Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  She went with him in the limousine to his hotel, a dangerous chase as a fleet of reporters’ cars followed them, everyone moving at high speed, and Sinatra screaming for his driver to run them off the road. They went up to Frank’s suite, and had some food sent up and drank champagne and talked and looked at each other and they went to bed.

  In April, after nearly four months, she left Australia. The press was there at the airport to record her departure—though a fraction as many as had greeted her in January. Then it had been like the arrival of some dazzling monarch, huge crowd, cheers and smiles all around; now, in April, it resembled the hunched exit of a deposed monarch. A farewell statement to Melbourne: “Miss Gardner does not feel like talking today.” For a week before she left the country, waiting only to know that her vocal dubbing was completed, she had barely left her rooms in the little building near the St. James. A reporter asked David Hanna about a story a resort hotel was putting around, that Ava was treating all her friends from the movie to an expense-paid beach holiday. Hanna joked to himself, “What friends?”

  Australia would be the end of the line for David and Ava. The news of his termination had not come to him as much of a surprise. They had argued too often of late, and Ava’s list of grievances and suspicions had grown too long for them to continue. Always uncertain of her place in the world, she was ever on the lookout for betrayal, Hanna believed, and age and fear and liquor had made it all the worse. Made it for him, at times, unbearable. You could be her greatest, most trusted friend one moment and treated like a barely tolerated servant the next. Often she had dropped hints that she suspected him of various corruptions, taking kickbacks from hoteliers or restaurants, tipping off photographers to her whereabouts for a share of the spoils, that kind of thing. Then she would do something so kind or generous or adorable, behave with such sympathy or honesty, that he would be back in her corner again, devoted. “I know how awful I can be,” she said to him once after he had turned in a letter of resignation at the end of a particularly awful weekend in Paris. “But you know I don’t mean it.…I’m sorry a minute afterward and at night I cry myself to sleep.”

  In Los Angeles a press conference was scheduled to publicize the opening of The Naked Maja. She had told someone at Metro she would be there, but she didn’t go. It didn’t matter: Nothing, no one was going to help— the film had disaster painted all over it.

  She returned to Spain briefly then abruptly left. She was restless, dissatisfied, lonesome, but lonesome for what she wasn’t sure.

  Through the summer of 1959 she drifted. No plan, no itinerary. She would stay somewhere for days or weeks. One morning she would head for the airport again. She went to San Francisco, Palm Springs, Florida, and Haiti. She lay in the sunshine and swam in the palm-shaded pool at a hotel in Petionville, above the capital. She moved on by taxi to Cap Haïtien, a dusty, spine-breaking five-hour drive. Her stay is well-remembered at the Hotel Mt. Joli, if not pleasantly so. Two rooms were taken (numbers 25 and 26) at the rate of eight dollars each, meals included. Miss Gardner drank at the bar till she fell asleep, to be carried to her room, say those who recall the brief but formidable visit. Late in the night she cried for the kitchen to be reopened for her dinner; she stayed up drinking till dawn. Her idiosyncratic schedule continued all the next day: She wanted breakfast at noon, lunch in the evening, supper after midnight. Ava and the management sparred. On the third day Madame Bussenius, the owner, requested that she look for lodging elsewhere. The hotel keeper’s English was not so good, and there was some confusion regarding her request.

  “What did you say to me?”

  The request was repeated with elaborations, mostly in French. Ava picked out the repeated use of the word “merde.” She cried out, “ That I understand!” The two women began shouting at each other across the lobby while other guests looked on. As Yvette Bussenius recalled it, “She launched forward, wanting to attack me…she screamed, battled, kicked and called me all sorts of names.” Only staff members rushing up to restrain the two women prevented physical injury.

  The guest’s checkout was expedited, Madame Bussenius closely observing her departure from the hotel. She recalled that Ava Gardner wore no shoes.

  She moved on to Cuba. In January, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army had seized control of the island. The dictator Batista had fled for his life. The political prisoners rotting in the colossal stone prison were freed, and fresh new political prisoners were invited to take their place.

