by Lee Server
The nurses doted on her. She told them funny stories, some involving famous people, some that left the nurses’ mouths hanging open. A nice young orderly brought her fast-food burgers and hot dogs and Cokes. The room filled with flowers. From Frank. He called many times to check on her.
One day she opened her eyes and Stewart “Jimmy” Granger was giving her a kiss. He was white-haired now, but otherwise as handsome and dashing as ever. He pulled a chair close, and they talked and laughed, and Jimmy launched into some of his usual outrageous, arrogant opinions of the world. An awful man, she thought, and wonderful.
On her eleventh day in the hospital she awoke with severe headache. The left side of her body was without feeling, and when she tried to sit up she fell back with a nauseating dizziness. Blood vessels had ruptured in the brain. A stroke, perhaps more than one. The left side of her body was partially paralyzed, a hemiplegia, and her face was twisted into thick knots and drooping downward. She could speak, but her contorted mouth made the words all but impossible to understand.
Tests were done to determine the extent of the injury. There appeared to be no marked cognitive problems, no damage to judgment, attention, memory. She lay in bed, medicated, taking oxygen, wired up, closely monitored for signs of a recurrence.
Frank would call, and the nurses would hold the phone to her ear. She tried to speak, but it was hard to make herself understood, and so she just listened to his voice.
“I love you, baby,” he told her. “It stinks getting old.”
Then she heard no more from him for some time. In early November, while Ava lay in her hospital bed in Santa Monica, the seventy-year-old Sinatra entered the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs with a case of acute diverticulitis and, barely escaping death, underwent an eight-hour operation during which twelve feet of infected intestine were removed from his body. (By the end of the month he was performing again in Las Vegas.)
On November 28, Ava was released from St. John’s. “I told her she had to give up smoking and drinking,” her physician, Dr. William Smith, re-membered. “She laughed and said she would try. She was a very fun- loving individual, and she wasn’t about to give up things easily.”
The hemiplegia of the left arm remained, and her face was still swollen and contorted. She needed medication, rest, exercise. With a stroke there was no certain timetable, no way to predict exactly when or if full recovery might occur, and much depended on the diligence and determination of the patient. It was considered unwise for her to go back to England just yet, to the damp English weather. Bappie’s home was thought too remote and cramped, and it was arranged for her to stay at the home of a friend from her days with Frank, the criminal attorney Paul Caruso.
Returning to London early in 1987 she began a course of poststroke rehabilitation. A therapist came to the flat several times a week, working to increase her mobility. A visiting nurse monitored her vital signs and mental response. She was able to walk on her own again in time, with a slight impairment, and her speech improved, but her arm remained problematic.
“She called me to let me know how she was doing,” Monica Lewis remembered. “Her voice was slurred. I’m quite familiar with a stroke, having taken care of my husband, Jennings, for thirteen years after he had his. And she was having difficulty speaking. It was hard. But she hadn’t given up, and she hadn’t lost her humor. She said, ‘Lady, if you happen to know anybody who could use a has-been actress with a wasted arm, a drooping lip, and a reconstructed Southern accent, then I’m their gal!’ And I fell apart. That was Ava for you. She could still laugh at herself. She was great.”
Writer and translator Lucia Graves, Robert Graves’s daughter, and a friend of Ava’s since their first meeting in Majorca when she was a schoolgirl, visited her at Ennismore Gardens. “We sat and talked. Always with Frank Sinatra playing in the background! It was after she’d had her stroke and one arm wasn’t working. But she wasn’t letting it get her down, and she could joke about it. She told me of how she had been to a dinner party and she had been seated next to a man who had also suffered a stroke and lost the use of one arm. She said, ‘Between us we couldn’t get a bite of food into our mouths.’ She was very funny.”
A few months out of the hospital, she was becoming bored and frustrated. Though still distressed by her physical condition she was eager to do something besides recuperate. She entertained an offer from Michael Winner to appear in another movie, a part chosen to accommodate her reduced capacity since she could do the whole thing in a wheelchair.
