Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Frank and Ava told friends they wanted children of their own. Ava had said it to a hundred reporters through the years: To have a family, three, four, six kids, that was her real destiny, not movie stardom. It might have been that she had voiced these sentiments in part to hear herself say them, to read them in black-and-white, for her actions regarding the prospect of childbirth had always been more ambivalent, confused, and fearful, and events in the months ahead would prove that these mixed feelings had by no means gone away.

  Ava did become pregnant. That much is clear. However, the details of the matter of the pregnancy—or pregnancies—and the circumstances by which she did not give birth to a child, remain in some dispute. As she recalled it in her memoir, Ava had discovered she was pregnant in late autumn of 1952 while on location in Africa for the movie Mogambo. The future of her marriage was by then not at all secure, and she no longer felt confident in her ability to offer a child the proper attention and a stable home life; while Frank was back in America, and without consulting him, Ava had the pregnancy medically aborted. Her book would go on to explain how, very soon afterward, she discovered she was pregnant again, that Sinatra knew about it but was unable to prevent her from having a second abortion. Some who knew Ava and /or Frank have questioned this claim of a second pregnancy and termination during the time of the Mogambo filming, suggesting that Ava had gotten confused while recording her autobiography. (It has been speculated that the book’s erratic creation, containing Ava’s sometimes blurred memories and posthumous editing and rewriting by hired hands, may have introduced some conflated material along the way to publication.) Sinatra himself was said to have read Ava’s book and privately disputed the story of the second pregnancy. But others on the scene at the time confirm Ava’s version of events, with one proviso: that the father was thought to be not Ava’s husband but one of the members of the company on the African locations.

  The possibility of one other pregnancy, not considered elsewhere, comes from actor Roddy McDowall, who had known Ava from the forties at MGM and in 1969 would star her in his only film as a director, Tarn Lin. According to McDowall, as told to producer and film historian David Stenn, Ava revealed to him that during that same first year of marriage she had unknowingly been with child and suffered a miscarriage after a fall during a drunken brawl with her husband. McDowall, who was clearly more sympathetic to Ava’s cause, put the blame for the tragedy on Sinatra. “Roddy didn’t gossip in that way at all,” said Stenn. “This was the only thing he ever told me like that about anybody. Roddy loved Ava, and I think he was very angry that this had ever happened to her.” There is no other evidence of such an incident, but in this same time period Ava was reported to have had a medical emergency, and was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in the predawn hours of May 24, a week when Sinatra was performing locally at the Cocoanut Grove. The exact nature of the emergency was never revealed, but the doctor summoned to treat her was Dr. Leon Krohn, a gynecologist and longtime friend and associate of Ava’s husband.

  No, they did not turn out to be very good at normal.

  As the summer went on, the old combustibility had returned in full measure. However much they may have loved each other, the relationship was still mostly sustained by two elements: lust and anger. “We never fought in bed,” Ava would tell friends. “The fight would start on the way to the bidet.” The “love nest” in the Pacific Palisades became the neighborhood tinderbox, ever ready to explode with the newlyweds’ raging disagreements. It was the same old crazy, exhausting act, jealousies, resentments, taunts, anything, nothing. They were the Battling Sinatras, a public amusement or an outrage, depending on how close you were sitting to the screamed obscenities and the flying ashtrays.

  This sort of thing, all the time: One night Ava had gone out to dinner with Lana Turner and another actress friend. They were at Frascati’s in Beverly Hills, one of Ava’s favorites. Halfway through a pleasant meal, Frank had charged into the restaurant, red-faced with booze. He lurched up to the table with the three screen beauties and began berating his wife, some earlier, unfinished argument he now picked up in media res. Ava simply ignored him and continued chatting. The other two took their cue from Ava and similarly pretended that Frank wasn’t there. Sinatra looked over the three women and started screaming at them (the scene recalled by restaurateur Kurt Niklas).

  “Lesbians! You’re a bunch of goddamned lesbians! All of you! Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!”

  The women did their best to act as if there was nothing wrong and that no one was standing there calling them lesbians. The rest of Frasead’s stared in open-mouthed shock. Frank then turned and stormed out of the restaurant, screaming behind him all the way: “Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!”

