Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  We talked for a while about Onassis, whom she clearly liked. “I never slept with him, although it was tempting, it would have been interesting. Are you taping this?” she suddenly asked sharply, with suspicion in her voice. “This is between the two of us, right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you when the meter starts,” she said.

  I assured her again that I wasn’t taping her, which was true; however, I was making plenty of notes. To change the subject, I told her that her first husband, Mickey Rooney, was coming to London shortly in his nostalgic Broadway success, Sugar Babies.

  “Mickey, the smallest husband I ever had, and the biggest mistake I ever made—well, that year it was. Pearl Harbor in December [1941], spliced to Mickey in January [1942]. It was the start of the goddamnedest, unhappiest, most miserable time I’d ever had. He wasn’t an easy man to live with, God knows. It was really a fucked-up marriage from day one. I was nineteen years old. Jesus! I was just a kid! A baby!”

  She talked about her days with Rooney, losing her virginity to him on their wedding night, when he was the biggest star on the MGM lot, and she was a starlet. “But I do owe Mickey one thing: he taught me how much I enjoyed sex—in bed, I’ve always known I was on safe ground.”

  I said that was very funny.

  “If I get into this stuff, oh, honey, have you got something coming.”

  There was a long pause in which I could sense her making up her mind. Finally, she said: “Well, okay, if this book is going to happen, honey, I guess I’d better see you up close and personal. I trust Bogarde, but I’m a gal who likes to buy her own drinks.”

  When shall we meet? I asked her.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “DON’T THANK ME. SHE will eat you alive; you know that, don’t you? I haven’t the faintest idea whether I’ve done either of you any favors putting you together. Maybe it’s a book she should never write, maybe she should remain an enigma,” Dirk Bogarde told me over lunch at La Famiglia, a favorite Tuscan restaurant in Chelsea. I’d known him a long time; when I was starting out in journalism and he was a Rank contract player going nowhere, I ghosted an article for him in Films and Filming, a now defunct movie magazine. Although he could be caustic and touchy—bitchy even—I enjoyed his company and wicked humor, and could take his ribbing in my stride. Now in his late sixties, he had been a handsome and popular leading man in British films in the 1950s and early ’60s. His performance as a working-class manservant who seduces and corrupts his aristocratic master in Joseph Losey’s The Servant launched him as an international star. His reputation grew rapidly in such films as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and Death in Venice, in which he played the dying Mahler character; and as a masochistic concentration camp doctor in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. Then a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for which he had high hopes, turned out badly and he stopped working for twelve years. When we met for lunch, he had semiretired from acting and was writing novels, literary criticism, essays, obituaries, and fragments of autobiography for the London Daily Telegraph.

  He said, “Before you start with Madam, old chum, a piece of advice: remember that she is essential to the Hollywood myth about itself. You tamper with that at your peril. She is very dear and adorable. I am devoted to her. She can also be outrageous—Dom Perignon at 5 A.M. in Makeup: ‘The only way to make filming fun,’ she used to say—but she is terribly conflicted about herself, especially about her fame. Most well-known actors are, but she especially, pathologically so. She may never make another movie, that stroke has buggered up her career for good, I imagine, but if she lives to be a hundred she will never go into oblivion, she will never be forgotten. She will try to spin you the expurgated version of her life. She will often be evasive and capricious and sometimes bloody tiresome—the obstacles and diversions she will throw at your feet!—but you must persevere if you wish to get to the truth. Trust me, the truth is something else. You must already have heard that she’s more fun when she’s had a tipple or two. But when she’s had more than a tipple or two, watch out! She can be rough, and bloody unpredictable. But always show her respect, yet not too much reverence. She’s smart, she’ll know the difference. And she will eat you alive.”

  When we said goodbye, he repeated with a bleak smile as he got into the cab in the King’s Road: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, chum: she will eat you alive!”

  With slightly more trepidation, I continued to wait for her call.

