Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Once it became known that Ava Gardner was out on the town with her married costar, the press came running like hyenas at the scent of fresh meat. Rome in the summer of 1958 had become a kind of battlefield between the growing ranks of international stars and succulent starlets come to work in the city and the equally expanding army of photographers who stalked them. Itinerant press photographers covered the celebrity beat in many big cities, but nowhere in the world was there anything to compare with the joyfully ruthless camera-wielding hordes who roamed the streets of Rome, a subculture that would one day achieve iconic status in a motion picture by Fellini. The freelance photographers of Rome were, most of them, tough young men from the working class who had grown up on the streets in the chaos and desperation of the war years. As children many had been scattini, itinerant street photographers one step up from beggars, making a few lire by snapping pictures of sightseeing GI conquerors and foreign tourists. By the early 1950s these street kids had evolved into a rowdy corps of photojournalists, haunting the city in search of exploitable pictures to feed the tabloids, primarily images of criminal or accidental violence and of Roman politicians behaving badly, like the headline-making shots of the Communist Party leader escorting his wife to and from an orgy at a Via Corridoni whorehouse.

  By the middle of the decade the photographers had turned to new prey, the movies’ celebrated faces from America and Europe descending on Rome in such numbers that for a period of time the city was known as Hollywood on the Tiber. It was easy enough to find and photograph these famous faces, for every celebrity in town inevitably gravitated to the broad boulevard named the Via Veneto, and particularly to the three blocks of it between the Aurelian Wall and the U.S. embassy, a stretch composed almost entirely of hotels, clubs, and cafés (establishments including l’hotel Ambasciatori, the Café de Paris, the Bar Rosati, the Golden Gate, Doney, Bricktop, Café Strega, Grand Hotel Flora, and the popular all-night pharmacy Γ Alka Seltzer). There, on any given evening from the cocktail hour until sometime near sunup, at the outdoor tables that crowded the sidewalks, sipping espresso or Campari or scotch amid the potted azaleas and under the bright-lit signage, and with the buzz of traffic as sound track, one could reliably count on finding a sampling of movie stars—rising, falling, or eternal—from Gary Cooper to Mickey Hargitay. So plentiful were the opportunities to photograph these notables in their Via Veneto repose, that the average shot of a star pleasantly enjoying his or her aperitif of a Roman evening became a glut on the market, its value eventually so reduced that it became hardly worth the effort of releasing the shutter. To make a good sale by then—the chance to earn not a thousand lire but a hundred thousand—a photographer had to have captured something out of the ordinary, something newsworthy, violence or intemperance or lust, a side of the stars the public had not seen before. Photographers went in pursuit of celebrities as they had once pursued dissolute politicians, in the hope of catching them with their pants down, figuratively or literally, however the night might go. Fueled by their need to make a living, to eat, plus undenied feelings of class resentment (“We had nothing,” said a veteran of the time, “and they, the rich who were living la dolce vita, had everything, beautiful women, cars, money”), the photographers’ hunt for salable pictures became spirited, then aggressive, and finally, at times, violent. On nights when the stars failed to provide sufficient scandalous behavior, photographers stepped forth and provoked it, taunting and challenging this or that celebrity into a temper tantrum, a grab for the offending camera, an absurd chase through the street, a wrestling match or a punch-out, with luck all of it caught on film by the photographer’s nearby partner—and sold the next morning to the highest bidder. One participant in these tumultuous encounters described the nightly scene around the Via Veneto and other celebrity haunts as a “theater of war.”

  For the roving photographers of Rome, Ava Gardner remained a most desirable subject, whether, for instance, snapped publicly brawling with local favorite Walter Chiari, or provocatively on her own, as when she was caught on film at the studio with wet, stringy hair and wearing little more than a bath towel (the photographer had sneaked into Cinecittà and hidden in a cardboard box for several hours before obtaining his memorable shot). Instant sales. Now, in a fresh, illicit liaison with Franciosa, she had placed the picture takers on full alert. Night after night they dogged the couple’s trail, staked out each club and restaurant they entered, gave chase through the empty, predawn streets, Ava and Tony in a Thunder- bird convertible or newly purchased Facel-Vega, the photographers swarming behind them on buzzing Lambrettas, gunning engines and screeching around ancient corners while the rest of the city was trying to sleep.

