by Lee Server
What puckers my alabaster brow is whether or not I’ll keep up full steam ahead or revert to type. As I said, I’m an old-fashioned girl. Hoot all you like, but what I really want is a home and kids. I’m not completely sure yet whether I’m going to be Forever Ambitious or not. One thing is a cinch, though. I won ‘t be Forever Promising anymore!
—”Confessions of an Ex-Playgirl,” Ava Gardner
“What did you eat today?”
“It ‘s been said of you that you have the most graceful walk in Hollywood. How did you achieve it?”
“Do you have pancake makeup on now?”
—Questions for Ava Gardner, Screen Guide
“I must have a Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split personality because I photograph so differently from my real character. Men seem to expect to see the f emme-f atale sultry Jezebel dripping orchids and mink. When they see, instead, a skirt, sweater and saddle-shoe girl, with no make-up, it’s a great let-down. “
—Ava Gardner, Screen Guide
“I know that keeping the lips slightly parted and wetting them occasionally with the tongue makes them appear fresh and appealing. So I do it. “
—Ava Gardner, Screen Guide
There had been a preview screening of The Killers in early August. Everyone went; everyone was excited. That weekend Jules Buck, Hellinger’s assistant, invited Ava to come with him and his wife and some friends going out to visit John Huston at his rambling ranch property in the wilds of the Valley. Huston had been at the preview and was lustfully enchanted by the woman he had seen on-screen embodying the duplici- tous bitch of his own invention. He greeted her with a tipsy extravagance, a tall, wiry man with an oddly simian handsomeness. They liked each other at once. He had a dazzling mind, a courtly charm, a compelling, theatrical manner of speech—and, she would soon learn, an anarchic, dangerous streak he fueled with gallons of liquor. And she was gorgeous. In time Huston would come to know and to enjoy and admire more about the woman whose stardom he had helped to create: what he recognized as a reckless engagement with life that made her very much a kindred spirit.
In the evening Huston showed off his postwar parlor trick, hypnotism, learned from the army psychiatrists treating soldiers for mental disorders. Jules Buck went into a deep trance, but Ava, perhaps wary of revealing the sort of stuff she gave to her psychiatrists, resisted, and Huston decided to ply her with more scotch instead. Everyone drank too much, or enough, whatever you called it. Ava remembered Huston becoming active with desire for her and chasing her out of the house and through the woods until she leaped into his swimming pool to get away. Eloise Hardt, who had been a starlet at MGM and first met Ava during her time with Mickey Rooney, was a friend of Huston’s and came by the ranch often to work with his horses. “I was feeding the horses, and I went to the house to speak to John because one of the horses was kicking in the stall. John loved to get girls to fuss over him and he knew how to convince every woman that she was the greatest thing on earth. I went into the house and Burgess Meredith was there somewhere, wandering around, completely out of it, and John was in bed with Ava and some other man, a New York actor. I don’t know if there was any sex. But that’s where I found them.”
Everyone had blearily decided to sleep at Huston’s and drive back into Los Angeles in the morning, but the chase to the pool, Huston’s inebriated attentions, had been enough for one visit, and sometime near dawn Ava had come bounding up to the snoozing Bucks and asked to be driven home. The sun was just coming up as Jules Buck tried to navigate the car to the dirt road, and Huston was on his verandah “waving…an alcoholic goodbye.”
They would see each other again, but their professional reunion, after The Killers, would be many years in coming. The next evening Huston went to dinner with his then-regular date, actress Evelyn Keyes, and on a whim they left their table at Romanoff’s for Las Vegas and that night they were married (and some years later Keyes would wed Artie Shaw).
