Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Mickey told Mayer he and Ava were in love. He was a grown man now. The public would have to understand.

  Mayer growled, “You won’t listen to reason? All right. I simply forbid it. That’s all. I forbid it.”

  Then Rooney, with a look of cheerless resolve, explained that he was going to marry the woman he loved and if Mr. Mayer could not respect that and did not think they should continue their working relationship, then he would have to see if there was some other studio that wanted him.

  Few in the world of the movies had contradicted the wishes of Louis B. Mayer and thrived. Mickey Rooney’s box-office standing would mean nothing if Mayer became determined to destroy him. There would be no “other studio”; they could keep the boy in litigation and off the screen for years (that was the whole point of the studio system, to make sure no one was more powerful than the studio they worked for). Rooney, despite his youthful impulsiveness, had to understand all this. But his determination was fanatic. This was Ava’s allure at nineteen: The biggest movie star in the world was ready to risk professional annihilation rather than give up the girl he had known for fifteen or sixteen weeks. He had diligently (and God knew celibately) courted her for all that time, and now that her charms in full lay almost within his grasp, nothing—not even the great and powerful Mayer—was going to stop him from getting what he had to have.

  Mayer, face-to-face with such grotesque defiance, gave perhaps his first serious thought to the root cause of the commotion, suddenly conscious of a heretofore barely-acknowledged fifty-dollar-a-week contract hopeful with a hopeless hillbilly accent. Ava Gardner? That had to be one of Strickling’s concoctions. What was her real name? Lulubelle? And here she was out of nowhere threatening the future of one of Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer’s most valuable assets?!

  The tension in the big room grew, peaked—ebbed. Mickey Rooney was, after all, a very valuable asset indeed. However much Mayer might have wanted to call his bluff it was not in the interests of the studio to risk the loss of such a uniquely talented moneymaker. New York would not understand such a decision. It would not be good business to punish Mr. Rooney at this time. Better to wait for a day that would surely come—perhaps not for many years but one day—when the willful boy’s value would be less and he could be made to regret his arrogant behavior (Mayer had a long memory). For now, let the boy have his hillbilly.

  The mogul’s mouth became a chilling smile.

  “Mickey…you know it would break my heart to see you unhappy.”

  The studio would handle all the arrangements. It was decided. Ava waited for details, daydreaming with Bappie about the fantastic ceremony MGM was bound to produce. But Metro’s wedding planners up on the third floor felt the best thing was to get it over with quickly and without a fuss, minimizing the publicity and cutting their losses. Ava was told not to bother asking any of her Carolina relatives to come out. And an elaborate wedding dress was deemed to be out of place and an unnecessary expenditure. Ava was disappointed, angry, and embarrassed, but shared her feelings only with Bappie. Mickey had already gone out on a limb with the studio, and now they were supposed to keep their mouths shut and follow orders. She found solace in a friendship with Judy Garland and her musician husband, David Rose. Like Mickey (and probably bolstering his own resolve), Judy had defied the studio in the name of love. Like Ava she was nineteen years old. In the previous summer— during the filming of Babes on Broadway, just before Ava and Mickey had met—Garland and Rose eloped to Las Vegas. Judy had asked for a couple of days off for a honeymoon, and Mayer and Arthur Freed furiously demanded she return to the studio that very day, and she did (but with a simmering resentment). Ava and Mickey visited the Roses at their house in Bel Air. Judy was hilariously caustic about her bosses. Ava was nervous about the wedding and Judy, for laughs, got them to rehearse the ceremony in the den. Judy wanted to take a picture of the couple and send it to Louis B. and the rest of them—”You were cordially not invited”— inscribed with an obscenity.

