Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  She arrived in Rome in midsummer, when filming had been under way for months. Among sequences already in the can were Creation (partly the work of photographer Ernest Haas, who had gathered footage from wilderness areas around the world), the Garden of Eden (with Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd as a naked American Adam and Swedish Eve gamboling on the grounds of an Italian count’s summer palace), Cain and Abel (Richard Harris and Franco Nero, respectively), and the Tower of Babel (Stephen Boyd as Nimrod, that shoot disrupted when Egyptian extras staged a bloody rock-throwing riot). And next up was the story of Abraham and Sarah, with filming to be done at the De Laurentiis studio followed by location work in the Abruzzi mountains and in Sicily.

  On the afternoon of Ava’s arrival Huston had called from his suite in the Grand Hotel a few floors below her own. “Honey,” he said, “I want you to come down and meet George.”

  Playing the part of Sarah’s hundred-year-old spouse, Abraham, was George C. Scott, the brilliant thirty-six-year-old stage and screen actor from Virginia and Detroit, in movies since 1959, his work including acclaimed appearances in Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler, and Dr. Strangelove. Scott had a craggy, broken-nosed face, a gravelly voice, a powerful physique (he had been a U.S. Marine for four years). On film he conveyed sharp intelligence, contempt, coiled anger, a screen presence that was intense and rather unpleasant. In movies he had been typed to play the antagonist, a smart bad guy or a creep, until John Huston had given him his first lead, casting him against type as the pukka English detective hero of his retro mystery, The List of Adrian Messenger, released in 1963. For The Bible, Huston found Scott a perfect choice to capture the gravitas, strength, and mysticism of the Old Testament patriarch.

  In Huston’s suite Ava met her costar. Scott seemed friendly, low-key, complimentary but not effusive, looking forward to working with her and all that. They left together. Out in the hall, out of Huston’s view, sort of an afterthought: “Ava, perhaps…if you’re not busy.…Would you like to have dinner? Talk about the script.”

  They had a good evening out. Yes, she looked forward to working with him, too. Nothing happened at once. He had a wife—the actress Colleen Dewhurst—and a baby son residing with him in a villa across town. There was that. For a while Scott hovered at the periphery, friendly, interested, but nothing more. Then they began to act together, and they were enjoying the experience, Scott very much. They huddled on the set, had lunches. By this time Ava had started up a thing with Stephen Grimes, Huston’s personable art director and another veteran of Puerto Vallarta.

  It was an on-location thing, a nice guy, some company for the night. Then one evening, without warning, Grimes discovered that he was out and George C. Scott was in. Suddenly the two performers were inseparable. Ava found George smart, sardonically funny, sensitive. They talked politics and books and poetry. He declaimed to her like a broken-nosed Cyrano, snatches of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. Scott thought show business was rubbish, but he was passionate about acting and language and the theater and film. And now about Ava Gardner. His ardor flared white hot. Within days of their affair starting up, he was overwhelmingly in love. And Ava in turn responded at once to his intense passion, she was intrigued, flattered, captivated.

  It had seemed a good idea at the time.

  “That was a bad, bad relationship,” Betty Sicre recalled. “He was not good for her. And she was bad for him too.”

  Scott had a drinking problem. Big time. Booze, in the right dosage, unleashed in him darkness and demons—paranoia, violent jealousy, rage. He had gotten the liquor habit in the marines, a response, he would say, to a depressing, haunted detail overseeing the bodies for burial at Arlington Cemetery. From his days as a struggling actor in the 1950s there would be rumors, tales told of a “Jekyll-Hyde” personality, a propensity for violence when he got into the liquor and particularly violence toward women, including the account by a longtime girlfriend with whom he had a child out of wedlock (while his then-wife was also pregnant) and whom he twice attempted to kill, once with an iron barbell and once in a thwarted murder-suicide. With success and the desire not to do anything to screw it up, perhaps along with some sense of responsibility or fear for his wife and children, Scott had tried to clean up his act, to stay away from alcohol, and to keep his demons at bay. Now, swept up in an affair with Ava Gardner, this was not going to be possible.

  “He had been on the wagon for years,” said Betty Sicre. “She got him drinking again.”

