Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Ava, furious, decided to leave Rio the following evening, three days ahead of schedule. She remained in her suite at the Palace all day and into the night, cursing Brazil and ordering room service. Then, long after midnight, she called David Hanna in his room, said that she had come thousands of miles to see Rio, and she was damn well going to go take a look at the place. The publicist climbed out of bed and got dressed, fearful of not going with her—and fearful of going with her too. A driver took them along the shoreline of broad moonlit beaches and up into the hills, past shantytowns flickeringly lit by open bonfires. At dawn they found a marketplace just stirring to life, and they bought baskets of fresh fruit from the first vendors. They were returning to the hotel, again driving alongside the broad sandy beaches, now lit up red and gold with the rising sun. Ava wanted to go down to the ocean. There was not another soul on the beach and she stood there in the dawning sunlight for a couple of minutes, staring down at the water rolling in and across her bare feet. Dave Hanna sat in the car, watching her through the window, sleepily bemused by the juxtaposition of the gentle image before him, the woman all alone on Copacabana Beach, and the hellish scene at the airport the day before.

  Flying back to the States, they saw that the story of Ava’s drunken, furniture-breaking hotel orgy was still being reported in the American press. Several items mentioned Dave Hanna by name, reporting that Ava Gardner had thrown a glass of booze in his face. He had even received a cablegram from an associate decrying his ordeal and urging him to refuse to work for such a person. Hanna had found it amusing—the number of wrong assumptions in one brief missive. Ava, not so amused, seized on the fact that no one had cabled her a similar message of support. “Not Beatrice, not my agent—no one—not one damned soul. And you know why? Because they believe it.”

  In New York, Dominguin was waiting for her. Lonely and upset, she had put a call through to him from Rio; he’d agreed to meet her in Manhattan. They were happily reunited in a suite at the Drake Hotel, and for two days no one saw them but the room-service waiters. But for all their continued physical compatibility, things had changed. Dominguin had changed: He had come to the conclusion that their informal, live-for- today relationship was an untenable one. He loved her, he wanted to marry her, to have children with her. He proposed; an ultimatum.

  Ava said she was not ready to get married again, and she did not know when she would be ready. Dominguin said he was sorry to hear that and returned to Spain. Before the year concluded he would marry a beautiful dark-haired movie actress from Italy named Lucia Bose; some called her Italy’s answer to Ava Gardner.

  A few days before the Barefoot premiere, Ava got a call from Sammy Davis, Jr. The African-American entertainer, a rising name on the nightclub circuit in the midfifties, had long been a solicitous friend and stalwart supporter of Sinatra’s and had cultivated a friendship with Ava as well, sending her gifts and well-wishing telegrams from the time she and Frank had started going together. Performing at the Apollo Theater uptown, Sammy was going to be named an honorary mayor of Harlem and was hoping to have some famous friends in attendance for the occasion. Ava agreed to be there. She stood on the Apollo stage with a group of black performers and local civic leaders and politicians; she was introduced, met with uproarious cheers from the audience, stepped to the microphone, and hailed Sammy as a great performer.

  Davis, believing that a good way to repay one favor was to ask another, called Ava the next day with a new request: A leading “Negro” magazine was offering to put him on the cover of their December issue posed as Santa Claus if he could get a celebrity friend to be in the picture with him, someone to sort of sit there and pretend to tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas. It would simply be a gas, Sammy said, if Ava was willing to be that friend. The request was a passive-aggressive act on Davis’s part—he had to be all too aware that a white female, certainly a celebrated white female love goddess, did not readily pose for photos perched on the knee of a black Santa Claus without the potentiality of dramatic repercussions, not in the United States in the autumn of 1954. Had one of Ava’s PR tacticians heard the suggestion, he would have ruled it out at once, but MGM was still giving her the cold shoulder and providing no advice at the moment, and David Hanna was just then confined to his apartment with a lingering amoebic souvenir of South America. Ava—indifferent or oblivious or defiant of racist conformity—told Sammy she would do it. The next day a photographer and crew arrived at the Drake Hotel along with a magazine editor, then Sam, his press agent, and assorted hangers-on. The crew draped red backdrop everywhere, Davis climbed into his Santa suit, and the pictures were taken. Later everyone sat around the suite to enjoy a cocktail or two. The photographer took up his camera and caught a few shots of the party—casual, candid stuff to include in the magazine, why not—of Ava and Sammy chatting and laughing together, drinks in hand, Ava with her bare foot up on the armrest by Sammy’s leg, and one of Sammy leaning over Ava in her chair, and another with the two of them smiling for the camera, Sammy crouched around behind with his arm around her shoulder and Ava holding his hand.

