Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  It had to end, of course. “To go on like this was impossible. I had to return to reality. I mean, I had to work, I had responsibilities. My behavior was rather cowardly, but when something like this is so strong, so big, it is the only way, I had to drop it completely. I never saw her again, I never tried to. She came to the Tour once more, I heard. I wasn’t there. She said, ‘Too bad.’ And said, ‘Give the bill to Mr. Terrail when you see him.’ For her dinner. That was all right. She left a note. She said, ‘Thank you for the meal.’ Just that. And that was the end.

  “Let me tell you, my friend, she was a wonderful woman. I want to always remember the good memories, and not the bad. She was lovely. She had class. She had something beyond anyone.”

  In June 1963 she returned to America, to New York City. To Frank. Their phone conversations in the preceding months had been frequent, lengthy, and tender. Past disagreements, disappointments, forgotten again. Whoever they were seeing, screwing—however antic their real lives—the voices traveling continents to murmur in each other’s head could yet convince of a common emptiness and need. Call by call they led each other back into the old dream. In Manhattan this time, reunited, they were enraptured. For a few hours, anyway. They came together at Frank’s East Side apartment and the next time anyone saw Sinatra he was walking on a cloud of bliss. “We’re back, baby,” he told his gathered lackeys. “It’s on. All the way.”

  They lay around the apartment, making love, nestling, warming to each other in a way they hadn’t done in years. Frank wanted to talk about a future. He told her it was time to come back home, and Ava admitted that her devotion to Spain was waning. They could live in New York, Frank said. Or get a nice place on the ocean or an estate in Connecticut, whatever the hell she wanted.

  There was—had to be—a fly in the ointment. On this occasion it was an insectile fellow by the name of Momo Salvatore “Sam” or “Mooney” Giancana, a leader of the Chicago Outfit and one of the most powerful crime bosses in the world. Frank Sinatra considered him a good buddy (or a passing acquaintance, or didn’t know the guy, depending on who was asking) and in the last few years especially, the two had spent much time together in the pursuit of certain interlinking mutual interests: Cal-Neva, the White House, the passed-around goumada Judy Campbell. Ava had met the fierce, gnomelike gangster on a number of occasions in her time with Frank, as she had met many others of his ilk, of variously greater and lesser couth, well-tailored, dead-eyed mob big shots who delighted in her ex’s company, and he in theirs. Often in the past she had found herself surrounded by them at her table in a club as she waited to watch Frank perform somewhere, or backstage where she’d see them swarm around their favorite singer kissing and grab-assing like—she’d tell him—so many gravel-voiced fags. It was one more thing for them to argue about. Frank thought the mobsters had style, guts, took no shit from anybody. Ava thought they were slobs and psychopaths who spent a lot of their adult years in jail. Many times through their marriage and after she had spoken against his fraternization with such people. She didn’t know much that went on between them and didn’t want to know, but she was sure it wasn’t healthy.

  Now Giancana was in town with his current girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, sexy centerpiece of the big-haired, harmonizing sibling act known as the McGuire Sisters, appearing that week on the Ed Sullivan Show. So naturally Frank wanted Sam to join them when they went out on the town. And when Dolly Sinatra demanded they come to Jersey for dinner at the fancy new home her son bought for her (a few minutes and a hundred grand from the old house in Hoboken), Frank had her invite Sam and Phyllis as well. (Dolly remained an Ava booster and during the evening grabbed her former daughter-in-law by the forearm, asking, “So when you two gettin’ married again?”) Back in New York, Frank took Ava to Jilly’s, his hangout on West Fifty-second Street, and naturally Giancana joined them, taking a place at Frank’s elbow. Ava resented having the mobster foisted on her like this, spoiling what had been shaping up as a dreamy reunion. She didn’t like him, and in so many words and icy looks she let him know it. (The feelings were mutual; Giancana told people he thought Ava Gardner was “a crazy bitch.”)

  “Hey, lighten up with Sam!” Sinatra squawked when they were alone. “What the man ever do to you?”

  “How about what he does to other people?”

  “The guy’s a businessman. He’s a good guy. Ask Phyllis.”

  “You and your fucking gangsters.”