  That summer Howard Hughes made one of his periodic forays into Ava’s life. Frank learned of phone conversations the pair were having and became enraged. In the peculiar way they both had of fanning the flames of an argument until there was a proper, all-consuming conflagration, Ava let it be known that Hughes had in the past supplied her with proof of Frank’s philandering, and even turned a suspicion into fact, crediting Howard with arranging for her to receive that pornographic pre-wedding-day letter from her fiance’s mistress. It was too much. Frank told her he had had enough of fucking Howard Hughes and he was going to settle the fucker’s hash once and for all. Grabbing a bottle of Jack and a revolver he stormed off to find the billionaire and presumably shoot him dead. Sinatra drove around Los Angeles for much of the night, rushing in and out of various Hughes haunts with his .38 under his jacket, drunkenly ready and eager to bring down that Texas capone and his Mormon bodyguards in a blazing gunfight.

  Hughes, alas, was out of town.

  By autumn the papers began to report on a marriage in trouble. Syndicated columnist Earl Wilson wrote, “Eleven months after their wedding, Frank Sinatra and Ava are desperately trying to avert a crack up.” In September they had been in New York while Frank performed across the river at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee. One night Marilyn Maxwell had been in the audience, and Ava thought Frank had been singing a song to her. That was it: She threw a cursing fit and left the club before he was off the stage. She went back to their hotel, packed, put her wedding ring in an envelope addressed to her husband, and left for Hollywood. “It’s anything that might happen between a man and a wife,” Sinatra said to the Los Angeles Times. “Just a mild rift.” But that same day, to the trusted Earl Wilson, Frank spoke less optimistically: “I am nuts about her and I don’t think it’s dead but it’s certainly all up in the air.” They did not speak to each other at all for several weeks. Frank lost the returned wedding ring in the meanwhile and had to have a duplicate made to bring back to California. She reluctantly accepted it. There was a reconciliation then, in mid- October. They went ahead with arrangements for Frank to accompany her to East Africa in November, when she would begin location work on a new film. But the truce was barely a couple of days old when they had one of their biggest fights to date, one that involved a brawl, two love goddesses, police, rumors of sex orgies, and the inappropriate use of a douche bag.

  On Saturday the eighteenth they had gone out to eat, an argument had broken out, and they returned to the Palisades house, both drunk and angry. Ava was giving him the silent treatment and disappeared to take a bath. Sinatra had a few thoughts not yet expressed and burst in on her. Ava screamed for him to get the hell out, and Frank at last said, “Okay, baby, I’ll get out. You can find me in Palm Springs. I’ll be there fucking Lana Turner!” She heard doors slamming and the car screeching out the driveway, and she screamed and punched the bathwater. She lay there in the tub in a simmering, inebriated rage, pondering her husband’s exit line until it had become in her mind a vivid actuality. Frank had, in fact, already offered Lana use of the house at the Springs for a weekend getaway. Lana was a good friend of Ava’s, but she knew what a thing Lana and Frank once had and…who the hell knew what to think? An hour later she had picked up a reluctant Bappi
e at her apartment and the two of them were speeding east into the desert.

  At Frank’s house (a modernist structure on Alejo a minute from the center of town) they found Lana and her business manager, Ben Cole, settled in and relaxing by the swimming pool. But no Frank. Ava gave Lana a variant account of events; Lana offered to leave, and Ava told her no, there was room for everybody. Ava and Bappie joined them for a swim, and then they all went into the kitchen to fix a meal. They were about to sit down to eat when the back door burst open and Frank charged in. Lana would recall Frank’s red face and “blazing eyes.”

  “I bet you two broads have really been cutting me up,” Sinatra said. Then he pointed at Ava and said, “You! Get in the bedroom. I want to talk to you.”

  Ava shrugged, went into the bedroom. Lana and Ben Cole stood around until they heard the screamed epithets and the sound of furniture being thrown against the walls, and they decided to make a hasty exit. Ava recalled Lana and Cole and Bappie all still there and Frank coming out and ordering everyone to “get the hell out of my house!”

  Ava said, “Fine! But I’m taking everything that belongs to me!”

  As Ava’s friend Esther Williams recalled hearing the story, Sinatra “found an article hanging in the bathroom and he filled it with water and went out to the porch where Ava was saying good night to Lana and he threw water from that…that article of usefulness known as a douche bag. He threw the water on both Lana and Ava standing there.”

