Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  Mayer’s office, paneled in buttery leather, was no larger than a small ballroom. A furled American flag stood behind his desk; on the wall photographs—from his favorite racehorses to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—testified to the range and grandeur of his friends and interests. Mickey sat across the room beside a table containing a family Bible, the Hollywood trade papers, a silver statuette of the Republican elephant, and photographs of his wife, Margaret, and their two daughters, Edith and Irene.

  Mickey introduced her as “My future wife, Uncle L.B.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you, young lady,” Mayer said.

  “He was perfectly polite. I could see why some people said he had plenty of charm when he wanted to use it, although he did remain seated behind his enormous desk. I didn’t think that was very polite. He was not an attractive-looking man, which wasn’t his fault, but he made me uncomfortable the way he looked at me through his small, round, gold glasses. I’m sure he wouldn’t have objected if I’d genuflected to him,” she said.

  Fifty-six years old, Louis B. Mayer was the highest salaried man in the United States, and as proud of that fact as he was of the studio that bore his name. Below average height, he had a mottled-pink face, a thin, hard mouth, and a large head of thinning white hair. But neither his expensive suits nor the rose-colored polish on his manicured fingernails could detract from the power of his body.

  He lectured them about the state of the country, the problems of the movie business, the genius of his London shoemaker. Told them how much he loved Clark Gable and respected Spencer Tracy and always trusted his own judgment. “I put your boy here in a couple of pictures [Captains Courageous, Boys Town] with Tracy and made your boy a star,” he said to Ava meaningfully. “He explained why the chopped liver at the Beverly Hills Derby was better than the chopped liver at the Vine Street Derby,” she said.

  “He was very sure of himself, and could be very funny, too. I don’t know whether he meant to be, but he was.” My whole life is making movie stars, she mimicked his liturgical cadence. All the billboards in the world don’t make a movie star. Only Louis B. Mayer can make a somebody outta a nobody. “Well, you couldn’t argue with that,” she said.

  I laughed. “Is that how he spoke?” I said.

  “I think he had voice lessons later,” she said. “Anyway, he was very polite to me. Very paternal, although he could be a bastard if he didn’t take to you, or got a grudge against you. Even when charm was coming out of his ears, you knew you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. That’s why Mick was so brave to stand up to him the way he did over me. I’m sitting here talking to you now because Mickey Rooney had the nerve to tell Louis B. Mayer he was going to marry me and if he didn’t like it to go fuck himself. Frank Sinatra had the same rage in him, the same defiance. Artie Shaw was capable of it, too, but not so much. I’ve always found that attractive in a man,” she said.

  “Did Mayer tell you why he sent for you and Mickey?” I said. “Did he give you his blessing?”

  “Eventually he got around to it, I guess. I don’t actually remember a blessing. He gave us the whole business about marriage being sacred, about not running away and getting a divorce at the first sign of trouble. He had a list of all the solid Hollywood marriages he knew of—Eddie G. Robinson, Paul Muni, a whole list of them. We should copy their examples, he said. Well, he was getting religion at that time,” she said.

  14

  The day after her meeting with Mayer, Ava was summoned to Howard Strickling’s office. The publicity chief was one of the good guys at the studio, she said. “He was the man who taught me never to sue no matter what lies the scandal sheets wrote about me—and I never did. He said that magazines like Confidential wanted you to sue because the publicity would boost their sales, and they had no money to pay you damages anyway. When one rag reported that Clark Gable had been slammed in the pokey for drunk driving, Howard flatly denied it. Clark might occasionally sip a small glass of wine with his dinner, he said, but he would never dream of driving afterward. Clark—a small glass of wine! And the press believed him! Howard was a very persuasive man. He got most of us out of jams at one time or another,” she said.

  Strickling was waiting for her with the studio’s general manager, Eddie Mannix. Ava had never met Mannix before but she knew that he was close to Mayer. “Mickey said he did Mayer’s ‘dirty work’ for him, and Frank later told me that he had Irish Mafia connections in New Jersey. Whether that was true or not, I don’t know.”

  But in all likelihood, Sinatra was right. Mannix had been a ticket scalper at the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey when Joe and Nick Schenck had taken him on as their bodyguard. When they sold the Palisades in the 1930s to concentrate on their movie interests, they took Mannix with them to keep an eye on the studio activities on the West Coast. By the 1940s he had become a trusted Mayer man.

  Ava still had no idea why Mannix had sent for her. “I thought he was going to get on my ass about something. I don’t know—too many late nights, keeping Mick up dancing till the early hours. Howard hadn’t given me a clue what it was about, he didn’t say much at all, but I felt more comfortable with him there. Then Mannix began discussing the wedding. Until that moment, I hadn’t given it all that much thought. I don’t think Mick and I had discussed the actual wedding at all, not the ceremony, not in any practical terms anyway. It seemed strange to be sitting there with this old Irishman, this complete stranger, discussing my wedding. He had a face like a raw potato in shades, that’s how I still remember him.”

  She laughed; then said, “But he was always sweet to me, despite the fact that he was about to piss on me—and that was only because Louis Mayer had ordered him to. It was nothing personal. That was his job, to carry out Mayer’s orders,” she said.

