by Peter Evans
“Don’t bother. I’ll ask Bappie. She’s the family historian. She’ll know if it’s there. I’ll call her. I’ll ask her.”
I looked at my watch. It was 8:15. It was after midday in California, and I suggested we call her at once.
“I’ll call her later,” she said.
“Okay,” I said docilely, remembering how carefully I still had to tread around the subject of Sinatra. But to my surprise, she never mentioned the story again, except once. A few mornings later, in the early hours, she called me: “I’ve spoken to Bappie. She says that story you told me about what I’m supposed to have said about Frank’s cock definitely isn’t in Kitty Kelley’s book. Bappie’s read it again and it’s not there.”
“I could have sworn that’s where I saw it,” I said lamely.
“Well, it isn’t. Forget about it. It’s garbage anyway,” she said.
I got the message.
22
Honey?” she said softly.
Before I understood the extent of her insomnia, I had encouraged her to call me anytime she couldn’t sleep, and knew that I had only myself to blame whenever she phoned me in the middle of the night.
“Honey?” she said again, more urgently.
“Ava, good morning,” I said. I tried to get my head together, and waited for her to tell me what was on her mind this time.
“Why do actresses always have this need to write their memoirs? If we want to be remembered we should keep our mouths shut. Orson got it right. He didn’t just saw Rita in half,” she said ambiguously.
I knew that Orson Welles had once sawed Rita Hayworth in half in his magic act, but I still couldn’t follow Ava’s logic. “How did Orson get it right, Ava?” I said.
“Didn’t he say actors should never explain anything to anyone? Actors should keep their private lives private.”
“He might have. I don’t recall it,” I said carefully.
“Wasn’t it in Citizen Kane?”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll check,” I said.
“I’m sure it was in Citizen Kane.”
I let that go. I was tired. None of this was faintly interesting to me.
“Anyway, actresses should never put in writing anything that can bite them in the keister,” she said.
That made me sit up. “You haven’t changed your mind about the book, have you?” I was wide awake now, and worried.
“Why do you say that, honey?” she asked innocently. “That’s not what I said. Have you changed your mind about the book? You must tell me if you have, honey. I won’t mind.”
I could tell she was amused, and I remembered it was the game she played with producers. “I like to make them think I’m indifferent about a role or a film they want me to do. That always gets them hot,” she’d once told me.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” I said and changed the subject: “Can’t you sleep?”
“I wanted a ciggie so badly. Old habits die hard.”
“You didn’t give in?”
“Frank says it’s easy to give up smoking. He says he quits every day,” she joked, ducking the question.
“That’s very funny,” I said. I wanted to get back to sleep. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Frank smokes less than I ever did,” she said, again ignoring my question. “He never smokes during the day. He never inhales anyway. Watch him next time he’s on. He’ll take two or three drags and stub it out.
“Smoking is part of his image. He does it with a lot of class. Although Bogart did it better. It was an art form with Bogie.
“But it killed the poor bastard in the end. He must have been smoking sixty a day when we made The Barefoot Contessa. He had a contract to promote one of the tobacco companies. He needed no encouragement. Chesterfields, I think it was. He said it was the best deal he ever signed. His dressing room was like a foggy day in London town every fucking day.”
It was obvious that she wanted to talk. It was her way of getting through the night. Spoli Mills said Ava used to keep her awake at night and now that was my role. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to my night’s sleep since temazepam,” she said.
“If you want, we could talk about making Barefoot Contessa. We haven’t covered that period yet.” I gave in to the inevitable. “What was it like working with Bogart? Shall we talk about that?”
“He would often ruin our scenes together with his coughing fits. It wasn’t the happiest movie I ever worked on,” she said.
“Why was that?”
“Did you know him?”
“Bogart? No.”
“He was a bastard,” she said flatly.
“In what way?”
