Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Kramer had determined to shoot the film wherever possible at the Australian localities of each scene in Nevil Shute’s book, including Frankston, Canadian Bay, the Phillip Island raceway, and all over the city of Melbourne. Although there had been a film industry in Australia for decades, large-scale studio space was limited, and Kramer decided to build his own from scratch, taking over the seventy-acre Royal Showgrounds, most often the site of agricultural fairs, transforming halls that had previously been used for judging sheep and cattle into soundstages, production departments, and dressing rooms. While the U.S. military had rejected all requests to aid Kramer with what they considered his gloomy, no-fun take on all-out nuclear war*, the Australian government, pleased to have their country’s shores opened to international filmmaking, made available to the producer all that he needed including the use of their top-of-the-line submarine H MAS Andrew. Kramer’s preparations and negotiations had gone on for months before actual filming began and there had been so much attention in the press that by the time his stars had arrived from Hollywood and elsewhere, there were few in all Austral-Oceania who were not aware of the cast list and planned locations and much else about On the Beach, the movie.

  On New Year’s Day 1959, Ava (with Bappie and Dave Hanna) departed from San Francisco for Australia (delaying her arrival by several days with a sudden, impulsive stopover in Hawaii: She simply decided to get off the plane in Honolulu and go swimming). A great crowd of press, fans, and gawkers came to the airport in Sydney to greet her arrival, and then another when she reached Melbourne, where production was headquartered. She had been gracious and appreciative of the initial welcome, the inescapable friendliness of the Australian people, but the crowds and the press kept coming at the same frenzied level the next day and the next, swarming around her rooms in an adjunct building on the grounds of the St. James Hotel in Yarra. On the Beach was the first large-scale, star- studded production to be made in Australia; the enthusiasm and curiosity were huge. Batteries of reporters and photographers had been assigned to the subject, charged with bringing back a daily supply of anecdotes, interviews, and pictures to meet the public’s demand. Peck, Astaire, and Perkins came in for their share of scrutiny, but nothing to compare with the interest focused on Ava Gardner.

  “She could not go anywhere without being bugged by people,” recalled Tony Trabert, the American tennis star who had met Ava on the flight to Australia. “We got off in Sydney and she went on to Melbourne, and eventually we went down there to play a tournament and we invited Ava and her sister to come to the tournament and they did. A bunch of us went out to dinner with her afterward. She was a lovely, lovely person, and she was warm to everyone. But it was tough for her to be out like that. They wouldn’t leave her alone. If you went to a restaurant, whatever you did. She couldn’t just enjoy an evening. They would hide behind trees and drive by in a car and take pictures. They just haunted her. It was pretty tough for her to move around like a normal person. She could never have any peace. It made her reclusive. Most of the time there I think she stayed pretty much to herself.”

  For Ava and Australia’s legendarily brash news gatherers, Melbourne became another Rome, another theater of war. They countered her reclu- siveness and perceived disdain with printed back talk and gossip. She was chastised for her arrogant, finicky ways (one headline read, DON’T BE SNOOTY AVA!), for her refusal to do a Red Cross charity advertisement (as her costars had done), for arriving an hour late to work (actually, due to a schedule change), and for demanding that the wallpaper in her rooms be redone. They speculated about an affair between Ava and the married Tony Trabert. One piece of reportage threatened to turn the entire host city against her. Melbourne in those days self-consciously bore the reputation for a lack of cosmopolitan excitement, and so it was touching an open sore when she was quoted as saying, “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.” The quote was soon picked up and reprinted everywhere, some who read it reacting with amusement (especially if they didn’t live in Melbourne), but quite a few concluding that Ava Gardner was a boorish, ungrateful guest. In fact, the offending quote had been made up by Sydney Morning Herald reporter Neil Jillett. Jillett had been assigned to get an interview with Gardner, but this proved impossible, and the only fresh news he had uncovered was the number of bottles of scotch the actress had ordered delivered to her flat. Dispatching his copy, he added the Melbourne quote, he would explain later, intending it as a joke, but somewhere en route to a morning edition the context got lost. “I wanted to do a correction,” Jillett recalled, “but the editor didn’t care. The line got picked up everywhere, and Ava had to answer for it, I’m afraid. I’ve researched it and found that it is the second-most-cited quote about Melbourne of all time, always with Ava having said it. And so I have had to live with the fact that in over forty years as a writer, my one famous line has been ascribed to someone else.”

