Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “Eventually we came downstairs to the dining room, and everyone looked up and I must say they were mightily impressed with me. And here she had been not wanting to deal with other people—forgive me, the Americans do it far more than the English do—being conscious of her own publicity, her own importance. But from then she and I got on like a house afire. And she was a delight. But she did have some habits—one of the things I dislike in life is somebody helping themself to your food. And while we were eating Ava suddenly darted her fork across the table and took something off my plate. I said, ‘Please don’t do that.’ She said, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ I said, ‘I do dislike people mucking around with other people’s food.’ And she laughed. But we got on extraordinarily well.

  “They wanted us all to get ourselves a bit tanned before we went off to film, and so every day all of us went up to the roof of the hotel where there was a swimming pool, Clark and Grace and Ava and myself, and we all sat around and sunbathed and got to know each other. Ava and Clark had worked together before and they were good friends. She said something rather funny that I thought summed him up more than any other remark I’ve heard. She said, ‘Clark is the sort of guy that if you say, “Hiya Clark, how are you?” he’s stuck for an answer.’ But she was very fond of him.”

  To make a large-scale MGM Technicolor production in the wilds of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda required an enormous operation, a company of nearly six hundred, from, cast and crew to drivers, bearers, pilots, guards, guides, hunters, chefs, servants, nurses, tribal extras (gathered from the local Turkana and Samburu as well as imported members of the particularly fierce-looking Makonde of Portuguese East Africa and some of the expert canoe paddlers of the Congo’s Wagenia tribe), and a witch doctor. “We went right into the wilds, nothing there but jungle and animals,” recalled Roy Parkinson, the film’s production manager. “We would clear out an airstrip in the bush, then fly the units out there and set up a camp. A small airplane flew the rushes back every other day to Nairobi and then they were put on another plane and flown back to London for processing. It would be days before we knew what anything we shot looked like.”

  In charge of securing locations, managing the location camps and keeping an eye on big game was Frank Maurice “Bunny” Allen, a legen- darily fearless, craggily handsome “white hunter” very much in the Stewart Granger mold. At each location in the African interior a virtual city of as many as three hundred tents was erected. The initial camp was set up on the crocodile-infested Kager a River along the Tanganyika-Uganda border 150 miles from the shores of Lake Victoria, then a second at the northern frontier, overlooking Uaso Nyiro River near the Ethiopian border. Conditions in the bush were varyingly primitive—water for showers had to be drawn from the river, heated over an open fire, and then loaded into a small tank—and luxurious, with a replenished supply of delicacies and French wines flown in from Europe. Also gin, vodka, and scotch. “At the Kagera Camp,” Bunny Allen recalled, “they drank enough to drown the Titanic.”

  Filming began in an unpleasant atmosphere. John Ford was a genius of moviemaking, pure and simple, but he was also a crabbed, calculatingly cruel man who frequently took a miserable pleasure in humiliating people who had the misfortune to be trying to make a movie for him. This worked well with the powerless and the sycophantic and those members of Ford’s professional “family” who loved him despite everything, but on Mogambo Ford’s intimidation tactics proved largely futile. Gable was a dignified man who worked in a spirit of comradely professionalism, and when Ford tried to belittle the star, Gable made it clear Ford would be sending back no more footage of him to MGM until the director’s behavior improved. Ford turned the same charm on Ava Gardner, telling her that he had wanted Maureen O’Hara for her part, and deriding her when she spoke too flippantly after a botched take (“That was a real fuckup!” quoth Gardner). Ava told him he could take the dirty handkerchief he liked to chew on while working and shove it up his ass. Ford reassessed his position on this MGM production with two MGM stars, adjusted his attitude, and was soon making nice. A couple of days later he told Ava, “You’re damn good.” From then on they were buddies (Ava: “The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!”) and worked together beautifully. Ford’s magic helped Ava to create a characterization that glowed with life. To many who knew her, the performance in Mogambo would be the one that best captured the Ava they knew, the fun, the charm, the humor, even the flashes of temper and self-doubt.

  Whatever his character flaws, Ford’s talent was enormous, and few were not awed by his directorial inventiveness and amazing skill at composition and staging (this despite damaged eyes “giving him hell” and working often in the midst of bouts with amoebic dysentery that had him running to squat painfully on makeshift wooden toilets for hours per day). Donald Sinden, who suffered his own battles with Ford (“He blamed me personally for all the problems of Ireland from the time of William of Orange”) recalled, “He had an incredible eye. I had to take my hat off to him. I went out scouting locations with him a couple of times. We’d be out in the wilds and he would say, ‘Stop the Jeep.’ And he’d stand in the middle of nowhere, turn this way and that, hold out his fingers as a frame for the shot, and say, ‘Put the camera here.’ And it would be perfect. If you had spent three weeks looking you couldn’t have found a better shot.

