Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  It looked to most like a frivolous fling, an amusing way to get through the night, but others thought there was considerable passion between the two. There was certainly some of the volatility of past romances. James Bacon, the Hollywood columnist, witnessed Ava and one of the beach- boys having a violent argument down by the ocean one afternoon: “They were going at each other, and the kid started hitting her. It was right in front of the tourists, and he was slapping her around pretty good. And she was taking it.”

  Richard Burton thought the beachboy a hustler and advised her to get rid of him. “He bleaches his hair,” Burton told her. “And any man who does that is trouble.”

  “I don’t know how serious it was, but you know, Ava had a tendency to get caught up in these things,” said Angela Allen, the script supervisor (who had known the actress since the days of Pandora and the now-long- forgotten Mario Cabre). “He was just a boy she’d picked up. A Mexican beach bum. And I don’t think he was very nice to her, but who knows what went on? I remember she threw a birthday party for him, and she was looking forward to it. And then the boy didn’t show up. He was very late. And she was very disappointed. I remember saying to him when he finally got there, ‘She’s organized this party for your birthday, and it’s very rude of you to be so late!’ I tried to make him go and say to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ but he was in his early twenties and selfish and didn’t care about her feelings, I suppose. She was drunk by then, and I thought, This is going to end up in a very messy thing, and I don’t want to be here mopping up the blood! So I decided I was not going to hang around, and I got out.”

  There was a movie being made during all this. In fact, it had been rolling along quite well. Everyone was pleased with what had been put on film. Though skittish and uncertain of herself as usual, Ava was pleased to hear the widespread praise for her own work. Her Maxine was a charismatic, funny, bittersweet creation. The performance had a raw, nervous energy, a quirky authenticity. She was offering a vision of herself in the caustic, romantic Maxine, more revealing in some ways than anything she had ever done. Huston had drawn it from her in his easy, sly way. His was an open, amused approach to the job. He offered an actor time and freedom to find the way to a performance. He was certainly capable of being displeased, and his sarcasm and cold shoulder could be withering, but with Ava he never showed impatience or disappointment (not even when for more than a dozen takes she persisted in blowing the same line, saying “My husband Frank“ instead of “My husband Fred”). “It was sheer magic,” she told writer Lawrence Grobei. “John put you in the mood, got you to feel you could do the right thing, and then let you go.”

  For the first time in years Ava really wanted to be good—not that she could promise it would be easy. When the time came to shoot one of Ava’s showy scenes, for instance, a distraught Maxine spiting Rev. Shannon by rushing into the ocean to cavort with her two beachboys, she had become sick with fear—of the physicality of the scene (how could she not look bad falling around in the water with her hair all soaked?), the sexuality of it (the two boys roaming all over her body as the surf rolled across them), and the physical exposure (the scene called for her to be wearing a skimpy bikini). Huston told her in that case, kid, they would rewrite and shoot the scene at night and with minimal lighting. As she continued to feel uncertain about the bikini, Huston suggested she simply go into the water in her clothes (Maxine’s ubiquitous poncho top and toreador pants). “It’ll look more natural like that anyway,” the director said. While they were preparing to shoot Huston waded into the water with her (they had had a drink or two together first) and held her hand till they were ready. Then he directed the scene in his shorts, dripping wet. It was not that he had asked her to do something so difficult or daring, but for her moments like this often became a kind of test of the director’s allegiance. Was he really listening, looking out for her? She had wanted the special attention, and Huston gave it to her, and in return she gave him all that she could. The scene was done, beautifully, in a single take.

  Some speculated about ulterior motives for the favored treatment, although Huston was there with his girlfriend, Zoe Sallis, and their baby son, Danny. But no, he had simply grown devoted, protective. She was a kindred spirit, an extraordinary character. The more he knew of her the more he was moved by her life’s predicament, what he saw as the ironic, even tragic aspect to her physical blessings. He told Deborah Kerr—who counted herself a great fan of Ava’s (“she is funny and rich and warm and human”)—what a disadvantage it could sometimes be to be so beautiful, like a curse from the gods. “It has been so for Ava, and she has well and truly paid for her beauty.”

  Ava and Frank return to Rome at the end of a brief, unhappy Christmas reunion, December 1953. The marriage is over. On Ava’s left is publicist David Hanna, soon to be Ava’s personal manager. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Ava wearing a velvet bathing suit as Maria Vargas in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), written, produced, and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  The 1950s was the heyday of the scandal magazines, and their perpetual cover girl was Ava Gardner, whose uninhibited lifestyle was heaven-sent to publications like Confidential, Whisper, and Hush- Hush. (Author’s collection)

  At a tienta in El Escorial, Spain, spring 1954, Ernest Hemingway demonstrates the proper use of the muleta to the world’s greatest bullfighter, Luis Miguel Dominguin. Ava Gardner, the matador’s girlfriend, looks on. (Courtesy A. E. Hotchner)

