Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  In the afternoons she posed for sculptor Assen Peikov, an affable, mustachioed Bulgarian creating the film’s marble statue of the countess, larger than life and more goddesslike than her Venus. She posed in a slip in Peikov’s drafty studio (conditions at the film studio and her new apartment were likewise cold and damp that Roman winter, and she would end up with competing flus in time for the holidays). “She is,” the sculptor announced, “a little square in the shoulders.” Following its impressive appearance in The Barefoot Contessa, the statue would be purchased by Frank Sinatra and end up for many years in the backyard of his California home.

  At last she read Mankiewicz’s script. It was a sophisticated work, set amid the worlds of filmmaking, café society, and the European upper crust. It told the story of Maria Vargas, a beautiful young Spanish dancer, her rise from a Madrid nightclub to global movie stardom, and a perverse, unstable marriage to a wealthy Italian nobleman, and finally her tragic fall. As with Mankiewicz’s screenplay for All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa advanced in flashback with a framing device and a series of narrative perspectives, though unlike Eve, with its cynical but lively comedy, this was a glum and tragic story that began where it ended with the title character’s funeral (Eve would suffer a professional stabbing in the back, the contessa would be shot to death). Though it contained Mankiewicz’s signature witty dialogue and cultural insights, the script was a tad bombastic, laden with symbology—for instance, bare feet representing authenticity and, somehow or other, a healthy sexual appetite; impotence, a decadent society. It was in large part a “scenario à clef,” full of disguised versions of real-life figures, a rich Latin American playboy à la the notorious Baby Pignatari, a Texas tycoon who makes movies and collects beautiful women in the manner of Howard Hughes, the Texan’s shifty fixer who might have been Hughes’s own right hand, Johnny Meyer, and a wise, witty, rueful movie director and writer who was clearly Mankiewicz’s alter ego and mouthpiece. The character of Maria Vargas, the doomed star out of the slums, was suspected of being based on a number of Hollywood actresses whose lives followed a similar trajectory. They included Linda Darnell (the married Mank’s sometime girlfriend, who claimed he wrote it with her in mind, and with her in bed with him while he wrote it), the obscure Anne Chevalier, star of F. W. Murnau’s Tabu, and Mankiewicz’s own stated inspiration, Margarita Cansino, better known as Rita Hayworth, a Hispanic former nightclub dancer turned love goddess whose troubled life included a marriage to the playboy Prince Aly Khan. Whoever else he may have been thinking about as he wrote the role of Maria, Ava Gardner was Mankiewicz’s first and only stated choice for the film and he paid plenty to get her (the cost was two hundred thousand dollars, a rare sum at the time—Nick Schenck’s revenge—less than half going to the actress). It did appear to be inspired casting: In addition to bringing to the part her looks and mythic star status appropriate to playing a beautiful mythic movie star, there were numerous parallels between Ava Gardner and the invented contessa—her humble beginnings, her independence, her tempestuous affairs, her long-running friendship with Howard Hughes, not to mention the shared fondness for bare feet. Maria Vargas’s life is linked to the Cinderella story; once upon a time Ava Gardner had been referred to in the columns as “the Cinderella of Hollywood.” “Hell, Joe,” she told Mankiewicz, “I’m not an actress, but I think I understand this girl. She’s a lot like me.”

  Mankiewicz’s preference for Gardner might also have been influenced by the actress’s performance as a similarly willful and doomed beauty in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman three years before. There were other reflections of Al Lewin’s film: Besides Ava, Marius Goring would appear in both films, and the director had tried hard to land James Mason for the part of the Italian count, but the actor, in search of greater status in Hollywood, felt that the role of an impotent murderer would not help his quest (Rossano Brazzi was cast instead). Also common to both films was cine- matographer Jack Cardiff, providing Contessa with extraordinarily rich, darkly glowing Technicolor images as he had done for Pandora.

