Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Often in those bachelor-girl days Ava went out and about with other females, part of a floating group of uninhibited girlfriends known for their love of the high life, a coterie of Hollywood-bred playgirls. There were friends of long standing from her starlet days like Marilyn Maxwell and Peggy Maley, two lush bottle blonds still waiting for their big break in pictures (Maley’s moment of glory would come in 1954, in The Wild One, feeding Marlon Brando the famous straight line: “What are you rebelling against?” to which biker Brando replies, “Whaddaya got?”). And now with Ava’s newfound status after The Killers, there were bigger names in her circle, too, such as Ann Sheridan and Lana Turner. Turner and Ava had much in common: They had both been teenagers plucked from nowhere without experience or education, Lana was Metro’s previous hot sex symbol, and she and Ava seemed to fall for many of the same guys. Some of them, like Artie and Frank Sinatra, had been Lana’s first; others, like Howard Hughes and the racketeer Mickey Cohen’s sleek thug Johnny Stompanato, were Ava’s castoffs. Ava liked Lana, but she found her a bit of a bore at times, humorless except unintentionally funny as when, with the manner of an accountant she reviewed the genital size and ability of her various lovers. Texan Ann Sheridan, eight years older than Ava, was another straight-shooter about men and romance. Ava met Sheridan, the Warner Bros. “Oomph Girl,” through local radio star Johnny Grant. “That was one of the great days in my life, listening to these wild chicks. They could drink and mix it up just like guys,” Grant remembered. “To hear Ava and Sheridan talking together was like being in a navy boat with a crew of horny guys. Ann was a gal who would greet you saying, ‘Hello, you cocksucker!’ And Ava was just as bawdy. They loved guys and they were both insomniacs, too, so they never went to sleep. These were great ladies who in those days you could say were real ‘broads,’ and they took it as a compliment.”

  Peggy Maley was Ava’s occasional roommate, when Peggy was between residences or when Ava was feeling lonely or blue. Peggy, said Ava, “was into everything,” and the two had many adventures together, including smoking pot for the first time, some reefer they had scored from one of Artie Shaw’s jazz brothers. They enjoyed putting people on and amusing each other with private jokes. There was one bit Ava did, aimed at the particular sort of dullard who might pester one of the girls while they were out together. Singer Mel Tormé recalled sitting with Ava and Peggy at the studio commissary: Ava trying to eat her lunch and an English actor, pompous and newly arrived, trying to charm her into going on a date; at the end of the man’s long and flowery offer, Ava looked up from her soup at him and impassively asked, “Do you eat pussy?” After a moment’s silence, said Tormé, Peggy burst out laughing, while Ava went back to her soup.

  “She had some friends like Marilyn Maxwell who were the drinking, partying kind of girls,” said Candy Toxton. “Very good-looking in a very cheap sort of way.…Anything went with a girl like that. You know, drink and sleep around. She was Bob Hope’s mistress and this one and that. A girl like that was sort of what Ava became…later. Ava had a mind of her own, but I think she was exposed to certain behavior. I don’t think that was her nature; I think she let certain people become an influence on her. I think friends like that hardened her a little.”

  She was by now a strong, steady drinker. In the beginning it had been a remedy for her great shyness; she had been so painfully withdrawn and tongue-tied among all those clever and self-assured people; then, during two dissolving marriages, it was an escape from hurt and hopelessness. Now it was just there, like eating or driving, one of the things you just did.

  Everyone drank then, and many drank too much, but she had a fierce capacity even by the high standards of 1940s America. She had never stopped hating the taste, like an awful medicine every sip (for many years she would drink with the booze in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other to drown it), but through the years in Hollywood she had come to crave the effects. She preferred the speed and certainty of spirits and pure alcohol cocktails to wine and diluted drinks, but she would drink almost anything offered and sometimes everything—there was her habit at parties of taking every bottle of hard liquor available—gin, vodka, scotch, tequila—and pouring it all into a single mixer or punch bowl and drinking up the fiery, revolting concoction whose only purpose was to knock a person through the floor.

