by Lee Server
For Ava, Spain was immediately a place of enchantment. With the passion of the people, with the flaring dark romanticism of the culture, she made an instant, heartfelt, lasting connection. The fury of the flamenco, the blood sport, the wine and dance and dinners till midnight—all the cliches of the travel writers’ lexicon—she experienced them all with an open and eager enthusiasm, and they had a life-altering result. “It was, I think, the first time there for all of us and it was very glamorous,” said Angela Allen, Pandora s script girl. “A sweet little fishing village— nowadays you wouldn’t even recognize it, it’s a big resort. But it was romantic and strange and a lot of wine flowing. You got into the swing of it, and I think Ava more than anyone. She got hooked on Spain and all that went with it, including the bullfights—and the bullfighters.”
Ava, Lewin, and costar James Mason (who would arrive sometime after shooting began) each had their own villas in or around Tossa, with rented rooms or hotel accommodations for the rest of the cast and crew. For the first day or two there were elements of discord. One of the supporting actors, suffering from parochial anti-Americanism, stirred up resentment against the pampered Hollywood contingent (Mason, having abandoned the British film industry for California four years before, and contemplating U.S. citizenship, was in this period routinely damned in the British press as an honorary American). “There were some people who were such laughable snobs,” recalled Jeanie Sims, the English production assistant. “So worried about someone getting too much money or something. Acting very spiteful, and, you know, we were all there and employed because Al Lewin had written this script. And Lewin was an absolutely lovely man. I loved him, adored him. And he adored his cast and crew. Anyway, this actor—I won’t say his name, but he’s dead now—tried to stir up things against the Americans, but he couldn’t with Ava because she was just too delightful. Everybody liked her, everyone on the crew loved her. You couldn’t not, because she had such a vibrant personality. She laughed all the time, she was quite jolly, and very good company. Everybody that I knew, then and later, who knew her, loved her.”
“She was totally delightful,” recalled Sheila Sim (Lady Attenborough), playing the character of Janet in the film. “So very friendly. I became very, very fond of her. So sweet to everybody. She was not standoffish in any way and was enormously generous.”
Shooting began at seven in the morning and lasted until eight in the evening. Even with the long hours, the production quickly fell behind schedule. Lewin had called for numerous elaborate visual sequences and complicated, predetermined compositions utilizing various deep-focus and trompe l’oeil effects, some in homage to the surrealist masters. “He loved offbeat modern art and had many visual ideas and knew the idea behind everything he wanted,” Jack Cardiff remembered, “and for both John Bryan, the art director, and myself it was fascinating to work with such an artistically minded person—much more so than most other producers or directors I worked with. But he was very specific about what he wanted, and it required all sorts of things to be built, a huge bell tower which was really something to construct and to shoot, and these giant heads of statues and so on.” Without the controlled environment of a studio—or its hierarchy hurrying him along—Lewin followed an odd and painstaking course to fulfill his vision. A more conventional approach would have allowed revisions to certain types of sequences for location shooting or faked them in the studio, such as the lengthy scenes set at night out of doors on the broad Tossa beach. “It required,” recalled Jack Cardiff, “that we shoot these night scenes day-for-night, with lights, in the Spanish sun, on this bright white beach. The glare was tremendous, and poor James Mason could not stand the reflected light in his eyes and Ava would be wearing sunglasses until we started a take, which was even worse because when she took them off she couldn’t open her eyes at all or they would fill with tears, and they were supposed to be standing in moonlight only. I had to cover a large portion of the beach with black net, which was very difficult, and on one occasion, amazingly enough, we actually painted the beach, sprayed it with dark brown paint, brown and blue, and this took some of the glare off. It was just impossible. We ended up doing the close-ups in the studio.”
“He would drive us mad,” Angela Allen recalled. “He would ask for things technically and we had to keep saying, ‘No, no, this won’t work’ or ‘That won’t work.’ “
“As a director, well, I found him a little unnerving,” said Sheila Sim. “He was always running off to do something with the technical side. Some things American were very strange to us. He wasn’t terribly good at communicating.”
