by Lee Server
Eventually the good relations turned sour. Perón complained that he couldn’t sleep due to Ava’s predawn—and postdawn—parties, the loud music and pounding flamenco dance steps on the ceiling. Ava, wanting to return fire, complained of the noise from his “yipping” poodles (though her own dogs were not exactly stoic). One day she was hosting a get-together with eight or ten of the young American pilots from Torrejon air base, and Perón’s pets had apparently gotten loose and were making a racket in the hall. “So I said to my two corgis, one of which was blind, ‘Go get those two little mutts!’ “ She swore no lasting damage was done to the Perón dogs, but the Argentines were outraged, called in a complaint to Franco, and soon a contingent of Guardia Civil arrived at the apartment house with orders to arrest Ava and everyone else in her apartment. The presence of the uniformed Americans complicated things, and the guards went away for new orders. Ava and the Peróns avoided any further contact after that, or at least friendly contact. Ava claimed that the ex-dictator often stood on his balcony and made speeches to an imaginary crowd of supporters, and that she and her maid would go out on their balcony as genuine hecklers, shouting, “Perón is a faggot!” in Spanish. Not very neighborly, perhaps, but after all the man had once given safe passage to Josef Mengele.
In July 1961 she heard shocking news: Ernest Hemingway had taken his own life. Driven into turmoil by physical and mental ailments, a shotgun blast through the head. She had enjoyed their friendship, their times together in Spain and Cuba. His books were among her favorites, and his characters were people with whom she could identify, for better or worse. She had taken pride in her association with his work on-screen, however mixed the results, and took to heart the compliments he had offered for her performances.
Ava’s friendships with writers were among the most prized relationships in her life. They became a validation of sorts for her intellectual insecurities and a window onto a world of articulate thinking. With Robert Graves she continued to visit and to exchange notes and letters. She wrote to him often at low points in her life, with intimate confessions of her fears and disappointments. He would send her words of advice or comfort, sometimes a small poem, often with a little drawing beside it. “Getting your letters makes up for all the motion picture crap,” she wrote him. “Instead of feeling dirty and useless I felt very strong and worthwhile ...”
She visited him at Deya in Majorca and in England, and went with him to Oxford to attend his final lecture as professor of poetry at the university. At the reception afterward she chatted with Lord of the Rings author ]. R. R. Tolkien, who found her “easy and agreeable” but otherwise had no idea who she was.
There were other writers she counted as friends: Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Henry Miller. Miller, the author of Tropic of Cancer, which Artie Shaw had put on her reading list during their marriage (“Holy shit, what a dirty book!” she had reported to her husband), begged for an introduction to Ava from George Cukor. The old Brooklyn roué thought her the sexiest female he’d ever seen. They exchanged letters, and she sometimes called him for a chat at his Pacific Palisades home. He sent her autographed copies of his latest works. A print he sent her of his wa- tercolor Three Heads, signed and inscribed to “Divine Ava, “ hung in her London residence for many years.
“She liked being with writers, I think that was true,” said Budd Schulberg. “She tended to look down on her own work. She didn’t think what she did anyway was much of an accomplishment and thought maybe that hanging around with writers was going to do more for her mind than hanging around with movie actors. There was a feeling in her of ‘self- improvement,’ wanting to expand her sense of the world, to talk about art and politics and things besides the movies.”
In mid-1962, after two and a half years of professional inactivity, becoming fearful about her bank balance, Ava was at last persuaded to return to work. There had been no swell of nostalgic or creative compulsion impelling her before the camera, no longing for the old camaraderie and shared adventure of a film production. Far from desiring to end her early retirement, she would later speak of those wholly inactive years as like a wonderful float in warm water, sadly interrupted.
