by Lee Server
Ava, for most of her first, perfectly pleasant evening with the man, gave no thought to his wealth, his legend, or anything else, having come out on the mistaken understanding that she was with movie director Howard Hawks. Hughes took the mixup with modest amusement (oddly, Hughes had recently fired Hawks and taken his place on his latest film production The Outlaw). Ava found him at the outset a charming fellow, quirkily funny, interesting. They were fellow Capricorns, in fact shared the same Christmas Eve birthday. When he asked her out again she agreed readily, and soon they were seeing each other several times a week and more.
Though he was often crude and lustfully chauvinistic about women to the aides who helped him manage his social life, Hughes played it modest to a fault with his new companion. For the first few weeks he pressed to be allowed to kiss her on the cheek, but nothing more, which was all to the good, as Ava did not find him an appealing prospect as a lover. As she related to friends then and through the years ahead, for all the affection she came to feel for the man as their friendship progressed, they were sexually incompatible as far as she was concerned. She simply could not relate to him that way. In time, she would have more specific reasons for avoiding his bed: he was too strange, had an offensive body odor, and there were rumors from reliable sources that he was infected with a venereal disease. Hughes pursued her with patience, certain of his ultimate victory. He was crazily generous with her. She would later complain that you had to watch yourself not to say anything nice about anything or glance too long at something in a store window or Howard would rush off and buy it for you. Ava’s sister and her girlfriends at the studio would listen to this complaint and not sympathize.
But it was not all fur coats and baubles he bestowed. Some of his gifts were of a more personal and humane sort and were received much more warmly by Ava. He learned that she was a dog lover and had not had a dog since she was a child (the family pet had been lost on the road when they moved from North Carolina to Virginia) and one day Howard presented her with a young Belgian sheepdog. Of course, the pooch was exceptional, trained by the top performing-animal trainer in Hollywood; the dog could walk itself and practically make its own dinner. There was another time, a day she had called back east to talk to her mother and Molly had been in a lot of pain and could not come to the phone. And Ava was distraught, and Hughes arrived and asked what was wrong. She told him about her mother and he said he wanted to help and a few days later one of the country’s top cancer specialists arrived at Molly’s home in Raleigh. It had seemed to Ava the most generous and the most amazing thing anyone had ever done.
He moved in on her life. He seemed to know what she was doing, what she needed, at any given time, and he or an underling was there at once to provide it. He would book her for dates weeks into the future, and if his business called him away he had John Meyer drop whatever he was doing—probably corrupting a government employee—and hurry around to be Ava’s surrogate date at Ciro’s or the Mocambo. When she was looking for a doctor for herself Howard arranged for her to see one of his, Dr. William Smith. “She was a wonderful girl, still a small-town girl in many ways then,” Dr. Smith recalled. “She came for a routine checkup when I first saw her. At the time I was taking care of Howard Hughes, and he would send me all his young ladies. I guess he and Ava were an item at the time. But he had a lot of items then.”
For a time Hughes seemed content with their flirtatious but platonic friendship. A kiss good night at the doorway, a brief squeeze of her hand at the wrist. Then one evening, over dinner at Preston Sturges’s Players Club, Hughes produced a little velvet box and slid it over to Ava, instructing her to open it. The box contained a substantial square-cut emerald ring.
“Howard, what is this?”
“It’s an engagement ring.”
“And who’s supposed to be getting engaged?”
“We are. I want you to marry me.”
“Don’t be silly, Howard.”
“Yes. Yes, you will.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Well…I don’t much like that.”