  At the Hotel Nacional she took a small suite on the second floor with a view of the malecón and the sea. Havana showed the signs of the recent upheaval in the shuttered shops, abandoned businesses, and patrols of khaki-clad, rifle-toting barbados, but the city was otherwise much as she remembered it, full of sun-tanning tourists, beggars, rum, rhumba, sin. The daiquiris at the Floridita remained ice cold, perfect.

  Like everyone else in the summer of 1959, Ava had been fascinated by the stories and pictures of Cuba’s charismatic, bearded liberator. And the comandante, as it turned out, had a similar interest in the yanqui movie star. A meeting was arranged at the Havana Hilton, the general’s base of command. Castro greeted her with extravagant Latin gallantry. He took her on a tour of his headquarters, high up in a former VIP suite, now transformed into disheveled office space he shared with his brother Raul and Che Guevara. They sat on the balcony overlooking the whole city, drank Cuba libres, and Castro told her about the revolution and his dream of a prosperous and equitable future for his nation. She’d had no idea how tall he was—perhaps six-foot five in his combat boots, one of which was untied (also, his socks did not match). She thought him a compelling personality and very attractive, even the beard. (“She spoke very highly of Castro when she got back,” said Betty Sicre. “She was very impressed with him. Said he was full of good ideas.”) Ava wanted to know if it was true that he hated Americans. Fidel told her no. He hated only Richard Nixon. Some Americans, Fidel told her, he found very sympathetic.

  What more occurred between the two is unclear, though Ava’s attentions were evidently sufficient to enrage Castro’s beautiful nineteen-year- old German translator-mistress, Ilona Marita Lorenz. “Gardner was after him,” Lorenz would recall to writer Ted Schwarz, the “middle-aged woman” sending him numerous notes that the mistress claimed to have intercepted before Fidel could see them. The two rivals at last came face to face in the lobby of the Hilton, and it was an ugly scene. Ava was staggeringly drunk, said Marita, and called the girl “a little bitch” for hiding Fidel from her. Ava followed her into the elevator and then, said Marita, slapped her hard in the face. A Castro bodyguard named Captain Pupo, also in the elevator, drew his pistol from its holster and told everybody to cool it.

  That night Fidel reassured his mistress he had rid himself of the movie star. “He had fixed up Ava Gardner with an aide,” Lorenz claimed, “who was to satisfy her in a suite at the National Hotel, compliments of Cuba.”

  Ava flew to New York in late August. Frank loaned her the run of his new luxury pied-à-terre in Manhattan. She haunted the jazz clubs. She went to see Miles Davis at Birdland. She went every night. Pee Wee, the midget emcee, would introduce her from the bandstand. Ava and Miles became friends. “She was a stunningly beautiful woman,” the trumpeter would remember in his autobiography, “dark and sensuous.…Man, she was a hot number.” Some nights after the show at Birdland they would go out somewhere together. “We didn’t get down or nothing like that. She was a nice person, real nice, and if I would have wanted to we could have had a thing. I just don’t know why it didn’t happen, but it didn’t, even though a lot of people swear that it did.”

  One night at a party, Miles Davis said, she started kissing him. She had a beautiful full mouth, said Miles, “soft as a motherfucker.”

  In September she went to North Carolina, to Raleigh and then Smithfield and Brogden, visiting with each of her sisters and her brother in turn. There were new members of the family to meet each time she came, it seemed, ni
eces and nephews marrying and having kids. Their lives went on and prospered, all within a few miles of Johnston County. There were parties and barbecues, and the young people would pester her with questions, and the older sisters would scold them to stop making such a fuss over the girl and let her eat.

  One day in the last week of September she boarded the Atlantic Coast Line train out of Selma and returned to New York City. On the night of her arrival she left for Europe.

