Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “We went anyway. We were gone for hours, explored all over the city. At about one or two o’clock in the morning Ava said she wanted to see one of the houses with the ‘dancing girls.’ That was a euphemism. They were really brothels.

  “We headed deep into the old native quarters, very murky. And a guy stopped us. He said, ‘I know who is this lady. She should not be here. This is very dangerous.’ We told him what we were doing, and he climbed into the tonga with us, saying, ‘I will take you where you want to go. But you must let me protect you. It is very bad here.’ And he took us to a place. A very simple place with a couple of musicians playing sitar and about five girls, and Ava and I sat on the floor cross-legged. And the man in charge had the girls dance for us. And the musicians must have played die only Western tune they knew, to please us. Ava said, ‘Goddammit, that’s ‘The Isle of Capri.’ Can’t you play something else?’ And so then they played the same song, but much faster.

  “We had a glorious time together. And then a couple of nights later she asked me to accompany her to the movie premiere in the town: It was the premiere of The Barefoot Contessa. And we went to the premiere, and we were photographed for the newspapers. Right after that we started working together. She was very kind to me and very protective when Cukor started screaming at me all the time. He screamed at me for six months. And Ava kept telling me I shouldn’t put up with his rudeness. She said, ‘Just walk off the set.’ Particularly when we got back to England and he was very nasty. She’d say, ‘Walk off until he apologizes. What’s he going to do, recast? Go back to Asia and reshoot for months?’

  “We became good friends. We’d run our lines together. And we began eating together in her suite—she couldn’t eat the local stuff, and she had things like T-bone steaks and American fries flown in every week. And we talked about everything under the sun. She was amazingly well read. Erudite. She was particularly well read about England. She loved English people. And Englishmen! She said they were polite and kind. And she was in a period when she loathed Hollywood. And she hated the press because they had pretty well torn her and Frank to pieces—not that they hadn’t torn themselves to pieces, you know. It was a time when she had divorced Sinatra, or what she had told me was she was divorced but she had not yet picked up the papers. She was the nicest person to be with, very down-to- earth about everything. And she was just adorable. She was free, she wasn’t married, and neither was I. It became a wonderful relationship.”

  The company returned to England in April.* Everyone felt as if they had been filming for a year, but there was still half a movie to be made, with exterior sequences—including the train wreck—to be shot in the English countryside, and nearly all the interiors as well as some soundstage exteriors left to be done in the MGM studios at Elstree. A terrible drama, a near tragedy, and much unexpected extra work was caused when Joseph Tomaity, the lovable and talented Irish comic actor who was playing Victoria’s railwayman father and had filmed many scenes with Ava in Pakistan, was the victim of a serious auto accident. He just escaped death and remained disabled for several years. It meant replacing him (with Edward Chapman) and reshooting most of his dialogue scenes, and simply discarding several of them (the original actor can still be glimpsed in some of the long shots taken in Lahore). It was one of many blows to the finished film, as Tomaity and Ava had reportedly had a great deal of warm chemistry on camera as father and daughter, something that was not duplicated in the abruptly staged version with Chapman.

  The most dramatic scene in the film had been saved for the English studio: the attempted rape of Victoria Jones and her killing of the assailant, the British officer McDaniel. Staged for maximum discomfort in an ugly, slimy reproduction of the railway yard, it involved McDaniel in a vicious attack, tearing at Victoria Jones’s clothes, her hair, dragging her through the muck, a horrifying, violent degradation until Jones manages to grab a piece of iron railing and land a mortal blow to the lieutenant’s skull. The sequence was brilliantly designed and photographed, blending the location footage with the soundstage set into a vision of muddy hell. As filmed it was a bold, almost transgressive scene for a Hollywood production of the mid-1950s, powerful and painful. Ava Gardner, throwing herself into it body and soul, performed with an abandon and intensity she had never before attempted. The scene became for her a kind of breakthrough, a revelation to herself of the possibilities she possessed as an actress, though one achieved at great emotional cost. Anticipation of having to perform the scene had given her an extreme anxiety attack, and she felt worse during and after the performance. When it was over she was trembling and shaking, Ava would recall, and she left the set without speaking to anyone, ran inside her trailer, and swallowed a great deal of whiskey. “At that moment I felt sick with fright,” she remembered, “as if I’d been literally fighting for my life.” When Cukor came to comfort her she demanded he bring Lionel Jeffries to see her at once. “Now! Because unless I see him and give him a big hug, I’ll never speak to him as long as I live.” Jeffries, of course, came over for his hug, and Ava eventually calmed down. She had never performed anything that so deeply affected her, and never would again.