  2

  It’s true then what they say: the world is so full of madmen that one need not seek them in a madhouse,” Peter Viertel greeted me when I arrived in Marbella, on the Spanish Costa del Sol, where he lived with his second wife, the English actress Deborah Kerr. Although they had come to meet me at the airport, I could see he was not happy that I had ignored his advice not to accept Ava’s offer. “Don’t even think about it, if you value your sanity; she was a ballbreaker then, and she’ll still be a ballbreaker. But she’s also beautiful and smart, and you’re going to go ahead with her book whatever I say,” he’d said when I called him from London to seek his advice on how to handle her.

  Viertel had known Ava since 1946, when she was an MGM starlet and married to her second husband and Viertel’s friend, the virtuoso clarinetist Artie Shaw. Each morning, Viertel had swum with Ava in the pool of the Shaws’ Beverly Hills house while Artie, who had literary ambitions, discussed books and writing with Viertel’s first wife, Virginia—known as “Jigee”—the former wife of novelist Budd Schulberg and onetime story editor for Sam Goldwyn. In 1956, Viertel was asked to write the screenplay for Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in which Ava was to play the aristocratic Lady Brett Ashley.

  I knew that they had been close—“men are inclined to fall in love with Ava at sight,” he admitted—although he denied they had been lovers. A disclaimer, if not said out of modesty and guile, uttered for the comfort of his wife, who sat next to him as we lunched at the Marbella Club.

  The son of Berthold and Salka Viertel—she was Greta Garbo’s friend and wrote several of her notable films of the 1930s—Peter had grown up in Hollywood and knew everybody. Over lunch he told lively anecdotes about Humphrey Bogart, Hemingway, John Huston, Orson Welles, as well as his parents’ famous friends in the Los Angeles refugee community, including Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, whom he had known as a child.

  “Anyway, you want me to tell you about Ava,” he continued seamlessly as the coffee was poured. “Let me tell you something: nobody handles Ava Gardner. Artie Shaw was a smart guy, a regular polymath—as well as a male chauvinist shit of the first order—and he couldn’t handle her, and neither could Luis Miguel Dominguín, one of the bravest bullfighters in Spain.” He looked at me pointedly, as if waiting for me to say something.

  “What about Sinatra?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Sinatra, the poor bastard, never stood a chance, and he loved her probably most of all. He was too possessive of her; that was the problem, or one of the problems—no one is ever going to possess Ava.” He shrugged; he clearly didn’t want to get involved in her marital problems. “Let’s just say she’s a complicated woman, courageous, difficult . . . well, you’ll find out. She’ll promise you anything. She’ll be nice as huckleberry pie—until the day you get down to work. She’ll take it as a personal affront if she can’t seduce you, by the way—and if she does succeed, you’ll have the time of your life. But you won’t have the book you could have had, or Ava deserves.”

  I expressed my doubt that she would still be sexually active. “Don’t forget she’s had a stroke,” I said, lamely.

  “That won’t have stopped her,” he said, sounding very sure of himself. “The trouble will begin when you show her pages. She will hate them. She loathed my screenplay [The Sun Also Rises]. She sent it to Hemingway for his opinion, for Christ’s sake. No author likes what a screenwriter does to his book. Fortunately, Papa went easy on me. Hollywood had screwed up every one of his
books; he was getting used to it, he said. Anyway, he was my friend.

  “But even so, what Ava did was unforgivable, and unkind. But she craves second opinions. A second opinion is always Ava’s first weapon of choice. You’ll have to fight her all the way, and I warn you now she’s a money player. She knows what is good for Ava, or thinks she does, but that won’t necessarily be good for you or your book. No matter what she promised to get you on board, when it comes to the point, Ava isn’t going to condone a truly honest biography. Her language, using all the four-letter words, the booze, the scandals, the lovers she’s had—okay, plenty of actresses put out, but few have been as eager or as beautiful as Ava Gardner. I’m telling you, I know her, and she’s not going to admit to one tenth of that stuff.