  Trying to slow the negative publicity, Stanley Kramer pleaded with Ava to attend a brief press conference. “She was utterly unable to cope,” Kramer would recall. “She was terrified. She began to shake as soon as they started asking personal questions.…The Melbourne press really gave her a bad time; asked questions about her tax situation, whether Frank Sinatra was coming to see her, how often he phoned her.…She was too frightened to be equal to them.…She refused to let them take any photographs, even if they agreed to throw away the pictures she didn’t like. The press of course resented her. So they always printed the worst pictures of her they could get.”

  Through the months of filming, Kramer had found Ava to be a person of great fascination and great contradiction, appealing and impossible, funny and self-pitying, arrogant and painfully unsure of herself, often all in the same day. She was prone to what he called “flamenco moods,” swinging transitions from happiness to depression, a condition he feared would take a great toll on her nervous system. As an actress, though, she was all he had hoped for and more. She was impressively professional, diligent, skilled (able, in one emotional scene, to cry on cue for seven takes in a row) and creatively engaged, adding detail and tone to the role of Moira, even wardrobe suggestions (some of them supplied from her own things). “She’s avid to grasp every nuance of her next scene,” Kramer would write of her. “Her projection really is extraordinary. Swiftly she can go from softness to pathos to violence.” Those parts of her screen character that seemed to intersect with elements of her own life— Moira a sarcastic but vulnerable romantic, unlucky at love, turning to booze and one-night stands for momentary comfort—Kramer didn’t dare to acknowledge in his directions, but it was clear that the actress was exploring the part from heart and soul, bringing to it emotional depth and intimate understanding. Due mainly to Ava’s open and sensitive performance, the love affair between Moira and Dwight became on film one of the most tender and real in any Hollywood production of that era. Too tender and real, perhaps, for the sensitivities of author Nevil Shute, who argued strongly against Kramer’s decision to let the couple have a sexual relationship, whereas the character of the commander in the novel pointedly abstained in deference to the memory of his dead wife. Kramer believed that Shute’s attitude was too severe and puritanical, and that to follow the novelist’s version in the matter was to deny the genuine love his two characters felt for each other and would trivialize the only affirmative subplot in the story. Shute became so enraged with Kramer’s refusal to keep his characters unsullied that he turned against the production altogether; it has been suggested that Shute’s lingering bitterness about the film may even have contributed to his sudden death the following year.

  The weeks crawled by, full of hard work, heat—temperatures well over a hundred in that Australian January—countryside locations infested with fat, biting flies, and the pesky, ever-buzzing intrusions of gawkers and reporters. Melbourne was—if not the end of the world—a city of very quiet charms. There was little for a film star to do after a day’s work other than try
to avoid being photographed. The town in those days followed a conservative regimen, and liquor was not allowed to be sold after six in the evening (this savage law didn’t change until 1966). Ava had in any case put herself on the wagon for a while, a temporary “health kick” to reduce her weight and the puffiness of her face she had noticed in the first rushes. The absence of alcohol made the nights pass even more slowly and uneventfully. There were occasional parties at the rented mansion of Gregory Peck and his new wife, Véronique, complete with meals prepared by an imported French chef, but Ava felt subdued, constrained in the company of her fellow stars, and while the others made small talk or played cards after dinner, she would slip away to the hallway by herself and sip a cup of tea or just sneak home (without the aid of liquor in such gatherings, she could be as shy and self-conscious as she had been at her first Hollywood parties eighteen years earlier). She felt stifled, lonely. Where was her redemptive romance like Moira’s with her submarine commander? One evening she and Tony Perkins ended up together, and she found herself making a strong play for the young, sensitive actor. It was awkwardly rebuffed. Perkins’s romantic interest was not in the opposite sex.

