Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “You fuckin’ idiot,” she said. “You don’t let me know you’re in town? I have to read it in the papers?”

  They chatted. Then they chatted again. Somebody said Peggy Connolly didn’t think much of that, so Frank said for somebody to pack Peggy Connolly’s stuff and take her the fuck to the airport.

  They agreed to go out to dinner one night with some other people and then sat whispering to each other all through the meal as if no one else were there. After dinner they parted respectfully. Later in the night Frank had returned to his suite, and as assorted cronies and guests lay about having a nightcap, Frank got her on the phone. They were talking and then Frank began singing softly to her through the phone, one tune after another, a regular concert in sotto voce. Twenty minutes later guests saw Ava Gardner come through the door of the suite, and then she and Frank disappeared. Ava was wearing a mink coat and a negligee.

  It was a one-night stand, not a reconciliation. But it was proof, just as Frank had said: They weren’t over. Betty Sicre: “She realized that she was really still tied up with Sinatra emotionally. And I think that never changed. He was on her mind in some way just about every day of her life. She was hung up on him. She really loved him but they both had a temperament that blew up when they were together. You know, jealous when there was no need to be, and all of that.…Now and then they caught up with each other and considered starting again. At one point Frank wanted it very much. He would never have lived in Europe, but it was one of those times when they thought it might happen for them again and he offered to settle in New York with her. They planned for it. They would live in the East. They were going to have an apartment in the city and a place out on Long Island, on the sea. But it was wishful thinking. They couldn’t make a life. And after a time Frank, I think, finally gave up on the idea and so did she. It was just a dream they sometimes shared together.”

  In the meantime. She already had a new love interest. Walter Chiari had been obsessed with her from the moment they had first met in Rome more than two years earlier, during the filming of The Barefoot Contessa. A ruggedly handsome Milanese two years younger than Ava, Chiari was a film and stage star in Italy, little known elsewhere in the world. The son of a policeman and a schoolteacher, Chiari had started as a vaudeville comedian and mimic and quickly rose to local stardom. He made movie comedies, many of them with another Italian favorite, the homely comic actor Toto. Press releases referred to Chiari as “the Danny Kaye of Italy.” Ava had gone to see him perform. In his act he did a much-talked-about imitation of Frank Sinatra; Ava, in the audience, had reportedly “roared with laughter.” He had come to see her at Cinecittà; he came again, joined her entourage for drinks and supper, and for a week or two he made a little space for himself on the periphery of her life, ready but not quite able to take things further when Dominguin arrived on the scene. (Chiari’s girlfriend at the time and for the previous four years was actress Lucia Bose, who subsequently met and married Luis Miguel after Ava had turned down his proposal; the celebrity life in Europe was every bit as incestuous as it was in Hollywood.)

  She had gone away to Spain and beyond after that, but Chiari had never stopped thinking about her. When she did return to Rome for some shopping he went to her, poured on the charm, took her out on the town. At last, after still more waiting and sniffing for his chance, Chiari found the stars in alignment. By the summer of 1956 they had begun an affair; they were working together on a movie and Chiari had moved in with her at her rented apartment on the Corso d’ltalia. In Rome he took no chance that she would slip out of his grasp again. He stayed so close to her at all times that he learned to speak English just from watching her lips move. Ava found him amusing, good-looking, smart, and sexy. Some said he resembled Sinatra, though Chiari was taller and brawnier and didn’t take himself nearly as seriously.

  Bhowani Junction opened that spring. Box-office returns were very good at first, then quickly declined. Critical notices were mixed but often very positive, especially for the film’s star. Despite all the cutting and tampering, the quality of Ava’s performance remained much in evidence. A keen if condescending admirer of the actress for many years, Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express, wrote: “She moves for all times out of the slapandtickle class of pinup stars.…Ava Gardner’s lovely face, skillfully given just the right touch of chi-chi plumpness, did not for once touch me as much as the quality in her voice and the look in her eyes—a look which not only made her into an actress, but showed that now she had grown up in other ways.…Will she go on allowing her studio to put her in any old part? Or will she use the intelligence and ability she has now obviously acquired and pick her roles according to the acting opportunities they offer?”

