Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  At the end of the month Frank Sinatra arrived for a two-week engagement at the Palladium to begin on July 10, moving into a seventh-floor flat on Berkeley Square. Some of his old confidence had been restored by recent events: He had signed a contract with the CBS network for a weekly television series and separate radio program at a salary of a million dollars per annum, and this, his first concert appearance in Britain, was being promoted as a major event of the season. Sinatra rehearsed every day. In the evenings he and Ava went out, to dinners in the West End, one night to the countryside for a meal at Bray-on-Thames, and on to the cafés and nightclubs until late. Many nights they went out with some of Ava’s new English friends from the Pandora company, such as Jack Cardiff and his wife, Julie.

  Cardiff recalled, “Frank used to call Ava many times when we were in Spain. And I had told her how much I liked his singing and that my favorite record of his was ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ and she’d obviously told him on the phone what I’d said and he sent over a copy of the record, signed by him—which I still have to this day. And in London we went out with them several nights. But it was just too much for me. Ava was a person who found it very difficult to relax. If we went to one nightclub, she would immediately say she wanted to leave and go somewhere else and then to another one and another one. It would go on like that right until the sun came up and breakfast time. It was too much for me, and I had to give it up.” Everywhere they went somebody always tried to get Sinatra to get up and sing something, and he always refused, but there was one night Cardiff never forgot when Frank suddenly broke into song, directed at Ava, sotto voce, as the four of them sat at a table eating dinner. “It was,” Cardiff recalled, “quite a unique experience to hear Sinatra singing without a mike, so close to us and so quietly.”

  The press pursued the couple at all times, as did a number of determined members of Sinatra’s British fan club, some of them appointed “spotters” who relayed info on their idol’s movements and when he and Ava took off in a taxi would pursue them through the London streets on bicycles.

  “My husband, Dick [Attenborough], and I saw them several times while they were in London,” Sheila Sim recalled. “It was a terrific love affair, but it was very volatile. One night we were going out together, we were taking them to the theater. Dick recalls that we were seeing a new musical of Noël Coward [it was the opening-night performance of Coward’s Ace of Clubs]. We picked them up where they were staying and there was a crowd of thirty or forty people, I don’t know, it seemed like a huge crowd outside waiting to see them. And Ava came whistling right out— she refused to stop for any of the autograph seekers, and she got right into the car. And then she looked around and Frank was still outside, and he had stopped and was signing autographs for everyone. And Ava became absolutely livid—she said they had just made a pact, apparently before they came out of the hotel, that they would not stop or sign anything. And he did the opposite! He stopped immediately. And when he finally joined us they had the most almighty row in the car. And so by the time we got to the Cambridge Theatre both of them were in a very bad mood.

  “Ava and Frank were very edgy about the press and the photographers. They got very agitated about all that, Frank much more agitated than she was—Ava was much calmer; I don’t think she cared a bit whether anyone took her picture or not. And we had planned to get to the theater early to try and forestall any sort of situation arising. But a photographer had come right down to the seats before the curtain went up. And he came in front of Frank and Ava and took a picture. Frank jumped up in a fury and went at him. And he grabbed the photographer bodily, and the two of them went rolling around and Frank just dragged him out of the theater! Threw him out! Very unexpected to have this happening at a Noël Coward play, and a bit dismaying! But there you are. He was very agitated by such things. Otherwise he was a delightful character.”

  Headlined on a bill that included local variety favorites Max Wall, Maudie Edwards, and Wilson, Keppel & Betty, Sinatra’s debut at the London Palladium was a great success. Due to the disruptions of the war, the British public had never been part of the original “swoon” era, and now a similar if more contained craze was finally upon them, giving Sinatra the sort of enthusiastic response he had not seen in a while. (“I watched mass hysteria,” wrote the reporter for Musical Express. “He has his audience spellbound.”) On opening night the London police held back a crowd of nearly a thousand excited fans, though at one point Sinatra was set upon by what were described as “two tall redheads” who had managed to break through the barriers and accost the singer, wrestling with him for possession of his trademark bow tie. The opening-night audience was studded with celebrities, including Ava, who would slip away before the encore to avoid press attention, and Noël Coward, who stayed to the end and did not beat up a single photographer.