  “I would overhear conversations when she and her sister were chatting,” remembered Alan Harkness, the film’s assistant editor. “And I understood that she was very bored. She didn’t mix with many people, didn’t have many people to talk to. Everyone tended to stay away from her, she seemed so unapproachable. They were a bit afraid of her. But I felt that a lot of the time that if anybody had just walked up to her and said ‘Hi’ and talked to her like a normal person, he would have been really welcomed, or if a young bloke had come up in a sports car and just said, ‘You want to take a trip down the coast?’ she would have jumped at it. People just stayed out of her way, and I think she really wished she could have gotten to know people.

  “There was a wrap party on the stage, with music and dancing, everyone was there. And Ava was by herself, and for a while not a single person was asking her to dance. She was sitting there, bored. You wouldn’t believe it. Here was Ava Gardner by herself, and no one would dance with her. And I finally went over to her. I thought, Gosh, I’m not going to let this opportunity go, I’ll regret it.…So I went over and asked her to dance. And she was great. And the ice was broken, and others came up to dance with her then. But most times people I think tried to keep out of her way.”

  On impulse one night she called Walter Chiari in Italy and told him to come to Australia at once. She missed him, she needed him. Chiari said of course, he would be there in a matter of days. But by the time he arrived it was too late. The lovelorn mood in which Ava had longed to resume their feisty romance had dissipated. Chiari, desiring a reason for flying halfway around the world other than to be yelled at or ignored, made contact with an Australian promoter who booked him for a performance at the local stadium. It struck Ava as the latest example of what she saw as Walter’s trading on their relationship for his own gain, the promoters interested in him only, she thought, as “Ava Gardner’s boyfriend.” Ava’s attitude was, in any case, really just more evidence of her boredom with the man, another attempt to drive him off, and this one had the earmarks of success.

  Wanting to get away from Walter and eager to be somewhere livelier than Melbourne, someplace that served booze past sundown—at Chiari’s arrival she had gone off the wagon—Ava ordered David Hanna to arrange for them a weekend jaunt to Sydney. In that jumping city she tried to make up for weeks of lost time in forty-eight hours or so. The press caught her scent, and a string of reporters and photographers trailed along in the shadows as she wandered from dive to dive in Sydney’s raffish, neon-lit King’s Cross. The visit properly climaxed with an unpleasant scene that made all the newspapers, a run-in with a newspaperman of course, this after midnight in a club called the Corinthian Room, where she arrived with Hanna and Bappie and one or two others met along the way, taking a table near the music and ordering a drink (not her first).

  “I was working for the Sydney Sun at that time,” recalled journalist Steve Dunleavy forty-four years later in New York City, “and she was shooting On the Beach in Melbourne, and now she was in town and she was news. I caught up with her—it was about one or two in the morning—at a club owned by Joe Taylor, the Corinthian. There was a very-well-known singer appearing there by the name of Norm Erskine, and I knew him pretty well. I went to Norm and he told me, he said, ‘1 wouldn’t go near her, man, she’s in a foul mood—you go near her and she’ll hit you with a champagne bottle ...’I stayed anyway.

  “I made my way over to the table. There were about four people with her, no other names there, just some hangers-on. They were all drunk.