  A press conference in Singapore, during the world tour to publicize The Barefoot Contessa, autumn 1954. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Ava Gardner as the Anglo-Indian Victoria Jones, with Stewart Granger, in Bhowani Junction (1956), directed by George Cukor. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  The Little Hut (1957), starring Ava, Stewart Granger, and David Niven, filmed in Rome at Cinecitta studios, featured the small, amusing role of a faux cannibal for Ava’s current lover, Walter Chiari, “the Italian Danny Kaye.” (Courtesy New York Public Library)

  In Spain, under the tutelage of Dominguin, Hemingway, and others, Ava became an aficionada, a devoted follower of the bullfight. As a guest at the festive testing of the young bulls in the small rings of wealthy ranchers, she could sometimes be tempted to make a few passes of the cape with one of the deadly animals. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Poster for The Naked Maja (1959) (Author’s Collection)

  Ava as the Duchess of Alba in The Naked Maja, filmed in Rome. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  Ava undergoing torture as the Spanish prostitute in The Angel Wore Red (I960), costarring Dirk Bogarde. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  Ava as Maxine Faulk, Mismaloya hotel keeper in the John Huston—directed The Night of the Iguana (1964), from the play by Tennessee Williams, with Richard Burton as the Reverend Shannon and Fidelmar Duran and Roberto Leyva as the “beach boys” Pepe and Pedro. (Courtesy New York Public Library)

  In the mid-1960s Ava moved to England. Here seen on a London street in 1969, with her beloved corgi, Cara. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Ava with her much-younger love interest, Ian MacShane, in the odd fantasy film Tarn Lin (1970), directed by Roddy McDowall. (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  Ava as the legendary beauty Lily Langtry in Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Here, in her single scene in the film, Ava as Miss Langtry is greeted by the stationmaster, played by Huston crony and practical joker Billy Pearson. (Courtesy British Film Institute)

  Ava’s London flat at Ennismore Gardens, her final home. (Courtesy HS Photos)

  During the shooting of The Sentinel (1977) in New York City, Ava with Mearene “Reenie” Jordan, her longtime maid and companion. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Ava as Mabel Dodge, D. H. Lawrence’s wealthy American patroness, in Priest of Love (1981), with Janet Suzman as Frieda von Richthofen and Ian McKellen as Lawrence. (Courtesy Associated Press)

  Ava Gardner in 1985, in her final work as an actress, a
guest appearance in a television pilot called Maggie. (Courtesy Cinedoc)

  By late November Iguanas jungle location had lost its charm for nearly everybody. For the hundred and more members of cast and crew who lived there full-time, in the bungalows strung down the hill below the Costa Verde set, the discomforts had accumulated like clockwork. The heat, the humidity, the stinging insects were a constant. Then the bungalows proved to be infested with termites and spiders. And they were falling apart. The ancient actor Cyril Delevanti, playing “the world’s oldest living and practicing poet” in the movie, had the roof of his residence cave in. The lack of potable water at Mismaloya, and the usual susceptibilities of gringo turistas, left nearly everyone with a running case of amoebic dysentery, aka the “Aztec two-step,” a whole company with loose bowels. Tempers frayed. Lovers fought. There were injuries, on-set bruis- ings and falls. The portable generator that provided the only source of electricity began to break down with increasing frequency. Sue Lyon developed a bad case of pimples. Richard Burton was nearly electrocuted. A significant scene had Shannon, in a symbolic gesture, cutting loose the rope of a captured iguana. The iguana refused to run away when the rope was cut and so an electric wire with a 110-volt charge was used to get the lizard moving. Something went wrong with something, and Burton was touching the iguana as they shocked it. Burton’s whole body felt the charge, and he was lifted straight into the air and crashed to the stone floor.

  One day Burton had dozed off for a few minutes while sitting in a camp chair waiting to do a scene. An assistant woke him. His eyes opened, and he looked around uncertainly.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  “Mismaloya,” said the assistant.

  “God, no!” Burton cried.

  Ava’s main source of misery was the ever-increasing presence of visiting reporters and photographers. Media interest in the filming and the personalities involved was enormous, and producer Ray Stark and his appointed publicists eagerly exploited it, encouraging the dozens of requests from the press for on-site visits and interviews (and Huston, the would-be resort magnate, had his own reason for allowing them). Each day the single flight from Mexico City would be packed full of journalists from the United States and Europe. Ava mostly ignored the reporters or greeted them with an obscene dismissal, but the interlopers with cameras were more difficult to avoid and caused her the usual waves of anxiety. Gjon Mili, a photojournalist of some repute, had been sent to the set on assignment and was shooting both posed and candid shots of the stars. Ava had cooperated for the formal shots, but when Mili continued snapping afterward she shouted at him to quit. The photographer ignored her and went on taking pictures, at which point Ava charged at him and kicked him solidly in the stomach, so hard he fell over gasping for air. He abandoned his assignment and left Mexico the next day.