“It was called Appointment with Death ,” Winner would say. “An Agatha Christie story. The part was of a crippled woman. She decided she wanted to do it. We talked about it, we agreed on everything.
“It was nearly time to start. And then she rang me. She said, ‘Michael, can I come and see you?’ I thought, This is very rare that she wants to come around. So she came over to my place to see me. We went out and sat in the garden. You could see her face was slightly distorted and her movements slightly disjointed. But only slightly. It would have been fine. And there was no effect to her mind. She was absolutely bright. She said, ‘Michael, I hate to let you down, but…I’m just not up to it.’ I said, ‘It’s okay, Ava. I understand.’ She was the most gracious person, a very sensitive person.”
“She was afraid to be seen after the stroke,” said Spoli Mills. “Afraid of the camera. She had a limp, and the left arm was weak. She saw the drop in her face. I didn’t really see it but she did.…Well, that’s wrong, of course I saw it. I mean, I wasn’t blind. But I wanted to help her not feel too badly about it. But she did feel badly about it. And then she had this lupus disease which began to weaken everything.”
Lupus erythematosus: a difficult-to-diagnose systemic autoimmune disease affecting mostly women. It is a progressive disease that essentially causes the body to attack and weaken itself, making it vulnerable to destructive bacterial and viral organisms. Probable symptoms were evident for some time, such as a sudden acute sensitivity to the sun, which she had begun to experience a year or so earlier. The disease—if lupus is what she had, because some difference of opinion existed—was likely the root cause of her stroke. The root cause of lupus was—is—unknown, but various genetic and environmental influences were assumed. Friends, some of them, suspected that no matter what you called what was happening to her, it was likely the cumulative, corrosive effects of drinking that had set in motion her health crisis; that Ava had over the years damaged her body’s ability to function properly and to fight back when something went wrong.
Throughout the year she was often in pain or discomfort. Her condition was subject to what the doctors called flares and remissions. She would begin to feel better, but what seemed like progress became only the upside of a cycle. She suffered with flu symptoms, pain in the muscles and joints, labored breathing, fatigue, malaise. Her medication was the probable cause of swelling and weight gain.
She spent much of the time in her apartment, venturing out only to take Morgan for his walks. Her contact with the outside world was through the telephone and the handful of friends who visited in person. Zoe Sallis had known Ava in Puerto Vallarta when she was living with John Huston and had played Hagar to her Sarah in The Bible, but they had become close friends only much later in London. “She never acted starlike at all,” Sallis remembered, “just very down-to-earth. She was a very funny, warm, generous person. I didn’t know her during her wild days. When we became friends in London she was a different person: quiet, and often lonely. But she stayed busy. We’d go to lunch and dinner, take walks in the park, go swimming or take exercise together. She did a lot of exercise, wanted to keep herself trim and together. And then she became ill, and she couldn’t keep up. Every day she had different illnesses and different pains. First she didn’t go out much. Then it progresses. You don’t go out, then you don’t see people, and then you don’t walk the dog. She became hermitlike, not wanting to be seen. She had been so beautiful, and now she was seeing it
all slipping by.”
She would lie in bed and watch old movies on the television. And she would catch some of her own, some for the first time. It felt like the first time she had seen any of them. They all now seemed imbued with good memories and a kind of magic that had not been there for her before. She watched The Barefoot Contessa one night, and she felt only fondness and awe for Bogart and for Joe Mankiewicz, men she had held a grudge against for years, her reasons now forgotten. When Mankiewicz was to be honored with a lifetime achievement award (the Leone d’Oro alla Carriera) at the Venice Film Festival in 1987, she alone among the major stars he had directed agreed to make a contribution, a taped message of congratulations that played through the festival hall. “Hi Joe,” she said, “this is your barefoot contessa speaking….” Mankiewicz was visibly moved. “Is that Ava?” he asked. “I always thought…she didn’t like me.”
