by Lee Server
the prospect of a salaried three-month stay in sunlit Southern California was sole and sufficient motivation; she told him to send the air tickets, she could read the script when she got there.
Lang, a Universal executive and overseer of the recent Airport sequels, had personally experienced a mild but thought-provoking earthquake one night in Beverly Hills, and this had led him to decide the subject for the next great entry in the expanding, popular Hollywood genre known as the “disaster movie.” Earthquake was going to chronicle, with spectacle and vivacity and tons of breaking glass, a “big one” shaking apart the city of Los Angeles. Lang would assemble a vast team of craftsmen, model makers, audio technicians, and special effects wizards to create many and various scenes of destruction, earth splitting, dam bursting, skyscrapers tumbling, and much more, all accompanied by what was hoped would be an exciting sound-track effect they were going to call Sensurround (a sonic rumble intended to simulate the vibration of a quake and felt by audience members through the floor and the seats). To let the audience get to know some of the people the buildings were going to fall on, a screenplay was written by Mario Puzo and George Fox. This followed the stories of a dozen or so characters all more or less interwoven as a result of the calamitous quake. Ava’s assigned role was that of a shrewish, pill- popping, hysteria-and-suicide-prone wife of a long-suffering architect husband (to be played by her old 55 Days in Peking comrade Charlton Heston), whom she drives into the arms of a kittenish young mom (to be played by kittenish French Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold). The earthquake and its aftermath puts both women in mortal peril, but in the end—as originally scripted—the wife is washed away to her death and her husband is left free to return to his pouty young girlfriend.
Ava arrived from London at the end of February, moving in with Bappie at her house high in the Hollywood Hills, and two days later reported for work at Universal in the Valley a short drive away. Costumer Edith Head fitted her for her wardrobe, which consisted mostly of variations of the same cream-colored suit, each one more torn and stained than its predecessor, indicating the increasing ravages of the disaster (unlike on many previous jobs, Ava would not be asking to keep her clothes from this film at the end of production).
Earthquake renewed Ava’s friendship with Monica Lewis, the sultry blond singer-actress she had known at Metro nearly twenty-five years before. Now Monica was the wife of Jennings Lang, and a mother. She had taken a small part in the film, playing the secretary of Lome Greene, who played Ava Gardner’s father. “It was great to see her after so many years, and we became very pal-sy all over again,” Monica Lewis would recall. “I thought she looked fine, but she was older—we all were. She had thickened. I think she was worried that maybe she didn’t look that good. Jennings told her, ‘Don’t worry about it, Ava. We’ll make Lome look older or we’ll make Heston look worse.’ “
Directing the film was Mark Robson. He and Ava had last worked together at Cinecittà in Rome making The Little Hut. He was a nice man, but she had not found him very inspiring in Italy and did not expect much from him now at Universal City. There was some tension in the air at the reunion with Chuck Heston, who was understandably wary after their time together in Spain. He was relieved to find her less visibly troubled on this picture, anyway less troublesome. She seemed, he wrote in his autobiography, “to have lost some of the fiery core that had been so much a part of her persona.” In his diary, though, he took note of her nervousness, her need for many takes, and her distracting tendency only to “approximate the exact text.” Their first dramatic sequence together, an early-morning domestic crisis, they performed with their usual lack of on-screen chemistry, and—thanks to Robson’s slack hand, perhaps—gave the appearance of working in two separate movies, Ava’s raw, gutsy acting something out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Heston’s overarticulated humorless- ness more redolent of Plan Nine from Outer Space (“Of course I’ll induce vomiting!” he shouts into the telephone after his wife has apparently attempted to kill herself). Anyway, it mattered little—the real stars of the film were the miniature models and the high-decibel sound effects.
By April they had gotten down to the bruising business of dodging girders, falling into rubble, and shimmying through sewer pipes. For many shots in the earthquake sequences, ranging from the uncomfortable to the dangerous, Ava refused the services of a stunt person and did the action herself. It was the tomboy in her coming out, she explained, a chance to roll about in the muck the way she did as a little girl. “She was very game,” said Monica Lewis. “Always ready to get right in there. Totally professional. And some of the scenes were difficult.”