  After nearly four months Ava’s Pandora adventure had concluded. It had been in many ways an epochal experience, opening for her new worlds of interest in the Old World, in Spain, in London, places she would come to know very well in years ahead. In gathering those experiences she had appeared to some as amusingly, charmingly naive, enjoying some of her first encounters with venerable cultural institutions with the wonder and enthusiasm of a little girl. Jack Cardiff would remember going with her for her first visit to the ballet at Covent Garden, Ava leaning forward enthralled by the performance of Margot Fonteyn in Sleeping Beauty and, childlike, chewing her bubble gum slowly or fast in rhythm with her changing degrees of rapture. It was understandable that she was often viewed with condescension by associates gifted with a more sophisticated background; few of them yet recognized the imagination and spirit that would one day enable her to make a place—a home and a vivid presence—in those worlds so different from the one in which she was born, on a dirt road in Grabtown.

  The film she had made, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, was a remarkable, original achievement, strikingly visual and boldly colored, deliriously romantic, daringly literary, mystic, baroque. Or: It was a folly, a catastrophe of pretentiousness and willful inexplicability. Take your pick. Some of the daily Anglo-American reviewers, confident of their own vast talents, poked fun at Lewin’s assumption of scholarship and his supposed over-the-top aestheticism (among other memorable elements of Lewin’s visual design were compositions that paid homage to works by de Chirico, Delvaux, Dalí, and Man Ray). The film found its most sympathetic critical reception in Paris, headquarters of the surrealist movement from which Pandora took so much of its inspiration. There writers on film at Cahiers du Cinema and Positif and elsewhere applauded its ravishing visuals, dream logic, and provocative allusiveness and particularly savored the mythic presentation of its glorious female star. In a special issue of Cahiers devoted, in alphabetized entries, to the women of film, François Truffaut dedicated the letter G to Gardner as Pandora, rhapsodizing (in Susan Felleman’s translation): “Ava Gardner’s body is yet that of the first woman, who, along with her hair, undoes the ties of all fatalities…cinema, once again the magic lantern of our childhood, has borne us very far and very high on the wings of a dream.” Critic Ado Kyrou declared that Ava now belonged in the exclusive pantheon with Lya Lys of Dalí and Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or as the “greatest surrealist woman in the history of film.”

  Back in America, Ava and Frank had little time together before they were once again separated by their work. Ava was needed in Hollywood to begin preparations for the role of Julie in the new Arthur Freed Technicolor production of the musical Show Boat. Sinatra, meanwhile, tied to New York City for his new CBS television and radio shows, took a two-year lease on a Manhattan apartment. On September 28 the Superior Court in Santa Monica granted by default a decree of separate maintenance to Nancy Sinatra. She was awarded one-third of her husband’s annual gross income up to $150,000 and 10 percent of everything above that. She was given the family residence in Holmby Hills, the 1950 Cadillac, and custody of the three children. Frank was allowed to keep his Palm Springs home, his �
�49 Caddy, whatever cash assets he had on hand, and his phonograph records. Ava cursed his wife as greedy Frank wondered if he could come up with the monthly payments. Despite his enormous income, he was in debt, had constant huge operating expenses, an entourage that had to be cared for, and taxes to be paid. He had been fronted so much money by Columbia Records (supposedly to settle his tax bill) that he could expect virtually no royalties for the recordings he would make for years to come even if his record sales improved. He joked to a columnist that he expected he would end up running a filling station in New Jersey, a pointed reference, perhaps—that was exactly the fate of Ava’s boyfriend, Burt Lancaster, in The Killers, just before her hired gunmen shot him to death.

