Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Ava had wanted to be untouched by the news. Later people would hear the tough-broad wisecracks (playing on the new Mrs. Sinatra’s stick figure and ultrashort haircut): that Mia was “a fag with a pussy,” and how she’d always known Frank wanted to go to bed with a boy. But she had not been able to hold it together that first night, and the sense of loss had overwhelmed her. She cried and could not stop crying.

  An examination at the Chelsea Hospital for Women in London had detected the likely presence of a fibroid tumor in her uterus. Her mother’s early death from uterine cancer had haunted Ava for more than twenty years. Any gynecological problem she ever experienced had provoked anxiety, and she would imagine a harbinger of that killing disease. Now, with little consideration, she elected to undergo a hysterectomy.

  She had grown tired of Spain, bored with the life she had created for herself there. A dozen years had passed in her adopted home, and now what wonderful experiences there had been seemed long ago and faded in her mind and she had come to think of her time there as mostly wasted. What had she done with the years? Why had she ever come there in the first place?

  And Spain, it could be said, had grown tired of her. The local press printed derisive stories, unflattering photos. Her neighbors filed complaints about the noise and the unsavory visitors (Gypsies wandering about Doctor Arce at dawn). A local actor was quoted in an article, circa 1965: “I don’t know who started all that about how popular she is in Spain. She’s too unfeminine for the Spaniards. They like women to behave like women.”

  Lately she had come under the government’s scrutiny. It was rumored that Franco himself had warned the U.S. ambassador to keep her under control. One day she was paid a visit by an auditor from the revenue department. There was a discussion of back taxes owed, perhaps—Quien sabe, señora, they were still investigating—a million American dollars or more.

  To a woman who might give away a fortune in jewelry on a whim one day and obsess about a missing golf ball the next, any formal questions about her financial history were strictly gobbledygook. Ricardo Sicre would try to help, and her money managers from Los Angeles would fly in carrying bags full of paperwork, but the problem lingered on without resolution.

  She began to talk of moving to London. She had been there so often in recent years it was already a home away from home. She loved the city, the people, the good manners. She liked the tiny shops and the parks where you could walk your dog. And the rain. A person could have too much fucking sunshine.

  She arranged to sublease the Park Lane flat of Robert Ruark, the North Carolina—born columnist turned best-selling, Hemingwayesque author, who at fifty had recently dropped dead from alcohol abuse. For two years she shifted back and forth between residences in Spain and Britain until settling permanently in London in 1968.

  After the completion of The Bihle in the autumn of 1964, she did not work again for more than three years. The offers continued to come, but no longer with the frequency or the urgency of before. The most significant film she did not make in this period was the epochal coming-of-age hit of 1967, The Graduate. “Ava was the person they had wanted for the role of the mother, Mrs. Robinson,” Betty Sicre would recall. “She was still living in Madrid then and she threw the script over to me and said, ‘Take a look and see if you think I should do this.’ I read it in a couple of hours and brought it back to her. I said, ‘Ava, this is great!’ She read the script and agreed to do it. They brought her to meet Mike Nichols, the director. Ava claimed that Nichols had booked her into a hotel and that their rooms were connected by a door. She was very insulted. She came back to Madrid and she said, ‘Oh, I turned it down because Nichols was coming on to me, and he expected me to unlock the doors.’ But I doubt Mike Nichols would do that. Why would he do that? I think probably what happened was she just got drunk in their evening interview and he decided she’d be too iffy to work with. I think she blew it herself there. I don’t think she could do it at the time.”

  Mike Nichols’s version of the encounter cast him in the role of an innocent, disconcerted Benjamin to Ava’s seductive, scary Mrs. Robinson, summoned for an appearance at her New York hotel suite. “She was Ava Gardner,” he would recall to the Associated Press, “and my heart was pounding…the source of a million fantasies.” When the two were alone in the suite, Nichols said, “She did all the things you prayed would and wouldn’t happen.”