Some nights, in the middle of watching one of her old pictures, she would reach for the phone and call someone who had made the movie with her, Greg Peck or Katie Grayson or Stewart Granger, wanting to share with them her epiphany She would watch Β howani Junction by herself, late at night, and call Stewart Granger in Los Angeles.
“Were we really that beautiful, honey?” she would ask him.
And white-haired Stewart Granger would say, “You were, my sweet. You still are.”
Sometimes she would lie in bed and take out the letters from Frank. They were all sorts and sizes, from all over the world, notes, postcards, long letters of many pages. She would take out each one and read it from start to finish, then put it back in the envelope and go on to the next one. She would read one and it would make her feel misty, then another that would have her laughing or cursing him on the page. Then she would pack them up again and put them away.
Another winter came to London. Ava began to have trouble with her breathing, and with the new year the problem worsened, seeming to be a recurrence of pneumonia. Again it was decided that she go to California for treatment, and this time a private jet was chartered for the flight. It landed in Los Angeles after midnight on January 6, and she was transferred by stretcher to the ambulance that brought her back to St. John’s in Santa Monica.
She remained at the hospital for two weeks of treatment and testing.
Various old friends called to wish her well. But she did not hear from Frank.
“Do you think he knows I’m in here?” she asked Bappie.
“I don’t know, hon,” her sister said. “I’ll look into it.”
But Frank’s only contact was through an intermediary His attorney made a call to Jess Morgan, Ava’s financial manager in Los Angeles, saying Frank had wanted to help her out. There was talk about the great cost of the chartered jet and the medical expenses. Sinatra’s man said Frank would certainly want to help her out there.
But there were still no visits to the hospital or phone calls.
Ava said, “It’s that fucking wife of his.”
Bappie said, “Baby, she is so jealous of you.”
Bappie went out and found a reporter waiting to ask about her sister’s condition. Bappie told him, “It’s such a shame that Frank won’t be able to come see Ava after all they’ve meant to each other. She’s having such a tough time and could really use the support. Last time he was so sweet, calling her and sending flowers, she really appreciated it. I don’t know why he hasn’t called her, I really don’t. I mean, it’s on the news all over the world that Ava is in the hospital. I guess he must be the only person doesn’t know.”
When Jess Morgan told Ava of the donation Sinatra had made to her expenses—reportedly a check for fifty grand—she was not feeling overly appreciative. “She didn’t think it was enough,” Morgan would recall. “So yes, she had a caustic comeback.”
One of the tabloids published a story the following week, headlined: SINATRA MISSING FROM BEDSIDE OF STRICKEN EX AVA. It quoted Bappie many times, giving her take on Frank’s “conspicuous absence.” The piece included an uninflected statement relayed from Sinatra’s representative: “He has just returned from a trip to Australia and is at home in Rancho Mirage.”
“Bappie did not want her to go back to England,” said Betty Sicre. “She thought that climate was not good for her health. She stayed with Bappie for a month, and she was doing really well. Bappie thought that if she had stayed with her in California and not gone back to that London damp and fog she would have gotten strong again and she would have lived a lot longer.”
She was by most standards still a wealthy woman, with investment dividends, a sizable pension from MGM, and perhaps a million dollars’ or more worth of personal possessions—art, antiques, jewels. But Ava’s rising expenses and the end of her supplementary income from motion picture and television work had put a strain on her resources. She would say she had been offered a gentle ultimatum: that it would be wise at this time, for the sake of liquidity, either to sell her jewelry or to agree to write her memoirs. She had sworn countless times that she would never under any circumstances be willing to sell her life story, and it would be the apex of hypocrisy for her to agree to divulge for money the secrets of her private life and those of the people she had known and loved. And yet, she was very fond of her jewels.
A deal was made for the autobiography of Ava Gardner. It was not a difficult sell. Publishers had been pleading for her to do such a book for ages. A collaborator or ghostwriter was found, Peter Evans, a journalist and author who had previously written a biography of Aristotle Onassis and knew Ava socially.
