Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “Hey, Frankie, come back out ...”

  “Pucker up, Frankie, I want to punch your fucking kisser!”

  Shortly after the ceremony, Ava changed from her wedding gown to a brown Christian Dior travel suit and joined Frank at the back door. They came out of the house, got into a green convertible, and drove off. Several cars followed them to the airport where the newlyweds went directly on board a chartered twin-engined Beechcraft plane and flew away. Some hours later the couple were seen at Miami International Airport, racing across the terminal to a waiting convertible.

  A ramp attendant who saw them said they were running just as fast as they could.

  SEVEN

  Tempt Me to Madness

  There is one extant press photo of the couple on their honeymoon that does not show them running, snarling, cringing, cowering. Of course it was taken from a distance, and from the rear. They are walking together on an empty stretch of Miami Beach, both barefoot on the sand but otherwise still dressed in their heavy northern clothing. Ava wears her husband’s jacket on her shoulders; in November in Miami the saline breeze off the Atlantic Ocean can turn very cold. They do not appear to be talking to each other in the picture, only holding hands as they walk back to their beachside hotel. It is early morning and they are alone, except for the stalking photographer.

  The private plane from Philadelphia had been an extravagance, Ava thought, but Frank had insisted; the only way to get away from those bastard reporters, he had told her. Reporters or not, Frank was a private- plane sort of guy, and it was not the day to challenge his sense of himself; but later it irked when she found out he had had the bill for the airplane sent to Morgan Maree (her financial manager in LA). Manie Sachs had cornered her before they ran from the house in Philadelphia that night; he’d said to her: “Take good care of him, Ava. It won’t be easy, but you’ve got to help him get back his confidence.” It wasn’t easy, or cheap— Frank’s finances were in such disarray that she would end up paying for the entire honeymoon.

  They had arrived in Miami in the wee hours of the morning and been driven to the small oceanfront hotel they had chosen to avoid attention.

  They didn’t have a lot of time to themselves before word leaked of their whereabouts. “Privacy was impossible,” Ava would recall. On the second morning Sinatra had supposedly flung open the curtains and a flashbulb had instantly gone off in his face.

  They flew on to Havana, Cuba, taking a third-floor suite at the regal Hotel Nacional, and for two days they romped in Fulgencio Batista’s corrupt playground. And for forty-eight hours, magically, they had an uninterrupted good time. Ava loved the dirty, humid, decadent city—the hot breath of sin and sex everywhere., On the last night they had come back to the Nacional after many Cuba libres—they had been to the voodoo show at the Tropicana, then wandered the dark, hooker-laden streets of La Playita—and Ava, in a state of drunken bliss, had hung over the balcony so far she looked as if she was going to slide off into space but then came back inside, taking Frank in her arms and to the bed, convinced she had never been so happy or so much in love.

  But once they returned home the old pressures and conflicts began anew. The course of Sinatra’s career seemed unchanged, still in a downward spiral. The film he had made at Universal, Meet Danny Wilson, containing perhaps his best acting work to date as well as much great singing, was released in February, received poor reviews, and quickly disappeared. No other film work was offered. His CBS television show, in its second season, was doing worse than ever in the ratings. The network had now placed him opposite the very popular Milton Berle on NBC. The comedian mocked his rival on the air: Introducing some new girl singer, Berle said, “My next guest has never been seen on television before—last week she did the Frank Sinatra Show”

  CBS canceled the program on April 1.

  In June, Columbia Records decided not to continue its ten-year-old relationship with Sinatra. Within days his talent agency, MCA, would make the same decision.

  If marriage had stopped most of the public hectoring, hate mail, and church sermons condemning them to hell for adultery, they still got their share of bad press. Sinatra was a hated figure to many columnists (many never forgave his reportedly unfair physical attack on the admittedly loathsome Lee Mortimer) and to editorialists and political writers of the rabid right. And now, as Frank’s bride, Ava was welcomed as their new object of scorn. When the Sinatras went to London for Frank to appear at a charity benefit sponsored by the Duke of Edinburgh, an editorial in the Richmond Times Dispatch was headlined: “Goodbye Frankie and Ava, and Don’t Come Back.” Columnist Westbrook Pegler published a screed chiding the royal family for associating with the “badly discredited” couple (the same column also referred to the Duke as “dumb” and members of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as “vermin”).

