Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  For the first weeks they went together there was no talk of bed. Surprising; she knew from the gossip columns and from friends of Artie’s love- ‘em-and-leave-’em reputation, and at the age of thirty-four he’d already had four wives, including Lana Turner. But Artie dealt with her as a comrade, and seemed to be enjoying her company and their time together for what it was, not just as a necessary prelude to something under the sheets. His cool approach became its own form of seduction. When was he going to make his move? Didn’t she appeal to him in that way? It was like the early months with Mickey or the times with Howard, only the roles were reversed. She was the one with the growing impatience for the big event. One evening, in the middle of a discussion of the mathematics of Chopin or nuclear fusion or something, he had looked at her and abruptly told her that she was in all ways the most perfect woman he had ever met and further that he would marry her in a minute if he hadn’t already done that too many times, which in its perfectly Shavian way contained at the same time a boast (“Artie took it for granted that everyone was panting to marry Artie Shaw”), a put-down (he didn’t think enough of her to marry her), and a great compliment (he spoke as a connoisseur of perfect women). One night they went back to Artie’s Tudor mansion in Beverly Hills, and it happened and it was good.

  Shaw was putting together his new group, with fresh personnel—the expressive Barney Kessel on guitar, innovative pianist Dodo “the Moose” Marmarosa, the spectacular trumpeter Roy Eldridge—and was full of new ideas and creative goals. For Ava to be there on the inside of Artie’s music as it was being created was like living in a joyous dream, exciting and satisfying in ways that moviemaking had never been. Artie took his new seventeen-piece band on the road, and Ava went with him. She was the band’s number one fan, cheering at every rehearsal, dancing on the sidelines of every one-night stand—”sipping bourbon, listening to the music, and having a ball.” It was likely that Ava had a better time than Artie. Shaw hated touring, not the playing of the music but the people he played it for, the hoi polloi of jitterbugging teenagers. He felt he was ere- ating for a serious form, a revolutionary American music to take the place of European classical, stomps the new sonatas, and here he was giving this greatness to pimpled jerks in bobby socks. He would be playing, soaring solo, his eyes closed, in communion with the infinite, then open his eyes and see some kid popping his bubble gum. The horror! Unlike the leaders of some other popular bands, Shaw had always refused to pander to audiences with funny hats and novelty numbers, and he added strings, even a harpsichord, to his lineup, as if to distance his music from the simple needs of the saddle-shoed hordes. His less-than-inviting attitude was evident in his chosen theme song (all the big bands had an identifying theme, usually something pleasant and hummable); Shaw’s theme was “Nightmare,” a film noir bad trip set to music. Still, the crowds would not be turned away, and Shaw continued to suffer as a king of swing. The new tour was a hit, though Artie refused to enlarge it to the kind of endless cross-country ordeal he had felt forced to do in the past.

  Somewhere in this period Shaw suggested that Ava become the band’s vocalist. He had heard her singing to herself in the shower, probably heard from her about the time she had auditioned in New York. She sounded good enough, and she looked great. He said they would rehearse until she felt ready, put a chorus behind her, the works.

  “You’ll look gorgeous up there,” he told her. “Better than all of them combined.”

  It would be her great fantasy fulfilled, but she sensed that it would never work. Already aware of Artie’s demand for perfection in his music, she could foresee the trouble it was bound to bring to their relationship. He kept at her about it for a while, but she refused even to sit in some night for a single tune.

  They were on the road for her birthday and for New Year’s Eve. In New York City on January 9 the band made their first recordings together. One of Artie’s new compositions was a tribute to Ava he was titling “The Grabtown Grapple.” He cut the track with his chamber jazz spinoff known as the Gramercy Five (a septet on this occasion). It was a raucous jive paean to their sex life, a pumping nonstop beat interrupted by eruptions of wailing pleasure.

  They traveled to Chicago and then back to California for a series of shows up and down the West Coast. On tour, Ava became friends with the band’s show-stealer, Roy Eldridge—aka “Little Jazz”—the trumpeter and charismatic performer late of the Gene Krupa Band (his vocal duet with Anita O’Day, “Let Me Off Uptown,” was one of the high-water marks in the history of hip). Eldridge was black and a dynamic and funny guy, but he had been scarred by his encounters with racism. It was as trivial as the amount of stage space that had to be placed between Roy and the white Anita when they were performing, and as serious as threats of castration from a gang of ofay thugs. Ava, Artie, and Roy would sit at a table having drinks after a show, and Ava would feel the perturbed glances of passing strangers. Ava had never understood it, had never been a part of it even as a kid who didn’t know any better, the atavistic color hatred that came so easily to so many people. Artie didn’t understand her confusion: The explanation was simple, the world was chock-full of assholes.

  One night they were playing somewhere in California, and Eldridge didn’t show. It turned out he had gotten caught up in a fight with a bigoted doorman outside the hall. Artie became enraged, called for the manager, and demanded he “fire that cocksucker.” Eldridge was so shaken up—he quit the band shortly thereafter—that he spent much of the evening in tears. Ava commiserated, held his hand. “Ava Gardner was great,” Little Jazz would say many years later. “A very fine person.”