  Ava ran back inside and began tearing paintings off the walls, books and records from the shelves, flinging them all over the floor, and Sinatra raging just behind her, scooping up the items and tossing them out through the open front door. Neighbors called the police. The squad cars came roaring up the driveway, red lights flashing, radios squawking, and several officers rushed up to the house as Sinatra was trying to evict his wife bodily and Ava was clinging to the doorway with both hands. The police chief arrived, an acquaintance of Sinatra’s, and he managed to separate the couple although they continued cursing at each other and throwing things. Lana Turner and Ben Cole, who had gone off and rented a bungalow at a nearby resort, returned to see if the situation had improved and to get Lana’s clothes. Lana and Ben told Bappie and Ava to come stay with them for the night. “Bappie and I went off with the cops,” said Ava, “leaving Mr. Sinatra to be king of the roost.”

  By Monday the incident was the hottest piece of gossip in Hollywood, although much embellished with rumor and lurid fantasy. One lubricious story retold for decades was that Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava in bed together. “There was even a version,” Lana Turner would recall, “that Ava and I had gotten mad at Frank, picked up a strange man and shared him between us—and Frank had walked in on that scene. The simple fact is that Ava, Ben and I were about to eat chicken in the kitchen when Frank appeared….

  “Their marriage,” said Lana, “was a dreadful fiasco.”

  They did not see or speak to each other for nearly two weeks. Finally politics brought them back together. They were both loyal supporters of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee battling Dwight Eisenhower in the upcoming presidential election. Ava had earlier promised to appear and introduce her husband at a huge rally for the candidate at the Palladium. “I didn’t intend to let my personal problems with Frank spoil any part of Mr. Stevenson’s night,” she would say later. “So, despite the Palm Springs incident, I showed up as scheduled for the rally. I stood in the wings and—as always happened when I saw Frank—my heart melted and the battle was forgotten.” There had been a script prepared for her to read, but Ava tossed it aside before she walked up to the microphone. “I introduced him to the audience as a wonderful man and a great guy. I think Frank was as surprised at the introduction as I was.”

  Murray Garrett, the syndicated photographer, was part of the press contingent covering the rally from backstage at the theatre. “She’d introduced Frank and he goes on stage and kisses her and they start playing ‘Birth of the Blues.’ Ava comes backstage now and every photographer and reporter there just gathered around her and started firing questions. And she wasn’t really paying any attention, she was just looking toward the stage where Frank was singing, smiling to herself. And this one idiot guy, from Chicago, I think, he says to her, ‘Hey, Ava, Sinatra’s career is over, he can’t sing anymore.…What do you see in this guy? He’s just a hundred-and-nineteen-pound has been.’ And Ava says, very demurely, no venom, just very cool, in the most perfect ladylike diction, ‘Well, I’ll tell you—nineteen pounds is cock.’

  “I mean, you got to remember, this was 1952. Nobody talked like that. And the guy that asked the question just stood there frozen, like somebody had hit him. And then people started laughing, and Ava just smiled and went back to looking at Frank out on the stage.”

  “The reconciliation of Frankie Sinatra and Ava Gardner is on the up-and- up,” said the Los Angeles Daily News on October 30. “Whatever that means. But, say the gossipers and keyhole detectives, the pair have patched up their crazy-quilt marriage, and the Thin Man will escort his Ava to Africa, where she is to emote in an adventurous epic.”

