Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “I think,” she would write years later, “every girl who ever worked with Bob fell in love with him, and I was no exception.”

  Love or lust or infatuation, for a moment in time it seemed real, like it was going somewhere.

  But there was a problem. Mitchum was married to his childhood sweetheart. It was a far-from-perfect marriage and Mitchum had strayed before, but his wife, Dorothy, had a hold on him one way or another; she was his home port, and he always sooner or later went back, a pattern Ava was unaware of at the moment. It was a hot affair, and Ava thought Mitchum as smitten with her as she was with him. She urged him to leave his wife so they could be together, at which point Robert suggested that Dorothy would probably not like the idea. “Let me talk to her,” said Ava, and according to Mitchum she had actually called Mrs. Mitchum on the phone to discuss what they were going to do about the situation. Ava had asked Dorothy if she hadn’t had him long enough and if it wasn’t time to give another gal a chance? Dorothy, in Mitchum’s wry recounting, answered, “No,” to both questions and hung up the phone. “One of the most understanding wives I’ve ever met,” wrote Ava, cagily, in her autobiography.

  Mitchum drifted away with the end of filming.

  It was always the same damn thing, somebody wanted too much and somebody not enough. You hurt or you got hurt, and you could never trust love to do the right thing. Love was a trick, a double cross. She was making an early resolution, swearing off love for the new year.

  Torchy Ava Gardner Croons “Where’s the Right Man?” Tune

  By Hedda Hopper

  Ava Gardner, the torchiest thing we have in Hollywood today, admits she ‘s “man-hungry.” Don ‘t get her wrong…she thoroughly likes her job as a four-figure working girl on the Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer soundstages. But she ‘s had the nightclubs and the glamour romeos and the parties…and she ‘d trade it all any day for a man who would give her a home, a family, and all the other things in the good, old-fashioned American concept of what’s really worthwhile.

  “There is just one thing missing,” she says, “that would make the whole picture perfect for me. “

  We know what she means. But stop pushing, fellows, She swears she ‘U know him when she sees him. No. 3 is her lucky number, and No. 3’s coming up.

  *Melville: “You can’t help being astonished by the economy of means with which he achieves his effects….”

  *Mark Hellinger would not live to see the release of this last great film of his career; in December he dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.

  *Three years later, aged thirty-three, the actor was dead from a reaction to a dose of sodium amytal administered as a sedative during an emotional crisis, though exactly what occurred in the last hours of Walker’s life remains something of a mystery.

  *Quotes like that and Ava Gardner’s color-blind friendships and roles like the half-black Julie in Show Boat, have no doubt fueled continuing suppositions about her ethnic background. In recent times, she has been claimed (along with Elvis Presley and a few other attractive celebrities) as a member of the mysterious mixed-race tribe known as the Melungeons, a Southern-states ethnic group composed of African, American-Indian, and Mediterranean bloodlines. The author is aware of no genealogical evidence for these claims.

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  Frankie Goes to Hollywood

  He was born, as the story goes, too big for this world: nearly fourteen pounds, a traumatic breech birth, forceps tearing open the baby’s face and neck, left for dead by the distracted doctor. His grandmother refused the physician’s pronouncement and rushed the boy to the kitchen sink, a torrent of cold December water shocking him back to life.

  He was from Hoboken, a square mile of working-class Jersey town across the river from Manhattan, his people Italian immigrants and new Americans: Marty Sinatra from Sicily at the country’s southern tip, mother Dolly from Genoa in the north. The father was inarticulate, introverted; a tattooed, short-money pug and laborer who could not read or write. Dolly was smart, brash, strong-willed, a candy dipper, a midwife, a wheeler-dealer in local politics. Dolly could have no more children after that first, damaging birth, so the boy, Francis Albert, grew up an only child in a neighborhood of big families. He was an isolated, self-involved kid, frail, sometimes the victim of local toughs and gang violence. But he had a gift of music in his throat and the imagination to know what he might do with it. It took some time, a slow meandering course, via small club bookings and radio remotes, with at last a big break in 1939 at the age of twenty-four as vocalist with trumpeter Harry James’s struggling new band, and then eight months later a place at the summit of the big-band world, singing for Tommy Dorsey’s all-star outfit.