  Ava’s close friendship with Francis Matthews continued in England. “Cukor didn’t like it much. He eventually separated us. He said, ‘I’m sending her away. You’re distracting her. She’s too fond of you. It’s not good.’

  “I was young, and I didn’t know really whether it was love or if it was infatuation with a big star. I suppose that might have been part of it. With me she was just like a young girl. We used to laugh; we had great fun together. I played cricket all the time, I was with the Stage Cricket Club and I was always going off to play. ‘What the hell, are you going to play cricket again?’ she’d say. And one day she had me take her to Lord’s. She said, ‘I want to see what this goddamned game is about.’ And we conned our way into the members’ stand because it was Ava Gardner. And she couldn’t stand the game. She’d say, ‘This guy has hit the ball three times, why doesn’t he run?’ I would explain, and she’d say, ‘I can’t imagine why you want to play this stupid game!’ But then she’d say to me, ‘I want to marry you and have a lot of little cricketers.’

  “We had some funny times then ...”

  Cukor completed Bhowani Junction by early summer. His first cut of the film ran just over two and a half hours. It was, according to some of the handful who saw this version, an exceptional film in all ways, of true epic dimension, capturing the color and sound and fury of India, and at its center a magnificent performance by Ava Gardner that was powerful, sensitive, and erotic. Within hours of the director delivering his version of the film, the knives of the second-guessers were out and flashing. From producer Pandro Berman and various voices in Hollywood there were immediate calls for cuts, changes, rewrites, and reshoots. Eventually they would demand a major reconstruction of the film’s plot and its theme. Having invested millions and months in a story whose entire premise revolved around the problems of love, race, and ethnicity, the studio now concluded that this premise would be the movie’s undoing in the marketplace. It was belatedly determined that audiences did not want to see Ava Gardner kissing the Anglo-Indian character played by Bill Travers or the good-looking Sikh played by Francis Matthews. It did not matter that all the lovers on the screen were either British or American in various shades of Max Factor. “The last twenty minutes of my role disappeared,” recalled Francis Matthews. “The people at the sneak previews in England and America said, ‘Why is she kissing an Indian?’ My loves scenes with Ava were cut right out.” Instead of the ending Cukor had shot, from Masters’s book, with Bill Travers’s character, Patrick, ending up with Victoria Jones (Masters’s endorsement of the Anglo-Indians as worthy citizens of an independent India), there was a new ending in which Patrick is killed (the climax of the film in the railway tunnel filmed again, this time in an abandoned London Underground station). To cover all the missing pieces and gaps in the narrative and to put more focus on the story’s
one European love interest, a voice-over was recorded by Stewart Granger so that Col. Savage became the film’s narrator, telling the story—often redundantly—in flashback. The released cut of the film ran 110 minutes, 40 minutes—and several subplots—short of Cukor’s version.

  Francis Matthews, who came in long after filming ended to dub some lines for the new cut of the film, recalled a very distraught George Cukor fighting the studio’s changes. “This is the gospel truth: Cukor was in tears in the dubbing room. He said, ‘Get Pandro Berman here. I’m not going to do this; this is ruining my movie. We did this right the first time, why are we changing it?’ And he wouldn’t do anything until Pandro was there, and they had this terrible row and George burst into tears. He said, ‘Listen, I made a good movie here. You are crucifying this movie and turning it into a goddamn Hollywood love story, and it’s going to be crap.’ It was quite an experience witnessing this. I had my problems with George, but I realized then how deeply concerned he was about his work and how much he had put into it. And he was dead right. He had made an incredible film. There were scenes in it that were overwhelming, beautiful, and they took them out. It was such a good film, and it became a good film struggling to get out, struggling to get out.”