  “If only she would tell the truth about herself—or allow it to be told—my God, what a book that would be! But it’s not going to happen, and that’s a pity because everything she has ever done in her life, all that she has achieved, has been done and achieved on her own terms. I still love her, in spite of a couple of things she shouldn’t have done to me, and to others. She is still the proudest, the most liberated, the most uninhibited woman I know,” he said.

  Deborah Kerr, who starred with Ava in The Night of the Iguana, and had been listening politely to her husband’s stories, chipped in with a wan smile: “I think what Pete is trying to tell you is that Ava’s a man-eater.”

  I RETURNED TO LONDON that evening feeling none the wiser about how to deal with Ava, whom I still hadn’t met. She had canceled a couple of appointments, but we had talked on the telephone nearly every evening and despite her procrastination she talked eagerly about the book, throwing in ideas and opinions and some wonderful throwaway lines.

  Eleven days after her first phone call, Ava invited me to her apartment, spaciously spread across the first floor of two converted fin de siècle mansions in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge. There were four bells on a brass plate screwed to the red-brick wall by the front door, with names written on cards fixed in small plastic slots by each bell. Her bell had the name Baker. “It’s my mother’s maiden name. I live like a goddamn spy,” she’d told me earlier.

  I rang the entry phone and gave my name; the lock was released and I was told to go to the first floor, where her housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, met me and led the way to the drawing room. But before we reached it, Ava appeared in the hall wearing nothing but an angry scowl and a bath towel. “I loathe it when people spread bedtime stories about me.” She explained her bad temper and the reason why she had been delayed getting dressed for our meeting. (Later, when we had gotten to know each other a whole lot better, she admitted that she also wanted to see how I would react to her state of dishabille; she never to her dying day lost her pride in her sexuality.)

  “I was in the tub when a girlfriend called from L.A. She said that Marlon Brando told her he’d slept with me; he reckoned we’d had a little thing going in Rome. That’s a goddamn lie, honey,” she said. She had called Brando on it right away. “I told him that if he really believed that I’d ever jumped into the feathers with him, his brain had gone soft. He apologized. He said that his brain wasn’t the only part of his anatomy that had gone soft lately. He said, ‘Ithn’t that punithment enouth, baby?’ ” she lisped, mocking Brando’s speech impediment. “That’s a funny line, isn’t it? How can you stay pissed with a guy who comes up with a line like that?”

  As I followed her into the drawing room, she pulled the bath towel more tightly around her; she was clearly wearing no underwear.

  She held out her hand. “Mr. Evans, good evening,” she said politely, as if remembering her manners. “May I call you Peter?” she asked, holding on to my hand and searching my face, slowly and quite openly.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Call me Ava,” she said, releasing my hand with a nod of acceptance. “I must put some clothes on,” she said. When she returned she was wearing a gray tight-fitting jersey track suit and horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

  “I don’t know about Jimmy Dean, Ingrid Bergman, Larry Olivier, Jackie O, and the rest of the names Marlon’s supposed to have carved on his bedpost, but my name’s definitely not one of them, honey,” she said, casually picking up the conversation where she’d left it. She was calmer now that she had finished dressing. “Marlon ought to know better than to make up a story like that. I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip.

  “I know a lot of men fantasize about me; that’s how Hollywood gossip becomes Hollywood history. Someday someone is going to say, ‘All the lies ever told about Ava Gardner are true,’ and the truth about me, just like the truth about poor, maligned Marilyn [Monroe] will disappear like names on old tombstones. I know I’m not defending a spotless reputation. Hell, it’s too late for that. Scratching one name off my dance card won’t mean a row of beans in the final tally. It’s just that I like to keep the books straight while I’m still around and sufficiently sober and compos mentis to do it,” she said.

  “Is that why you want to write a book?” I asked warily. “You want to put the record straight?”