Ava thought it was ridiculous. They weren’t in love. She didn’t love him. He had never hinted at such a thing before, and now he acted surprised when she turned him down. For Pete’s sake, she was still married to Mickey Rooney! But Hughes was only following his standard procedure, in romance as in business. He had plied many women with proposals and engagement rings in the past and would do so in the years to come. In fact the emerald ring he offered Ava had already spent time on the finger of Ginger Rogers. Hughes looked upon such utterances and such offerings with the dispassionate eye of an Indian trader. They were made in simple exchange for something he wanted and that apparently could not be gotten cheaper. It was thought by those who would make a study of his psychological makeup that Hughes, due to the peculiarities of his childhood and the probable presence of an undetected mental illness, was without normal interpersonal guidelines and was incapable of feelings of love. His relationships were fueled by lust and curiosity and sustained by a coldblooded obsessiveness. The “sanctity of marriage,” the sacredness of love, meant nothing to him. He was capable of plighting his troth almost at will and without a trace of guilt. He was once engaged at the same time to both Lana Turner and Linda Darnell. When he first proposed marriage to Ava, Hughes was simultaneously pursuing an interest in a teenage Jane Greer (in time to come the noir vixen of Out of the Past), while at his mansion in Los Angeles he was keeping a seventeen-year-old mistress, and at the same time he had scattered around the city other females in various stages of “cultivation.” Nevertheless in the months ahead he pursued Ava Gardner with an appearance of righteous single-mindedness, for all the world as if she were the only girl in the world. He told John Meyer and others he had found in her the ultimate beauty: “I can do no better.”
Meanwhile a humble development occurred in the slow professional ascent of the actress Ava Gardner. Ben Thau informed her that she was being given a featured role in a movie. Whether the assignment was somehow connected to alimony negotiations with Rooney or to the fact that she was now making a hundred dollars a week on her contract and there was more reason to seek a return on MGM’s money is not clear. In either case it was no proof of their faith in her talent, since the breakthrough role was to be done on loan-out to another and considerably less prestigious studio. Monogram was a small B-picture factory that specialized in three- and five-day Westerns, cheap serials, and the like. Ava’s assignment was a quickie called Ghosts on the Loose, the latest entry in the East Side Kids series, starring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, and so on, the continuing adventures of the juvenile delinquents introduced on film in Dead End in 1937 and now grown into knuckleheaded adults. Playing the sister of Hall’s “Glimpy Williams,” Ava in the film gets married and heads with her new husband for their honeymoon cottage only to find it is being used by Nazi propagandists led by Bela Lugosi; the East Side Kids come to a noisy rescue. Shot in a week at Monogram’s tiny redbrick base, the production startled the actress with its shoddiness and haste. There was no time to rehearse anything, and when cues were missed or props dropped, they just kept on going. The conditions on the set were too hurried and rough-hewn for her to feel her usual butterflies, not enough attention was paid her to allow her to become self-conscious. You went to your mark on the dirty, scuffed floor and did what you were told; and by the time you did it the people behind the camera were already paying attention to something else. Director William Beaudine shot everything in the primitive, unblinking style of Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903; the camera turned and the actors shouted and bumped into one another, and you moved on. Ava’s part called for a few lines spoken, a few expressions of bemusement, and a lot of affectionate gazing upon her bridegroom. She found Bela Lugosi to be a sweet old man, and she went on a dinner date with her lumpish and unskilled leading man, Rick Vallin. For Ava there was one satisfaction derived from the assignment, an unexpected thrill a few months later when she
and Bappie were walking in Hollywood and came upon a grindhouse marquee that read: GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE STARRING AVA GARDNER, the first such recognition she had ever received.*
Howard Hughes continued his pursuit, plying Ava with gifts and increasingly fantastic offers, most of which she met with indifference or annoyance. The more he tried, the more she would feel he was trying to buy her favors. Did he think she was a courtesan? That he simply had to find the right price and she could be bought? She wished he could relax and enjoy their companionship as she was doing. Why couldn’t they just be friends? Howard was fun and crazily exciting. Mickey was a star with money to burn and had shown her a big-spending life she had never known, but Hughes made Mickey seem like a boy who had just gotten paid from his paper route. Howard was a kind of wizard, capable of breathtaking acts of magic. Did you want to fly to the desert at Palm Springs for dinner? Or to Acapulco for the weekend? Did you crave a quart of barbecue from Scott’s in Goldsboro (her favorite—the secret sauce had come to the Reverend Scott in a dream—)? You had only to ask; Howard had only to snap his fingers. Of course she enjoyed it. But then Howard would go too far, expect too much, and she would have to put her foot down, sometimes a stiletto-heeled foot right on his instep. It became a kind of game, a teasing, sometimes torturous game at which she was becoming increasingly adept. Hughes took it and came back for more, though there were times when his patience would snap. One weekend he had taken her on a trip to San Francisco—planned an elaborate, grand weekend that seems to have been intended to lead up to another proposal of marriage. Ava had grown bored and was reading the comic strips just when Hughes had expected her to be eating out of his palm. He slapped the paper away in a sudden rage, and Ava’s temper flared back twice as fast and hot.