James Mason, who had enjoyed his time in Hollywood getting to know the erudite Lewin, found him a less than inspiring collaborator on the Catalan coast. Siding with the sniping Nigel Patrick, Mason felt he had become a “cool fiihrer,” throwing his authority around. Regarding his direction of the film, Mason believed Lewin’s deafness had a detrimental effect on many scenes, that he did not catch the actors’ spoken errors and that his lack of hearing affected the pacing of scenes, made him oblivious to “the pulse of life.”
“We used to be evil,” said Angela Allen. “Everybody’d go quiet and whispering, and then he was pushing his hearing aid up because of course he couldn’t hear a word. And then, you know, he’d get the hearing aid at full blast and then everyone would shout. The actors used to play that awful game on him.”
Mason and the other performers’ dissatisfaction may have been provoked in part by feelings of neglect, for it was evident that most of Albert Lewin’s attention was being directed at his gorgeous Pandora.
“Of course,” said Jack Cardiff, “Lewin thought Ava was a goddess. He thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he used to just gaze and gaze at her. And we would shoot her, and he would say, I want to do another close-up. Closer.’ And we would do that. And then he would say, ‘Let’s do another one. Different angle.’ Then one more, ‘Closer! And on and on like that. It became that all we were doing was close-ups of Ava Gardner’s face. He couldn’t stop himself. And the continuity girl, Angela Allen, had to make notes and coordinate what was being shot and she’d say to me, ‘I don’t know what he’s shooting. Where is he going to cut in all these shots? There’s nothing like it in the script.’ But he was so enthralled with Ava, and he just adored doing all of these close- ups of her.”
“As an actress she was rather nervous,” Sheila Sim recalled. “She did not have great faith in her talent, actually. And I think she was a much better actress than she was given credit for, but I think she had a problem in that her beauty was so distracting to people you couldn’t concentrate on her performance. I have never known anyone so beautiful. A totally beautiful, perfect figure and face, whatever she was doing, or whatever clothes she was wearing, totally, absolutely lovely. And she moved so beautifully, had an instinctive gracefulness, fascinating to watch. She was very talented in many ways.”
“I remember one time we were shooting a scene of Ava by herself,” said Jeanie Sims. “She was supposed to be lost in some deep thought about the man she was in love with. And she couldn’t sort of get it right for Al. He was very gentle with her, but he was a bit frustrated or sad that he couldn’t quite get what he wanted from her, some look of complete absorption in this love affair. Then Al finally went over and said to her, Ava, is there some one person in your life who you love or have loved more than anyone else on earth?’ And she answered him so quietly I could not hear her. And he told her to think of that person and it was just the impetus she needed, and she got it perfect on the next shot. And afterward I was a bit curious, and I asked Al what she had said, who she had loved more than anyone, and Al said, ‘The clarinet player—Artie Shaw.’ And, you know, I thought how interesting because she was thinking of Shaw and in the newspapers there was all that talk about Ava and Frank Sinatra.”
In New York City, Frank Sinatra’s world was coming apart. In shattering succession he had separated from his wife and family, buried his chief
strategist, George Evans, lost Manie Sachs, his closest ally at Columbia Records, and seen him replaced by Mitch Miller (far less sympathetic, in Sinatra’s mind), he was about to be dismissed by his talent agency, and he had been shown the door at MGM, reportedly because of a rude joke at L. B. Mayer’s expense, though many believe the studio had simply wanted him gone, at least in part because of the trouble he was causing for their more valuable investment, Ava Gardner. Forced against his own best judgment to take an eight-week, three-shows-a-night gig at the Copacabana, he had been further straining his throat and nerves with daily live radio broadcasts on the Light Up Time program, a series of live appearances at the Capitol Theater, and numerous recording sessions. His records were not selling, his press was largely derisive, he owed close to a million dollars to the government and to his record company (advances paid by Columbia unlikely to ever earn out). And the woman with whom he was crazy in love was in another country in a goddamned nowhere village that barely had a working telephone to let him hear her voice. In addition to an excessive ingestion of alcohol, he was becoming addicted to sleeping pills and other medications to relieve…everything. Standing tall against any and all calamities, there had always been one invincible factor on Sinatra’s side, his overwhelming talent and artistry as a performer and recording artist, but now even these had begun to dissipate.