  The exact nature of these prayers Nichols would leave unrevealed. As to the prospective film, with its mature themes and sexy scenes, Ava declared, “I strip for nobody. I want to make that clear.” She then told Nichols, “I can’t act…they’ve all tried, but it’s hopeless.”

  “Miss Gardner, you’re wrong,” said Nichols. “You’re an excellent actress, I love your acting.”

  “You’re very sweet,” Ava said. “But I can’t act.”

  Instead of The Graduate, her return to the screen would be in the 1968 remake of Mayerling, the venerable historical confection about star- crossed romance among the Hapsburgs. Enacting the part of the Austro- Hungarian empress Elisabeth to James Mason’s Franz Josef, she was paired with a man she had first worked opposite eighteen years before, Pandora to his Flying Dutchman. Then they had been the romantic leads in Albert Lewin’s passionate fantasia. Now they played support to more bankable mad lovers, Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve as the doomed Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress, Marie Vetseia. For the temperate, dapper director Terence Young she worked without difficulty, offering a seductive and convincing performance full of imperial hauteur, glamorous, worldly, and assured. She and Mason, the old-timers, the supporting players, would receive the best notices upon the film’s unspectacular release. (The approval of Ava Gardner in the role of historical European royalty was fresh testimony to the distance she had traveled from Grab- town and from rival Love Goddesses like Turner and Monroe.)

  Sharif, the handsome Egyptian then at the height of his period of international stardom, was just ten years younger than the actress portraying his mother, and he did not respond to Ava Gardner as anyone’s mom but as a woman, very beautiful and “infinitely feminine.” They struck up a friendship—”a rather ambiguous,” he would write in his memoirs, “highly pleasurable camaraderie, one that bordered on romance.”

  For three months on Austrian locations Sharif would be her affectionate squire. He found her fascinating but so troubled—full of sorrows, unfulfilled desires, only alcohol easing the distress. “Terrific guys have been in love with her,” he wrote, “but they couldn’t satisfy her need for the absolute and Ava was always disappointed. She has known glory, wealth, but never love in the sense that she understood it: total giving shared in passion.”

  Omar’s insights had to warn him of inherent dangers in a more intimate relationship with his complicated new friend. The two did not cross that border to a romance. “I didn’t want to do anything to ruin our wonderful friendship.”

  Frank had sent notes, good wishes, a phone call on her birthday. He wanted her to know, he said, that he was still there for her. Anything, anytime. Talking on the phone to him, she had bitten down on her lip till the skin bled. “Say hi to Mia for me,” she told him.

  But the marriage did not go well. Frank and his swami-loving child bride had turned out not to be compatible after all. A year and a little more after their wedding there began to appear items in the gossip columns, reports of discord, by autumn 1967 a separation. Frank filed for divorce. “Maybe it bothered him not being young,” Mia reflected. “My friends from India would come into the house barefoot and hand him a flower. That made him feel square for the first time in his life.”

  Ava grappled with her reaction. There was undeniable relief in the news that Frank and Mia would not be going on together, happily ever after. But there were no more jokes. She knew what it felt like to have a marriage die.

  Work was finishing on Mayerling, the crown prince and his gal dead and buried in the name of love, when a call reached her from Florida.

  “M
rs. Sinatra?” the voice on the phone said. “It’s Frank. He’s sick. He’s got the pneumonia. It don’t look so good, I got to be honest. He keeps asking for you. Just keeps saying your name over and over. I would come pretty quick if you know what I mean.”

  She flew to him at once. Frank had been in Miami to make a private-eye picture (Lady in Cement) in the daytime and sing in the Hotel Fontainebleau’s La Ronde Room by night. “He was pushing himself so hard, and that whole divorce thing, it was too much, he couldn’t take it,” Jilly Rizzo told her. “The poor guy.”

  She was taken by private elevator to his inner sanctum at the top of the Fontainebleau, behind sprawled layers of hangers-on, yes-men and three hundred-pound gorillas—Frank’s mouth-breathing cuadrilla he now took with him wherever he went.

