Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “And, you know, she had her family, really. It would be wrong to think of her as alone in the world. She was very much a part of our family, we thought of her that way, and she had Bappie who was really like Ava’s mother, and she was always in close touch with her. She was an extraordinary person, too—Bappie, a tough Southern broad—and she had really looked out for Ava all those years. They beat the hell out of each other; there were lots of arguments, Bappie was not such a paragon of virtue either, but there was great love between them. And then Ava had Reenie, lovely Reenie, who had been with her for years and years. And that was a fiery relationship, too, but they were very close, like sisters. Reenie came and went, but she was always there if Ava needed her. These were people she had around her most of her life and they loved her and she loved them.

  And then came the last member of the family, really—Carmen, who was as devoted as a daughter and was there with Ava at the very end.”

  Carmen Vargas was a pretty, raven-haired native of Ecuador, resident in England for several years when she arrived at Ava Gardner’s London flat to interview for the job of housekeeper. The position had become a nuisance to fill as several women in a row had not gotten along with Cara, and some of them had been chased off before they had quite come through the doorway. “She was frightened because that dog bite everyone,” Carmen Vargas would recall. “It tear up everyone who go there. The ladies used to come to interview and the dog pulled the bags, bite the ankles. They say the dog bite, and they say, ‘Oh, Miss, I’m sorry I cannot live in a house with this dog!’ She said it was very bad. Miss Gardner said to me, ‘I’m afraid the dog bite you.’ I said, ‘I think maybe I change my mind to come here.’ I don’t want to be next for the dog to bite. She said, ‘I think I will give up to find someone. Then I will just do everything myself. I will mop the floor myself and everything. But what else can I do? I cannot put the dog to sleep just to have a housekeeper!’ I see she is sad about this, so I come into the house and we sit down. The dog came in then. Name was Cara. And the dog came right to me, sat next to me. The dog looks peaceful. I want to pet her. Miss Gardner is very afraid. ‘Oh, please, no!’ she says. ‘Don’t touch!’ But the dog want me to pet her. And I scratched the ears of the dog. Miss Gardner, she just look at me and the dog and she didn’t say anything she just look. Then she say, ‘Carmen, let me show you the house.’ I tell her, ‘Okay.’

  “She told me to think about it. The third day I call, I say, ‘I take the job.’ In the morning I started working for her. I started working that first morning and after a few hours she said to me, ‘Carmen, I have to meet someone for lunch. I will be back around three or four.’ And she go away, leaving me alone in the house. And I saw that she had very valuable things everywhere. I was so surprised. I had to ask her when she come back. ‘How is it you are so trustful? To leave a person who just start working a few hours and leave her in your home with all these valuable things?’ She laughed. She said she knew I was special. Then in the evening she said, ‘Carmen, we’re not going to cook tonight. Let’s go out. Come on, I’m treating you.’ We went to have dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant, Montpeliano. And I think to myself, ‘It must have been somebody crazy to leave this job.’ I was so happy. I feel straightaway like I am with my own family.

  “Another day she says to me, ‘Carmen, how you cook?’ I said, ‘Miss Gardner, I cook a little, not too much.’ She said, Okay, you don’t have to be cordon bleu, lady.’ She said, ‘I do a lot of cooking. You can watch what I do.’ And I said, Okay, you will teach me, and I will follow you.’ And I learn many things from her. She taught me to cook Chinese food and Italian and Southern fried chicken. She was a fantastic cook. Every gravy she made, believe me, so good, mmm On Sunday she liked to prepare a special dinner, a big dinner, roast beef or roast lamb. She would put it in the oven and then go to do ironing. Yes, she used to love to iron. She would iron every little thing, my little apron, everything. I would say, ‘Miss Gardner, you don’t want me to do ironing?’ She said, ‘No, I enjoy it.’ She would iron and watch the television. She liked to watch cartoons or any old movie while she ironed the clothes.