After the first weeks at the Copa his throat had begun to evidence growing distress, affecting as well his ability to make records with his usual brilliance and command.
“Listen, Sinatra had a marvelous voice,” said Mitch Miller, recalling a period fifty-four years earlier. “But it was very fragile. There were certain guys like Gordon MacRae who could stay up all night and drink and sing the next day—he could sing underwater. But if Frank didn’t get enough sleep or if he drank a lot the night before, it would show up. And Frank was a guy—call it ego or what you want—he liked to suffer out loud, to be dramatic. There were plenty of people, big entertainers, who had a wild life or had big problems, but they kept it quiet. Frank had to do his suffering in public, so everyone could see it. And this was a time he was having trouble with Ava, she was in Spain, and it showed in his work. He would come in to record, and he couldn’t get through a number without his voice cracking. And finally what I did was I shut off his mike and I made music tracks and then brought him back by himself at one o’clock in the morning without anybody else around and we worked till he could get it. No one did that then, tracking was against the union rules. But no one could tell that’s how we made those records because I knew how to do it—you brought up the rhythm section and so on—but that was what we had to do because he couldn’t get it down the other way.”
Ava was seemingly never far from Sinatra’s thoughts or emotions. Every day he would send off a heartfelt cable and then telephone her in the early evening in New York, late night in Spain, and try again sometime after midnight, early morning in Tossa de Mar. But long-distance telecommunication in Catalonia was still erratic at best. Sometimes hours of transatlantic operator assistance were necessary only to be told again that the lines were down or that no one was answering. When at last he would reach her, the connection was often filled with static and her voice a maddeningly faint and broken echo. Conversations would end with his frantic declaration of love and anguished hope that he had correctly heard Ava declare the same.
“This love I feel for her, it’s sapping me of everything I got,” he cried to Hank Sanicola, as reported by Sinatra biographer J. Randy Tarabor- relli. “I got no energy for anything. What is this spell she has me under?”
“That Ava broad is gonna be the death of you,” said Sanicola in a tone weighted with sycophantic weltschmerz and linguine. “This woman has you so fucked up, you’ll do anything in the world to be with her. Is the sex that good, Frank? Is it?”
On April 26, Sinatra appeared as usual for his Copa shows. “It was a wonderful room, a terrible house orchestra, and a hilarious, old-fashioned chorus line of three or four showgirls,” remembered Skitch Henderson, Frank’s bandleader for the engagement. “And Frank was a hit. Whatever else was going on, we were selling out. And most nights Frank was wonderful.” On this night, however, his dinner show had not gone well, his voice cracking and scratching repeatedly. A doctor had been summoned and advised that he cancel the rest of the night and go home. But Sinatra had read a taunt in the newspaper that he was not up to completing his Copa gig, and he insisted on working. At two-thirty in the morning, as Skitch Henderson brought the music up, Frank stepped out on the stage and sang his first number, “I Have But One Heart.”
At the song’s end, as the audience applauded, Sinatra said, “That one was for you, Ava.”
He began to sing again—”It All Depends on You”—and abruptly no further sound came out of his mouth. He felt what he thought was spittle bubbling at the side of his mouth, dabbed it with his handkerchief, and saw that it was blood.
“He just stopped,” said Henderson. “I didn’t know what had happened, I wasn’t aware of it till afterward. I expected he would gather himself together in another moment. But nothing happened. He croaked something and walked off the stage, walked out of the club.”
Sinatra was diagnosed with a submucosal throat hemorrhage. The remaining days of his Copacabana engagement were canceled along with all other scheduled performances.
