Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Fernandez had terrified Burton and Taylor at the airport during the press riot by stampeding onto their airplane with his guns drawn, an ostensible rescue attempt, grabbing Elizabeth and attempting to lead her away. Burton had pulled him off, screaming, “Let go of her! Someone take this maniac away!” Most of all the Mexican was causing distress for Ava. From the moment he had set eyes on her, El Indio had become infatuated with the American actress, stalking her movements and refusing to leave her side whenever she appeared at the studio or a dining room. He flirted and flattered, attempted to impress her with tales of his various bloodthirsty adventures and the number of young women and whores he had bedded. He also offered to shoot anyone who bothered her or came between them. Ava pleaded with Huston to take him away, but the director and others were amused by the sight of the ferocious, slobbering Fernandez’s courtship and the way he gazed upon Ava with puppyish adoration. Eventually Huston made El Indio’s crush the subject of one of his practical jokes, planting a story with one of the visiting reporters that would end up in many of the world’s newspapers: that Ava and Emilio Fernandez had fallen in love while making The Night of the Iguana and were going to be married. (For example, the Hollywood Citiien-News declared: “Ava Gardner May Marry on Saturday.…Fernandez said that he was going to Los Angeles on Saturday and that the wedding might take place there or at Puerto Vallarta, or Guadalajara, or in the village of Mismaloya.”)

  In Mexico City, Ava reported for several days of wardrobe and hair tests. Though she was not allowed to have her own costume designer (as usual she wanted the Fontana sisters for the job) the producers did permit her to import Sydney Guilaroff from Hollywood to spend all of five minutes creating Ava’s Iguana hairdo: pulled up, with a few strands left dangling in the back. Filming proper began on September 26, shooting Burton’s pulpit breakdown at a seventeenth-century church in the village of Tepozotlán. As Huston had decided to shoot the entire film in continuity, from first script page to last, Ava was not needed before the camera for a while. She was encouraged to make a visit to a local health resort, where it was hoped she would drop some weight and lose what one of Huston’s assistants Thelda Victor described as “huge dark bags under her eyes.” Assigned to take care of her, make sure she returned on time, was Ray Stark’s young assistant, Sandy Whitelaw.

  “I was terrified,” Whitelaw remembered. “A nervous wreck meeting her again. I had a whole thing with Ava before Iguana. I had been sent over to see her in Madrid about her doing a movie. It was an Irwin Shaw novel they were going to make, I forget the title—it was a girl’s name [Lucy Crown]. I went to see her about doing this film, and it was most bizarre, the whole meeting. She lived opposite the dictator Perón then. We went out. We had a long night on the town which ended up completely weird. We had an excellent time at first. But she acted very strange. We would go into restaurants, and she would storm out over something. We would go to a nightclub, and then she became very angry. Maybe the drummer was not keeping very good time. Or there were people shadowing her. When she drank she became very paranoid. She had all this hostility and fear. She would get up suddenly, saying, ‘We W got to get out of

  this club!’ Or she would tell a taxi driver to stop and she’d jump out of the cab. ‘I’m not letting him drive me I’ she would say. And I’d have to jump out and go after her on foot. She was very fussy about the strangest things. She could turn nasty. She told me a woman once came up to her and said, ‘For a moment I thought you were Ava Gardner. You are so lucky that you’re not that awful woman.’ It ended up badly between us. We had been having a very good time, but I was there to do a job. And at some point she got very pissed off because she thought I was more interested in getting her to commit to this movie—which was what I was there for—than in being nice to her personally. And it ended up very badly with her screaming, ‘Why are they always sending faggots to see me all the time!’

