by Lee Server
Michael Winner: “When I rang her to wish her Happy Christmas, she said, ‘They want me to go to Los Angeles for treatment. I’d rather die in my own bed, here.”
“She love England, she love her apartment,” said Carmen Vargas, “she have her dog. She did not want to go anywhere else.”
One day in December, Ava called her friend and erstwhile collaborator Peter Evans and asked him what he knew about EXIT, an organization that assisted the terminally ill and others to commit suicide. She told him, “I hear they give you a bottle of brandy and the necessary pills and it takes you out. When I go, I don’t want to make a mess of it.”
“She wasn’t religious,” Zoe Sallis said. “Every time I tried to talk to her about it, she would say, Oh, it doesn’t exist.’ She was an atheist, or perhaps she had become disillusioned with life. If you get a little of that, you lose faith. But when John died, John Huston, she gave me a lovely rosary as a present. He had given it to her, she told me. She said, ‘I want you to have it now.’ It was a very old rosary from Italy or somewhere. She must have thought there was something to religion to do that, don’t you think?”
On Christmas Eve, her sixty-seventh birthday, two cakes were baked, one chocolate and one coconut, just as one it was done the day she was born. Her mother had taught her the secret recipe, and she had taught it to Carmen Vargas. Bappie, eighty-six years old now, was ill herself in California and could not travel to be with her sister.*
“The last time I saw her was not long before she died,” said Lucia Graves. “And I remember looking up at her from the street, seeing her through the window of her flat without her seeing me. I remembered how she had once been, and I could not help feeling sad that she had lost her wonderful beauty. But, you know, the moment you were with her and she spoke to you—when you heard the affection in her voice and her sense of humor, her sense of life—you saw that nothing had really gone away, nothing was lost, she was still beautiful.”
“Miss Ava, she used to say, Oh Carmen, I think I’m dying, I’m going to Chicago.’ I say, No, no, no say “I’m dying!” I tried to know what she was meaning. She say, I think I go to Chicago.’ She mean that she is going away to die. She say, ‘Carmen, I only want to ask you one favor.’ She say, ‘Please, wherever you go, will you stick with my baby?’ Morgan, the dog, she mean. ‘Wherever you go, whatever you do, please hang on with my baby. Then I can go, and I will be at peace. Then I will go to Chicago in peace.’ I don’t know why she talk so funny. I say, ‘Don’t go to Chicago, Miss Gardner, please, it is too cold there!’ “
One day she called to Carmen. She held in her hand a wrapped package. She said, “Carmen, take this and if something happens to me I want you to destroy it. I don’t want anyone to open it or see inside. Will you do that for me?”
Carmen took the package. She did not know what was inside, maybe letters, she thought, but she did not try to open it or see inside. “I respected her wishes. She trust me fully I did what she asked.”
“She was suffering,” said Spoli Mills. “She had pneumonia again. It was very bad. We spoke on the telephone the night before. She said, ‘I feel so awful, Spoli.’ And she was going to try to go to sleep. And I was so sad, but I didn’t want her to hear it. And she said, ‘Spoli, I just don’t think we’ll ever have any more fun together.’ And I said, ‘We will, Ava, we will. I’m going to get you right and we will have fun again.’ And those were the last words I spoke to her.”
On the morning of January 25, 1990, Carmen Vargas brought a breakfast tray to Ava Gardner where she lay in her canopied Chippendale bed. When the housekeeper returned for the tray a little later Ava looked up and smiled at her. She said, “Carmen, I’m tired.”
Tributes and lengthy obituaries appeared all over the world. Headlines variously described the passing of the Screen Beauty, Sultry Film Star, Legendary Femme Fatale. People Weekly in America pronounced her “The Last Goddess…the most irresistible woman in Hollywood.” With a somber enthusiasm writers pondered her ravishing looks, spectacular glamour, tempestuous private life. They counted up the stormy marriages, paying particular attention to the third (the Romance of the Century, as some were valuing it), tabulated an assortment of the also-rans, bullfighters, and playboys, and billionaires. Regarding her professional achievements, some were perhaps encouraged by Ava’s denigrating self- assessments, but others described a fine actress given too few good opportunities in a career lasting more than forty years (in itself a rare tribute to her professionalism). She was, said the London Times, “certainly one of the most striking and genuine stars of her time…her great beauty and, even more, the sheer personality shining through even the most indifferent vehicles.”
Reporters and television crews solicited remembrances from Ava’s colleagues: Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Joe Mankiewicz, among those offering words of affection and admiration.
The media sought comment from Ava’s three famous former husbands.
Mickey Rooney said: “My heart is broken with the loss of my first love. The beauty and magic of Ava will forever be in all of our hearts.”
Artie Shaw refused to comment. But a few months later, realizing that he had passed up one more opportunity to sound like a coldhearted prick, he offered this: “What are you going to say about something that represents a part of your past you don’t recognize anymore? I don’t even know who she is. There’s nothing to talk about. She ruined her life. She killed herself—I mean, by smoking and drinking and carrying on.”
A statement was issued on behalf of Frank Sinatra: “Ava was a great lady and her loss is very painful.”
He had heard the news, it was said, and he had slumped down and his eyes had filled with tears. He had turned red with anguish, and he cried out, “Why wasn’t I there for her? Why wasn’t I there to help her?”