As Mickey Rooney had done, Hughes went to work making Bappie an ally. It didn’t take much effort. Bappie would repeatedly growl at her in disbelief. “You’ve got the goddamn richest man in the goddamn country wants to marry you and you turn him down?”
Ava tried to tell her of the man’s eccentricities, weirdnesses, hygiene problems. He ate exactly the same meal every day of the year (steak and peas, the latter numbered exactly twenty-five). He hatched million-dollar deals at gas station pay phones like a cheap traveling salesman, afraid that the government had his office telephones tapped. He wore dirty old clothes and tennis sneakers unless he was forced to wear a presentable or formal outfit. Then he put on something out of a box direct from the nearest clothes store, or on one memorable occasion a Roaring Twenties vintage linen suit and celluloid collar that looked like wardrobe from a revival of Good News. Ava harbored a growing suspicion that he was cer- tifiably crazy.
To all that Bappie said, So what? Then Ava would say that anyway she wasn’t in love with him. And then Bappie would tell her that she was crazy.
Once Ava and Howard were fighting and Ava refused to make up, and Hughes summoned Bappie to act as mediator. She came running to her sister with news of Howard’s peace offerings: rings and bracelets, diamonds and rubies, piled in a heap like a sultan’s treasure, waiting for her. Bappie was orgasmic. Ava said: “Tell him to fuck off!”
In the second week of May 1943, Howard took Ava and Bappie to Las Vegas, Nevada, piloting them himself. They took a suite at the El Rancho, one of the few resort lodgings in a town that had not yet found its fame. On the morning of May 16, Hughes left Ava and Bappie to breakfast and the swimming pool and drove out to Lake Mead, where he was flying some test runs in his beloved Sikorsky amphibian before handing the aircraft over to the government for military use in the war. Hughes took the controls, with his mechanic and flight engineer and two representatives of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) sitting beside and behind him. The plane went up in the bright desert sky, banked around Hoover Dam, and after a short scenic cruise descended again on the lake’s Vegas Wash. On touching the water the plane spun out of control. It tore and split in several places and one of the propellers shot loose and flew at the cockpit, and sliced away half of mechanic Richard Felt’s head. The ravaged parts of the aircraft churned in the water and then began to sink to the bottom of the lake, taking along the body of one of the men from the CAA who was trapped in his seat. Hughes, the other aeronautics man, and the flight engineer, clutching Felt’s blood-slicked body, managed to swim away and were rescued by an approaching boat.
Hughes had a gash in his forehead but was otherwise physically unharmed. He returned to Las Vegas in the afternoon. He had had to discard his waterlogged clothes and someone got him a cheap pair of pants and shirt to put on, both several inches too small for his six-foot-plus frame, leaving his pale belly and calves exposed. When he walked in on Ava and Bappie at the hotel, Ava burst out laughing.
Hughes said, “I’ve killed two men.”
On May 21, Ava was granted an interlocutary decree for divorce from Mickey Rooney She had asked for no alimony, accepting a cash settlement of twenty-five thousand dollars (approximately ten weeks of Rooney’s salary), plus the fur coat and jewels she had accumulated from her husband, a fraction of what she might have gotten if she had wanted to fight for it; MGM promised to be grateful in return for her not taking their boy to the cleaners. The divorce decree would be final in one year.