  Vocalists were a minor element in the impact of a swing band in that era, but the captivating qualities of Sinatra’s voice and lyric phrasing brought him plenty of individual attention. His innovative, self-created manner of singing took the intimate crooning of Bing Crosby and the more sensuous stylings of Billie Holiday and wove them through a lyrical musicality likened to classic Italian bel canto. Inevitably he would leave Dorsey for a solo career, quickly achieving a level of popularity and acclaim that put him among the handful of most successful performers in the world. He was at first famously the idol swooned over by young females of the war years, disdained by males, some resenting his escape from military service (reportedly for the punctured eardrum sustained during that natal trauma—though other factors may have been considered, including a diagnosed psychoneurosis, and the fact that he was the married father of a small child). The resentments mostly faded, worn down by his brilliance and omnipresence, and the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice— “the Voice,” as it was known—became the sound of the age, the emotional identity of the war years felt in the yearning, almost desperate romanticism of Sinatra’s dreamy ballads with their lush, enveloping Alex Stordahl arrangements.

  Sinatra had married in 1939, a raven-haired Italian American Jersey girl named Nancy Barbato. She was a homebody, devoted and maternal, not glamorous but with a certain plainspoken beauty, a neighborhood girl with the earthy dark looks that evoked the old country. He was no Greek god, average-looking at first glance except for the strikingly blue eyes, another face from the neighborhood, scrawny in physique, with the scars of his brutal birth evident on his face and neck; but he glowed with the fury of his talent and charisma, and in success he presented himself in dazzling array—hand-tailored and avant-mode wardrobe, manicures and onyx pinky rings that guaranteed he was never going to be mistaken for an average mook from Monroe Street in Hoboken. Nancy bore with him three children, in the second, the sixth, and the ninth years of their marriage: two girls and a boy. She was a great mother and a loving, loyal wife. He was a devoted dad and errant husband, an egotist and compulsive womanizer who denied himself few if any of the pleasures his fame and power made possible.

  In 1944 the Sinatras relocated from their New Jersey home to California, and Frank signed on at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He starred with Gene Kelly in the hit musical Anchors Aweigh, directed by George Sidney, Sinatra playing what would be his typical role as a shy, small-town boy who had no experience with girls. Once he had become settled in Hollywood, with its increased, constant temptations, his philandering increased, and he seemed to look upon his marriage as little more than a sentimental formality, or so some said. He carried on affairs all but openly with various available women, including Marilyn Maxwell, Marlene Dietrich, and in 1946 Lana Turner, with Turner believing for a time that he was leaving his wife to marry her. He maintained separate residences or a presence in shared bachelor pads apart from the family home where Nancy raised the kids. He needed places to bring women, places where he and hedonistic pals like songwriter Jimmy van Heusen could host raucous gatherings often attended by contingents of prostitutes. Nonetheless, however tattered, the marriage remained a fact, and the family continued to grow: the third child, Christina, would be born in June 1948.

  In 1
948, Frank Sinatra was, as he had been for many years, a prominent and important star of films, radio, recordings, and concerts, with a growing international following now that the end of war had returned American pop culture to the world market. Few others in show business could claim such a major and multifaceted success. Nevertheless, a decline in Sinatra’s fortunes was at hand. The bobby-soxers had stopped their screaming, and a new generation looked for other, younger singing idols. Popular music itself was shifting away from the romantic balladry and lush orchestrations of the war years, veering toward the nascent sound of folk and rock and roll, styles that to Frank Sinatra would forever be anathema. At MGM he had found little success away from his roles as Gene Kelly’s sidekick. His record sales were not what they had been, and for the first time since his ascent to stardom the critical and popular polls of favorite vocalists no longer ranked him the best of all. Brawls with columnists and newspaper exposés that claimed to tie him to various organized crime figures or to Communist political fronts further chipped at his luster. As the 1940s drew to their end, a difficult and dramatic period in Frank Sinatra’s life was about to begin, a period of great professional losses and personal crises, of ecstasies and despair, of self-destruction and at last spectacular regeneration. He was about to fall in love with Ava Gardner.

