Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Despite the burden of Bogart and her mistrust of Mankiewicz, there was still much about the production for Ava to enjoy. She had never been more glamorously, stylishly presented in a film, thanks to the series of dazzling costumes—virtually an entire season’s worth of couture—created for her by the Fontanas; and thanks to the magical lighting schemes of Jack Cardiff, his Technicolor palette capturing her glowing beauty with subtle perfection. She felt particularly excited and pleasingly challenged by Contessa s dancing sequence, her first on film. Another case of life and art intersecting, she had, since Pandora, a growing enchantment with the rhythms and passions of flamenco. For three weeks she threw herself into dance rehearsals, and the sequence—filmed in the Tivoli olive groves outside Rome, Ava moving with flair and intensity, daringly erotic in a tight (and in some shots nearly transparent) sweater—would become one of her career favorites.

  Filming continued until April, with two weeks away from Cinecittà on locations at San Remo and Portofino, Ava hauling her entourage (it had expanded now to include Dave Hanna; a driver, Mario; the visiting Doreen Grant; and two or three others whose exact duties or origins were never quite established) to both places. With Sinatra banished, her new boyfriend in hand and the damp winter weather gone, Ava seemed renewed, charged with energy and joy of living. During the stay in San Remo, even after a long day’s work, she would slither into one of her Fontana gowns and with Dominguin and perhaps some others head off in the car for Monte Carlo and a night’s play at the casino. She slept, slowed down, only when absolutely required.

  Toward the middle of production Lauren Bacall—Mrs. Humphrey Bogart—arrived for a visit with her husband. She came bearing a gift for Ava. It was a white coconut cake of the sort Ava traditionally had on her birthday, and it was a gift from Frank. “Betty [Bacall] got a little miffed about that cake,” Verita Thompson would recall. “She had felt responsible for her charge and had hand-carried it by taxi and limousine and several thousand miles across the Atlantic by plane to ensure its arrival in one piece. And when she finally presented it to Ava, Ava thanked her but pushed it aside and didn’t even open the box. The action was so uncharacteristic.” Everyone pondered Ava’s reaction to the cake, and in spite of all the more provocative evidence she had made available to them for weeks—she had been shacked up with a bullfighter, for starters—it was the dismissal of Sinatra’s sentimental gift, the baked, frosted offering sitting forlornly in its unopened box, that became proof to them all that the romance between Frank and Ava was now indisputably over.

  Filming concluded in April. Luis Miguel and much of the entourage had gone home. Eager to be back in Madrid with Luis, Ava hurried through her final obligations, completing the dialogue dubbing in a matter of a few hours and then a still session, shot late at night in a small photo studio at Cinecittà. To Hanna the night was a revelation—she seemed more creative, more inspired there with the still camera than she had been on the film set. She confidently took charge of the session, arranged the proper mood enhancements (a portable bar and a record player and records), chose her own costumes and props. Hanna: “She even whipped off her slip to show her figure to better advantage in one form-fitting gown and slyly put Vaseline in the crease of her bosoms to highlight them. The evening was a tour de force and I could see that Ava was really at home in front of the still camera, that her affinity for it seemed to have been born in her.”

  She extended her modeling career with a playful surprise for the Fontana sisters. At an afternoon fashion show for the house, Ava turned up unannounced on the runway in one of the outfits designed for her movie, strutting and flouncing in imitation of the other models, as the audience of wealthy patrons watched in astonishment. A newspaper reported that she “cavorted hoydenishly backstage before and after the show.”

  Now, returned to Madrid, she could devote herself to the new romance without distraction. She took a two-room suite at the Castellana Hilton and for a week she and Dominguin were seldom out of it—seldom out of the bed, to be exact. Feelings, responses that had shut down inside her in the declining days with Sinatra were now reignited. Night and day they crawled over each other like two happy, concupiscent kittens. “If I was part of Luis Miguel’s convalescence,” she would write, “he was part of mine after the goring Frank and I had given each other.”

  They liked each other, and it was such a relief. It didn’t have to be love, did it? Not that goddamn word that made everything crazy and out of control. They laughed, they drank, they fucked, they had a wonderful time. “I was his girlfriend, he was my guy; it was as simple as that.”