  “You glad to see me, baby?” Frank said.

  “They told me you were dying, Francis,” she said. “I’ve been traveling for 24 hours to get here.”

  He’d had a virus in the lungs, it was bad, not quite bad enough to go to the hospital and lose his penthouse view. But when Frank got sick he needed a lot of people at his bedside, praying. She remembered that time in Lake Tahoe when the stooge, with tears, told her Frank was at death’s door and she had to turn around and rush back from Los Angeles at dawn. In Miami, stressed from worry and jet-lagged, she screamed at him for being a selfish prick.

  “Hey, lady, I been sick. What you come here for if you’re gonna give me a hard time ...”

  It didn’t get much better than that. Frank was in a cranky mood, and now that she had come to see him he seemed to have little interest in the two of them being together. He didn’t want to leave the hotel so he sent her out to enjoy Miami in the care of Joe E. Lewis, the raunchy nightclub comic whose throat had once been sliced by gangsters (Sinatra had portrayed him in The Joker Is Wild). When she was with Frank it was all tough talk and dirty jokes and rants about the hippies ruining the country, playing to his goons, whom she hated. A couple of the hangers-on pushed a piano through a window, and Frank said something about her looking old. Ava went back to her suite, packed her things, and flew away.

  He would make it up to her. In time the relationship returned to something like what it had been before the coming of Mia, they went back to the phone calls in the night, the affectionate notes, Frank generous in small ways and large. There was, however, no return to the sexual relations they had—prior to his remarriage—enjoyed, intermittently but intensely, in many of the years since their own formal separation and divorce.

  In London she lived at the luxury flat on Park Lane with Reenie and her corgi Cara (Rags, her first “baby,” had died after a long and pampered life). She brought few of her things from Spain, most of the furniture and other large items shipped to the states and a storage facility in New York where they were forgotten for decades and finally sold at auction. She did bring her antique brass and lace-covered bed from Madrid but eventually replaced it after she heard someone describe it—because it was too narrow for two—as a “pessimist’s bed.”

  In London she was setting out to make a new life. To make a new Ava Gardner. In departing from Spain she had wanted to leave behind the furies that had directed her behavior for so long. “By that time in her life she was really very tired of stardom,” said Spoli Mills, Ava’s close friend for the last thirty years of her life. “It had overwhelmed her. She started out a very shy person, and a lot of what had happened to her she found very embarrassing. When she came to London she really just wanted to become a normal person again, an anonymous person. She wanted to walk down the street and not be bothered. She wanted peace. She didn’t want to think about being beautiful, about having to live up to that legend. She wanted to walk her dog in the park and not give a damn about how she looked.”

  In the cooler, less tempestuous climate of England she went about constructing a more reticent existence. There were to be fewer all-night club crawls and more evenings at the opera and the ballet. Tennis tournaments took the place of the bullfights as her spectator sport of choice. There were to be no more public brawls or broken bottles, or far fewer, anyway. No more cursing at journalists (not to their faces). No more mad love affairs, not after the nightmare with George Scott (although she knew very well this promise to herself would be the hardest to keep if and when temptation came). There would be men who caught her eye, always, men with whom she would flirt and toy in the years ahead (and, gossip had it, a few women, too), but she would remain cautious in her personal affairs, keep out of harm’s reach. In public she would occasionally be seen and photographed on the arm of a handsome escort—the gossip columns might hint at a new “love interest”—but most of these were homosexuals. Her physical needs she would satisfy for a time in occasional, and discreet, liaisons, including one long-running relationship with a young man (an eighteen-year-old messenger boy delivering a package to her flat when they first met) with whom she arranged clandestine visits at a hotel in Knightsbridge.