  They went into January with the wedding in a holding pattern. Mickey had to finish the new Hardy picture. A date was set for the end of the week and then had to be canceled: Mickey was needed for a few retakes. “If the picture is out of the way on Saturday,” reported Louella Parsons, “the wedding can take place.” Ava wanted to thank Louella for the news. The studio at last gave the nod. On January 10, a small wedding party drove out of Los Angeles in two cars. There were Ava and Mickey; Bappie (who would be maid of honor); Mickey’s mother, Nell (a tough old bird whose first words upon meeting Ava were, “Well, I guess he ain’t been into your pants yet”), and his stepfather, Fred Pankey; his father, Joe Yule, Sr. (who was currently working in a strip joint in downtown LA), and Dad’s new wife, Theota; Les Petersen, Mickey’s appointed “keeper” from the studio (and self-appointed best man); Eleanor Stewart, an actress in Hopalong Cassidy Westerns and Petersen’s wife; and a staff photographer from the studio. They picked up a marriage license in Montecito near Santa Barbara and then continued on to the small village of Ballard and the obscure Santa Ynez Valley Presbyterian Church. Petersen had chosen the location and quietly reserved the Santa Ynez, although Ava was a Baptist and Rooney a Christian Scientist; the joke was that Petersen picked it because Andy Hardy was a Presbyterian.

  The group gathered inside the church at a few minutes before eleven. Ava wore a feathered hat, a plain blue outfit, and a corsage (she still brooded over being denied a fancy white gown). Rooney wore a sedate dark suit. Both the bride and the groom looked grim and distracted. Ava’s uncertain mood was understandable: There had been little that could be called normal in the past half-year, and this least of all, a wedding to a movie star among a group of strangers (only Bappie had known her as long as six months ago), thousands of miles from home. The Reverend Glen H. Lutz performed the ceremony; his wife pumped out the wedding march on a wheezy organ. Mickey slipped a platinum ring onto Ava’s finger; the ring bore the inscription, “Love Forever.” Les Petersen had picked it out. Lutz pronounced them man and wife. Ava leaned down to kiss her husband. The Metro photographer prepared to take the official wedding portrait, and Petersen scurried up ahead of him with the little stool he had brought from the studio, plopped it on the floor, and helped Mickey to stand on it, bringing him up to Ava’s height for the picture.

  One car took the guests back to Los Angeles. Mickey, Ava, and Les got into Mickey’s convertible and headed up the Monterey coast to the place Les had chosen for them to stay for the next four days, the sprawling Del Monte Hotel near Pebble Beach.

  “You’re married now, doll, how does it feel?”

  Ava looked at her husband. Then she turned and looked at the other man in the car, the publicist and minder from MGM.

  “Are you coming on the honeymoon, Les?”

  “Sure. I go where you kids go.”

  He was joking, sort of. He checked the couple in to the hotel and joined them in the suite for some iced champagne, then dinner; at last he left them to themselves. As the night came on, the prospect of facing her matrimonial bed left Ava visibly disconcerted, which in turn spooked Mickey, and they both drank too much. Ava would give a discreet, vaguely satisfied account of the night in her memoir, but Rooney’s recollection would be blunt: An evening-long booze-up had diminished his resources; while the bride was locked away in the bathroom he rolled over in bed and passed out. Ava, fully primped for her ordeal, came out to find her husband sleeping. The night of bliss he had risked so much to enjoy was his for the having, and he’d let it slip away.

  On day two of the marriage, Mickey said they were going to play golf, or Mickey was going to play and Ava could watch. With the wedding night having passed uneventfully—anyway, without the main event taking place—and the morning proceeding briskly to breakfast, Ava might have wondered when exactly her husband was going to claim the prize for which he had so long feverishly clamored. For most of that day, however, the object of Rooney’s pleasure was not the breaching of his bride but of the eighteen ho
les on Pebble Beach’s legendary course.

  In the evening, though, his attention returned to her in full.

  She was tense, skittish to his touch. Why couldn’t it be like in the movies? A kiss, some pretty music, and a fade to black, not this embarrassing intimate grapple. Mickey, by his reckoning, was contrastingly confident, attentive, and then “tremendous.” Her body gave proof of what for months her words and the prohibitive snap of her thighs had declared: She was a virgin. He made love to her, and Ava, “agreeably surprised” by the thing her mother had taught her to fear, soon opened herself to it absolutely. They made love all night long. A “sexual symphony,” said Mickey Rooney.