Earthquake s climax involved her character and Heston’s becoming trapped in a storm drain and overcome by a torrent of water set loose by a bursting dam, being swept away to their deaths (Heston had demanded a change in the script—a noble if unhappy ending for his character— instead of survival; now he would give up his life trying to save his “bitchy wife”). Ava again agreed to do the risky shot herself. A floodgate released a pressurized flow of 360,000 gallons per minute that rushed across them like an express train, the wig she was wearing ripped from her head, and her body pounded against the concrete, leaving her black-and- blue for a week. She was brought out at last, looking as glamorous as a drowned rat, shivering, and walking with a limp. The crew applauded her effort. She said, “I don’t think you could call that acting.”
“She led a quiet life out here when she wasn’t at work,” Monica Lewis would remember. “We spent a lot of time together. She wasn’t interested in seeing many people. She hung around with her sister and with us, at my house. She had some friends who were not in the business, and she went to see them, too, a wonderful massage person and his wife, who had been a dancer in England. At night Ava used to go running. And she had a lot of guts, running down the road at night all by herself. I remember one night she was very excited because Maria Callas was singing somewhere. She said, ‘I’m going, I don’t care if I only get to sleep for three hours, I gotta hear Maria.’
“And then, on the set, we’d sit around in her room and talk. Ava had a very eclectic and curious mind. She knew about many things. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She had taught herself about things because she wanted to know. And she’d play Frank Sinatra records, and she’d sing along ... ‘Is it an earthquake9 or simply a shock?’ And she’d say, ‘Sing it for me, Monica, sing it!’ And I’d say, ‘He ‘s in a different key, honey.’
“We had a very good time on that picture.”
Late in April Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Nearly every media report on the milestone focused on the golden past, the time of Mayer’s factory of stars, Gable and Garbo, Crawford, Harlow, Gardner. What else could you focus on? Under the leadership of James Aubrey the studio had sold most of its heritage at auction to the highest bidder and had essentially forsaken moviemaking for hotel management in Las Vegas. In the year 1974 there were just five new films bearing the MGM logo, one of them a low-budget Israeli musical comedy. One of the four others was the company’s spearhead for its birthday celebration, a documentary tribute to itself called That’s Entertainment. Naturally the film focused on an earlier, better chapter in the studio’s history, primarily the golden age of the Metro musical. The company’s new owners desired to restore some of the old luster to a tarnished name, and hopes were riding high on the documentary’s joyful display of the MGM legacy. There was to be a gala world premiere and press event, and invitations were sent out to all the stars and major contract players from the studio’s heyday who were still alive and to a few who were not. Ava’s old friend and Metro’s onetime chief hairstylist, Sydney Guilaroff, insisted she go, it was an honor and a duty he said, MGM was her alma mater for better or worse, it was history, probably the last chance anyone would ever have to see many of the people who would be there, and so she went, Guilaroff her date. A large, loud mob of gawkers had come out in force for the uprecedented gathering of classic Hollywood n
otables. The black limousines moved up one after another, and onto the red carpet at the Beverly Theater the stars emerged—Fred Astaire, Gloria Swanson, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Myrna Loy, Howard Keel, Janet Leigh, Eleanor Powell, Marge Champion, Cyd Charisse, Roddy McDowall, Jackie Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, the one and only Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, and on and on. At Ava’s appearance an electric surge of recognition went through the mob—some among the autograph hounds and cinephiles knew she had not been to a premiere in HollywOod in more than two decades—and pockets of enthusiasts began chanting her name louder and louder, some screaming for her recognition. She turned pale, hissed to her escort, “I’m scared to death!” and dug her nails so hard into Guilaroff’s arm that the hairdresser nearly let out a scream himself. Inside the theater, the lion roared, she saw the footage of old Culver City driveways and soundstages, too many bad memories, bitter feelings never gone away, telling Sydney she wanted to leave, but then staying to watch the clips of old friends showing their stuff, seeing how the studio had sometimes gotten it right, all the great talent (and here and there some just getting by, but beautiful), old friends, old lovers, and old husbands, Frank wonderful singing and dancing with Bing Crosby, and Mickey, his time on-screen a startling reminder to her of how very gifted he was. The film went on, unreeling before its once-in-a-lifetime audience as half testament, half three-strip Technicolor home movie. There was applause and cheering from beginning to end, loud laughter, inside jokes, pride, trauma. Some in the darkened theater who watched themselves on-screen were heard to sob quietly, tears for what had been and was no more.
