Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Knowing she would probably regret it eventually, Ava agreed to let Howard take care of her lodgings and sundries in Nevada, and in the second week of June she and her maid, Reenie, drove out to Lake Tahoe and settled into the luxurious cottage provided for the necessary six-week stay.

  Hughes being Hughes, he immediately assigned someone to keep Ava under twenty-four-hour surveillance. This job went to a new associate, Robert Maheu, chief exec of his own exclusive investigative agency with important connections in the capital and especially at the CIA. It was absurd to hire a high-priced Washington-based operative of Maheu’s stature to do work normally handled by a cheap hotel dick, but Maheu savored his new relationship with the eccentric Hughes and so took the job and then subcontracted it to a local private eye in Nevada. The house on Lake Tahoe had already been wired with microphones before Ava’s arrival, so it only remained for the Zephyr Cove detective to set up shop in the woods near the house, keep tabs on the actress’s visitors, and follow her when she went away. He would sit there behind some bushes, occasionally taking a look through his binoculars at Ava Gardner sunbathing or drinking on the patio, then take a bite of one of the sardine sandwiches his wife had packed for him, once in a while having to get up and head for his car and follow the movie actress into town or over to the Cal-Neva casino.

  By that summer of 1954, the world had become Frank Sinatra’s oyster once more. In March he had run up onto the stage of the Pantages Theater and accepted the gold statue for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity. He could pick and choose now from among dozens of offered film projects. He was again a popular recording artist and the darling of the music critics. The money thrown at him, by movie studios, television networks, Vegas casinos and theaters and nightclubs around the world, amounted to an incalculable fortune, millions many times over. Women— from chorus girls to the socially registered—threw themselves at him wherever he went. About the only thing in the world he could not have was Ava Gardner.

  He had found out about the bullfighter, thrown a tantrum when she’d told him, torn a room to pieces. And then he had come back from Europe, knowing it was all over, wanting to move on. “What else can I do?” he said to Jimmy van Heusen. “This broad is gonna kill me. Who the fuck does she think she is? I swear to you, no woman will ever do this to me again.” But it was easier said than done. He couldn’t get past her. Either he had to have her back, to love her, to have her loving him again. Or it was anger and resentment, needing to get even with her, to make her suffer as he had suffered, to find a way to show her he was the one who decided when things were done.

  “One night we went to Frank’s for a dinner party,” recalled Betty Comden, the lyricist and the co-screenwriter of On the Town and Singin ‘ in the Rain. “And we saw that one of the rooms was filled with pictures of Ava, and around the pictures were lit candles. It was like the altar of a little church.”

  On the other hand: Irving “Swifty” Lazar, the dapper, diminutive Hollywood-based literary agent, was Frank’s neighbor at his new digs, an apartment house on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Lazar had come home very late one night and saw that Sinatra’s door was open and the lights on. Wondering if there was a problem, he stuck his head through the doorway and saw Sinatra by himself, evidently very drunk, slumped in an armchair, holding a gun. Cautiously Lazar stepped inside and as he did he saw that Sinatra was aiming his gun—an air gun, it turned out to be—at three large portrait images of Ava he had propped up on the floor. The three faces of Ava were full of pellet holes where Sinatra had been shooting at them—all night long, as it appeared.

  One day Sinatra showed up at the house where Ava was staying on Lake Tahoe. As Robert Maheu would recall the story, the detective staking out the place had looked through his binoculars, and there was Sinatra entering the house. The detective had been particularly instructed to keep an eye out for this man and so he watched with diligence now as Sinatra went inside with Gardner, catching glimpses of them moving about within the house. Sinatra, Maheu figured, was trying to persuade Ava to drop the divorce business and to get back together with him. “He was successful enough,” Maheu wrote, “to persuade her to go on a romantic little boat ride with him on the lake.” Under the circumstances, as Maheu saw it, the practical thing for the private dick to do was to stay by the shoreline out of sight and wait for them to return with the rented boat. “Instead…my man impulsively rented one himself and went out after them!”

