Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  She arrived in London in January, having logged 49,639 miles in the air. Reporters gathered around for the usual inquest.

  At thirty-two,” Ava told them, “I’m the second oldest actress at MGM. At the studio they call me ‘Mother Gardner.’ “

  “Create? I don’t create anything. I leave that to the scriptwriter and the director. I’m not an actress. I have no theories about the job. I just do what it tells me to do in the script. I read it through and usually it is a terrible chore, the same old cliches over and over again.”

  “I make films for the money.”

  “I owe my success to luck.”

  “My mother and father had the happiness I hope to find for myself someday.”

  “I still believe that the most important thing in life is to be loved.”

  Released by United Artists into the custody of MGM once more, she was immediately to begin work on a new film, Βhowani Junction, playing the Anglo-Indian heroine of John Masters’s best-selling novel. Set in the turbulent period prior to Indian independence from Britain, in a North Indian hub full of religious and political tensions and violent rival insurgencies, the story centered around the conflicting allegiances—cultural, national, and personal—of returning Women’s Army Corps soldier Miss Victoria Jones, daughter of an Anglo father and Indian mother. Jones’s tripartite identity crisis is explored in romances with men from each of her three worlds, first with a boorish Anglo-Indian, next with a militant Sikh, and finally with an imperious British colonel. The novel was considered by some, mainly Indian intellectuals and politicians, as controversial—racist, imperialist, and/or insulting. The negative response among Indians seemed largely centered around the “airing dirty laundry” aspect of the delicate mixed-race issue and on the fact that the fictional half-Indian Miss Jones had a very active sex life. Others felt that, despite his own service to the Raj, Masters was in fact understanding of all sides in his story and clearly sympathetic to the plight of the Anglo-Indians, and to his heroine, who narrates much of the novel. Bhowani s ingredients—a strong female protagonist, dramatic historical backdrop, scenes of sex, riot, a train wreck, an attempted rape and an attempted assassination—offered the possibility of a subcontinental Gone With the Wind, and Metro was providing the budget for an epic production. It was certainly strong, exciting material, and the character of Victoria Jones one of the most complex and nuanced of Ava’s career.

  The director assigned was George Cukor (whose distinguished filmog- raphy included Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Philadelphia Story, and Adam’s Rib), coming to the project direct from his masterful work on the remake of A Star Is Born with Judy Garland. That project had in effect sponsored the reinvention of Cukor as an exciting visual stylist, working for the first time in color and wide screen and with the contributions of the famed photographer George Hoy ningen-Huene as color consultant. Bhowani, too, would benefit from Hoyningen-Huene (and brilliant cinematographer Freddie Young) and from Cukor’s new visual adventurism as well as from the decision to make the film on authentic locations. Reasonably authentic, anyway: The original plan to shoot in India was thwarted by a prickly new government determined to have a say in the film’s controversial content; Metro made a deal with a cooperative Pakistan instead, and it was arranged that the film would be shot in the ancient Punjabi capital city of Lahore.

  Playing the men in Victoria Jones’s life were Stewart Granger, Metro’s swashbuckler du jour, as the cruel-to-be-kind British colonel Rodney Savage; Bill Travers (an actor from whom the studio was expecting great things, although Cukor was not, and openly disdained the casting choice) as the priggish but ultimately redeemed Anglo-Indian, Patrick; and a young stage actor, Francis Matthews, picked by Cukor to play Ranjit, the sexy Sikh (Cukor claiming to have tested a number of Indian actors for the part, all of them striking him as like “Armenian opera singers”).

  Renowned for his rapport with actresses, Cukor had directed to great effect most of the Metro movie queens of the last twenty-five years, from Garbo to Lana Turner (“Every bitch on the lot except Lassie,” as he put it to Ava), and he was very much looking forward to this first collaboration with the studio’s current grand dame. She began the relationship with her back up, as she had hoped for a bit of time off after her draining round-the- world tour, and Cukor had been abrupt in telling her to report for “character-building” preproduction chores. Starting in the first week of January, while berthed at the Savoy in London, Ava met with a speech coach for help in creating a believable rendition of Victoria Jones’s British Indian accent; and on several occasions she was taken to a military base out of town to spend time with a Women’s Army Corps unit, kitted out in her uniform for the film and following a few genuine WACs on their assignments.

