Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “It was my first day in Hollywood. I was being hauled around the sets to be photographed with the stars. He came over to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mickey Rooney.’ He did a little soft-shoe shuffle kind of dance, and bowed to me. God, I was embarrassed. I don’t think I said a word. I might have said ‘Hello’ or something. I was overwhelmed. His Andy Hardy pictures made the studio millions and cost peanuts. So did his Mickey and Judy [Garland] pictures. I wanted to ask for his autograph but I could barely open my mouth.”

  Years later, she said, the psychoanalyst her second husband, Artie Shaw, made her go to, to try to find the cause of her drinking—“a fifty-minute session, six days a week on the couch, I felt like a character in a New Yorker cartoon”—had a theory about why she could hardly speak when she first met Rooney. “It might have been a bunch of bullshit, but it kind of made sense, too. Shall I tell you about the shrink? I know you hate me jumping around.”

  “If we can stay with the Mickey story for the moment,” I said.

  “You don’t like it when I wander, do you? But I’m more relaxed when I can say things directly from my thoughts,” she said.

  “One thing we don’t have right now, Ava, is time. The clock’s running and it’s important that we have at least half a dozen chapters for Ed to show Richard Snyder as soon as possible. It’ll be quicker and easier for me if we concentrate on one subject—”

  “And it’s easier for me when I can say things as they come into my head,” she said angrily. “Why the hell shouldn’t I tell you what comes into my head? You should be pleased, at least you know I’m not holding anything back. That’s how I did it with the shrink and it seemed to work fine for her.”

  “The shrink and the Artie Shaw story can wait, Ava,” I said bluntly. I hadn’t meant it to sound aggressive, or like an ultimatum, but it did. I knew we were on the edge of another argument. She knew it, too. She looked at me steadily for a long moment, in silence. I imagined she was making up her mind whether she wanted to continue with the book or not. Then she said quietly: “Let’s get on with it, honey. Where the fuck was I?”

  I felt duly reprimanded for interrupting her flow. “The publicity man was taking you around the sets. He’d introduced you to Mickey Rooney,” I said.

  “He said, ‘Mickey, this is Ava Gardner, one of our new contract players.’ Mick did another quick soft-shoe shuffle and bowed even more elaborately, like a courtier or something. The people on the set were laughing like mad at him. He loved an audience, of course. He was always at his best when he was in the spotlight. I just wanted the ground to open and swallow me up.”

  She fell silent for another long moment. Then she said, “I remember asking him one evening, shortly after we were married, what he thought of me that first time we met. We had a kind of truth game we used to play in bed. We’d spend a lot of time in the sack in the early days, a lot of time: talking, laughing, making love. We were still getting to know each other really. Mick was only a couple of years older than me, but he’d been playing the vaudeville circuits since he was a kid. That was some education. He had all the street smarts in the world when I met him. I must have seemed so fucking awkward, so fucking gauche. Anyway, I asked him what went through his mind when he saw me on the set that day. He said did I really want to know?

  “Of course, I said, although I didn’t expect he would tell me the truth. New husbands seldom tell the truth to their new brides—at least none of my three ever did! And especially Mickey!

  “He said, ‘Okay, when Milt Weiss said you were a new contract player, I figured you were a new piece of pussy for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you.’ ”

  Ava smiled. “Mick was always the romantic,” she said. “I guess he meant it as a compliment but I was shocked. I was still capable of being shocked in those days.”

  She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke drift out slowly through her mouth and nostrils. It was a seductive piece of business. Men had fallen in love with her because of that performance. I had seen her do it a dozen times. It took me a while to realize that she never finished a cigarette once the performance was over. She used it to play for time, to avoid an issue, often to change the subject. As I watched her crush out another barely smoked cigarette, I asked why she didn’t give up smoking altogether.