  They had actually met many times through the years, even been out on a date once. Skitch Henderson, the musician and bandleader, working as a rehearsal pianist at Metro just before the war, believed he had introduced Ava to Frank for the first time ever, soon after she had arrived at the studio; it was following a concert, Frank was still with the Dorsey band, and he had come over to say hi. “It was just, Frank this is Ava, Ava this is Frank, you know, but I think that was the first they set eyes on each other.” They had later passed each other in the corridors of nightclubs, at the studio, at charity events like the celebrity baseball game in which she had been a cheerleader for his team, the Swooners—they had posed together for photographers, Ava with her arm around him. Once at the Mocambo, married to Mickey Rooney, she had been introduced by Mickey, and Sinatra had been jokingly flirtatious: “Why didn’t I meet you first?” She had even once been to his house, making a brief appearance with Peter Lawford at the Sinatras’ New Year’s Eve party at Toluca Lake.

  For a time they had been sort of neighbors, Ava in a small apartment house on Sunset Boulevard and Sinatra camped out in a bachelor pad in a high-rise building next door. One evening they had run into each other on the street, and he had talked her into going to dinner. Over food and drink she found herself attracted to his bright blue eyes and “incredible grin.” He was pleased with himself, pleased with her, and his enthusiasm proved sufficiently winning to get her up to a different nearby apartment—she wasn’t sure whose—and into a heated make-out session. Clearly he had wanted to ease her from the couch to the bedroom, but Ava knew about his marriage, his new child, felt a surge of conscience and pulled away. Enough with married men, she told herself, and not long afterward she had moved on to another neighborhood and saw no more of Frank Sinatra. For a while.

  Autumn 1949. With Bappie in tow, Ava had gone to Palm Springs for a couple of weeks of rest and recreation in the desert air and sun. One night she went out to a large party at the home of producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Frank was there. He was grinning like an excited young boy at their reunion. They talked and laughed. At some point, the flirting starting to get under her skin, Ava broke off and shook her head at him.

  “That all sounds swell, Frank—but you’re still married.”

  “No, doll,” he told her. “It’s over. It is done.”

  They had both been drinking for hours and were looped and giddy when they left the party, announcing that Frank was going to drive her home. They slipped away with a fresh bottle of something from Zanuck’s bar and got into Sinatra’s Cadillac Brougham convertible. Frank didn’t know where Ava was staying and didn’t ask. They drove into the night, roaring out of town, headed into the desert flatlands. Frank pressed the accelerator to the floor, racing to nowhere with a crazed determination, Ava opening the bottle of booze and drinking it straight, passing it back and forth to Frank behind the wheel.

  They reached the small outpost of Indio, surrounded by nothing but dirt and black sky, and Sinatra careened up over a street corner and squealed to a stop. He pulled Ava toward him, and for a while they kissed and squirmed and groped. As Ava pulled back to take another drink, Sinatra opened his glove compartment and took out two .38 Smith & Wessons, extended one pistol in a vaguely vertical direction, and fired it three times until a sharp plink sounded and one of the streetlights went out and glass tinkled to the dusty ground below. He tried for another and got it on the first shot.

  Ava said, “Let me shoot something!” And she took the other gun and fired it at random into the sky, at the ground, into a hardware store window. Frank put the car in gear, screeched around back onto the street, and roared the car forward, steering with one hand, shooting at the street- lamps with the other. Ava turned around in the front seat and as the car accelerated she fired across the back of the car and let forth an ear-splitting rebel yell. They shot the .38s empty and then turned up a side street in a squeal of rubber, heading back for the main road. They had not yet regained the highway back to Palm Springs when they heard the siren and saw the flashing light of a police car. The car cut them off, and two officers approached with their own guns drawn.

