by Peter Evans
“Incompatibility then? That’s what you’ll go for? Can I give Mr. Mayer your word on that?” he said.
“Sure,” I said casually, but I really meant it. I knew that if I had sued Mick for adultery, and named some of the girls he’d been fucking, it would have blown his wholesome Andy Hardy image right out of the water. It could have destroyed his career stone dead. I truly didn’t want to hurt him. I knew that citing “incompatibility” was the cleanest and fastest route out of the marriage.
Eddie said, “You’re not as dumb as you look, kid.”
He asked me what I was going to do after the divorce. The question surprised me. I knew the final decree would take at least six months or maybe even longer to come through and I hadn’t planned that far ahead.
I said, “If the studio renews my contract, I’d like to try to make a go of acting.”
“I think you should,” he said.
A couple of weeks later, the studio renewed my contract and increased my salary.
It put my mind at rest.
I put the copy and my note into an envelope and biked it over to Ennismore Gardens. Then I went to the Caprice for lunch with Ed Victor.
17
We spoke at least once a week on the telephone, but I hadn’t seen Ed Victor since we met with Snyder at Ava’s apartment a couple of months earlier. The Caprice, on Arlington Street, a hundred yards down from the Ritz, was one of Ed’s favorite London restaurants. A territorial man, he was already there when I arrived, seated at his regular table with a discreet view of the whole room. I suspected that he liked the restaurant because not only was the food good, and he knew many of its famous clients by their first names, but it also possessed an atmosphere of wealth and privilege in which it was possible to talk megabuck deals at one’s ease.
He was in no hurry to ask about Ava. We chatted amiably for twenty minutes; we had many mutual friends, and there was no shortage of amusing gossip and trade talk to exchange. We eventually studied the menu. We both ordered fish with a chilled Pouilly-Fuissé.
“How is Ava behaving?” he finally asked.
“Good days and bad days,” I told him.
“How good are the good days?” he said.
“Good enough to make me stop worrying about the bad days,” I said.
“And Theodora?” he asked. “How is that coming along?”
“It’s not. I’ve decided to put it on ice for the time being.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Ava’s too demanding,” I said. His suggestion that I continue to work on Theodora during the day and Ava at night had not been very practical, I told him.
“Well, it was worth a try,” he said philosophically. But his smile gave the game away: he had never expected me to be able to work on both books at the same time anyway.
“I’ll be able to understand Theodora better when I can give her my full attention,” I said casually.
“Why is that?” he asked quietly with sudden curiosity in his voice.
“I’m discovering a lot from Ava about movie actresses of a certain age,” I said as inconsequentially as I could. The question had surprised me and it was the best I could come up with.
“Such as?” he persisted.
“Oh, you know. Their vanities, and insecurities. The self-protective fibs they all tell. The delusions they have about themselves. Some touches I’d like to give to Theodora,” I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about Ava at that point. I didn’t want to tell him her doubts about the book’s frankness. I definitely knew it would be a mistake to mention her disquiet at seeing her ribald language repeated so accurately on the page. Her dialogue was one of the book’s strengths. I didn’t want to put doubts in his mind; I didn’t want to spoil his lunch. Anyway, I was convinced that these were problems I could handle, or more likely she’d simply forget all about them, the way she dealt with most of her problems.
“Do you like her?” Ed suddenly asked, watching my face closely.
I said I did, very much. “She’s smart. She’s funny. She can be difficult, though.”
“In what way?”
“She’s like Onassis. She doesn’t respond to question-and-answer interviews. She’s a lady who likes to lead,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully. After a moment, he asked, “Is she going to deliver all that she promised?”
“I’m sure she will, Ed,” I said.
“No second thoughts?” he said. He was a perceptive bastard. But that was what made him such a brilliant agent.
“Was it just the Louis Roederer Cristal talking? Is that what you’re asking me?” I avoided a straight answer.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said, and laughed. “Is she still drinking?”
“Of course, but she can handle it. It doesn’t seem to have affected her memory. You won’t be disappointed,” I said with assurance, although a conversation I’d had with Ava a few nights earlier did bother me.
“I STILL DON’T KNOW whether I’m doing the right thing going ahead with this lousy goddamn book, honey,” she’d said. Her voice was raspy. It was one of her early hours of the morning conversations. “Frank’s not going to be happy when he finds out that I’m writing a fucking book,” she said.
They were still close, and I was surprised that she hadn’t told him. They talked all the time on the phone, although she hadn’t seen him for at least five years. “We live in different worlds, honey. We get along best when we’re apart,” she said.
“Are you going to tell him about the book?” I knew that it was a stupid question the moment I asked it.
“I’ll have to choose my moment. I don’t want to do it on the phone. He’ll find out sooner or later. I’ll have to choose my moment,” she said again. “I don’t want him to hear about it from someone else.”
When they were first married, she said, they had agreed that neither of them would ever write their memoirs.
“That was a long time ago, Ava,” I reminded her.
“Nineteen fifty-one,” she said. “November 7—a Wednesday,” she added with ironical precision.
