by Peter Evans
“All you’ve got,” I said.
“Dick Snyder’s very interested in the book. He wants to meet Ava.” Richard E. Snyder was the chairman and CEO of Simon & Schuster, the New York publishers. I’d never met him but I knew of his reputation: his astuteness along with his imperial style and epic temper tantrums were legend.
“He’s coming in from New York next week and wants to sit down with her as soon as possible. Can we fix a date? How about lunch at the Savoy?”
I said that might not be such a good idea; it was where she had often stayed with Frank Sinatra when they were married. “I think they had some of their famous disagreements there,” I said.
“You mean fights,” he said.
“I was being polite,” I said, but I also knew she probably wouldn’t step outside the front door to have lunch with a man she’d never met, even if he were Richard E. Snyder, warrior-king and moneybags of Simon & Schuster.
“Can we meet at her apartment?” Ed said. “Dick would love that.”
I wasn’t too sure that she would agree to that either, but said I would ask her.
“Her apartment would be perfect,” Ed said in his let’s-get-rolling voice. “How is it coming? Is she behaving herself?”
“She’s definitely got a book in her, Ed. Although she tends to repeat stories she’s comfortable with. She’s like someone learning to swim but still doesn’t trust herself in the deep end,” I said.
“It’s important you win her absolute trust as soon as you can,” he said. I could tell by his tone that my swimming analogy had disturbed him. I decided not to tell him about the sessions she had canceled, or her doubts about whether she should go ahead with the book at all.
“It’s early days yet, Ed,” I reminded him. “I won’t have any pages to show Dick by next week.”
“That’s not important. He just wants to meet Ava. He wants to get some idea of what she’s offering, how much she’s prepared to talk about the Sinatra years.”
“He wants to interview her?”
“He wants to hear what she has to offer—from her own lips. Is that going to be a problem?” He must have sensed my disquiet.
“It could be delicate,” I said.
“How delicate?”
“She’s pathologically shy with strangers. She’s practically a recluse.”
“Dick will be gentle with her,” Ed said.
“It’s not going to be easy for her to open up to a guy she’s meeting for the first time. She’s more relaxed after a glass or two but I don’t think that would be advisable either.”
“Dick really wants this book. Trust me, he can handle the situation.”
I said I’d talk to Ava and get back to him.
AVA WINCED. “WHAT’S THE fucking point, honey? I thought Ed Victor was handling the money side of things?” she said when I told her that Dick Snyder wanted to meet her. Dressed in sweatpants and a gray wool sweater she looked bulkier than usual. “Didn’t anyone tell you? I stopped auditioning a long time ago, honey. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I hate dealing with suits. Tell Ed he can forget it.”
I poured a couple of glasses of wine and handed one to her. “Ava, he doesn’t want to audition you, I give you my word. But he is buying your book, we hope for a lot of money. It’s perfectly reasonable that he should want to meet you. He is the head of Simon & Schuster. He’s the guy who signs the checks.”
She lifted her glass. “Down the hatch, baby,” she said, and sipped her wine. “I hate talking to suits,” she said again.
“You said you wanted to redeem your life for a little cash,” I reminded her.
“How about a lot of cash? A lot of cash would be better,” she said, and burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ, I’m such a whore!”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re Ava Gardner, you’re a legend, and you’ve got a wonderful story to tell. All you have to do is have tea with the man.”
I told her how good our last interview was, and how moved I was reading about the death of her father.
“It’s hard talking about those times, honey. Those times still hurt. Talking about the past makes you realize how many of those you’ve loved are dead. You know, you love people far more when they’re gone,” she said. She was calmer now but she still hadn’t agreed to the meeting with Dick Snyder. I didn’t push her. We talked for about an hour, reviewed our progress, and discussed ideas for the next couple of chapters while I made notes and asked questions that would keep her on track.