  With a good deal of her prep work finished, Ava was taking time off for Christmas, with plans to spend the holiday week (and her birthday) in Spain. She was finalizing the arrangements for her stay in Madrid when she received a call from Frank.

  Back in November, on a very lonely and confused night in New York City, he had been rushed to Mt. Sinai Hospital with his wrists slashed. For public consumption it was announced that Mr. Sinatra was being treated for nervous exhaustion (and that he had simultaneously suffered a domestic accident with a broken glass). After three days the singer checked himself out of the hospital and took a plane to Los Angeles. He drove up to the house above Nichols Canyon. He had come to plead with her, to ask her to give their marriage another try. Ava had feared it turning into a terrible scene of some sort, pitiful or violent. But there had been no fight and little emotion left in him that afternoon—she suspected he was on a great deal of medication—and so it became only a rather quiet and empty reunion with much left unsaid. He had wished her bon voyage and offered his hope that they could be together at Christmastime.

  Now he was coming to see her.

  “I won’t be in Rome. I’m going to Madrid.”

  “Then Madrid. Baby, I’ll go to the North Pole. I want us to be together.”

  Ava had other plans in mind for this trip, and they did not include Frank. But she didn’t have the heart to tell him not to come. The love she had felt for him in the past was still there within her, covered over now like a bandaged wound, not yet healed underneath and perhaps still easily reopened. She decided she would simply have to go on, let things happen as they might, though she didn’t expect it would be pretty.

  She left Rome on her thirty-first birthday. In Madrid she was met by her American friends Frank and Doreen Grant and brought to stay at their villa. Through the Grants she came to know others among Madrid’s elite expatriate circle, including most significantly the Sicres—Ricardo and Betty—who were to become her close, beloved pals and advisers in Spain. It was at a party in the Sicre house in Madrid that Ava had been introduced to Luis Miguel Dominguin.

  Hemingway had once described Dominguin as a mixture of Hamlet and Don Juan. He was, after Generalissimo Franco, the most famous citizen of Spain, and, unlike the general, almost universally admired. Born Luis Miguel Gonzalez Lucas to a bullfighting dynasty (Dominguin was his father’s “ring name,” which he assumed as his own), he was a prodigy of the corrida, at twelve having killed his first bull, by seventeen risen to the elite rank of matador whose carefully nurtured opponents were the most powerful and deadliest fighting beasts on earth. With the death of Manolete in 1947—a tragedy to which he had been an eyewitness—his standing began a rapid rise until in the early 1950s he was widely considered Manolete’s successor as the greatest of all living matadors, and some said better than that—the greatest of the century, living or dead. In the ring, wrote Hemingway, “He was proud without being arrogant, tranquil, at ease at all times, and in full control of everything that went on. It was a pleasure to see him direct the fight and to watch his intelligence at work. He had the complete and respectful concentration on his work which marks all great artists.”

  His technique dazzled everyone, from the jaded and nitpicking aficionados who placed him among the immortals of an ancient tradition to the women of all ages for whom the gleamingly handsome young man was an idol and sex symbol of movie star proportions. He was that rare thing, a star who seemed fully worthy of stardom—graceful, fearless, funny, well-mannered, and smart. His elegance, style, and good looks, in fact, shone above and beyond his celebrity status. Ava Gardner had never heard of him when they first met, but she had been entranced. But of course, when she did learn that the rakishly good-looking Spaniard was also the greatest of all toreros and the hero of his nation it did not make him any less attractive.

  Dominguin’s appreciation of the opposite sex and his many romances were well known. At the time of his introductio
n to Ava Gardner he was in the company of his latest love, a spectacular-looking young woman of Portuguese-Thai descent named Noelle. Ava had bumped into them in the lobby of the Hotel Alfonso XIII during the feria in Seville. Luis Miguel had grinned, kissed her hand and introduced her to his young girlfriend (Dominguin was four years Ava’s junior; the girl appeared perhaps five years younger than that).

  “What a charming creature,” said Ava. (The Spanish press would detail this delicate encounter.)