“It happens to every singer at some time. It happens to opera singers all the time,” said Skitch Henderson. “It wasn’t as tumultous as it has been made out. But it became a great trauma for him, although I felt it was in part a manufactured trauma because of his mental state at the time.”
Sinatra was advised to lie low, rest, not sing for two months. He communicated with people by writing his words down on a scratch pad. In New York and Miami he lay about, recuperating, seeing doctors, scribbling notes, and thinking of Ava Gardner.
While Sinatra suffered in America, in Spain, Ava pursued another, happier philosophy: out of sight, out of mind. After the long hours in the glare of the Spanish sun and of Al Lewin’s camera examining her every pore, she was eager for fun at nightfall. There was not a great deal of nightlife in Tossa and neighboring villages, but what there was could be intense—taverns where the gypsies danced and played till dawn and the wine and brandy flowed as freely as the cold springs in the looming Cadi- retes Massif. “There were parties, and the Spanish parties, of course, went all the way through the night,” recalled Sheila Sim. “And we came when they invited us, for ten o’clock. And of course what they hadn’t made clear was that it wouldn’t be remotely starting till midnight. And Ava would be out all night, much to our fury, because when she’d arrive on the set, arrive for makeup, she looked so beautiful. It was really quite maddening for those of us who had to wear so much makeup to make us look reasonable in front of the camera. She didn’t need anything.” (Jack Cardiff, looking at the star perhaps more intently than others, would recall sometimes having to take special care with the lights on mornings when Ava’s eyes did show their lack of sleep.)
“And Ava, of course, in those days,” said Sheila Sim, “was young and undisciplined. A very, very wild spirit.”
“She was an extraordinary creature,” said John Hawkesworth, the young Englishman in charge of set dressing on the location. “A wonderful girl. I liked her very much. Stronger than any of us. Amazing. She would join us for dinner some nights at the café, and she could eat twice as much as anyone and drink three times as much. She would come out with her sister, whom she brought I think out of kindness, a much older and rather pathetic woman, with a look of alcoholism and rather going to fat. And they would drink, and then the sister would drop out and Ava would go on through the night enjoying herself.”
Jeanie Sims: “Ava…how shall I say…was very romantic and she enjoyed boys and she enjoyed some of the girls, I think, too, but she certainly liked lots of boys. She liked to be smitten and liked to have people smitten with her. James Mason was not available because James was there
with his wife, and I think Pamela was very careful to keep James to herself and you didn’t see a lot of him. And it was inevitable, I suppose, that Ava would take an interest in Mario…the bullfighter. And he certainly took an interest in her.”
“She fell for the bullfighter, yes,” said Angela Allen. “He looked quite glamorous to her and they had a fling, I think that’s the right way to describe it. And for him it was quite a great catch to be going out with a Hollywood star. He was a bit second rate.”
For the role of Juan Montalvo, the murderous matador, Lewin had with inspiration cast a real-life bullfighter with acting experience, Mario Cabre, a movie-star handsome and charismatic torero of minor repute in the ring. Cabre would allow Lewin to shoot the bullfighting sequences much more freely without having to resort to fakery or cutaways to a stunt matador. Cabre was charming and well liked, though a bit of a figure of fun, a glutton for attention, an amateur poet, irrepressibly so, soon inspired by a new, emerald-eyed muse. “Mario,” said Ava, “was handsome and macho as only a Latin knows how to be, but he was also brash, conceited, noisy, and totally convinced that he was the only man in the world for me.”
Ava had at first been amused—but no more—by Cabre’s infatuation with her until they had all gone to see him in the bullring. “Oh, she really loved it when she went to that first bullfight,” John Hawkesworth recalled. “It just got into her blood right away, I think: the excitement and the color and the drama of the thing, she loved it.”
“If you’ve ever been to a bullfight,” said Jeanie Sims, “you know it’s a rather dramatic atmosphere, the pageantry and the sound of the trumpeters. And, well, she saw Mario in his costume, his ‘suit of lights,’ and waving his cape and his sword, and I think she was very impressed. And to see him bravely standing up to this great bull—it gave her a different impression of him, I suppose.”