“When Daddy died in 1938, we were still living in Newport News. Daddy passed in the hospital there but we laid him to rest in the Smithfield graveyard back in North Carolina. I don’t know whether he asked to be planted there but that’s where his family had been buried for generations, so I guess he had said something about it, and that’s where Mama said he belonged. ‘He’s done his purgatory in Newport News,’ she said, and she was damn right. Then Mama took sick. We didn’t know it then, but she had cancer. Anyway, the following year, we shipped back to North Carolina—I reckon because she wanted us to be closer to Daddy, but she had never warmed to Newport News.”
She stood up and walked across to the French window and looked down into the square. Her feet were bare. “I guess he will have to come here,” she said. She put down her glass. “We don’t need a butler, do we, honey?” My mind seized up—who was she talking about, what butler? Then I realized she was discussing Dick Snyder.
“I think a butler would be a bit over the top,” I said.
“You can take care of the booze,” she said.
“Why don’t we invite him for tea? He will appreciate that,” I said, remembering Dirk Bogarde’s stories about her unreliable behavior after a glass or two. “I’ll tell Ed you’ll see them here for tea. If we say Wednesday at four o’clock, you and I can get in an interview session afterward. It’ll be a productive day.”
“You think tea rather than champagne?” she said. She sounded disappointed. “Really, honey, tea?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY SHE phoned me at 2 A.M.
“What the hell should I wear for this guy on Wednesday? I guess a dress, huh? Jeans would be too casual, you think?”
“I think so,” I said, clearing the sleep from my head.
“I think so, too. Why don’t you come over this afternoon and help me choose one? There’s a darling little dress shop near here. I saw a black dress I liked in their window the other day.”
I was working on Theodora during the day; I didn’t want to traipse around Knightsbridge looking for a dress for Ava. “You know, Ava, I wouldn’t go to all that expense. You look great in anything, and you’ll be more comfortable in something you’ve worn before.”
“Maybe,” she mused. “Get back to sleep, honey. I’m sorry I woke you.”
No more was said about what she should wear for the meeting on Wednesday, and on Tuesday there was another crisis. “I look terrible, honey. I look as if I’ve been in a fucking train wreck. That fucking stroke,” she said. She wanted to cancel the meeting with Snyder. I reminded her that he was only in London for a few days. “It would be a pity to miss this opportunity,” I said. “He really wants to meet you.”
“But he can’t see me looking like this—we’d never get a deal if he sees me looking like this. I’ve got more lines on my face than Lana Turner.”
“Do you want me to call Ed? Shall I tell him and cancel the meeting?”
That got her attention. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“It’s your call. I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” I said. It was ten o’clock in the morning; an unusual hour for her when she wasn’t filming. “Have you put your makeup on yet? I’m sure you’ll feel much better once you’ve put your face on,” I said.
“Call Jack Cardiff,” she said after a silence.
“What can Jack do, Ava?”
“Call him now and explain the situation. Tell him I desperately need him,” she said,
and put the phone down.
I rang Cardiff and told him exactly what Ava had said. That afternoon, the world’s finest cinematographer rearranged the lamps in her drawing room—and placed a key light above the chair on which she’d sit for her meeting with Snyder.
He called me that evening. “It’s the best I can do discreetly,” he said. “When she sits in that chair tomorrow, keep telling her how beautiful she looks. Keep on saying that. How beautiful she looks. Lay it on thick. She won’t believe you, she’s too smart to fall for blarney, but it’s what she wants to hear. It’s the tribute you must always pay to great beauties when they grow old. Remember, it’s always the cameraman who grows old, never the star.”
I ARRIVED EARLY. I wanted to go through some lines with Ava before Snyder and Ed Victor got there. A bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne rested in a silver bucket packed in ice. There was another one in the fridge, she told me. She clearly mistook what must have been a look of deep apprehension on my face for one of approval. “And I hope they like quails’ eggs and caviar,” she spoke softly into my ear. “They cost a fucking fortune at Fortnum’s.”
“I’ll go easy on the champagne,” I said. I was determined we wouldn’t have to open the second bottle.
“Don’t make me look mean, honey. Jesus, I hate people who pour small measures.”
“I won’t,” I said. “But don’t forget who we’re dealing with.”
