by Lee Server
The Sentinel was a horror movie, a lurid haunted-house story about a portal to Hell in a Brooklyn brownstone. The filmmaker was the prolific and lively Michael Winner. A great movie buff from an early age, he often tried to cast in his productions some of the veteran stars who had been the idols of his youth. Ava Gardner, he would say, he had first met in the 1940s, “transfixed by her beauty in the little cinemas where I got my education.” An MGM publicity photograph of her in a one-piece bathing suit had hung on the wall of his room at school. Now he was offering her a small part as the agent for the story’s infernal real estate, and he went to her home not far from his own to talk to her about it.
“She lived very comfortably, had a lovely apartment,” Michael Winner would recall. “I immediately hit it off with her. I had told her, ‘Ava, you know, the government in America is now going to make you pay tax even if you’re living abroad.’ So she immediately rang her accountant. He was at lunch, and she insisted they give her the name of the restaurant. So she rang the restaurant. And she made them find this accountant, and she gets on the line with this fellow in the middle of his lunch and gives him a long spiel about this tax thing. When she put the phone down I said, ‘Ava, are you a Capricorn?’ She said, ‘How did you know?’ I said, ‘Because that’s exactly what Capricorns do—when they want something they don’t wait a second, they don’t care, they’ll phone you in the middle of the night….’ She enjoyed that. And we hit it off. I thought she was lovely. Incredibly shy, always interesting, a great sense of humor.
“We made the movie. She was very good. She didn’t think she was. She had a very key line in the movie, the line that told the audience this girl in the house was in terrible trouble. And she did it very, very well. She was a very underrated actress, I think. She was a big crowd puller on location. If you walked the streets of New York with Ava Gardner you got very big crowds. She was like Sophia Loren—you walk with them on the streets, you’re mobbed. But put them in a movie and nobody goes! Just a fact of life, isn’t it? She was very professional, down-to-earth, a person first and a star next. She was late one day and I told her off, I gave her a big bollocking. She said she had been to some restaurant in Brooklyn where she used to go with Frank Sinatra. She said, ‘I just wanted to go there and remember things.’
“We became close friends. In London we went out to dinner occasionally, though she was becoming quite a recluse by then. She was shy but occasionally she opened up to me about things in her life. She was very outgoing if she trusted you. She was a lovely person. A very nice person, really. Of all the people I’ve known, maybe the nicest.
“We talked on the phone all the time. She’d ring me up. She might be a bit tipsy. She was coherent, but a bit sloshed. She did crossword puzzles a great deal, and she’d often ring me and ask for help with a crossword puzzle. She’d say, ‘What’s a seven-letter word for ephemeral?’ “
In the spring of 1978 she returned to the States to see her family. First her sister in Los Angeles. Bappie was a widow now, living alone in the house in the hills, with a corgi of her own (though they both knew it was really so Ava could walk him when she was in town). She would be seventy-five years old in the fall, but she was still feisty, ready to take on the world for her baby sister. Ava had Bappie come along to a thing George Cukor was throwing for a bunch of foreign movie directors. Bappie blew out a tire on the car just below the grand Cukor estate. A long sedan came by and stopped to see what the problem was. In the backseat, poking their heads out the window were George and the third Mrs. Sinatra, Mia Farrow. She and Ava exchanged pleasantries. “You two must have a lot to talk about!” Cukor giggled. He had to hurry on to his party, George said, but he would send someone to fix the flat tire. He sent Katharine Hepburn, and she did a good job of it.
Ava arrived in North Carolina in time for an event she had reluctantly agreed to attend. She and the governor, Jim Hunt, would be the special guests at the ceremony for Rock Ridge Day in the town where she and her mother had gone to live thirty-nine years earlier. People smiled and applauded with prideful exhilaration to see the movie star who had once walked among them as a mortal. Smithfield might have given her life, but Rock Ridge had given her a diploma. Asked in advance to say a few words, she had tried to write down what she would say and had made a mess of it, so instead she just said what came to mind, remembering things and people she had not thought about in many years. In the crowd was Alberta Cooney, long ago Ava’s best friend. The other most beautiful girl at Rock Ridge High. They had exchanged letters once in a while through the years, but it had been a long time and Alberta hardly thought she could impose herself on such an occasion. But then Ava had seen her, and she was making the policemen open the way so she could get to her. And she cried, “Alberta!” And the two embraced and Ava wouldn’t let her go. She wanted Alberta to come to Smithfield so they could talk, but it seemed to Alberta that was for family and she couldn’t impose; they promised to write each other, and then the troopers were getting Ava out of there and into the limo and driving away.
She stayed at her brother Jack’s house on Vermont Street in Smithfield. Jack, who had bounced around in various lines of work over the years, oilman and salesman and restaurateur, had finally found a calling for his intelligence, charisma, and social concerns in the world of politics and had been elected a representative to the North Carolina General Assembly. He was still her hero, Ava told him, just as he had been when she was seven.*
By evening the others arrived at the house for a big reunion—the sisters and in-laws and nieces and nephews and their children, and now their children as well.
