Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  In mid-March Ava arrived in New York City to spend two weeks with Frank before she left the country. She knew how much he wanted her to be with him as he began a crucial, long-running engagement at the Copacabana, his first New York nightclub appearance in more than five years. She moved in with him at the Hampshire House. The press was poised. Immediately there were gossip items about the two stars “staying at the same hotel.”

  “The main reason I am in New York is because I am on my way to make a picture,” Ava stated for the record. “Inasmuch as Frank is officially separated from his wife, I believe I have a right to be seen with him. However, since he is still officially married it would be in the worst possible taste to discuss any future plans. One thing I’m sure of is that Frank’s plans to leave Nancy came into his life long before I ever did.”

  It was a tempestuous two weeks. Sinatra was a wreck, drinking and smoking too much, swacked on a variety of pills—ups, downs, outs—beset by the scandal, beset by what he perceived as an ever-invasive press, by his workload of daily performing and rehearsing, by the growing signs of a crumbling career. The Copa showcase—three shows a night—was turning out to be a mixed bag—reviewers squawked that his voice was not what it had been; audiences no longer screamed as in the old Paramount days, though many of them did make noise, chattering to one another while he sang. At the same time, his records were not selling, and his new fifteen-minute radio program, Light Up Time, had sunk in the ratings and was headed for extinction.

  But what compelled more of his attention than anything else, sapped more of his juice, was a love affair that continually offered every bit as much pain as pleasure. They were crazily volatile together, bouncing from love to jealousy to rage to love again. They were always on the edge of something explosive. Studying each other with a hungry lust as if ready to race for the nearest bedroom one minute, then screaming and cursing at the top of their lungs, drinks knocked over, chairs knocked over, one or the other storming away. With Ava mad at him and out of his sight, Sinatra would take an emotional nosedive, frantic to make up with her, unable to think of anything else till they were together again. It was an exhausting experience for both of them, though more visibly, more extremely so for the stressed, strung-out Sinatra. He looked at times like a beaten boxer never let out of the ring.

  Skitch Henderson was a frequent Sinatra collaborator and at this time was Frank’s bandleader at the Copa and piano player on the New York radio show. “He was absolutely obsessed with Ava,” he recalled fifty-four years later. “Absolutely crazy in love. It is a kind of legendary romance now, but I have to say the reality was even stronger. I don’t like to say it because I loved Nancy, his first wife, and still do, but he was ready to do anything for Ava.

  “She was like a Svengali to him. She was an enigma. A mysterious presence. You didn’t quite know how she had done it to him, and I’m not sure I wanted to know. She was ruthless with him. And it used to affect his mood a great deal. It could be horrible to be with him then. Her acid tongue and her ability to just put you away. If ever I knew a tiger, or a panther…I’m trying to think of an animal that would describe her.…To be honest—I didn’t let anyone on to this—but I did what I could to stay out of her way. I was scared to death of her.”

  One of the last nights before Ava flew away to Europe, she had been to the club as always, backstage in the dressing room with him giving support before he went on, then an enthusiastic audience member, loudly applauding. They were billing and cooing through a late supper. Then it came, the little thing to set off Frank’s compulsiveness or Ava’s emerald-eyed monster, ready to bite your hand off at the elbow in the blink of another woman’s eye: a waitress it might have been this time, someone winking or whispering or something, and they were at it.

  “You bastard!”

  “Screw you!”

  “You want her? Instead of me? To hell with you then!”

  And Ava was gone into the New York night. Sinatra simmered for a moment, then charged out after her, but she had already disappeared. She had gone back to the suite on Central Park South, paced around restlessly, then remembered an old friend who was living in Manhattan just up the street, another night owl. She found his number in her book and called him. Artie. He and his new girlfriend were up, and Ava asked him if he’d be up a little while longer. Could she come over? Had to talk to somebody. And Artie said sure, she should come over for a nightcap.