  A festering problem for the newlyweds was the fact that their work continually kept them thousands of miles apart. Stuck in New York under nerve-racking circumstances until the end of April, Sinatra wanted Ava there with him. The fact that she had a career and her own contract to uphold seemed irrelevant to him. Never very comfortable with making allowances for anybody but himself, Sinatra, now that they were actually married, felt more secure in his “traditional” demands on his wife. But Ava sympathized. She told him she didn’t want to go to Hollywood, would rather be there with him in New York, and in fact she had several times already turned down roles and requested a variety of allowances from the studio in order to accommodate Frank’s schedule. Frank would be appeased by these efforts, though seldom thankful, or eager to reciprocate, and as soon as she had to return to her own professional responsibilities he went back to complaining.

  Metro had arranged for her to be loaned to Twentieth Century—Fox for a film of Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a last-minute deal when another actress had been found inadequate. “Snows” was a short story like “The Killers,” but much longer and far more elaborate in content than the gangster vignette. Still, screenwriter Casey Robinson and producer Darryl Zanuck saw fit to plunder bits and pieces of several other Hemingway stories to round out the tale of a celebrated, macho American author, to be played by Gregory Peck, dying on the African veldt in the shadow of the snowcapped mountain of the title and feverishly recalling his life and love affairs on three continents (Susan Hayward, Hildegarde Neff, and Helene Stanley were to play the other women in the hero’s recollections). In the story Hemingway’s protagonist at last expires from his infection, but the Hollywood variant would get to live on in the arms of a hot redhead, at least past the fade-out and end title. Ava Gardner was cast to play—as one of the series of newspaper ads for the film had it— “Cynthia, from Montparnasse, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by…The Snows of Kilimanjaro Γ Largely borrowed from the Lady Brett character in The Sun Also Rises, Cynthia is a dazzling, uninhibited playgirl in Paris (a nude model for aspiring expressionists) and Harry’s muse; he devotes much of his first novel to capturing her in prose, representative selections glimpsed in typescript: “ ‘You’re everything,’ I thought. ‘Everything. On Wheels!’ “ (Hemingway must have gone looking for Casey Robinson with a hunting rifle when he saw this writing sample come on the screen.) Cynthia and Harry live together, not always happily, travel to Africa (where Robinson takes stuff from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a Hemingway story Gregory Peck had already filmed five years earlier); then to Spain, where Cynthia runs away with a flamenco dancer; then turns up helping fight the Spanish civil war (reunited with ambulance driver Harry, as the screenwriter now grabs some scenes from A Farewell to Arms to round off his ruthless borrowings). The writer and producer were both Hemingway idolators (“If I could have been anybody else I’d like to have been Hemingway,” Zanuck once said), and were intent on making this the ultimate adaptation of the man’s work and of his life, too. But the final result was a sometimes risibly self-serious affair, f
urther marred by a production that reduced the various exciting locales of the story to a series of phony back-lot and soundstage sets and some fuzzy stock footage.

  Ava had been impressed by the role of Cynthia, and saw that it contained many parallels with her own life and personality. “Cynthia,” she would write, “was probably the first [part] I understood and felt comfortable with, the first role I truly wanted to play.” Ironically, then, she had to give the producers an ultimatum regarding her participation: Under Frank’s ranting instructions, she could give them only and exactly ten days to shoot all her scenes before she had to return to him in New York, take it or leave it. Not happily, the studio rearranged shooting schedules and cut corners in order to cram all of her scenes into the allotted time. Still, it would be a fine performance she gave in those ten days, perfectly capturing Cynthia’s mercurial, romantic nature (and, she said, with no help from the traffic directing of veteran Henry King). The film reunited her with the sympathetic Peck, who made much over her work, what he saw as her growth as an actress since the time of The Great Sinner. Peck was not always in a pleasant mood; his marriage was beginning to crumble, and there were rumors of outside interests but none involving his costar, who regarded him as a warm friend and brother.