  “For three months I was working for her, and I did not know who I was working for. I did not know who was ‘Ava Gardner.’ My friends say, ‘Where are you working?’ I say, ‘It is an American lady. No husband. She comes in and out. Some people come. I never pay attention what they’re talking about. She is very nice.’ One day she says to me, ‘Carmen, I would like you to come with me. I have to go to…’ Someplace, some country, maybe it was Mexico. I was nervous. I said, ‘I will think about it.’ She said, ‘Don’t think about it. We will have a good time.’ I said, ‘Miss Gardner, why we have to go to this place?’ She said, ‘I have to go work, baby, it’s my job.’ I said, ‘You have a job? What kind of job do you do?’ She started to laugh. She started to laugh very much. Then she says, ‘Carmen, for heaven s sake, don’t you know I’m a lousy movie star?’ “

  Once again Ava’s presence had been requested by John Huston. In the autumn of 1971 he was making The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Paul Newman in the title role, an episodic and highly fanciful account of the self-appointed 1890s Texas hanging judge, the legendary “law west of the Pecos.” As scripted by John Milius and then revised and reconceived during filming by Milius and the director, the film was to be another Hustonian venture in subversive storytelling, a violent, absurdist black comedy that mocked the notion of Wild West heroes and legends while ultimately offering a heartfelt, haunting lament for their passing. A leitmotif throughout was Judge Bean’s obsession with a British theatrical superstar of the time, Lily Langtry, a woman Bean would never meet but in whose honor he named both his Texas town and his saloon. For the film’s finale, the actress, on an American tour, would make a brief visit to the windblown whistle-stop and to the shrine created by her number one fan, the long-dead Judge Bean. To play the part of the “most beautiful woman in all creation” in her one brief but significant scene, Huston could think of no one better than the great beauty of his own acquaintance, and a woman for whom he had felt something of a Bean-like adoration for nearly thirty years. In September he sent her the script with a brief note (“Ava darling…you’ll see that it’s a must. Much love”). In October she joined the Judge Roy Bean company at Tucson, Arizona.

  She was needed for just three days of filming, but it was time enough to cause some commotion and show them all that living legends had not died with “the Jersey Lily.” At the party given to welcome her she arrived two hours late. “And she didn’t walk into the room, she came in like a cat,” actress Victoria Principal told Lawrence Grobei. “I had never seen a woman move like that or have that kind of presence, before or since. I’ve never seen a woman electrify a room sexually like she did. You were aware that she was on the prowl.”

  Ava had been looking forward to meeting Paul Newman (by now she regretted turning down the chance to work with him years before in Sweet Bird of Youth), but in Tucson she found the man—for reasons that are not clear—less than simpático. (“One of my unfavorite actors,” she would say later.) She drank too much one night, had words with somebody, glasses were broken, she disappeared. John Milius, the young screenwriter on hand, was drafted to go find her where she had wandered into the desert. He refused the assignment. She was too old, he’d say (to Grobei), unappealing, “predatory.”

  Out there in the desert was even more potential trouble. Over the next tumbleweed from Roy Bean, directing himself in a film called Rage, no less, was George C. Scott. When Huston learned that Scott and Ava had been in contact (What was she thinking? Not with her head, anyway) he paid two Stuntmen to keep her under watch until her scenes were completed. The reunion became no more than a brief, calm conversation.

  Her filmed entrance to Langtry by rail was staged in a long single take, Miss Lily coming down the steps of the train, greeted by the few residents, and walking off to see the town as the craning camera moved before her. Playing the
part of the stationmaster who leads Lily Langtry from the train was Billy Pearson, a Huston crony, former jockey and sometime pre- Columbian art smuggler, whose real job was to keep the director amused. As the much rehearsed and elaborate shot started, Pearson stepped up to Ava, doffed his stationmaster’s cap, and, with his back to the camera, said, “Welcome, Miss Langtry…And on behalf of the entire railroad let me jes’ say… I would be honored if you would let me eat your pussy!” He continued in this vein or worse as they played out the whole lengthy shot, but Ava refused to react, only remaining perfectly in character to the end, at which point everyone exploded with laughter, Huston with tears in his eyes. It would mean an hour on the clock before anyone could work again, but, as it was explained to the producers, who could put a price on a good joke?