She accepted an offer from Samuel Bronston to play the female lead in something they were calling 55 Days at Peking. The prospect of acting again was made slightly less annoying by the fact that the film would be shot not far from home, in and around Madrid. Bronston was a Bessarabian-born film producer who had left Hollywood after a career of no great distinction and in the late 1950s established headquarters in Spain, promoting investments from a hodgepodge of private speculators and distribution companies to bankroll a series of historical epics: John Paul Jones, King of Kings, and El Cid. He saw himself as a potentially great independent mogul in the tradition of Sam Goldwyn, making what he hoped were high-quality grand-scale motion pictures with international appeal. He borrowed heavily and spent freely for talent and production value. He leased vast acres of Spanish land for his sets, employed craftsmen by the hundreds, extras by the thousands, and for battle scenes most of the foot soldiers in Franco’s army. What Bronston lacked was the iron will or the eagle eye of a Goldwyn, and his films were generally produced in an atmosphere of disorganization, middle-level corruption, and creative chaos. 55 Days at Peking would be no exception.
The project came into being as no more than a historical subject—the Boxer Rebellion of 1900—dangled before the ranking king of screen epics, Charlton Heston. Bronston’s de facto creative chief, Philip Yordan, and designated director, Nicholas Ray, talked Heston into signing a contract without a story or script written (screenwriter Bernard Gordon said Yordan “threatened to throw himself out the window of the hotel room unless Heston yielded”), and with nothing more than a title and a star Bronston presold Peking around the world and began reconstructing the Forbidden City (the royal Chinese enclave, not—see above—the Honolulu strip joint) on a field outside Madrid. Six weeks before filming the principal roles besides Heston’s (set to play a rugged U.S. marine) were yet to be cast. The script, quickly written by Gordon (a Hollywood exile, victim of the blacklist), then written a second time when Yordan found the first draft too complex for the popcorn-eating masses, centered around the foreign legations in the capital city under siege by angry nationalists. The feminine “love interest” was a Russian aristocrat, a worldly adventuress who finds romance amid the insurgency, but just barely, before catching a fatal Boxer bullet. Bronston hoped to give Deborah Kerr the part (she was unavailable), while Heston favored Jeanne Moreau or Melina Mercouri. It was Nicholas Ray who suggested Ava Gardner, and Bronston endorsed the choice, certain his far-flung network of distributors would be pleased with a star known to even the most remote box offices of the world. Bronston offered her five hundred thousand dollars to portray Baroness Natalie Ivanof in 55 Days at Peking, and she took it. Also hurriedly added to the cast were David Niven as the British ambassador, Flora Robson as the Empress Ts’u-hsi, and John Ireland as a marine sergeant. The hundreds of ethnic Chinese needed for bit parts and extra work would be press-ganged from all over Europe, many literally hired out of Chinese restaurants and laundries.
Things began pleasantly enough. Late in June Ava hosted a cocktail party for some of Pekings personnel and that night she was in top form: charming, interested, funny. The skeptical Heston was favorably impressed: “She has a softer quality than you get on the screen,” he noted in his diary, “more accessible, vulnerable.” There was chitchat about Hollywood and some of the films in current release. Ava realized how far she had fallen out of touch with the picture business. She had never even heard of some of the new hits or stars. There was talk about the film they were about to make, and someone offered up a nugget of research about Chinese court life, not as yet in the script: how the empress dowager—55 Days at Peking’s villainess—made visiting diplomats kneel down in tribute and kiss her pudenda. Ava declared that the empress was her kind of gal and demanded Bronston recast her in the role.
&nb
sp; A few days later, at a script conference in Nicholas Ray’s villa, things went less well. Those gathered began to offer their views of the screenplay and the characters. Ava sat curled up, shy and tongue-tied until she had downed a second stiff vodka and tonic, then unleashed an angry assertive- ness, complaining and cursing about the “fucking lousy” script and her unspeakable dialogue. The fury of her rhetoric made some turn away in shock. People looked to Nicholas Ray—legendary director of Rebel
Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place (as well as Bronston’s King of Kings)—to bring the discussion to order but the director seemed curiously at ease, accepting the star’s rant. The bitter discussion continued for most of an hour. Heston sneaked away and didn’t come back (his diary entry: “A macabre evening”).