  In the morning, more golf. Ava followed him around the course with a puppyish devotion, euphoric from the night before, and when the time came to return to their suite she rushed them along in eager anticipation. Another symphony was performed. Ava would much later rave to intimates about Mickey’s expertise in bed. “Don’t let the little guy fool you,” she told Ann Miller. “He knew every trick in the book.” According to journalist Radie Harris, Ava said she had been so ignorant of sex in the beginning that for a time she completely surrendered herself to Mickey’s domination, but that her enthusiasm for the activity was such that she quickly developed a more active and aggressive approach, “such a technique,” as Harris reported, “that no man would ever dominate her in bed again.”

  It was good that Ava was so pleased and consumed by their sexual encounters because Mickey paid little attention to her away from the mattress. “It was an ideal honeymoon,” he wrote. “Sex and golf and sex and golf.” After the first couple of traipses around the course, though, Ava had had enough and spent her remaining mornings at the hotel lying in bed; she would have lunch with Mickey in the clubhouse, then play cards and get treated to a chocolate milk shake with Les Petersen, then dinner and back into bed for the next course in her sexual education.

  After four days they drove to San Francisco. Metro had decided to make it a working honeymoon from there on and tie the star’s travels to various public appearances and publicity events, some connected to the war effort, some to the promotion of their new release, Life Begins for Andy Hardy. From San Francisco they took the train east. They stayed a night in Chicago, promoting, then caught the Twentieth Century Limited for New York. Putting them up in a suite at the New Yorker Hotel near Penn Station, Les coordinated a meeting with press and photographers at the hotel. The Metro man scurried about making sure the poses looked proper—Ava seated in a deep chair and Mickey on the arm so that he loomed above her. Bappie arrived from Los Angeles by train, and the sisters were loosed on the Manhattan stores with a blank check from Mickey. They went to Boston and attended a charity function hosted by the mayor and attended by a contingent of area blue bloods. Ava was overwhelmed by the pomp and could barely function for fear of picking up the wrong piece of silverware.

  She had naturally wished to include a stop to see her mother and family while they were in the East, and so the MGM planners, not wanting to waste their boy on a strictly personal side trip, booked him to make a morale- boosting visit to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. Mickey shook hands with some generals and fired a machine gun as flashbulbs popped, then went with Ava to Raleigh, where Molly was living with Inez and her husband, John Grimes, at their small but comfortable house on Fairview Road. Everyone in the Gardner family who could make it arrived for a big welcome-home- and-meet-Mickey party. Molly’s illness had taken an evident physical toll, but she rose to this joyous occasion, delighted by the return of her beautiful daughter and the chance to know her famous son-in-law. Mickey lavished Ava’s mom with attention, poured on his legendary personality, joking, dancing, trying out a song from his new picture, leaving the crowd of young and old laughing and applauding, Molly most of all. Ava watched, almost in tears with appreciation for her new husband.

  The next and last stop of the tour was Washington, D.C., and for Ava the most impossible experience of an unreal six months. They were to be among the star-studded Hollywood contingent attending Franklin Roosevelt’s sixtieth birthday party at the White House. The president and first lady greeted them on their arrival, and Ava, curtsying nervously, could not stop imagining her father’s expression if he could have seen this moment—his daughter meeting the man he had always spoken of as a kind of god. Ava, Mickey, Bappie, and Les Petersen sat together in the vast dining room, Ava causing much attention, the radiantly beautiful newly- wed, stunningly turned out, the regal sweep of her shoulders highlighted by a strapless black gown. The protocol for the event was for FDR to sit at a different table for each course, and soon the time came when he was wheeled up to his place at the table with Ava, Mickey, and the others. They were allowed a few minutes of small talk between bites, though Ava was too nervous to speak or eat. FDR, too, seemed to be distracted. Some would recall that President Roosevelt could not take his eyes off the dazzling young woman at his side.

  The honeymoon ended. Married life, real life, began.