  Sinatra quickly realized that they were being pursued on the lake and, according to Maheu, “went nuts.” There was a nautical chase, and the detective was barely able to get back to shore and disappear ahead of the angry, pursuing crooner. Sinatra departed Tahoe soon after. Ava had not changed her mind.

  As the weeks rolled by, boredom set in. Longing for some attention and affection, Ava put through a call to her Madrid friend Betty Wallers, with instructions to tell Miguel to come to America at once and keep her company. Days later, on July 7, Dominguin arrived from Spain.

  The couple had a lusty reunion. For a week they sunbathed, swam, went fishing, went to bed. At the casino Luis Miguel held her hand as she played roulette. Columnist Earl Wilson and his wife, visiting from New York, paid a brief visit.

  Ava introduced them to the great matador and then sent him to refill her drink. “He’s trying to learn English,” she said. “Miguel, get a piece of ice. A piece of ice—that’s not the same as a piece of ass.”

  One night she and Dominguin had been out to the casino, Ava had been drinking too much, and a fight broke out. It wasn’t that they had never fought before. Ava had lost her temper many times about something or other, and she had screamed and stamped her feet, but Miguel had usually been unimpressed or else amused by her theatrics, smiling at her while she ranted, not understanding or not trying to understand, and usually just waiting for an opportune moment to slip his hand around her rear end. On one occasion witnessed by Jack Cardiff, when he and his wife were visiting the couple at Dominguin’s hacienda outside Madrid, Ava had lost her temper and wouldn’t shut up. The matador had finally gone over to her, swept her up in his arms, and thrown her fully dressed into the swimming pool.

  On the night of the big argument at Lake Tahoe, Ava had turned her back on him, stormed off to her bedroom, and slammed the door. Obviously apprised of everything that went on in the house (aside from planted microphones, Ava suspected the servants were Howard Hughes’s paid informants), Hughes’s man Johnny Meyer showed up as if on cue, lending Luis Miguel a shoulder to cry on. Meyer carefully pricked the easygoing Dominguin where he was vulnerable—his pride and his native machismo—urging the bullfighter to teach Ava a lesson, make her know he didn’t stand for such behavior from a female; take it from Johnny, it was the only way to deal with an American woman. Soon Meyer had hustled Dominguin out of the house and off to the airport, where an aircraft was already waiting to fly him away.

  A reporter caught up with him in Los Angeles. Were he and Ava Gardner intending to marry? “No marriage to Ava,” Dominguin said. “I am too infirm.” (Writer Peter Viertel had agreed to let Dominguin stay with him in Los Angeles and asked his friend Kathy Parrish, wife of director Robert Parrish, to meet the bullfighter at the airport. She had met him once before, in Madrid. “He was wearing his ‘suit of lights’ then,” she recalled, “and looked so romantic, like the ultimate hero. When I picked him up after he’d left Ava he looked miserable and as romantic as a dentist.”)

  With the competition seemingly eliminated and before she had a chance to import God knew what other men she had lined up, Howard Hughes returned to plead his case. One evening they went out on the lake, floating about under a midsummer moon. Howard presented her with a gift, a fabulously expensive sapphire-and-diamond ring. Then, as she was languidly modeling the ring under the moonlight, Howard proposed.

  “Come on, how about it? You’ve been married three times already, don’t you think it’s my turn?”

  “Your turn?” Ava said, emitting one
of her earsplitting cackles. “Howard…honey…you crack me up. You make it sound like I’m a pony ride at the county fair.”

  Hughes waved an arm. “Don’t make fun of me! I’ve been waiting over ten years for you to come to your senses. Just think of the life you could have with me. I’ll supply you with every luxury imaginable. Why don’t you be sensible and let us settle this thing. Eventually you could learn to love me if you gave it half a chance.”

  Her six weeks’ residence in Nevada completed, Ava could apply for her divorce. Newsmen had staked out the courthouse on the day she was scheduled to testify. She didn’t show. With the advice of her lawyer and accountants she had decided to ask Frank for repayment of the money she had loaned him through their time together. She was not asking for alimony, property settlement, nothing. But she felt it was only right for him to repay some of the extravagances he had grandiosely insisted upon and for which she had picked up the tab (there was also the time she had come back from Europe on his account, incurring a huge tax burden as a result). Many times he had told her he would pay her back when he could, so why not make good before they went their separate ways? He was becoming wealthy beyond belief; with his new contracts and movie deals and his piece of a Vegas casino, he could certainly afford to set things straight with her.