  To move around with Artie, Ava had all but abandoned her movie career. She was living now in the night, not on the dawn-to-dusk cycle of the studios. Shaw—who hated MGM from his conflicts with them over Lana Turner (Mayer had once lectured him on the birth control he should use so as not to impregnate their sexy star)—did not discourage her from playing hooky. The question was whether Metro cared. They appeared to have lost any real interest in developing her as a star. She had stalled at the level of supporting player in the Β category. By the end of 1945, after nearly five years at the studio, she would rate no better than an eighth- billed part in the low-budget comedy She Went to the Races, supporting the less-than-stellar leads, James Craig and Frances Gifford. Her only encouragement at this time came from an outside source, independent producer Seymour Nebenzal, who negotiated with Metro to borrow her for the female lead in a project titled Whistle Stop. It was her biggest part to date, and by comparison with anything else she had done, a part with background and emotional complexity.

  Whistle Stop was ostensibly an adaptation of a best-selling novel of the same name by Maritta M. Wolff, a book that had caused a bit of a sensation for its provocative sexual content. Nebenzal was an important figure in the prewar German cinema—his credits included Fritz Lang’s M— now working in the haphazard world of the Hollywood independent. He had, in fact, produced a film (Hitler’s Madman) in which Ava had done a few days’ extra work, but it was Whistle Stop s screenwriter and associate producer Philip Yordan who claimed to have introduced him to the actress one night at the Mocambo and suggested she was perfect for the female lead in their film.

  Yordan, a lawyer-turned-writer with a colorful and sometimes brilliant career ahead of him, would recall a friendship with Ava Gardner that predated the production. “I came to her apartment in Westwood or Beverly Hills, somewhere, it was a small party, I went with some other people. Someone—an actress who had passed out from drinking—started a fire, I don’t know, she dropped a cigarette on the couch, and that was a big commotion. I met Ava that night, and we had a good time. She was a very sweet girl then. She was not a heavy drinker yet. I had to work with her later in Spain, and that was a different story.”

  Yordan once claimed to have had a sexual fling with the actress. Asked about this again many years later Yordan would only say, more ambiguously, “We went out. Who can remember what we did?
”

  Yordan’s screenplay had to make considerable changes from the source material. “The book was full of stuff that could not be put into a movie,” he recalled. “The brother and sister were fucking each other. The girl was a hooker. I used a very small portion of the actual book and developed the story from there. My script was very good. But Nebenzal made some poor choices. He put George Raft into this thing because he was a big name around the world and he was on the skids and we could afford him, but he looked like hell and who wanted to see this old man with Ava Gardner? It should have been a young guy like a Burt Lancaster.”

  Yordan maintained the opening setup of the novel—the return of a beautiful young woman from the big city to her small hometown and the uncertain rekindling of an old love affair, and the script made surprisingly explicit that the girl, Mary, had been living as a prostitute and kept woman during her Chicago sojourn. But the book’s old love affair was an incestuous one between two siblings, which was of course entirely taboo in forties cinema, and so for the screen Mary’s love interest went from an alluring ne’er-do-well young brother to a jowly ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend who for some reason or other lives in Mary’s home with his mother. It still felt like incest: George Raft looked old enough to be her father. After some passionate sparring between girl and ex-, the script veered off on its own in the direction of noir skullduggery, with a thwarted robbery, a murder, and a frame-up before a happy ending and the girl and the middle- aged boy walking off into the murky horizon.

  Nebenzal put together a first-rate package on a constrained budget. The cast included Raft, Victor McLaglen, and George Sanders’s dessi- cated brother Tom Conway. Cinematography was by Russell Metty (whose future work would include Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil). The production design was by another skilled German refugee, Rudi Feld. The director assigned was Leonide Moguy, a Russian who had worked in the Soviet film industry in the years after the revolution, then fled to France and worked as a director there until the arrival of the German army, at which time he fled again and settled in Hollywood.

  Whistle Stop was a mildly creditable effort in the subset genre of forties lowlife melodrama, an atmospheric evocation of a sordid small midwestern city made up entirely of bars and cocktail lounges and pool halls (even the barber shop is part of a saloon). Ava had largely risen to the occasion of her first full-bodied part, though it was obvious she was not yet in control of the instrument of her voice and she evidently had difficulties with the longer stretches of dialogue (Yordan would recall that both Ava and the veteran Raft needed to have an entire scene rewritten on the set to a manageable monosyllabic simplicity). Moguy’s English was said to have been very poor, and though he treated Ava with sympathy, he could not offer her much help with her performance. He was, though, successful in capturing her nonverbal presence. She was posed, lit, and dressed to striking erotic effect. And Moguy would be the first director to imagine her as more than a utility performer, staging her mink-coated, high-heeled arrival on-screen in arresting backlit and silhouetted images that gave her the mythic aura of a presumed star.

