Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “We were all looking for a place and Ava said, ‘Let’s see if we can find something together.’ And La Moraleja was just beginning to be developed. There were maybe eleven houses there—now there are thousands. So we found these two houses being finished and we told Ava to take her choice, and she took the one nearest the entrance gate and we took the one two houses further on. So, there we were, neighbors; and we became very close for many years and she was around while we raised our family and she was the godmother to my son; she had the kids stay with her on occasion and they cooked supper together and she’d put them to bed. She was great with kids. So she was a part of our lives and we became part of hers.…I took care of her fan mail for years. There was an enormous amount, and people just poured their hearts out to her. Now and then there was a letter that I’d say, ‘Ava, you really have to answer this one.’ But she was really not interested in it, and the most she would do was sign the pictures for people who asked for one…and, oh, she’d give me scripts they would send her to do and say, ‘Read this, tell me if you think I should do it.’ Otherwise she would send them all back. She had by then cut herself off from the studio people and advisers who might have helped with this sort of thing. She was really on her own.

  “She didn’t really much want to work. My husband thought she was a very lazy person, and I guess that was right. She liked to sleep late, and she was very lax about exercise. But she had positively the most beautiful body you could ever imagine. And she wasn’t like some other beautiful stars who spend two hours getting ready before anyone can see them. She got up in the morning and she never even looked at her face, never looked in a mirror. She just popped out of bed and ran a hand through her hair. She wasn’t a vain person at all.

  “She wasn’t big on many activities. She swam well and was a pretty good tennis player and she played some golf. But she slept so late the day was pretty much over by the time she got out. She was a night person. She liked to go out all night, and she really liked the life in Madrid because it started so late and went on so long.”

  There was a large, growing expatriate scene in Madrid, and Ava quickly became its glamorous centerpiece. “It was a wonderful, fun time in Spain in the fifties,” recalled Imogen Wheeler, a resident for much of the decade. “It was rather like you read about Paris or the Riviera in the twenties. You met lots of interesting English-speaking people, film people and artists and writers as well as the usual business people and diplomats. But it wasn’t one of those expat groups where they avoided the local life or tried to re-create things as they were at home. Everyone was very much part of the Spanish scene, lived a Spanish life.

  “I met Ava through the Grants, Frank and Doreen. They had a wonderful villa on the edge of Madrid, and we used to all go out there on Fridays, party all weekend, come in for the bullfights on Sunday. We ate wonderful meals and drank and danced all night. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her the first time. She had this face that was so beautiful, this extraordinary pale skin, like marble. I had loved seeing her in the films, but it was nothing like seeing her up close. The films gave you no idea that she was so exquisite!

  “I knew them both. Bappie came to live with her. And I found them such completely different people. Ava was this extraordinary-looking, moody, complicated character. And Bappie was just this simple, fun- loving person, always joking, with this bright blond dyed hair and this blue mink stole she wore everywhere. She was going along for the ride, you know, and having fun. Very simple reaction to everything, the way she looked at life. She used to take things, I remember—yes, she would see something on the table at a restaurant or a dinner party, like the terra-cotta wine stands on the table or something like that, and she would just swipe them off the table and hide them under her stole. She’d just think, Ooh, that’s nice. I think I’ll take that with me. We’d all look at each other and not know what to say, and Bappie just went on like nobody had noticed.”

  Ava’s arrival to stay, her many warm remarks about Spain, were met with affection and respect by the Spanish people. “Which couldn’t have been easy,” she would say. “After all, I represented everything they disapproved of: I was a woman, living alone, divorced, a non-Catholic, and an actress.” Indeed the time was to come, as the reports of Ava’s antic private life accumulated through the years, that the local attitude toward their most famous foreign resident would turn increasingly ambivalent. For now, anyway, good feeling reigned all around. She was adored, and politely. In Spain she could be a star but without all the pushing and shoving. “She could go most places without any problem at all,” said Betty Sicre. “She would go to the bullfights with Bappie or a friend, just the two of them, and it was no problem. They left her alone.” Ava liked to ascribe the respectful reaction of press and public to the national character, though in truth she was benefiting as much from Franco’s stern fascist rule. For instance, the idea of reporters and photographers staking out a person’s home as they did in Hollywood was unthinkable—everyone would be carted off to jail. (“She was very liberal politically,” Betty Sicre recalled. “And she was very interested in what was going on in the U.S. elections, but she didn’t get involved in Spanish politics. She never spoke Franco’s name once that I can remember.”)

  In those first months Ava was full of a determination to fit in, to become something more than a tourist in her new country of residence. At home she took Spanish lessons from an elderly local teacher. The study would go well for a brief while, but eventually Ava would feel the need to offer teacher and student a reward for their diligence—dos martinis, or perhaps a pitcher of them since Reenie made them so well, and the lesson would be over for the day. Her spoken Spanish would never get much beyond the rudimentary.