“Is it too late to back off?” she said.
I checked my watch. “Definitely,” I said.
“It’s just that I have to get a little pie-eyed to talk about myself, honey,” she said.
I knew that was true. “Just don’t overdo it,” I said.
“Time will tell,” she said mischievously, but I knew she understood what was at stake, and let it go.
“I’m just not happy having strangers digging around in my panties drawer, honey.”
She sat in the chair Jack Cardiff had lit for her and slowly moved her face around, feeling the warmth of the key light on her cheekbones . . . tilting her head so the light made her eyes shine. “Tricks of the trade,” she said.
I took her through some questions Snyder might ask her, and rehearsed her possible replies. She wore black silk stockings and high heels, which showed her legs—of which she was still extremely proud—to advantage. She had settled on a little black Jean Muir dress she’d worn before. She smoked several cigarettes, not finishing any of them.
“They’re here,” she said when the doorbell rang. She stood up and waited by her chair. It was as if somebody had called “Action.” She was on.
“Hello, I’m Ava Gardner,” she said, holding out her hand, the model of sobriety. She wasn’t the first movie star these men had ever met, and she was no longer in her prime, but they were bowled over. She sat down, crossing her long legs. Carefully catching Cardiff’s key light, which put the frozen side of her face into shadow, she exuded elegance and sensuality with all the composure of Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises. I opened the champagne and began to fill their glasses. To my surprise, and relief, Ava discreetly lifted the neck of the bottle with her little finger before I’d poured little more than a taste into her glass.
“I guess my first and most important question, Miss Gardner, is why do you want to write your book?” Snyder asked pleasantly.
Ava was ready for that one. “Well, Mr. Snyder, my business manager, Jess Morgan, in Los Angeles, told me I either had to write the book or sell the jewels,”—she spoke in a tone so dulcet and Southern that Max Steiner could have set it to his score for Scarlett O’Hara—“and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added with a small sensuous smile. She even made it sound like the first time she had said it. Restraining her usual ribald language, she continued to talk easily and convincingly about herself. She made wicked remarks about the famous people she had known—a few of them “intimately but not well, honey.” She smiled at Snyder knowingly. “Elizabeth Taylor is not beautiful, she is pretty—I was beautiful,” she said, describing her looks in the past tense. It gave her self-appraisal a sense of reality and acceptance. She went on like this for more than an hour, her stories sometimes funny, sometimes indiscreet, but always interesting. There was no question that she made an impression. Ed and Snyder were beguiled.
“You were great,” I congratulated her when they had left. She had drunk very little; the second bottle of Cristal remained unopened in the fridge.
“Aa-vah Gahd-nuh,” she mimicked herself. “That was pure Tobacco Road, Johnston County, honey. But God, I so wanted a pee,” she said.
“Why didn’t you just go to the bathroom?”
“But they would have seen my limp,” she said.
“That was silly, Ava,” I told her.
“Sure it was.” She clapped her hands. “Now let’s open that other bottle of Cristal before I die of fucking thirst.”
9
Newport News has bad memories for me. It’s where Daddy died. He was so weak and so hurt from his coughing at the end. In the mornings, before I went to school, I would go to the hospital and comb his hair, and shave him with his own cut-throat razor, which I think had been his Daddy’s. He loved watching me soap up the shaving lather in his old mug. ‘You make a good barber, Daughter,’ he’d say. He was fifty-nine years old—born 1878, he was younger than I am now, fahcrissake. Some men can still be young in their fifties, even in their sixties—I’ve had leading men as old as Daddy was when he died; even Clark Gable was up there, he was fifty-something when we made Mogambo. And he could still get the girl! But the years weren’t good to Daddy, they just ground him down physically. I would follow his progress on a chart above his bed in the hospital, and it sank a little more every day. The last day I went in to shave him, he waved me away. It was a very little wave. He managed a weak smile. He said he wanted to sleep but I knew he meant he wanted to die. When I went back after school that day, the nurses were putting screens around his bed. And that was that. He passed in a goddamn public ward in a town he hated. Nothing can be sadder than that, fahcrissake.”