  “So now I had taken the job with Ray Stark as an associate producer, and I’m terrified of meeting her again. We’re in Mexico and the time came to see her, and I expected I would be fired the next day. She extends her hand and says, ‘So nice to meet you.’ She had no memory of meeting me before in her life. I was supposed to keep an eye on her, go over her lines with her, and get her ready. We went to this place in Mexico, sort of a spa, where people went to dry out and get in shape. She brought her black maid with her who was very sweet, and Ava treated her more like she was her girlfriend. And at this spa there were a lot of racist Texans, Southerners, who couldn’t believe how she acted, like this black person was an equal. I remember one of them actually offered me fifty dollars if I could do something to have the quote unquote spook sit somewhere else away from them. But Ava was just ‘up yours’ to people like that. And she was great. We became very good friends. She was not my type, and I was not tempted to mix business with pleasure with her, but I liked her very much. She still couldn’t remember meeting me before. We would be sitting around talking and she would say something like, ‘You have to come visit me in Madrid. There’s this amazing guitarist I want you to see.’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, Ava, I know, his name is Paco.’ And she’d say, ‘You know Paco?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, Ava, you took me to see him last year.’ It was a blank. We remained friends from then on, though at the location I didn’t see much of her away from the set. I ended up hanging out more with Burton and Taylor. Ava went off to live very separately from the rest. She had her own interests there. The rumor was that she was getting to know some of the local beachboys.”

  On October 1, chartered planes began flying Iguana personnel to the Pacific Coast town of Puerto Vallarta (the vaguely existent road from the interior through the rain forest was considered unreliable due to landslides and bandits). A colonial creation at the foot of jungled mountains, onetime port for the silver dragged down from the Sierra Madre mines, it was an attractively tumbledown place of whitewashed adobe buildings and cobblestone streets, fronted by seaside promenade and golden beach, populated by an affable Spanish/mestizo community and a small complement of American expatriates (remittance men, retirees, gay divorcees), the better heeled among the latter residing in villas in the eastward section known as “gringo gulch.” (From this expat colony Huston would recruit several women to play some of the long-suffering ladies in Rev. Shannon’s tour group; others the director spontaneously cast as hapless teachers for the tour bus were his assistants Gladys Hill and Thelda Victor and his actress friend Eloise Hardt.) The company filmed on the streets and outskirts of Puerto Vallarta until late October, then moved seven miles south to Mismaloya, where production was to be centered for the final six weeks. Everyone was transshipped to reside in the just-barely completed lodgings at the mountainside compound built by Guillermo Wulff, except Ava and Burton (with Taylor) and Deborah Kerr, who would remain in the relative comfort of private homes in town and commute each day to the location. Ava’s villa on the hill, the Casa de la Luna, was enclosed by a stucco wall and thickly overhanging foliage, the living space within largely open-air in the tropical style. The villa also sported a rare air conditioner, but it worked only erratically and there was often no electricity on the block at all. At night bats swooped down across the courtyard, and large rodents and thick-shelled scorpions skittered along the bedroom floor. Each morning Ava would be taken from the house and down to the Playa Los Muertos (the Beach of the Dead), where she waded into a dugout canoe and was paddled across the surf and lifted aboard a waiting motorboat for a half hour commute along the coastline to the peninsula at Mismaloya. From the new floating dock at the edge of the beach she climbed a steep 134 steps cut through the overgrowth to where the ground leveled off high above the bay and the dense tropical forest had been cleared for a series of bungalows, a kitchen, a commissary, two bars, and at the highest point, the primary set: the lush grounds, stone patio, and main building of Maxine Faulk’s Costa Verde Hotel. (Pursuant to Huston and Wulffs plans for post-Iguana property development, the set had been built in full working or
der and was intended to be the centerpiece of their would-be resort.) Here, in extreme heat and humidity, without fresh water, and constantly pursued by biting insects, Ava would work six days a week until December.