  Rooney owned a big house in Encino where his mother and stepfather had been living with him, and it was decided to let Ma stay there and let the newlyweds get a place of their own. Les Petersen found them an apartment in Westwood. Right away, Rooney was needed back at the studio, a new slate of films waiting to be made. No longer the unattained object of obsession she had been for the previous six months, Ava found herself faded into an adjunct position in her husband’s life. He was often too busy to see her at the studio—he was starring in as many as four movies a year—and many of his free hours he returned to spending as he always had, handicapping horses, playing golf, and joyriding with his gang of buddies and sycophants. Mustering little interest in an ordinary married home life, he only seemed bored by Ava’s initial assumption of a wife’s traditional activities of keeping house and making home-cooked meals. He much preferred to spend every night at Chasen’s or Romanoff’s, with the noise and the smoke and the visible fealty and the glad- handing between courses. Day by day Ava became more aware of how little they seemed to have in common. Mickey, as everyone said, was always “on.” He liked performing, noise, fun, crowds; he had a manic mind that seemed to fear quiet and calm as if they were death. Ava liked to be “off”—to laze around in bed till the sun was halfway across the sky; shuffle around barefoot and aimless; eat long, lingering meals; and lie on the floor for hours listening to records. Like her father, she was wary of strangers. Mickey greeted every stranger’s gaze like the warm caress of a spotlight.

  One thing seemed to sustain their mutual interest: Rooney was the happy beneficiary of his wife’s recently uncaged sensuality. Back in Monterey nineteen years of trepidation had evaporated in a night of pleasure. Now Ava approached the sex act with an animal enthusiasm, wanted to make love all the time, in all ways. She would signal her need with a smoldering look or a provocatively raised eyebrow or come to greet him in a pair of panties and nothing else. Or dispense with subtleties altogether, growling at him: “Let’s fuck!” By Rooney’s reckoning, she was custom designed for intercourse. Her body seemed to possess something “extra”— something wonderful. He’d had a wealth of experience behind him for comparison, from good-time girls to horny widows, and, he would write in his memoir, there had never been anyone like Ava “down there”—it seemed to have a life of its own, as supple and expressive as “a little warm mouth.”

  One night Ava began screaming from shooting pains in her abdomen. It reminded her of her mother’s cancer and the painful spasms she had seen Molly suffering, and she screamed as much in terror as in pain. Mickey got an ambulance that rushed her to the hospital. She was operated on for acute appendicitis and remained at Hollywood Hospital for a week of convalescence. Mickey had come to the hospital repeatedly, full of gifts and affection, but when she returned home Ava found what she believed to be telltale evidence that her husband had been entertaining one or more other women while she was away. Rooney denied it—then and in later recollections (which did not often f
ail to reveal regretted behavior)—but Ava erupted with jealous fury.

  They would kiss, make up, and go on, but the relationship had been exposed to serious discord—and in Ava’s version to betrayal. From now on each disagreement and every suspicion she felt accrued a greater and lasting weight. It was a downhill turn from which the marriage would never recover.

  Since Ava’s debut before a camera the previous autumn, her career had moved at a very modest pace. She had gotten more bit parts in short subjects and then the same in feature films, most in the Β or low-budget unit but a couple of A productions as well, including We Were Dancing, starring faded Metro diva (and Mickey Rooney’s former flame) Norma Shearer. She was nervous and unsure of herself on the film sets, and on some of those early jobs Mickey had been there to help her. For a bit she did as a movie cashier in an Our Gang short called Mighty Lak a Goat, Robert Blake—then a boy actor playing a member of the gang— remembered Rooney bringing her to the set and privately directing her through the very brief performance. She told journalist Adela Rogers St. John, “Mickey was so patient, so kind…when I got my first parts he showed me how to walk, to stand, what to do with my hands, how to ignore the camera. If I ever do anything big, I’ll owe a lot of it to Mickey, bless him.” Her memoir, curiously, contained a much less generous recollection, saying Mickey had never taught her anything and never gotten her an acting job. It was more likely that he had gotten her not only her first part but some of the other early work as well. But his influence was somehow not great enough to land her a more substantial job, even on an Andy Hardy picture. When he asked producer Carey Wilson to give Ava a role in the latest installment, The Courtship of Andy Hardy, Wilson refused, saying she was not ready for it (the part went to Donna Reed). (The Andy Hardy films had made a tradition of introducing the studio’s newest ingenues, including Lana Turner, Esther Williams, and Kathryn Grayson.)