Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  She arrived at Idlewild Airport on September 7. Frank was not there to meet her. After the long flight she was tired, hungover, now furious. A reporter caught up with her. Would she be seeing her husband later? “Not today. I have no definite plans. I don’t want to discuss it.”

  When he did catch up with her—he was commuting between the Waldorf and the 500 Club in Atlantic City—she refused to talk to him. He hadn’t known she was coming, he said, pleading his case via Hedda Hopper. “I don’t understand it. We’d had no trouble. I can’t make a statement because I don’t know what she is planning. It’s a crying shame, because everything was going so well with us.”

  She holed up at the Hampshire House and nursed her grudge. Frank phoned, left frantic messages, then abusive ones. She had them not put through any more of his calls. They had been playing these games for nearly four years. They were reflexive by now, almost empty of reason or goal. Dolly Sinatra came over from New Jersey. “Frankie is so upset,” she told Ava. “It’s drivin’ him nuts you two not speakin’.” Frank was drinking too much, the mother-in-law told her, he was back on the sleeping pills. “You know you two kids love each other so quit all this fuckin’ shit for God’s sake!” Dolly played matchmaker, brought them to her new place in Weehawken for a big dinner, Frank coming up the road from Bill Miller’s club between shows, not knowing who would be there. Frank speechless. “Hello, Francis.” And so they kissed and made up. She had to come along back with him for his last show, and he sang to Ava as if there were no one else in the room. “Everything was forgotten,” she would say, “except pride and love for my old man.”

  “The Voice unleashed a torrent of sound at the sultry Ava,” said the reviewer in the New York J our nal-American. “Emotion poured from him like molten lava.”

  “Honey, Frankie and I are both high-strung people,” she told columnist Sidney Skolsky. “We explode fast, maybe faster than most married couples. But it’s great fun making up.”

  The explosions continued. One night he had promised to be back to the hotel by 2:00 A.M. and then wandered in at dawn. Another night at the club in Jersey she went missing, her reserved table empty, destroying his concentration, ruining the show. It was the same old thing, of course, but somehow not the same—worse, because attrition was at work, the wounds no longer healing properly between battles. There was love, still, but it had become all tangled up with resentment and exasperation and boredom. Ava complained to some of her friends that Frank’s rising fortunes, his career turning around now after From Here to Eternity, made him more arrogant than ever. (And Sinatra might have agreed—his time had come again, why not rub it in people’s faces, take some payback; why did she have to break his balls like it was six months ago, like he was still a loser?) Making up was not as much fun as it had once been. She complained to some others that Frank no longer satisfied her in bed. She could not have an orgasm with him anymore, she confided to close friends. She even voiced this intimate complaint to her ex-husband. “When we were, you know, doing it,” she asked Artie Shaw, “was it good?” Shaw said, “If everything else had been anywhere near as good, we’d have been together forever and I’d never have let you out of my sight.”

  At the age of eighty-nine, recalling the encounter in an interview with Kristine McKenna and perhaps finding some payback of his own, Shaw said, “She gave a sigh of relief. I asked why. She said, ‘With him it’s impossible.’ I said I thought he was a big stud. She said, ‘No, it’s like being in bed with a woman.’ “

  On October 2 they went to the premiere of Mogambo at Radio City Music Hall. The reviews for the film were filled with praise for Ava’s warm, funny, lovable portrayal of “Honey Bear Kelly, a performance that would gain her an Oscar nomination for best actress of the year. A reporter got her to the phone the morning after the picture’s opening and read her a sampling of the critical reaction. “Don’t believe a word of it,” she told him. “I don’t.”

  From New York she and Frank returned together to California, drove out to Palm Springs. They were going to lie low until Frank’s opening at the Sands in Las Vegas. Then the evening he was to fly to Nevada to begin rehearsals they drove to LA for a quiet dinner before she took him to the airport. Everything had been fine, but some friend of Frank’s had seen them and come over, and Frank and the friend had yakked it up for an hour. It was her last hour with him, and now there was no time left but to rush to the airport. Ava blew up. Frank shouted back; he stood up, he walked out of the restaurant without another word, and he took a taxi to the airport.

  The plan had been for her to follow him out to Las Vegas for his opening night. Frank didn’t call, and she didn’t go. “Why would she do a thing like that to me?” Sinatra whined to Louella Parsons. “I’ve been at her beck and call. No matter where she’s been, I’ve flown to her regardless of the fact that I also had some important engagements.…She doesn’t understand that I’ve got a career to worry about, too.