  As it happened the publication of the pictures in Our World went virtually unnoticed, even with an accompanying article (actually an adapted interview) under Ava Gardner’s byline, provocatively titled “Sammy Sends Me.” The trouble came with the republication of some of those photos in a different context and in a popular—and infernal—publication called Confidential.

  It was Howard Hughes—of course—who was the first to learn of the planned scandal story (his informers spied on the informers). “They are about to do a devastating thing on you in Confidential ,” he told her sadly, “about you and your black lover, Sammy Davis.” (He assumed it to be true, another of her blows to his heart.)

  The piece was titled “What Makes Ava Run for Sammy Davis, Jr.?” (an unwelcome play on the title of Budd Schulberg’s famous novel), and contained the Drake Hotel pictures now with insinuating captions, plus a chronicle of implied erotic encounters between Ava and Davis and Ava and assorted other “colored” crooners and musicians, including Herb Jeffries, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cuban mambo king Perez Prado. (“Dark- skinned gents,” wrote Confidential! s pseudonymous “Horton S treete,” “have been proving their powerful fascination for Ava for years.”) The piece cynically churned together a few facts, some lurid conjecture, and the unquestioned evidence of Ava Gardner’s acquaintance with Davis and a number of jazz musicians. “Everyone saw that thing in Confidential,” recalled Herb Jeffries a half century later. “They tried to link me to her romantically. But as God in heaven is my witness I didn’t know her that way. She was a fan and came to see me in the clubs where I worked. It was very flattering to one’s ego, but I have to tell the truth. She’s dead now, and it would be nice for me to go ahead and lie, because everyone seems to have believed it. But it’s not so. I’ve had enough interesting and strange things happen in my life not to have to lie about anything.”

  However much of Mr. Streete’s work was fantasy, the impact of the article was real and for a moment in time held the potential for a career- rocking scandal. Confidential, with its fresh formula for showbiz gossip as pornography, had not yet been around long enough to have its credibility dismissed out of hand (or its liability tested in court), and the mere existence of the published photos of Ava and Sammy casually holding hands and Davis with his arm around her were a sufficient call to arms for some in the feverishly racialist regions of America. MGM received letters by the thousands complaining of their star’s behavior. “People all over the country said they would never see one of her pictures again,” a Metro exec told journalist Joe Hyams. “The things they called her were disgraceful.” A telegram from the mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, informed the studio of a plan to ban all future Ava Gardner movies from that city, and in Smith- field, North Carolina, it was reported, the chamber of commerce had forthwith removed the motto BIRTHPLACE OF AVA GARDNER from their promotional literature. “Even my own family criticized me,”
said Ava. “And there wasn’t any use in telling them how it happened. They wouldn’t understand. Hell, they wouldn’t even believe it.”

  Metro fretted over the consequences for weeks. The studio attorneys were prepared to launch a lawsuit against Confidential, but Howard Strick- ling, head of publicity and Ava’s longtime ally at the studio, told them to forget it. The magazine was a rag published in a sewer, said Strickling, and no matter what happened they would never pay off and would try to drag the case on for years. The lawsuit would merely bring the story unending publicity all over the world. “The best thing to do,” said the master of ballyhoo, “is ignore it completely.”

