Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “The penny dropped. Howard Hughes, I said, appalled. Howard Hughes was a great tit man and loved Greer’s designs. He sent all his girls to him.

  “ ‘Exactly, Howard Hughes. Frank’s going to love that when he finds out you’re marrying him in one of Howard Hughes’s blue-eyed boy’s creations,’ Bappie said.

  “Frank hated Howard Hughes. He was jealous of all my previous lovers but especially of Howard. And Artie Shaw, of course.

  “ ‘Well, Frank’s not going to find out, is he?’ I said, although anyone who knew anything at all about fashion would recognize it as a Howard Greer design straight off.

  “ ‘Well done,’ Bappie said sardonically.”

  26

  This conversation never happened, okay?”

  It was Bill Edwards, vice president of marketing for MGM International, and a friend of Spoli and Paul Mills. Through them, he had become close to Ava. He thought she was one of the wittiest, most self-deprecating actresses he knew. He was an old friend of mine, too. We had been young reporters together, and I trusted him totally.

  “What conversation?” I said.

  “Have you ever invited Ava to dinner—to your place, I mean?”

  “Not yet,” I said, puzzled. She hated going out at night. Although it was less noticeable than she believed, she was conscious of the frozen look of her left profile as a result of the strokes. She never accepted dinner invitations.

  “It would be pointless to ask. She just wouldn’t come, to my place or to anywhere else,” I protested.

  “You should at least invite her. She’s upset about it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told Spoli.”

  “Spoli has never mentioned it to me.”

  “Maybe Ava told her not to, but I’m mentioning it to you now. I really think you should ask her,” he said again.

  A former MGM publicist, Edwards had spent half a lifetime dealing with actresses. Like Greg Morrison, he knew them inside out, their vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies; he especially loved Ava’s down-to-earth take on life. He had first met her at the Millses’ apartment in London shortly after she had completed Mogambo in Kenya when she was in London doing the post-sync work on the picture and seemed in no hurry to return to California—and Sinatra.

  If he believed that I should invite her to dinner, there must have been a reason.

  “Okay, I’ll ask her,” I said. Accompanied by Bill, Ava came to my place for dinner with me and my wife.

  Ava didn’t wait to be invited to sit at the table. She sat down where the light was to her advantage.

  “The canvas behind you, Peter, is that the one you told me about? Your favorite guests are invited to sign?”

  “Yes, do you want to sign it?”

  “Let me think of something.”

  We had a lovely dinner, and Ava regaled us with her story of one night spent with four New York garbage collection men.

  She was in New York for the premiere of one of her movies, followed by the customary party at one of the city’s top hotels.

  Naturally gifted with a low boredom threshold, she rapidly tired of the company. “It was like watching a drunk count his change,” was her expert opinion, “and I soon went AWOL [Asleep With Open Lids], so I kicked off my shoes, made the usual powder room excuse, left the table and started walking back to my hotel.”

  She was walking along Fifth Avenue when The Barefoot Contessa was spotted weaving her way by the team of a city garbage truck doing its nightly round. “Hey, Ava!” shouted the driver in his familiar New York way, “you can’t walk alone like that in a city like this. Hop in, we’ll give you a lift.” Which she did, squeezed between two sons of toil in the cab and guarded by two more riding shovel at the rear.

  Arriving at the hotel and noting the night was still young, she invited them in. “Come on up boys and we’ll tie one on.” Which they did, the festivities reaching three in the morning when they were interrupted by a knock on the door and the night manager entered. “I think he was English,” Ava recalled, “because he was very polite and apologized, profusely, I think is the word.” He said there had been complaints. Not about the noise, but because the garbage truck had been parked in front of the hotel all night. “Not the sort of thing we are used to, you see,” he concluded apologetically. So the truck was moved to another spot, and the party continued. One of the best she had ever hosted, recalled Ava.

  Then Bill told us how after a particularly heavy night, he had found himself walking with Ava and Spoli through the streets of Kensington in search of “some fresh air.” It was that period when London was teeming with coffee and burger bars all sporting pseudo-American titles on their shop fronts. They were approached by two young American tourists who asked if they knew where The Great American Disaster was. Ava was not looking her best but was on the ball. “You’re looking at her, kid,” she told them.

  After midnight when Ava and Bill had left, I looked at the canvas on the wall to examine the new addition. It was a caricature of a chicken squeezed between Rex Harrison and David Hemmings with a speech bubble saying, “The chick got her corn tonight.” It was signed “Ava.”

  Epilogue

  BY ED VICTOR

  Peter Evans sat down to write the final chapter of this book on Friday morning, August 31, 2012, with his notes in front of him on his desk. The manuscript was due the next day, and his goal—to finish the book he had begun writing with Ava Gardner a quarter of a century ago—was finally in sight. Sadly, he never got to write “The End,” because at about 11:30 A.M., he had a massive heart attack and died.

  These are the notes he left behind: Soon after the dinner party, during one of their phone conversations, Ava said to Peter:

  “You never told me Frank sued you for a million dollars.”

