Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  A draft of the screenplay soon arrived at her door in Madrid. Looking the script over, her initial enthusiasm turned to uncertainty. When she heard that Hemingway was back in Spain, vacationing at the Hotel Felipe II in the mountain resort of Escorial, she packed the screenplay and went up to see him. His reaction to the news that she had been offered the role of Lady Brett, Ava sensed, was not unalloyed pleasure.

  “I guess you’ll do,” he told her. “You’ve got some vestiges of class.”

  Ava left her script for Papa to read. When she returned for his assessment, Hemingway was well along in one of his “black dog” moods, drunk and standing on a chair screaming about the debased and distorted adaptation of his work. The screen rights to The Sun Also Rises had long ago been given over to his first wife, Hadley, as part of a divorce settlement (and she in turn had been all but swindled out of them by the original buyers), so Hemingway had no financial stake in the new production, nor any great hope for it, only the bitter foretaste of another Hollywood violation.

  Arriving hot on their trail was screenwriter Peter Viertel, who found Ava shaken by Hemingway’s assessment and ready to walk away from the project. In the presence of his friend Peter, Hemingway modified his antagonism, though some of the script’s lapses—like an unfortunate flashback sequence to explain Jake’s wound, in which Lady Brett is surprisingly interjected as his hospital nurse—continued to enrage the great writer. Viertel eventually convinced Ava that they hoped to make a good film and that her role was a special one and that she might regret it if she turned it down.

  Alas, as Papa had suspected, the production was fatally compromised before the first frame of film had even passed through the camera. Though Viertel would fight to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, studio dictates subverted him all the way, glaringly so in the revised ending, which turned the haunted stoicism of Hemingway’s last lines in the book into the movie’s empty note of hope (Brett: “Darling, there must be an answer somewhere.” Jake: “I’m sure there is”). Among many errors in judgment, Zanuck would cast several of The Sun’s key roles with veteran, middle- aged actors: Tyrone Power (as Jake), Errol Flynn, Eddie Albert—hardly the jaded youths and recent soldiers of Hemingway’s book. And to direct a film that might have benefited from the neurotic discernment of a Nicholas Ray or the Hemingwayesque perspective of a John Huston, Zanuck accepted the eternal Fox house director, Henry King, whose moribund style had seemed old-fashioned in 1925. And Zanuck, instead of insisting on shooting the film at the story’s specified European locales (Paris and northern Spain), which at the least would have offered the hope of visual authenticity, followed studio dictates and budget concerns and based the production in Mexico (there would be a brief stop in Paris for a few exterior street shots, but the Parisian interiors were all to be filmed in Mexico City). The colonial town of Morelia was chosen to try and pass itself off as Pamplona, and the resident mestizos and Tarascan Indians would play the beret-wearing revelers of Basque Spain (when the assistant directors attempted to hire only the lighter-skinned locals as extras the company was predictably picketed with accusations of racism).*

  Ava arrived in Mexico to begin filming in the spring of 1957, taken by car from the capital city to Morelia, four hours away. Seven years earlier she had gone on her first foreign sojourn eager to enjoy the adventure, alive to each new experience. Now she traveled to a distant location with all the enthusiasm of a commuter headed for the job on a Monday morning, with the return trip three months away. In Morelia, while everyone else, even Zanuck, sociably took up residence in a tumbledown motor court run by an American couple, Ava demanded private lodgings, and a house was found for her a couple of miles outside town. It was rote behavior by this time, a perquisite of status that you didn’t not demand, even though she often felt lonely separated from the rest of the company.