  “I used to smoke Winstons. They had the highest content of nicotine and tar around. A pack could keep the smile on Marlboro Man’s face for a month. I was smoking three packs a day. I hardly had enough breath to get from my bed to the bathroom. I called John Huston and asked him how he stopped. He said, ‘Honey, when I had to.’ A few days later he died of emphysema. It’s such a hideous disease. To think I only started smoking to make me look sophisticated—after I saw the gold cigarette case and gold lighter Lana Turner carried around all the time. The dumbest move I ever made.”

  “You once said that marrying Mickey Rooney was the dumbest thing you ever did,” I said, getting her back to the subject of Rooney.

  “Yeah, well Mickey . . . you have to remember, I was eighteen! August 1941. I was still a virgin. That was a long time ago, honey. A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework since then. The studio photographer took a bunch of pictures of us, with Mick mugging it up. The whole business took five minutes, tops. But that evening, he called me and asked me out to dinner.

  “I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five-foot-two of him! The complete Hollywood playboy, he went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge. He was incorrigible. He’d screw anything that moved. He had a lot of energy. He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s a funny line.”

  She looked uncertain. “Let’s think about it, honey. I’m not sure that you should use Lana’s name . . . not until I’m pushing the clouds around anyway.” She had used that line a few times now. I should have paid more attention to it.

  She said, “Anyway, Mick called me that night and asked me out to dinner. I said no. I wasn’t playing hard to get. I wasn’t into that Southern Belle shit. I was just too shy. I said I was busy. That was a stupid thing to say. Who the hell was I busy with, fahcrissake? It had taken about six minutes flat to unpack my only suitcase and brush my teeth. I didn’t know a goddamn soul in Hollywood, except my sister. And I’m busy?”

  Rooney continued to call her; she continued to say no to his invitations. But he was funny and cajoling and persistent. “He could talk like all creation,” she said. He would call her every day from his dressing room in the lunch hour, between calls to his bookmakers, and again late in the evening. On the phone, she lost some of her shyness with him; she laughed at his jokes, and enjoyed the gossip about the stars he shared with her. He was laying siege to her. She was flattered.

  “Every conversation ended up with him asking me to have dinner with him. Finally I just ran out of excuses. I thought the hell with it, and said okay—but I have my sister Bappie staying with me, I told him!”

  “ ‘Fine, bring Sis along, too,’ he said, bang-off. He was like Frank Sinatra in that way. He said he’d call Dave Chasen and pick us up at seven. The last thing I wanted was for him to see where we lived—in a goddamn walk-up on Wilcox Avenue!

  “ ‘We’ll meet you at the restaurant,’ I said desperately. He wouldn’t hear of it. That wasn’t his style. His chauffeur-driven limo arrived at exactly seven o’clock.

  “The only other time I’d seen him he was wearing that Carmen Miranda shit on his face. I’d seen him on the screen a hundred times but that was in black-and-white. His looks in the flesh, without the Carmen Miranda makeup, came as a shock. He still wasn’t what I’d call a h
andsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was . . . well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!”

  Chasen’s was run by Dave Chasen, an ex-vaudevillian, like Rooney. Along with Romanoff”s, the Brown Derby, and Perino’s, it was the place to eat and be seen. And Rooney made sure that Ava was seen. He took her from table to table, introducing her to the celebrity diners. Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and W. C. Fields were all regulars. But caught up in the whirlwind that was Mickey Rooney—“and after a glass or two of champagne, and I wasn’t used to booze at all in those days, I was feeling no pain”—Ava couldn’t remember who she met that night, except for Jimmy Durante, who gave an impromptu performance of his classic number, “Inka Dinka Doo.”

  “We left Chasen’s and went to the Cocoanut Grove, at the Ambassador Hotel, where Freddy Martin’s band played, and then on to Ciro’s. They became our favorite hangouts,” she said.

  That was the start of something.