  “No, Ava’s wrong this time. I’ve been wrong other times, but this time it’s all her fault. She’ll have to call me….

  “She doesn’t love me anymore or she wouldn’t do this.…I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I love her.”

  Out in Las Vegas it became like a nightly birthday party for Frank Sinatra, a king restored to his throne, the treasure houses of the pleasure palace flung open to him once more. He was damned if he was going to let his wife ruin this triumphal occasion or feel guilty for enjoying the spoils of victory. Some say Ava heard word of Frank fiddling with some of the Copa Room’s statuesque showgirls, that she had gotten a call through to him in his room at the hotel one night and she had heard a woman whispering to him in the background. Or was it as Ava would remember it in later days, Frank calling her from Vegas himself, showing off, telling her, yes, right now he was in bed with another woman, telling her that if he was going to be constantly accused of infidelity when he was innocent then he might as well enjoy the benefits of being guilty. And then as she remembered it, she had put down the telephone and she knew that something had happened then, a crossroads, a point of no return reached, and that the marriage was over.

  Sydney Guilaroff, MGM’s chief hair stylist, a friend and something of a fairy godfather to Ava since her earliest days at the studio, remembered her showing up at his house, unannounced, late in the night, lurching out of her car, and standing in the driveway in tears. He ran out and found her anguished and frantic and crying, “almost to the point of a nervous breakdown.” She refused to come inside with him, and Guilaroff stood with her near her car and held her as she sobbed.

  Guilaroff said, “Come in, for god’s sake, let’s sit and talk.”

  She refused. After some time she urged him to go inside and leave her alone.

  Reluctantly he went back into the house, but he couldn’t go to bed with Ava out there, so upset, and he sat in his front room in the dark and looked out at her through the window. “For hours I watched her pace up and down in my garden, bathed in moonlight, lost in grief. Eventually she just trudged off into the night.”

  Ava escaped to Palm Springs—not to Frank’s place, but renting a house for herself on the road to the airport—and remained there, sober, she said, suffering, pondering her decision.

  “Everything will be straightened out,” Sinatra told Hedda Hopper. “It’s just a misunderstanding.”

  That was all it was. She was going to forgive him. He would get her something nice, tell her how crazy he was for her. And they would be off to the races again.

  On October 29 Howard Strickling at MGM issued a press release: “Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra stated today that having reluctantly exhausted every effort to reconcile their differences, they could find no mutual basis on which to continue their marriage. Both expressed deep regret and great respect for each other. Their separation is final and Miss Gardner will seek a divorce.”

  Ava went to see Ben Thau at Culver City and told him, “Get me out of the country!” She wanted to get away from Frank, from Ho
llywood, the stalking local press, all of it. She had an idea about a publicity tour: Send her around the world to publicize Mogambo. Thau got back to her with another idea. There was a project Joseph Mankiewicz was producing in Rome in the next month, The Barefoot Contessa, it was called. Mankiewicz, it seemed, had been after them for Ava for a while but the studio had not been interested. Mankiewicz had yelled at Nick Schenck in the New York office, called him an idiot for the way he had screwed with the aspect ratio of Julius Caesar, the studio’s last association with the writer-director. Ava pleaded with them to get to Mankiewicz and get her that part. Thau wondered whether somebody had already signed for it—they knew Jennifer Jones had been interested and Yvonne De Carlo, and some Italian actress he’d never heard of. And even if it was still available, it was certain that Nick Schenck would veto it or ask an impossible amount of money from Mankiewicz as an act of revenge. Well, the best he could do was to go ahead and make some inquiries, and in the meanwhile, Ben Thau said, he could get her a copy of the script and see what she thought. Ava said she thought the picture was shooting in Rome, and the character was barefoot, and go make the deal.

  In the end she made a direct plea in the form of a telegram to old man Schenck himself:

  I AM DESPERATELY ANXIOUS TO DO THIS PICTURE…YOU MUST KNOW MY TERRIBLE DISAPPOINTMENT AT NOT BEING ABLE TO ACCUMULATE SOME MONEY AND SECURITY WHICH I HAD CONTEMPLATED WHEN I MADE MY NEW CONTRACT WITH metro [this in reference to the huge loss she had sustained when returning to America too soon to appreciate a tax benefit] AND I THINK THE LEAST THAT THE COMPANY CAN DO IS TO GIVE ME SOME MEASURE OF HAPPINESS IN DOING THE KIND OF PART I WANT TO DO AT THIS TIME AS I COULD LEAVE FOR EUROPE IMMEDIATELY.