  George Cukor’s admiration for Ava’s performance and his fascination with her as a star remained undiminished. They stayed friends, and for many years Cukor tried to find viable projects for a creative reunion. While he was still finishing up with Βhowani Junction in London, he entertained an idea for filming a new version of Carmen outlined by critic and cultural gadfly Kenneth Tynan, and Cukor at once felt it would be a perfect vehicle for Ava. In late May he brought Tynan with him to a lunch with the actress. No film ever came of the meeting, although Ava found the stuttering, wickedly witty Tynan amusing company and brought him into her circle of London friends. Tynan would recall with a mixture of enthusiasm and horror a night spent out and about with the movie star, “six enthusiastic flamenco singers and several bottles of vodka.” Miss Gardner, he wrote to critic Cyril Connolly (by way of apology for broken engagement due to night with Gardner, hangover, and so on), “is…not easily discouraged when she gets the smell of riot in her nostrils, and I allowed myself to be swept in an open car across London with her entourage, which was joined at odd times by a policeman and a rich swimmer named Esther Williams, on whose presence Miss Gardner insisted, saying that a party wasn’t a party without a drunken bitch lying in a pool of tears.”

  Ava’s obligations to Β howani Junction concluded in July. She was returning to Spain, permanently now, she had decided, with plans to buy a house. A few possessions she prized—a piano, her silver and linens—were being shipped from Los Angeles. “I want a place just outside Madrid,” she told people. “If I don’t find the right place I’ll build something. My new contract says I make two films a year. Some of them may be a piece of cheese, I don’t have the right to approve scripts in advance, and if some of them are made in Hollywood I’ll go there, but home will be Spain.”

  For Ava and Francis Matthews there were a few last nights on the town together. “We went to dinner, and we went round to the nightclubs getting stoned, as was her pleasure. We went out with her English friends, who were from every sort of background. She could go all night, you know. She was a wild country girl and liked to let her hair down and fling off her shoes and have a good time.”

  They would go on till every club had closed down for the night, and she would lead them off to Covent Garden, behind the opera house, where the vegetable markets would be open all night. And she would get everyone drinks and she would chat with the vegetable porters who were working (and who all seemed to know her) and she would dance the flamenco, there in Covent Garden with the sun about to come up.

  “I was wild about her. I really was. We were neither of us responsible to anybody else for our lives, so it wasn’t wrong or anything, but I was a strong cradle Catholic and took these things very seriously. It’s very difficult to describe what I was like then, very naive. And Ava was trying not to take things so seriously. She had been hurt by men, I think. She had been with these guys who had not been so nice to her, and I don’t think they knew how lucky they were, actually. And Ava used to say to me, ‘Bloody Frankie was a confused Catholic as well, with his wife and all, confused about his religion and everything.’ She’d say, ‘I keep picking Catholics.’ She gave me a photograph of herself and on the photo this is what she wrote:

  ‘To Francis, my favorite Sikh

  I send all my love at least once a week

  though unnaturally meek as a good Catho-lic

  be careful my boy ‘cause I’m taking a peek.’

  “Then she was gone, off to Spain. She wrote to me a couple of times. The last time I saw her was the year after we finished Bhowani. They were starting a film [The Little Hut] and I think Mark Robson was the director, and they needed to do a reading with David Niven and Ava and Stewart Granger, but Granger was not available, he was working in Hollywood. And someone rang round and asked if I would do a reading with Ava and Niven. So I agreed to do it. Most actors who’d just had a starring role would have refused, but I did it because I wanted to see Ava again. And it was a lovely meeting. I didn’t see her after that. She lived near me many years later. But I never saw her again. She had moved on. It was something she did, have a close friend on a movie and then she’d go on with her life. She was very practical in that way.”

  *Hemingway did receive the odd amulet, and carried it with him for some years.

  *According to local legend, on the film company’s departure from Pakistan a Lahori gentleman with the wherewithal purchased from someone at Faletti’s Hotel the pillow on which Ava Gardner slept during her stay at the hotel; fifty years later the pillow was said to remain a prized possession of this unnamed man.