  And still Nancy would not talk about a divorce. It was the religion, Frank told Ava; she just couldn’t go against the rule book. But Ava heard the whispered scuttlebutt from others: “She thinks she can wait you out, you two will blow over and she’ll have him back one day. That’s all she wants.” To Ava it was an infuriating irony: There they were, wanting to do the right thing and get married, and there was this woman using her religion as an excuse to keep them “living in sin.” Some who listened to her gripe about the situation suggested she simply give it up. Was it worth all this mess? they asked. The affair and the scandal had provoked the first serious rift in her relationship with Bappie, who disliked Sinatra and believed he was harming her career. “You hang on to him, Ave,” Bappie told her, “and he’s going to ruin you like he’s ruined himself.” The disagreement over Frank left the two sisters not talking to each other for months.

  But how committed was she to this difficult man? Depending on the circumstances, Ava’s feelings for Frank could still fluctuate greatly: from love and longing to ambivalence, resentment, contempt. Unlike Sinatra, whose obsessive love burned even hotter when they were apart, Ava, once she was on her own again in California, found it hard to stay focused exclusively on her missing guy. As in Spain, she was susceptible to sensual temptations (she had no doubt—and indeed would eventually have proof—that Frank was not faithful either, despite his seemingly far more intense dedication to the relationship). Indeed, back in California she seemed at times to behave as though quite unburdened of any emotional or physical commitment to Frank at all. Actor Robert Stack would tell of a provocative if unsatisfying encounter with Ava that autumn after her return from Spain. Stack had recently finished filming The Bullfighter and the Lady in Mexico for director Budd Boetticher and was sitting with a friend in a booth at the Naples Restaurant in Hollywood; he was recalling his experiences as a movie matador, using a table napkin to demonstrate a certain pass of the cape when fighting a bull. Ava, in the next booth, was drawn to the conversation at once. “How did it feel to face an animal that wants to kill you?” she asked him. One thing led to another, and Stack found himself at the pink house in the hills making martinis while Ava changed into something presumably more comfortable. They lay about talking and sipping cocktails. Ava’s ardor seemed to increase with each of Stack’s recollections of his dangerous time in the bullring.

  Eventually, Ava, according to Stack, turned the conversation away from the toros and toward a consideration of what she referred to as “shared sex.” She spoke amusedly of some new friends she had made, a young couple who liked to have sexual foursomes and, further, that perhaps this couple might be induced to come over for a drink later in the evening. As Stack would recall it, the prospect of remarkable erotic adventure ended abruptly with the actor feeling the effects of a case of sudden flu or food poisoning and rushing out of the house without apology. (Stack believed Ava’s disappointment in him may have caused her to nix his casting opposite her in The Sun Also Rises six years later.)

  Show Boat had been considered the great musical of the American theater since its Broadway debut on December 27, 1927, a groundbreaker in its introduction of serious and even tragic matters into the whimsical world of operetta. Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, it was a story of life and love aboard the Mississippi paddle-wheeler Cotton Blossom, with a legendary score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, that included the songs “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Make Believe,” and “Ol’ Man River.” Metro and Arthur Freed had been eager to make a new color version of the property since its New York revival in 1946. Freed conceived the remake as not only a dazzling entertainment in the tradition of his other great musicals but also a satisfying drama that dealt with themes of love and family, sacrifice, and racial prejudice. To write the screenplay he had hired John Lee Mahin (rather than any of the witty Broadway writers he usually employed for his films), a hard-nosed craftsman who, it was presumed, would not let the music numbers get in the way of the characters and story (one of Mahin’s first scripts was for the film Ava and her mother had so enjoyed in 1932, Red Dust). As encouraged by Freed, Mahin was to increase the importance of the character of Julie—the part now assigned to Ava Gardner—the tragic-romantic chanteuse, a woman of mixed blood, passing for white, driven by love and a bigoted society into a life of drunken self-destruction. “Who do people most remember out of the earlier Show Boat?” Freed asked. “It is Helen Morgan, who played Julie. She acted the character that lives in the mind partly because she is a tragic figure.” For a time the role in the remake was intended for Judy Garland, but by 1950 Judy was on her own destructive path and headed out the door at MGM. Dore Schary (taking creative control of the studio as Louis Mayer slid from grace in a power struggle with the New York office) had been pushing singer Dinah Shore for the part, an idea strongly resisted by the Freed unit. Although the other major roles were to be filled with traditional musical-comedy talent—Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and Marge and Gower Champion—Freed felt that in lieu of Garland as Julie they should cast someone associated with straight drama rather than musicals. Although some questioned the decision, Ava Gardner was seen by the producer and others on his team as an exciting, attention-getting addition to the film, an authentic Southern girl like Julie, with her own reputation for extravagant romances and controversy.