  For many months after Bhowani Junction had concluded filming, she had turned down every picture she had been offered, whether from Metro, from Bert Allenberg, her new agent at William Morris, from various European producers. She read some of the novels or the scripts they would send, gave some to friends in the film world like George Cukor or to her neighbors the Sicres, asking for advice, and others simply never got read, got left on an airplane or in a hotel room or fell into the swimming pool. No doubt there were some she would have been smart to accept, but many of the known offers were wisely rejected. Warner Bros, had wanted to reteam her with Clark Gable for a paltry Civil War drama called A Band of Angels, like Show Boat and Bhowani a story revolving around a female of “mixed blood,” what Hollywood had evidently come to see as one of her specialties. Cukor read it. He told her: “You d be awful good in it…you jes talk lak you done in Grabtown and it’s be perfect. “ Cukor himself tried to find projects for them to do together. For two years he worked in vain to get Metro to back a new production of Her Cardboard Lover, a warhorse of a romantic comedy he had previously directed to no great acclaim in 1942, Norma Shearer’s cinema swan song.

  At last the next film was decided for her. Metro cast her as the horny heroine of The Little Hut, a French sex farce by André Roussin that had been translated into a West End hit by Nancy Mitford. She had reservations about what appeared to be very thin, silly material, but to let any more time go by without working meant extending her studio contract even farther into the future (“If I took another suspension they’d keep me at Metro for the rest of my life”). The film starred her with Stewart Granger and David Niven, and the director was Mark Robson. Most of the movie would be filmed on a single interior set at Cinecittà, with a few exterior sequences shot in London, and a second unit sent off to photograph some tropical scenery in Jamaica. Ava played Lady Susan Ashlow, Granger her inattentive husband, and Niven their ardent, treacherous best friend. The story largely revolved around the trio’s becoming shipwrecked on a deserted Pacific island and a struggle by the men to win the sexual favors of the island’s only female. Eventually they are joined by a bullying cannibal (actually a ship’s steward in disguise, and played by Walter Chiari), adding a third would-be partner for Lady Susan’s ménage. In the French stage original, the woman actually does go to bed with each of her male admirers, but this was considered too saucy for English- speaking cinemagoers of 1956 and so—like Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch—the plot was sanitized for the screen, and The Little Hut became a sex farce without anyone having any sex.

  No one in the cast seemed to be working in devotion to the art of film. Granger, like Ava, glumly accepted his role to avoid suspension and also, he claimed, because his pregnant wife had wanted him out of the house, while Niven, not yet reaping the rewards of the successful Around the World in 80 Days, signed on with his usual amiable hack’s lack of concern for the finished product (his philosophy, as expressed to Granger: “Well, it may be shit and not very good shit, but we have to go through it, so let’s just be cheerful about it”). In Rome a press conference was held to promote the start of filming. As one of the “big stars,” Granger had expected to share with Ava most of the press attention. “Suddenly,” he told writer Sheridan Morley, “we’re all shoved out of the w
ay as the press stampede to photograph Ava’s little Italian, who turns out to be a huge star locally. So that makes us laugh a lot.” Later, Granger and Niven would find Ava and her “little Italian” most annoying: At lunchtime the couple would disappear together and not be seen for hours; everyone would end up sitting around doing nothing, waiting for their tryst to conclude.

  Without a director or a project she respected, Ava now had begun to relax the professional discipline that had served her well for most of her fifteen years in the movie business. For all the anger and arguing that might have gone on with the front office in all that time, she had very seldom been the cause of any difficulty once the cameras rolled. There were two primary rules you learned at the Metro academy: Be on time, be prepared. Ava had lived by them. Other stars could be late, not know their lines, refuse to come to the set when called, refuse to continue a scene until their lines had been rewritten, throw tantrums, have directors fired. Ava had always resisted that sort of diva behavior.

