by Lee Server
All of Ava’s earliest appearances were uncredited, nonspeaking parts, hardly more than extra work, some virtually incorporeal. “We did a lot of those together,” said Leatrice Gilbert. “You didn’t know what the film was half the time. You’d get in and get your hair and makeup done, and then you hung around the set for hours, and then you did your scene. And sometimes you weren’t even in the sight of the camera. And we’d go down to the commissary for lunch and say, laughingly, though we wanted to believe it, ‘We’re actresses!’ There was one Ava and I did together called Hitler’s Hangman [the film was released as Hitler’s Madman] and we were dressed up as little Czechoslovakian girls in the village where the Nazi Heydrich was hanging everyone. Neither of us had anything to do, really; we just stood around all day looking like mournful refugees.”
After some months of silence Ava was at last entrusted with speaking parts. Her brief first chance occurred one day when she was plucked out of a group of starlets playing students at Miss Hope’s Finishing School in Calling Dr. Gillespie, shooting from early February. In the final scene of the movie, she sits outside with four other young women, laughing with surprise at the romantic advice of the geriatric, wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore. Ava’s laugh, throaty and real, is heard above the tittering of the other girls. In a moment she is sharing a two-shot with the film’s leading lady and, startlingly so, making the lovely Donna Reed look like she is playing the ugly duckling sister. Then her voice, low and melodious, devoid of accent. “Can it really be a happy marriage,” she asks, of all things, “if a girl deliberately goes after a man?” Barrymore harrumphs: “No marriage was ever spoiled by the trivial question of who started it.” She will remember him fondly, the old actor kind and patient with the nervous newcomer. A boy comes for her, she leans toward the camera, whispers in Dr. Gillespie’s ear: “I’ll let you know in ten minutes whether your advice was any good or not.” And she glides away, breathtaking. It is a sudden glimpse of the celestial in an earthbound programmer. A star’s presence is clear in the half-a-minute of celluloid, the radiant face, the voice, the floating movement. For MGM it ought to have been the moment of elucidation, bells and whistles sounding: let’s do something with that girl! But no one noticed. Uncredited bit parts and a few more lines were her only reward.
Her first officially assigned dialogue, and the public debut of the voice that had once caused Metro so much consternation, was to be heard in the film Kid Glove Killer, previewed at the Ritz in Los Angeles on March 10, 1942. Kid Glove Killer was a Β movie with a three-week shooting schedule under producer Jack Chertok’s supervision, a small-scale mystery about a crime-solving police lab technician. The movie marked the graduation from the shorts department to feature directing for a man who would later become one of the more artful and acclaimed of postwar filmmakers, Fred Zinnemann. Ava’s bit was efficiently staged in two shots on a soundstage set representing the exterior of a drive-up diner. She played a carhop paying call on leading lady Marsha Hunt and second lead Lee Bowman in their convertible, stopping first to leave a tray on the door of a jalopy and suddenly kissing the young man behind the wheel.
To Bowman and Hunt she spoke her first line of two, “Anything for dessert, folks?”
Bowman, gesturing to the scene of the kiss, says, “I don’t see that on the menu….” Ava replies, “Oh, him? Well, he’s my husband.”
Cut.
The appearance lasted all of twenty-five seconds on screen, and was not extraordinary but was not bad either: Eye-catching in her twenty-five seconds, with a beautiful smile and the sleek sexiness and precise movements of a fashion model (in her snug sort-of-paramilitary carhop uniform looking unexpectedly chic), she gave the otherwise homely film its only moment of glamour.
Proof that it was acting was the fact there was no sign of the great anxiety the work had caused. For the entire time it took to complete the scene she was wretchedly nervous, queasy, close to vomiting. “So unhappy was she about the awful job she thought she had done,” Fred Zinnemann remembered, “that she wanted to go back to North Carolina immediately.”
Other speaking parts followed, but the studio had no coherent plan for her career, and she experienced no clear hierarchical advancement—she continued for some time to be used as needed in silent walk-ons. Her anxiety when she had to perform remained, though along the way she discovered that a slug or two of booze before a take did wonders; she found that if you befriended certain of the prop men they could be depended on to have available a little liquid encouragement, poured into a paper cup. She hated the taste of straight liquor and took it down like an awful medicine, but she was becoming increasingly fond of its relaxing effect. It relaxed her on the set and it relaxed her at social gatherings, parties where she had often found herself sulking on a chair in a corner while Mickey and the other Hollywood extroverts held court.
The marriage had continued to deteriorate. By summer the arguing and recriminations were an almost daily occurrence. There were good days, and they continued to have sexual relations—now that she had been introduced to that pleasing aspect of married life she was reluctant to give it up. But the dream of love and marriage had dissolved for Ava, and she now increasingly saw only disappointment and betrayal where there had been hope and trust. Her husband was immature, selfish, and, she believed, chronically unfaithful. She disliked his friends, was distressed about his endless gambling losses, suspicious of his frequent late-night disappearances. One night she was with him at a drunken party at the Ambassador when some of his pals began teasing him about his “little black book” of girlfriends’ numbers. A new friend of Ava’s at the studio, the young Peter Lawford—suave, shallow English playboy actor ever on the make—whispered to her that Mickey had a new dolly he was meeting daily at his country club. She looked for signs of his infidelity, pondered evidence of unexplained activities, looked for lies on his lips and in his eyes.