  She was sitting in the living room of Artie’s apartment having a drink with her ex-husband and his girlfriend, Ruth—the couple in their night- clothes and bathrobes—when the doorbell rang. Artie got up, came back with Frank and Frank’s song plugger/crony/bodyguard Hank Sanicola. Ava reckoned she had “accidentally” left her phone book open back at the hotel, to the page with Artie’s number. Frank hated Shaw and seethed at the idea that Ava sometimes talked to him, sought his advice, that she might still hold some affection for the clarinet-playing bum.

  “How about a drink, Frank?” said Shaw.

  Sinatra ignored him, stared hard at Ava, began to berate her, the bulky song plugger hovering behind in a classic henchman’s pose. Artie’s girlfriend said something about Sinatra’s tone and Sinatra said something back at her, something that made Shaw step up. He knew the sort of thing that got Frank’s attention and told him he had a very-large-caliber pistol on hand.

  “You talk like that to my woman,” Shaw said, “I’ll blow a nice big hole through your guts.”

  Sinatra stopped talking, made a highly dramatic volte-face and went out the door, Sanicola stumbling to catch up.

  “Oh, shit,” said Ava.

  When she got back to the Hampshire House, Frank was there. Ava was tipsy, falling asleep, and told him to forget about it. They could continue fighting in the morning if he wanted. But Sinatra wanted one last round.

  “If I don’t mean anything more to you why don’t we just call it quits.…I’ve got nothing to live for anyway.…You hear me?”

  Sinatra went into his room. As Ava recalled it, the phone rang, and it was Frank calling from a few yards away in the bedroom.

  “So long, baby, it’s been fun.”

  And then a roaring explosion—maybe a second—sounded in the receiver and could be heard throughout the suite as well. Ava ran to the bed-room and saw the gun smoke and saw Frank stretched out on his stomach. She screamed his name and scrambled onto the bed. She saw that smoke was curling from within the mattress, and then Sinatra rolled on his side, clutching a revolver, his finger still on the trigger.

  “Frank!”

  He smiled grimly. “Hello.”

  “Goddamn you!”

  For a moment she had thought he had done it, and when it turned out to be one of his practical jokes she felt relief instead of anger and grabbed him in her arms. Someone called the management about a gunshot and the management called the police and poor Hank Sanicola had to get out of bed quick and come upstairs and help hide the gun and the mattress with the bullet hole and the powder burns.

  On March 25, 1950, Ava and Bappie departed New York for London. The newspapers had printed advance notice of her travel date, allowing a few dozen or so of the scandalized public to reach her with irate letters sent care of the Hampshire House, including many expressing the hope that her aircraft might crash en route. Whatever her feelings for Frank Sinatra—and, yes, she told herself, she did love the man despite plenty of cause for throwing in the towel—it was with a sense of great relief that she boarded the BOAC aircraft that evening, increasingly so as she felt the power of the Rolls-Royce engines surge through the cabin and the wheels snap up and America fade away. She was, yes, happily leaving Frank and Nancy and all those wonderful letter writers behind her, and after one last look out the window to make sure that none of them was clinging to the wing, she settled back in her seat and closed the past from her thoughts, turning them only to the adventure ahead, allowing her glass to be filled with champagne by a pretty English stewardess and enjoying the bubbles poppin
g gently against her upper lip.

  SIX

  Torrid Was Your Blood

  The ‘Love Goddess’ flew out of the skies to England yesterday,” reported the Daily Express. “Green-eyed Ava Gardner, voted ‘The World’s Best Shape,’ went straight to a room at London’s Claridge’s Hotel at 8 a.m., locked the door and went to sleep. The Shape was feeling out of shape.”

  The Daily Mirror informed the kingdom, “Ava Gardner, 5ft. 6ins. Hollywood ‘Venus Girl’ with hazel eyes, a dimpled chin, and a face and figure film producers pay £20,000 a year for, flew into London yesterday. Then she disappeared…locked herself in her bedroom at Claridge’s, ordered that no calls be put through, and went to bed—in pyjamas because she doesn’t like nighties in cold weather.”

  “At Claridge’s,” stated the Daily Mail, “all was tiptoe and shush.”

  Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was the creation of Albert Lewin, one of the more original and eccentric filmmakers in the history of the big studio system. For many years an MGM producer and executive, he defied every stereotype of the breed: a Harvard graduate, former professor, doctoral candidate at Columbia University (all but the dissertation when Metro found him), an unregenerate intellectual, expert on art and ancient history, patron of objectivist poets, surrealist painters, and Danish explorers, friend of Djuna Barnes, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. In 1942, Lewin left MGM to independently produce, write, and direct a version of Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, starring George Sanders as a supercilious Paul Gauguin figure finding inspiration among the palm trees and nymphs of Tahiti. Returning to the fold at Metro, Lewin wrote and directed The Picture of Dorian Gray from Wilde, filmed amid much complaint from the front office but completed without compromise, a remarkable adaptation, literate, precise, and haunting (with its memorable Technicolor insert of the Ivan Albright portrait of a decayed Dorian), and perhaps the oddest and least likely production to come from the Culver City lot since Tod Browning’s Freaks.

  After one more remarkably idiosyncratic independent production ( The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, from Guy de Maupassant’s novel), Lewin again came back to MGM and again defied Hollywood precedent in a dual relationship as production executive and sometime independent writer- director with the presumption of Metro distribution. Pandora was Lewin’s first original screenplay, a story in which he had managed to include most of his consuming obsessions: myth, magic, beauty, sexual obsession, decadence, the nature of art, the cruelty of love. It was the tale of Pandora Reynolds, a beautiful American playgirl, resented and worshipped center of attention for a group of British expatriates living in the village of Esperanza on the Mediterranean coast of Spain in the 1930s. Bored and destructive, unable to feel love, she drives one man to his death and another to a terrible sacrifice, becomes on a whim engaged to David, a race-car driver, while leading on yet another man, Juan Montalvo, a violently jealous matador. Into the bay sails a yacht with a single occupant, the mysterious Hendrick van der Zee. Intrigued, Pandora swims out to the vessel, coming upon van der Zee as he is completing a painting of the mythical Pandora, the first mortal woman; the figure bears a striking, disturbing resemblance to the American Pandora, who impulsively destroys the work. Intrigued by the enigmatic Dutchman, the one man in Esperanza who seems not desperate for her affections, Pandora becomes infatuated with him, enraging Montalvo, who murders him in a jealous rage; but in a mysterious turn of events, van der Zee returns to life and causes Montalvo to meet his own death in the bullring. A resident archaeologist uncovers the bizarre truth that Hendrick is the immortal Flying Dutchman of age-old myth, condemned to wander the world forever for the murder of his bride—”blown back and forth between Death and Life, neither of the two willing to claim him”—until the time he can find a woman willing to die for the love of him. Pandora Reynolds becomes that woman, his redemption, and her own.

  It was a script conceived, by Lewin’s admission, “with a deliberately surrealist intention,” loyal to the manifesto of André Breton in its calmly irrational storytelling, its blurring of the lines between the real and the fantastic, its bland acceptance of magic and myth, and its exaltation of fate and l’amour fou. Lewin knew that his Pandora, weighted with the burden of cross-references to the mythic first woman and ultimate femme fatale, had to be cast with an actress of appropriately legendary beauty and allure. His first thought for the role was the movies’ own most mythic creation, Greta Garbo, but when this proved unrealistic (retired from the screen since 1942, she would never make another film), Lewin cast his eye about for another screen goddess and found her in Ava Gardner—the young woman who had so convincingly embodied Venus come to earth and seemed, according to the newspapers, to be leading a style of life not unlike the fatal woman of his screenplay There was a description of the character in the script: “Complex, moody, restless with the discontent of a romantic soul which has not yet found the true object of her desires.” Ava said, “It is almost me.”

  In Hollywood she posed for Lewin’s buddy Man Ray for two works intended to be seen in the film, a painted portrait Lewin ultimately rejected, and a charming photograph meant to look like a Renaissance miniature. “She was,” Man Ray would remember, “absolutely ravishing—no film, I thought, had ever done her justice. And as a model, no one in my experience with mannequins and professionals surpassed her.”