  But Frank reacted to the suggestion with hostility. That was what it was all about now, baby, money?

  She couldn’t believe he’d say such a thing. It was Frank who had to have money for the power it bought him to make people jump, to pay his way out of problems, to make his waiters and flunkies worship him for those hundred-dollar tips. She had never gone after any of her husbands for money the way other wives had done, despite the urging of her attorneys. If she was interested in money, she fumed, she would have married Howard Hughes any of the fifty times he proposed: Howard who could buy and sell Frank ten times over in a morning and forget about it by the afternoon.

  Working herself into quite a state over Frank’s refusal to make restitution, she simply abandoned the divorce proceedings until things could be settled. Perhaps she might come back and seek a piece of his income after all, the way Nancy had done; that might be quite an annuity in the years ahead. Instead of going to court she abruptly agreed to accompany Howard on a business trip to Florida. In the space of two hours, Ava and Reenie packed, left the Tahoe divorce cottage for the airport, and were headed for Miami. Then Jean Peters, on a separate flight, did the same. And then Jean Peters’s former husband followed her to Miami (but that is another story for another time).

  Howard installed Ava and Reenie at a rented villa in a tony residential neighborhood north of Miami Beach. The two women occupied the two bedroom suites, and when Howard finally arrived to stay with them a couple of days later, he was left with the only remaining sleeping quarters, a small bedroom near the kitchen intended for a maid. The two ladies giggled over the tall tycoon crammed into the servant’s quarters, but they both agreed that he was very sweet to accept the situation without complaint. For two weeks Ava and Reenie did nothing more strenuous than the backstroke in the villa’s kidney-shaped pool. Howard would visit for a day or two, then disappear. Gradually, predictably, Ava grew bored, Howard grew tedious. He was once again becoming strenuous in his desire to take what Ava had no interest in giving. All the old tensions returned to the relationship, Howard poking around at her, seeing if there wasn’t some way his wealth could find a route to her heart, and Ava resenting the very idea that she might put a price on her seduction or her love. One night Reenie had been strolling the grounds when she struck up a conversation with one of the armed plainclothes guards assigned by Hughes to watch over the property and its guests. The talkative guard confided, one hired hand to another, that Mr. Hughes had on the premises some famous zillion-dollar Romanoff necklace that he was going to give to his girlfriend the second she went to bed with him, and so, said the guard, a word to the wise: If the dame in there liked expensive jewelry, she might want to make up her mind and hop under the sheets with the guy before he sent the necklace back to the shop. Whether Ava was really outraged by the idea of Howard sharing such intimate plans for her with the security man, or whether she was simply following the ritualistic next step in a psychological game she and Hughes had been playing with each other for more than a decade is difficult to say. She heard the story let out a growl, and told Reenie to pack them up, they were leaving at once—for Havana.

  Registered at the Nacional under the name Miss Grey, she languished now under the Cuban sun, drank daiquiris in the Floridita, went nightclubbing and gambling with an assortment of new acquaintances. She spent many afternoons and evenings at the Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s hacienda near San Francisco de Paulo. Her nude swims in Papa’s pool became local legend, observed—to judge from all those who would claim through the years to have been eyewitnesses—not only by Papa but by half the men on the island. When David Hanna tracked her down via telephone from Los Angeles to discuss plans for the New York premiere of The Barefoot Contessa, she was restless again, ready for new worlds to conquer. Ava offered an idea that Metro had previously rejected for another film: a Barefoot promotional tour of South America. She had an itch to visit Rio de Janeiro and a couple of other spots down there and liked the idea of someone else picking up the tab. Lacking MGM’s heavy-footed officialism, United Artists responded to the actress’s offer at once and with enthusiasm. As Ava wanted to leave as soon as possible, and the company wanted her in New York for the September premiere, Hanna hurriedly contacted the UA reps in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela to make arrangements, alert the press, and so on. There was an immediate problem with Brazil: It seemed that the country’s leader had shot himself to death—at least that was the official story—and the country was under martial law, revolution reported as imminent. Hanna advised his star of the situation but she was unimpressed, said she was not going to go to South America and not get to visit Rio. After all, the revolution wasn’t even a certainty.