THAT EVENING I SHOWED a draft of this material to Ava. Was there anything she wanted to add, or change? She read it quietly without saying a word. She closed her eyes and remained silent for a while. I didn’t say anything, and waited. She read it again more slowly. Then read it a third time.
“You think the stuff about Gable being old is okay?” she said eventually. “It isn’t too cruel, is it? It doesn’t make me sound too bitchy?”
“You do say that he could still get the girl,” I said.
She didn’t smile.
“Do we have to say ‘fahcrissake’?” she said. “It makes me sound like a fucking fishwife.”
“We can take it out but it’s what you said, Ava.”
“I said ‘fahcrissake’?” she said.
“Twice,” I said.
“Screw you,” she said.
It was the first copy I had shown her and I tried not to let her see how anxious I was. Would she like it? Was she going to be difficult? I hadn’t put words in her mouth but I had turned her answers to my questions into prose, and sometimes I’d cut together quotes and ideas from separate interviews about her father’s death to make a convincing whole. Was she going to understand why I’d had to do that? I’d also done my best to imitate her voice but would she recognize it on the page? More importantly, would she accept it? Her reaction to the relatively mild “fahcrissake” was a worrying start, although it did amuse me.
She removed her glasses, and looked at me quizzically. “What do you think, honey?” she said.
I remembered Peter Viertel’s warning that she could make a writer’s life hell if he showed any weakness. “Never let her get the upper hand, kid,” he’d said. If she senses uncertainty in a writer, his life won’t be worth living, he’d said.
“I think it’s a good start,” I said firmly.
“It’ll be better when you take out the second ‘fahcrissake,’ ” she said.
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br /> “Okay,” I said. It seemed like a reasonable compromise to me.
It was seven o’clock. Was I going to open the wine, or were we going to sit and look at it all evening? she said.
“You know, when Daddy was alive I had no problems. I had a charmed childhood. Life was sweet,” she said as she watched me open the bottle of Good Ordinary Claret that I had brought from Berry Brothers in St. James’s. “The worst thing that had happened to me was failing a sewing exam! I’d made myself a little dress—that was the exam, to make a dress. I bought some brown linen and made a little princess style dress, with a round collar and round cuffs in pink. I made it as easy as possible for myself. That sewing teacher bitch hated it. Maybe she just didn’t like pink and brown. Anyway, she failed me, the bitch. It hurt my pride but I’d already decided I wanted to be a secretary anyway.”
I poured the wine and handed her a glass. She sipped it thoughtfully, and said it was good.
“When Daddy died I thought nothing as painful as that could ever happen to me again. He’d made me feel special, although I’m sure my life was no more special than any of the other kids brought up in the Depression. I didn’t expect very much from life but Daddy made me feel loved. He made me feel safe. No daddy can do more than that for his daughter. It would be nice if you could work something like that into the story somewhere. Have you got enough material to do that, honey?”
“I think so. I’ll come back to you if I need more,” I said.
She asked me to leave the new pages with her. “I’ll read them again tonight, when I can’t sleep—instead of waking you up at three o’clock in the morning,” she said. She smiled and asked what ground I wanted to cover that evening.
I suggested that we take it from when she returned to Newport News after her father’s funeral.
She thought about that for a moment, and sipped the wine. “Well, Daddy was my favorite, but I loved Mama, too. Daddy’s death brought Mama and me closer,” she said. There was another long pause as she pondered where to start.
“After Daddy died, when he was no longer around to give her a hand, that was the time I realized how tough running the boardinghouse had become for her. We can begin there. When I suggested I quit school and get a job. Well, she just about went through the roof at that. ‘Doing what?’ she said. ‘Bringing in a wage, Mama. Doing my share. I want to pull my weight,’ I said. ‘You finish your schooling first. I want you to make something of yourself, something your Daddy would be proud of.’ I loved her dearly but she could still be fucking annoying at times. She still wanted to control my life. I was fifteen, for God’s sake!