  There were some old acquaintances among her fellow cast members gathered in Morelia. Back in the forties she had gone out a time or two with both Ty Power and Errol Flynn. Then they had been two of the most beautiful men she had ever seen, Power dreamily romantic looking, Flynn the rugged, exuberant swashbuckler in life as in films. Now both appeared aged far beyond their years, Flynn especially, a spectacular wreck from dissipation, bleary and red faced. He was still delightful company, but it hurt her to see what he had done to himself. Both men would be dead in less than two years. Flynn was a tax exile now, living from paycheck to paycheck in Europe and on the island of Jamaica. Power had left Hollywood after two decades of stardom, telling confidantes his life “was empty, almost purposeless.” And Darryl Zanuck, too, the last and youngest of the moguls and some thought the greatest, had abandoned his empire and his family to wander about Europe with a series of young mistresses. Fame, fortune, and the rest had left them all variously unhappy, unhealthy, and/or broke. Together, with Ava, they were a curious, ironic reflection of the young drifters in the movie they had come to make, a veritable Lost Generation of Hollywood exiles.

  It was in Mexico that Ava first began to worry about her looks. There had barely been a day that had gone by as far back as she could remember that someone had not said or shown by their reaction that she was stunning to behold. That had not changed. But still, the clock never stopped its damned ticking. She had begun to see the signs of aging, the little lines, the bigger lines, the inability to snap back into shape quite so fast after a night or a weekend of good times. Observers would recall her on the set, “constantly, anxiously peering into a mirror.” There was whispered talk at the rushes about the circles under her eyes, and an occasional puffiness. One morning she was having her face made up and someone said without further comment that tequila of all drinks was the hardest on the skin.

  She gradually began to fear the presence of photographers. The girl they used to say photographed perfectly from every angle had now too often seen what an unfortunate candid pose could reveal. Roaming press photographers taking candid shots made her particularly nervous. She began to ask—demand—that they be barred from the set while she was working. Even when they promised you they would not print anything without your approval, and even when they did show you the proofs and you X-d out the bad shot, they double-crossed you and the bad pictures appeared anyway. It was easier just to refuse altogether. In Mexico a squadron of local press had descended one day, and the studio rep had pleaded with her to pose for a few shots for the sake of diplomacy and she had refused and stormed off the set. The Mexican papers printed the story, with editorial insults: What was the matter, they asked, was she getting too ugly? Was she afraid she would no longer attract any bullfighters?

  She was thirty-four years old. By Hollywood standards of attrition it was the beginning of the end. Garbo had retired from the screen forever at thirty-six (the same age at which Marilyn Monroe would die). Rita Hay- worth, at thirty-eight, had a few leading roles still ahead, but her time as a star was essentially over. Lana Turner, thirty-seven years old, had begun a new phase in her screen career playing the mothers of teenage kids. Thirty-four was not a good year for love goddesses.

  Feeling lonely, but shy of the social cliques formed in town, Ava singled out Peter Viertel for friendship and one day invited him to her place for dinner. On his arrival Ava had martinis made, but Viertel asked for a Coca-Cola instead.

  She told him, “I don’t trust any man who doesn’t drink.”

  Viertel switched to martinis. The writer, trying to have some positive influence on the disappointing direction of the movie, hoped to confer with Ava about her approach to the role of Lady Brett. Ava wasn’t interested. Over more martinis, and then bottles of wine at dinner, she talked instead, and at length, of her life, the men who had done her wrong, the various burdens of fame, and the iniquities of the movie business. “It seemed strange to me,” Viertel would write, “that the industry that had provided her with a status she must once have desired was finally accountable for her discontent.”

  It became very late, and Viertel was preparing to return to t
own when Ava asked that he stay the night. Determining that there was no sexual motive to her request, only “an almost panicky loneliness,” he reluctantly agreed, expecting to be put up in the guest room. Ava, though, insisted he sleep with her in one of the double beds in her bedroom. “I told her that life had not equipped me physiologically for the role of teddy bear, a remark she ignored.”