The period after the breakup with Artie in the summer of ‘46 was filled with restlessness, randomness, impulses followed then denied. Ava moved frequently, from apartment to apartment, leaving each on a sudden whim. She lived alone much of the time; she and Bappie remained apart after Ava and Artie separated, though Bappie was ever ready to come running back into Ava’s life as needed. The places Ava rented were often never fully furnished, never fully inhabited either, her bags left partially unpacked, clothes strewn around as if in a hotel room taken for a night. Her personality seemed equally transient. Different people knew different Avas: sweet, down-home, acerbic, or outrageous, the barefoot tomboy playing volleyball and football and roasting hot dogs at the beach, the big sister baby-sitting and doting on the kids of married friends like the Heflins and the Rosenthals, and the lover of the night, habitue of the glitzy Mocambo and Ciro’s, all the boites of Hollywood and the jazz joints of Central Avenue. “She was just a country girl, and she wasn’t sure what she wanted out of her life,” said Eloise Hardt. “She didn’t have a plan. None of us did. You just got pushed along and hoped you would land on your feet. But she was in the fast lane, and that was trickier to maneuver.”
For a time after leaving Minna Wallis’s place Ava lived in a small two- family house on Olympic Boulevard at the edge of Beverly Hills. She rented the second-floor “penthouse”; on the ground floor lived Candy Toxton, actress, former girlfriend of Tommy Dorsey, and later the first wife of Mel Tormé. “I paid $175 a month and she paid a little more because she had the upstairs, better apartment. Charlie Feldman was my agent and was also her agent, and he found the apartments for us; he may have owned the building, I’m not sure. He was a very charming and sophisticated man. He and Ava, if they had something going on, it was for a short time. Charlie was married, but he had a history of going on the make for every woman he represented. He was married to Jean Howard and cheated on her. Anyway, it was nothing serious.
“She played a lot of Artie Shaw records, I remember that, and that was a bit of a pain in the ass to hear all the time. I guess she had just busted up with him—I had met Artie when I was dating Tommy Dorsey, and Tommy didn’t like him at all. And I remember her place was filled with yellow roses. Somebody was always sending her all these fresh yellow roses.
“We’d borrow a cup of sugar from each other now and then. And she knew some of the men I was dating, and I knew some of the men she was dating. But we were neighbors, not best friends, and I did not know any of her inner thoughts. She seemed content when I knew her, and I never sensed any great unhappiness about her. She was a very free person, it seemed to me, and she was not embarrassed about anything. If a man stayed overnight with her she didn’t try to hide it; she would just say, Oh, he stayed overnight.’
“She was very free, I mean, nothing embarrassed her. She was very comfortable with her body, I know. I remember going up to her apartment one day, she was getting ready to go out, and she wanted to borrow a pair of earrings. Her door was open, I don’t know if she was expecting somebody. And, I mean, things weren’t as crazy as they are today, but her front door was open and I tapped and she yelled, ‘Come on in.’ And she was in front of the mirror putting some makeup on, and she was standing there nude. It was rather shocking for me. And she had the most gorgeous body, and the complexion and the hair, I mean, she was just beautiful. And she was quite comfortable being like that…and it made me very uncomfortable because I felt quite ugly next to her.”
Ava went out three or four nights a week; after her cloistered, devotional years with Shaw, she returned to nightlife with a vengeance, dancing, dining, drinking. She had always said she felt “more alive” when the sun went down, and now she proved it. Herman Hover, the boss of Ciro’s, the ne plus ultra of forties Hollywood niteries, recalled her as “the most constant and the most intense customer” he ever had. She went to parties, she went out with dates or with groups of friends and—rare for young women of the time—-she went out alone, enjoying the music at one club or another, buying rounds for the musicians, moving on. From the summer aft
er The Killers had concluded filming until the end of the year she had few professional obligations beside publicity work, and so there was no having to get up at dawn and report to the studio. Her evenings out might last past sunup, and she sometimes scheduled two separate outings with different friends or two different dates in a single night, going home after eleven to freshen up or to meet her late-shift caller. Ava often complained that she suffered from insomnia, and that this made her reluctant to go home, but some recalled that she often expressed a kind of childlike fear of going to bed or of the lonely moments on the pillow before sleep came. She had a habit, when there was no Bappie or husband or boyfriend about, of asking people, females and males alike, some she had just met, to come home with her and even to share her bed with her while she fell asleep. It was a provocative habit that would on occasion lead to misunderstandings.