  She eagerly explored other parts of the country, often on road trips with Bappie or Reenie, heading out in the car to visit the fascinating old cities of Seville and Barcelona, driving through primitive whitewashed villages in the southern plains, mingling with Gypsy enclaves in Grenada. Her fascination with the flamenco grew. No less obsessive than the aficionados of the corrida who traveled the country to see every important fight, she haunted the flamenco clubs wherever she went, a patron of assorted Gypsy bands, drinking wine and brandy and gin and dancing the paso doble with them into the night. When there was no place to continue, she gathered them up, brought them home, and continued until dawn. “She became very taken with the Gypsy scene,” recalled Imogen Wheeler. “It was not touristy like it is today, but very authentic and gritty, and you could have these fantastic nights. There were streets in Madrid, narrow old streets lined with bars on both sides, and you went in and out from one to the next through the night, filling your wineglass at each one, all of them with flamenco singers and musicians playing for tips or for free drinks. Or in Grenada, these caves where an entire family of Gypsies would be playing and dancing, from children to grandparents. When it would be very late at night and people were starting to leave, Ava would invite them to her place, and for some wine or some pesetas they would come and play and dance until morning.”

  Early in March Ava went off to spend a week on the island of Majorca with the renowned British poet, scholar, and novelist (/, Claudius, among others) Robert Graves. She had met the loftily—and impishly—brilliant Graves sometime before at a party at the Sicres’, had been unaware of his name or work, and had thought him to be a vacationing scientist. It was the awkward start to a relationship Ava would eventually describe as “one of the most gratifying of my life.” Said Betty Sicre, “Graves and my husband had met in a pub in England before the war and became fast friends. We used to visit him, and he came to stay with us. One time Ava was moping around Madrid, complaining that she had nothing to do, and I said, ‘Why don’t you go and visit Robert Graves?’ She was interested in poetry and writers, and she thought that was something to do. And so we sent her off to go see Robert.”

  The Graves family came to meet her at the Palma airport, Ava arriving in a typical swirl of chaos, pursued acro
ss the San Bonet tarmac by two amorous Spanish wolves who had forced her, she said, to lock herself in the ladies’ room for much of the flight from Madrid. “I was about twelve, and I was feeling great excitement at the chance to meet her,” remembered Lucia Graves, the writer’s daughter. “I was then a student at the convent school right next to the airport, and I had to tell the nuns that an aunt of mine was arriving because they would never have let me go to meet Ava Gardner, a film star!

  “First of all I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was when she came down the steps off the plane. Just exquisite. And then I didn’t believe how very normal and nice and straightforward she was. I remember telling her how I thought she was such a wonderful actress, and she said, ‘Do you really think so?’ She seemed genuinely surprised. She acted nothing like I imagined. She talked and laughed like any normal person! She was funny and very affectionate. She was just great.”

  Robert Graves, who had written of goddesses and temptresses as Ava had played the same on screen, had agreed to the Sicres’ request that he take her under his wing with an eye to the possibilities of a professional liaison. “The glamour of Hollywood had always excited my father,” said Lucia Graves. “He always had this Hollywood dream, trying to get these scripts going. So I’m sure he was tickled that this famous film star showed so much interest in him and wanted to read his poems. He enjoyed it. But then she was such a lovely person that he came to have a great affection for her—as we all did. And he admired her enormously for the way she fought against being tied down by Hollywood and trying to stick to her own ideas, her own way of living.”

  Ava arrived with a list she had drawn up of resolutions for Robert and his family to help implement: She must rest, swim in the sea, study Spanish grammar, and learn about poetry. As it turned out, there would be no time for studying Spanish, and Ava allowed no one to rest during the five- day visit. One cold winter morning on Camp de Mar beach, she did get to plunge into the freezing Mediterranean, to the silent awe of a crowd of gawkers. As for the poetry: She confessed to Graves that she seldom understood the things she had read. Robert reassured her, “You aren’t supposed to understand it. You’re supposed to enjoy it.” Further, he told her, there was “little worth reading and much that was wrongly supposed to be worth reading.” He gave her, though, one of his own (“Not to Sleep”), written sometime before he met her, but it seemed to fit the person he was coming to know, “pledged to love through all disaster.”

  A large party was given at the Graves home. In those days in Franco’s Spain, you had to advise the Guardia Civil of your intention of having a gathering in your house, and a couple of guards would be sent along to see there was no trouble. “There was music and dancing, and Ava decided she wanted to dance with one of the Guardia Civil,” Lucia Graves remembered. “And he refused. He said he was sorry, but he was on duty and could not dance. And she was rather surprised. She couldn’t believe this young man was saying no to dancing with Ava Gardner! Everyone laughed about it and pulled his leg a bit, and the poor boy apologized and said he was only doing his duty, and Ava forgave him.”