  “In 1972, that’s right. He sued the BBC, and me, for a million dollars but finally he settled for about a thousand pounds and an apology in the High Court. I had forgotten all about it.”

  “Well he hasn’t. He doesn’t forget a fucking thing. You should have told me, honey.”

  “I’m sorry, what has brought this up?”

  “I told him you were writing my book. He wasn’t happy about that. What did you say, fahcrissake?”

  “Not much, I was on the TV program 24 Hours. I said it was rumored that the Mafia helped get him the Maggio role in From Here to Eternity. I never said there was any truth in it. I simply didn’t know. Although it was widely acknowledged that Mario Puzo used Frank Sinatra as the model for singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. But the BBC program suggested that he was in London ducking a subpoena to appear before the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Organized Crime. Kitty Kelley said as much in her book. Frank didn’t sue her.”

  That conversation was the beginning of the end of Peter’s relationship with Ava and her book. He called me right afterward and told me he saw, all too clearly, the writing on the wall. Ava had always had her doubts about the book, constantly complaining to him that she was revealing far too much about her life for comfort. Frank Sinatra’s condemnation of Peter was the final straw for her. We concluded that Sinatra had probably asked her how much money she expected to make from the book and offered to pay her that amount not to write it. Whatever the case, Peter’s work with Ava ceased shortly thereafter. She eventually went ahead with another writer and produced a bland, sanitized version of her story, which was published after her death.

  Many years later, in May 2009, Peter asked me to lunch with him, saying he had an interesting proposition to put to me. Over that lunch, he proposed writing a book about his adventures with Ava, incorporating into it the approximately forty thousand words of Ava’s that he had on tape. I agreed this was a marvelous idea, because I knew just how revelatory and fascinating those words were. I told Peter that we had to get permission from the estate of Ava Gardner to print the transcripts of those tapes verbatim—which we duly did. Ava’s manager, the venerable Jess Morgan, enthusiastica
lly gave the estate’s blessing to the project, and Peter began to write the book.

  Peter’s widow, Pamela Evans, remembers that sometime after the collaboration ended, Peter called Ava and said that he hadn’t heard from her for a while and jokingly said he didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. Ava promised him that she would send a sign when she died. On the afternoon Ava died, the promised sign was delivered. It was the day of the European Great Storm of January 25, 1990. A two-hundred-year-old oak tree crashed through the roof of Peter’s writing room. Fortunately Peter was at the gym at the time.

  Ava always said to Peter that maybe one day, when she was “pushing clouds around,” the book she was working on with him could be published. Now they are both pushing clouds around and her amazing life story can finally be told properly.

  (1) This portrait of Ava taken by her brother-in-law Larry Tarr led to a screen test with MGM. When Ava left for Los Angeles, her mother told her, “Enjoy yourself, my darling baby. You are going to be a movie star.”

  (2) Ava with her beloved older sister Beatrice, known as “Bappie.” Bappie accompanied Ava to Hollywood and chaperoned her on her first date with future husband Mickey Rooney.

  (3) Nineteen-year-old Ava with her new husband, Mickey Rooney. “He went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge,” said Ava. Lana Turner nicknamed him “Andy Hard-on.”

  (4) The newlyweds with Ava’s mother, Mary Elizabeth “Molly” Gardner, in the Gardner home in North Carolina. Ava’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had been too ill to attend their wedding. On that visit Rooney put on a terrific show for Ava’s mother. “Nothing had ever touched me as deeply as Mickey’s performance for Mama that day.”

  (5) Lana Turner was Ava’s idol. Lana had had an affair with Mickey Rooney and had married Artie Shaw. “First Mick, then Artie . . . she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too,” Ava said. “Even so, I liked her.”

  (6) Howard Hughes “was in my life, on and off, for more than twenty years, but I never loved him,” said Ava. “Till death us do part would have been a whole lot sooner than later if we had tied the knot.”

  (7) Ava married star bandleader Artie Shaw in 1945. She admired his intellect, but he bullied her emotionally: “He was always putting me down. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating sonofabitch.”

  (8) John Huston working with Ava on The Bible. Huston once said that it was seeing Ava’s open-mouth kiss with George Raft in Whistle Stop that persuaded him to cast her in The Killers. Although she resisted his advances, she remained close to him throughout his life: “He knew me better than anyone alive, better than I knew myself.”

  (9) Ava and Clark Gable in Mogambo. “He was my hero when I was a kid. He was still my hero when we made our first movie together and until the day he died.”

  (10) John Ford directed Ava in Mogambo—he was crusty and a hard-drinker, but he and Ava had a strictly professional, if feisty, relationship.

  (11) Ava with Frank Sinatra, husband number three. The first time they met, Ava claims Sinatra said, “If I had seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.”

  (12) “The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. Bappie said I was Frank in drag. . . . [But] you don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers.”

  (13) Humphrey Bogart, Ava’s costar in The Barefoot Contessa. Their working relationship was not a happy one. “Bogie hated learning lines,” Ava said. “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. . . . I just didn’t like him very much as a man—and he had no respect for me at all.”

