Ava Gardner: Twilight of the Goddess

Sinatra was already married, with a family, and Ava became a homewrecker. The press loved it, followed them everywhere, and wrote stories that became breakfast table gossip across America: "Didja hear that when Ava told Frank over the phone she didn't wanna see him he pulled the trigger of his gun and she called the police because she thought he'd killed himself over her?" ("He shot the bullets through the mattress to scare her," Artie Shaw would later say. "What a dumb, stupid thing to do.")

According to Ava, it was she, not the Mafia, who got Sinatra back on his feet when his career floundered. Without Frank knowing about it, Ava went to see Harry Cohn's wife, Joan, pleading with her to put in a word for Frank to play Maggio in From Here to Eternity. "He's willing to test, just give him a chance," she recalls saying to her. She went to see Harry Cohn himself. "He was a devil of a man," Ava remembered of that exchange, "a terrible monster. I said to him, 'Will you do me a favor?' Because Frank had fallen in love with the part and he wanted desperately to do it. And the poor guy was literally without a job. He said all he could do was play saloons, crappy night clubs. His contract with Metro was terminated, his contract with Capitol Records had been terminated, and he was in a terrible state. His ego and his self-esteem were at the lowest ever. And mine were practically at the peak. It was hell for him. And it was a terrible thing to go through because he's such a proud man, and such a giving man, and to have his woman pay all his bills was a bitch." When Cohn complained that Sinatra was a singer not an actor, Ava asked for her favor. "Just test him," she pleaded. "He will work for whatever you want to give him." Cohn agreed, Sinatra tested, and he got the part. "It was a great success," Ava told me with pride. "He got an Oscar for it and he gave me a little miniature one."

Once Frank was back on top, Ava told newsmen at the time, he became "a sacred monster. He was convinced there was no one in the world except him." The press reported that she was upset with Sinatra's associations with underworld figures, but she denied it. "We never had a fight about the Mafia," she told me. "About broads, yes. We had terrible fights."

By the time Ava left for Italy to make The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart, her marriage to Sinatra was on the rocks. He apparently tried to make it work. He even sent a coconut cake along with Lauren Bacall to give to Ava. "She couldn't have cared less," wrote Bacall in her autobiography. "She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated--not a thank-you, nothing... Her reaction had only to do with Frank--she was clearly through with him, but it wasn't that way on his side."

"All three of my marriages..." Ava told me, "I was still in love with all three of them and they always broke my heart. They were each the love of my life. Unfortunately, none of them felt that way about me."

In the mid-'50s, Ava's name was scandalously linked with Sammy Davis Jr. when the tabloid rag Confidential ran a picture of the two of them and made them an item. " 'Ava and the Black Man,' " she recalled sarcastically. "Or, they would have probably said, 'The Nigger'."

Gardner told me she suspected that Sammy may have actually had a hand in that picture being released, to boost his own career at her expense. "Sammy had given me a present," she said, "some earrings initialed AS, for Ava Sinatra. I thought it was touching because we didn't have many friends, me and Frank. Then Sammy asked if I'd pose with him for the cover of Ebony Magazine's Christmas issue. I said sure, and went there with my maid Reni and a bunch of makeup people to his studio. While I was waiting for them to get set up, Sammy came and sat on the armchair where I was sitting. Pictures were taken of us sitting there, and those are what later appeared in Confidential. I tell you, there have been so many lies and such ugly stuff printed, and that one "was particularly bad and hurtful. I went to Metro about it and Howard Strickling [MGM's head of publicity] said, 'If you sue you can only lose, because you can't stop it and you will only get headlines. You will give them exactly what they want, publicity, and you will get nothing, except maybe a retraction which nobody reads.' So I've never sued," Ava said. "I've never even attempted to. Because you can only lose."

Throughout the '50s the films Gardner was appearing in brought her increasingly favorable attention. Mogambowhich reunited her with Gable and brought her an Oscar nomination appeared in 1953, The Barefoot Contessa in '54, Bhowani Junction in '56, The Little Hut and The Sun Also Rises in '57, On the Beach in '59, Seven Days in May in '64, and then two more John Huston pictures, The Night of the Iguana and The Bible in '64 and '66.

Iguana was a media circus, with Richard Burton and his love Elizabeth Taylor, Deborah Kerr and her husband Peter Viertel (once a lover of Ava's), Tennessee Williams and his homosexual young love, Sue Lyon and her wildly jealous boyfriend, Huston and his mistress Zoe Sallis (with their two-year old son Danny), and the water-skiing Ava all descending on the sleepy town of Puerto Vallarta, changing it forever into a heavily populated tourist attraction.

It was the worst kind of environment for the press-shy Ava, who didn't want to work at all by the early '60s. "I was trying to get away from the whole thing," she said. But Huston was too persuasive to refuse. "Huston fueled the publicity fires in Puerto Vallarta by giving us all pistols," she recalled. "It was during a rehearsal. Each of us got a pistol with each bullet engraved with a different name [of the other cast members]. It was funny. He liked to stir things up." But she trusted him because he knew how to calm her down when her nerves prevented her from doing a scene. When she was supposed to wade into the water in a bikini she balked and Huston told her to forget the bathing suit, just go in dressed as she was. When she was still afraid, he went in with her, showed her how easy it was, held her hand until she was composed enough to perform.

Huston had to hold her hand again during The Bible when she refused to come out of her dressing room for a scene. "John came in and held my hand and didn't say a word," she said. "I didn't ask him anything, but it was like a vibration, just sitting there with him. Finally I said, 'Okay, it's all right now, I can do it.' "

Huston had to do more than hold Ava's hand to calm her during their time shooting in Italy. George C. Scott, who was playing Abraham, had fallen madly in love with her and Huston once had to jump onto Scott's back as he and six others wrestled the inebriated actor to the ground to keep him away from Ava. "A man drunk and in love behaves with a degree of madness sometimes," Huston said of the incident, perhaps remembering back to when he himself once chased Ava behind the bushes of his Tarzana home.

Pages: 1 2 3 4



Comments