  In London, as Ava slept through the day, a crowd filtered in and out of the outer rooms of the suite: producers, dress fitters, studio representatives, a cinematographer, reporters, photographers. Hosting the group, until Bappie joined them after her briefer slumber, was Minna Wallis, by coincidence in town, delightedly sharing with the crowd titbits of information about her beautiful, adored young friend. The name, first of all, was pronounced “Ay-vah” not “Ah-vah” as many present had believed. As for Mr. Frank Sinatra, no, he was not to Minna Wallis’s knowledge going to be Ay-vah’s husband number three. And yes, she had indeed been visiting a psychiatrist. “To recover from an inferiority complex,” Minna Wallis explained. “She wanted a new set of standards to judge people by. But she isn’t going to one anymore. It was just a phase.

  “Ava’s intelligent, you know,” said Minna, helpfully. “Surprising for a pretty girl, but she is.”

  Rested, the star appeared at a press conference in the Claridge’s banquet room, and was beheld by the reporters of London as beautiful, adorable, and sly (perhaps even intelligent). “I agree that arriving stars from Hollywood are quoted as saying a lot of darned silly things,” she told them, “but just think of the darned silly questions they’re asked.”

  She met with Albert Lewin, a cheerful, white-haired, very short, and nearly deaf man (he wore an enormous hearing aid at all times) who was from the first day adoringly appreciative of his casting choice. She also conferred with the film’s director of photography, Jack Cardiff, supreme master of light and lens, whose previous credits in Technicolor included his stunning work for Powell-Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn.

  “We met at her hotel,” Jack Cardiff recalled, “and she was very nice and of course very beautiful, with a wonderful sexy voice and an extraordinary way of moving, like a cat…and almost the first thing she said to me was, ‘Jack, you have to watch how you light me when I’m having my period.’

  “It was rather disarming. But that was Ava, just very natural and frank about everything. I mean she said it just as you would say, ‘Watch me when I have a bad cold.’ I told her yes, I would try to watch out how I lit her on those days.”

  Between color tests and dress fittings there was time to explore London, and Ava reveled in her first encounter with the city she would one day make her home. The only disappointment came at mealtime, the holdover of wartime rationing and the contrast with California plenty painfully visible in portions that taunted a woman with Ava’s vast appetite. At her first dinner she looked at the size of the steak she had been served and ordered the waiter to bring two more.

  One weekend, wit
h Bappie, she had her first look at Paris, Metro arranging for a suite at the George V and a chauffeured limousine. Wanting to see something of the “real Paris,” they ditched their chauffeur outside the Tour d’Argent and wandered off on their own, ending the night drinking champagne in a glitzy lesbian nightclub. (The visit to the club was a naive accident, Ava would claim, disingenuously, perhaps, as she had a continuing curiosity about the sexual demimonde and through the years paid visits to gay bars, red-light zones, and brothels all over the world.)

  On April 14 she departed Northolt Airport for Barcelona. A limousine took the two sisters north along the Costa Brava to Tossa de Mar, a small fishing village between sea and mountain, with whitewashed homes and walled enclosures little altered since the Middle Ages. Lewin had chosen it for its scenic beauty, historical associations and inspirational metaphysics well suited to his Pandora. The blue Mediterranean and the scalloped beach and the flower-bedecked houses and outdoor markets were perfectly production-designed for the Technicolor camera; there were numerous archaeological remnants of ancient Rome and others as old as the Paleolithic period, evoking a world of myth and legend; and for more recent inspiration, Tossa had been frequented by Marc Chagall and other modern artists and was not far from Cadeques, birthplace of surrealist Salvador Dalí, aesthetic associations Albert Lewin found most compatible. For some of the exterior scenes, arrangements had been made to rent the large summer estate of Spanish business magnate Don Alberto Puig and, remarkably, the grounds contained visible Roman remains and archaeological fragments almost exactly like those Lewin had imagined in his script. To film the bullfighting scenes they would be allowed the use of the plaza de toros in nearby Gerona. From the Bertrand family of Barcelona they rented the 250-ton schooner Orion to play the role of the Flying Dutchman’s yacht.