  (14) Ava became involved with George C. Scott in 1964, when she played Sarah to his Abraham in John Huston’s The Bible. “When GCS was loaded, he was terrifying,” Ava said. “He’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea next morning what he’d done.”

  (15) Ava in her apartment in London. Though debilitated by a stroke and having replaced her glamorous outfits with a track suit that became her uniform, she never lost her wicked wit. “You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey,” she told Peter Evans. “She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life. But she never made jam.”

  Acknowledgments

  Peter always enjoyed writing acknowledgments thanking all those who’d helped him. Sadly, with The Secret Conversations this undertaking has been left to me.

  I probably don’t know all of the people who helped Peter, so if I haven’t mentioned you below, please forgive me, but on Peter’s behalf you have his heartfelt thanks.

  My thanks to:

  David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary, where it all started when he published Peter’s original Ava article.

  Margo Howard, who read the article and pushed Peter to pick up his Ava Gardner book again.

  Bob Bender, who worked closely with Peter on the manuscript.

  The late Jess Morgan, Todd Johnson, Maggie Phillips, Bill Edwards, Eric and Marcelle Clark, Brian Wells, Richard Kahn, Greg Morrison, Michael Baumohl, Myrna and Jeffrey Blyth, Norma Quine, Jeanne Hunter, Penny Bianchi, Kitty Kelley, David and Nancy Aukin, Matt Warren, Paulene Stone Burns, Rev. Michael Kingston, Pat and Roy Bailey, Maggie and Jeff Tetlow, Jerry and Sheridan Lewis, Duncan and Rachel Clark, Helene Gaillet de Neergaard, Phillip Kurland. All supported Peter with wise counsel and friendly encouragement.

  Ed Victor, Peter’s agent and friend, who supported Peter throughout the original Ava venture as well as The Secret Conversations.

  Also: William Pratt, Christine Walker, Mark Saunders, and Michael Evans.

  My children, Lisa and Mark, and granddaughters, Camilla and Clementine, who have always been very supportive of Peter and me.

  Finally, I spent the late eighties living with Peter and Ava, and the last couple of years of Peter’s life again living with them. While I was reading the manuscript of The Secret Conversations, I could hear Peter’s voice on every page. To relive those memories was both a delight and sadness in equal measure.

  So to Peter, my love always and thank you for being my companion, friend, and husband.

  –Pamela Evans

  © WILLIAM PRATT

  PETER EVANS was a columnist and foreign correspondent with London’s Daily Express in the 1960s and also wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and New York magazine, as well as every major newspaper in Britain, including The Times, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Mail.

  He was also the author of a dozen books, including Ari, a biography of Aristotle Onassis; the bestselling novel The Englishman’s Daughter; The Mask Behind the Mask, the first and official biography of Peter Sellers; and Goodbye Baby & Amen, the defining book on the Sixties, with pictures by David Bailey. Peter Evans’s book Nemesis was made into a West End play, Onassis, starring Robert Lindsay.

  Peter Evans died in 2012, just as he finished this book.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Peter-Evans

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  ALSO BY PETER EVANS

  Nonfiction

  Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O,

  and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys

  Behind Palace Doors (with Nigel Dempster)

  Ari: The Life and Times of Aristotle Onassis

  Bardot: Eternal Sex Goddess

  Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask

  Goodbye Baby and Amen: A Saraband for the Sixties (with David Bailey)

  Fiction

  Theodora

  The Englishman’s Daughter

  Titles

  ALSO BY AVA GARDNER

  Ava: My Story

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

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  Index

  A.D., 217

  All About Eve, 62, 234

  Ari (Evans), 10, 150

  Aristophanes, 11

  Arshawsky, Sarah, 201

  Astaire, Fred, 63

  Babes on Broadway, 110

  Bacall, Lauren (Betty), 51, 52

  Baker, David Forbes (grandfather), 38–39

  Baker, Elizabeth (grandmother), 39

  Bancroft, Anne, 263

  Barefoot Contessa, The, 7, 61, 63, 65, 232–36, 271

  Barrymore, Lionel, 119

  Baxter, Anne, 234

  BBC, 279, 280

  Bergman, Ingrid, 19

  Bhowani Junction, 77, 234

  Bible, The, 143

  Billboard, 273

  Bogarde, Dirk, 12–13, 57, 195, 261

  on Evans, 10, 263–64

  Evans warned about Ava by, 13, 24, 26–27, 82, 150

  Bogart, Humphrey, 16, 50, 61, 63, 239

  Ava on, 233–34, 236

  lisp of, 28

  Boys Town (1938), 120, 137, 245

  Brando, Marlon, 18–19, 21

  Brecht, Bertolt, 16

  Bringing Up Baby, 187

  Buck, Joyce, 54

  Buck, Jules, 54

  Bull, Clarence, 125

  Burton, Richard, 6

  Cabré, Mario, 225, 226–27, 273

  Cagney, Jimmy, 119