  The rush to get all of Ava’s footage in the can may have contributed to an injury Peck suffered during their last scene together: Ava trapped under a vehicle on a Spanish battlefield and Peck frantically attempting to drag her body free. Peck miscalculated his position when he pulled Ava out and ripped a ligament in his leg, causing much pain and a halt in shooting. Despite their best efforts to make Ava’s deadline, they fell behind and there remained a few last shots to be filmed. She was asked if she would mind extending her services to the picture for another twenty-four hours. Ava agreed at once, but when she told Frank of the brief delay he went into a tirade. She hung up on him, furious: All she and an entire production crew had done to accommodate him had been acknowledged with selfish, childish belligerence.

  In late March she was back in New York for Frank’s return engagement at the Paramount Theater. The sales were weaker than the year before. Some were referring to the appearance as a disaster. Frank’s most sympathetic observer among the Broadway columnists, Earl Wilson, volunteered to try and drum up some excitement for the show—plugging it in the column—and arranging for visiting celebrities to come to the theater (which would be the excuse for another plug). One night Wilson and a Columbia Records publicist got singer Johnnie Ray to the Paramount, and between shows Ray, with a couple of friends, was taken backstage to see Sinatra. Young Ray was one of Columbia’s hot new stars, the sensation of the moment with his hit recording of “Cry,” a melodramatically rendered torch song. An eccentric, partially deaf, slightly effeminate bisexual who performed with flamboyant intensity, Ray’s appeal had a somewhat freakish cast. To Sinatra, Ray was a prime representative of Mitch Miller’s growing carnival of sideshow acts, gimmicks, and novelty numbers: the mincing Ray, Frankie (“Mule Train”) Laine with his lousy bullwhip, Rosie (“Hey Mambo”) Clooney and what he considered her insulting ethnic accents. To Sinatra the fact that the public was eating up such shit and ignoring his own artful recordings made it of course all the more infuriating.

  Nevertheless he was perfectly gracious backstage in his dressing room, hosting Johnnie and his friends and introducing each of them to his wife. Ava had heard Ray’s hit record—you could not avoid the thing that year—and was intrigued to meet the tousle-haired, lanky, quirky young man who had sung it. The group chatted for a bit until Sinatra was called out of the room to deal with something or other, at which moment Ava shifted up from her chair and settled herself on Johnnie Ray’s lap and began touching and “petting” him. Ray’s friends, recalling the scene for the singer’s biographer, described a distinctly uncomfortable situation, much more so when Sinatra returned in midpet. Here was a scene he found wrong in so many ways: His wife wriggling on another man’s lap, and the man—if that was what you called him—a member of Mitch Miller’s despised freak show. Sinatra stood silent among the group for a moment, then grabbed Ava by the arm, jerked her from Johnnie Ray’s lap and rushed her out of his dressing room without a word, leaving the guests to exit at their leisure.

  Late in April, Frank was booked to do a series of concerts in the Hawaiian Islands. He told Ava it would be great if they took advantage of the visit and added on a week or so of vacation. MGM told Ava it would be great if she reported to work for her next assignment, a romantic drama called Sombrero to be shot on location in Mexico. Frank was in no mood to be contradicted, and Sombrero looked like a dog, so Ava sent the studio her regrets. A message was quickly relayed from the office of Eddie Mannix that Miss Gardner was expressly forbidden to go to Hawaii without the permission of her employers. On April 22, Mannix was informed that Ava had left that morning for Honolulu. The studio sent Yvonne De Carlo to Mexico to make Sombrero and put Ava Gardner on suspension, with all further salary payments to the actress to be withheld.

  One rainy day in Hawaii, Frank Sinatra performed before a few hundred customers in a tent at the Kauai County Fair, water leaking through the canvas, dripping down on his immaculate tuxedo. Sinatra chatted with a sympathetic local reporter, speaking words more of hope than reality: “Tonight marks the first night on the way back. I can feel it in every bone.”

  To Ava he spoke more honestly. A newsman recorded the private conversation. “I’m washed up. I oughta just face it. The public is finished with me.”