In the early months of 1975, as a favor to her friend Paul Mills, she made Permission to Kill, a warmed-over spy movie starring another of her 1960s leading men—and a sympathetic one—Dirk Bogarde. From the Bristol Hotel in Vienna they ventured off each day to the various Austrian locations. Bogarde, in his memoir, An Ordinary Man, could recall the experience as little more than countless hours of freezing in snow and biting wind and nothing to eat or drink all day but stone-cold tea and boiled spaghetti on a sagging paper plate. Ava left as soon as possible, telling an envious Bogarde that London was calling her, “quite desperately.”
Then, another favor. George Cukor had agreed to make a film of Maeterlinck’s children’s fantasy, The Blue Bird, in an unprecedented coproduction deal between American interests and the Soviet Union, to be shot entirely in the USSR. It was a time of a thawing Cold War, and Cukor felt invested with a historic cultural assignment. To raise the film’s commercial prospects he sought notable “guest stars” for cameo and small roles, and obtained the services of Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Cicely Tyson. There would be not much salary to speak of, George explained, just deluxe accommodations and some expenses—he told Ava to think of it as volunteer work for a good cause, the way Audrey Hepburn helped out the United Nations. She arrived in Leningrad to find the production, already in progress for five months, a disaster, mired in inefficiency, bureaucracy, despair. Nearly everyone was ill, Elizabeth Taylor thought to be at death’s door for a time. Ahead was an unpleasant experience. Scheduled to work for three weeks, Ava ended up being there, off and on, for more than three months. She found the Russian actors and crew uniformly the saddest and most depressing people she had ever met. The elevators at the hotel never worked, and she hated the glaring floor attendants—worse than the Roman paparazzi the way they followed you around with their eyes. And her rooms, so she’d been advised, were probably bugged with hidden mikes and cameras; it was like dating Howard Hughes again. In lipstick she scrawled a homemade sign, KEEP OUT, and hung it on the door as a statement of principle. She hated the food—even the delicacies flown in from Fortnum & Mason tasted like cold potato soup by the time they were served. The security officials wanted none of the visiting film people to go off on their own but boredom got the better of her one night and she found a friendly Russian cabdriver to take her out on the town. They drank vodka and danced together at a little jazz club until security agents finally found them just before dawn and escorted her back to the hotel (and the driver to Siberia, no doubt). Cukor, at age seventy-five, was full of vigor, but the project wore on his nerves. He was frequently nasty. One day he snapped at her—for the first time ever—and again, with no apology to follow. She completed the job, refused even to say good-bye to him, and flew home. She stayed mad at him for a year or so; then one day she watched one of his old pictures on television, Pat and Mike, and she sent him a cable with her regards, writing about the movie (Pat and Mike, not The Blue Bird), “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” Cukor cabled back at once: “Ava, they don’t make ‘em like you anymore.”
On July 11, 1976, Frank Sinatra was in the news again. At the estate of newspaper magnate Walter Annenberg in Rancho Mirage, California, he had gotten married for the fourth time. His new wife, Barbara, was a blond and beautiful former Las Vegas showgirl, ex-wife of Zeppo Marx (brother of Groucho et al.).
For Ava it was, anyway, easier than the last time. She had made her peace with things. She and Frank had what they had. She didn’t expect that would change now. He would go on calling, checking in with her; she would know she could turn to him whenever. But then after a while, it was said, Barbara began to let it be known that whatever it was Frank and Ava had, they possibly had too much of it. A man was entitled to one wife at a time, after all. It had been good enough for Zeppo Marx, and it ought to be good enough for Frank Sinatra. Over time, the calls and notes from Frank became fewer. He was still out there for her, but he was a little farther away.
In the garden of Frank’s home in California there had stood for more than twenty years the magnificent marble statue of Ava that had been created for the opening scene in The Barefoot Contessa and that Frank had purchased from the movie company and had transported across sea and ocean and land from Italy to the western coast of America. One day in 1976 a truck came and hauled the statue away, and that was the last anybody has ever seen of it.