  It was John Huston’s delight to film under such circumstances, to bring a group of interesting people to an inhospitable, sweltering locale and watch the result. The actual stress and discomfort of the cast added to the reality of the film, and besides that it was fun to observe. From the start Iguana s gathering of volatile and scandal-prone personalities promised an amusing time, a prospect further guaranteed by the steady arrival of friends and family from the outside world: wives, mistresses, ex-husbands, an opium-smoking nanny, and Tennessee Williams, along with his boyfriend and his promiscuous poodle. Among those at hand awkwardly linked by a web of not necessarily friendly personal histories were Michael Wilding, Liz Taylor’s former husband and now the agent of her lover; and accompanying his new wife, Deborah Kerr, Peter Viertel, who had once had an intricate relationship with Ava during the making of The Sun Also Rises and was also the author of the novel White Hunter, Black Heart, with its distinctly negative portrait of John Huston. Viertel also had a delicate link to Ava’s and Burton’s visiting friend Budd Schulberg, having married Schulberg’s first wife, Jigee, upon her split with Budd. Everyone, said Huston, was “expecting at least one murder.” Enjoying the perceived tension, the director contrived a commemorative gift for the principal actors on their first day together at Mismaloya. “I gave them all gold-plated derringers,” he would recall, “the kind of little pistols that the card sharps used to wear up their sleeves. Then I also gave each one five bullets with the names of the other members of the cast on them.”

  There might have been a shot heard round the world had Ava followed an early impulse regarding Richard Burton. There was one story that could probably generate more public interest than the Burton-Taylor affair: the breakup of the Burton-Taylor affair by Ava Gardner. She was quickly alert to the appeal of her hypermasculine, hard-drinking, poetry- spouting costar. As the pair were sweatily in close quarters at the torpid Mismaloya location, there appeared a certain spark of mutual interest. Observers twittered about the meaningful eye contact between the legendary sex symbol and the lustful Welshman. “She is livelier and lovelier around him,” wrote Thelda Victor in her journal. But Liz Taylor was obsessively in love with her guy and in hot pursuit of a wedding ring, and she could recognize a proximate seductress as she could her own face in the mirror. Almost immediately she became a presence on the Mismaloya set and thereafter came every day without fail. What’s more, she came dressed for battle: ripely armored in sultry outfits, a series of tiny custom- made bikinis or bikini bottom with loose top and no bra (Victor: “You literally could see the complete upper structure”). She would stand just behind the camera during filming and then move in between takes, kneeling over Burton, whispering in his ear, fussing with his hair (often to his evident displeasure). Ava got the message, averted her eyes when the camera stopped. Besides, she liked Liz well enough. They had too much in common to become enemies now, the two femmes fatales, survivors of the MGM trenches made equally unfit for normal life.

  Ava and Richard Burton had at least one thing in common. Burton’s intake of liquor was legendary, astonishing. There was a great deal of drinking at Mismaloya, some of it disruptive to the work at hand. Burton drank at all hours. Ava generally abstained until lunch at midday or afternoon (but not always; there were sometimes cocktails on the morning boat ride). Terry Morse, second assistant director on Iguana, recalled, “If we got her into makeup and got her up on the set without a drink, then we’d have her most of the day. If she started in the morning it was bad news. We just didn’t get a lot of work with her after lunch.” By late afternoon both stars might begin to slur their lines; sometimes no one heard until later when the rushes came back from the lab in Los Angeles and then they would have to reshoot or throw away an otherwise superior take. Huston was accepting. He had too much respect for the magic in alcohol and the vagaries of creativity to impose a prohibition on his actors. For some performers booze was crucial to a truthful performance. In tequila Veritas. “Huston just rolled with the action,” said Morse. “He was wonderful that way. He could just roll along, and if she was too drunk he’d go on and do another scene.” “He didn’t give a shit,” said Tom Shaw, the director’s longtime first assistant. “He never bothered them. He’d never say anything about that. He might be as drunk as they were.”