  “No one with your talent is ever washed up,” she told him. “This is just a bad time. Here, rub my ass. It’ll give you good luck.”

  And he rubbed it.

  Ava’s devotion to her man was playing havoc with her own career. With her growing power as both a star and an actress, it was a time when she should have been working carefully with the studio to choose strong roles, develop significant projects, forge alliances with stimulating collaborators. Instead she was becoming increasingly disengaged, dropping out of planned productions (the most intriguing of these Sister Carrie opposite Laurence Olivier) and negotiating for assignments that could be scheduled around her husband’s nightclub performances in Chicago and Atlantic City. Just as the powers at Metro might have been most inclined to give her the attention and respect they had withheld for a decade, she was doing her best to antagonize them. At a moment in time when there were few motion picture stars commanding more attention than Ava Gardner, she was effectively unemployed and without income.

  Ava’s agent went in to squabble with the studio. Her contract was due to expire soon. Metro understood that however badly she had behaved, there was still a lot of money to be made from a continued alliance with the star. A treaty was negotiated: first, the suspension would be ended immediately and withheld payments restored, in return for which Ava would be available almost immediately and without complaint for her next assignment of the studio’s choosing; the seven-year, multifilm contract provided for payments of from $90,000 to $130,000 per picture. The most disconcerting part of the negotiations, as the executives saw it, was Ava’s attempt once again to make the studio suffer for her spouse’s dwindling fortunes, now with her insistence on what they came to call “the Sinatra Clause.” As Frank was getting no offers of movie work at all, Ava— presumably with Sinatra’s blessing and perhaps his urging—demanded that MGM formally include an agreement to produce a film that would star her with her husband. She and Frank even had a project in mind, a film from a Broadway musical called St. Louis Woman, and Ava had them mention that in the clause as well. In the end, the studio would make this offer so vague and nonbinding as to be meaningless. Still, it was something she could show Frank all down in rich legalese, let him know she was on his side.

  With the suspension lifted, Metro immediately assigned her to another film, one of no promise and a role that was clearly without challenge or prestige. From a poor script by the talented Frank Fenton, Ride, Vaquerol was superior to Lone Star only
in its lush Technicolor exterior photography. A range-war Western in which good bad guy Robert Taylor and bad bad guy Anthony Quinn oppose nice-guy settler Howard Keel and his emerald-eyed wife, the film was partially shot on location at Kenab, Utah. “It was really the asshole of creation,” recalled Howard Keel. “Beautiful territory, but we were out there for about, oh, Christ, a month, and there was nothing there and nothing to do there. Nothing.” Ava passed the time drinking with the Stuntmen and hating director John Farrow, a man she found to be a mean and lecherous character, cruel in equal measure to the horses and to the whores he flew in from Los Angeles.

  California, that late spring and summer of 1952, was going to be about normal: about love, happiness, domesticity, laying the foundation for a future together. It was a time for Ava and Frank to stop rushing around the country and to settle down, show the world—and they were more than a little interested in getting some incontrovertible proof for themselves— that they could live in peace, in one place, show that it had all been the right thing after all, worth all the commotion and the craziness of the past two years.

  Frank worked to restore his stature with his children. One day he had been out spending time with Nancy junior and then, impulsively, he decided to bring his twelve-year-old daughter home to meet her stepmother. Ava greeted the girl with apprehension, imagining the demonic profile she must have had in the household of Frank’s first wife, but little Nancy proved to be more awed than resentful. “What I saw knocked my little socks off,” she would write in a 1985 memoir. “I could imagine a bit of what my father felt. And he was swept away.…My heart melted just looking at her. I was only a kid. I didn’t know about beauty—that awesome kind of beauty…she was just the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in my life. I couldn’t stop staring at her.” Nancy would come to stay with them for some weekends in Los Angeles and in Palm Springs. Even as she became more familiar with her father’s new wife, the woman remained to her a mysterious, unreal presence, “a goddess.” Ava did her best to be friendly and fun (she bestowed on the girl her first lipstick, neon orange Tangee Natural that magically adjusted to the pigmentation of your lips). Nevertheless, the mood underlying these visits was anxious and sad, and Ava knew it.