In 1980 her beloved Cara died. It was nothing less than the death of a child. The dog had been such a part of her heart—at the flat there were stacks of scrapbooks and photo albums containing thousands of pictures of Cara, more coverage than a supermodel; when Ava had to be away from her she would call home day and night just to hear the dog bark, and she had even written letters to the pooch—the caretaker in place was expected to read them aloud to her. The grieving went on for months.
“Such a wonderful baby,” Ava would say. “She would bite photographers at the airport, just like her mistress.”
In time came a pup, a Pembroke Welsh corgi (of course) with snow white paws. She named him Morgan (after Jess, her longtime financial adviser and pal in Los Angeles) and rushed around the neighborhood introducing him to everyone. This dog liked to bite even Ava, but she pampered and praised him with unbridled enthusiasm. Soon more scrapbooks began filling up with photographs. “It was like she had adopted a new child, it’s true,” said Spoli Mills. “And all was right with the world again.”
Wanting something to do with herself after Cara’s death, she took a job. Priest of Love, a screenplay by Alan Plater, based on the book by Harry T. Moore, chronicled the turbulent wanderings of tubercular, controversial D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, in the 1920s. Director Christopher Miles offered Ava the role of the American heiress and sybarite Mabel Dodge Luhan, who for a time was the writer’s devoted patron, bringing him to live at her ranch and sometimes in her bed in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence said of the four-times-married Dodge, “She collects money, great artists and husbands.” Ava found the character not sympathetic but the part well written, and the lead role of Lawrence was going to be played by an actor Charles Grey assured her was brilliant—Ian McKellen, fresh from a West End theatrical triumph in the play Bent and now to make his first film as a star. She went to be introduced to her castmates at a party in the Mayfair home of the film’s producer, Stanley J. Seger.
McKellen would write of their meeting, “I knew from her neighbor, Charles, that she liked cards and liquor and, I gathered, men—she flirted playfully, offering fun and a good time rather than sex. After a couple of drinks she hauled off her shoes and danced to music that Stanley had written for the film.”
At the party Ava met actress Penelope Keith (cast as Lawrence’s hapless admirer the Honorable Dorothy Brett), who would become
a good London friend in the years ahead.
Two weeks later they were all in Oaxaca, Mexico (substituting for Taos). She was thought by some in the cast to be a bit remote on the location, disappearing at the end of the day, taking her meals in her hotel room with her maid while the others would go out at night to eat and explore the town. It was just the usual desire for privacy and shyness around new people and feeling a bit out of the circle of the younger English actors. Carmen Vargas remembered that Ava was also not enjoying the hot, humid weather, and that she and many with the company suffered at times from the tourist’s lament—what Maxine Faulk would have called the old Aztec two-step.
“We was uncomfortable with the stomachs,” said Carmen. “Oh my God, I thought I was going to die there!”
The production amenities were haphazard, the Mexican pickup crew not very disciplined. Ava and the other actresses had to change and make up in a single small, broiling trailer, joined now and then by men from the crew squeezing by to use the ladies’ toilet. Limited transportation was provided from the rural location back to Oaxaca, and Ava would find herself finished for the day and stuck in the heat and the dust for many hours until a car was made available. One night she called Frank in the States and told him of the miserable conditions. He told her to try to get a good night’s sleep. The next morning—and each morning thereafter—a chauffeured limousine was waiting to take her to the location and bring her back when she was ready.
Many credited Ava with a fine performance, but the film as a whole was not well received. Time Out magazine called it “interminable,” “twee,” and “high in the running for the year’s dumbest art movie.” A bit harsh— there were good things in it, a penetrating incarnation of Lawrence by McKellen, evocative production design and costumes. Appropriately provocative as an account of the author of Lady Chatterley, the film would bear the distinction of being the first mainstream English-language movie to represent a male erection on-screen, though McKellen was to confess humbly that it was not his own but the work of a dildo and much sticking plaster.
There was one more feature film appearance, in an obscure, low-budget endeavor called Regina, shot in Rome in the summer of 1982. It was a ponderous, four-character piece (starring a top-billed Ava plus Anthony Quinn, Ray Sharkey, and a virtually mute Anna Karina), about an elderly couple spending an evening with their son and his girl. It had the look of a very underfunded television program and was shot entirely on a single, badly lit set (it may indeed have been intended for sale to television in some markets). Startlingly, Ava’s acting was like nothing she had ever done before, a kind of go-for-broke, raw emoting one might more normally associate with Anna Magnani or Shelley Winters. It was proof that there were aspects to her talent still to be explored, but this odd and cheap production was not a worthwhile place to explore them. It was the unfortunate—and fortunately barely seen—end to her forty years in the movies.