  The “scandal” blew away—with Ava soon gone from America and nothing more to add to the story, perhaps people had difficulty remaining incensed. Within certain inner circles of showbiz, however, the story did stay in play for a while longer. Sammy Davis had made voluble public statements regarding the inaccuracy of the Confidential innuendo, and was said to have given Frank Sinatra several heartfelt assurances regarding same. But still, there was talk. People heard things. Sam was legendarily a Sinatra acolyte, an idolatrous mimic—dressed like Frank, sang like Frank, moved and smoked and drank like Frank. It was known to some that Davis also developed a curious, persistent habit of pursuing former female acquaintances of Frank’s, taking ex-Sinatra girlfriends to bed in a kind of ultimate, intimate mimickry of his idol’s life. Pursuing Ava Gardner behind Sinatra’s back would have taken this game of second-hand seduction into more dangerous territory, but some believed Davis was capable of it (it was said, for example, that he continued an affair with Kim Novak even after his life had been threatened by gangsters if he did not give her up). Arthur Silber, Jr. was Davis’s personal assistant, bodyguard, and friend from the 1940s to the 1990s, and lived at Davis’s house in Los Angeles in the fifties. “I used to drive Sammy to wherever he was going and then pick him up at an appointed time,” Silber recalled. “On two nights I dropped him off at Ava’s house in Los Angeles and left him there and he got home by his own means, which was unusual. These were not dinner parties but more in the way of a rendezvous. That was how it looked to me, that was my feeling, knowing Sammy’s habits as I did. It was not something that he was ever going to say much about because of Sinatra, but I had a pretty good idea what was going on.”

  United Artists promoted the release of The Barefoot Contessa as a major cultural event. The publicity campaign had already stirred up great interest, with the memorable posters and advertisements with their sketched rendering of an ecstatic Ava and the printed declaration: “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal.” It was the delirious worldwide hype more than the film itself that confirmed the movie star’s divine ascension. For a moment in time, however brief, no other performer held such a grip on the planet’s imagination.

  Just before Barefoot was ready for release, Howard Hughes threatened UA with a legal injunction to stop the film’s exhibition. Hughes had his lawyer suggest that the Hughes-like Kirk Edwards character “cut too close to the bone” and would be legally actionable as written (the original script included references to the character’s Texas background, to the source of his wealth, to his going into the movie business to meet girls, his various hideaways and more, and a scene of Maria beating up the tycoon that was remarkably like Ava’s actual battle with Hughes in the forties). Editor William Hornbeck was forced to fly to the lab in London to make thirteenth-hour cuts and changes to the sound track (for example, Edwards turned into a Wall S treeter instead of a Texan); Hughes revealed no personal anger, only the need to protect his professional reputation, and actually arranged Hornbeck’s transportation. It is difficult to say whether or not the cuts did any harm to Warren Stevens’s monotonous performance as Edwards.

  At the world premiere in New York, Ava arrived looking glorious in a Fontana creation, publicist David Hanna serving as utilitarian escort (the world’s most beautiful animal unable to find a date!). The premiere screening would be her first view of the film; in Rome she had seen only scattered rushes and those edited scenes she had viewed for the purpose of postdubbing some dialogue. The film played well at the beginning, the audience responding favorably to the dramatic opening and the witty lines, to the glorious painterly style of cinematographer Cardiff, eventually to the arrival of the star in all her sumptuous beauty. Long dialogue exchanges and monologues, some more like spoken essays, began to lessen the film’s initial spell. Shortly after the midway point, Ava nudged Hanna to get her out.

  They stopped by Hanna’s apartment for a drink before heading to the postpremiere party. The publicist waited for some amplification of the star’s reaction to the film or her performance, some show of anger or fear or disappointment to which he would offer the expected calming response. Instead she said nothing about it. The film seemed already gone from her mind, the possible critical response, the response of future ticket buyers, recriminations for the months of work that had been given to the project, the need most stars had for comforting and reassurances at such moments, were of no apparent interest to her.