Thinking that they could use a change of scene and more breathing room, Mickey moved them to a large rented house on Stone Canyon Drive in Bel Air. It solved nothing. They simply no longer got along. They fought when they were alone, they fought in public. She had been drinking more and more. It had helped her nerves at the studio, relaxed her at parties. Now it briefly erased some of the pain of a crumbling marriage and gave her courage to complain. As drinking became an increasing component in her social life, it was also becoming clear that she was chemically ill-equipped for the amount she might consume, one of those who with sufficient alcohol in her system could become startlingly transformed, prone to emotional imbalance, paranoia, even violent outbursts, a Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome, as some would come to describe it.
Rooney had to wonder: Where was the bashful farm girl he had helped down off the hay wagon nine or ten months before? She would tear into him, obscenity-laced complaints; she once threw a heavy inkwell at his head during an argument; at a party—”juiced on martinis”—she flirted and danced intimately with other men, intent on provoking or humiliating him. Where was the girl? he would wonder. He was still the same, fun- loving guy she had married.
One weekend that summer they had gone down across the Mexican border to Tijuana, to the races. They had had a good day, watching the horses, drinking chilled tequila with lime. They drove back to California, a beautiful summer day with a flaming orange sunset at the end. They got back to Los Angeles and had a late dinner at Chasen’s. Ava said she was tired and wanted to go home after they ate, but Mickey was caught up in his usual whirlwind with a hundred admirers. Ava drank too much, brooded, became angry, stormed out of the restaurant, and had a taxi drive her home. Raging from the liquor and mounting dissatisfactions, she took a carving knife from the kitchen and went around the living room stabbing and tearing at the sofa cushions and the upholstered chairs, leaving clouds of cotton batting floating in the air. Then Ava went upstairs and got into bed, knowing her marriage was over.
Mickey returned, less than sober himself, finding everything shredded and overturned. What the hel
l?
She left. The next day or the day after she returned to the apartment in Westwood Village, still under lease. She had a brief falling out with Bappie—now living at her own place on Fountain Avenue—who sounded to Ava as if she was taking her husband’s side. Mickey was after her at once, calling, pleading with her to come home. Leatrice Gilbert stayed with her for a while to keep her company. “She didn’t want to talk about it much,” Leatrice recalled. “She said she was done with him and she felt like she was breathing free for the first time in months.”
If Mickey had often taken her for granted in their time together, her sudden absence from his life, from his bed, made it painfully apparent how much she meant to him. The thought that he would never again touch her glorious body or hear her hoarse whispers of appreciation left him shaken, desperate. He called all day long, pursued her at the studio, sent presents. He sent a messenger to deliver a ten-thousand-dollar mink coat. One night, frantic with desire, he showed up at the apartment and demanded she take him back. Leatrice Gilbert recalled the night: “She was terrified. He had driven up on a motorcycle, as I remember it. She wouldn’t let him in. He was crying for her. He so wanted to be back with her that it made him crazy.”
Ava called the studio and told them what was happening and threatened to go to Louella Parsons or maybe the police if they didn’t help her, and Metro, holding its corporate head at the prospect of the bad publicity, revised the schedule for the picture Rooney was shooting, A Yank at Eton, and sent him at once across the country to some locations in Connecticut. He called every night, but Ava refused the calls or hung up on him. In September the press reported the separation. In the Smithfield Herald it was written that “Johnston County’s glamorous Ava Gardner admitted…that her marriage to filmdom’s greatest box office attraction had ended in failure.”
“We just couldn’t seem to hit it off,” Ava told a reporter, “things just weren’t happy around home and we decided to call it quits. As things stand now I’ll ask for a divorce later.”
Now MGM stepped up. In August, Mickey Rooney had been classified ΙΑ by the Draft Board and was eligible for induction into the army in September. MGM intended to fight with everything they had against their valuable employee’s being drafted. Eddie Mannix, Mayer’s bulldog, requested the actor be given an “occupational deferment.” In an affidavit Mannix explained that Rooney in his movie stardom was an asset to the war effort, and that in the next Andy Hardy movie Rooney’s character would propagandize for American boys to volunteer for service, and further that Andy and the Hardys represented to the public “the highest type” of the American family. Mannix could be damn sure that headline stories of a pending divorce were not going to help them make their case for Mickey/Andy’s moral standing, not in an America where many considered divorce a sin and a scandal. He called the couple in and pleaded with them to reconcile, for their own sake, of course, in the name of true love.
And so she took him back. But it was not a happy reunion. It was clear that the romance had outlived its expiration date. The dynamics had changed, the sense of dependence had reversed, and Ava seemed at times to be pursuing a cruel payback for Mickey’s real or imagined offenses. Now she was the one to aggravate him, disappear, come home late without a good excuse. She had pals from the studio, some of them with a reputation, party girls, hard drinkers. How could a guy know what his wife was doing out there?
