Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  On her return to Spain early in 1960 she put the house at La Moraleja up for sale. The place she had once thought would be her home for life was barely five years old, and she was through with it. It had always been a headache to manage, after all, something always falling apart, a phone connection impossible, the toilet flushed properly only on special occasions, repairmen like permanent residents, bills never ending, and now there were annoyances like the American jets from Torrejon flying too low, the increasing construction around the area changing her once- isolated enclave into a suburban hub. In the spring she moved out of La Bruja for good. While the house awaited a buyer it would be rented out on short-term lease, mostly to visiting movie stars and directors. Tenants complained of rats (seen sipping at the pool) and gossiped about the mirrored ceiling above the bed.

  It suited her needs to live in the center of things, within the comforting embrace of a city where the nights went on forever, she would say, “if you knew your way around.” After living out of hotel rooms for a few months she settled on a new permanent residence, a modern duplex apartment with terrace at 11 Avenida Doctor Arce in a discreet neighborhood of villas, apartment houses, and embassies off the Plaza de la Republica Argentina.

  The dissolute life she sought in her newly declared retirement was not difficult to effect. She was now without responsibilities—no family, no work, no lover worth a second look. There was no one to answer to, and she herself was not asking any questions. Impulse and indulgence became guiding principles. By day, like a beautiful vampire, she did little other than sleep; with nightfall came the drinking, and with the drinking came the taste for blood. These years—the early 1960s—played out like a very long lost weekend. There were scenes, reckless liaisons, unfortunate misadventures. She left a trail of legend throughout Spain, her exploits disseminated like modern myth from Chicote’s to the Barrio Chino. There was the night she was found wandering in the Reforma park, disoriented, wearing only bra and panties, and the incident—so they said—with a rejected young lover who tried to kill himself, and the wrecked cars, the wild parties. She could be literally dangerous to know. Old friends, out of self-preservation, faded from her life. She cultivated a new entourage from the Gypsy gangs who wandered the bars performing for tips. They came home with her to dance and play till the sun rose and beyond, feral characters among them who did not let her hospitality prevent their routinely stealing anything not locked up or nailed down. Sometimes she would wander off with a group of them, disappear for days, sojourns that were—all for the best—forgotten upon their conclusion. Esther Williams, MGM’s Technicolor mermaid and a friend of Ava’s since the 1940s, had moved to Spain with her husband, Fernando Lamas, in the summer of 1961, and in Madrid the old studio sisters would cross paths on several occasions. Williams remembered the young girl she had known in Hollywood long ago, the sweetest person in the world back then. Now, in Madrid, Ava’s “halo of stardom” had dissolved. “She had gone from famous to infamous to notorious and was now regarded as something of a menace to polite society,” Williams wrote. She would recall an impressive encounter with Ava in the company of her new playmates (“the ne plus ultra of trailer trash,” according to the mermaid) at a party in the home of Luis Miguel Dominguin and his wife, Lucia Bose. The decorous gathering had been suddenly crashed by the actress and her Gypsy friends, all of them drunk, and the uninvited gang began to perform a flamenco, Ava stepping up onto a wooden table to dance, guitars and song and clapping hands and stomping feet merged in percussive assault on cringing guests. Facing Luis Miguel she danced with a wicked fury, her skirt raised high above her legs, revealing to the awed matador and to everyone else that she wore nothing underneath.

  Her regimen encouraged unreasoned behavior, wicked moods. She burned bridges, usually from midstream. Restaurants and nightspots that had been honored by her presence five years before came to dread the star’s business and the inevitable outbursts of imperiousness and paranoia, the cursing, the ugly scenes. At a number of her haunts she was banned outright, including Horcher’s, long her favorite place for dinner. Loudly dissatisfied with the “cheap Spanish gin” in her martini, she had poured the drink down the owner’s trousers. She was most notoriously barred from the Hotel Ritz, where one unfortunate night of drunken insensibility she had openly urinated in the vestibule between the reception lobby and the bar, witnessed by startled staff and passing guests. As a result she was forbidden to ever reenter the hotel, an edict that in their rage the Ritz management had extended to any and all movie people, the proscription more or less enforced for years to come. (Director Billy Wilder claimed he had once pleaded with the manager for special dispensation— “I swore to God I would not pee in the vestibule.”) Once in a while— longing to revisit that favorite bar with its cozy elegance and excellent bartender—she would attempt to test the hotel’s resolve. Ben Tatar, for a time Ava’s personal secretary, recalled, “She came in to me one day and said, ‘Get dressed, we’re going to the Ritz. I’ll show those bastards they can’t keep me out!’ She had us both get all dressed up and we went there, and she was not allowed into the hotel. They stopped her from entering. There was an annex where we could sit and have tea outside but that was as close as they let us come. And she’d stare at the building, calling them all bastards, and trying to figure out how to get back in.”