  “Ava didn’t like those types of people at all,” Phyllis McGuire told writer Kitty Kelley. “She hated the image. It wasn’t just Sam, either. Frank had others around him all the time and when Ava found out…she really gave him hell.”

  As a member of the retinue in New York told it to Randy Taraborrelli, that night at Jilly’s Ava had suddenly had enough and got up from the table where Frank and Giancana were gazing fondly at each other and went wandering off to the other side of the room, where she stopped and sat with a stranger who was by himself having a drink. Sinatra and Giancana stared in open-mouthed disbelief as Ava chatted and flirted with the man and then when she got up and moved over and sat her rear end—the rear end that Sinatra worshipped nearly as much as he adored her beautiful face—sat it far back on the man’s lap, Giancana’s jaw dropped to the tabletop like an anvil, and Sinatra’s face did a Tex Avery complete with steam-whistle sound effect. In a flash Frank crossed the room to them, yanked his ex-wife to her feet, and grabbed the stranger by the collar.

  “Are you cra^j?” Sinatra shouted into the man’s face. “You want to die} Because I’m the guy to make that happen, chump!”

  He took Ava by the arm and hurtled her back to their table. Ava then reached down to the glass in front of Sam Giancana, pulled it from his hand, and tossed the contents in Frank’s face. She snarled, once at Frank, and once at the underboss of the Chicago Mob, then exited Jilly’s without looking back. According to the witness Sam Giancana “laughed riotously” at Sinatra standing there with a gin-and-tonic dripping from his chin. “Buddy boy,” said Mooney, “I ain’t never seen anything like that. That was classic.”

  They made up—barely. And then Frank insisted they see still more of Momo. Giancana wanted to throw a little celebration for Phyllis and the sisters after their Sullivan gig on Sunday night. Ava refused to go; Frank insisted, demanded. Fuming, she went. At the party, in a Polynesian restaurant on Broadway, they snarled and spit at each other like two alley cats. No one knew what it was about, no one wanted to know.

  “Dumb broad bitch!”

  “Fucking guinea!”

  The gangsters and girl singers sipped their Virgin Sacrifices and tried to look the other way. The next morning, as Frank sat around his living room expounding to some acolytes, a limo driver came to the door and Ava, without warning, emerged from the bedroom, had her bags taken downstairs, and departed for the airport. Frank stared after her, speechless, while his friends in the living room squirmed with empathy.

  She spent the rest of the summer with Bappie in California and made another movie in her spare time. It was hard to believe, but she had not done a picture in Hollywood since Ride, Vaquero at MGM more than ten years before. It was fine with her if she never worked there again in her life, but the offer by producer-star Kirk Douglas of a six-figure salary for just six days of her time was all but impossible to refuse. Seven Days in May was a political thriller about an attempted military overthrow of the U.S. government by a right-wing general, based on a recent, controversial bestseller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey II. The prospective film had been refused cooperation by the insulted generals at the Pentagon, but President Kennedy personally endorsed the production and offered Douglas permission to shoot some exterior scenes on the grounds of the White House. In addition to old acquaintance Kirk, the film’s cast included two of Ava’s colleagues from The Killers, Burt Lancaster and Edmond O’Brien. Ava’s part was that of another world-weary elegant lady with a spotty past, the conspiring general’s former mistress now enlisted b
y Douglas to help foil the coup d’etat with some incriminating love letters. There was a sharp script by Rod Serling and the director was the dynamic John Frankenheimer, two veterans of the hectic years of 1950s television. With Frankenheimer’s experience putting together “live” ninety-minute broadcast dramas, Ava’s tight schedule did not at first seem worrisome: they would simply work at television’s killing pace. And with only a single week to do everything there would not be any time for her to lapse into the desperate boredom and confusion she had experienced while making the endless 55 Days at Peking, in other words, no time to do anything crazy. It was a good theory, anyway. In reality, with such a short schedule there was much greater pressure on her to get it right—and right away. Almost at once Ava was plagued by anxiety. “She was exquisite. She was just so beautiful,” Frankenheimer would remember. “A lovely person but at times difficult to work with.” She drank, had trouble with her lines, reported late. Frankenheimer was compassionate, but with his youth and ultra-adrenalized personality (and short schedule) he had difficulty slowing down and connecting with Ava’s enigmatic sensitivities, and Kirk Douglas, already feuding with the director, seemed reluctant to get involved. Agitated by the pressure to perform, Ava made each day an ordeal, for her and everyone else. There were the usual obsessions to distract her. One day a studio photographer arrived on the set to take publicity pictures. Ava recognized his name from Life, a magazine she hated for some past betrayal.