Ava had acquiesced to the urgings of the Metro executives— intimidated, uncertain of the future—but she resented it at once. It felt intolerable to have them managing her private life. At times she felt not much happier with her own behavior. The dissolution of the marriage often haunted her. It was how people behaved in Hollywood: Love and marriage were what you did until the next romance came along. But it was not how it was supposed to be. She thought of her mother and father, never wavering, together to the end. She struggled with uncertainty, disappointment, and apprehension, questions of right and wrong, what she was doing in that town, what she was becoming.
In December, Ava and Bappie went to Raleigh to be with their mother for the Christmas season. Ava had planned on a January visit, but Molly had become very ill early in December and no one knew how bad it might get. They arrived at the Grimes house on Fairview Road on the eighteenth. Molly was tucked under blankets on the living room couch. It seemed she had aged a dozen years since Ava had seen her the previous January. Molly beamed and cried with happiness at the embrace of her glamorous daughter. They sat together and talked and laughed. They exchanged gossip about Hollywood and Smithfield and Rock Ridge. They celebrated Ava’s birthday, and they celebrated Christmas. Bappie and Inez baked the chocolate and the white coconut cakes as one or another in the family had done since Ava was born. There were presents for everyone from the fancy stores on Wilshire Boulevard.
Ava departed on the twenty-eighth. The newspaper in Raleigh reported that she was eagerly returning to her husband in anticipation of their first wedding anniversary.
In reality the marriage was over. On January 15, after four months of ambivalent reconciliation, Ava filed for a formal separation.
Mickey surrendered to her wishes, succumbed to the legal fact of it. But her loss obsessed him. He was full of self-recriminations, abstract jealousies. Why hadn’t he done better? Who would be taking his place? There were some people at the studio who said you could see his distress on film; he looked older than Judge Hardy. What a dame could do to you! Some nights he drove around her apartment house and made himself crazy thinking about her: “Ava in the shower. Ava in bed…Ava with a parade of guys, singly and in bunches.” It was impossible to accept that he could not have her again.
Ava waited to see what the reaction would be. Would the studio turn against her, despite Mickey’s assurances to the contrary? Would she be shunned at the nightspots and restaurants where Mickey’s patronage was valued and frequent? She decided to stay away from them rather than have an unpleasant time. Instead, she would try to do something less frivolous and contribute her presence to the local USO, bringing good cheer to the servicemen on leave. Once in a while someone from Johnston County would turn up, an old schoolmate or a relative, now in uniform, bound for overseas and the fighting. She would chat and dance with them, introduce them to some stars, take them out to dinner or home for hot dogs and beers.
Metro did keep her on. Mickey, certainly, had done nothing to impede her employment. And when a friend eventually persuaded her to go back to Romanoff’s one night for dinner, Mike Romanoff himself came to greet her and escort her to one of the better tables. For better or worse, it seemed Hollywood was not ready to send her back where she came from.
On a morning in January in Los Angeles, Howard Hughes read with interest the newspaper item about the breakup of Mickey Rooney and wife. He looked with even greater interest at the photograph of the sumptuous brunette pictured standing beside her diminutive husband.
Hughes twisted the page with the photo in the direction of a nearby underling and with a thin smile said, “The little runt couldn’t satisfy her.”
Hughes, a busy man, often looked for new friends in the newspaper, also in magazines, new movies he privately screened, and in pictorial calendars of the sort that hung on the walls of barbershops. He liked very young girls, very sexy and especially sexy and bosomy girls, and he liked movie stars, who were often in possession of those first-named enticing characteristics as well as offering in their renown proof of his power to attain what other men imagined unattainable. Hughes was also particularly enthused about dating young women who were freshly separated or divorced and therefore he imagined in a state of great sexual avidity.
Hughes left the initial contact with Ava to an operative named Johnny Meyer, his press aide, fixer, and liaison with the female gender. Meyer was a man of many talents, and could schmooze up a date for his boss with a beauty contest winner and bribe a United States senator in the same afternoon. He went to Ava to “size her up” and reported back with a ringing
endorsement. She was gorgeous, friendly, just what the doctor ordered. Hughes then called and asked her out to dinner and she agreed, at least in part because Meyer had implied that Hughes might be on the lookout for a new star for one of his pictures. She felt no great new compulsion about her career, if that was what it was called, but she had to pay some mind to her future; it was a tentative time with MGM, they had not gotten rid of her, but their intentions were not clear.
The man who came to her door for their dinner date was tall, rail thin, with the lined, rawboned face of a cowboy or a leathery farmer. At once he reminded her of her father. He behaved with a confidence bordering on the arrogant, but in his manner there was also something shy, boyish, and absentminded, something like the diffident charm of Gary Cooper.
Howard Hughes was, in 1943, not yet forty years old and the most legendary and flamboyant rich man in America. The son of a Texas tycoon, orphaned and an inheritor of millions as a teenager, he had lived an impossibly colorful life, at once a powerful businessman, highly independent filmmaker, and reckless, wildcat adventurer. He was an inventor, a record-setting aviator, the majority owner of Trans World Airlines, and a celebrated ladies’ man whose string of famous girlfriends had already included Jean Harlow, Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Bette Davis.