  12

  Mickey Rooney made no secret of his obsession with Ava. He took her out every night: dinner at Romanoff’s, dancing at the Grove one night; dinner at Chasen’s, dancing at Ciro’s or the Trocadero the next. He took her to the races at Santa Anita and to watch him play golf at the Lakeside Golf Club. “He acted, he sang, he danced. He told jokes, did impersonations—Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney, Lionel Barrymore, he did them all. He’d have even turned somersaults if I’d asked him to,” Ava recalled.

  Some idea of her apparent coolness to Rooney’s approach can be judged from the Pinteresque conversation on their first date at Chasen’s, remembered by Rooney himself:

  “Would you like to hear me impersonate Cary Grant?” I said.

  “Would you like to impersonate Cary Grant?” Ava said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I do it great.”

  “Well, go ahead, if you want to,” Ava said.

  “It wasn’t that I was immune to his charms. I was just so fucking overwhelmed by his energy. I couldn’t think straight. I was so shy I could barely open my mouth, honey. Mick was manic, he was a complete hambone. He was always on—he was always on heat, too. At first, I didn’t know whether he was trying to woo me or entertain me,” Ava said. “It was flattering being with him, knowing that people were wondering who the hell I was. But it was goddamn exhausting, too. Mick was so famous. You have no idea how famous he was. Everybody loved him. Everybody wanted to be his friend. He’d introduce me—‘This is my girlfriend. Isn’t she pretty? She’s gonna be a big star!’ he’d say. Most times he’d forget to mention my name! ‘And this must be the Girl with No Name,’ said Frank Morgan [a popular MGM character actor; the Wizard himself in The Wizard of Oz] when Mick introduced me to him for about the third time one evening at Schwab’s. He meant well though.”

  Under the name of Mickey McGuire, the Brooklyn-born son of vaudevillian comic Joe Yule Sr. and chorine Nell Carter, Rooney had appeared in dozens of two-reel comedies for a B picture unit before changing his name to Mickey Rooney. Rooney was soon cast as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in 1934 MGM gave him a contract. His performance was acclaimed by the critics and fans alike. “Rooney’s Puck is truly inhuman,” critic David Thomson later wrote in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, “one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic.”

  But Rooney really hit the jackpot in 1937 with A Family Affair, the first of his Andy Hardy family series. By the time Ava arrived at MGM in the summer of 1941, he was the hottest property the studio had, turning out several Andy Hardy movies a year plus the equally cheap and profitable “Hey, let’s do the show right here” musicals with Judy Garland. And movies with Spencer Tracy—Captains Courageous and Boys Town (1937, 1938)—further enhanced his popularity.

  On screen, in the Andy Hardy series, he had endeared himself to audiences, especially American ones, with his sassy, boy-next-door persona and embodiment of family values, which earned him a special Academy Award for “bringing to the screen the spirit of youth.” Mayer watched over his protégé’s screen image like a hawk. When he noticed at a preview that Rooney had failed to remove his hat when he entered a room, he made the director shoot the scene again. In one classic Andy Hardy scene, written by Mayer himself—and reflecting the mogul’s own sentimental affection for the American family—Rooney falls to his knees and, clasping his hands together, prays for his sick mother: “Dear God, please don’t let my mom die, because she’s the best mom in the world. Thank you, God.” (“Let me see you beat that for a prayer,” Mayer said triumphantly when Rooney finished the scene.)

  Off screen, Rooney remained more than a handful for those who were assigned to take care of his needs. He wanted a direct telephone line to his bookmakers on the set. He got it. He expected a copy of the Racing Form delivered with his first cup of coffee on the set each morning. It was there.

  “Poor baby, Mick was hooked on the horses,” Ava said. “That’s one vice I’ve never had. Installing that phone on the set for him was fatal. I was surprised the studio would do it, but I guess they’d do anything for him as long as he was making money for them. His pictures were cheap and made millions for the studio. Those Andy Hardy pictures paid for MGM’s great movies, Ninotchka, Camille, Two-Faced Woman, all those other Garbo movies that were a bust at the box office. Mickey’s movies kept the studio running.”