“In every way, honey. Mank [director Joseph L. Mankiewicz] liked to shoot long scenes, he was a dialogue man. Bogie hated learning lines. He knew every trick in the book to fuck up a scene and get a retake if he felt a scene wasn’t going his way. Marius Goring [the English actor who played her lover, Alberto Bravano, a South American millionaire] was on to his games. He called him Humphrey Bogus.”
“Why didn’t Bogart like you?”
“Probably because he knew that it was my film, not his. He wasn’t happy that I got the part. A lot of better actresses than me were up for it. Bogie didn’t approve of me. He had no respect for me at all. He never tried to hide it.”
“That never came over in the film.”
“He was a good actor.”
“So are you,” I told her.
“He knew that I was being paid more than he was getting. That was another thing that pissed him. The money wasn’t because I was such a great fucking talent, because I wasn’t. But I was a box office name by that time. I’d just come off a run of big pictures: Show Boat, which made MGM a fucking fortune, Pandora [and the Flying Dutchman], Snows of Kilimanjaro. It doesn’t get much better than that. Mankiewicz had to pay MGM a fortune to get me. My name on the billboards put bums on seats, as they say now.”
“Do you know how much Mankiewicz paid for you?”
“I can tell you exactly how much, honey: two hundred grand plus ten percent of the gross over the first million.” There was pride in her voice as well as anger.
“That was a lot of money.”
“I didn’t realize how hot I was. The two hundred grand–plus was the figure that stuck in Bogie’s gullet. It pisses me, too, because the greedy bastards at MGM grabbed most of it. I was still under contract. The studio was making a fucking fortune out of me. I was their milch cow. I took home less than seventy grand for that picture. Bogie still pissed and moaned that I was getting more than he got, but he banked his usual hundred thou. It didn’t make him any nicer.
“I told you, it wasn’t the happiest film I ever worked on. I’d gone into it with such high hopes. Mankiewicz had gotten a wonderful performance out of Linda Darnell in A Letter to Three Wives a couple of years earlier, and another stunning performance from Anne Baxter in All About Eve. He’d gotten a reputation as a woman’s director, although I don’t think he was ever as good as George [Cukor, who directed her in Bhowani Junction]. George was gay; Joe wasn’t. George understood actresses, Joe liked to screw ’em.
“I told Mankiewicz going in that I wasn’t much of an actress. But I understood Maria Vargas [the contessa of the title]. She was a lot like me. That was an understatement! If he’d help me, I said, I thought I could deliver a performance we could both live with. Well, something went wrong. I didn’t get any help from him at all. He was a complete bust. I read somewhere that he knew it, too. He told a reporter he didn’t think he was as much help to me as he would have liked. He got that right. The only good thing on that picture was Eddie O’Brien. He deserved his Oscar. I first met him on The Killers. He was a wonderful actor, and knew I was struggling. He would say little things, like: ‘Don’t be in a hurry to say that line. Wait a beat. It’s a good line, it’s important.’ Eddie knew more about Maria Vargas than Mankiewicz did—and Mankiewicz created her!”
“But he based her on you, right?”<
br />
“Down to the soles of my feet, honey. Later he said she was based on Rita [Hayworth]. That was crap. There was too much shit in the script about my affair with Howard. Joe even included the scene in which I nearly whacked the bastard.”
“Whoa, you nearly killed Howard Hughes?”
“I hit him with an ashtray. I think it was onyx. Anyway, it was heavy. I practically had him laid out on a slab. We fought all the time but I nearly put a lily in his hand that night.”
The memory of it made her laugh until it became a cough. She said she’d tell me the story later. It was worth a whole chapter, she said. “It’s funny now but Louis Mayer nearly had kittens when he heard about it. He was convinced I’d killed the guy.”
“Tell me more about The Barefoot Contessa,” I said.
“It could have been called Howard and Ava, it was so fucking obvious. But Joe swore till he was blue in the face that it was based on Rita’s life. Howard was a friend of his—most of those guys stuck together like shit—but he was on to him like a fucking tiger once he’d read the script. I didn’t give Howard the script, by the way; Mankiewicz was convinced I did, but I know that Howard got it from Johnny Meyer, although Johnny denied it,” she said.