  He lay uncomfortably a few feet from her until dawn, then he got up and walked the two miles back to town (running straight into a leering Er- rol Flynn). Ava appeared happier than usual on the set in the morning (Flynn no doubt leering once again). In the evening she requested that Viertel repeat the sleeping arrangements of the night before. An awkward, intimate but not-quite-romantic friendship had begun, and for the remainder of their time in Morelia, the writer ambivalantly accepted his role as Ava’s platonic bedmate, a relationship, it occurred to him, that had some resemblance to the one between Ava’s film character and the impotent Jake Barnes (once again her art and life becoming oddly interchangeable). Viertel, a good-looking heterosexual who did not have Barnes’s physiological problem, would remember being tempted and provocatively teased by his close proximity to the beautiful star—”Maybe I will let you make love to me,” she told him once, while they were dancing, “to loosen you up”—but remained, somehow, Ava’s roommate and not her lover.

  Viertel, from his often close-up vantage point, observed as others had before him, a woman of mercurial temperament and wildly varying personality, charming and adorable at one moment, coarse and impossible the next. Alcohol, he saw, was the most obvious catalyst for her plunges into darker moods. With a few drinks she could travel the full trajectory from pleasantly high to violently unpredictable that would take others all night to achieve. Viertel took note of her tangled feelings toward the opposite sex, her many resentments and disappointments in love, as well as her impulse toward cruelty in her relationship with Walter Chiari—arrived finally from Rome—whom she would taunt with intimations of her infidelity, at one point conspiring to have him catch her in her room, wearing only her underwear, with Viertel quite obviously hiding from him in the bathroom, another uncomfortable scene into which she had drawn the writer, one he would recall as resembling something out of a Feydeau farce.

  Filming dragged on into June, by which time no one involved held much expectation that a very good film was being made. Chiari arrived in Mexico, then Bappie. Ava abruptly declared that she was on the wagon, but after a week or so abruptly jumped off of it. At a restaurant one night, she behaved very badly, nearly causing a riot among the Mexican men at a nearby table, then excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and never came back. A Mexican playboy she met at a tango palace agreed to take her on a tour of the real Mexico, as requested, to the bars and brothels. The playboy (later a hotel keeper on the Lebanese coast) and Ava drank much tequila and ended the night together in bed. He had roamed her glorious body, he would claim to reporters, telling her he was searching for a spot that had never been kissed…“And I got to the soles of her feet and I said, ‘I found it‘ “

  In May, in Mexico City, Ava went to the Department of Foreign Relations and registered a complaint for divorce. She offered as grounds under Mexican law her husband’s unjustified abandonment of their home for more than six months (in fact, they had been separated for more than three years). In June the suit was filed, the spouse was notified of the impending action and agreed without complaint, and on July 5, in the Thirteenth Civil Court in Mexico City, Judge Agustin Espinosa de la Peni granted Ava Gardner a final divorce decree from Frank Sinatra.

  In June, wending her way back to Europe, Ava made a visit to North Carolina, Walter Chiari in tow. The volatile, uninhibited couple provided an entertaining, exotic spectacle for the Smithfield relatives. After one great row at the house of her brother, Jack, Ava demanded that Chiari be thrown out and taken to the airport at once. As recounted by Doris Cannon, Jack dutifully packed up the visitor, escorted him to the car, and drove him to the Raleigh-Durham airport. By the time Ava’s brother had gotten back home he found Chiari’s bag sitting inside the doorway. The Italian had gotten a taxi at the airport, urged the driver to drive as they did in Rome, and beaten Jack back to Smithfield by some minutes. He and Ava had already resumed their argument where they had left off.

  In October, back in Spain, she had gone with Walter and Bappie to visit the Andalusian bull ranch of Angelo Peralta, a wealthy breeder she had met through Ernest Hemingway. That day a large, excited crowd had gathered to watch the testing of the bulls in the plaņta ring, and many had taken note of the presence of the famous madrileña from Hollywood, swarming around her with cheers of “Viva Ava!” And as the festivities continued, someone had come forward to suggest that the prestigious visitor enter the ring herself and take a turn on horseback with the banderillas, the barbed darts thrust into the bull’s neck or back to lessen his ferocity. There had been some talk about a script, Ava to pla.y a famous rejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback, perhaps the offer was all tied up with that, a bit of a publicity stunt.