“The whole fucking world’s press was on our necks. Reporters loved making a scandal out of our lives, and Frank’s behavior never helped. He hated the press. He loathed reporters with a passion. They were all sonsofbitches. I don’t know how they did it but those creeps always knew where to find us, and how to get a rise out of Frank.”
Sinatra was obviously on her mind. I got up and went to my study, and started making notes.
“Boy, they were good at that, those hacks,” she went on with that curiously fierce and at the same time oddly amused way she had of recalling the bad times with Sinatra. “He hated being called Frankie; they called him Frankie. Except in Mexico. In Mexico, they went one better: they called him Mr. Gardner. You can guess what he thought of that! When he was flying high, he’d been a cocky bastard. That was his nature. It was part of his charm. Now they were killing him for it.”
“Reporters have long memories,” I said.
“As well as long knives,” she said.
“Once, Frank was on a comeback tour in Europe. I was making a movie in England. Knights of the Round Table, a piece of medieval malarkey. Robert Taylor was Lancelot; he did all the fighting. I was Guinevere, all I had to do was sit around and look pretty. I was good at that. But I got fed up with it after a while. I flew off to Italy to catch a few of Frank’s gigs. I had to have been in love with him to sit through those performances. Let’s say he was not at his best. He was playing to half-empty houses. The Italian press felt he was patronizing them.
“One evening they must have paid the guy who worked the spot to turn it on me in the middle of one of Frank’s numbers. The audience started chanting: Ava, Ava, Ava. It was embarrassing for me and humiliating as hell for Frank. I got up and walked out. So did Frank.
“They quieted down once I’d left. Frank went back on and finished his act, which I thought was brave of him. When he got back to the ho
tel that evening he blamed me for the disturbance. We had another fight, of course. The next day I flew back to England to face the music for taking the run-out.
“It didn’t matter a damn, of course. The studio didn’t even know I’d gone. It gave more hokey dueling time for Bob and Mel Ferrer. But I had to be punished for going AWOL, and another year was added to my contract. That way they could keep you under contract for a hundred fucking years if they wanted to.”
She paused. “Are you making notes of this, honey?” she said.
“Maybe I should,” I said hesitantly. I didn’t want her to know I always made notes of her three o’clock in the morning calls, or when she didn’t realize she was saying anything useful or indiscreet. I never told her that, of course. I didn’t want to inhibit her. “You should keep a diary, Ava,” I said.
“I don’t have to, honey. I’m talking about my life. Some things you never forget.”
After a pause, I said: “Anyway, you were telling me about Frank.”
“It was all about Frank in those days. I once won a bet with Bappie that she couldn’t find a single picture of Frank in which he wasn’t snarling at a photographer. It was a nightmare time. Our affair. The collapse of his marriage to Nancy. His kids begging him to come home. He was going through a terrible time. We both were. It was hell, but it was worse for Frank. Nancy was taking him for practically every penny he had.
“She played hardball, but I couldn’t blame her. I’ve never blamed her. She’d been a good wife. She was the mother of his children. She had every right to fight for him, for their marriage. She’d stuck by Frank through thick and thin. That’s something I should say in the book, by the way.
“I stayed right out of it. But she must have hated my guts. She wouldn’t withdraw her objections to his Nevada divorce until he paid off his back alimony. He owed about forty thousand dollars. She wanted a further payment when she got a California divorce. She threatened to take over Frank’s Palm Springs place unless he paid up. That was about the only asset the poor darling had left.
“As I said, his voice had gone. The bobby-soxers had moved on. His career had nosedived. Mine was on the up, thank Christ. The studio was starting to pay me decent money at last. I got a hundred and forty grand for Show Boat, even though the bastards finally dubbed my voice for the musical numbers. It was still less than they got for loaning me out, but I wasn’t complaining, and it kept us afloat—in more ways than one! We were both drinking far too much. Jesus, we were really knocking it back, and fighting all the time. Jesus, did we fight—and make up!
“Anyway, that’s the time we made this stupid pact never to write our memoirs. ‘Those news bums love memoirs,’ Frank said. ‘You give them a pot to piss in and they’ll pour it over your head the first chance they get.’
“Some of the papers offered damned good money for Frank to tell our story. A tabloid, the New York Daily Mirror I think it was, or it might have been one of the syndicates, I forget now, but they offered more than he got for Meet Danny Wilson, a crappy little movie he’d just made with Shelley Winters. He needed the money badly, but he told them to get lost. He had principles, I’ll give him that.”
“It’s been forty years, Ava. Frank’s not going to hold you to it after all this time, is he?” I said.
“He’s never written his memoirs,” she said.
“Maybe he’s never had to,” I reminded her of her present difficulties.
“You’re not listening to me, baby. Frank was flat broke when we tied the knot. The poor darling was on his ass. His voice had gone. His records weren’t selling. His movie contract had been dropped. His confidence was shot.
“I don’t know where those stories came from that the Mafia was taking care of him. They should have been. But the fucking so-called Family was nowhere to be seen when he needed them. It really ticks me when I read how generous the Mob was when he was on the skids. But I was the one paying the rent when he couldn’t get arrested. I was the one making the pot boil, baby. It was me!”