  Metro made the deal. She would fly to Italy in the last week of November. Almost at once she began to think of the trip as not another four- or six-month sojourn to make a movie, but as the first leg of a permanent escape. Even after twelve years of living in Los Angeles she felt few if any ties to the place, had less than a handful of close friends, and no roots that could not be settled with a phone call to a realtor.…About Hollywood she had almost entirely negative feelings. Yes, she wanted to put the entire shallow, prying, perverse place behind her. Europe appeared to her as adventure, a fresh start, a future without the baggage of the past. She dreamed particularly of Spain, with all its from-the-blood passion and authenticity looming before her as the antithesis of Hollywood phoniness.

  Her dream Spain overlooked the fears and treachery of a land under the yoke of the Franco fascists, but it was very real in her imagination.

  As the days passed after Ava’s publicist at MGM announced the end of their marriage, Frank Sinatra had gradually and painfully begun to understand that this was not after all like the feuds and separations of the past. The confidence that had fueled his taunting assault from Las Vegas went away. He took stock, humbled himself, called with protestations, apologies. Ava made herself unavailable, or talked to him briefly, bluntly. She had been angry, stubborn, cruel even, many times in the past, but now, he found, there was a cold intractability that had never been there before. A fear of actually losing her began to invade him like a terrible spreading fever.

  “Frank was torching for Ava…heavy…heavy,” remembered Milton Ebbins, Peter Lawford’s manager and an adjunct member of the Rat Pack—to be. “And Ava, she wasn’t pining for anybody. She was putting him behind her, and that was that. She was out and laughing.

  “Peter Lawford and I were having lunch at Frascati’s in Beverly Hills. Ava was finishing up some business with her financial adviser, and her sister was with her as well. Peter knew her quite well for many years and went to say hello. Ava said, ‘Peter, when you’re done why don’t you come join us for a drink at the Luau?’ That was a Chinese restaurant up the street on Rodeo. And Peter was not going to go—because of Sinatra. But I was a big fan of Ava’s as was everybody else, and I wanted to go and meet her. It was my idea to go to the Luau; Peter went because I asked him to. So we went, and I met Ava and her sister. And Ava was terrific. A wonderful gal. Extremely attractive, funny, very amusing. She was drinking, but she wasn’t drunk. Ava and Peter had known each other for a long time, and it seemed that they might have gone out. Peter never went into detail about their past, but he had been with Lana Turner, and this one and that, he had made the rounds. And some didn’t like him: He had had a thing with this one star and afterward she hated his guts and wouldn’t even say hello to him.

  “Anyway, that was it. I thought it would be nice to have a drink with Ava Gardner. We were only there a few minutes. But it was in Hedda Hopper’s column the next day, something about Peter and Ava having a drink together. And then I got a call from Peter. Peter was hysterical. Frank had called him. He said, ‘Frank said I’m a dead man! He said he was sending somebody to break my legs for being with Ava! What am I going to do?’ So I had to try and find Sinatra before this got out of hand. And I tracked him down to New York, he was staying at Jimmy van Heusen’s place. Van Heusen was a very kind, loyal friend. But van Heusen was like, ‘Yeah, he’s here! Jesus Christ, and he’s driving me crazy!’ All about Ava. And eventually they got Frank onto the phone. And he started threatening me. He was furious, furious with Peter. His legs were going to be broken for seeing Ava. I said, ‘Frank, Frank, listen to me, it wasn’t Peter, / wanted to see Ava!’ He said, ‘What?!’ I said, ‘Listen, it was my idea to go to the Luau, I just wanted to meet Ava is all.’ I told him the whole story just as I’ve told it now. And it took some time to calm him down. I think he believed me. Well, he never said anything more. He never says that he’s sorry. And when he got a hate on, forget it. He didn’t talk to Peter for years.”

