Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “I can handle conversations,” she said, seriously. “I never played a woman who was smarter than me.”

  It was time to go. At the door, she shook my hand in a very English manner. Then she kissed me on the mouth—“the only real way to seal a deal,” she said. “Now that the meter’s running, let’s not waste any more time.”

  I said I would call in the morning and fix a meeting as soon as possible.

  “We’re gonna have fun, but don’t think it’s not going to be a bumpy ride, honey,” she said with a smile.

  It was a smile I would get to know very well, for it conveyed a warning as well as warmth.

  3

  At five o’clock the following morning Ava phoned and said she wanted to start work on the book that afternoon. “I can’t sleep,” she said, when I mentioned the time. She suggested that we meet at four o’clock at her apartment. “It’s not my best hour, Jesus knows. I’m a night owl. Let’s make it five, okay? I don’t want to waste any more time, honey. We’ve frittered away too much of it already. Now time is of the essence, as they say.” She laughed wickedly at the trite phrase. “When you get to be my age, baby, you have to pay time more respect.”

  Her enthusiasm was reassuring, and I said that five was fine with me. It would give me another hour to work on my novel, Theodora, only Ava still didn’t know about that yet. It was part of her attractiveness that she showed no interest in my life beyond our working relationship.

  “How do you want to start the book, by the way?” she asked.

  To be honest, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. I’d imagined that we’d begin with her childhood in North Carolina. That’s what I suggested.

  “Jesus, honey, that’s so boring. It’s so goddamn . . . boring, baby, don’t you think? We can come up with something a little better than that, can’t we?”

  “Where would you start, Ava?” I was curious.

  “I think we should begin with the story of my stroke—how I had to learn to control my bladder again; that was fun, having to train myself not to wet my goddamn pants every time I sneezed, or got excited?”

  It was a funny idea and she made it sound outrageous, but I wasn’t convinced that it was the best way to begin her book, although her ebullience gave me a warm feeling toward her, a reminder of the moxie she had needed to get her through a stroke, which left her half paralyzed, temporarily speechless, and with a form of glaucoma that threatened permanent blindness at any minute.

  “You don’t think people might find it a little too downbeat to open with that?” I said.

  “Come on, they’ll love it. The irony of a screen love goddess peeing her pants, and having to learn to walk again. We start the book with my second childhood?” she said, and laughed again. “That’s funny, isn’t it? That would work.”

  There was an edge of obstinacy in her voice, as if she had already made up her mind that this was how the book would begin. I’d planned to use her stroke as a set piece—but not in the opening chapter, and certainly not in the way she suggested. “You really think that’s a good idea, Ava?” I asked cautiously. Both Dirk Bogarde and Peter Viertel had said that she could take offense for the most abstruse reasons, even when she was sober, and I knew I might be on tricky ground.

  “You don’t think so, honey?” She sounded surprised, but still perfectly friendly. “We start the book with me back in diapers, a sixty-something old broad back in diapers?” Her voice had a cajoling quality. But the idea conjured up a troubling image. I still couldn’t think of a more inappropriate way to begin her story. Perhaps she was testing me, perhaps I hadn’t got the joke—it was, after all, five o’clock in the morning, and I was still half asleep.

  “I don’t want a book that’s downbeat; I don’t want a ‘pity me’ book, honey. Jesus, I hate those kind of books.”

  I agreed that that would be a mistake.

  “Let’s at least start off with a few laughs,” she said.

  The stubbornness in her voice had hardened. I knew that she wasn’t joking.

  “It had its funny side,” she said. “I fell down in Hyde Park with a friend who’d had a hip operation and neither of us could get up again. People must have thought we were a couple of drunks rolling around and walked on by. Tell me that’s not funny? Thank God, nobody recognized me. Or maybe they did and thought, There she goes again!”