  She was still very young and had the recuperative powers of youth, and so for a long time the drinking was seen as a reflection of her energy and a love of life, not as a harbinger, nothing negative at all. A girl showing indications of desperation or self-destructiveness would be the last things on the mind of anyone who gazed upon the glorious sight of of a twenty- three-year-old Ava Gardner crossing the floor of a Hollywood nightclub on an autumn evening in 1946. Still, there was no denying booze had crept up, taken its prominent place in her existence. Many of her friends were heavy drinkers, and liquor was sometimes used as a litmus test for further social interaction. Mitch Miller, the musician and record producer, recalled seeing Ava at the bar at Chasen’s with singer Vic Damone: “It was the first time I saw her in person. She was pushing a drink on him, and he said, ‘I don’t drink,’ and finally she said, ‘You’re too square for me, ‘and she got up and left.”

  Ava Gardner saw off 1946 at a series of New Year’s Eve parties in the company of Peter Lawford. She began 1947 on an impromptu date with Mel Tormé, a 3:00 A.M. manic drive through the night in the convertible Howard Hughes had given her, ending up on the beach at Santa Barbara in the blood orange light of dawn.

  At last she was making another movie. The powers at Metro had stood by while another studio had turned their girl into a star, Hellinger and Universal doing in the course of sixteen weeks or so what MGM’s vastly greater resources had been unable and mostly unwilling to do in nearly six years. And now Metro stood to gain considerably from Ava’s success.

  She had been requested to come to a meeting with Louis Mayer. Gone was the contempt he had expressed on their first get-together, when she was going to marry Mickey Rooney. Now he was Uncle Louis or Papa Louis, full of benevolent condescension, an enthusiasm that nonetheless managed to sound like a threat.

  “You’ve done it, Ava, just as I always knew that you would. And now a new life has begun for you. You must realize that a star has great responsibilities. You must assume those responsibilities now. There is no escaping them. Your time has come, young lady.”

  She was told that the studio would be looking for wonderful properties for her, important roles, and to get this renewed relationship off to a good start they were going to put her in a featured part opposite”the King” himself, Clark Gable. The Hucksters was based on a popular novel by Frederick Wakeman, a satiric expose of radio and advertising. Gable had vetoed the project at first, declaring, “The novel is filthy and it isn’t entertainment.” Metro put its writing department to work excising the filth and trying to make what was left a bit more entertaining. Gable okayed the adaptation, and the production came to life. Metro’s great male star had not worked in nearly two years, remarkable for the sort of assembly-line schedule the studio usually kept. But his previous film, his comeback after military service, had been the disastrous Adventure,, with Greer Garson, and Gable had decided he would not work again until they found the right material. One might have thought a rip- roaring adventure film or a serious war movie would be the sort of thing to restore Gable’s prewar status, not a satire about radio jingles. And after zero chemistry with Greer Garson in the last film, one would have expected Metro to avoid pairing him with another well-bred British actress, this time Deborah Kerr in her American debut. Ava Gardner’s feistiness and overt sexuality could be seen in the tradition of Jean Harlow and Lana Turner, two of Gable’s past big box-office team ups. She might have been just the hot female costar to light a fire under the veteran male sex symbol, a Gable-Gardner pairing to compete with Warner’s Bogart-Bacall team—but no, Metro would take another five years to put something like that together for the two very compati
ble performers. For The Hucksters Ava’s role as nightclub thrush Jean Ogilvie was not the female lead or love interest (she played Gable’s former flame), and Metro would reward her newly won stardom out of The Killers with fifth billing, below Gable, Kerr, and character actors Sydney Greenstreet and Adolph Menjou.

  Ava had come down with her usual case of heebie-jeebies when it was time to go back before the cameras. She had even tried to get out of the assignment, feeling the pressure of being in a big Metro project with their biggest star. Working with the unknown Burt Lancaster and a company of character actors was not the same thing. Then Gable called her one night, said, “I’m supposed to talk you into doing this thing. But I’m not going to. I hated it when they did that to me. But I hope you change your mind, kid, I think it would be fun to work together.”