  They went out together that evening—Luis Miguel and Noelle and Ava—and as the evening proceeded Dominguin’s girlfriend began to suspect that this woman from Hollywood—a married woman no less—was after her man. “I noticed the way she lifted her glass to him, danced with him and let her fingers glide over his back,” she would recall. “Later in the car, she pretended that there wasn’t enough room and sat down smack on Migúelo’s lap. I then knew that this cat was bent on destroying my happiness.”

  Indeed. The Eurasian beauty was gone from Dominguin’s life by December, and by Christmas week Ava Gardner was a part of it. He was now officially, if rather mysteriously, retired. A bull’s horn had only lately gone through a muscle in his leg. One week after the goring he was back, but the wounded limb could not hold him upright, and he had been forced to withdraw from the fight. Doctors advised that there was a good possibility of his suddenly toppling over in the ring if the muscle did not mend properly. In the prideful world of the matadores de toros it was easier to retire on a whim—to arrogantly claim you were bored with the poor selection of bulls that year or had other interests—than due to injury or doctor’s orders, and so Dominguin let it be known that he had abandoned the bullring just because he felt like it to chase the young ladies and to spend his money. He divided his time now among his ranch, his business concerns, and his social affairs. Ava met with him almost instantly upon her return to Madrid and found him as good-looking, charming, and humorous as she remembered, perhaps even more so now without the threat of death hanging over him each Sunday. They still had no language in common, a few scattered phrases and hand gestures, but Ava made it easy for him to understand what she wanted. Her physical desire for the man was intense—she had been thinking about him, truth to tell, from the moment they met, and that was reason enough not to delay the romance any longer (she had been without a sexual partner for months). She was also not a little distressed over Frank’s pursuit, could not trust her resolve in the face of his determination, and so felt a pressing need to affirm a new romantic alliance right then, before anyone could do anything to stop it. All but running to get there, she went with Luis Miguel to the Hotel Wellington near the Retiro Park, and in the room Dominguin rented they made love, just hours before Sinatra’s arrival in town.

  It was, as she had expected, an unpleasant reunion with Frank. For all the love he declared that he felt for her, it was now mostly disguised by a seething anger and righteous indignation that seemed at times ready to boil over into violence. “Love” could only very loosely be the proper word to describe the traumatizing obsession he felt for her. She was like a drug that no longer provided pleasure in its use but that his body, addicted, went on craving for survival.

  She did little to disguise the fact that she was seeing another man, but stopped short of an outright admission. Who knew what he might try to do in his state of mind if she pushed him too far? They argued, seethed. At last an inadvertent truce was called when both of them were felled by viruses.

  On the twenty-ninth Ava returned to Rome, with Frank glumly clinging to her arm, like a cop transporting a prisoner. In the customs hall he lunged at a photographer. Ava groaned and raised her arm to block him.

  “Please, Frank, stop it!”

  It had been planned that they would host a New Year’s party at Ava’s apartment, a publicity event, really, since they knew almost none of the guests. They spent the three days after that holed up in the apartment, foiling the band of photographers who clustered outside the front door at all times. Inside the house were harsh words, pleas, reminiscences, silence. When Ava next emerged from the house Sinatra was already gone, sneaked out a back entrance and off to America, due in Hollywood to begin work on a movie with Marilyn Monroe (it would be canceled). Until the moment Frank departed he—and he alone—had remained adamant: The two of them were not over.

  At once she sent a message to Luis Miguel inviting him to Rome. Within days they were living together on the Corso d’ltalia.