  It was left to Shaw and his team to figure out how to keep on schedule despite the stars’ proclivities. Since no one, drunk or sober, really wanted to do much after the midday break, with the sun blazing even hotter and the Pacific waters beckoning, for a while it was arranged to begin shooting a couple of hours earlier in the morning and go on through the lunch break, and then everyone could have the afternoons off. The shortened hours were welcome but did not discourage the feeling that they were all there not to work but to enjoy a tropical holiday. Some days Ava would finish a scene and go direct from the set to the beach, where a hired speedboat would be waiting to take her waterskiing across the shark-infested bay or riding up the coast to some isolated beach where she would swim and lie in the sun. Her aquatic chauffeur, a young Yaqui Indian named Ramon, kept the boat stocked with the items from a long list she had provided. “Always it was a lot of ice, and plenty of beer, and tequila, and gin—a lot of gin,” Ramon told journalist Bruce Porter. “Sometimes she would drink it with an olive, or mix the gin and the tequila and pour it into a coconut with ice and stick in a straw.”

  “She was having a good time,” Budd Schulberg remembered. “Everyone was drinking quite a bit. Richard hit it very hard. And Huston always did. And Ava, yes, she was pretty good, too. I stayed out with Richard Burton several nights. It would be past three in the morning, and he would be in his cups and want to talk about Dylan Thomas or—he was a big fight fan—we’d be yakking about the fights. And Elizabeth would come storming out in her bathrobe looking for him, giving him hell—’What do you think you’re doing, you’ve got to work in the morning!’ They were all having a good time. It was a happy company. You couldn’t believe they were making a movie.”

  By night Puerto Vallarta’s population swelled with Iguana personnel taxied by flotilla from Mismaloya, filling the small selection of restaurants and bars to overflowing. The visitors were also a boost to Vallarta’s underground economy, giving brisk trade to the local prostitutes and purveyors of marijuana and of a local moonshine known as raicilla, made from a variant agave plant peculiar to the state of Jalisco, a ninety-plus- proof mescal Burton endorsed but Ava decried as “cactus piss.” The scene in town was hectic, made even more so by the influx of gawkers, celebrity chasers, and journalists (many of dubious provenance) drawn by the publicity the production was receiving. Puerto Vallarta had seen nothing like it since the conquistadores had traipsed through four hundred years before. Most locals seemed to enjoy the excitement and the spike in commerce, but there were those who complained about the hedonistic ways of the foreign invaders. Church sermons and newspaper editorials denounced the amorality, skimpy clothing, drug use, and homosexuality (even Tennessee Williams’s dog, Gigi, came under fire, due to a propensity for running away from her owner and getting humped by local mutts on the public beach).

  “It was a very sensuous location,” recalled Eloise Hardt. “It was like never-never land. Everyone was on edge from the heat and the sickness. Scorpions and iguanas hopping on your bed. You never knew if you were going to be bitten by something or stranded by a storm. There were all these emotions and egos. Everyone got a bit desperate, everyone wanted to be loved or to love. I often thought of the Sadie Thompson story, where the preacher goes to the tropic island and loses control. It got to be ridiculous. If you wanted to get in a sexy mood, just go to the malecón and listen to the waves. Even if you didn’t want it, your body felt it, the atmosphere was so primeval.”

  Ava was constitutionally unlik
ely to be immune to all this sensuous- ness. On arrival she entered into a brief romance with one of Guillermo Wulffs handsome relatives, who was collaborating on the project at Mismaloya, but she soon abandoned him to enjoy the less complicated attentions of the fun-loving boys from the playa. It was that curious phenomenon striking again, real and screen lives beginning to morph, blending into one. In the script hotel keeper Maxine’s bellhops were a pair of bare-chested young men who were clearly kept around for more than their ability to tote luggage. Now, as if in a walking rehearsal, Ava was to be seen going about Vallarta with her own entourage of sinuous young attendants. She threw parties many nights, and the beachboys would fill the villa—drinking, smoking marijuana, and dancing the twist. “They all wanted to be with her, of course,” said Nelly Barquette, Guillermo’s wife. “She was so beautiful, so sexy, you know? And she was taking water-ski lessons. She loved to water-ski. And that was how she met Tony. He was teaching her to water-ski. And one thing led to another. Tony…he was about twenty-two, twenty-three years old. He was not so handsome. I don’t think so. Very skinny. Maybe she liked this kind of person. Cheap looking. She wanted to be with him, and he moved into the house with her. “