  “She had a PR guy, Dave Hanna. Nice guy. A hell of a nice guy. I came up to him and I said, ‘Look, we want a picture of Ava,’ and all that. I said, ‘If you want to get the bottles off the table first’—it was common with celebrities to want to remove the evidence of alcohol for a picture—I said, ‘that would be fine.’ Anyway, he was very nice about it, but then Ava looks around at me and says, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  “I turned to her and I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Miss Gardner, my name is Steve Dunleavy and I’m a reporter with the Sydney Sun, and we would like to have a picture of you…

  “She started shouting four-letter words at me. And then she reached into the bucket for the champagne bottle, just as Norm Erskine had predicted! They must have taken it away. But she had a full glass of champagne in her hand and she threw that at me, the glass and all. She just drenched me with it. I remember I had on a very light tan suit. And of course my lead the next day was: ‘Last night I shared a glass of champagne with actress Ava Gardner: she sipped it and I wore it.’

  “And that’s pretty much what happened. But the thing I remember about that night, although she was drunk—and I’d heard all the stories about her, the absolute marathon drinking she did—and she’s cursing at me—it was incredible to hear what came out of her mouth, like a sailor and a truck driver were having a competition—and I’m drenched in champagne—regardless of all that at that moment as I saw her face the only thing I could think was, how bloody gorgeous the woman was. She was absolutely stunning.”

  The next week Walter Chiari performed his concert in Melbourne, received a rubber check for his efforts (“He deserves it,” said Ava, when Hanna relayed the news. “He’s a sucker”), and left for the airport. Reporters came to record his departing words, less a press conference than a Hamletic monologue:

  “This time it is really good-bye. Ava and I have parted and come back together many times, but this time it is final. I know what I’m doing. No one has to feel sorry because they think I’ve been hurt. I know when I’m hurt and I know how much hurt I’m willing to take….

  “I suffer because I love Ava, and I love her because I understand her, because I know she is so good and defenseless and because I know she suffers. If I could say just one thing to people, and especially to the press, I would say: ‘Be kind to Ava. Because this is the only way to make her realize that people see in her more than she thinks they do.’ “

  She began making telephone calls to the man she so often ached to talk to at the lonely and restless moments in her life. Long distance calls to Los Angeles and Palm Springs and Las Vegas. They had begun calling each other regularly since the divorce—it was his need as much as hers— sometimes once in a month, sometimes several times a week. The conversations might go on for hours, intimate, far-ranging, comforting. Unpleasant memories were unremembered. She had come to think of him as the one person in the world who understood her, who wanted nothing from her, who cared only for her friendship and her happiness.

  One night at her place in Yarra she was on the phone to him thousands of miles away, and he was telling her about a concert he had just done, and she said to him that she wished she had seen it and then that she wished she could see him.

  He said, “So why don’t I come down there and sing to y
ou?”

  She said, “I would love that, baby.”

  “Then you got it,” he said.

  The next time they talked he told her to leave some time for him on her dance card, he was on his way. It had taken a couple of hours to make it happen. He called the promoter he knew in Australia, an American guy named Lee Gordon. They booked it immediately. He was on his way. He traveled light, no orchestra, flying over with the great jazz combo he had been performing with in the States, the Red Norvo Quintet (Norvo, Jimmy Wyble, Jerry Dodgion, Red Wooten, John Markham) and pianist Bill Miller. It was an extravagant gesture, calculated to impress. But why the visit had to be in the form of a very brief, professional engagement neither Frank nor Ava seemed to consider. They would be happy to set eyes on each other, and they would leave it at that.

  The local press interest in Sinatra’s visit was enormous, of course, raised higher still by the presence in Australia of his former wife. Ava told David Hanna how she wished she could go to the airport and meet his plane the way ordinary people did. Hanna told her, “So do it. Just forget you’re Ava Gardner and go to the airport and meet him.” She looked at her manager in shocked disbelief, as if he had suggested she go to the airport naked, on the back of a mule.

  She sat in the front row at the concert. He sang “All of Me” to her and they locked eyes like in the old days, as if there was no one else in the stadium. The scene afterward was chaos and invective. Sinatra bodyguards played rough with the local rubberneckers. The singer’s imprecation to a photographer was widely reported: “Take another picture and I’ll ram that camera down your throat. You stink!”