  “Christ,” Sinatra mumbled, “what do these clowns want now?”

  Ava lay on a bench in the police station and catnapped while Frank talked turkey with the police. The cop in charge was deferential to the two Hollywood stars, and agreed to let Frank phone his publicist in Los Angeles. As it is told, the publicist was awakened, talked to the policeman, and asked him to name a figure that would make the story go away and the policeman named the figure, and in a few hours, in a chartered plane, the publicist was in the desert with a suitcase full of cash. Ava was back in Palm Springs in the morning. Bappie was up and having breakfast, and Ava told her she had been out with Frank Sinatra and they had had a wonderful time.

  In Los Angeles he came for her, a quiet date this time, with no guns drawn. They had dinner at a candlelit Italian restaurant in Hollywood. The evening was diametric to their Wild West night in the Springs. They were both sober. Frank was subdued and yet in a way no less intense than in his manic mood out on the desert. He talked to her with great feeling; he was earnest, romantic, and, she thought, honest. He did not try to evade the subject of his wife or family, but spoke of them with concern, loyalty, and love. The marriage, Frank told her, had been over for years, but it continued in name only for the sake of his kids. If Ava wondered why another child had been produced in the long-failed marriage only twelve or so months before, she did not pursue it. If she was feeling some awareness that he had probably turned on this sad-sweet intense charm with a hundred other women in a hundred other spaghetti joints, she did not pursue that either. There were the blue eyes to contend with, the voice, the hands holding hers beside the candlelight. She was in no mood to argue with his version of reality; it seemed to suit them both fine.

  They drove to Ava’s eagle’s nest above Nichols Canyon, to the pink house, the yellow bedroom, and they made love for the first time. She would invest that night with an aura of magic, of myth. At the end of her life, constructing an autobiography, speaking memories into a portable tape recorder, by then as much a believer in the legend of their romance as any reader of Modern Screen magazine, she would recall those first intimate hours in epiphanic terms. “We became,” she would record, “lovers forever—eternally.…I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love.”

  She called him Francis. “He looks like Francis to me,” she would say, the extent of her explanation, “and I know him better than anybody.” They were much alike, in temperament, tastes, sympathies, neuroses. Each had been raised by a taciturn father and an outgoing mother, two children of the Great Depr
ession, children of FDR, instinctive defenders of the underdog, resentful of authority. Both were wary of the better bred, and both at times fancied themselves victims of bigotry, whether cultural (Ava the “hillbilly”) or ethnic (“I’d see a guy staring at me from the corner of the room,” Sinatra would say, “and I knew what word was in his head. The word was ‘guinea’ “). Both felt discomfited by their lack of education (Sinatra was a high school dropout) and had become self-consciously self- improvers, diligent readers of good books and upscale journals, admirers of writers, composers, and intellectuals.

  They were both independent-minded, hotheaded, selfish, possessive, suspicious—traits intensified by the alcohol of which they were equally fond; they were both generous, open, affectionate, sensitive, funny. Both were highly sensual people, with strong sexual drives. Ava would speak of Frank’s ability to go on and on in bed, while Sinatra characterized her to friend Jimmy van Heusen as “out there” sexually, ready or eager to try anything. There were rumors—of modest provenance, but similar to gossip about some of Ava’s later relationships—of a consensual brutality to their lovemaking.

  They were both creatures of the night, proclaimed insomniacs. For both the night held the promise of elation as well as sadness—Sinatra famously described himself as “an 18-carat manic-depressive”—as the hours passed and the crowd all fell away and there was nothing left anywhere but sleep. Both often felt a painful sense of loneliness they would seek to deny in the brash public spectacle they so often made of their lives. “Ava gave the impression of being insecure, Frank of being supremely confident,” said David Hanna, Ava’s manager in the 1950s. “Actually, each had something of both qualities in their characters.”