  The rest of The Barefoot Contessa cast—including Humphrey Bogart, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Stevens, Mari Aldon, Rossano Brazzi, and Valentina Cortese—assembled in the first week of January, with filming scheduled to begin on the eleventh. Bogart, to play world-weary writer- director Harry Dawes, arrived on January 4 in the company of his wig maker/mistress Verita Thompson and was installed at the Excelsior Hotel, his lodging of choice largely on account of its renowned bartender and easy access to the ham and eggs and other American fare at George’s restaurant across the street. One of the preeminent stars of the last ten years and more, recent winner of the Oscar for his endearing comic turn in The African Queen, Bogart was contracted to receive top billing in Contessa’ s credits but he was getting only half the salary being paid to Ava Gardner—and about one-tenth the publicity. He was one of the few Hollywood legends Ava had never met and she looked forward to working with him in his role as the contessa’s trusted adviser and friend. Alas, from the start Ava and Bogie proved to be incompatible personalities. Bogart was a needier, enjoyed finding and poking a person’s raw nerve (“I like a little agitation now and then,” he told Dave Hanna, “keeps things lively”), and he was a fan and friend of Sinatra’s besides. On the morning of the first day of shooting, Bogie came by his costar’s dressing room to say hello. Stuffed into the tiny room were Ava, a makeup man, Ava’s Italian secretary/translator (supposedly a princess of the long-deposed royal family), Luis Miguel, and Bappie (who had recently arrived from California with an emergency replenishment of Ava’s Larder: Hershey chocolate bars, chewing gum, marshmallows, popcorn, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey). Bogart remarked that it looked like the circus was in town, and when introduced to Dominguin, he made a crack regarding men who wore “capes and little ballerina slippers.” Ava laughed it off, but it was to be the beginning of a rocky relationship. Their rapport did not improve on the set.

  Ava’s “stage fright” was still in place, and she found her confidence shriveling when confronted with Bogart’s chronic irritability and what she perceived as his deliberate disruptions of her concentration with his complaints. Shooting one of their first scenes together, Bogie turned away from her during a take and shouted, “Hey, Mankiewicz, can you tell this dame to speak up? I can’t hear a goddamn word she says!” To others he grumbled, “She’s giving me nothing to work with.” When not complaining, the sad fact was that Bogart ruined countless otherwise good takes with his racking coughs—warning heralds of the cancer that would kill him three years later (“Many takes,” Edmond O’Brien told Mankiewicz’s biographer Kenneth Geist, “were printed simply for the lines Mankiewicz could get between the coughs”).

  Ultimately more damaging to Ava’s confidence was an inability to make any creative connection with her director. As she saw it, not only did Mankiewicz fail to defend her from Bogart’s antagonism, but he gave her insufficient help in shaping her performance. Her technique as it had haphazardly evolved through the years was an instinctive naturalism, making her character believable by going through the action of the scene and reacting to the other actors with the conviction that it was real life. But Mankiewicz’s scenes seemed to thwart this approach—it struck Ava that much of his Maria was all poses and speechifying. Too often there was nothing to act, only talk and more talk. She needed more support to bring Maria Vargas to life, and the director would only realize it too late. To Kenneth Geist he considered with regret this failing: “It was almost unforgivably stupid of me not to recognize how really nervous and sensitive she was. She
was aware that this was a tremendously difficult part and she was terribly insecure about her ability to do it. I think I failed her, in one respect, because I didn’t give her enough security.” A passing, meaningless wisecrack by Mankiewicz when he happened to catch her perched on a sofa on the set, apparently daydreaming (“You’re the sittingest actress I ever saw”) served as a last straw, and Ava petulantly withdrew her trust in him for the duration. The gulf that existed between them was a blow to Mankiewicz’s confidence as well, for he saw himself as particularly adept at directing women, at understanding their nature, their psychological needs as artists (and apparently their physical needs too: Bristling at a comparison to George Cukor, famously a “women’s director,” Mankiewicz snapped, “George only befriended female stars. I fucked them”).

  Regardless of personality clashes or questions of ability, giving life to Maria Vargas as written was inherently problematic. Mankiewicz had a blind spot regarding his characters’ logorrhea, and Maria carried a further burden of unbelievability in that her ruminations, in English, were those of a supposedly uneducated madrileña slum girl. In the end it was a part that would have likely given trouble to any actress of whatever talent and with or without carnal knowledge of Joe Mankiewicz.