The first sessions did not go well. But then Ava began drinking more while she talked, and the drink made her more expansive, funnier, and less “discreet.” There suddenly loomed the prospect of an entertaining book. Ava, however, when she was sober, recalled enough of what she had said in her uninhibited state to know that as far as she was concerned not a word of it was going into any goddamn book. The work up to then was destroyed, the collaboration ended.
Michael Winner would recall, “I talked to her one day, and she said to me, ‘You know, I’m doing my autobiography.’ I said, ‘Well, Ava, you’ve had the most incredible life; it will be the most wonderful autobiography, as long as you tell the truth.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to tell the truth!’ “
Another writer was found to work with her on the book, a veteran author named Alan Burgess. The two would sit together for two or three hours at a time and talk into a tape recorder. A version of Ava’s life story was eventually put together based on the transcribed interviews and delivered to Bantam Books in New York. “The manuscript that was turned in,” said Genevieve Young, the book’s editor, “was very boring, it didn’t say anything, and she left out large swatches of her life.”
A third ghostwriter was hired, this one in Los Angeles and this one to have no contact with the subject, constructing the missing pieces of Ava’s life story out of quotes and information in archival sources and melding these with the usable sections of the Burgess-Ava collaboration.
“She was in poor health all that last year,” Spoli Mills would remember. “The lupus got worse and worse. She was in pain. Her joints felt so bad. She would cry to me, ‘I ache, I ache.’ There were rashes and swellings. I mean, it was not a happy time. She had medicines and painkillers to take, but, you know, she was going to different doctors, and she would take too much of the medicine, and you mix it with drink. It was just a rotten situation. She wasn’t supposed to drink or smoke, but at that stage she just thought, What the hell’s the difference?
In October 1989 she arranged to sell a selection of her jewels at auction. She had no more use for them, she said. They were disposed of at Sotheby’s in New York: the emeralds and the diamonds and the gold and the pearls and the Kashmiri sapphires, gone to the highest bidder, all with their secrets and stories never to be told.
“I was on my way to Africa, and I stopped in London to call on her,” said Gene Young of Bantam Books. “I had to meet with her to pick the pictures for her bo
ok. So I went to her lovely apartment overlooking a park. I met her very nice housekeeper and a dog named Morgan. Ava was not recognizable. Her friend Steve Birmingham had warned me about her changed appearance. He said that if you passed her on the street you would not recognize her. And that was absolutely true. She had gotten fat, she told me, because she had been on steroids because of her illness. She was barefoot and somewhat disheveled. She was clearly in a state of depression. She was very, very depressed. She was cordial, she was sweet, you know. But she did babble, not always coherently, about what had happened to her, what bad shape she was in, about her past. She couldn’t do anything, she couldn’t exercise, she was fat, she didn’t feel well.
“We sat and had tea. And then we looked over the pictures for the book. And she looked them over, very wistfully. There were a couple of pictures of her with Burt Lancaster very early in her career, the two of them exercising on the beach. She said, ‘I used to be quite an athlete.’ And there was another picture of her from years ago, and she sighed. She said, ‘I used to be very beautiful.’
“I left her then. I got quite distressed. I thought I ought to talk to Jess Morgan about this. I called him and said, ‘Look, this woman is very depressed. She’s up there talking about her father, who died of pneumonia. And she’s frightened. And she’s facing another winter in London. And I think maybe we ought to get her out of there. And I think she also needs some psychological help.’ Jess was very concerned. He was very protective of her. So I called a friend of mine, a neurologist, who had a psychiatrist friend who was going to London. He was also a doctor. And he agreed to call on Ava. He called on her and spent three hours with her. And then, two days later, he sent her a bill for three hundred dollars— which made her furious. She told me, ‘Here I spent time with this guy and gave him tea and he sends me a bill!’ But the psychiatrist saw that she was ill and needed treatment. He said that she was not going to live if she stayed there. And so they arranged to have her flown to Los Angeles, to get treatment and to get out of the cold weather. And it was my understanding that they had a plane ready with a doctor and a nurse and she wouldn’t go.”