  Testimony to the daunting scale of her hard living: It awed even Robert Mitchum, Olympian debauchee. “He was in Madrid making a movie,” remembered Betty Sicre. “He and I were sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. I was waiting to meet Ava, but I hadn’t mentioned it to him yet. We were just chatting about Madrid and about working there. I saw Ava come into the hotel then, and I said to him, ‘Oh, there’s Ava. Let me go get her.’ And Mitchum jumped up and said, ‘Ava Gardner! No, no—don’t tell her I’m here! If I get together with Ava fm done for…’ And he sort of backed away and ducked behind a palm tree and ran off. He seemed very afraid of her bad influence.”

  When she grew bored with her Madrid routine, she would travel, often on no more than a couple of days’ planning, sometimes without a plan at all. It was a short drive to Barajas, after all, and there was always a flight leaving for somewhere. She would fly off to New York or London or New Orleans or Monte Carlo for a few days or weeks. Once on an impulse she had gone to Las Vegas by herself to surprise Frank on the first day of an engagement at the Sands. She arrived to learn that he was hosting his first wife and his children for the occasion; without telling him she was there she checked out of the hotel immediately and took a taxi back to the airport. In any place she visited, the scene was the same: a suite at the finest hotel, bags of luggage sprawled in deshabille, close attendance by room service, a recruitment of acquaintances old or new, dinner, dancing, a club crawl till whatever hour the local laws allowed, and then figuring out a way to go on for hours after that. An expatriate friend from Madrid, Betty Wallers, remembered a weekend jaunt to London that began at a Covent Garden ballet among the formally dressed royals and high society and ended in a raucous dance joint, Ava sweeping through the nightclub in white chiffon gown, diamonds, and tiara. Heading straight into the ladies’ room, Wallers recalled, “Ava lifted her dress and wriggled her girdle off. After more contortions she got off her undies. Then she took off the tiara and the diamond bracelets. The whole lot was stuffed in our handbags. Ava shouted, ‘Thank God I’m me again’ And wriggling happily she went back into the club. Later on she took the entire band home with her when the club closed.”

  A reporter dogging her trail in the fall of 1961 logged the itinerary of a typically manic visit to New York City: Ava “showed up at the Chateau Madrid with Tony Pastor’s son, Guy…stormed out when a flamenco dancer started snapping pictures.…went to Count Basie’s opening at Birdland and laughed until there were tears in her eyes when Jerry Lewis borrowed the baton and led the band…danced the pachanga with bandleader Pupi Campo…showed up at Jilly’s with a bunch of unidentified men at closing time…‘I’m Ava Ga
rdner,’ she said, ‘and I’ve brought along my own piano player!’…brought four men to a party by fashion photographer Bill Helburn. One of her escorts stood on his head on the floor to amuse her, but she was only bored ...”

  She went to Hawaii one winter. Tempest Storm, another fabled sex symbol, a striptease artist of legend, living in Honolulu in those days and married to Ava’s old pal Herb Jeffries, befriended her there. “She was a great person and a great friend,” Tempest Storm remembered. “And she was a wildcat, I’ll tell you that! My husband introduced us. As a matter of fact, I think she and Herb had kind of hit it off once, they had a little thing going.* But I never questioned him about it. Let sleeping dogs lie. That was before he knew me. Ha! I said, ‘It’s great you can still be friends.’