  “Ava, are you making this up?” I said warily.

  “Mayer had gone down on his knees and begged Mickey not to marry me. I was not Uncle L.B.’s flavor of the month.”

  I was still puzzled. “Why would Mayer order Mannix to piss on you, Ava?”

  “Do you want to hear the fucking story or not, honey?”

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  Mannix, she said, told her that the studio had worked out Mickey’s shooting schedule on his new Andy Hardy picture and the perfect date for their nuptials would be January 10, 1942. “I had no idea he wanted to discuss our wedding plans—he didn’t look like a fucking wedding planner to me, nor to anyone else, I imagine—but suddenly I got this crazy fucking notion that MGM was going to take care of everything: a reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or the Beverly Wilshire, a star-studded guest list, one of the studio’s top designers to create my bridal gown. I was carried away. After all, Mick was MGM’s biggest star, he was one of the most successful movie stars in the world. Of course his own studio would want to put on a show for his fans! I just got carried away, honey. I don’t blame Eddie Mannix. I let my imagination run away with me.”

  “I know what’s coming, Ava,” I said.

  “I was a kid. I was nineteen years old. I didn’t see it coming at all, honey,” she said.

  “Mannix was there to do Mayer’s dirty work,” I said.

  “He was there to piss on my parade, honey,” she said.

  There would be no white wedding, no glamorous guest list, just a hole-and-corner ceremony someplace as far away from Beverly Hills as possible. Mannix told her that this was to avert Mickey’s fans turning her big day into a circus—“into a ‘fucking donnybrook’ were his exact words, I’ve never forgotten them,” she said.

  But Ava knew that in spite of Mayer’s earlier lecture about the importance and sanctity of marriage, he was not prepared to break the hearts of millions of adolescent girls and risk destroying the fan base of the studio’s most valuable asset.

  THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE on the morning of January 10, 1942, in a tiny Protestant church in a village called Ballard in the Santa Ynez Mountains, California. Ava wore a smart navy blue suit and a cors
age of orchids. The wedding party consisted of Ava and Mickey, Bappie, Mickey’s father, Joe Yule, Ma, and Mickey’s stepfather. Rooney’s personal publicist and minder, Les Peterson, also attended with a studio photographer.

  “I think Larry Tarr was there, too—Bappie’s husband, the guy who took the picture of me that started it all. By this time, their marriage was on the skids; Bappie had had a little fling with the manager of the Plaza, where we stayed when we first arrived in Hollywood. Anyway, Larry might have been at the wedding. I can’t remember. It was not a memorable occasion, honey,” she said.

  After the ceremony, the guests drove straight back to Ma’s place in the Valley in one car—“Larry must have been at the wedding because there was a tremendous drunken brawl at Ma’s place that night and my sister said Larry was in the thick of it, as usual,” Ava remembered in a later interview at Ennismore Gardens—and the bride and groom, and Les Peterson, took off for the Del Monte Hotel on the Monterey Peninsula in Rooney’s Lincoln Continental, a gift from Henry Ford.

  “I liked Les. He was a young guy, but already quite bald. It wasn’t his fault he was tagging along on our honeymoon. But I was pleased he was there that first night. I invited him to our suite for a glass of Cristal. I still wasn’t much of a drinker at that time but I had a glass of champagne, and another glass of champagne. Les kept trying to excuse himself and I kept hanging on to him. Oh, one more glass. Talk about first night nerves. We were going through the Roederer’s Cristal like it was tap water. I was scared out of my fucking wits. I didn’t want Les to leave us. I would have felt a whole lot more relaxed if Mick and I had got it on weeks before. But I was so determined to be a virgin on my wedding night, I’d barely let him give me a belly rub.

  “All week, I had been saying to Bappie, What am I going to do? What am I going to do? She’d say: Relax, you’re going to do fine, honey. Nature will take its course. Just open wide! That was funny but it did nothing to gentle me down. She finally bought me a sexy negligee. She sent me off with that—and a douche bag. ‘That’s all a girl needs on her wedding night, honey,’ she said, and as usual she was right.”

  Everything was fine. It was a perfect wedding night, except she was terribly shy, she said. “But I caught on quickly. Very quickly. I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly. Mickey was tender, actually he was sweet. He couldn’t have been a better first lover for a lady. He’d been around quite a bit, of course—and marriage didn’t stop him for very long either.”

  The following morning, Ava woke up with “the teensiest hangover”—and the start of her menstrual period. “I was soaked. All the excitement and everything had brought it on two weeks early. I couldn’t get out of bed because I realized what had happened. Mick had already gotten up and wanted me to go with him to play golf. I was too embarrassed to tell him what had happened. I told him that I had a splitting headache. I knew he’d understand that,” she said.

  So while Rooney spent the day on the golf course, Ava—too shy to ask the hotel staff to take care of the situation—occupied herself washing the blood off the sheets and from her bridal negligee. “There was so much blood. I never saw so much blood. Well, not until GCS [George C. Scott] beat the bejesus out of me in Rome,” she said.