  One night that summer, the night of August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, would come to be seen as the quintessence of this glamorous and absurd time in Rome. It was another long, humid night like all the rest that summer, but emblematic and influential—as some would have it, the night La Dolce Vita was born. Around two o’clock in the morning, a gang of photographers had spotted Farouk, the obese exiled King of Egypt, sitting at the Café de Paris with his fiancee and some other people. The photographers—five of them—decided to get some pictures and came charging at the group (in those days the need for a photoflash and the absence of telephoto lenses meant photographers were required to be very close to their subjects for a good picture), which the king and his bodyguards mistook for an assassination attempt. Farouk put the closest photographer into a headlock and wrestled him to the ground while the bodyguards battled with the others. Bodies crashed around, knocking over the cafe’s metal tables and chairs, drinks spilling in the air. The police were summoned, but by the time they arrived, the photographers had run away, having received a tip that Ava Gardner and Tony Franciosa were arriving at Bricktop, the nightclub on the opposite side of the Via Véneto. The photographers charged again, Ava screamed as a bright Bruin flash went off directly in her face and Franciosa, enraged, lunged at the man. A fight ensued, and the photographer got much the worst of it. But Franciosa, unlike King Farouk, had no bodyguards, and so the other photographers were able to rush at him and drag their comrade away to safety. Ava, agitated by the violence, refused to leave the nightclub until the photographers had gone, but they waited her out, and when she exited the club at four-twenty that morning, many were still waiting for her and chased her home.

  To those involved it was all just another night in Rome, nothing worth making a fuss about. But someone decided to write up the story for one of the daily newspapers, the story of the movie stars, the fat king and his girlfriend, the photographers and the all-night battle, titled it PHOTOGRAPHER ATTACKED BY FAROUK AND FRANCIOSA. The tale was then retold (now under the title THAT TERRIBLE NIGHT ON VIA VENETO) in the national weekly L’espresso. The piece caught the attention of filmmaker Federico Fellini, who had been trying to develop a scenario about Rome’s decadent café society. Fellini went on to meet with the leader of the photographers in the fracas, a man named Tazio Secchiaroli. Tazio would supply Fellini with numerous stories from his hectic life as a freelance shooter, including many close encounters with Ava Gardner (it was Secchiaroli who had waited in that cardboard box for the shot of Ava in a towel), and from some of these stories Fellini and his collaborators would develop the screenplay for what became his epochal film, La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life).*

  Ava Gardner would become the prototype for La Dolce Vita’s visiting Hollywood star, played in the film by Anita Ekberg (herself not an unknown prey of the Italian photographers), a ravishing, wild, sometimes barefoot screen goddess whose desperate search for excitement goes on deep into the night. Ava’s influence was felt throughout the film’s first hour, even informing Ekberg’s wardrobe, the provocative adaptation of an Italian clergyman’s garb that was a replica of a controversial outfit originally created for Ava by the Fontana sisters; the outfit had caused so much negative comment in Italy for its supposed disrespect to the church that the sisters requested she allow them to take it
back. Fellini’s film, released in 1960, was the cause of considerable analysis and punditry in media and cultural circles. There was grave concern about the depiction of modern life as nothing more than joyless hedonism and spiritual emptiness; to Ava Gardner the first half of La Dolce Vita must have looked like home movies.

  Her romance with Tony Franciosa continued its passionate course until the arrival one day of Franciosa’s wife, the volcanic presence known as Shelley Winters. Franciosa feared Winters’s wrath, but he seemed incapable of disentangling himself from his alluring costar. And now the paparazzi pictures of the two had begun to surface in the press. Mickey Knox, having accepted Franciosa’s “droit” philosophically, advised him of the potential disaster ahead. “The paparazzi were all around, and he was very volatile. I told him, ‘You must be fucking crazy! Shelley’s coming, and you’re out there getting photographed!’ But he was caught up in this thing. Then he wouldn’t tell Ava Shelley was coming. I told him, ‘You’ve got to tell Ava that Shelley is coming, don’t surprise her.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right.’ But he never did. He could punch a fucking paparazzo, but with these two women he didn’t know what to do! I knew Shelley from the time she was an extra; I didn’t want to be any part of this. And I was with Ava when Shelley arrived. I was playing Jotto with her. And all of a sudden Shelley pranced on the set, and she screams out, ‘Ava!’ And the look on Ava’s face was unbelievable. Tony hadn’t said a word about his wife coming to town.”