  In February members of the production began making their way to Pakistan. There would be in total over one hundred British and American personnel sent to the distant location. Ava had arranged to fly out with Stewart Granger, and took a brief sightseeing stopover with him in Copenhagen. Ava remembered Granger (known to friends as “Jimmy”) as “great fun…talkative, assertive and a nice guy under it all” (the “under it all” likely a reference to what some considered Stewart Granger’s sometimes overbearing surface). Although in Hollywood Ava had been socially friendly with both Granger and his actress wife, Jean Simmons, he would claim that she had blithely attempted to seduce him early in their Bhowani sojourn, floating into his hotel room, diaphanously clad, for a late-night heart-to-heart, a temptation Granger said he had abruptly curtailed out of a sense of spousal rectitude.

  Ava: “Don’t you find me attractive?”

  Granger: “You’re probably the most attractive woman in the world, but I’m married.”

  Ava: “Oh, fuck Jean.”

  Granger: “I’d love to, darling, but she’s not here.”

  Ava remembered the situation a bit differently in her memoir, recording that Granger had acted silly and jumped the gun in his fear of her seductive powers (“Honey,” she said she told him, “you’ve been reading the wrong press clips”).

  In Lahore the Bhowani company was billeted at the venerable Faletti’s Hotel on the edge of the commercial district, the city’s finest lodging, offering all the modern conveniences of the year 1880. Lahore was an ancient city, containing magnificent palaces and mosques and elaborate gardens and an array of fascinating architectural works in the style known as “Mughal Gothic”; it was also a city beset by hectic overcrowding and squalor. “There were terribly poor people, and the sights you saw were detailed suffering, terribly upsetting,” actor Francis Matthews recalled. “To those who were used to London or Beverly Hills it was a damned hard town to live in,” remembered Eva Monley, a veteran of the Mo gambo shoot, who had left her native Kenya to become a part of the Anglo- American film world for the next fifty years. “People didn’t like the climate or the dirt. It was a hard case if you didn’t know that kind of habit, a lot of people came down ill. We had a very difficult time with the food. Cukor simply refused to eat it, and I couldn’t eat much of it either, so we were always sitting together for meals of boiled eggs and not much else.”

  Ava was given the hotel’s grandest two-room suite, room 55—forever after to be known as the “Ava Gardner Suite”—with veranda, multiple overhead fans, bathtub, and private refrigerator (which she would stock with foodstuffs air-shipped from California). But even this luxury failed to bring much comfort. The climate was hellishly humid, and when the electricity failed on many evenings, the fans went from listless to motionless and the temperature would rise another twenty degrees, making sleep impossible—that plus the all-night howling of what the room servant assured her were rabid prowling dogs. Other creatures made their presence known as well. One afternoon a buffet luncheon was held in the hotel gardens with Ava, Granger, Cukor, and many local dignitaries in attendance: No sooner had the great platters been laid out than a black cloud swept over the lawn and descended on the buffet table, squawking carrion c
rows, sending the guests running in a panic as the birds helped themselves to the feast and even plucked food from people’s hands. One night Ava emerged from the bathtub after a long soak and was attacked by a large bat. The flapping, echolocating animal, determined to make a new home in the actress’s chestnut hair, chased her from the bathroom and outdoors onto the open veranda. As the maid raced after her to cover Ava’s naked body with a towel, a hotel employee responded to her screams and attacked the flying intruder with a tennis racket (“I think that was all a plan of hers,” Eva Monley joked, “just to run around with no clothes on”).

  Conditions away from Faletti’s were not as comfortable. “Outside it was teeming,” Ava would recall. “Flies, smells, carts, horses, and masses of humanity.” As it did many others in the company, the damp, unrelenting heat left Ava continually sweating and exhausted while she worked, and she was often working while just recovered from or just about to fall prey to a bout of fever or dysentery. Sometimes the level of physical discomfort was caught on camera. Once, for a shot filmed in town, in which she was to rush out around a corner from off-camera, she had unknowingly backed into some open sewage, and when she reappeared in camera range she came forth vomiting.