  “He could make a wonderful scene from nothing. I remember watching him and Ava do a delightful scene; a total improvisation. We discovered this farm with an elephant compound, no one on the film had known it existed. Ford saw it and said, ‘We’ve got to get this in the picture.’ And Ava said to Ford, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Just go in and play with the elephant, give it some food.’ It was in a corral. So Ava, who was playing very much of an urban character let loose in the country, shall we say, goes in with the food. No one else in there, they stuck the camera through a hole in the fence. And the elephant began following Ava around. It was really very charming, and Ava was wonderful, improvising with this animal, very natural. Ava didn’t know how long the shot was meant to go on, and she finally looked up at Ford as if to ask, ‘Is anybody going to say CutV And at that moment the elephant could take no more and butted her, and she fell into a muddy pool. Immediately people on the crew started to go to help her, and Ford said, ‘Get back, get back! Leave her alone! Keep filming!’ And he wouldn’t allow anyone to go in, and poor Ava was struggling in the mud. But the whole scene was quite brilliant. And it went right into the movie.”

  While Ava was off all day creating what would be an acclaimed Oscarnominated performance, Frank Sinatra stayed behind in the camp and suffered. He was not a tent-and-river-water kind of guy, and the inconveniences of the bush on top of his career anxieties and the idleness of being in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, put him in a tense, unhappy frame of mind, which, in the evening, with the addition of chilled gin, often brought out the same in his wife. “All was not well with them,” said Bunny Allen. “And as a result Ava was very testy at this time.” The Sinatras battled—and did everything else—with their usual lack of self- consciousness. The open conditions of the safari camp made the dramatic ups and downs of their relationship sometimes uncomfortably apparent to their neighbors.

  “Frank and Ava shared a tent three away from mine,” Donald Sinden recalled. “And I needn’t tell you the tents were not very thick. One night we’d all had dinner together like jolly chaps, and then we all retired to our tents. A little later a great row broke out. Frank and Ava. And you should have heard the language and the screams and shouts. What it was all about I don’t know. Cursing and screaming like wild creatures. I had not even gotten into bed yet, and so I put my head out of my tent to see what the devil was going on. And I see Clark Gable and Grace Kelly are also sticking their heads out at the same time! And there were things being thrown from Ava’s tent, pots and things, flying out of the tent; they were throwing them at each other! Then, suddenly, silence.

  “The a
rgument was over, and the next thing you heard they were in bed and the bed was creaking. And you’ve never heard a bed creaking so loud!”

  Then Frank went away. A call had come for him: an audition with Columbia Pictures. It was the opportunity he had been desperately seeking for months, ever since seeing a news item about Harry Cohn at Columbia making a film of From Here to Eternity, James Jones’ acclaimed bestseller about the peacetime Army in Hawaii on the eve of World War II. There was a character in the story named Maggio, a frail but feisty, impudent, tragic Italian American sidekick to the book’s protagonist, Robert E. Lee Prewitt. Sinatra seized upon the idea of playing Maggio, a part he thought could be a comeback and breakthrough for him in the movies, a perfect part for him—he knew Maggio, he said, he was Maggio, it was a part he was born to play. Nearly everyone up to and including Harry Cohn was uninspired by Sinatra’s idea, even at the bargain rate Sinatra was offering for his services. Sinatra didn’t give up. In the fall he had recruited Ava to pitch for him and finally, through her painter friend Paul Clemens—then living in a bungalow on the Cohn estate—she had been asked to a dinner party the Cohns were throwing.* During the meal Ava made her pitch for giving Frank the role of Maggio, and Harry’s wife, Joan, got on her side. Cohn still said he wasn’t interested, but in the meantime his preferred choice for the part, Eli Wallach, had become unavailable. In November, Cohn sent word that he was at least willing to consider Sinatra if he wanted to come back to California and do a screen test, but he would have to pay for his own transportation (Ava would end up fronting him the money for the flights).

  Frank took the production plane to Nairobi and headed for Hollywood. “The immediate change in Ava was quite amazing,” recalled Bunny Allen. She now became “a sweet, beautiful and most adorable girl.”

  As it has been told—especially by Bunny Allen himself—Ava and the great white hunter became very friendly after Sinatra’s departure. Eva Monley was a production coordinator on the film (“I was a kind of Junior Keep-it-all-together”), a Brit raised in East Africa who spoke Swahili and had known Allen before Mo gambo. “Bunny was a great friend of mine, absolutely; we had a lot of love. He ran a wonderful camp, he really did. And if you were a female you had to have an affair with him. I was in the queue with everybody else. Ava and Bunny? They had a very little thing together. He was not her type of man, I think. He was always busy with other women, and that was not to her liking. A one-night encounter. Give him two nights. He bragged about it for years. He had a wife at the time in camp as well, so it was all a bit complicated for him.” (Another person who was on the location “strongly disagreed” that there could have been anything between Ava and Bunny Allen, explaining as proof, “He was already having an affair with two other people!”)