  He was a stricken, desperate man, sleepless, inconsolable. In van Heusen’s Fifty-seventh Street apartment he would sit up all night drinking, marathon sessions with a commanded audience of friends and flunkies to hear his tale of woe, until each had made his escape or passed out from exhaustion. He couldn’t rid himself of her for a minute. She went round and round in his head till he thought it would explode. The siren in that Billy Strayhorn thing she loved so much. Now it was his fucking theme song. You came along…to tempt me to madness. He would sit, staring at her photograph, then in an angry outburst tear it to shreds, then crawl around on the floor putting the pieces together…so the legend says, he had reconstructed one prized now-shredded picture except for a single missing piece, and when a passing delivery boy discovered it, Sinatra gratefully took the gold watch from his wrist and gave it to him.

  Los Angeles Daily News, Nov. 23, 1953

  AVA GARDNER ITALY BOUND SANS FRANKIE

  Smokey-eyed actress Ava Gardner was packing for Rome, and one of the things she did not slip into her suitcase was down-to-118pound Frank Sinatra.

  On the night of November 18, he had found himself alone in the apartment in New York City, van Heusen out, the flunkies all dispersed. Lonely, full of booze and pills and despair, strolling about the halls in his pajamas, he had wandered into the kitchen and taken a knife and he had run the blade across each of his thin wrists. Van Heusen came home and found him dazed and his arms and white pajamas wet and red.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  *About her upcoming project, Harry Cohn offered this bit of movie mogul wisdom: “Mogambo? That’s a lousy title. Mogambo Starring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner—that’s a fucking great title!”

  PART THREE

  EIGHT

  Spanish for Cinderella

  She arrived from New York at Rome’s Ciampino Airport, met by a pulsing mob of international photographers and reporters, and when at last she emerged into sight through the gangway—after every other passenger had disembarked before her and the mob had grown crazed with anticipation—the whoosh and flare of a hundred flash cameras going off was like a sudden burst of thunder and lightning. David Hanna, newly appointed head of publicity for Joseph Mankiewicz’s production company, Figaro, Inc., whose fortunes were to be tied to Ava Gar
dner for the next six years, would remember that first glimpse of the actress as she stepped onto the metal stairway after a very long flight from New York and confronted the Roman clamor: serene, self-possessed, “a devastating picture of simplicity, directness and charm.” With the help of some burly private security guards, Hanna and Mankiewicz ushered her through customs, outside to a waiting Cadillac, and on to a suite at the Grand Hotel.

  At the hotel she had a brief chat with Mankiewicz, the worldly Hollywood veteran who had written and directed the O scar-winning hits A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Stretched out on a divan in her flower-filled suite, barefoot, sipping champagne, Ava blandly told Mankiewicz she had not yet read his script. She had wanted to go to Rome, she said, and his title had “spoken” to her. She raised her legs in the air and wiggled her naked toes, telling the writer-director she’d be willing to do the whole picture without shoes. Mankiewicz chuckled, said there were a few scenes where footwear would be required. Dinner that night at Alfredo’s with Dave Hanna and United Artists exec Arthur Krim (UA co- producing with two Italian financiers), Alfredo himself coming out to prepare his famous fettucine for the Hollywood star, Hanna watching in awe as she tucked into the big bowl of pasta and much more to come. “I never diet,” she told him. “And I never exercise, unless I’m running to get to my next meal.”

  The next morning she began looking at apartments, settling on a dark, rambling first-floor flat in an ancient house on the noisy Corso d’ltalia. For several days she lost herself in the unlikely pleasures of house- cleaning, commanding a battery of young female assistants, scrubbing and redecorating and removing cobwebs half as old as Rome. Then each morning she went for fittings with Contessa s appointed dressmakers, the Sorelle Fontana on the Via Veneto. The House of Fontana made star- tlingly beautiful and sexy clothes, particularly formal wear that utilized luscious fabrics and intricate work (“they had embroiderers and headers,” according to Vogue, “whose skills rivaled those of medieval nuns”). The connection with the brilliant couturiers—sisters Giovanna, Micol, and Zoe—would result not only in the gorgeous costumes Ava would wear in the film but in a momentous cultural collaboration. The Fontanas and their sumptuous, artful, and sensuous designs would become the beacons of a new era in haute couture, crucial in the taking of the fashion spotlight from France to Italy in the 1950s, and Ava Gardner would be their avatar—as customer, booster, and good friend of the sisters—their most glamorous representative.