  “Oh, yeah,” remembered Nan Birmingham. “She said he’d been on the wagon. But she said he sure wasn’t staying on there.”

  Ava had seen indicators of his potential in the fury with which he argued and roared his sudden jealous complaints, but her temper was nothing to be taken lightly either, when the vodka was flowing. Shouting and slapping and throwing things were not unknown activities in her life and no reason to interrupt what had become a divertingly passionate relationship. Then came a night, on location in the Abruzzi, in the village of Avezzano. They had come back to his hotel room. They were drinking. It was said to have been a mention of the name Frank Sinatra that triggered the argument this night. There was screaming, four-letter words thrown back and forth. Scott became increasingly threatening, inflated with rage. Though she was probably in no condition for entirely rational thought herself, Ava decided she’d heard enough, told him she was leaving, and headed for the door. Scott charged at her, flung her back, and punched her on the side of the head so hard she spun in a circle and dropped to the floor. The powerful, furious ex-marine hovered, held her down, and punched her again, again, again. She felt her skull ringing, blood on her tongue. It went on till he released his grip suddenly, turned away for a moment, muttering curses, and she scrambled to the door and was gone.

  In the morning he was lying in wait. Her face bruised, red, and swollen, she rushed past him. He shuffled alongside, head bowed, like a cur.

  “Ava, my GodI f m so sorry…I don ‘t know how I could do such a thing…Forgive me, please, I’m so ashamed. “ He whimpered and groveled. Ashamed…I beg you to forgive me!”

  “Fuckyou, you bastard!”

  The makeup department did what they could to make her presentable. Word of what had happened spread through the company. There was a sense of shock, sympathy for her, disgust with George C. Scott. “I remember Peter O’Toole wanting to go right away and give Scott a beating,” said Tony Huston, a visitor to his father’s set (he had acted with Scott two years before in Adrian Messenger). “Dad intervened before things got out of hand. But no one was very happy with George after that. He had a drinking problem, but Dad came to feel that was just an excuse, that he was essentially a coward. The drink was there to cover up some essential flaw in him as a man. Hitting women was part of it.”

  Ava was not the sort to call in the cops, and while she gave some thought to quitting the picture she felt she owed it to Huston to carry on. Scott remained with his tail between his legs, begging to be forgiven. Some say she taunted him by turning to other men at hand, including a very brief encounter with a guy from the De Laurentiis office.

  The unit was headed south to the next location. She had a long weekend off and Frank was in Italy making a movie, Von Ryan ‘s Express. He was going to come see her, then he wasn’t. The press rats were all around, he told her. They had a bounty out for a picture of the two of them together. He wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. She flew to Rome, and a couple of his bulky underlings took her from the airport to his Twentieth Century—Fox—provided digs outside the city, an eighteen-room villa complete with heliport (from which he was flown each morning to the Von Ryan s mountain location at Cortina d’Ampezzo), walled off and guarded like a despot’s fortress. Frank was affectionate, sentimental. There was some of the old talk about them getting back together. But there was a sense of strain in the air. There was no sex that weekend. Brad Dexter, Sinatra’s sidekick at the time, told biographer Randy Taraborrelli, “Frank was still trying to revive the relationship,
but she had started to hit that bottle and it was painful for Frank to see the woman he adored destroying herself with booze.”

  She returned to The Bible, which was shooting now at desolate locations around the Gulf of Catania in eastern Sicily. She felt stressed and lonely on her return, and the atmosphere at work did not help. A malaise had settled on the huge, tiring production. Huston’s low threshold of boredom had been reached, his growing disengagement apparent—one morning nearly a thousand people stood around waiting for direction while he sat working on a crossword puzzle. Ava declared that this one would be her last movie. A visiting journalist, Peer Oppenheimer, got her (in her loneliness perhaps) to speak to him for a few minutes. She was “as tense as the spring of a tightly wound watch,” he reported. “If anything,” she grumbled, “I hate making films more than ever. The only exception was The Night of the Iguana…thanks to Richard and John. No—thanks mostly to John. He’s wonderful to work with. It was John who talked me into playing Sarah in The Bible. But I’m already sorry I accepted. It’s such a big picture with so many people in it. You sit around, and you really aren’t close to anyone.” Huston, speaking with the same reporter, offered his own mixed feelings: “I don’t really know her. I don’t think anyone does. I wanted her for Night because I thought she had always been miscast and had never been given a chance to show what she could do as an actress. I think she showed it in Iguana, and I think she will be as good again as Sarah.”