  Under Dore Schary, Metro had begun a policy of remaking some of their old hits and each year the studio’s slate of new productions was to be filled with titles or properties from out of the past—Scaramouche, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Merry Widow, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, The Painted Veil, The Women. Now it was decided to make a fresh version of one of their biggest hits from the Pre-Code 1930s, the rollicking, sultry comedy- drama Red Dust, with the screenwriter of the earlier film, John Lee Mahin, given the job of revising his own work (derived from a play by Wilson Collison). With thoughts of the recent success of King Solomons Mines, excitingly filmed on location in Africa, the Red Dust remake would be taken out of its Southeast Asian rubber plantation setting and placed in the Technicolor-friendly safari country of Kenya and Tanganyika, leaving plenty of room for scenic diversions and the intrusion of big game. In Mahin’s revision—Mogambo it would be called, Swahili for “passion” said the linguists in the publicity department—hunter-trapper Vic Marswell crosses paths with the stranded Eloise “Honey Bear” Kelly, an ebullient wandering playgirl. The two have a lighthearted romance, until the arrival of Donald and Linda Nordley, a guileless English couple on a scientific mission. Vic and Linda fall into a passionate affair, to Kelly’s dismay. The affair ends terribly, and by the fade-out Vic has come to realize that the overlooked Kelly is the woman for him. Woven into the melodrama were scenes with dangerous wild animals, cute baby animals, tribal ceremonies, and native attacks. At the outset the part of the big-game-hunter hero had been seen as a natural for King Solomon s Mines star Stewart Granger (who claimed the idea for a Red Dust remake in Africa was his own), but in the end the part went to Clark Gable, the man who had played the studly protagonist in the steamy original twenty years earlier (it was a real tribute to Gable’s eternal appeal and vigor; none of the original stars of the other films to be remade were even remotely considered for another go). Ava, in her third pairing with Gable, would play the part of the sweet good-time girl endearingly and erotically portrayed by Jean Harlow in 1932, the studio casting the woman some saw as a throwback to the late Harlow’s brand of earthiness, sexiness, and humor. Portraying the Nord- leys would be Donald Sinden (now Sir Donald), a rising star from the British stage with one previous film credit, and Grace Kelly, the patrician Philadelphia blond with two films under her belt, a year away from her major stardom. Producing the film was Metro veteran Sam Zimbalist, and hired to direct was one of the most highly regarded creative figures in Hollywood, John Ford.

  Ava was too much an old Hollywood hand now to spend time wondering at the irony of costarring with Clark Gable in a remake of the film— starring Clark Gable—that had been such a hit with her and her mother two decades before. But it deserved at least a moment’s reflection as evidence of the distance traveled in those twenty years, remarkable link between the little Piedmont girl staring up
at the big black-and-white images of Gable inside the Howell Theater in Smithfield and the worldly woman—Clark’s costar—who in early November, 1952, stepped aboard a Stratocruiser en route to Nairobi.

  Frank had decided to come with her—he had nothing better to do, and Ava was going to be out of the country for many months. But he was sensitive to the way some people saw it, the has-been in attendance on his more successful spouse. When a reporter asked if they were going to find a role for Frank in Mogambo he snapped sarcastically, “Yeah, I’m going to play a native, in blackface.” Ava, trying to help, had made things sound worse: Someone asked her what Frank would be doing while she made the movie, and she said, “Oh, he’ll do his act in some African nightclubs.” Somebody cracked, “Who’s opening for him, Tarzan?”

  In Cairo the airplane stopped for refueling, Ava and Frank tucked into their sleeping compartment. A photographer came aboard, located the couple, and attempted to take a picture. Sinatra lashed out, the photographer ran, and Sinatra gave chase, charging onto the Egyptian runway in his pajamas.

  The principal cast members were gathered together at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi a few days before filming. “They had us all down there early to get used to the climate and the water and to get a bit of a suntan,” recalled Sir Donald Sinden. “For the first couple of evenings I had dinner with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly, and on the second evening we were in the dining room and I said to Clark Gable, ‘I wonder when Ava Gardner will arrive?’ And Gable said, ‘She’s here. She won’t come down. She has all her meals sent up to her room.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s very antisocial. English actors don’t behave like that. I’ve a good mind to go up and bring her down.’ He said, ‘You wouldn’t.’ I said, ‘I jolly well will.’ And off I went to her room, knocked on the door, no answer, knocked again, and then a voice said, ‘Who is it?’ It was a bit difficult introducing yourself through a closed door, but I said, ‘My name is Donald Sinden.’ She said, ‘Who? What?’ I said, ‘I’ve come to take you down to dinner.’ And there was a pause and then the door was kicked open and there was Ava standing with her back to the light, which was a most impressive sight because she was wearing a quite diaphanous dressing gown that outlined her complete figure. And she looked at me from head to toe and she said, ‘You’ve come to take me down to dinner?’ I said yes. There was a pause, then she said, Okay, then. I need to take a bath first.’ And she went into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Which is pretty frightening for a young chap, you know. Somebody less of a gentleman would have looked, but I didn’t. She said, ‘Help yourself to a drink,’ which I did. I heard this splashing of the water and every thing in the bathroom. She then came out with the same dressing gown on and started floating around the room looking for something and she picked up a small tin of Nivea cream and then flung it aside, saying, ‘Godammit, I thought that was my Dutch cap [diaphragm].’ So this was my exotic first encounter with the most beautiful woman in the world. She was totally uninhibited.