On the same day she received the news that she had been expecting and dreading for months. Her mother was gone. She had been taken to the hospital at Raleigh, and in the morning just after sunup she passed away. Molly was fifty-nine years old (the same age at which her husband, Jonas, had died).
It was wartime, and flights east were perpetually, totally booked, but Howard Hughes did what was necessary (that is, canceling other passengers’ reservations) and Ava and Bappie flew out to arrive for the Sunday funeral in Smithfield. A connection to Raleigh-Durham was missed or a flight cancelled—they arrived too late. For the sake of the two sisters a special graveside service was conducted on the following day.
Ava remained in town till the end of the week, grieving.
She went out by herself to the Teacherage and some of the other places where her mother had lived her life. She stood in her mother’s kitchen, imagining it as it had been and the swirl of activity when Molly had cooked her glorious meals, and she thought about how happy it had made her mother to make other people happy.
She couldn’t be sure when they had begun spying on her. At first it was just a feeling on the back of her neck. They came in shifts to her apartment house, sat in their cars across the street. Then sometimes she saw one of them outside a restaurant or a nightclub, the same cars, the same guys sitting in the dark watching her. It took a while longer to find out that Howard was responsible, that he had her under twenty-four-hour surveillance. When she confronted him about it he said he was just looking out for her. Howard said he had secret sources in Washington who told him that Nazi spies might be trying to get to him through the people he cared about. She had no idea—not yet, anyway—that Howard had all his girls followed and watched, that photographs were taken and reports filed, that he had his own spy ring that the Nazis would have envied.
Though he seemed to Ava to have become a major presence in her life, she was severely compartmentalized in his. When they were together he spoke only elliptically of his day’s events, and she had only the vaguest knowledge of the many other facets of his eventful existence, his responsibilities to business interests like TWA and Hughes Oil, his overseeing the fulfillment of huge military contracts and his other complex and often nefarious dealings with the American government, his legal and public relations battles with censors over the release and exploitation of The Outlaw, his controversial “sex Western.” And at first she knew just as little about the variety and duplicitousness of his romantic pursuits.
One night Hughes had taken Ava to see singer Frances Langford at the Cocoanut Grove. At the end of the evening they were driving back to Westwood, headed west on Santa Monica Boulevard. Stopped at a red light, Hughes looked across the street at the facing traffic and saw a familiar conv
ertible roadster paused there waiting for the green. The light changed, the two cars moved past each other, and for a moment Hughes’s eyes locked with those of the driver of the sports car, the haunting, dark, sensuous eyes of Hughes’s seventeen-year-old “fiancee,” Faith Domergue.
Faith: just fifteen—but a disconcertingly sultry fifteen—when she had come aboard Hughes’s 320-foot private yacht Southern Cross for a Warner Bros, publicity event. With the wary blessings of her parents—who were quickly put on the company payroll—she was moved into Hughes ‘s Los Angeles estate, becoming his protegee, his special project, privately groomed for stardom, and along the way—and sometime before the statutes of California allowed it— becoming his lover. She had been carefully nurtured and adored by this man old enough to be her father and in Faith Domergue’s teenage mind she and Howard were deeply in love, betrothed, and destined to be wed sometime soon after her next birthday. He called her his ‘Little Baby. “ For much of their time together, Hughes had kept her locked away like a caged butterfly. Like a lonely Beauty to his Texas Beast, she lived a strange fairy-tale existence, alone most of every day, roaming the halls of a palatial aerie at the peak of Sorbonne Road. Now, at seventeen, and in receipt of a shiny new sports car from her patron, Faith did on occasion get out of the house.
There was a squealing of rubber behind them as the roadster did a sudden U-turn. Hughes looked up to the rearview to see the sports car following them. He turned down a side street and then another, trying to lose her. Ava, languidly resting beside him, felt the surge in speed and glanced up to see Howard twisting his head front and back, and then to see through the car window a flashy convertible coming up as if to pass them in the oncoming lane.
“Christ, what is she doing?!” he said.