  In Madrid changes were coming. Beatrice would be going away, leaving her for America—leaving her for love. She had found a guy, a fella in the business, Art Cole, a veteran prop man who had come to Spain for a picture and returned to Hollywood. They had gone around together, fallen for each other, and wanted to give marriage a try. Bappie was no less devoted than ever, but she was nearly sixty years old and craved a little time to have some kind of life that did not involve her baby sister. Bappie had been her protector, booster, and the closest thing to a restraining influence (though some observers considered her quite the opposite) for twenty years, and now she was not going to be there anymore. And Reenie Jordan, Ava’s trusted servant, would soon be missing as well. They were more like sisters, too, than employer and employee, but Ava was always the sister who paid the salary and had the last word in any argument. For Reenie the time had just about come to see if there really was a world out there without Ava Gardner. With her support system missing, Ava would find continued life at La Bruja more difficult and lonely, and soon what roots she had planted at the house in Moraleja would be pulled back out.

  Later that autumn she flew to Rome to begin a new picture, The Angel Wore Red. Titanus, despite the debacle of The Naked Maja, had sought out Ava for their next international production (pursuant to the modest hope that lightning strikes once). Again it would be an Italian operation with MGM as mostly silent partner, once again a film with a Spanish setting shot in a Roman studio, the project barred from Iberian locations by the controversial subject matter (the Spanish civil war). As with The Naked Maja, the direction (and script) would be by a Hollywood veteran, this time Nunnally Johnson, a celebrated screenwriter (The Grapes of Wrath) and producer for decades at Twentieth Century—Fox and of late—and reluctantly—a director, with middling result, his heart still back in a warm room alone with his typewriter. It was the story—per Johnson—of “horny priest and virgin-type prostie”—a heroic cleric, that is, pursued by the forces of evil, taken under the wing of a luscious, gold-hearted hooker. Cast as the priest was Dirk Bogarde, Britain’s fifties matinee idol, now in the course of revealing himself as a serious and daring screen actor. Unlike The Naked Maja s mishmash of a script, Angel’s screenplay by Johnson had some coherence and the character of Soledad seemed compelling on the page. “It was,” Bogarde told the Evening Standard in 1961, “a magnificent part for Ava. It would have done for her what Two Women did for Sophia Loren. She really put her heart into it.”

  Also unlike The Naked Maja, filming of The Angel Wore Red at least began with efficiency and a sense of purpose. Ava found Johnson wonderful company; he adored her and made her laugh; they were fellow Southerners who tried to outdo each other with tales of their humble beginnings (“Where I come from,” said the Georgian Johnson, “Tobacco Road people are the country-club set”). The good times ended fast, however. Seeming to embrace the deglamorization process that had begun in On the Beach, Ava’s physical interpretation of the role called for an earthy, Gypsy sensuality, sans makeup or underwear. A glimpse of the first footage shot and word came down (from Hollywood, according to Dirk Bogarde): This would not do. The higher-ups claimed the footage showed her with bags under her eyes and her ass spread all across the screen. This film stared Ava Gardner not Anna Magnani, they squawked. She was ordered into makeup and a girdle,prontíssimo. Said Bogarde, “The life went out of Ava after that.”

  Before the production’s end, she vowed never to make another movie. Enough was enough. She was going to collect her final fuckin’ paycheck, she grumbled, and when the check cleared she was out of business, retired, for good.

  Johnson, too, soured on the job at hand (it would be his last as a director). Used to the whipcrack efficiency and vast infrastructure of bigstudio filmmaking, he became mired in the elusive ways of the Italian system. (Johnson: “In Italy you shoot from twelve o’clock to eight. That’s in theory. But at noon they break for lunch, so you really start at one, if you can get them back. It’s a very loose organization.”) There were problems with the Mafia-organized extras, problems with the Vatican, and the director’s job requirements included keeping a running count of the number of Communists versus Catholics the production employed. “The day I finished the photography,” Johnson told biographer Tom Stempel, “I was given a ticket to leave town. I never saw the final cut. I’ve never seen the picture. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “It opened,” wrote Dirk Bogarde, “apparently to ten Eskimos in North Alaska, closed the next day and sank without trace.”