In London, as she lived her quiet life, it sometimes seemed that the past was another, very far off country indeed. One day she opened the newspaper to read that her old downstairs neighbor Isabel Perón was the president of Argentina. Husband Juan had finally staged a comeback, gotten ill, pronounced his wife the country’s new leader, and died. How odd the course a person’s life could take. Ava remembered Isabel, the sweet, simple, former exotic dancer in her kitchen in Madrid and could not easily picture her as a head of state. The woman did cook a very good empanada, you had to give her that.
Then there was the day she ran into Artie Shaw. Artie, who had abandoned his musical stardom ages ago. He had put the clarinet down and never picked it up again, wandered around Europe, married Evelyn Keyes, dumped her, lived in a motor home for a while, became a gun collector, thought of himself as a writer now, published something every twenty years or so. They had seen each other in Spain and then not again for many years. She had run into him recently: a stooped, bald character with tufts of hair in his ears and an unpleasant white mustache. Where the hell was the sleek, sexy bastard she had been so crazy for, with whom she had once been so wildly, emotionally, and erotically obsessed? No way it could have been this fuzzy old man.
And Howard. Dead in the spring of 1976. The news reports of the man she had once known so well read like a ghastly horror story, an atrocity report: shrunken to ninety-four pounds, lost in insanity and addiction, his atrophied body studded with shards of broken syringe needles, an open wound where a tumor had been scratched from his head, the richest man in the world. She remembered the last time she saw him. Autumn in Palm Springs, before the Barefoot jaunt to Tokyo. He had called her late at night, said he was flying in with important news for her, landing for a few minutes only before he had to rush on to Washington or somewhere. She had gone out to the airport to meet him. The airport was closed but a dozen drivers with black limousines had been summoned to line up in formation along either side of the landing strip and to illuminate it wi
th their headlights. It was like the memory of a dream, the cars lined up and the headlights blazing a trail in the dark desert. Howard had come down out of the black sky, walked to her with his lanky stride, in his dirty flying clothes, carrying a small box under his arm. What was the important news, Howard? What was all the fuss? A movie, Howard said. A great new project for the two of them. He would make the deal with Metro but he wanted to come and tell her in person and give this to her. And he had opened the box under his arm—an old shoe box it was—and inside were stacks of loose cash, thousand-dollar bills, a quarter million dollars in cash. A bonus for her, in advance, he told her. It was to show her how much he looked forward to it, how much she meant to him. And she had laughed and knew there was no movie, just another crazy attempt to buy her interest, her affection. Howard, she told him, I don’t want your money. And Howard said: There must be something you want. And then the wind had picked up and blown across the open shoe box and lifted some bills off the top, four, ten, a couple dozen thousand-dollar bills whipped up and fluttered off into the desert night.
She continued to work, once a year or every two years. Most of the things she was offered had little to recommend them in advance but a paycheck and her best guess that the director was not going to be a pain in the ass. They were in some cases the 1970s equivalent of the bottom-of-the-bill pictures in which she had started her career, though at least in the old days those movies had been guaranteed a release. The most visible of her later feature film appearances would be in The Cassandra Crossing, shot in 1976, and The Sentinel, made the following year. Filmed largely at Cinecittà and featuring an ensemble cast of her fellow faded stars—Burt Lancaster, Sophia Loren, Richard Harris—The Cassandra Crossing was another disaster film, this about a runaway train carrying a deadly plague. It was a pleasant, uneventful time. (“Is yours a good part?” reporter Roderick Mann asked her. “No, just some old broad,” she replied.) The days of the old location adventures were over. No more haunting the Roman night, touring brothels, car chases, and battles with the photographers. Now she liked a good night’s sleep after a day on the set, and on the weekends whenever possible she flew back to London, like any commuter wanting to get home from the office, pet the dog, and watch some telly. The job ended up being more trouble than it was worth. The Italian authorities, on a vendetta against wealthy tax dodgers, accused producer Carlo Ponti, his wife, Sophia Loren, and various Cassandra stars, including Ava Gardner, of violating the nation’s currency laws and charges were made, warrants issued. Sophia was briefly put in custody, and Ponti was sentenced to two years in prison in absentia (he had wisely taken a hike from his native land). Like the producer, Ava stayed far away from the court proceedings, but unlike Carlo she was eventually acquitted.