  Few in the cast or crew did not become ill, often causing delays or awkward changes in the shooting schedule. At one point the entire company of British Stuntmen was confined to sickbed. Stewart Granger’s assistant/bodyguard Bob Porter contracted meningitis and nearly died (“rescued” from a local hospital, he was nursed back to health by Ava and others at the hotel). Francis Matthews, who managed to evade the plague of intestinal and other ailments, fell unconscious from heat exhaustion. Director Cukor was often under the weather, but refused to take any time off, keeping himself going with a variety of pills that put him to sleep, woke him up, and fortified him against pain (“Cukor had so many medicines with him,” remembered Matthews, “that some of the locals thought he was a doctor”).

  Many exterior shots called for huge crowd scenes, their coordination at times slowing the work to a crawl, which was no fault of Cukor, who directed the hundreds of extras with the precision of a skilled troop commander, waving a few pages of rolled-up script like a field marshal’s swagger stick.

  Several sequences in the film took place in and around the clamorous railway depot, and crowds of more than a thousand were required to fill out the background. The extras were recruited and given chits for the next morning’s shoot in the evening when filming had concluded for the day. Each evening there was an endless queue of Lahoris eager for the work— the modest day’s pay was for them the equal of an average weekly salary. Some nights there were fights and riots, and the police had to be called in to restore order—to some in the Bhowani company it looked so familiar from the script that the rioters might have been rehearsing.

  The oppressive atmosphere encouraged frayed tempers. Stewart Granger maintained a running feud with Cukor (who was known to have wanted Trevor Howard for the part of Colonel Savage), disparaging him personally (“Granger,” as one member of the production put it, “did not want to work with a man who was going to give him ‘infections’ “) and professionally as the wrong man for the job. “Here he is, a little homosexual Jew from Brooklyn,” Granger recalled to the director’s biographer, “and I’m playing an English colonel, and my father was a colonel in the Indian Army, and I was in the English Army, and he’s telling me how to say the lines.”

  Granger, perhaps lost in familial memories, at times behaved as if unaware that the days of the Raj had passed, that the Pakistanis were no longer colonial supplicants. One incident, which might easily have come directly from the film they were making, involved a spat over attentions paid to Ava Gardner by a young Anglo-Pakistani officer. Shah Rafi Alam, the son of the inspector general of West Punjab and a dashing star of the Lahore Polo Club, was enjoying a new acquaintance with the visiting American movie actress, to the evident displeasure of her costar. When at one point Ava somehow found herself sitting in Alam’s lap, Stewart Granger had had enough and a brawl ensued. The two scuffled and swung at each other, and the Pakistani officer was said to have landed a solid blow to Granger’s nose before onlookers rushed in and pulled them apart.

  Part of Granger’s complaint about Cukor was that the director had lost sight of the Masters novel, sending the film off in too many directions, many of them emphasizing Victoria and not the colonel. It was true that Cukor had begun filming, against his usual procedure, with a script in disarray. Unhappy with the first version Metro had provided (written by Robert Ardrey), he had gotten Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat to start from scratch but too late—the screenwriters were still working on many scenes as Cukor had to leave them behind and start off across the globe looking at locations, and after that the filming had to begin. The situation left the director to discover the nuance, the deeper meaning, or the truth of certain scenes through instinct and improvisation with his actors, rather than through the usual long conferences talking things out with the writers. Considering Cukor’s traditional empathy for actresses—and his ongoing feud with Granger—it was not surprising that he focused so much attention on the performance and presentation of Ava Gardner. He began working with her, he began filming her, he began considering the results as captured on celluloid. He became fascinated by her. It might be asked if he had ever met an actress who did not fascinate him? (Yes. Lana Turner.) But Ava offered Cukor more than he had expected: extraordinary beauty, of course, and intelligence, and what he saw as a quality of fatalism, of desperation, and a magic on film that he likened to what he had seen long ago in Garbo. Why the hell had no one done anything about this before? Cukor wanted to know. The girl could do marvelous things—she could do marvelous things without doing anything at all, just a turn of her lips, the set of her eyes. He came up with shots just to see how she would look, how she would respond. In scenes like those during Victoria Jones’s immersion in Indian culture, scenes with the actress clad in colorful silk saris, Cukor was so enraptured by the look of her that—like Albert Lewin and others before—it was difficult for him to stop shooting, always the urge for one more angle, one more close-up, and then another. As they worked together, the sensuality Cukor saw in his star emboldened him to expand the film’s love scenes, almost compulsively adding elements of daring eroticism that he had to know would not escape the censor’s scissors. They improvised a passionate sequence with Ava and Bill Travers that Cukor likened to a later, groundbreaking moment in Louis Malle’s Les Amants-, Ava’s face in close-up, reacting to what is implied to be Travers in an act of cunnilingus. “Marvelous erotic scenes,” Cukor would recall. “All cut by the censors.”