  Ava liked Gable. She had some time ago been introduced to him at a party at Minna Wallis’s and they remained friendly passing acquaintances. He was an uncomplicated man with a vast natural charisma that he never sought to analyze; he drank himself to sleep, got to work on time, and never took himself too seriously; wore his crown, as Louise Brooks said, “at a humorously apologetic angle.” Ava found him solid as a rock. It was fun to work with him. Gable’s easygoing attitude kept her calm throughout the production. He was relaxed, reassuring, funny. On one occasion shooting was halted while some adjustments were made to a gown Ava was wearing in the scene; because of the way the low-cut top was revealing too much, the costume person had to take her aside and fasten her breasts down with some invisible tape, and Gable cracked, “That’s the same stuff they use to pin back my ears.”

  Kissing him in a scene, and in another singing a song directly to him (her voice dubbed by Eileen Wilson), Ava’s biggest problem was getting lost, distracted by the strangeness of it, of doing these things with the man she and her mother had both idolized so many years ago. “I had been in love with Clark Gable since I was a little girl,” she would recall. “And every once in a while I’d think, ‘It’s CLARK GABLE!’ and I’d go to pieces.”

  They became good friends and would make two more films together in the years ahead. The pair developed an easy, kidding rapport, and most believed it was no more than that, a sisterly/big brotherly sort of relationship. Ava refuted any rumors outright: “There was never anything between us—ever.” Some speculated that at forty-six Gable was too old to attract Ava as a sexual partner, and others said Gable never pursued her because he had an aversion to brunettes—although the truth was Gable in his time had gone to bed with women of every hair color and probably a few bald ones too, so that couldn’t have been it. If they were never more than friends, it seems that the friendship may have come to be a particularly intimate one. Ruth Waterbury, the veteran Hollywood journalist whose party Ava had attended on her first day in California, recalled a visit to Ava’s residence in London circa 1953, about the time the actress was completing the movie Mogambo. Arriving at Ava’s fiat in the morning for a breakfast appointment, she found the actress in the kitchen making eggs and bacon. Waterbury said that from the back room she heard a familiar voice, and a moment later Clark Gable walked out, “wearing nothing but a grin.”

  In The Hucksters they proved to be a wonderful pairing, with an on-screen spark between them that revealed their genuine amusement and easy pleasure in each other’s company. In the film Gable’s charisma was more weary and rueful than in the past but he had never seemed more urbane or so wise. Gardner was ebullient, radiant; she lit up every scene she was in; it was a glowing performance. The film itself was handsome, well-crafted, and entertaining, a seemingly knowing look at a little-known subculture, the first of what would become a minor genre of films exposing and mocking the banality of advertising and the “media.” In the hands of a Joe Mankiewicz or Billy Wilder the material might have found another level, but director Jack Conway, an old Metro reliable and one of Gable’s favorites, put it all together with his usual middle-of-the-road competence. It was well received by the critics, Ava Gardner was given many positive reviews, and the film made money.

  She was still filming The Hucksters in late February 1947, when she began working in her next movie, Singapore, starring opposite Fred MacMurray. Universal had had a last-minute problem with their scheduled female lead and needed a “name” actress immediately. Metro agreed to loan Ava for five thousand dollars per week for a minimum of ten weeks, and for a while she had to divide her time between Culver City and the Universal lot north of Hollywood. The film was a hodgepodge of elements from Casablanca—an American adventurer separated from his lover by war, reunited in an exotic city ridden with intrigue and nightclubs—and the film noir staples of shadows, looming ceilings (tropical subdivision: ceilings with languidly turning fans), time-tripping narrative, and a case of amnesia (noir’s version of the common cold). The story was not a good one, and the dialogue was often less than riveting:

  MacMurray to amnesiac Ava: “Look, Linda.…What’s the matter, what’s happened to you?”

  Ava: “My name isn’t Linda.”

  MacMurray: “Linda Grahame! With an e on the end.”