  In pursuit of her new self-image she would even give up alcohol, at least temporarily. Once or twice a year she would go for a week to Grayshott Hall Health Farm in Surrey south of London, and diet and exercise and not touch a drop. Other times she would check in at a local private nursing home, where they would keep her away from liquor for a twenty-four-hour period, enough, apparently, to set her straight without further treatment. She could stay completely sober for three or four months at a time before she would begin drinking again.

  Contentedly she went without work for a year and a half after Mayerling, and would have remained unemployed but for the pleading of a new friend, Roddy McDowall.

  McDowall was the doleful child star of the 1940s, returned to movies in the sixties as an eccentric, spritely leading man and character actor. Early in 1969 he had promoted himself to his first job as a feature director with a project known as Tam Lin (the most lasting title of the many it would assume in a long and bumpy history, including Toys, Games and Toys, Tamilin, The Devil’s Widow, and The Ballad of Τ am-Lin), from a story by Gerald Vaughan Hughes, based on a Scottish Borders ballad by Robert Burns. Adapted as a kind of horror movie fable set in a contemporary mod Britain, it told of a wealthy, older woman, demonic godmother to a band of swinging, stoned young wastrels; a witch in fact, she takes a terrible, uncanny vengeance on the man who spurns her love. To play the lead role of Michaela Cazelet, the deathless bitch-goddess, the “devil’s widow” of the piece, McDowall needed an actress with the qualities of “glamour, maturity and mystery.” His list of cinema divas of a certain age quickly narrowed to one legendary name, a woman he had met—only briefly— when he was a boy at MGM and with whom he had remained fascinated ever since. It was a strong, juicy part, a rare central role for a woman of middle age, and was so well suited to Ava Gardner it read in places like an occult reflection of her own life, this story of the legendary, aging but glamorous “witchy” woman, Michaela, and her “coven” of mooching layabouts (not unlike the Gypsy bands who once filled Ava’s living room in Madrid) and her young lovers, and her tempestuous temper.

  As usual, Ava did not want to go back to work. McDowall pursued her. He was a rare character in the picture business of that time: a veteran Hollywood insider who was also a movie buff, deeply knowledgeable of film history, a collector of autographs, posters, and 35 mm prints. He was the first prospective director Ava had met who appeared able and eager to talk to her with a thorough knowledge of her past work, surprising and flattering her with aesthetic appreciations of her performances in Pandora and Bhowani Junction and others. And beyond that McDowall was an engaging and empathetic person. They became friends. Coming to know her— “this gouache of remarkable qualities,” he would write, “deeply appealing, heartbreakingly moving…a study in contradictions”—he wanted her for the film more than ever. But Madame Cazalet was the longest and, Ava thought, the most complicated part she had been offered in many years, too much trouble, and she had never before worked with an inexperienced director. McDowall per
sisted. At last, with the producers getting restless, she came around. His sympathy for her was all-apparent, and she liked him very much; she agreed to do Tam Lin for Roddy, more than anything to help make sure his dream of directing a movie came true.

  In London, Roddy McDowall picked his other actors and technical crew. To support Ava’s central role he cast a mix of old and new names, venerable Cyril Cusack and Richard Wattis (late of the popular St. Triniaris comedies, now to steal scenes as Michaela’s mordant Jeeves), rising new leading man Ian McShane, and an assortment of teenagers and twenty- somethings, some to make their one and only film appearance in Tarn Lin, others at the very start of what would be long careers in movies and television, including Joanna Lumley, Stephanie Beacham, Sinead Cusack, and Bruce Robinson (future writer-director of the transcendent Withnail & I). To photograph the film McDowall chose Billy Williams, the brilliant young British director of photography whose other credit that year would be for Ken Russell’s Women in Love. “Roddy wanted to work with someone of his own generation, a cinematographer who was not set in his ways but would be willing to experiment, to try out new ideas,” Billy Williams would recall. “He was a very stimulating person to work with, had a great deal of interest in the composition and the color and the effects, and we had a lot of fun finding ways to shoot certain scenes, like the drug scene, trying to find unique imagery to express someone high or crazy on drugs.