  I WAS WORKING LATE into the night on the first draft of her honeymoon chapter and having doubts about whether I should use her George C. Scott line at that point, or keep it for later. It was simply a matter of construction. Scott had not yet made an appearance in the book and I was wondering if I could use the line more effectively when I came to write about her torrid affair with him in Rome in 1964—she played Sarah to Scott’s Abraham in John Huston’s The Bible—when their drinking often became dangerously uncontrollable and he regularly beat her up.

  I was still turning the question over in my mind when Ava called.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. “What’s happening?”

  It was a funny question to ask at two o’clock in the morning, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion about a small technical detail that could be easily fixed in the editing.

  I told her I had been working on the story of her honeymoon.

  “Which one is that, honey? I had three,” she said.

  “Your first one—the one with Mickey Rooney,” I said.

  “How I lost my virginity. What do you think of that stuff?”

  I told her that I thought the whole episode, from the wedding ceremony in Ballard to the wedding night, was touching and funny.

  “You don’t think a little too much detail, honey—the blood on the sheets, and all that stuff?” she said. There was a dangerous hesitation in her voice. “Maybe I’ve been a little too graphic?” she said.

  “It’s perfect, Ava,” I told her firmly. “It’s very honest. I’m sure a lot of young women will identify with that situation. I don’t think we should change a word of it.”

  “Bloodstains are hard to get out of bedsheets,” she said. There was still hesitation in her voice.

  “It’s perfect,” I said again.

  “You don’t think it makes Mickey sound too fucking . . . well, too fucking insensitive? For not noticing I’d been bleeding—for going off to play golf for the day?”

  “Maybe he had noticed, and was being discreet,” I said.

  “You think so, honey? You really think that’s possible?”

  “I think it’s definitely a possibility. After all, he was a young guy,” I said. I knew I had to choose my words carefully. “I think you should just leave it as it is, and let people make up their own minds.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Anyway, I want to read it first,” she said unnecessarily, for that was already our arrangement.

  She would see it as soon as I’d finished it, I said. “I promise you, Mickey comes out of it fine,” I assured her.

  “I hope so. I don’t want to hurt him. Poor darling, he ain’t got a fucking cent. He’s been raked over the coals for millions by those goddamn wives he kept getting married to after me. What is it they say? The fucking you get for the fucking you got?”

  It made me laugh, as she meant it to. She continued to speak kindly of Rooney, and amusingly of his passion for golf. “I had to learn to play golf quickly otherwise I’d never see the boy,” she said. “I became very good at it, too. It became the best game I played and the one I liked least.”

  I was pleased she had dropped the negative discussion about the blood on the sheets. “What other games did Mickey play?” I asked.

  “He played the horses. He was at the track a lot. He played a lot of gin rummy, usually with Les. He continued to be a fanatical golfer but whenever he got in a slump, he’d break our clubs,” she said. “He had a real Irish temper. He took up tennis—which I adored. I was still playing it when I had my stroke.”

  It was almost 3 A.M. “You must be tired,” I said.

  “I’m fine, but I’m keeping you up,” she said in her special tone of sympathy. “You’d better get some sleep.”

  “You, too, Ava,” I said.

  “Good night, honey.”

  Three minutes later she called me back.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “I was about to brush my teeth.”

  “I’m still not sure whether we should use that stuff about scrubbing the bloodstains out of the sheets while Mick was out on the golf course,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Is that okay, we won’t use it? Or okay—okay what?”

  “It’s okay, we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said, keeping it as light as possible.

  “But you do understand my concern, don’t you, baby?” she said.

  “Not really, Ava,” I said. I knew that was a mistake the moment I said it.

  “I think people will find it distasteful,” she said.

  “I don’t see why they should,” I said. “It’s frank but it’s not distasteful.”

  “It’s unnecessary,” she said.

  “I think it’s honest.”

  “We’re no
t going to have a fight are we, baby?” she said.

  “I hope not. I’ve already explained why I think it’s so good, Ava.”

  “I have a head like a fucking sieve these days. Tell me again,” she said.

  “First of all, and most important, a lot of women and young girls are going to understand that situation,” I said. “If it hasn’t happened to them, it’s happened to someone they know. It will strike a chord with a lot of women.”

  There was also a directness about it that was pure Ava Gardner and that was why I was determined not to lose it, although I didn’t tell her that. After I had finished explaining it to her, there was silence on the line. I tried to remember how many times she had called me “baby”; more than twice was not a good sign.

  The silence continued. I said: “Ava, it’s gone three. We’re both tired. Why don’t we discuss it tomorrow?”

  “I’m not tired. I’m going to be awake all fucking night worrying about it,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll put it in the draft, we’ll sleep on it. You can always remove it at the editing stage, if you still don’t like it. It’s your book,” I said.

  “Then why put it in at all, for fuck sake?” she said. Her voice had hardened.

  “You might have a change of heart,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “I know you are, Ava. But I’d hate to lose it, and things get forgotten if they’re not in the first draft,” I said. I knew it wasn’t a convincing argument, it might not even have been true, but I didn’t want to give her an inch. She wasn’t a woman you should ever give an inch to. Anyway, I wanted her to know how determined I was to keep it in. I wanted her to understand how good and important her observation was.