  The tour became a high-water mark, flash point evidence of Ava Gardner as international phenomenon. At city after city her arrival was met with huge crowds, great waves of Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans, so frantic and ecstatic swarming over each airport along the route that they might have been there to greet a messiah. Ava had known from the amount of fan mail and from her box office success in South American countries that she had a particularly strong following there—”They like me because I look Spanish,” she told Hanna. But she was not prepared for the size of the crowds and their emotionality. People lined the routes from the various airports, cheering and tossing flowers. Even the controlled environment of the press receptions held within stately hotel ballrooms often verged on the riotous, fistfights breaking out among reporters vying for a closer glimpse of the beautiful star. At Lima, when Ava’s late arrival coincided with the landing of the president of Peru it was said that even the official military band come to play for the president’s return abandoned the post to join those awaiting the visitor from Hollywood.

  In Rio the crowd at last became uncontrollable, dangerous. Long before the plane even touched down, the police had been overwhelmed, the mob breaking past the fences and barriers to swarm the runway. The passengers on board glimpsed the frightening, extraordinary sight of the landing strip itself lined with people. A landing was somehow made and the aircraft taxied to the stopping point at the terminal. But the runway crew were barely able to place the ramp in position before the crowd moved up. That the screaming mob of men, women, and children did not actually charge up the steps and rush inside the airplane was, under the circumstances, inexplicable. The police at last broke through to the ramp and forced an opening—really a gauntlet—through which the passengers were forced to run. Ava and Dave Hanna waited for the arrival of someone with a plan for the star’s escape, but no one came. Ava grew impatient and decided to brave it out. “They’ll let a woman through,” she said. Hanna felt queasy, glancing down at the unruly crowd, imagining th
em fresh from overthrowing the government, seeing the narrow passage the police made already swallowed up and thinking of the strong possibility of his charge being literally torn to bits. Just before the actress attempted to go out, the pilot came and whisked her out through the opposite side of the plane, where another portable stairway had been brought up.

  Somehow they managed to get her a running start across the field before the mob caught on. She was hurried into a building at one end of the airport where reporters and photographers had been corralled and literally locked up to await a scheduled press conference. The conditions were barely less chaotic than those out on the field. This mob inside, reporters and film crews and assorted interlopers with no connection to the press, now tightened around Ava Gardner in a squirming circle. Cameras blind- ingly flashed directly in faces, and the blazing-hot lights of a television crew fell against the back of a man’s neck, burning hair and flesh. Ava fared badly, helplessly pushed along by the swarm on every side, men thrusting themselves against her from the front and from behind, grabbing, fingers reaching out from between other bodies to pinch and probe her.

  Airport personnel at last appeared to effect some belated rescue. Hobbling with a broken heel, she was ushered down a corridor, out to the street, into a taxi. When the taxi driver failed to get the car moving—with the mob approaching fast—Ava took off her damaged shoe and hit him on the head.

  The fun didn’t end there. The U A rep had booked them into a second- rate hotel—a kickback was suspected—and when Ava demanded her bags be taken downstairs and sent over to the more appropriately luxurious Copacabana Palace, there occurred a brief predawn tussle with the manager of the shoddy place, shouting, drinks thrown in faces and the manager, fearful of the terrible publicity the rejection of his hotel would cause him, preemptively called every newspaper in town to report that Hollywood star Ava Gardner had destroyed her beautiful room during a drunken orgy and had been evicted. The story ran in all the local papers the next day and the day after that had been picked up worldwide. “A warm Latin welcome dropped to subfreezing,” reported UP. “Miss Gardner, her 16 suitcases and her retinue were out in the cold. They left the hotel at the request of the management, which submitted a bill for liquor, a broken table, splintered glasses, smashed pictures and water stains on a wall.”