  “You people promised me no press on the set!” she shouted. “Fucking Life magazine!”

  And she ran to her dressing room and would not come out. The photographer was made to go to her and plead his case. After suffering a startling assault in four-letter words—”I mean, I couldn’t even repeat it,” the photographer would recall—he was finally allowed to explain the innocent circumstances of his employment and his disassociation with a periodical she despised. The man’s abjectness mollified her, and eventually she returned to work.

  The shooting was somehow completed on schedule, but the six days went by like a thousand. In the end, for everyone’s trouble, she had given a superb performance, the character’s faded glory perfectly, poignantly caught in a few minutes of screen time. It was a small part and might easily have been satisfactorily handled by a character actress or minor leading lady, but the producers had paid extra for something more and they had gotten it, an aura not contained by the limited screen time, the instant glamour and embedded history of a star. What Ava herself saw of the work left her aghast. Perhaps it was the director’s or cinematographer’s style, or the speed with which they had to work, or maybe it was a covert reflection of their exasperation with her, but the sharp-focused black-and-white camera work seemed mercilessly to highlight her every wrinkle, her every swell. She told people not to dare go to see the movie. “I look like shit.”

  Once again she declared herself closed for business.

  But another offer arrived and this one at least had to be dignified with consideration. It came in mid-1964, from John Huston, one of the men— with Mark Hellinger and Robert Siodmak—who had, eighteen years ago, enabled Ava Gardner to become a star. Huston, after that under-the-table scripting of The Killers at the end of the war, had resumed his directorial career and soon had several brilliant and award-winning works to his credit, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, and The African Queen, that established him as one of the greatest talents of the era. There had been successes since then, and many flops and mistakes, but even Huston’s failures were invested with his adventurer’s spirit, jagged humor, and artist’s eye. A maverick in the assembly-line world of the big studios, he, like Ava, had turned his back on Hollywood and gone to live in Europe, settling in a restored Georgian manor house in county Galway, Ireland, (stocking it with modern abstract art, ancient Bhutanese bronzes, an entire Japanese bath complete with shoji screens, and select mistresses, screenwriters, and jockeys). Huston had not seen much of Ava since the inebriated 1946 weekend at his ranch in the Valley, but she had remained a lively memory, and now at last there came an opportunity for them to work together, a part for her in his film version of Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana. The play (which would prove to be the last of Williams’s long string of major critical and popular successes) had opened on December 28, 1961, at Broadway’s Royale Theatre, starring Bette Davis, Margaret Leighton, and Patrick O’Neal. A typical Williamsian study of desire, dysfunction, and emotional crises, The Night of the Iguana was set in a frowzy Acapulco hotel where defrocked, alcoholic, horny minister, now tour guide, the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon haphazardly battles for his salvation, aided and abetted by lusty innkeeper Maxine Faulk and wandering spinster Hannah Jelkes. Film rights were purchased by an agent turned producer, Ray Stark, who correctly believed that Iguana’s mix of soul-searching, melodrama, and lowlife exotica would capture the interest of John Huston.