Some nights if she found herself alone and restless, she liked to call in to one of the radio stations and chat with the all-night disc jockey. She would ask the dj to play one of her favorites. The song she most frequently requested was Gershwin’s wistful “Someone to Watch Over Me”—in later years it would be “Lush Life,” Billy Strayhorn’s world- weary ode to a life of “jazz and cocktails.” Sometimes she would go to the station and sit in the studio and just quietly listen to the music. “She did that a lot,” recalled Johnny Grant, a North Carolina native and in the period a top disc jockey in Hollywood, for a time broadcasting live from a booth at Ciro’s. “She absolutely loved music, and she would just come by and sit while you played the records. She didn’t want to talk on the air or anything or have you mention she was there. You’d have a little chitchat during a break, but she just liked to come and listen to the music. I played the regular stuff, Dorsey, Artie Shaw and all, but she liked to hear a lot of the harder jazz, and there was another guy, a disc jockey named Don Otis she liked to drop in on quite a bit because he played a lot of the music she liked. They had a very good friendship. It wasn’t a romance or anything, as far as I know—well, it could have been, who knows?”
In October she went to court to divorce Artie Shaw. Until then she had not done anything to finalize things, keeping the marriage alive if only on paper. But Artie had already found someone to replace her and had called her into his office to tell her and to ask that they get the split in the works as soon as possible, would she be so kind—as simple and as bland as that. It hurt but it made her laugh: She was already ancient history in Artie’s autobiography. Someone had introduced him to the glamorous-looking novelist Kathleen Winsor, whose notoriously sexy novel Forever Amber he had once chastised Ava for buying. She was married too. They had known each other for only a couple of weeks but had decided to tie the knot. Ava numbly agreed to Artie’s businesslike request for her cooperation. Shaw and Winsor then went across the border to Juarez, Mexico, to get a pair of quickie divorces, staying for five days at a small hotel where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sanders “to avoid newspaper comment.” The divorce decrees from their spouses were granted, and they were immediately wed, returning to Los Angeles at the end of the month. But it turned out to be a little messier than anyone had expected. The district attorney’s office took exception to the circumstances of the Shaw-Winsor Mexican union, and the couple was forced to flee the state at once to avoid “the probability of bigamy charges and the threat of jail.” It would take more than a year to disentangle the embarrassing mess, and newspaper comment was not avoided. By the time Artie and his best-selling bride were fully and legally recognized as married they were ready for a divorce. In court, Shaw said his wife tried to force him to be sterilized, and Winsor claimed Shaw threatened her with violence when she refused to join the Communist Party, an accusation that made the papers and resulted in Shaw being subpoenaed and humiliated at length by the House Un- American Activities Committee.
Naturally there were men waiting to take Artie’s place with Ava Gardner. There were many men ready and willing. She was not going to let them do that. Baby, I have had it with love, she would say. She enjoyed the attentions, the affections, of men, she couldn’t help that; and she was fond of sex, no denying it, that cat was out of the bag now; but she was giving no man access to her heart, not for a long time to come.
“She was so beautiful,” said Candy Toxton, “that every man wanted her, they all fell for her. But I felt she didn’t really care what they thought. If they liked her, if they didn’t like her, she didn’t really care. It was like she didn’t take them seriously, all these men. If they loved her or not, she was just not going to work that hard at a relationship with a man.”
There were dates who were in the way of buddies she had known for a while, fun-loving hunks like Peter Lawford and Turhan Bey, with whom she could have random nights on the town and no strings attached. “She was a wonderful free spirit,” recalled Turhan Bey of a time when he was the handsome young Austro-Turkish actor (born Turhan Gilbert Selahet- tin Sahultavy), best known for his bare-chested appearances in the delirious adventure films of Maria Montez. “I have such wonderful memories of her as a dear friend, some of them quite humorous and some of them not printable. She was very easygoing when I knew her. She took things for what they were. She knew that she was beautiful and she didn’t pretend otherwise. But she was okay. I liked what her agent, Charlie Feldman, would say, ‘Ava is an okay dame.’ She was very real. She said what she felt, did what she wanted, and you knew where you stood. She was 100 percent okay. She was one of the best.