After her corrosive behavior at the script conference an atmosphere of anxious expectation surrounded the actress’s first day before the camera, a scene to be shot on one of Bronston’s soundstages, broiling in the heat of a Madrid summer morning. Everyone was relieved to find her, per Heston, amiable, if edgy, and while she was seen to need “kid glove treatment” from Ray, she performed the scene perfectly. Alas, there would not be many such good days to come. “We had a great deal of trouble with her on that picture,” recalled Philip Yordan, who had known Ava in the forties and as screenwriter and associate producer of Whistle Stop had played some part in her early steps toward stardom. “She didn’t really want to work. I don’t know. Maybe she needed the money. She had trouble concentrating at times. She was late. She didn’t know her lines. She was very afraid of being photographed. How can you be a movie actress and be terrified of someone taking your picture?”
“She was drinking all the time,” said Bernard Gordon. “You heard a lot of stories about her in Madrid, how she had been kicked out of the Ritz Hotel, all of that. She was in decline, I think, no longer at the top of the heap. I had the impression she was a troubled, lonely woman who was squeaking out the end of a long career. I don’t know if she didn’t care or didn’t understand that she was making life difficult. I know that one time on the set she spoke to Paul Lucas, who was playing the doctor in the thing, and asked him if he knew how they could make their scene play better, and Lucas looked at her and said, ‘Yes, it would help if you stop drinking before noon every morning.’ “
Only Nicholas Ray, whose burden of responsibilities was made still heavier by his star’s increasingly erratic behavior, remained firmly supportive. “Ray particularly enjoyed directing Ava Gardner,” wrote Bernard Eisenschitz, Ray’s biographer, “with whom he formed an alliance of outsiders. She was, indeed, almost unanimously detested or considered impossible: her lateness and her outbursts on the set were soon legendary.”
The troubled, unpredictable side of her nature that caused anxiety for everyone else excited Ray as an artist. He was—platonically, aesthetically—smitten, saw in Ava a fellow traveler in nonconformity, a fellow free spirit. Like Lewin, Cukor, others before him, he imagined the great possibilities in their collaboration, the exploration of her persona, the artful unbridling of the qualities only vaguely required by the Peking script: dark passion and sensuality. Most of this was wasted daydreaming—like so many of the director’s thoughts for the production—inappropriate to the task at hand (sensuality in a Charlton Heston picture!). The kind of poetic realism and idiosyncratic characterization that Nicholas Ray’s unique gifts could bring to the screen were simply uncalled for among the cardboard-cutout archetypes and rampaging Chinese rebels of 55 Days at Peking. “Ray was a great talent,” said Bernard Gordon. “This was not his kind of thing. He should have been doing personal stories like Rebel Without a Cause. But Nick had his own problems with drinking and drugs and what have you, and he needed a job. He wanted to make this work for him, but he was not very successful at it.” (According to some sources, Ray’s vices in these years included the use of amphetamines and heroin.)
In August the company moved to the Marqués de Villabragima’s rancho at Las Matas, thirty minutes outside Madrid, where a sizable portion of Imperial Peking had been built, much of it to actual scale (all who saw these sets agreed that the finished film never did justice to the truly spectacular nature of Bronston’s ersatz China, less than a third of it ever exposed to a camera). A merciless sun made the outdoor work an endurance test for everyone. The pace was sluggish, tempers flared.
The script remained in contention, a work in progress, long past the time when it should have been set. Phil Yordan would commute daily from the sets to Bernard Gordon at his typewriter, with orders for line changes, a new action sequence, a soul-searching monologue suddenly required for David Niven. Fresh blood was flown in at great expense to tweak the odd page with “additional dialogue” (one of these imports being Robert Hamer, the brilliant writer-director of Kind Hearts and Coronets; on arrival seen to be in the shocking last stages of alcoholic self-destruction, sent back to London immediately). “If rewriting the script was for the purpose of making the picture better, you didn’t mind,” said Gordon, “but a lot of it was to keep the stars happy, who were all prima donnas, like spoiled children. If Ava Gardner didn’t like something you were supposed to adjust the script so that it would be suitable and acceptable to her. And Heston—who I thought was about as animated as a block of wood—when he found out somebody had a scene rewritten he had to have a scene rewritten. And Niven, too. He refused to work at one point until he got a big speech for himself. Nobody cared if it made no sense to the picture as long as it fed their vanity.”