  “He was very concerned with her,” said Francis Matthews. “He was extremely helpful; he would take her aside for long sessions of talk about the scene. He was sure this was going to be an Oscar-winning performance for her. He would talk to her quietly for a very long time and try and inspire her. And when he was done he would turn to give me direction, which usually amounted to him yelling, ‘Try and get it right!’ “

  Matthews, the handsome young British actor Cukor had cast to play Victoria’s Sikh lover Ranjit Kasel, was flown out to Pakistan with Lionel Jef-fries (playing the villainous Lieutenant McDaniel) several weeks after location filming had begun. He recalled: “When Lionel and I got there Cukor asked us to have dinner with him in his suite. He and Hoyningen- Huene, the color consultant, were an item, and they shared a large suite at the hotel. Cukor did not turn out to be a particularly nice man to me. I have my suspicions why: At the time I was a pretty good-looking man and he was rather predatory. So there was some tension, which was not my fault, you see.

  “When we left George’s that first night, Lionel and myself, we were coming along the arched corridor below, it was an open terrace, and we walked right into Ava Gardner. She gave us a big greeting. ‘Hiya boys! I’m Ava!’ And she was just a vision. And she said, ‘I’m really glad to see you guys. It’s gotten pretty dull around here.�
�� And she talked and joked with us, and she was terribly funny and she was absolutely adorable.

  “I didn’t see her again right away because George Cukor sent me off to Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, to do some studying of the religion, to help me understand the character. He wanted everything in the film to feel authentic. So off I went to meet with the gurus, and I was allowed inside the temple and I observed the ceremonies. And Cukor also had me working with an Indian adviser to help me with an accent, and I went through the script with him phonetically so I would sound like an Indian, and I learned from him how to speak with a very strong Indian accent. Which it turned out George wouldn’t let me do at all. The first time I opened my mouth for a scene he screamed at me, ‘What’s with that goddamned chinky Chinese accent!’

  “So I had been away, and I’d returned from Amritsar. I hadn’t started acting yet. I was in my room, it was late in the evening, almost midnight, and I got a phone call. It was Ava. She said, ‘I’m sorry, did I disturb you? I know it’s late but I can’t sleep, and it’s so damn hot. How do you feel about going out into the town with me? I’m not shooting tomorrow, and I’ve been stuck in my room and I want to go out!’

  “So, of course, I said, ‘Yes, Ava. All right. I’m not shooting tomorrow either. I’ll call a cab.’ She said, ‘No, I want to go out and find a tonga.’ Which was a covered horse-drawn carriage. One of the studio publicity men caught up with us. He said, ‘Listen here. Ava’s told me that she’s going into the town with you.’ He was very concerned. I was very green and young and didn’t know there were any rules about such things. But I learned. She was considered rather like royalty. They watched over her and were afraid of her mingling with ordinary people. It was just like in the film Roman Holiday. And the publicity man said, ‘She wants to do this, and we don’t think this is a good idea. You’d better take good care of her.’