Mankiewicz had used Meyer as the model for the publicity man Oscar Muldoon, whom Edmond O’Brien had played as a sweaty, sycophantic press agent, for which he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
“The film had wrapped and was ready to be shipped but Howard still demanded changes. It must have cost Mankiewicz a small fortune. The Hughes character, a Texas tycoon [played by Warren Stevens], became a Wall Street big shot. They had to dub pages of dialogue to remove the clues that pointed to Howard. I felt sorry for Joe. We had our differences but he always stood up for me when Bogie was being difficult.
“By this time Bogie was feeling his age. He looked burnt out, like Daddy at the end. I still admired the sonofabitch on the screen, I just didn’t like him very much as a man—and he had no respect for me at all.
“He knew I was dating Luis Miguel Dominguín. It wasn’t much of a secret. Frank had heard about it in New York. Luis Miguel was the most famous bullfighter in the world. Bogie was furious that I was giving Frank a hard time. He loved Frank like a brother. They started the Rat Pack together. ‘I don’t know why you want to two-time Frank with a goddamn fruit,’ he’d needle me. ‘I never had you down as a dame who’d go for a pantywaist.’ Stuff like that. Luis Miguel was one of the bravest men I knew. He was definitely no fruit, I can tell you that. Bogie knew it, too. It was his way of winding me up. He was always trying to get my goat.”
She paused thoughtfully. “What year was that?”
“You started shooting Barefoot Contessa at the beginning of ’54,” I said.
“My God,” she said in a small voice. I heard her refresh her nightcap and wondered what she was drinking at three o’clock in the morning. She didn’t sound drunk. “Frank and I had been married barely a couple of years. The marriage was obviously unraveling even then. Maybe I’m remembering some things wrong. It was a long time ago. I get mixed up, honey,” she said. “That fucking stroke didn’t help one little bit. You’ll have to sort out the dates later.”
She had told me that she had never cheated on any of her husbands. This couldn’t have been true if she had started the affair with Luis Miguel Dominguín. But I let it pass. This was not the time to question things she had said in earlier conversations. As she often reminded me, it was her life and she’d remember it any way she wanted.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Ava?”
“Yeah, I’m here, honey,” she said after a moment.
“I thought you had fallen asleep on me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m just surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did. Although it was over long before it ended.”
“It must have been a difficult time for you,” I said sympathetically.
“It was a bad time for Frank. Poor darling, he was so insecure. He was broke. He didn’t have a job. He was hanging on to his place in Palm Springs by the skin of his teeth. It was the last real asset he had. If he’d lost that, it would have been the end of the line for him. He had made a lot of enemies in his good years, before the bobby-soxers found somebody new to throw their panties at. Nobody wanted to be around him. There were no hangers-on. He didn’t amuse them anymore. He couldn’t lift a check. There was nobody but me. He had burned most of his bridges with the press. There was a catalogue of disasters: His voice had gone. MGM had let him go. His agent had let him go. So had CBS. On top of all that, the poor bastard suffered a hemorrhage of his vocal cords and couldn’t talk, let alone sing, for about six weeks. That’s when I saw through those people. I saw through Hollywood. Naive little country girl that I was, I saw through all the phoniness, all the crap. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I go back there today I realize just how right I was. It’s just awful, it’s still false, the yes-men and bullshitters are all still there.”
“At least your career was on the up,” I said.
“Thank God. Time magazine put me on the cover in 1951, just before we married. They called me Hollywood’s most irresistible female, or some rubbish like that. A Time cover was a great accolade in those days. It was almost as sought after as an Oscar. We all wanted one—except Frank. Time was on his SOB list since they said he looked flea-bitten in some movie or other. He took that very personally. He could hold a grudge longer than anyone I know, even against friends. He turned against Sammy Davis for years after I did a Christmas spread with Sam for one of those big black magazines. They made up, on the surface they did, but Frank never really forgave him, he was always slapping him down. People thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.”