  Stark and Huston agreed on Richard Burton for the role of the loquacious, boozing Shannon, Deborah Kerr for the gentle Miss Jelkes, and Ava Gardner to play earthy widow, Maxine. Huston was hardly unique in associating the Southern actress’s feline sensuality with one of Tennessee’s hot-blooded ladies. Through the years she had been mentioned in regard to several adaptations of the playwright’s work, and Metro had begged her to play Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth (she was “retired” at the time, and anyway the role of the washed-up, pill-popping, man-hungry movie star had appeared way too close for comfort). Tennessee Williams had written the role of Maxine Faulk, and Bette Davis had played it onstage, as blowsy and loud, Davis with a red dye job, lots of jiggling cleavage, and a harpy’s screech. Huston believed the playwright’s characterization of Maxine revealed his fear of women and, by the play’s conclusion, his disdain for “a woman’s place in the love life of a man.” Huston had a different view of the part, reshaped it in his script and cast it accordingly. His Maxine was lovable, sexy, profane, funny, flawed, romantic. She was Ava. Stark and Huston arrived in Madrid to make their pitch. Ava took the pair out for several exuberant, exhausting nights on the town, but always deflected any attempt to discuss the proposed film job. No way she could do the thing they were offering. A part Bette Davis had created? Davis was Ava’s idea of a real actress, a legitimate star (she had seen her in person once, rushed up, introduced herself, and told Davis how thrilled she was to meet her; Davis eyed the younger movie star imperiously, said, “Of course you areand went on her way). Huston, though, observing Ava in her element, her mature allure, her blend of sexiness, sadness, and rowdiness, saw the exact Maxine he wanted and was not to be put off. The nocturnal pursuit went on for almost a week.

  “Dear Ava,” said Huston at last, “I know damn well you’re going to do this part and so do you.”

  The script—by Huston and his old Killers collaborator Anthony Veiller— opened up the stage play to include several settings in addition to the sea- view hotel, and the director looked forward to shooting them all on authentic locations along the tropical Pacific Coast. Huston was put in contact with a Mexican architect and entrepreneur named Guillermo Wulff, who claimed to hold a long-term lease from the Indians for some undeveloped beach and jungle property on a stretch of the Bay of Banderas known as Mismaloya. It was proposed that said land would be the perfect place to shoot much of The Night of the Iguana while at the same time laying the groundwork for an investment in the future, constructing lodgings, dock, roads, plumbing, and more that could have subsequent use as the infrastructure of a holiday resort. The exact nature of the deal the two men concocted would become a bit fuzzy with passing time (“The whole thing,” Huston would say years later, “certainly appealed to my sense of chicanery”). Like many of the characters in his films, Huston was often in hope of securing his fortune through unconventional schemes, but, as in a Huston picture, this quest for loot in Mexico would end ironically, the gold blowing away like dust in the wind.

  The cast and crew of The Night of the Iguana started gathering
in Mexico City in late September. Ava arrived on the twenty-first, accompanied by Reenie Jordan, her long-serving maid having returned for another tour of duty. The following day saw the arrival of Richard Burton and his inamorata, Elizabeth Taylor, whose love affair, begun on the sets of Cleopatra in Rome, had made them the most scandalous and talked-about adulterers in the world (both were still married to other people at the time), the Frank-and-Ava of the 1960s. A day later came Sue Lyon, the sultry seventeen-year-old blond, playing Iguanas troublemaking nymphet, typecasting after her debut the year before in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. An aura of anarchy began to gather around the production even before the actors had all checked into their hotel rooms. There were riots at the airport with the landing of the Hollywood movie stars, and the press laid siege to the hotel and the entrance to Churubusco Studios. Huston had gone missing for days, sequestered somewhere with Tony Veiller trying to complete the screenplay (their collaboration at the Irish manor house that summer having been subject to distractions and sidetracks, such as the days genially wasted rewriting the ending to their script for Moulin Rouge, a film that had been shot ten years earlier). And proving something of a recurring disruption was Iguana s indigenous “standby director” (a position imposed on foreign productions by the local film guild), Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez. Huston’s choice for the mostly no- show job, Fernandez was an actor (he later portrayed Mapache, the vicious general in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch) and filmmaker (La Perla, La Cucaracha), and a certified loco hombre who generally went around in a cowboy hat or sombrero and carried a pair of six-guns strapped to his belt. Fernandez was currently at loose ends, having been blacklisted in the Mexican film business for shooting a producer. “He once told me he didn’t know how many people he had killed in his life,” recalled Bayard Veiller, Anthony Veiller’s son, “because he didn’t count Indians. He was really quite something. My father said the first time they went to see him at his place in Mexico City he was in the living room practicing the bullwhip on a cowering young girl. There always seemed to be fifteen-year-old girls nearby him wherever he was.”