The edict to keep the proceedings big, crowded—”epic”—as often as possible made even simple scenes full of complications and extras and kept everything moving at a crawl. The size of it all made it more likely for things to go wrong, and there were frequent technical mistakes and production miscalculations, forcing them to reshoot pages of script that were thought to be behind them. Director and stars floundered, sunbaked amid the looming fake Peking, drifting into an assortment of private hells, Heston alone remaining diligent and professional, though even he had begun to lose hope. Ava’s behavior continued to be erratic, troublesome, until the first week of September, when it crossed over to what some considered the outright irrational. One day, at close to noon, the unit was preparing an elaborate, time-consuming shot involving Gardner and Heston trading lines while hundreds of Chinese, playing refugees, rushed through the gates behind them. Ava arrived on the set very late, increasing the tension as Ray and an assortment of assistants struggled to keep all the elements in order. During a lull in the activity, just before the first take, one of the Chinese extras in the crowd took out a small Brownie camera and snapped a picture of the stars as a keepsake. Ava spotted the man, turned red, cried for a halt to everything. Her reaction, according to Heston in his memoir, “made the Dowager Empress of China seem like your favorite aunt.…She insisted the offender be found, fired and stripped of his film. I’m surprised she didn’t have him skinned as well.”
Ava abandoned the set for her dressing room, exhausted by the ordeal. It would be two or more hours before she agreed to return. Ray and his team wearily worked to put the difficult shot back together: dialogue, crowd, camera movement. They were at last again ready to shoot and— incredibly, it happened again.
“I heard a camera…someone’s taken a picture,” Ava whimpered.
“No…Ava, darling, please,” said Nick Ray.
“I heard it!”
And that was it, she couldn’t work. They had to find who did it, take the film away from him. Heston and others believed that this time it simply had not happened; no picture had been taken; she had imagined it. And no culprit was found. But the result was the same. The shot had to be postponed, she had to go back to her dressing room and calm down from the ordeal.
There was no one else to blame for her seeming complete professional breakdown a few days later while shooting her most difficult—and potentially rewarding—dramatic scene in the film, the death of her character, the baroness, in the legation
hospital. A rehearsal had gone well but by the time the set was lit and they were ready to roll, Ava, lying in a hospital bed, could no longer remember her lines. They started, stopped, tried again. She complained that the camera, above and below her as she lay on her back on the bed, had to be making her look horrible, double-chinned. They tried rearranging the angle. She still could not play the scene. Ray tried breaking the shot up, tried feeding the lines to her one at a time from off-camera, but even this seemed beyond her capacity. The director had shown a limitless patience until now, but after hours of Ava’s intransigence and impenetrability he was exhausted. The towel was thrown in, the scene was eventually reworked, and most of Ava’s lines were somehow given to Paul Lucas to speak instead. The death scene would later be tricked up in the editing room, using pieces from another sequence and an insert of a sheet being pulled over Ava’s presumed body, though it seems she was not even in the bed at the time that shot was filmed. “Yordan said she had just disappeared, and they did it without her,” recalled Bernard Gordon. It was her big scene and it would end up looking like what it was—unfinished, a mess.
It had been an ordeal for everyone there, and a mystery—no one could fathom the actress’s motive. Heavy drinking was too common to credit entirely for her disruptions and distractions. Away from the set she was often seen to be relaxed, untroubled. In the same period she played delightful host to some relatives from Carolina and even granted a couple of reporters private interviews without incident. It was clear only that her heart was not in the job of acting. She had come back to making movies too soon, perhaps—or too late.*