  Every day she had to work with George Scott. He was at all times considerate, supportive. He asked her once more to forgive him, and then one day she did. They began going to dinner again. She began going back to his room. He told her he was more in love with her than ever, begged her to marry him. The ugly night of violence was nearly forgotten. Then, another night, one drink too many and back came the demons. It was like a horror movie transformation, suddenly the deep breathing, the eyes bugging out, the filthy names, the slapping, strangling, punching. In the hotel bar one evening he came storming through the entrance looking for her, like the Frankenstein monster on a rampage.

  “I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch!”

  Huston ran forward to intercept him, leaping on his back and locking arms over his face. The actor was too powerful to bring down, and he lurched and twisted across the barroom with the director wrapped around his shoulders, knocking over chairs and bottles, Huston digging in as if he were riding an ostrich. Some others joined the battle and pulled him over and subdued him, and Ava was hurried out of sight.

  He was taken to a hospital—”a nuthouse with bars” according to Ava— and pumped full of tranquilizers. The moviemakers were looking at a potential catastrophe if Scott could not return—his part ran through nearly one-third of the picture, half or more to be shot again if he was replaced. “Without George,” said Huston in his voice of God, “we re fucked.”

  It was, naturally, Ava who would be called on to lure the crazed star back to work in one piece. And so she did. The show must go on. And George remained devoted to her, when he wasn’t trying to murder her. One day three Sicilian bruisers came and took Scott for a ride. He refused to talk about it; some believed they were three Mafiosi sent by Sinatra to deliver an ultimatum, others that Huston had hired them from central casting for the same purpose. There was nothing logical about what went on, nothing rational. The affair continued, the drinking continued, the violence continued, The Bible got made.

  Stephen and Nan Birmingham had gone to Spain that year. Ava had finished her movie in Italy, and she invited them to have Thanksgiving dinner at the duplex. They were in Madrid then and Ava called, asking them to meet her flight and take her home from the airport. She had been to see a doctor in England that day and was flying back, wanted to dodge the press. “We said, ‘Sure thing, Ava,’ and we went to get her,” Nan Birmingham remembered. “Ava arrives, and I see that she has an arm in a sling. That’s why she’d been to her doctor. She’s got the arm in a sling. And then I see there’s a bald patch on the back of her head. We had no idea what this was all about. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘George and I had a fight.’ She’d gotten a dislocated shoulder…or a broken collarbone, one of those. And he’d torn a chunk of hair from her head. I didn’t know how to react to that. It must have been some fight.” (Some say the broken bone was a result of whiplash from a misplaced punch thrown at Scott by Ava.)

  “Then, a couple of days later, we went over to her place. It was a small gathering she was having. And now George was on the scene. We met George C. Scott. Ava introduced us. Ava was not drinking. And George wasn’t either. She was eating an apple. I think George was eating an apple, too. He seemed very relaxed. He was charming, simply charming. But the thing you couldn’t help noticing was George’s face—it looked terrible, all red and burned, like he’d been in a fire. And Ava gives me one of her signals, ‘Psstf Woo-hoo!’ And I go with her and she whispers, ‘Did you see George’s face?’ She said he had been drunk the night before and he had thrown himself into the fireplace and he had smashed his head in it, beaten his own head on the hot coals or the hot fire grille. Oh, boy. And I looked over at him and, jeez, his face did look pretty terrible, I’ll tell you that. But there was George sitting and talking away like everything was normal, just eating his apple. And then Ava said, ‘Come on upstairs, Nan, I want to show you something.’ So I went upstairs to her bedroom. And she shows me the door to her clothes closet, and there was a great big hole in it. She said, ‘Look what he did!’ She said Scott had put his head through the door. She said they were fighting, and George was coming after her. She went into her bedroom and wouldn’t let him in, and he kicked the door in and she went hiding in her closet and barred the door or something, and he literally smashed his head through the door. I don’t know how Scott ever survived all this. I don’t remember the whole itinerary, whether his head went into the closet first or into the fireplace! Ha! But it seemed like a pretty strange relationship and a miracle that they both survived.”