Any acting she did from now on would be for television. She had held out all this time, turned down many offers through the years, a movie actress loyal to the old school, defending the bulwark between the big screen and the very tiny; Mayer would have been proud. And now, wherever he was, he had to forgive her at this late date for taking a few welcome paydays in the upstart, cut-rate medium in which the glamorous names of the past were still a welcome currency in the “all-star” miniseries and the popular “nighttime soaps” that laced their cast lists with former matinee idols and femmes fatales. She played devilish ancient Roman matron Agrippina, Nero’s mother, in A.D. (Anno Domini), a miniseries shot in Tunisia that ran a cumulative half day in all its parts; an exotic grand dame of the white-slave racket in Harem; a senior Southern belle in a TV version of the honeysuckle melodrama, The Long Hot Summer, starring Don Johnson (a sexy boy Ava seemed pleasantly to remember getting to know briefly—very briefly and very pleasantly—long ago, introduction by her chum Sal Mineo). In the winter of 1984 she signed to make six episodic appearances in the CBS series Knot s Landing, a long-running, Southern California spin-off of Dallas, playing scheming Ruth Galveston (mother of the show’s star William Devane, and the widow of a character who had been played by Ava’s long-ago boyfriend Howard Duff). She was treated well, gave a rousing performance, and was asked to do more episodes, but she begged off. It was simply too much of a disruption at this stage in her life. “Those people work eighteen-hour days,” she told Spoli Mills. “And they’re all eighteen years old.”
She appeared before the camera once more, in the pilot for a proposed female private-eye series set in London, Maggie, with Stephanie Powers.
Turning sixty: It was fine, she told people. Fifty had been the hard one. That was when you knew there was no turning back. She didn’t mind people knowing her age. “I’m one hell of an old broad,” she would say. “It’s undignified to lie about it.”
She put herself on the wagon in anticipation of a birthday celebration, just to lose weight. There was a gorgeous new red dress she had bought for her party, and she was determined to get into it. On December 24 they could start pouring the champagne again. Sixty years old. For that one, she said, they were going to have one hell of a ball.
The press had been calling her a recluse for years. Oddly, in her sixties, as her life had become truly more circumspect—cocooned in her cherished home, venturing far from her neighborhood only rarely and then to visit personal friends or to catch them in a new play, traveling abroad only when necessary for work—she had let herself become increasingly accessible to members of the press. There had always been a few favored journalists she would occasionally meet for a chat and with whom she had established a rapport (they tended to be good-looking or at least charming males). Now, asked to promote some of her television work especially, she began seeing any number of reporters, feature writers, and photographers dispatched by the various papers and magazines eager to get some copy from the legendary, long-unavailable star. She welcomed them to number 34, introduced them to Morgan, offered a cup of tea or (her voice rising hopefully) a drink, perhaps? Maybe she felt obliged to her employers, or lonely, or simply had gotten over and beyond the old fear and disdain of such meetings. They frequently became a chance to set straight some of the errors of the past, the mistaken notions that the newspapers and the public had gotten about her.
“The trouble was that I was a victim of image,” she would explain. “Because I was promoted as a sort of siren, and played all those sexy broads, people made the mistake of thinking I was like that off the screen.”
It was good to have all that straightened out at last.
She made her last journey to Spain in 1984, to Seville and Madrid. It was a country she would always love, though now with a certain reserve, as toward a seducer who had led her astray. “I stayed there far too long,” she would say. “I don’t know why.”
“I was in Spain doing a film…had two fabulous lunches with her,” actress Susan Tyrrell would recall of the time of Ava’s final visit. “She had saddlebags of vodka on the sides of her eyes. But what a beauty. You’re just in awe, it’s like taking in the Taj Mahal of beauty. But she was a real girl. ‘Honey honey’ and smoking smoking and the beauty of this face and drinking and laughing our asses off. She was trying to get me out of Madrid. She said I had to get out of there—get the fuck out of the country. And she leaned over the table, and she said, ‘You need to get the fuck out of Spain, because the guys all have little dicks and they’ll fuck you in the ass before you can get your panties off.’I loved her so much. We laughed so hard.…What a genius. She held a lot of vodka in her, boy, that’s for sure.”
The year 1986 had begun, and she did not feel well. She mourned the loss of her beloved friend Robert Graves, and she lay in bed for much of January, suffering with a cold and congestion. Winter became spring and she was still run down, losing weight, and with a hacking cough that got only worse. She smoked too much, but it was too hard to stop, even with the coughing. By the autumn she was feeling pains in her chest most of the
day, and her breathing was not good. Her London physician saw the possibility of a grave illness and ordered her to the hospital for testing, including a test for lung cancer. Frightened, she flew at once to Los Angeles, on October 6 checking into the St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica (she had previously favored British medical facilities while living in Spain; now, living in Britain, she preferred to put herself in the care of specialists in California).
The tests showed no cancer. The diagnosis was pneumonia.
Treatments were administered. She got better. A week after entering the hospital she was permitted to eat normally and to get out of bed.
“I talked to her in the hospital,” said Monica Lewis. “She had pneumonia, and she was down to 110 pounds. From 140 or something. You know, she was a very robust girl, healthy. Maybe 120 would be okay, but 110 for her was very low. I told her I was coming to see her. She said, ‘No, no, don’t come here. You’ll get sick with what I’ve got.’ “