“We were very social. She was invited everyplace, of course, but sometimes she would get stood up or needed someone to take her to a party, and she would drag me out of the darkroom and take me along. A couple of times she brought me to some big event at Louis B. Mayer’s, which was great for me because I was at Universal and I would have never met such important guys.
“We got along so well. I don’t know who made a pass at who. The romance was interesting; sex was not what was most interesting. To me that was always the beginning of the end. Did I want things to become more serious? Yes, I think we both felt that way, but somehow it never happened. Maybe we became too friendly, liked each other too much.”
There was sometimes a taunting quality to the way Ava dealt with men, the way she made herself almost indiscriminately available and yet unreachable and easily distracted by the next interested male to come along. Her habit of booking two dates in a night seemed part of the same game. She sometimes had two suitors crossing paths in her hallway, like a changing of the guard. “There was a place behind the steps leading to the second floor,” Candy Toxton recalled of the Olympic Boulevard house she shared with Ava. “And that was where she would tell a guy to wait until the first date left.…I think that was fun on her part. I think she liked that playing one against the other. I don’t think she was mean about it, she just enjoyed it. She liked men…but she knew how to handle her men.”
She began seeing Howard Hughes again. It was late in the summer just after she had separated from Artie. Howard had fallen out of the sky once more, his closest brush with death yet.
Atter his year of peripatetic hiding, nursing what he believed was a nervous breakdown, he returned to public life. Immediately he had tried to renew his friendship with Ava, but she was deeply under Shaw’s spell by then and refused to talk to him. On July 7, 1946 Hughes had taken off from his aircraft plant in Culver City for a test run in the prototype XF-11 reconnaissance plane. Toward the scheduled end of the test the aircraft lost power in the right wing and began to descend rapidly. The XF-11 came crashing through a residential street in Beverly Hills at 155 miles per hour, tearing through the tops of palm trees, a wall, a rooftop. The plane exploded. Hughes had confidently put twice the legal amount of fuel in the plane’s tank, and now the explosion sent fire a hundred feet into the air. Hughes should have been incinerated but somehow managed to get free of the cockpit and was dragged through the flames to safety by a fearless marine who happened to be at the scene. The fire blazed for hours. Hug
hes arrived at the hospital with burns to his hands and face, broken bones, concussion, and multiple lung punctures. He was given a 50—50 chance of survival.
Ava got a call from John Meyer. “You heard what happened to Howard? He asked for you, kid. Can you come over to Good Samaritan and just let him see you? Might be the last thing he ever does.”
Ava still felt an odd affection for the man and could not turn down such a request. She hurried to the hospital, but when she got there she found that Howard was not permitted visitors. Reporters, however, were on hand to take note of Hughes’s harem. Ava, Jean Peters, Linda Darnell, Jane Russell, and other filmland beauties gathered in Hughes’s name. Howard had orchestrated the scene through Meyer and a couple of flacks for his own amusement, as well as dictating a press release to downplay the story about the young marine who claimed to have saved his life.
In September he was largely recovered and ready to get back in the game. But he had changed much since Ava last saw him two years before. He seemed many years older, slower, less vibrant. His hair appeared badly dyed, and he now wore a mustache (apparently to hide a burn scar above his upper lip). On September 17 Howard piloted them both to New York for a long weekend trip. They went dining and shopping and attended the Joe Louis—Tami Mauriello fight at Yankee Stadium. She enjoyed their time together, but soon Howard was back to his exasperating habits: nightly requests that she marry him, outlandish gift giving (she did accept, with minimal complaint, the Cadillac convertible he presented to her), and the return of his cadres of spies staking her out and following her every move. Her temper would flare up at some of the liberties he took with her, but she seemed now to have a less personal concern for his deep- rooted eccentricities. She would keep him as a friend, occasionally enjoying the things he could do for her, and at times playing with his infatuation for her, but always keeping him at arm’s length.