  Gentle, boyishly playful, with a wicked sense of humor and a penchant for practical jokes (he was particularly amused by getting Bappie innocently to say to local people certain Spanish phrases that turned out to be wildly obscene), it was difficult to picture him in the grim, life-and-death atmosphere of the corrida. And yet the evidence of his deadly work was there in the flesh: When she first saw him undressed, in the light, she had caught her breath—his legs, his inner thighs, his buttocks were full of deep gouges, missing pieces, and thick red-brown scar tissue, all souvenirs of the brave bulls. Some of the scars looked like the most ragged of repair jobs (emergency surgery was performed in the bowels of the bullring, and the doctors, the matador joked, were veterinarians). In time she would hear the history behind many of those wounds, stories that—even told with Luis Miguel’s usual modest understatement, and in broken English besides—could make you faint with horror. The worst story was one Dominguin himself hated to recall, for the memory often took away his desire for sex for at least twenty-four hours. It was the first time, he explained, that a bull had gored him in the balls. The great angry beast had put the horn right through his cojones and lifted him till his feet left the ground. His cuadrilla had run in and managed to carry him away, and he’d been rushed to the bare-walled, bloodstained dispensary, convulsed with pain. The doctors readied the ether to knock him out before the surgery but Dominguin had refused an anesthetic. He had seen it as a test of will, to stand up to the fear he was feeling and to conquer it or to surrender to it and be ruined, for fear of any kind, the matador believed, ruined you for the arena. The doctors had told him he was insane and then they had given him three handkerchiefs to bite into for the pain and they had poured an entire bottle of iodine over his balls and his scrotum, which was completely torn open and spread out on the operating table. By the end of the operation Dominguin had chewed through the three handkerchiefs and had loosened some teeth in the process. Two days later, in Toledo, he was back in the ring.

  One night in Madrid, in that spring of 1954, Ava had been sleeping in her bed at the Hilton, Luis Miguel cuddled up close behind her, when suddenly she awoke in agony. Dominguin called for help, and she was rushed to the nearest hospital. The pain—an excruciating tearing, biting sensation in her stomach and lower back—was the worst she had ever known. Doctors diagnosed kidney stones, formations of jagged calcium crystals in the urinary tract. The stones would take from a few days to a week to pass from her system—unless they didn’t. Ava, not following her bullfighter’s stoic regimen in times of discomfort, screamed for painkillers.

  She lay there suffering in her hospital bed, intermittently howling curses that even without translation made the Spanish nuns who served as nurses turn crimson. Dominguin became her devoted attendant. He remained with her around the clock, napping on the floor on a small pallet the nuns brought for him. He fretted over her, sang softly in her ear. He had the room filled with fresh flowers. One night she awoke and found him kneeling beside her bed as in prayer, in the dark, staring at her with wide, moist eyes. She saw his distraught, devotional expression, the unmistakable look of love, and she could only think, Goddammit, I’ve done it again.

  One day Dominguin disappeared, for a while, and when he returned Ernest Hemingway was with him. Ava recognized the visitor at once, the burly, bearded literary icon, the only writer in the world with the public profile of a movie star. S
he greeted him with enthusiasm . Quite aside from the fact that she had acted in two adaptations of his work, she had also read him from cover to cover—Artie had ordered it in the beginning, yes, but she had gone back to him of her own volition, and A Farewell to Arms

  was possibly her favorite book. She’d even tried to interest her studio in remaking it.

  Writer A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s buddy and part of his entourage in town for the Feria de San Isidro bullfights, had come along to visit Ava in the hospital. “She was being very crabby on the phone when we got there,” he remembered, “talking to Hollywood, cursing up a storm. There was some picture they wanted her to do, and she was not interested and telling them what they could do with it. She’s screaming all these four-letter words into the phone while the nuns are all around plumping up her pillows. I must say, as everyone already has, she was gorgeous. And to listen to her talk, she was funny and very irreverent.”