  Ross Lowell was a young documentary filmmaker who had been hired by the production company to shoot a 16 mm behind-the-scenes promotional short.* “I got down there, and it was a pretty interesting bunch of people,” Lowell remembered. “When I got to Mismaloya the first place you passed was a bar they had built there, and John Huston’s adopted Mexican son was sitting there with another Mexican, a pretty dynamic guy who was holding a firearm [Emilio Fernandez]. There was a lot of drinking going on, and Huston had to work around a lot of problems, but he was holding it all together. He took things very casually. He was an extraordinary person. I met Deborah Kerr, who was just such a lovely lady. And Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were pretty wonderful. Burton was very friendly and insisted I have some beers with him. This was after he’d sobered up enough in the fresh air to consume some more alcohol. And Ava Gardner was very sweet when she was sober. But I was advised to be awfully careful with her after noontime. She was at that point in her life where she was very much concerned about her appearance. And one afternoon I was filming her, and I guess I got on the wrong side and she had a fit. I was trying to frame a shot of her through some flowers, and she must have thought I was trying to sneak some shots of her, I don’t know. But she saw it, and she blew up and went off the set and didn’t come back.

  She went off to her room and held up production long enough that I became very upset. I went to Huston and told him what I had done, and I said that I would leave the job if he thought that was what I should do. Huston had a world-class sense of humor and knowledge of people. He said no, he didn’t want me to leave over this. He said, ‘We knew what the problems were when we hired her, and we’re willing to live with them.’ I asked if he objected to my going and apologizing to her and he said, ‘Not at all.’

  “So I went to see her. And she agreed to see me and I apologized. I think she took it well. But she was pretty busy crying.”

  The low point of the filming, and a near tragedy, occurred on the night of November 20. They were shooting now from sundown to late in the night, some of the final scenes in the picture. Ava had been having problems getting her performance right. She would go away and drink, and when she came back the problems were worse. It went on like this for many hours, and finally around two or three in the morning assistant director Tom Shaw told Huston, “I don’t think she’s going to get it. We better call it a day.” The company was dismissed, and everyone straggled to their beds. “It was a long night, shooting exteriors on the porch there where they had Burton tied up in the hammock,” Terry Morse remembered. “I headed back to my place. We were all living in these houses they had built, the ones they were hoping to sell as condos. Huston…I don’t know who was involved. And they were already starting to fall apart. Tom Shaw was up in his place on the second floor when I came by. It was about three, four in the morning. And he was sitting on the balcony, and he said, ‘Come on, sit down for a minute, we’ll talk about tomorrow’s work.’ “

  Shaw: “I’m telling him, let’s make sure so-and-so and so-and-so, about the next night, and I don’t know, I must have leaned too hard on something and down that son-of-a-bitch went. ...”

  Morse: “I just sat down and the whole building seemed to give out, just crumble. The building came down. And the two of us went flying over backwards down twenty feet onto our heads. I landed right on my head, and it was just luck that I wasn’t killed. I came to and Deborah Kerr was looking at me, holding my head up. They thought Tom Shaw might have been dead.”

  “Yeah,” Tom Shaw recalled, “I threw my back out on that thing.”

  Unconscious and bleeding, Shaw was taken down the mountainside to the dock, put onto a motorboat, taken to the town, Huston and some others carrying him to the beach through deep water with the surf over their heads. An airplane was hired and flew Shaw away that morning to a hospital. His back was broken, and there were threats from internal bleeding. The doctor, when Huston managed to make contact, couldn’t be sure if Shaw would make it. (He lived, and after a lengthy period of recuperation went to work on Huston’s next picture.)

  It was believed that the cement used in the bungalows at Mismaloya had been made with seawater instead of fresh because of the difficulty and expense of bringing freshwater to the jungle, and that this had left the cement unstable in the humid climate. After the injuries to Tom and Terry, Huston lost all interest in the potential jungle resort, wanted nothing more to do with it. (Forty years later a sprawling superresort does operate above the Mismaloya beach just beside the old Iguana location, and the rotting remains of the bungalows can still be found scattered over the jungle peninsula; the Costa Verde, constructed of better materials, is intact, currently operating as a restaurant and bar, with photographs of Richard Burton and Ava Gardner indicating the men’s and women’s lavatories.)

  Some thirty-six hours after the accident with Shaw and Morse had shaken the company, there came more bad news. On November 22, it was learned, via the ship-to-shore radio on Ray Stark’s yacht, that President John Kennedy had been assassinated. “Everyone was in a state of shock, of course,” remembered Ross Lowell. “And there was a lot of disbelief and waiting to get confirmation because communi
cation down there was so terrible. The radio was full of static.”

  Ava, like everyone else, stood about, feeling helpless, numb. After a time Huston gave a somber speech to all who were there. It was decided that they should try to keep working.*

  Filming concluded at the end of November. A wrap party was thrown on the last day of the month. It began at four in the afternoon and ended twelve hours later. Cast and crew and two hundred Mexican townspeople attended. There were locally made dishes as well as a planeload of American items Ray Stark had flown in from a Los Angeles delicatessen, and cases of fine wines and spirits for which Stark had also provided passage (there were also bottles of tequila and raicilla contributed by the local citizenry). Ava arrived, turning all heads, wearing a bright-patterned Pucci harem suit, a gift from the producer. A twenty-piece mariachi band played, and people danced.