  Of course it was funny. It would make a wonderfully funny piece; it would win the reader’s sympathy, and her fans would identify emotionally with her dilemma. But it was a question of balance. The stroke had been the most desperate and demoralizing episode of her life, and the idea that we treat it in such a trivial, lighthearted way in the first chapter was not only perverse and illogical, it was plain stupid. She didn’t seem to understand—or even want to acknowledge—the seriousness of the stroke she had suffered, or the courage she had displayed in her fight to overcome it.

  Even if I wrote the episode as black farce rather than in the lunatic Lucille Ball fashion she suggested, it would still diminish her mystique, it would destroy her legend; all the things that she was admired for, the qualities that had sustained her box office appeal for so long, would be jeopardized. It would deprive her book of its heart.

  I knew there would be arguments—she had been a movie star for forty years; getting her own way was in her DNA—and times when I’d simply have to roll with the punches. I decided to say as little as possible and hope that eventually she would see reason and change her mind. The one thing I didn’t want to do was trade shots with her at five o’clock in the morning when I was still half asleep.

  “You don’t like that opening?” she pressed me impatiently.

  “It’s a funny idea, Ava. I think it could be quite poignant, too. But I wonder if it’s the best way to begin your story?”

  “You really don’t like it, do you?”

  “No, I really don’t. But maybe I’m missing something,” I said, in spite of my determination not to get into an argument with her so early in the morning. “Maybe you could persuade me to change my mind, but I rather doubt it.”

  “Then how should we begin it? You’re the writer.”

  I tried to think of what I could say that might divert her, and undo the damage I had obviously done with my last remark. Had she read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye? I quoted Holden Caulfield’s opening line: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like . . .”

  “I didn’t have a lousy childhood. I had a happy childhood—well, it definitely wasn’t lousy anyway,” she said. “I don’t think childhood is an interesting place to start anything, honey. Where I was born, what my childhood was like! Jesus! It has no come-on. I made over a hundred movies in my time, one thing I learned was that the opening scene has to have sucker bait, honey. I learned from the best . . . John Huston, Tennessee Williams, Papa Hemingway, John Ford, Joe Mankiewicz, the sonofabitch. I worked with them all. They knew how to tell a story. You want to second-guess Hemingway, Tennessee Williams? You know how to tell a story better than those guys? I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”

  I had obviously been put in my place but let it pass. I remembered Dirk Bogarde’s warning that “she can go from solicitous to savage in three seconds flat.” I must always ignore her when she’s in that kind of mood, he said.

  “You have to show the bait, honey,” she repeated. Why didn’t I want to start with the story of her stroke? Didn’t I think that was interesting? “I almost died fahcrissakes! That’s interesting to me, goddamnit. It was one of the most frightening things that ever happened to me in my entire life,” she said. “I almost bought it, honey! I almost died.”

  She was not being rational. I knew that she couldn’t defend that argument and continue to justify the case for beginning the book in the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way she proposed. But I knew that it would be futile to attempt to point that out to her in her present mood. I was wide awake
now and had the sense to bide my time, and try to change her mind later.

  “Ava, I’m not saying it isn’t interesting. I’m certainly not saying it wasn’t frightening. Of course it was. It must have been terrifying. I just don’t think it’s the best place to start, and it would deprive us of a really compelling ending,” I said in an attempt to preserve at least the appearance of reasonableness. “But it’s your book.”

  “You’re damn right, honey, it is my book, and that fucking stroke ruined my looks and put paid to my career, that’s why I’m having to write the fucking thing in the first place. I can’t believe you said it isn’t interesting.”

  “That’s not what I said, Ava,” I said, hoping we could finish the conversation, and I could catch up on a little more sleep before it was time to get up.

  I heard her light a cigarette. “You know what? I think you just want to call all the plays, honey. And I won’t have it.”

  She sounded so petulant, it was almost childish, and I wanted to laugh, only I still didn’t know her well enough to risk offending her any more than I already had. I suggested that we talk about it at a less ungodly hour.