“What was that about, Ava?” I said.
“Frank had just made a film with Shelley Winters [Meet Danny Wilson]. It wasn’t very good. They sent out invitations to the premiere in New York. It wasn’t a big do, I don’t remember too many faces being there, but Sammy was sweet enough to come. He gave me a little pair of drop earrings, engraved AS [Ava Sinatra]. When he asked me to do a shoot with him for the Christmas cover of Ebony I think it was, I could hardly say no.
“He came round to the Hampshire House with his photographers. I dressed up in a pretty red dress, Sammy put on a Santa Claus suit and wore a hokey white beard. I spent all afternoon on a picture session with him, something I wouldn’t normally do. Frank wasn’t there, but my sister was, my maid Rene was there. I was on the wagon. I ordered Coca-Cola for everybody. When the session was finished they took some informal shots of Sammy and me—me on the sofa, Sammy sitting on the arm, looking happy, looking festive, that sort of thing. He put his arm around me in a friendly way.
“It must have been a couple of weeks later, Howard Hughes tipped me that Confidential magazine was planning to run a story claiming that Sammy and I had had an affair. They have pictures, he said. Frank hit the roof when I told him. ‘Did you screw him?’ he screamed. Of course I didn’t, I said. Frank went through the whole there’s-no-smoke-without-fire routine. How could he even think that? I said. Was he crazy? ‘How the fuck does your boyfriend know all about it then?’ he yelled. Howard was always ‘my boyfriend.’ Frank would never call him by his name. I said, ‘I’ll sue the fuckers, Frank. I’ll sue their asses off.’
“ ‘Yeah, do that,’ he said.
“I was so naive. I thought it would be easy to kill the story. Whitey Hendry, who ran MGM’s private police force, had a lot of muscle in that town. He could keep most of the studio’s scandals under wraps. He said he’d get back to me. Instead I got a call from Howard Strickling, the head of studio publicity. I liked Howard. I had a lot of respect for him, everybody did. He’d been with the studio forever. He said, ‘Ava, I don’t want you to sue this rag. It’s a piddling, jerkwater outfit. If you sue you’ll get a small apology and no money—but they will get enormous publicity around the world. It’ll hurt you, it will hu
rt the studio.’
“ ‘You’re not going to do anything about it?’ I said.
“He said, ‘Of course we are. We are going to ignore it.’ ”
I heard her sigh. “All my fucking ghosts,” she said.
“We’ve got some good stuff, Ava. It’s been our best session yet.” I said, and meant it, although I knew that the narrative would need some fixing.
“You think so?”
“I know so. We probably have enough material for several chapters. The Bogart material is terrific.”
“You think so?” she said again.
“We should always work through the night,” I said.
“You, me, and my ghosts,” she said.
“Good night, Ava,” I said, but she had put the phone down and the line was already dead.
23
Burning the midnight oil, I finished the draft of the next couple of chapters in three days and couriered them over to her with a friendly, businesslike note:
Dear Ava,
I hope you’ve caught up on your sleep, and are feeling better. I am a great believer in the healing powers of sleep. Grab as much of it as you can, I say. One can never dream to excess!
As promised, here are the drafts of the chapters we discussed. I think they work well, and move at a good pace. I’ve wrapped up your marriage to Mickey, continued to develop your relationship with Howard Hughes, and segued into your marriage to Artie Shaw (1945). It stops just short of your breakthrough movies (Whistle Stop; The Killers) in 1946.
Since you talk about Hollywood and the 1940s better than anyone I know, I have used your own words and phrases wherever I can. The gossip, opinions, and asides are all yours, of course!
Anyway, these are first drafts; nothing is set in stone. After you have checked the facts, and corrected my inevitable errors and any misunderstandings, let me have your thoughts and suggestions, and I will get moving on the final polish.