  Artie Shaw had, predictably, grown bored with touring and dissatisfied with his return to public life. He put the new band on hold and went home to ponder his future and to consider worthier endeavors. Artie and Ava lived together now in his big faux Tudor mansion on Bedford Drive. Word was not long in getting to the third floor at MGM that one of their contractées was shacked up with the—to them—notorious bandleader. Ava was warned by one of the execs that her domestic arrangements were going to lead to bad publicity and scandal. Ava ignored the advice and the veiled threats. She was in mad love, she would choose life with Artie whatever the consequences.

  But time passed and they more obviously settled down as a couple. The war ended, victory over Japan declared on September 5. There was in the air then a feeling of new beginnings, everyone with fresh plans for the future. Whatever the inspiration, the idea of marriage began to seem more relevant. And Artie came around to it or didn’t give a fuck—tie the knot one more time? Why not? Perhaps it would be fifth time lucky.

  In the evening on October 17, 1945, they were married in the Beverly Hills home of Judge Stanley Mosk. Frances Heflin attended the bride and Artie’s friend Hy Craft was best man. With Bappie, Artie’s mother, Van Heflin, and a few others they went out to celebrate afterward. Artie and the new Mrs. Shaw drove to Lake Tahoe for a honeymoon, spending much of the time there in bed.

  The marriage did not turn out to be such a great idea after all. Something became lost—not to be recovered—in the transition from girlfriend/mistress to wife. Ava couldn’t figure it, she was the same crazy in love with him but sometimes Artie acted as if he had been sold a bill of goods. She had never, for instance, claimed any qualification for the role of conventional haustrau, but Shaw nonetheless began to assess her in this role and not surprisingly found her wanting. One evening, as Artie told it, she had come home happy and glowing from a tennis lesson, walked in on her husband in the bedroom, and asked him, “What’s for dinner?”

  Said Shaw, “Ava, I do certain things for you, do I not?”

  “Darling,” she replied, “you do everything.”

  “No, wait, not everything. But certainly some things.”

  “Oh, darling, I know you do—”

  “And, Ava, what do you do?”

  “What do I do? I love you, baby.”

  “You love me. I love you. We’re even. But I own the house. I pay the maid, the butler. I own the cars. I buy the food. What do you do? Can’t you at least go down and tell me what we’re having for dinner?”

  It sometimes seemed as though the wedding had devalued her in Shaw’s eyes. No longer the ravishing bauble of before, the creature of glamour and sex and freedom, she seemed now an official responsibility, like his mother, like family.

  Artie Shaw could be…a difficult man. In the opinion of many he was arrogant and contemptuous. He had little patience for the imperfect, the banal, the obvious. The existence of the mediocre nagged at him like a bleeding ulcer. He was no less hard on himself, cursing particularly the precious time he had squandered on the mindless pursuit of attractive females. “What was I doing with those women I was living with?” he would reflect in later years. “I was thinking with my groin, that’s all. I had no connection with those people. Lana Turner might as well have been a Martian.”

  It was no different with Ava. He was, certainly, not dismissive of the value of simple human beauty, as appreciative of his wife’s physical splendor as everyone else. “She was a goddess,” he would say. “I would stare at her, literally stare in wonder.” But it was not enough. He would become dismayed—even angered—by her lack of education, by her lack of interest in the world beyond the latest records, fashions, the gossip from her damnable movie studio. He would try to educate her on a subject that interested him—science, history, literature—and then wait to gauge the result, which was usually to his mind disappointing. He was abrasive by nature—his father had been a rough, unpleasant fellow, and his mother could be infuriating, they bickered his whole childhood—and was prone to respond to disappointment with stinging rebukes and outright insults.

  Some women—Lana, for instance—were lured by the surface attraction of the handsome, dapper, supercool music star, and then fled when the egocentric posturing began to surface (quoth Lana: “The most conceited, unpleasant man I ever met”). But Ava had fallen head over heels, and in concert with (what the analysts would now call) her own issues of low self-esteem, she accepted Artie’s rising tide of arrogance and rebukes, commiserated with his disappointment in her. She was a hick, dumb, lazy, had never put heart and soul into anything, hadn’t even kept up with her tutorials at MGM—Artie was right on the money. From the beginning of their relationship, she remembered, in their first conversations, she had felt such a sense of inferiority that she shaved a couple of years off her age, thinking that a dumb nineteen-year-old didn’t seem as bad as a dumb twenty-one-year-old.
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  Once, changing trains in Chicago, Ava had gone off to buy a book, and Artie had been horrified when she came back with a copy of the bodice- ripping best seller Forever Amber—trash! (Ava liked to tell that story for its coda: that Artie later married Kathleen Winsor, Forever Ambers author.) Ava had sheepishly admitted that she never read anything, hated to read, that the last book she had finished was Gone With the Wind many years ago and that was only because she was not going to be the only person in North Carolina who hadn’t read it. Artie gave her a syllabus for her lost soul. She went to the bookstore in Beverly Hills with the list: Babbitt by his friend Red Lewis, Buddenbrooks, The Brothers Karamazov, Madame Bovary, The Magic Mountain. She said Artie had made her bring a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species on their honeymoon.*