  The film, as suspected by many who attended the premiere, did not become the road show sensation as planned. Mankiewicz’s Shavian dissection of the worlds of moviemaking and high society was judged too talky and dull by the carriage trade, and too rich for the blood—and too talky—by the common man. It was either too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough. The handling of the decisive matter of the count’s sexual impotence, which sets in place the events that lead to Maria’s murder, was reported to have provoked derisive laughter at some screenings, while at others the audiences were simply unable to grasp what was going on (screenwriter Walter Bernstein recalled seeing the movie in Boston in a theater full of sailors on leave, all of them restively baffled by Rossano Brazzi’s predicament until one cried out, “He’s got no dick! He’s got no dick!”).

  It was, to be sure, a flawed and decidedly verbose film, but one that contained much that was impossible to forget. Visually, the film was a remarkable, glowing object of beauty There was the melancholy beauty of the opening in the rainy Rapallo cemetery, the camera craning above the hillocks of black umbrellas, Bogart/Harry Dawes’s ruefully funny voice-over (a line timed to reflect the 3-D craze: “I go way back—back to when the movies had two dimensions and one dimension—and sometimes no dimension at all.”); Ava’s passionate dance by the gypsy encampment; and the final glimpse of the contessa in death, a dark, exquisite image worthy of Vermeer, with Bogart again, removing the shoes of his beautiful friend and woefully unable to remember the Spanish word for Cinderella.

  Breathtaking to behold, Ava had never looked more beautiful—or more like a star (as Oscar Muldoon, the publicist, says of Maria Vargas— whether she was “born with it or got it from a public drinking cup, she had it.”). Ava Gardner’s physical presence, her visual impact on the screen, was stunning. Her performance, however, appeared inhibited, remote, evidencing her difficulties with the role and the lack of rapport with Mankiewicz; though, to be optimistic, the ultimate enigmatic quality of Ava’s Maria could be judged as at least partly intrinsic to Mankiewicz’s conception, his contessa a case study observed, reflected upon, not an intimate portrait.

  As with Pandora, the film found its most fervent admirers among the cinephiles of France. “Brilliant, intelligent, and elegant,” wrote François Truffaut. “One of the most beautiful portraits of woman ever filmed, in the person of Ava Gardner, Hollywood’s most exquisitely beautiful actress.” The Barefoot Contessa was equally adored by Jean-Luc Godard; Mankiewicz’s film, with its erudite dialogue, philosophical discourse, its glamorous Italian setting, and aestheticized visuals, would be the template for Godard’s 1963 masterpiece, Le Mépris (Contempt).

  The day after the premiere, Ava appeared at the Capitol Theater to sign autographs for the film’s first patrons. Hundreds of men and women streamed up Broadway to the Capitol foyer, and though there was the occasional anxious scuffle as the people caught their first sight of th
e movie star, it remained a civil gathering. Ava looked over the orderly crowd, turned to her publicist and winked. “It was more fun in Rio,” she said.

  United Artists, now aware that their film needed all the extra help it could get, endorsed sending Ava on a second international tour, this one to touch down in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rome, Stockholm, and Berlin, culminating in London for Contessa s British premiere. There was no repeat of the apocalyptic conditions in South America. After a first, frivolous bad impression of Tokyo from the air (“Hell! It looks like North Carolina,” she told Hanna. “I hate this place already!”), she came to much enjoy the brisk modern city and the civilized fans who bowed and offered little slips of paper with adoring, handwritten poems. She appeared onstage in Tokyo and enchanted the audience with her endorsement of the local custom of removing one’s shoes when entering a home—at which point she happily removed her own and continued the appearance barefoot. In Japan (and later in Germany) she arranged to make appearances at a U.S. military base and hospital, putting on a little show “for the boys,” singing her two songs from Show Boat plus a rendition of “One for My Baby,” a thing her “old man” had recorded back in the forties. In Hong Kong she charmed the gathered crowd by appearing in a traditional Chinese dress, a custom-made silk number with a slit up one leg. At her hotel she ran into another Hollywood American, Bill Boyd, the great Hopalong Cassidy, and at dinner Boyd presented Ava with the tin button and documentation to make her an official member of Hoppy’s International Fan Club.