  Heading home, she made a brief visit to New York City, staying at Frank’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers (he had given her an open invitation to use any of his many apartments and vacation homes when she was traveling or on holiday, and she did so happily; when he got rid of his Las Brisas property in Acapulco, Mexico, she was heartbroken). Also staying at the Waldorf apartment when she arrived was Tina Sinatra, Frank’s youngest child. She had been born only a year and a bit before Ava and Frank had gotten together. She was in her early twenties now, a dark-haired beauty. The girl seemed to hold no ill will about past events, and Ava was happy to find that the two of them got along very well. As they spent time getting to know each other, she saw something of herself in Tina, and there was a physical resemblance as well, a notion she considered confirmed when they were out on Fifth Avenue together and someone mistook them for mother and daughter. It was an amusing and then saddening mistake.

  Ava’s flat in the high-rise at Park Lane was in time exchanged for a large town house on Alexander Square in Kensington. The five stories plus wine cellar were difficult to keep up, the rooms with their thickly barred windows never felt very cheering, and the neighbors objected to Sinatra and Maria Callas recordings played loud after midnight. Early in 1972 she sold it and moved once again, this time to a large second-floor flat with balconies in a converted Victorian house with a pillared entrance at number 34 Ennismore Gardens. The new place was in a quiet, graceful part of the city, looked out on a private park, and was a short walk from Hyde Park and Harrod’s. She found it a comfortable fit, enjoyed the space, the neighborhood, the neighbors. Much time and expense were given to the design and furnishing of the large, light-filled rooms, early on under the guidance of George Alfred Stacey, the American “decorator to the rich and famous.” He filled the flat with pristine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiques, rare Chinoiserie, towering old oil paintings, and gilded mirrors. There would be few mementos—some pictures of friends and relatives and a framed photo of Frank—certainly no items to directly commemorate her life in the movies (unless one counted the original, framed Man Ray photograph of her as a sixteenth-century maiden seen in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman). The apartment looked like the residence of a veteran ambassador—visitors would remember thinking—or a well-off, widowed contessa.*

  In the early years at number 34 there would be occasional talk about moving on again, heading to the next place, back to somewhere warmer, somewhere on the beach this time—Hawaii or one of the Virgin Islands or the Spanish coast—especially when the rain did not stop or she felt a cold damp in her lungs, or the time there was no hot water to be had in her building and she had to scurry across the street in a terry-cloth robe and wet hair to use a neighbor’s bath (“God bless the English,” she said, “they pretended not to notice me”). But such talk faded after a while. Ennismore Gardens became, finally and forever after, her home.

  All Ava’s periods of negative energy, which Reenie Jordan summed up simply as “movie-starrish,” meaning the bad behavior and self- indulgence and self-destruction, were going away. In London now, freed of the violent passions and many of the fears of the past, her generous, positive spirit—often dormant—took charge. She was to be a much loved and admired addition to her new neighborhood, made many chums. Though she was still shy with strangers, it became easy enough to break the ice with her, especially if you were an animal lover; a person who was seen to be affectionate with their dog was soon among the flock and in receipt of an invitation, welcome for coffee or a drink. When neighbors became sick she brought them flowers and books. She went to sit with an elderly woman who suffered a stroke or took her for a walk every day until she was feeling better. “Miss Ava was very generous,” Carmen Vargas would say. “She would worry about all the people. She did not like to see someone in trouble. If she saw someone homeless or sick, she would bring them home to give them something to eat, or send them in a taxi to her doctor. I say to her, Oh, Miss Gardner, you cannot bring everyone here you don’t know. Maybe they will rob or kill us!’ She say, ‘Oh, Carmen, I could not leave them like that.’ “ For her Christmastime birthday parties she would invite people from every walk of life. Oblivious to the class consciousness of some of her well-heeled neighbors, she entertained local housekeepers and workers, people who had never expected to be the guest of a Hollywood legend. “I remember one nice old lady come to the party,” said Carmen, “she was caretaker of some building, she say to me, ‘Carmen, I will never forget this as long as I live!’ Miss Ava make her so happy.”