  Ava had to see the nightlife of Palma, of course, and night after night dragged her hosts from one bar and tablao to another. It was exhausting entertaining her, and Beryl and Robert were soon taking turns staying up all night with their guest so one or the other could get to bed. Nevertheless, for Robert the five days proved “a most fantastic experience,” and a warm friendship was founded. Robert and his wife had completed a film treatment, a bullfighting story called “El Embrujo de Sevilla,” and Ava had taken a copy away with enthusiasm, declaring that she would get MGM to produce it. The studio rejected the idea abruptly, but Ava would continue to promote other potential projects for them, including a collaboration with Albert Lewin as director and a version of 7, Claudius to be made in Rome with Ava in the role of the wicked Messalina.

  Ava and the Graves family would visit each other many times in the years ahead, and with Robert she would carry on a long and heartfelt correspondence. He would send her poems with handwritten dedications, and she would write to him, sometimes with superficial highlights of recent events and passed-along greetings, other times as if to a spiritual adviser, seeking meaning and understanding in what often seemed her inchoate life. “It was a love-conspiracy between us,” she would record, though explaining that there was never a thought of a physical relationship with the white-haired family man thirty years her senior. “Being with him and his wonderful wife, Beryl, and the kids gave me a kind of pleasure and satisfaction nothing else in my life could approach.”

  In mid-April 1956, she had gone to Monaco to attend the wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier Grimaldi, joining such luminaries as Egypt’s ex-king Farouk, Gloria Swanson, the Duchess of Westminster, Somerset Maugham, Aristotle Onassis, and the Aga Khan. Ava had greater claim to an invitation than most—the whole thing had been set in motion at her flat in London where she had introduced Grace to gadabout journalist Rupert Allan, who had then dragged Grace to the Cannes Film Festival, where a photo opportunity with the prince turned into an engagement. Rainier, head of the oldest continuously ruling family in Europe, had been advised to take a high-profile American for his bride and reap the rewards of good PR and U.S. investment in his postage-stamp- size principality (as Dore Schary had rudely pointed out to the prince during a lunch in his honor at Metro, all of Monaco was smaller than the studio’s back lot). The wedding had therefore been planned with maximum worldwide attention in mind, with its starry international guest list, and more press coverage than the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The entire ceremony was filmed in 35mm and color under contract to Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, with klieg lights everywhere for the sake of the big cameras, causing many guests to squint and don their sunglasses. From all the imported technicians, hairdressers, and publicists, it looked to Ava as though half of Culver City was in Monte Carlo. It was a goddamned MGM movie. She wondered if someone wouldn’t call for a couple of retakes after the bride and groom had said their “I do’s.”

  She had felt, beneath genuine happiness for her friend Gracie, a certain uncomfortable envy. The young woman, only twenty-six now, had charted the course of her life so smoothly, had come to Hollywood, conquered it in a year or two, grown tired of it, and quickly found a spectacular plan of escape. And Ava had seen at the wedding Grace’s father giving her away, and imagining the love and support the girl must have received from him, she had fallen into a funk thinking of her own long-gone father and how much she could have used such a person in her life to lean on. The grass was always greener. She was unaware of the actual, more difficult relationship between Grace and her father, and not much more aware of the things that had made Kelly eager to jump ship in Hollywood: the whispered word-of-mouth campaigns against her, Hedda and Louella calling her a home wrecker for her affairs with some of her venerable costars.

  At the wedding there was one missing celebrity from the guest list: Frank Sinatra. His seat for the ceremony, two away from Ava’s (Rupert Allan between them for safety sake) would remain empty. He had come as far as London and then stopped. At the last minute the prospect of being so close to the woman who could do such damage to his ever-roiling psyche became too much for him. He returned home, letting it be known that he had not wanted to spoil Miss Kelly’s day by causing unwanted commotion from the press.

  But a reunion was at hand. Later that spring Sinatra was bound for Spain on a sixteen-week sojourn to star with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in a film for Stanley Kramer, The Pride and the Passion.

  Hedda Hopper had quizzed him just before his polar flight from Los Angeles.

  “I’m looking forward to many exciting things,” said Sinatra.

  “Such as meeting Ava?” said Hopper.

  “If I do meet Ava it will be in some public place. It will be a casual matter—hello, how are you, goodbye.”

  “No chance of a reconciliation?”

  “There would have to be a complete change.…But complet
e. I don’t think that could happen.”

  Shooting for the Kramer film was to be done mostly in Escorial and the countryside beyond, but Sinatra, no fan of location discomforts, had insisted on commuting from Madrid, where he was headquartered at the Castellana Hilton. To keep him company, Frank had brought along a new girlfriend, a pretty starlet named Peggy Connolly. But it became clear to everyone that his thoughts—however unspoken, and God forbid anyone else try to speak of such things in his presence—often turned to the missing, chestnut-haired woman who resided just outside the city. They had not lived in such close proximity for this long in nearly two years. But tempting as it was—grueling as it was—Sinatra stood his ground. In the end it was Ava who made the call, treating it as lightly as she might a ring- up to an uncle passing through from back home, though perhaps a bit less respectfully.