  According to Winters (in her memoir) she had arrived in Rome to find her husband a physical and emotional wreck, shriveled, sick, frightened. What in the hell had he been up to? The studio driver told her that Franciosa had not slept in three days and not eaten in no one knew how long. “Whatever was happening on this film,” Shelley mused, “whatever its name, was killing him.”

  Soon she learned its name.

  In Shelley Winters’s account, her husband admitted his wrongdoing— it may have been difficult to cover up at that point, with the evidence being displayed in newspapers and magazines around the world—and begged for forgiveness. “Shell, “he told her, “you left me alone for six months…I’m not a very strong person.”

  With some days off before two weeks of location shooting in Naples, Winters ordered her husband to go with her to the isle of Capri for a rest cure, taking a moment to confront Ava Gardner, whom Shelley would recall as being ready and eager to accompany the couple on their getaway.

  “I got very quiet and said, ‘Ava, I grew up in Brooklyn with Murder Incorporated as my playmates.…I went to junior high school with these men. Ava, I swear, if you so much as set a foot on Capri while my husband is recuperating, I’ll put a contract out on you.”

  The affair was over.

  But not quite. Shortly after the conclusion of filming in Italy, they all found themselves in London, all at the Savoy Hotel; Shelley and Tony in one suite and Ava in one on the floor below. Ava had called him, needed to see him again, she had said. “So I went down,” Franciosa would recall, “and emerged days later.”

  The way it had finally ended, the end of the whole exhausting, crazy affair, Franciosa would remember as the weirdest part of all. One night they had been together in London, and Ava had told him she was pregnant and he was the father.

  He didn’t believe her. “And in fact it wasn’t true,” he told Rex Reed. “She wasn’t pregnant. I was dumbfounded. At that moment the situation didn’t seem romantic anymore. The fact that it wasn’t true seemed very out of character for Ava.

  “She never spoke to me again.”

  With the completion of The Naked Maja, Ava’s life as a studio contract player ended. For the first time since she was eighteen years old, seventeen years ago, she was no longer in the employ of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The separation caused no nostalgia on the actress’s part, only relief (fears for the future were something else again). One could talk all one wanted about tradition and ties that bind, but as far as she was concerned the contract had been a license to steal. For The Naked Maja, Ava had received ninety thousand dollars from her studio. The going rate for a star of her rank was five times that amount and more. With a proper payout, she hoped, the business—the ordeal—of making movies, could be over within another few years, a few major vehicles to take her out in some sort of style and to leave her rich for life.