  However, her allegiance to the old ways was fading. The business itself, the studio system to which she had directed her professionalism, was not the same. Back in Hollywood, the great infrastructure of places like MGM was crumbling. Government edicts had stripped the studios of their exhibition arm. Audiences were defecting to television. At Culver City, Mayer was gone. Now S chary, too, was gone. Even Clark Gable was gone. The feudal ways of the past could no longer be afforded. There would be no more contract players by the hundreds as before, no more Ava Gardners on the studio payroll while they took five, six years to teach her the business.

  Without the old iron grip of the studios, the balance of power was shifting. Stars and powerful directors and producers had begun to set up shop independent of or in equal partnership with the studios. Ava saw in the very fact that Metro had met her demand to live and work in Europe, even though she was still bound to them by long-term contract, proof enough that the studio’s iron fist had rusted. And yet in that sense of her potential power was also frustration: She was still under contract, and earning a fraction—perhaps one-third—of her market value. For all the changes in the business, she was essentially working under the same circumstances as in her first year of stardom. It had irked her in the 1940s when Metro had loaned her out to their great profit, and it irked her even more now when other stars of no greater popularity were reaping huge returns in payment and percentages. There was no single, sudden decision she made to become “difficult,” only a chronic resentment nurtured for many years, now more and more finding a release. On The Little Hut, cables would fire back and forth across the Atlantic regarding her extravagant demands and unbelievable expenditures—personal hairdressers ordered in from two continents and three countries, whopping bills for liquor and entertainment and more. The studio’s representative in Rome cabled Culver City: MAY BE POINT WHERE YOU DECIDE WHETHER AVA RUNS THIS PICTURE OR COMPANY DOES. But there was no one at the studio to decide.

  The Little Hut, on release, was rather harshly judged, almost universally disdained, not least by all of its participants. Surely some patrons felt they had gotten their money’s worth: Ava looked ravishing in a role that required her to wear no more than a black teddy for most of the running time.*

  Ava’s romance with Chiari flourished through that summer and fall. He showed her Rome, took her around the Italian countryside. As she had done with Frank, she followed Walter on tour with his revue, sitting in the theaters in Turin and Milan and applauding louder than anyone. As with Frank, the couple had explosive arguments. And, as with her other guy, after the fighting there would be a very passionate time making up. By December there were reports of an imminent wedding. Ava denied it. For one thing, she was still married. In fact, she was more married than she had been for a while: Her Nevada residency had elapsed. She would now have to go back to the state for another six weeks or get her divorce somewhere else.

  “I have asked her to marry me many times,” said Chiari. “All over Europe. Everywhere. And she always answers, ‘Who knows?’ “

  For nearly three years they saw each other, one way or another, off and on, up and down. After the first year the passion and fun had mostly gone from the relationship, but it dragged on for two more, unevenly sustained by Walter’s dedication and Ava’s lazy inability to cut him off, though she did try. As Chiari hung on, his appeal, then his dignity, faded in her eyes. She began almost to look for reasons to dislike him, to be mean to him. His international profile had risen in the time of their affair, and sometimes, when she was ill disposed, Ava would complain that he was using her to become more famous, to become known in Hollywood. “I was obsessed with her,” Chiari told Charles Higham in 1967. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever known. Yet somehow when we were together I often felt I was alone, that she had withdrawn from me in some mysterious and unsettling way.”

  “I think she just lost interest in him after a while,” said Betty Sicre. “I don’t know why it went on so long. There were things she found out about him that she didn’t like. She said he was a cocaine fan and that caused tension between them. She was very anti—all drugs.”

  “Walter was nice” said Ava, summing up the relationship in her memoir. “The distance that separates liking from love is as wide as the Pacific.”

  There were other men in and out of her life during those years. As to exactly how many, Ava herself, to friends like Betty Sicre, toted a very modest sum, her busy love life a great exaggeration, she would say, while to the scandal press of the time the figure was for all practical purposes innumerable: a passing parade of men, many younger, from matadors to elevator operadores.