  “She was in Hawaii sort of on a holiday. She was with someone when we met. I think he was a bullfighter. She had a knack for collecting those. She was still a great beauty. Still flirty. Flirted with a lot of guys, of course. We used to play tennis together. I was staying at the Colony Surf, and I think she was maybe at the Ilikai, I’m not sure. I was working at the Forbidden City in Honolulu. She came to see the show. And we all went out to have breakfast after at a place called Coffee Dan’s. It was late at night. I remember she couldn’t seem to get her order correct with the waiter, and she had a little ‘misunderstanding.’ And all of a sudden she picks up her plate and throws a plate of eggs into the waiter’s face. I said, ‘Oh my God, Ava! I’m so embarrassed!’ And she said, ‘Well, he couldn’t get my breakfast right.’ To her it was no big deal. Well, you had to say, ‘That’s Ava,’ you know. Always kind of wild. I think she had had a couple of drinks. And then I heard a story the next night she was at the Red Vest and they threw her out bodily when she was giving them a bad time over there! But basically I found her to be a very nice person. We had a lot of fun together playing tennis.

  “She wanted to know what it was like to be an exotic dancer, a stripper. We kind of talked about it. She said, ‘You know, I think I could do that. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, Ava, it’s not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot of work to do it right and with a lot of class. But I could be a good teacher if you want to try it.’

  “Well, then no one saw her for three or four days. And the rumors were really flying about her. She was holed up in a hotel with some black singer, I don’t remember who the singer was, someone performing there. I took it with a grain of salt, you know how rumors start.

  “Basically I have to say I liked her very much. She was a great gal, you know, and I considered her a friend. Still a great beauty, I’ll tell you. Time was being kind to her. We had a lot of fun. She was an original.”

  In Madrid now her staff consisted of a battery of maids and kitchen help, her driver, Manolo (in charge of her bargelike American convertible), and for a period of time a series of live-in personal secretaries. The secretaries were American or English, and all were male (“They can be trusted more than a woman,” she told Sidney Skolsky), some homosexual and some not, some unavoidably—if briefly—becoming involved with their employer on a more intimate level. All would quickly find themselves in something other than a business relationship, caught in the silky, sometimes sticky web of the boss’s high-strung existence, an attachment that was nonetheless often abruptly terminated after some imagined or esoteric betrayal of her trust (one secretary was supposedly fired over the unaccountable absence of two golf balls). One year the secretary’s position was filled by a young aspiring actor named Ben Tatar. “I had heard about the job through Gene Kelly,” Tatar remembered. “I had worked for him on a picture, and at that time Reenie was Kelly’s maid in Paris. Then Reenie was back with Ava in New York. But Reenie did not go back with her to Spain. This went on all the time with them. Ava would go into a fit and throw her out, and then she would call and apologize and Reenie would go back.

  “Ava interviewed me for the job in New York. When she opened the door it took my breath away: She was much more beautiful off the screen than on. She asked whether I would be interested in taking a trip around the world as her secretary. She said she needed a letter written turning down the governor of North Carolina, who had invited her to a testimonial dinner. I did the letter and she liked it. I was hired. And that was the last secretarial work I ever did. The trip around the world never happened. Once we got to Madrid, I just became a part of the family, part of her strange life.

  “When we got to Spain there was a guy there living in the apartment.

  An American, an air force major. He might have been an old boyfriend, but I can’t swear to it. He had been living there and looking after the apartment, and then finally she threw him out. She didn’t make a film when I was there. I was sorry about that; I would have liked to have been involved. She was sent scripts all the time. They didn’t interest her. There were only a couple of people left whom she was willing to work with, otherwise she didn’t want to know. She was thirty-eight or thirty-nine at that time. She had fallen off a horse, damaged her face; she talked to me about that. She said that after the accident she had lost her looks. I couldn’t believe she thought that. I had never seen anybody who looked as beautiful as she did.