  And she could sing. Or could she? Nervous at the opportunity before her Ava gave many hours to rehearsing her solo songs, “Bill” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” in anticipation of an early November “prerecord” date (in movie musicals all the numbers were recorded in advance, the performers miming to an audio playback during filming). She asked for help from her friend Phil Moore, an African-American musician who had been a rehearsal pianist at MGM. Moore agreed to work with her on the songs in the evenings when she left the studio. But Moore would recall Ava as not always having her mind on her work. “Man, she was acting out everything. Short, short dresses. Being rather coarse and loud in her speech.…Sitting in unfeminine positions with dress up to here! And no drawers.” The musician, charismatic and known as something of a ladies’ man, was then living with Dorothy Dandridge, the beautiful black singer- actress, though they maintained two separate apartments in their house off Sunset Boulevard. Moore had a small rehearsal space in his apartment, with a microphone, so that when Ava came over they could approximate recording conditions. But when she arrived in the evening she told him it made her “too nervous” to sing to a mike and with all those lights on. Soon they were sitting together at the piano, with no illumination in the room except for a tiny pin light on the sheet music. One night Dorothy Dandridge arrived unexpectedly through the back door and found Moore and Ava together in the dark. “Needless to say,” Moore told biographer Donald Bogle, “this didn’t sit too well with Miss D.” Ava no doubt explained to Dorothy about the problem she had with her nerves.

  For weeks she worked on the songs, with Freed’s talented team, with Phil Moore, sang them again and again in the shower, made her own demo recordings, and had even overcome her usual nervousness about singing in public, doing a rendition of “Bill” before an audience of paraplegic veterans at a Long Beach hospital (the crowd demanded two encores). She was satisfied with the job she had done when the studio recording sessio
ns were completed: Her voice—a “whiskey tenor,” she called it—was spare, her singing tentative but heartfelt, with a dramatic power, conveying as much a characterization as a tune, wonderful. The Freed team sat around all through production and listened and listened again, arguing over the results. Some days it seemed acceptable, other days not. In the end the decision was made that Ava’s throaty, modest vocals stood in too great contrast to the rich voices of Keel, Grayson, and others, and so a professional singer—Annette Warren—was brought into the studio to be the singing voice of Ava in the film; with the scenes already shot, Warren had to synchronize her singing to the lip movements of Ava, who was synching same to the playback of her original recordings (one of which had been more or less copied from the phrasing of a rendition by Lena Horne). Gone was the bluesy tone of Ava’s singing, replaced by a conventional-sounding soprano (although due to concerns about false advertising, Ava’s original renditions of the songs would end up being the ones used on the record of the sound track). When she learned of the switch Ava was hurt, and when she saw the finished footage she was insulted and embarrassed—she had been dubbed in movies before, but usually with a voice that was chosen to sound like hers, which Annette Warren’s voice clearly did not. Monica Lewis, the voluptuous blond jazz singer who was then under contract at Metro and a new friend of Ava’s, recalled, “Ava was very independent and she had her own way of seeking information. And I give her a lot of credit because she didn’t come from, you know, Vassar, and she knew she didn’t have a lot of education and so when she wanted to learn something or achieve something she really put her heart into it. And she thought she had done a good job with these songs. I had a record that was hot at the moment, and so she wanted my opinion. So she played the demo recordings she had made for me and she said, ‘I can’t sing like you can, I can’t sing like some of them in the picture…but aren’t these okay?’ And I said, ‘Yes, they are.’ And they were. They worked perfectly with her speaking voice, and she was very musical, she was in tune, there was no sweat. And she was distraught. And I felt so bad for her because there was no real reason to have to use a professional singer. She thought it was just another example of how they put her down and it became one of a list of reasons she had for hating the studio and wanting to get away from them.”