  “Five A.M. is not an ungodly hour, baby. I call it studio time, although it’s been a while since I got up at that hour to make a movie,” she said in a more agreeable tone. “We’ll finish this conversation later. I’ll see you at four.”

  “Five,” I reminded her, but she’d already hung up.

  I ARRIVED AT FOUR, to be on the safe side. Ava, in bare feet and blue jeans, wearing a man’s black V-neck sweater over a white linen shirt, was waiting for me in the drawing room. She wore no makeup, or very little I could see, and that must have taken a lot of confidence two years after suffering a stroke that had frozen half her face. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She was standing in front of the Adam fireplace on which stood a near-empty glass of wine. I thought she was still angry with me. Nor was I sure that she would go ahead with the interview, or even the book, after our conversation that morning.

  Weeks had passed since she asked me to ghost her memoirs. We’d had dozens of telephone conversations, and three or four “script meetings” as she called them, but we still hadn’t gotten down to a serious interview. We would discuss ideas and the subjects we needed to cover but her manner would change abruptly the moment I suggested that we switch on the tape. She became cautious; the spontaneity went out of her voice. She would even attempt to clean up her language, and I missed the profanities that enlivened our private conversations. It was like Bogart without the lisp.

  I knew that she was only doing the book for the money; the fact that her heart wasn’t in it didn’t really surprise me. But I still hoped that if I could persuade her to let me tell her story in the same uninhibited way she talked to me privately, her book would have an edge and a humor that no other movie star’s biography had. No other actress’s memoirs anyway. Little by little I was beginning to understand her, and I’d be disappointed if she pulled the plug on the book now.

  “Have you thought any more about where you’d like to begin, Ava?” I was determined to be positive.

  She poured a little more wine into her glass, filled another glass and handed it to me. “Not too early for you, is it?”

  It was but I said no.

  She said: “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning. Maybe there’s some truth in what you say. But maybe you’re wrong, too. But what the hell—we’ll start with my childhood, okay? That’s what you want, isn’t it? What the fuck difference does it make where we start? We can always change it if it doesn’t work, right?”

  I knew that she would at least want an option on the last word. “It makes sense, doesn’t it—to start at the beginning?” My relief felt like a shot of adrenaline.

  She said, “Maybe it’s the only way people are ever going to make any sense of my fucked-up life. My God, it’s probably the only way I’m going to make any sense of it. It’s the later years that get me mussed up. Sometimes I can’t even remember the movies I was in, but some of the ones I saw as a kid come back clear as daylight.” She sipped her wine. “I’m sorry I lost my temper this morning. I shouldn’t have made such a song and dance about it. But you did provoke me,” she said.

  I said it was obviously a misunderstanding. I was sorry, too. “It was too early in the morning. We should never discuss serious matters before breakfast.” I hoped that she would take the hint, although I knew she probably wouldn’t.

  “This isn’t going to be easy for me, honey. My memory isn’t all it used to be. I will lose the combination a few times. You’ll have to help me out with the dates and a lot of the names and places.”

  I said I’d sort out those details with research.

  She had an air of wanting to get on with it, and that was encouraging. I told her that I would run two tapes, one for her to keep and play back later to remind her of what she’d said, forgotten to say, or would like to add. I would give her a copy of the transcripts as soon as I’d typed them up. Later I would write draft chapters for her comments and any corrections she wanted to make.

  Did she really make over a hundred movies? I asked her. I was curious.

  “I don’t know, honey. Eighty, ninety, a hundred maybe. I don’t have a clue. I did a lot of hokey movies when I was starting out at MGM. Good and bad, mostly bad. Maybe it’s a blessing I lost track. A lot of my stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor. A lot more should have. You’ll have to help me out with that stuff, honey. We might even discover some lost Ava Gardner masterpieces. That would be fun. It would be a goddamn miracle, too.”

  I reached for the Sony VOR microcassettes and switched them on. “Shall we start?” I said. That was usually the signal for her to find some excuse to delay the interview: a further question about the ground we intended to cover, a need to visit the bathroom . . . but before I asked my first question she was off.