  Ava got Bunny to take her on a mini-safari in the bush. She urged him to take her where she could see some wild animals from close-up. At one point, moving through tall grass, Allen realized he had walked them straight into a large herd of elephants. “A complete surround of cow elephants, gently cropping the bushes very close to us.” Ava was thrilled. Bunny less so: “I knew what could have happened.” Suddenly, so close it seemed right at her feet, Ava heard a loud “sploshing” sound and jumped against Allen in fright. The hunter whispered in her ear, “It’s all right. Elephant’s just gone to the bathroom.” Ava looked up at him and burst out laughing, which sent the herd trampling in the opposite direction.

  If Bunny Allen became too preoccupied to keep her company, there were others in the company to take his place.

  “Ava couldn’t be alone,” said Eva Monley. “That was the big thing with her. Something to do with her childhood or something, but she didn’t like to be alone. That was, I think, why she had so many affairs. She’d bring someone back to her tent, say, ‘Hey, come on, have a drink with me, I’m bored all by myself,’ and she’d bring back a prop man or whoever. She liked to have lots of men around her. She just enjoyed them. She got rid of one, and she’d go find another one. She had a great time with Frank and then he was gone, and she found a prop man and he was rather good. I only know because I was in charge of the tents and I’d come by and she’d say, ‘Monley, come over here, I’ve got to tell you something! I was with this man…’ It was crazy, the whole thing. But she enjoyed herself. She just lived life from day to day.”

  As had happened during the filming of Pandora, there was a curious, Pirandellian crossover between movie and reality. The company seemed to be living out chunks of their script: the leading lady fiddling with a big-game hunter, and Clark Gable and Grace Kelly falling for each other just as their characters did in the movie; there was lust, cuckoldry, angry natives (Mau- Mau bandits slaughtering the whites on a nearby farm one night), and dangerous beasts (two lions invading the camp on several mornings and looting the kitchen, and an attack by three rhinos nearly killing the cameraman). Ava Gardner was free-spirited “Honey Bear” to the life but a lustier version MGM wouldn’t dare to put on-screen. Producer Sam Zimbalist, delighted with Ava’s performance, at the same time and with nervous apprehension took note of her antic behavior at the camp: The affairs with members of the crew, the drunkenness and fighting, the exhibitionism in front of the boys who prepared her bath; one night, Zimbalist would recount, Ava and Grace Kelly had been strolling among the African extras and Ava said, “Gracie, have you ever seen a black cock?” and then lifted a tribesman’s loincloth to show her one. (“Frank’s is bigger,” she supposedly sighed.)

  “Ava,” said Eva Monley, “walked the way she wanted to walk and she talked the way she wanted to talk, if you see what I mean. She was very special and had her own energy.”

  It was at Kagera, in November, that Ava discovered she was pregnant. She determined to end the pregnancy immediately before Frank returned to Africa and tried to stop her. With the help of MGM problem solvers it was arranged for her to fly to England and have an abortion performed at a private clinic in London. Considering the event in the late 1980s, preparing her life story for eventual publication and public scrutiny, in conditions of illness and nostalgia, she would remember the discovery and the decision to abort the baby as deeply reasoned, sadly inevitable: “I felt that unless you were prepared to devote practically all your time to your child in its early years it was unfair to the baby. If a child is unwanted…it is handicapped from the time it is born.” Some who were there at the time recalled other factors influencing Ava’s decision, possibly unwelcome memories deliberately unremembered at the end of her life. Robert Surtees, Mogambos director of photography in Africa, told Charles Higham in 1974 that his wife had accompanied Ava to London and had been at her side at all times through the operation, the recovery, and then the return to Kagera. After it was all over, Surtees said, Ava told his wife: “I hated Frankie so much. I wanted that baby to go unborn.”

  The studio put out a press release to explain their star’s sudden visit to London and what they called her “tropical infection.” The major newspapers and news syndicates printed the story without question. “Ava Gardner Stricken on Set in Africa,” headlined the AP article printed in the Los Angeles Times: “Doctors pumped powerful shots of antibiotics into Actress Ava Gardner tonight.…The Hollywood beauty who made the mistake of drinking the local water in Kenya’s native country lay in pain with stomach troubles. But her doctors said it is not serious and promised to have her back on her feet again in a couple of days.” Ava, recovering in the Savoy Hotel in London, told a version of the same story to Frank when he called from California. He did not learn the truth until they were reunited at the Mogambo location in December.

  The screen test for the role of Maggio had gone well. Cohn would not make a decision right away, but Sinatra felt in his bones he had nailed it, and others who had been on the set agreed with him. But with no immediate word from Columbia, the enthusiasm started to fade. There had been other times in the past couple of years he had thought he was turning things around, and something had always gone wrong. Packed to go back to Afric
a in time for Christmas and Ava’s birthday, he made a visit to Ruser’s, a jewelry store in Beverly Hills he had frequented in the past, looking to pick up a present for his wife. Billy Ruser, the owner, said he would show him something he thought Ava would love, a gorgeous pair of emerald earrings.