It was wonderful copy. I was sorry when she said she was tired and put the phone down. I think she was crying.
ED WAITED UNTIL THE end of our lunch and had signaled for the check before he told me his news.
“Have you read Kitty Kelley’s biography of Frank Sinatra?”
“Not yet,” I told him.
“You must read it. It’s full of interesting stuff about Ava.”
“I will,” I promised.
After a long silence, he said: “You don’t know the story Ava tells about the size of Frank’s penis?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s very blessed.”
“I must read it.”
“You must. I’m astonished you haven’t read it. It’s an Ava classic. She’s very graphic.”
“I’ll read it tonight,” I said.
“Dick Snyder says he wants you to ask her about it.”
“Dick wants me to ask Ava about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock?” I repeated dully.
“He’s very keen that we use it in the book.”
“How the hell can I put a question like that to her, Ed?”
“You’ll think of something,” he said. “You’re the writer.”
18
There were five messages on my answerphone when I got home. Three of them were from Ava. The first one said, “Got the new chapter. Let’s talk, honey. Call me.” The second one, timed one hour later, said, “Where the hell are you? Call me, fahcrissake.” The final message, at 5:15 P.M., sounded more conciliatory: “It’s Ava. Call me when you get in, please. I don’t understand your note. Jesus Christ, when have I bawled you out about anything, honey?”
“How much longer is this fucking book going to take, baby?” did cross my mind, but I let it go. I was still worried about Dick Snyder’s request that I ask her to repeat the story about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock. Without appearing puerile or overly inquisitive, there seemed to be no polite way of bringing up the subject. It was a three-pipe problem all right.
Ava was still irate when she called again just before six. “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon,” she said crossly. “Where the hell have you been, baby?”
“I had lunch with Ed. He says hi.”
“It was a goddamn long lunch. I’m surprised you can find the time.”
It was clearly not the moment to ask her about the size of Frank Sinatra’s dick. It still seemed to me bad form to ask anytime. “Have you read the copy I sent you?” I said pleasantly. I didn’t want to get into an argument about how long I took for lunch, but I saw the funny side of her irritation. Anyway, she changed the subject.
“Do I really swear that much?” This was the third time she had questioned me about the accuracy of the dialogue I wrote for her. She seemed genuinely puzzled. “I don’t swear that much, do I?”
“I’m afraid you do, Ava.”
“Maybe I swear a little when I’m angry,” she said. I knew she couldn’t really believe that, and her solemn tone made me laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“Ava, I’ve quoted you verbatim.”
“You make me sound like a goddamn tramp,” she said petulantly.
“Last time you said I made you sound like a fishwife,” I said, and laughed to let her know I wanted to keep it friendly.
There was a puzzled silence in which I knew she was making up her mind whether to be angry or amused. “We’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?” she finally said with a laugh I had not expected. It was her husky, smoker’s laugh. It was disarming and sexy.
“Once or twice,” I said.
“Well, it won’t do, honey. It won’t do at all. I want you to clean up the obscenities for the book. We don’t need that shit at all.”
“I think it would be a mistake, Ava,” I said.
“Why do you think that?” she asked sharply.
It was the kind of question Peter Viertel had warned me about. When they were making Th
e Sun Also Rises, in which she played Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley, he told me: “I’d show her the script, she’d ask something innocuous like, ‘Would Lady Brett say that line?’ or ‘Does Lady Brett need to say anything here? Jake [Barnes, the narrator and hero of The Sun Also Rises, played by Tyrone Power] will understand from her look what she’s thinking. There will be no need to spell it out.’
“And suddenly she’s embroiled you in an almighty argument about the script, or about the book you’re trying to write for her. You can’t reason with her because she never approaches anything intellectually. She is the most intuitive woman I know. About roles, about men, about anything—her decisions are made totally without any reasoning at all.”
She gets away with it, he’d said, because she expects men to fall in love with her. And usually they do, he’d added.
“It makes us awfully vulnerable to her whims. She turns men around like no other woman I know. The problem is, she prefers strong lovers—but wants her writers and directors to be weak as piss. That’s a pity because she is so much better with men who stand up to her. Guys like John Huston. He doesn’t put up with her nonsense—and neither should you, by the way!”
Viertel stopped and looked at me solemnly for a long moment, as if deciding whether I was up to the task of taking her on. “Anyway, that’s the way to play the game, but it’s easier said than done,” he’d said, and burst into laughter. “Don’t let it worry you, not many of us can handle Ava. Not when she turns those green eyes on us.”
I could feel her green eyes on me now. Nevertheless, I was determined to make my point. “Ava, I really don’t think we should mess with your dialogue. I love it the way it is. It would be a mistake to try to gentrify it.”
“Well, I think it’s fucking vulgar, I won’t have it, honey,” she said again.
“It’s uninhibited, but that’s you, Ava,” I tried again.
“It’s crass, honey. All those fucking cuss words are undignified.”
“Without a few cuss words, it just wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t sound like you, Ava,” I said.