  “My job was basically to keep her company. After she got up we might go to play golf over by the U.S. air base. She was not a bad golfer, much better than I was. She knew someone on the base who gave her a pass to come and go. We would play golf, and then we would go to the clubhouse and play the slot machines. If she lost at the slots she would get upset. Every Thursday and Sunday we went to the bullfights. Sometimes the bullfighter would dedicate the bull to her. And when a bullfighter dedicates a bull to you, you have to do something in return, and so she would invite him to dinner that night, if he lived. Many nights we had flamenco parties, with the Gypsies. This is something she did almost every night, actually. We had many of them at the apartment because she was banned from a lot of the flamenco clubs. The parties went on all night, dancing, music, drinking. Every night. We’d have dinner at six in the morning. Ava loved to dance, not only flamenco. We used to dance at home. It came over her: she had to dance. She’d put some music on and we’d dance a little bit in the foyer of the apartment, and into the living room. The bossa nova was popular at the time, and we would dance the bossa nova. She played a lot of Frank Sinatra’s records. She had every record he ever made. He called the apartment sometimes. I got the feeling they were still in love with each other. The first time I answered the phone when Sinatra called he said,’ Who the hell are you}’

  “We didn’t involve ourselves that much with people. She didn’t keep close friends because she’d usually thrown them out when she got on a binge. She was a great person until she got drunk, but she started drinking almost from the time she woke up. She was a lonely woman. She didn’t have a boyfriend when I was there. Her romances never survived. I think alcohol was the main culprit.

  “We had our own liaison, which I won’t talk about. It wasn’t romantic. It just happened.

  “Yes. She was a great person. ...”

  Not long after moving into the duplex apartment in town, Ava found herself with a new downstairs neighbor. Juan Perón had been the president-turned- strongman of Argentina from 1946 to 1955, his notoriously idiosyncratic populist-nationalist dictatorship a success at first thanks to the help of his charismatic, platinum blond spouse, Eva Duarte de Perón, the Evita of West End—Broadway renown. Following Evita’s death from cervical cancer, the dictator’s job approval rate flatlined, and a violent coup d’etat sent him into hiding. After some time on the run, Perón accepted a gracious personal invitation from Francisco Franco and settled in Madrid, and as a gesture of sentiment a place was found for him off the Plaza Argentina and on the street named after Perón’s former ambassador to the United Nations (where Dr. Jose Arce was once known for his spirited defense of the Franco fascist regime, bringing it all back home). Perón was delighted to learn the identity of the woman who lived above him. He had been an admirer of the actr
ess for many years and had tried to meet her during her visit to Buenos Aires on the publicity tour for The Barefoot Contessa in 1954 (she was steered clear, something to do with Perón’s virulent anti- Americanism and his open-door policy for escaped Nazi war criminals).

  Ava did not think much of her new neighbor’s politics, but he was an old man now, and they were both occupying the same plot of land in Franco’s Spain so she tried to be friendly. Perón had two dogs and a new wife, Isabel, from whom Ava learned that El Presidente was mad for women in showbiz. His Evita, with the Lana Turner dye job, had been a star of radio soap operas. He had met the beautiful new Mrs. Perón (his mistress until pressure was applied by Franco’s Catholic advisers) when she was performing in a Panamanian nightclub. Isabel made empanadas that were out of this world, and Ava would sometimes go downstairs and eat them in the Peróns’ kitchen while Isabel would sit and chat, speaking without jealousy about how the late Evita remained the most important woman in her husband’s life. The ex-presidente longed to be reunited with Evita’s perfectly preserved body (the cadaver had been embalmed to a permanent, astonishingly lifelike condition and remained in Perón’s care until it was abducted during the military coup, sexually violated numerous times, then buried in an anonymous grave in Milan, Italy; eventually Perón was able to retrieve Ε vita’s body and bring it to Madrid, where it would lie in its coffin inside the Peróns’ apartment). Ava characterized Isabel as a “dumb broad” and never knew how much to believe of the odd things she heard about her. Mrs. Perón dabbled in the occult and at some point brought home to live with them her own warlock, a male witch (he was formerly a doorman) who performed macumba ceremonies in the living room. Isabel was also a big movie fan, became very excited when she learned that Ava was making a film with Charlton Heston, her favorite star (she had seen The Ten Commandments seven times), and wanted to know all about him. “Well,” Ava told her, “he wears a wig.”