  Thanksgiving dinner was served. Ava’s mood had declined by then. They were not going to have a fucking turkey she told the guests, they were going to have a fucking chicken. “There isn’t,” she said, “a fucking turkey in all of Madrid.”

  And they went into the dining room, and Ava went over to where the meal was all set out, and she picked up a chicken leg and hurled it across the room. For why no one knew. Who was she throwing it at? No one knew. The world. And then she stormed upstairs and that was the last anyone saw of her.

  The affair with Scott went on into the next year, 1965. No one who knew Ava could explain it, not with a great deal of certainty or understanding. She was a magnet for mad situations, some said, or addicted to high drama or turned on by violence, or it was her upbringing (“redneck,” said Stephen Birmingham, “where men beat up women”), or it was just that crazy little thing called love, only this time very much too crazy. The turning point in the affair—though, unfortunately, not its climax— occurred in London. They had gone to the theater to see Othello. Reenie Jordan thought that was definitely the wrong play to see with George C. Scott. They were drinking afterward, and Scott’s demons had begun to surface. By the time he and Ava returned to the suite at the Savoy, he was out of control. He began slapping and punching her. She ran from him, but Scott blocked the way out of the suite and she retreated and hid in the outer bathroom off the foyer, calling for help. When Reenie attempted to go to her, Scott threatened her, dared her to try and get past. Reenie left the suite through a bedroom door, found a busboy to help her, and got Ava out through a transom. Hotel security came. Then the police. Scott was charged with “disturbing the peace” and spent the night behind bars. Ava and Reenie were checked out and gone before he could be released. She swore she would never see him again. It had to end before someone’s head got cut off.

  But Scott’s passion for her continued. For some time he tried all methods to reach her, declaring his love, begging for a last chance. He sent word he was seeking a Mexican divorce from his w
ife, Colleen, so that he and Ava could be married. It went on like that, and she went on avoiding him until at last it seemed he had gotten the picture and faded away.

  She was in Los Angeles then, late in 1965, visiting Bappie and her husband (their marriage remained a modest success). She was staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel above Sunset Boulevard. In bed sometime after midnight, she was awakened by a racket at the back door. There was a sound of a window shattering, things cracking and crashing. And the next moment George C. Scott was in the room with her. He was heaving with rage, his flesh dank with whiskey sweat.

  “I love you! Do you hear me?”

  He held a bottle of booze in his hand and he smashed the neck and waved the jagged glass under her eyes.

  “I won’t give you up! I’d rather see us both dead!”

  She pleaded for mercy, for the sake of their love, said whatever lies he needed to hear. It took forever to wind him down. It was a little before dawn when she convinced him he needed something “for his nerves,” she would call somebody they could trust, she said, and she phoned her physician and friend Dr. Smith, while Scott sat there watching her, shaking with rage, his eyes popping. The doctor arrived, calmly assessed the situation, gave Scott a powerful sedative, then went off to alert the hotel and phone Bappie. Scott dozed while Ava and a security guard, and then Bappie, debated what to do next. Suddenly, Scott woke up, stared at them for a moment, then got up and disappeared out the back door.

  She would never understand it. Love was supposed to be such a wonderful thing. How could it cause so much unhappiness? Why did love always have to mean a broken collarbone, 50 ccs of phénobarbital, and somebody fleeing in the night?

  On July 19, 1966, Ava got a call from Las Vegas. It was George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s longtime valet. On his boss’s instructions he was calling to say that Frank was about to marry Mia Farrow. Mr. S. had not wanted her to find out about it after the fact in the papers or on television. Mia was the young star of the TV soap opera Peyton Place, the daughter of Maureen O’Sullivan and director John Farrow. A slender, fawnlike blond, she epitomized the flower-power youth culture, a believer in macrobiotics and rock music and the Maharishi. Their relationship had been in the papers over the previous year, but mostly it had been the subject of jokes, the hippie and the old Rat Packer. She was twenty-one years old, Sinatra was fifty. Said Mia of her mature boyfriend, “He’s groovy, he’s kinky, and above all he’s gentle.” And now, after a quickly planned ceremony inside the Sands Hotel Casino, they were going to be husband and wife.