  4

  I was born in Grabtown, North Carolina. I was named after Daddy’s spinster sister, Ava Virginia. She lived with Mama and Daddy all her life. I guess she never had the marrying gene—but neither did I. You only have to look at my record to figure that one out! I gave it a shot three times, but none of them stuck. The marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw were hit-and-run affairs, both of them were over and wrapped up in a year. The marriage to Frank Sinatra . . . well, that did a little better. Anyway, on paper it did. On and off it did. It lasted seven years on paper—if you counted all the goddamn splits and the injury time we played. And there were plenty of those, honey, believe me. I tried to be a good wife. I tried to be any kind of wife; the plain fact is, I just wasn’t meant to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. After Frank—we married in ’51, separated in ’53, divorced in ’57—I knew that a happy-ever-after marriage was never going to happen for me. The marriages to Mickey and Artie were easy come, easy go. I called them my ‘starter husbands’! You only had to sneeze and you’d have missed both of them. My marriage to Artie Shaw might have lasted a little longer if I hadn’t asked John Huston for advice. John was the last person in the world anyone should go to for advice of any kind—let alone advice about their marriage. Although what Huston said didn’t matter a damn one way or the other. Artie was determined to get rid of me anyway. He already had my replacement lined up, fahcrissake. You know how many times John Huston was married? Five times. Jesus, I needed my head examined asking Huston for advice about my marriage. Although it’s true I was pretty sloshed at the time, and so was he. The pair of us, sloshed to our bloody eyeballs. It was the first time he invited me to his place in the [San Fernando] Valley. They were thinking of using me in The Killers, which he’d written [with Tony Veiller].

  “God, I was beautiful then; that was the first time I looked at myself on the screen and didn’t want to hide with embarrassment. Huston clearly fancied me—although he struck out with me that night. I was a married lady, I told him—but I also knew he had his hands full with Olivia de Havilland and Evelyn Ke
yes at the time. He was screwing a lot of women in those days. He knew how to give a girl a good time. He had plenty of stamina, but his romances never lasted. Actually, the following weekend he went off to Las Vegas with Evelyn and married her. I’m not saying he married her because he struck out with me but that’s what he did. Anyway, when he’d got tired of chasing me around the bushes, I asked him what I should do about Artie.”

  The marriage was not that good but it was not that bad either. She and Artie Shaw had been married for less than a year and it could have gone either way, she said. But Huston, aged forty, with all the gravitas and cunning of an older man—“he wanted to get into my pants, honey,” she said with her own measure of wisdom—told her: “You know damn well that it’s not going to work, kid—just get the hell out while he’s still got the hots for you.”

  Although she knew that Huston had no feelings about it one way or the other—“John loved giving mischievous advice; causing trouble always gave him a kick in the pants,” she said—“I picked up my shoes and shuffled out of Artie’s life. He didn’t seem to have minded too much, I have to say.”

  It was entertaining stuff, she could always make me laugh, she could always do that, but the narrative was a mess, the continuity nonexistent. It was clear that the strokes she’d had a couple of years earlier had affected her ability to concentrate—the wine obviously didn’t help—and she was all over the place, lost in the debris of her past.

  Rather than try to dig her out, I just shut up and listened. The material was all grist for the mill, nothing would be wasted; her tone, her cynicism and ribald vocabulary, would be invaluable when I attempted to reproduce her voice on the page. But, first, if she was going to deliver the goods, she had to come clean about herself; she had to stop sidestepping the interesting truths, and ducking the painful ones. I already suspected that, in spite of her promises, she never intended to be totally frank with me about her life. (“Do you think I’m crazy? Of course I’m not going to tell the whole truth,” I later learned she admitted to Michael Winner the day she told him she was going to write her autobiography. “I’m going to say things that leave the impression with people that I want left with them,” she said.)