  MacMurray, whom French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville once enigmatically called “the inventor of underplaying,”* having left his jaunty Paramount years behind, had entered his stolid freelance phase; he was unconvincing as an adventurer and uninspired as a passionate lover, his scenes with Ava having a very low wattage (though the two got along fine, and Ava called him “great”). Ava appeared—yes—gorgeous, shimmering under a soft overhead spotlight, the Asiatic cast of her eyes perfect for this sort of hothouse orientalism atmosphere. Her physical perfection was challenged only by a few moments in a bathing suit, an unflattering glimpse of heavy thighs that showed she had at least been eating more regularly since the breakup with Artie Shaw. The director, John Brahm, a sort of poor man’s Robert Siodmak, was another German exile who had just hit his stride in darkly atmospheric crime melodramas, the remarkable vehicles for the corpulent Laird Cregar, Hangover Square and The Lodger, and the crazed-with-flashbacks noir The Locket. Singapore signaled the end of his brief surge of artistic glory, obscure films and television lay ahead. Of Ava, Brahm said, “She has the makings of an excellent actress and a very big star. However, so far she hasn’t played enough important roles to gain confidence in herself. She is apt to approach a scene full of the fear of doing it wrong. Consequently, to get the best performance out of her I explain how the scene should be played, how the character would feel, speak and react in such a situation. Once she knows all that is expected she can do it very well. A great deal of the time she could figure things out for herself if she only had confidence in her own judgment.”

  Ava was not bad in the end, but like everything else in the film, just not very interesting, and Singapore proved a step backward after the professional achievements of her performances in The Killers and The Hucksters.

  Her private life remained free-floating. In romance she followed the whims of the moment, working perhaps too diligently at not being harmed by her emotions. “She was sexually uninhibited, wild, all kinds of goodies and quick,” Jo Carroll Silvers, wife of comedian Phil Silvers, told writer Kitty Kelley. “She was gone and off with somebody else before you knew where you were.” Ava took on lovers and discarded them with a seemingly deliberate carelessness, sometimes with what seemed deliberate cruelty. She ended a two-month relationship with Mel Tormé (then at MGM working in Good News while Ava was shooting The Hucksters) after he broke a date with her to attend a sneak preview of some new movie, and lied about it. She summoned him to her apartment without letting him know she had found him out, smiling, said Tormé, as she told him, “We’re through, Melvin. Finished. You lied to me and I won’t take that from anyone. Out!”

  Through the spring she had again been seeing much of Turhan Bey. They made a glamorous and sexy couple, photographed together at parties and premieres. One night they went on a double date. “Ava was my date. And Ava’s friend Peggy Maley, a wonderful girl
with the most beautiful breasts in Hollywood, she was with her date, David Niven. The four of us were out and as the night went on David began to hit it off with Ava. She liked to laugh and David made her laugh, he had a great sense of humor. And he was good-looking. She was out with me, you know, but what could I do? Now she was getting along so well with David I did not have the heart to interrupt them. When you were with Ava and somebody came along that she liked, you had to bow away. And there was poor Peggy, stuck with me. Finally, I took Peggy home, and David took Ava home. Niven said to me, ‘You’re a man after my own heart.’ “

  There followed a short-lived affair. Niven was a recent widower, his beloved wife, Primmie, killed in a grotesque accident during a game of lights-out hide-and-seek, falling headfirst down a flight of stone steps. Niven suffered the loss deeply, no doubt, though he claimed a rather odd manifestation of his grief was an extended period of satyriasis, a near- perpetual erection, relief from which he found in the procreative recesses of all the alluring Hollywood females who would have him. Ava did not give much thought to Ni ven’s peculiar grieving process but simply enjoyed a few scattered days and nights with the suave, jocose Brit. When they later costarred in two movies—The Little Hut (1957) and 55 Days at Peking (1963)—she seemed hardly to remember their brief period of intimacy.

  Extraordinarily, to those taken with the JFK mythos, Ava’s time spent with a young John Kennedy left even less of a lasting impact. Her agent, Charlie Feldman, had made the introduction, at Kennedy’s request (his visits to Los Angeles were for the express purpose of meeting the latest screen beauties). The “ambassador’s son,” as he was then known in the press, had put “quite a rush” on Ava, so heard columnist Louella Parsons. When Parsons cornered her for a scoop, Ava told her Kennedy was “very nice, sweet,” and Louella, in private notes to herself, concluded “not any great thing as far as I can see.” When her relationship with Kennedy came up in conversation many years afterward, Ava claimed to no longer remember anything about it. Bappie, ever Ava’s archivist, would gleefully remind her of the juicy details.