  On the Beach opened in mid-December. With his editors working all during production, Kramer had been able to have an initial cut of the film completed while he was still in Australia. Screened for his production staff and invited guests, that first cut had run three hours and ten minutes. By the time of the film’s commercial release, fifty minutes had been removed, possibly under some pressure from United Artists. “At three hours ten, it was a great, great movie,” said assistant editor Alan Hark- ness, one of those who had seen the first cut back in Melbourne. “What got taken out were all these little scenes that had humor and drama and ordinary people, and he left in every scene that repeated the message about the stupidity of mankind in destroying itself, and in so doing he took out too much drama and left in too much message. It actually felt longer and slower at two hours and fifteen than three hours ten. When I went to the premiere I was the most disappointed person in the theater because I knew what was missing.”

  Kramer’s arrangements for the film’s opening displayed both inspired showmanship and his prideful belief that On the Beach was—at any length—a profound creation, the movie that was going to save the world. On December 17, 1959, after painstaking planning, the film had an unprecedented simultaneous “global premiere” in sixteen cities and on seven continents (Berlin, London, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Zurich, in Europe; Johannesburg in Africa; Tokyo in Asia; Melbourne in Australia; Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto in North America; Caracas and Lima in South America; and Little America, in Antarctica). Gregory Peck attended the premiere at the Domkino in Moscow, while Ava Gardner appeared in Rome’s Fiamma Theater where those in attendance included the Italian president and his entire cabinet. After the film’s stark conclusion—a montage of empty Melbourne streets signifying mankind’s end—audiences around the world responded with standing ovations (presumably an endorsement of the film’s antinuke ethos and not of human annihilation)—though in Tokyo, it was reported, a large portion of the audience sat weeping at the end and stayed long after the lights had gone up in the theater (accounts of the Antarctic premiere have not been uncovered). The reaction of reviewers, a breed rarely accused of trying to save the world, was more reserved, many acclaiming the film for its lofty aim and dramatic impact but others deriding Kramer’s “radiation romance” as preachy, defeatist, and/or dull (“How,” asked one critic, “can the spectacle of the civilized world dying in front of your eyes be so strangely unmoving?”). The film’s initial newsworthiness soon faded, and in the end On the Beach did not become the momentous event or lasting statement of Stanley Kramer’s dream, slipping into its general release and vying for the public’s coins like any other movie of that atomic age.

  The mixed reaction to On the Beach as a whole muddied a greater appreciation of Ava’s wonderful and touching performance, and what many had at first expected to be an award-winning triumph for the actress did not come to be. She was widely praised in the reviews, though the commendations sometimes included a blurring of the line between the thir
ty-seven- year-old performer and the bruised, blowsy character she portrayed. One critic declared that she had never acted better or looked worse. It was an inevitable comment regarding a woman whose very name had for so long represented physical perfection and desirability. Pepe Rotunno’s soft, shaded images presented her with sympathy and care, and her bewitching eyes and the sublime crescent curve of her mouth were never more haunt- ingly captured on celluloid. But the camera did not turn back the clock, and the screen gave damning evidence: The goddess was mortal.

  *For the film, Fellini gave one of his photographer characters a name that would become the universal term for anyone who practiced freelance celebrity photojournalism in the Roman mold: Paparano; Fellini sometimes said he had taken the name from the character of a hotelier in British writer George Gissing’s 1909 book By the Ionian Sea, enjoying its appropriately pejorative sound, but Tazio Secchiaroli claimed it had been the actual nickname of a photographer friend of his.

  *According to Kramer, the Pentagon’s Strangelovian spokesman told him: “Your story says an atomic war would wipe out the world, and that isn’t so. Only about five hundred million people would be killed.”

  ELEVEN

  “Love Is Nothing ...”

  She lived now without plan or purpose, escaping the past, evading the future. Happiness had proved elusive. Love didn’t last. Beauty and fame and success were not all they were cracked up to be. She wanted to forget everything, said a friend, wanted only “to drink and dance and screw.” She refused the tourists who came up for an autograph on the street. “Aren’t you Ava Gardner?” they would say and she would answer, “No, I just look like her.” Wanting it to be true.