  It was an absurd idea. For starters, she had little experience on horseback. And then there was this: It was a good way to be killed. And yet the absurdity and the mortal danger seemed to escape her, with an enthusiasm fueled by a considerable intake of absinthe and Spanish cognac mixed in a notorious combination known as a solysombra (sun and shadow), Bappie had gone off somewhere, and Walter Chiari seemed unaware of the risk. Suddenly it was happening. She was lifted onto the saddle of a restless black stallion, the reins placed in one hand and the two decorated banderillas in the other. And suddenly she was prancing into the sunlight at the center of the tiny bullring, and the crowd screamed in a deafening roar. Drunk and uncertain of what she was doing, she clung to the reins as the horse circled the arena floor at a gallop. And now horse and movie star were joined by the bull, a great snorting young animal bred only for terror, killing, and violent death. The creature charged them and grazed by, crashing into the wooden barrier behind. The bull swerved and charged again. As Ava leaned forward with the banderilla her horse reared up high and twisted back, escaping the charging horns. She was thrown from the saddle and sent to the ground with the speed of a whiplash, landing with a great thump in the dirt, the ground hitting the right side of her face with the force of a wooden bat swung straight at the cheekbone. Unable to move for several moments, she lay in great peril of being gored by the bull or stomped by the frightened horse before she could be rescued, lifted up and rushed away and out of the ring.

  At first it had seemed like only a bruise and a close call. Brushed off, given a restorative drink, she was soon back on her feet. The solysombras had proved to be an efficient anesthetic for the pain. In a little while, though, she began to feel the throbbing ache and when she looked in a mirror she saw a terrible purple bruise. In another day her cheek showed a plump swelling atop the cheekbone, and it was nearly the size of her fist.

  With increasing concern about the damage done to her face, she arranged to see Archie Mclndoe in England, flying out, her features hidden by dark glasses and a scarf. After an examination, the plastic surgeon explained that of the limited number of medical remedies for a muscular trauma of that type, all held the possibility of leaving her face permanently disfigured. The safest bet, Mclndoe told her, was to do nothing and hope that it would heal itself.

  Time went on and the lump decreased, but it did not disappear. After several months there remained a solid bump the size of a walnut. Frank came to visit her in Madrid that year. He got his first look at the injury. “Honey,” he said, “you ain’t gonna make any films looking like that.”

  Frank recommended a highly regarded plastic surgeon he knew in New York. This doctor suggested she agree to one of the remedies—chemical injections—that Mclndoe had warned her against. She could not decide what to do, and the injury got no better.

  The press had begun to sniff around at her problem. Louella Parsons wrote, “There has been so much talk ab
out Ava Gardner’s beautiful face being badly scarred after her accident in a bullring in Spain.…As I exclusively reported, Ava came to America to consult one of the top plastic men, who advised an operation. Then she made two visits to a London specialist. Those who saw her say that her face was in a pitiful condition.…But time takes care of everything, and she’ll be able to cover any disfiguration with makeup.”

  The problem weighed on her, depressed her. She would look at herself, and her face looked terrible. When would it go away? Would it ever go away? She feared getting the injections, and she feared not getting them. In public she ran in real fear now that someone would take her photograph. Friends tried to be reassuring, told her they could hardly see it anymore. But she could see it and feel it, hard and implacable, as she moved her finger back and forth on her cheek. She would look into the mirror and raise and lower her cheekbones and watch the results in her reflection, dismayed. She would close her eyes and wish it away, wish away that day in the plazita and the horse and the goddamned solysombras, and open her eyes and it was there, still there and worse than ever, she would think. After a while she was touching it all the time, going back and back to look in the mirror; she could think of nothing else. It frightened her and saddened her. It was gone, the beauty, the perfection that she had never thought about before but that had always been there and had given her everything. Gone.

  *In a contest promoting the release of The Little Hut, MGM gave the winner an entire, sizable Fijian island, renamed Ava Ava in honor of the film’s star. It was later learned that ava ava was in fact a Polynesian name for a potent, homemade form of alcoholic refreshment.