  “I’m broke, honey. I either write the book or sell the jewels.” Although it was what I had suspected, I was surprised at the frankness with which she admitted it. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added.

  She tapped a cigarette out of a half-empty pack on the Adam mantelpiece, lit it with a gold lighter, and inhaled deeply. It was a slow, well-practiced performance—a routine I had seen her go through a dozen times on the screen—during which I got my first good look at her. Her luminous beauty had faded with age and hard living although good bone structure and a strong jawline still gave her face a sculptural force. The stroke she’d had two years earlier had partially paralyzed her left side and froze half her face in a rictus of sadness. It would have been a hard blow to bear for any woman, but for an actress who had once been hailed as “the world’s most beautiful animal,” it was a tragedy. And yet her sensuality hadn’t completely deserted her; in her composure, in her stillness, it was still there.

  I tried not to stare, but she must have guessed my thoughts. “As if getting old wasn’t tough enough,” she said, with no sense of self-pity at all. She carried her limp left arm across her chest, holding it at the elbow. “Actors get older, actresses get old. Ain’t that the truth. But life doesn’t stop because you’re no longer a beauty, or desirable. You just have to make adjustments. Although I’d be lying to you if I told you that losing my looks is no big deal. It hurts, goddamnit, it hurts like a sonofabitch.”

  She crushed out the cigarette with an irritable gesture.

  “The thing is, I’ve survived; I dodged all the bullets that had my name on them. I have to be grateful for that. But it does remind you of your mortality when you hear them whistle by. You go on living knowing that from now on in, death is always going to be somewhere about. But I’ve had an interesting life; I’ve had a wonderful time, in parts. I’d be crazy to start squawking now.”

  It was six o’clock.

  “Tea—or something else? I’m a something else kind of woman myself.” She grinned at me.

  Peter Viertel had warned me that she didn’t trust men who didn’t drink, and I suspected that this was more of a challenge, some kind of test, than an invitation. “Something else would be fine,” I said. She handed me a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. “You do the honors, honey,” she said.

  “One thing you must understand about me from the get-go is that my vices and scandals are more interesting than anything anyone—including Mr. Limp Dick Brando—can make up about me. If we tell my story the way it should be told, maybe I won’t have fucked up my life completely,” she said, watching me open the wine.

  I sensed that she was judging me as much by the measures I poured as by my reaction to what she was telling me. “Last month I was sixty-five years old. I’ve had a stroke—a couple of strokes, actually. I got both barrels,” she said as I handed her t
he drink. “But before they put me to bed with a shovel, we’ve got to finish this book, honey. I’ve lived an interesting life, goddamnit. I want an interesting book, one that tells it the way it was.”

  “It’ll be a great book,” I said.

  “And let’s make it a fast one, because pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby,” she said. She saw the look of surprise on my face, and laughed. “We might as well be honest with each other, baby; we are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

  She held out her glass in a toast.

  “Movie stars write their books, then they are forgotten, and then they die,” she said.

  “You’re not going to die for a long time yet, Ava,” I told her.

  “If our book doesn’t replenish the larder, honey, dying’s going to be my only hope.”

  It had been my intention that first evening simply to break the ice, to discuss the areas of her life we would need to explore. Instead, we talked about a lot of things. I was not prepared for her frankness, or her wicked sense of humor. (“I saw Elizabeth [Taylor] on TV. ‘Yes, I had a little tuck under my chin.’ A little tuck! Jesus Christ! She’s such a wonderful actress.” And, “I liked to fuck. But fucking was an education, too.” And, “Who’d have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog.”)

  At the end of the evening, she asked how I wanted to handle the deal. Before I could answer, she said she’d like Ed Victor to deal with the publishers (“I’m told he knows all the questions and all the answers.”), and she would have her business manager, Jess Morgan in Los Angeles, talk to Ed about our split. I said fine; it was as simple as that.

  “So how will we do this thing with us, honey?” she asked. “I don’t like interviews.”

  “I prefer conversations,” I said.