  NINE

  Sun and Shadow

  Two o ‘clock in the morning, a gray Cadillac convertible races over La Coruna highway north of Madrid, the driver a woman whose auburn-red hair flies in the dry, warm wind. Next to her sits a beautiful young Spaniard with broad shoulders and narrow hips.…Through the barbed-wire gate the woman drives into the garage and disappears with her companion. A record player intones melancholic flamenco songs. Later, a door opens and two nude figures come out andjump into the pool for a swim in the starlit night.

  —”Ava Gardner: The Bullfighters’ Delight”

  She’ s running away from things and she ‘s searching for things—heaven knows what.

  —British newspaper item

  She has become The Barefoot Contessa.

  —British newspaper item

  In December 1955, they moved into the new home at La Moraleja: Ava, Beatrice, Reenie, and Rags. The ranch-style villa was set on two acres of plush lawn amid scattered pines and weeping willows with tan hillside as distant backdrop. It had the advantages of space, comfort, and privacy and yet was only an eighteen-minute drive from the center of Madrid (nine if Ava was driving).

  There were four bedrooms, three baths, two sitting rooms, a parlor, several large, raised fireplaces, a patio, and a swimming pool (said to be the largest private pool in the country). The purchase price had been fifty thousand dollars and she had spent another twenty-five thousand dollars on alterations, including wall-to-wall carpeting and mirrors for her bedroom walls and for the ceiling above her bed. For furnishings she roamed the region for weeks, selecting items in exclusive antiques shops, and in rustic flea markets. There were Louis XV tables and dressers under old hanging coach lights bought for a few coins. When they arrived from Los Angeles, her music filled one wall from floor to ceiling, overlooking the new state-of-the-art hi-fi system; to the thousands of jazz and pop records were added a growing selection of locally purchased flamenco recordings (dancing to that dark, dramatic sound had become her new obsession).

  The developers had nicknamed the place La Bruja—the Witch—after the rooftop weathervane with its broomstick-riding iron crone. Ava approved: Frank
had called her that many times, in anger and with affection, for the way she could read his mind and the many times she had predicted things and they had come to be so.

  Buying a home at the same time and just down the road, were Ava’s acquaintances of the past two years, Ricardo and Betty Sicre. For the long Iberian adventure ahead, the Sicres would become the closest of her new friends, at times her protectors, her counselors, and with their children her surrogate family in Spain. They were smart, dashing, wealthy, and well- connected to Spanish society and to the expatriate community. Ricardo was a Catalan who had fought in the Spanish civil war, became an American citizen, and served in World War II as an OSS espionage agent. Betty Lussier had been an air transport pilot in the war, then switched to spying, first as one of the handful of American agents working with the top-secret British unit decoding the German Enigma machine (her godfather was su- perspy Sir William Stephenson, better known by his code name, Intrepid), then as an agent in the field, a member of X-2 branch, tracking down German agents in Italy and France. The two spies met while interrogating Nazis, fell in love, married, and after the peace settled in Spain where Ricardo established a highly successful import-export business.

  “Ricardo met her first,” Betty Sicre remembered. “I was away in Morocco. He said, ‘I’ve just met this wonderful girl.’ He liked her very much, and the way he talked about her, as a nice country girl from North Carolina, I don’t think he even knew how famous she was. And we met, and we liked each other immediately. She was a bit of a lost soul then, separated from Frank, and not quite sure what she wanted to do with herself. She only knew that she wanted to be away from Hollywood. She had a lot of memories she wanted to leave behind. She felt that she had never fitted in there. The way she spoke of it, she had come there with so little experience and had been dropped among these very sophisticated people. She was so young and she had gotten thrown into that fast life, a very debauched scene from the way she described it, people involved in drugs and sex things. That was why she started drinking, to try and cope. A lot of troubled people she had known in Hollywood. She spoke of Robert Walker, who had destroyed himself; it bothered her. And all the trauma with Frank. She wanted a fresh start. She was very shy—people find it hard to believe—and she did not like the constant social pressures and the constant prying of the press. In Spain she thought she could get away from all of that.