could often encourage her to divulge an unexpected nugget of information. “You mean he tried it more than once?”

  “All the fucking time. It was a cry for help. I always fell for it.”

  After a pause, she said: “Anyway, I was telling you about Mr. Dali.”

  “Yes,” I said, grateful that she had remembered.

  “I was running away from Frank again. I’d finished Mogambo, and was about to start The Barefoot Contessa. I was just hitting my stride career-wise, and making some decent money—despite the fact that MGM still pocketed most of it under the contract I signed when I was eighteen. I was looking for a house to buy in Madrid. I really loved Spain, the pace of the place, the climate; I thought I could put down roots there, at least for a year or two.

  “I was staying at the Castellana Hilton. I was one of the few Americans living in the city at that time. Dali asked me to go to an exhibit with him. He came up to my room like a whirlwind in a cape. He was as mad as a fucking hatter. He had this silly waxed mustache like a string of licorice twirled up at the ends. He carried a rhinoceros horn with colored candies, which looked like violets, in the top of it.

  “ ‘Oh chérie, you must have one, you must have one.’ They were about the only words I understood. If he’d been offering me a drink, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I thought, what the hell is this stuff? I didn’t want to touch it. It could have been anything! He was gabbling away in Spanish, French, some Catalan, I think, but no English at all. I smiled and nodded. I had no idea what he was saying. The whole thing was fucking crazy . . . surreal, right?”

  She ordered tea and cucumber sandwiches from room service, hoping that the plebeian English ritual would restore some sanity to the sense of madness. But something must have been lost in translation—there was clearly plenty of room for confusion, she admitted—for Dali seemed to take offense at the word cucumber.

  “Perhaps it means something different in Catalan, I don’t know. He swept his cloak over his shoulder and flounced out. Unfortunately he collided with the waiter arriving with the tea and cucumber sandwiches and went ass-over-head. The rhinoceros horn, colored candies, the whole kit and caboodle went flying.”

  She threw her napkin down on the table. “I could never take Surrealism seriously after that,” she said. “Let’s talk about the wedding in Philadelphia.”

  We took our drinks into the sitting room. She curled up on the sofa and took out a small notebook, in which she had scribbled pages of dates. “I’d been seeing Frank since the end of ’49,” she said thoughtfully. “I went to his birthday party in New York in December. That was on the 12th.” She didn’t open the notebook, which she played with like a talisman between her fingers. “His marriage was already on the rocks. Let’s make sure we put that in, honey: the ball and chain was well and truly smashed before I came on the scene. But he was a good dad, I’ll give him that.”

  “But it was hardly a sotto voce romance, was it?” I said.

  “Frank moved in with me the day Nancy announced she was taking the bus to Reno. That was St. Valentine’s Day, 1950,” she said precisely, still not checking with the notebook. “I’d taken a house in Pacific Palisades that belonged to a dance director at Metro. It was a beautiful place on the ocean, but Frank couldn’t settle. I’ve told you about that time, haven’t I? He was constantly moving in and out, in and out. Never quietly either! He was picking fights with everyone. Especially with me. Things got so bad between us I felt sick the moment I heard his voice. Figure that out!

  “Then I made the mistake of letting him con me into telling him about my affair with Mario Cabr
é when I was making Pandora [and the Flying Dutchman]. I still don’t know if I told him to clear the air or to start another fight or simply to hurt him. He’d convinced himself I’d slept with Mario before I admitted it anyway. But I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to come clean.”

  Sinatra’s records had completely fallen off Billboard’s list of top tunes. His agent said it was all over for him: he could no longer draw flies, he said. In April, MGM had had enough and fired him.

  “They were pissed off with his attitude. Louis Mayer was pissed at me for sticking with him. If I hadn’t been making the studio such a barrel of dough on the crappy loan-out pictures they were putting me in, I’d have been out on my ass, too. He did a record with Harry James that was so bad, I cried when I heard it. I couldn’t listen to it with him. Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass. No matter what I did, his having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills—most of them, actually—made it all so much worse.”

  Nancy got her divorce on October 31, 1951, charging her husband with mental cruelty; seven days later, November 7, Ava and Frank were married at the Philadelphia home of the brother of Manny Sachs, the head of Sinatra’s record label, Columbia. It seemed a bit too soon to Ava but she went along with it.

  BAPPIE SAID, “YOU HAVEN’T told Frank that Howard Greer made that dress for you, have you?”

  “Why not?” Ava said absently. This was a couple of days before the wedding. The dress had just arrived from Hollywood and she was trying it on for the first time. “It was a simple little gray and pink number. Howard Greer was a wonderful designer but you usually couldn’t wear a stitch under his things. He made quite a few things for me. They were often sheer at the top, no straps—you couldn’t wear a bra. The whole thing was like a second skin. The dress he made for my wedding was a little more respectable than that, but it had Howard’s distinctive cut.”

  Bappie said, “Why not? Are you fucking crazy, girl? Who introduced you to Howard Greer?”