  An unusual and largely unreported friendship in this period was with Dr. Archie Mclndoe, a legendary plastic surgeon she had first met shortly after crashing her Mercedes-Benz en route to the Madrid airport. She had crashed other cars, too, a Cadillac, a Facel-Vega Frank Sinatra had given her for a present. One automobile she had driven straight into the sea at Biarritz and she had been forced to get out of the car and watch it float off and disappear. “She drove too fast,” said Betty Sicre. “Always. And she was a terrible driver. She just got behind the wheel and started speeding, and I don’t think she ever paid much attention to what she was doing.”

  In the Mercedes crash she had gone off the road, spun over twice, and landed upside down in a sea of broken glass. A huge bruise on her leg brought her to Mclndoe’s Harley Street clinic in London. The New Zealand—born surgeon was a legendary figure for his work on soldiers burned in combat during World War II. A charismatic and inspiring personality, Ava took to him as a friend, but perhaps more than that, according to Betty Sicre. “They were dating, she said. She was very fond of him.” Mclndoe was married.

  Ava would spend time with the doctor at the Royal Air Force Hospital in East Grinstead, visiting with the pilots there, men who had suffered horrible scarring injuries, some surviving with only the vestiges of a face. She would visit with them, chat, hold their hands. It was difficult and depressing, but Archie forced her to find the strength and to see the need for doing it, and she loved him for it.

  The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s novel of disillusioned and dissolute expatriates in Paris and Spain, was considered one of the significant works of the twentieth century, both as a stylistic triumph and as the literary encapsulation of the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s, those who had come out of the horrors of World War I stripped of ideals and hope. A number of attempts had been made through the years to adapt the book for the movies and the property had changed hands several times. In the forties, Howard Hawks bought the screen rights and put writer Samuel Fuller to work on a script, but this adaptation, like all others, was thwarted by the restrictions of the Production Code. Hemingway’s novel was full of censorable material, prostitutes, bad language, “amoral” attitudes, promiscuity, not to mention a protagonist—the book’s narrator, Jake Barnes—sexually incapacitated by a terrible war wound. By the mid- 1950s, though, restrictions had beg
un to loosen, and adult themes and more provocative material were slowly beginning to find their way into the English-speaking cinema. It was, in fact, Joseph Mankiewicz’s borrowing of the Hemingway hero’s genital wound for The Barefoot Contessa that pricked, so to speak, Darryl Zanuck’s renewed interest in the Hemingway property. Perhaps, he thought, the time was right to do The Sun Also Rises justice at last. (It wasn’t.)

  The catalyst for much of the novel’s action was the central female character, Lady Brett Ashley, a dazzling, passionate, troubled, troublemaking young English playgirl. Cynical and promiscuous on the surface, hopping in and out of frivolous, destructive sexual affairs, in Lady Brett’s heart is a tragic frustration—the only man she loves, Jake, cannot share a physical relationship with her. As a role for the screen, Brett had glamorous style and sexuality and several interesting twists of character. Zanuck felt the part deserved a big name to play her, and several important stars were closely considered for the job, among them Jennifer Jones (her husband David Selznick all but begged Zanuck to take her), Audrey Hepburn (who declared in the end that she did not want to play a nymphomaniac), and Marilyn Monroe (Zanuck quickly shouted out of this unfathomable notion).

  The project’s appointed screenwriter, Peter Viertel, was the first to mention Ava Gardner in regard to the part, and the idea was quickly endorsed by Darryl. Once considered, it seemed inevitable: Aside from the fact that she had not yet been widowed by an English lord, there was very little else about the actress that did not seem custom designed to embody Hemingway’s creation, including but not limited to her physical allure, her capricious love life, her often desperate joie de vivre, and her intimate knowledge of bullfighters. Ava agreed. She enjoyed one of Hemingway’s observations of Brett: as charming when she is drunk as when she is sober. It was the sort of thing one liked to believe was so. “I always,” said Ava, “felt close to Papa’s women.”