  For consideration as her next film, her first as an independent contractor, David Hanna had relayed an offer from producer-director Stanley Kramer for her to star with Gregory Peck in the screen version of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, slated to begin filming in Australia in January. Apprised of the offer, Ava’s representatives in Hollywood had urged her not to do this story of the poignant last days of the last people on earth following an apocalyptic nuclear war. Too depressing, the William Morris Agency told her, not the right part and a likely box-office flop. But she had been impressed by the screenplay, and she had been deeply touched by the character of the woman, Moira, a weary romantic who had seen too much of love but now enjoyed one last bittersweet—literally doomed— romance. David Hanna encouraged her to accept the offer, saying that Stanley Kramer was a class act, that the film would be treated with respect, and that it was a distinguished way to begin her freelance career, perhaps even the sort of thing that got one an Oscar. Ava said she wanted a half million dollars. Kramer countered with four hundred thousand and perks. He came to see her in Rome. She agreed to meet with him only on a night out, and with a raucous group she had gathered they went club hopping. She refused to talk business, refused to talk to Kramer very much at all, becoming preoccupied with some flamenco dancers and then at last disappearing into the night. It was an eccentric performance, and Kramer had been plainly distressed. He told Hanna that maybe after all Ingrid Bergman would be a better choice for the part. Hanna had had to give him a spiel, how she was shy—people didn’t realize how shy she was—and did Kramer hear how she had cried when she read the script? Kramer nursed his second thoughts. Hanna was irked, knew he should have been used to her unpredictability, the unfathomable turns of behavior, but he still couldn’t believe that after all her heartfelt ruminations about the future this was how she had chosen to begin her career as her own boss, muddying the first important, lucrative deal on a whim. And then Ava had come out of nowhere to meet with Kramer just a few hours before he left for the airport, and she had given a charming, charismatic performance; everything got settled, Kramer was starry-eyed, and she sent him off to Hollywood with a big kiss. Dave Hanna went to the bar at the Excelsior— the Snake Pit it was called by Americans—and had a stiff drink.

  The hardened bruise on her face had gotten harder and she had flown to London for a weekend to let Sir Archibald Mclndoe have another look. The doctor now told her that the accumulation of dead tissue below the surface had become attached to the cheekbone, and that to release this hardened buildup would require a small operation. An appointment was made. The idea of having her face sliced into by a surgeon’s knife—even one in the skilled hands of Sir Archie—filled her with dread. The accident had already shown her the fragility the impermanence of her appearance. A few days before the scheduled operation she canceled it. Mclndoe called her some weeks later, asking her as a personal favor to make an appearance at his charity bazaar in East Grinstead, an annual event to benefit the hospital nurses’ pension fund. She was not at all eager for a public display of that sort but couldn’t bring herself to refuse him. They spoke several times in the days leading up to the bazaar, and Mclndoe brought up the subject of her cheek, and eventually, subject to Mclndoe’s powers of persuasion, she had again agreed to have him perform the operation, scheduling it for the end of her brief appearance at the charity bazaar. The benefit would serve as a cover, no one would have to know about the other business at all. David Hanna had accompanied her to England and to the bazaar. There were photographers and reporters, a public appearance to be made, and the surgery—all the ingredients, he assumed, to cause his employer flamboyant distress,
and he had steeled himself for the first awkward, temperamental, or irrational scene of many ahead. But the opposite had occurred, she had gone through it all like a charm, strong and upbeat, no problems at all. Her unpredictability, Hanna realized, was the only thing you could rely on; otherwise you lost as much sleep worrying about what she didn’t do as what she did.

  With a tiny incision behind the ear, allowing access to the bone, the doctor quickly removed the dead tissue, closed the opening, and was done. It was only when she had been wheeled into the recovery room with her face covered in bandages that Ava finally released her stifled fears, crying and sobbing uncontrollably. She asked Dave Hanna if he thought Sir Archie had really performed the operation on her face or if without telling her he had given the job to someone else, to some underling. Hanna was taken aback to realize that she wasn’t joking.

  Her face would heal as well as expected. A faint concave line on her cheek would remain as permanent evidence of a foolish afternoon.

  Written in the Cold War atmosphere of A-bomb brinksmanship, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, adapted for film by veteran screenwriter John Pax- ton, posited a post-nuclear-holocaust world in which the end of humanity is at hand, the only survivors of the catastrophic conflict—the inhabitants of Australia and the crew of a single U.S. submarine—awaiting their inevitable, imminent end from the nearing clouds of radiation. The intertwined story lines followed the last chapter in the lives of assorted characters coping with their grim fate: a local naval officer and his young wife (to be played by Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson); a scientist who had helped to create the weapons that were now to destroy him (Fred Astaire, in his first nonmusical role); the American sub commander, Dwight Towers, who has lost his family in the war (Gregory Peck) and Moira, the boozy, bittersweet woman who falls in love with him. For Stanley Kramer, a high-minded, politically liberal filmmaker with a tendency to preach (The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? among the other films on his resume), On the Beach had an antiwar-anti-nuclear-proliferation message he felt born to tell.