  They also more than satisfied Mayer’s greed, and the old showman was always willing to overlook his star’s extravagant whims. When his minders warned Mayer that on weekends Rooney often drank insatiably, Mayer ignored them. “He would say I was a good little fella and pat me on the head—he made about ten million dollars a pat at the box office,” Rooney said, when all the money was gone and his liver was shot.

  Whatever Rooney did off screen, it was important that his Andy Hardy image remained unsullied. “If you let Andy get too crazy about girls you’ll lose your audience,” was Mayer’s view. It was all right for Andy to be smitten by some passing beauty—played by a series of MGM starlets, including Lana Turner, Donna Reed, Kathryn Grayson, and Esther Williams—so long as in the final reel he’d wind up with plain Ann Rutherford, his reliably chaste, faithful, and patient girlfriend.

  His pursuit of Ava had a familiar ring to it. “He was like an eager puppy dog. He followed me everywhere. When he realized I didn’t have a car and had to travel to the studio on public transport, he insisted on picking me up every morning at Wilcox Avenue and bringing me back every evening—in time for me to powder my nose ready for the evening round of dinner and dancing. He was a pretty good dancer, by the way.”

  “Wasn’t it tiring for you, Ava?” I asked.

  “I must have enjoyed it. I always accepted,” she said.

  The only thing she didn’t accept were his proposals of marriage, which he made at the end of every evening.

  “Please marry me, Ava,” he would say.

  “No,” she would answer.

  “Please, please marry me, Ava.”

  “You’re too young,” she would tell him.

  “I’m twenty-one, fahcrissake!”

  “Well, I’m eighteen and I’m definitely too young to marry anyone,” she said. He really put the works on her, but she always played it straight with him, she said.

  “He vowed he’d keep asking me until I said yes. Now that was tiring. He even went to work on Bappie. That was a smart move because Bappie was all for it. She loved the idea of being Mickey Rooney’s sister-in-law. She thought I was crazy to keep turning him down. The truth is, I suppose, I was having too much fun being wooed by him. I didn’t want it to stop.”

  The news that they were an item soon spread around the studio. Starlets who had previously enjoyed Rooney’s attention—many of whom had grown to count on it—took his neglect to heart. Eventually, Les Peterson, Rooney’s personal publicist and minder, as well as his friend, decided that it was time to warn L. B
. Mayer of the seriousness of his star’s interest in Ava. Mayer—who had to have Ava pointed out to him, some five weeks after she joined MGM—asked how serious.

  “He wants to marry her, Mr. Mayer,” Peterson told him.

  “Tell him he can’t,” said Mayer. “He belongs to MGM. Tell him a married Andy Hardy would break the hearts of all those little girlies out there who want him for themselves. Who knows what that would cost—him, me, the studio?”

  “I’ve already told him, L.B. I’ve told him that at his age he should still be playing the field, and having fun. He won’t listen,” said Peterson.

  “Is he slipping her the business?”

  “He swears he’s not, L.B.”

  “Why doesn’t he fuck her? He fucks all the others.”

  “He says she’s holding out like no dame he’s ever known, L.B.”

  “She ain’t the fucking Virgin Mary,” Mayer said.

  “He says it’s giving him terrible headaches,” Peterson said.

  “He should just boff her and get her out of my fucking hair.”

  “This was before he wanted to become a Catholic,” said Ava, who loved to tell the story of Mayer’s meeting with the hapless publicist. “One of his daughters, I don’t know whether it was Irene or the other one, Edith Goetz, talked him out of it. She said people would laugh in his face—a short, fat, famous Russian Jew—if he converted to Catholicism. Well, in Hollywood they definitely would have.

  “I liked Les, and I think he liked me. He was devoted to Mickey, of course. But he knew which side his bread was buttered. And who can blame him? Mayer was the boss of bosses. He was the king. They all owed their careers to him. Afterward, after Mick and I were hitched, I asked Les whether there was anything Mayer liked about me?

  “Les had to think about that. ‘Well, he once told me you obviously had cunt power,’ he said.