  Ava hung up the phone and beamed at Hemingway, beckoning him to sit with her on the bed. “Ernest!”

  Ava thanked him profusely for coming and informed all present that she had been in two movies based on Hemingway stories, and one of them had made her a star.

  “ The Killers was okay,” Hemingway said. “But the only good things in Snows of Kilimanjaro were you and the dead cat.”

  They talked about Hollywood, and Ava said living there had driven her to an analyst’s couch. Hemingway said he was afraid of such things.

  “You’ve never been to a shrink?” Ava said.

  Hemingway told her, “My analyst is my Corona Portable Number Three.” His typewriter.

  Dominguin arranged an outing to coincide with Ava’s release from the hospital (the doctors had warned her that two more stones remained to be passed), a trip to the bull-breeding ranch of his friend Antonio Perez. There would be a tienta, a testing of the young toros. They drove out to the countryside in two cars, Hemingway and his wife, Mary, Hotchner and one other traveling companion in one car, and in the other Dominguin, his driver, Ava, and Peter Viertel, the screenwriter and novelist (White Hunter, Black Heart, the classic fictional examination of John Huston) and a friend of Hemingway’s for some years. Viertel had met Ava in California in the midforties, when she was married to Shaw, had swum with her in the pool at the Tudor-style mansion.

  Arriving at the Perez ranch, everyone proceeded to the plaqua, a miniature bullring, and Ava stood with Hemingway and some others at the barrera, where they could see the bulls coming into the ring. Hemingway explained the proceedings, how they would test the young animals with a kind of practice fighting to gauge their potential ferocity and courage, and how the breeders wOuld take notes and decide which of the young stock were meant for the corrida and which were not. Between bulls there was small talk, Hemingway eager to hear juicy gossip about this or that Hollywood actress, and the two traded African adventure stories (Hemingway had not long ago been in a plane crash in the jungle coming back from a safari, and initially newspapers around the world had declared him dead). Hemingway by now called her “Daughter,” which struck Ava with a particular warmth as it had been the way she was always addressed by her father. She in turn began calling him—as most of the others in his party did—”Papa.” They got along very well. Mary Hemingway, after an initial suspiciousness (ordinarily, according to Hotchner, “Mary hated any woman that was acceptable to Ernest…just a ball of jealousy”), took a liking to Ava as well.

  At the tienta Ava was seeing Dominguin in the ring for the first time, though it was a miniature version of the great plazas where he shone before thousands of cheering spectators. There was to be no killing, but he worked the muleta with several animals, and his skill and artistry were evident even under the reduced circumstances. After one graceful performance, Hotchner recalled in his memoir of the writer, Hemingway told Ava, “You see what Luis Miguel did to that cow? He made it into something. He convinced it…made a star out of it. That cow went out of here proud as hell.”

  Ava sighed. “He’s a lovely man, isn’t he?”

  Then Dominguin came to take her into the ring with him. Ava squealed, held back. “She was very reluctant,” said Hotchner. “But he coaxed her. He took her into the ring and had her hold the cape and make some passes at the animal. She was frightened, but Dominguin knew what he was doing, and by the end she was really enjoying herself.”

  “They made a handsome couple,” Peter Viertel would write, “the young movie queen and her bullfighter. Yet I had the suspicion that they were acting out a storybook romance that was expected of them as mythical figures, an expectation that was certain to complicate their relationship in the long run.”

  Hemingway was staying on in Madrid to the end of the feria. Ava was leaving town, going back to America to get her divorce from Frank, and so she went to see the writer once more and say good-bye. Papa invited her to come visit him at his home in Cuba, then asked a special favor: a gift of one of her expelled kidney stones, as a good-luck charm. Ava, rolling her eyes (or so one might hope), said she would see what she could do.*

  On May 24 Ava and Luis Miguel attended the festiva brava, sitting in Miguel’s regular front-row seats. Chenel, considered by some as Spain’s top matador on Dominguin’s retirement, was gored by a bull that day, a horn catching him in the leg, throwing him high in the air, and dropping him down on the hard ground with his thigh ripped open for six inches. From the front row, on the costlier sombra, or shaded side of the arena out of the glare of the afternoon sun, you could see in sharp focus where the bull had ripped the flesh, and you could see the blood rippling down on his leg and dark stains on the sand beneath him.