His daughter Tina would recall that he had gone into his room and he sat there alone all night and all the next day and when he spoke to her at last he could not raise his voice above a whisper.
Ava had wanted to be buried beside her mother and father in the family plot at Smithfield. Carmen accompanied the coffin from London to North Carolina. The Reverend Francis Bradshaw delivered the graveside eulogy at Sunset Memorial Park just at the edge of town. It began to rain during the ceremony, and umbrellas were opened, and it seemed to some that it was very much like the funeral of Maria in The Barefoot Contessa except that the color was not as pretty as in the movie, when the sun came back out.
Carmen returned to London, and when she entered the apartment at En- nismore Gardens and understood that no one was there she felt shock and sadness again as if for the first time. She was permitted to stay on at number 34 until the place was finally closed down in August. She had to take care of Morgan—that was a promise to Miss Gardner, and she had wondered what she was going to do with the two of them because who would hire a housekeeper with her own dog? Then Gregory Peck had asked her to come and work for him and his wife in California. Gregory Peck liked the dog very much and said it brought back good memories of his friend. The dog lived to the age of fifteen and was buried behind the house under a weeping elm. The stone marker reads: MORGAN GARDNER VARGAS.
*The adored Cara sat in Ava’s arms whenever the actress came to a screening of the Tarn Lin dailies, and the dog was known to go into a barking frenzy at the moment her mistress came onscreen.
*At Ennismore Gardens an inventory of her drawing room alone would include the following items: a circa 1785 Louis XVI giltwood canape (divan), a pair of circa 1750 Louis XV flowercarved fauteuils, two late-eighteenth-century Venetian parcel-gilt armchairs, a nineteenthcentury gilt-carved Pietra Dura circular chess table, four eighteenth-century footstools, nine eighteenth-century decorative Chinese painted panels, a pair of large nineteenth-century French gilt-bronze candelabra, a George I giltwood overmantel mirror, two nineteenth-century Japanese red lacquer tables, a circa 1760 Meissen gilt-metal-mounted tobacco jar, a giltwood Lambrequin-carved coronet, a Regency-era painted cabine
t on simulated bamboo stand, a nineteenth-century brass and steel basket grate with fan-spark guard raised on brass monopodia (of course!), an ebonized Napoleon III brass-and-ivory-inlaid bonheur-du-jour, a circa 1920 redground-lacquer mah-jongg set, and an antique U-shaped bronze Japanese gong; partial list.
*Brother Jack would die of a heart attack in Raleigh in 1981, at the age of sixty-nine, only hours after being sworn in for his second term of office.
*Bappie was to die in Los Angeles on November 6, 1993.
SOURCES
INTERVIEWS
Berdie Abrams
J. M. Fordham
Marc Lawrence
Angela Allen
Leatrice Gilbert Fountain
Margaret Lee
Diana Altman
Raul Garcia
David Leeming
Robert J. Anderson
Murray Garrett
Janet Leigh
James Bacon
Richard Goldstone
Monica Lewis
Nelly Barquette
Bernard Gordon
Michael Logothetis
Kathleen Beckett
Johnny Grant
Ross Lowell
Turhan Bey
Lucia Graves
Sid Luft
Nan Birmingham
Virginia Grey
Joanna Lumley
Johnny Blowers
Pete Hamill
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Peter Blythe
David Hanna
Francis Matthews
Keith Botsford
Eloise Hardt
Virginia Mayo
Phil Brown
Alan Harkness
Ann Miller
Joe Bushkin
John Hawkesworth
Mitch Miller
Waller Bussenius
Skitch Henderson
Spoli Mills
Jack Cardiff
A. E. Hotchner
Eva Monley
Marge Champion
Cici Huston
Terry Morse
Esme Chandlee
Tony Huston
Nan McGlohon
Betty Comden
Christopher Isherwood
Mike Oliver
Alistair Cooke
Herb Jeffries
Dale Olson
Alberta Cooney
Neil Jillett
Roy Parkinson
Luther Daughtry, Jr.
Howard Keel
Kathleen Parrish
Steve Dunleavy
Evelyn Keyes
Bob Rains
Milton Ebbins
Mickey Knox
Jess Rand
Marge Edwards
Frank Laico
Gene Reynolds
Betty Rose
Donald Sinden
Carmen Vargas
Ron Rosenberg
William Smith
Bayard Veiller
Ann Rutherford
Robert Stack
Imogen Wheeler
Zoe Sallis
Mokie Stancil
Sandy Whitelaw
Budd Schulberg
David Stenn
Ann Williams
Artie Shaw
Austin Stevens
Billy Williams
Tom Shaw
Tempest Storm
Michael Winner
Vincent Sherman
Ben Tatar
Clarence Woodell
Betty Sicre
Claude Terrail
Jimmy Wyble
George Sidney
Roma Tomalty
Philip Yordan
Arthur Silber, Jr.
Candy Toxton
Genevieve Young
Sheila Sim
Tony Trabert
Jeanie Sims
William Tuttle
ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
USC Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles, California
Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California Los Angeles Public Library
Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, New York City
British Film institute, Library, London
Heritage Center, Smithfield, North Carolina
Ava Gardner Museum, Smithfield, North Carolina
Smithfield Public Library, Smithfield, North Carolina
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