  Many actors and people from the film industry lived in the Knights- bridge neighborhood, and she would often run into acquaintances from her cinematic past, people with whom she had shared adventures twenty and thirty years before, perhaps last seen at some back-of-beyond location. One day there was Eva Monley, veteran of Mogambo and Bhowani Junction, now living a couple of blocks away. “I was walking along the street, and suddenly I see a face popping out of the door. ‘Eva! Come up! Come up! Coffee! Coffee!’ And there was Ava. ‘My dear! And how are things in Pakistan?’ “ They would sit and reminisce. They would remember the Christmas in the jungle under the stars, cranky John Ford, and the beautiful blue-black Congolese singing carols, and the drunken cameramen dancing on the dinner tables, mad dogs and Englishmen, and the time John Huston introduced them to each other—”Eva meet Ava,” he had said—when they had already been through Africa together, silly man, and the bat in the room at Faletti’s in Lahore, and Ava running around without a stitch, and fussy George Cukor afraid to get ill and eating nothing every day but boiled eggs.

  There would be new friends, too, among the show-business professionals who lived on Ennismore, some as starstruck by the American movie actress as any of the “civilians.” “I knew she lived in the neighborhood and I had thought how wonderful it would be to meet her sometime,” recalled Peter Bly the, the stage and television actor (well-remembered as Sam Ballard in the long-running Rumpole of the Bailey series). “Late at night, returning from the West End, I would take my dog Herky, a Rhodesian ridgeback, out for his p.m. walk and one night a woman who was walking a small dog saw me and stopped, obviously nervous. I said, ‘it’s all right, I’m just walking my dog, too.’ The woman relaxed, came closer, ancl asked, ‘What kind of mutt do you have?’ And there was Ava Gardner. And I was very thankful for that casual meeting because had I been formally introduced to her, I know I would have stammered away. And she was wonderful. We became friends, to my delight. I would see her nearly every day on her walks or striding up the street with a towel under her arm (she liked to go for a swim in the nearby university pool). I liked her very much…I remember one day she came by our place to show off her new dog. She knocked on the door, and it was Ava with a puppy in her arms. ‘Just come to let you meet my new mutt!’ she said, and after mutual agreement that the mutt was magnificent, she said, ‘Something smells good.’ It was a Friday, my day for cooking my specialty— though I say it myself—very good fish-and-chips. I invited her to have some, and she did. She must have enjoyed it, because from then on she frequently found something she simply had to tell me or show me that brought her by just exactly at lunchtime on a Friday. She was a wonderful person
, full of life, could party with a stamina I envied, and I was so delighted to know her.”

  Another neighbor and one she became especially close to was Charles Grey, an actor best known for playing smugly sinister villains in the movies including—twice—James Bond’s nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He was a frequent drinking companion, partner in card games, and comrade in arms for various jaunts through the city and to the theater. Together, and in their cups, the two were said to have made a quite amusing team. Alistair Cooke, who once spent an afternoon with them after they abducted him from a London book-signing appearance, likened the two together to “a sort of raucous Nick and Nora from the Thin Man movies,” although it was strictly a platonic “marriage” in this case, Grey a very gay Nick Charles.

  Ava’s “local” was the Ennismore Arms, a tiny pub tucked away in the nearby mews. She bought the place its first jukebox, then directed it to be filled with Frank Sinatra records.

  Thanks to the wise investments made by her financial planners, she could afford to live a very comfortable life without ever acting again. “I’m wealthy,” she would explain, “just not ‘stinkin’ rich.’ “

  She did continue to work in the movies, but now with the secure conviction that such employment was no more than a vague sideline. If her name, her face, were still worth something to someone she might act again, but only for immediate practical reasons, to afford some desired extravagance like an expensive addition to the apartment, or as a favor to a friend or as a paid vacation. With no emotional or professional stake in what she did, no great pressure to work or not to, she could now almost enjoy her old profession. When producer Jennings Lang visited London in the chill winter of 1974 to offer her a part in his next film, Earthquake>