  Later Ava and Dominguin went back to the Castellana Hilton and they made love and in the morning she kissed him good-bye and flew to America.

  It was going to be her last visit to Hollywood, she told everyone. She was going to straighten things out with the studio, sign on the dotted line to end her marriage, and then she was going back to Europe for good.

  Metro was again displeased with Ava Gardner. A film had been planned for her, Love Me or Leave Me, the life story of the Roaring Twenties chanteuse Ruth Etting. Ava told them she would not be doing it. Whatever the project’s merits, she could not see beyond the fact that they intended to have someone else’s voice coming out of her mouth when she sang—still angry after what she saw as her humiliation over the songs in Show Boat, she wanted nothing more to do with any phony MGM musicals. (“I stand there mouthing words like a goddamn goldfish,” she’d squawked at them from Spain, “while you’re piping in some goddamn dubbed voice!”) She had told them at the time that even if she had wanted to go back to Los Angeles and do the Ruth Etting story, she was in a goddamn hospital with goddamn painful kidney stones. They still threatened her with suspension. Dave Hanna had told her that people in Hollywood thought she was faking her illness to keep from working. Now she was carrying with her from Madrid a copy of the hospital X-ray of her insides with the stones visible. She was going to give the X-ray to Dore Schary; maybe he’d like to release it to Hedda Hopper or to one of the newspapers for their Sunday supplements.

  After her acrimonious meeting with Metro she was preparing to leave LA for Nevada to take up the necessary six weeks’ residence for an expedient divorce, when who should pop up before her but Howard Hughes, like a genie out of a bottle she thought she had long ago thrown back into the ocean. Hughes, as usual, knew everything that was happening, had happened, without her having to say a word. He looked like the cat who’d made a good dinner of the canary, barely containing his pleasure in the knowledge that the marriage to the hated Sinatra was in its final weeks.

  “I understand you’re headed out to Lake Tahoe,” Hughes said with a thin-lipped smile.

  She had decided against going to Las Vegas (where she had long ago effected her severance from Mickey Rooney) when she learned the extraordinary news that all three of her husbands, exes and present, were currently playing in the small desert town, making it just a little
too crowded even for a woman with a penchant for dramatic encounters.

  Hughes said, “You let me take care of everything. I own or lease half the houses on that lake anyway.”

  Hughes explained that he was very busy with some delicate business matters at the moment—among the items on his plate was a dangerous feud with the secretary of defense over aircraft contracts, a risky scheme to buy RKO Pictures outright from its nosy stockholders, the establishment of a multi-million-dollar hospital charity/tax dodge, and the overseeing of the invention of a new three-dimensional camera that would best exploit the well-known chest of actress Jane Russell. But, Hughes told Ava, he hoped to have time to visit her out at Tahoe very soon. Hughes said they had a lot of catching up to do now that she was going to be a free woman again.

  This all happened just a few weeks after Hughes had planned to marry Kathryn Grayson—Ava’s bosomy buddy from Show Boat—until Grayson experienced a premonition of tragedy and called it off at the last minute (as it happened, her young nephew would have a fatal accident at exactly the hour planned for the wedding). Not that Howard was as free of female entanglements as he hoped to be to renew his romantic pursuit of Ava. There was sexy ingenue Terry Moore, who claimed to have married Hughes in a shipboard ceremony, and he had stashed about two dozen starlets around LA waiting for a promised big break in movies. And as Hughes was preparing the vacation home for Ava’s comfortable stay on the shore of Lake Tahoe near Zephyr Cove, while she waited for her divorce, he was simultaneously getting his longtime, on-again-off-again girlfriend Jean Peters ensconced in another lakeside house up the road. Peters, the beautiful star of Pickup on South Street and Three Coins in the Fountain, had recently impulsively fallen in love and gotten married to someone, and now, thirty-some days later, Hughes was helping her to get a divorce, too (as it is said, to get a job done send the busy man).