In one of her last interviews, Ava Gardner, the siren who stole Frank Sinatra, spurned Howard Hughes, and ate matadors alive, talks about how it all began and where it all ended.
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The last time I saw Ava Gardner was in the winter of 1988, after she'd had a stroke and come from her home in London to Los Angeles for therapy. She had just turned 66, and with the left side of her body, from her face to her feet, still numb, she didn't care to make an effort to glamourize herself. She was able to walk through the Westwood Marquis, where she was staying, without anyone recognizing her or asking her for an autograph.
On this particular night, she'd asked me to take her to her sister's home in the Hollywood Hills. She wanted to do her laundry and had her dirty clothes in a plastic bag which I carried down for her. As I walked ahead to my car, I turned to see her standing between the elevator and the entrance to the dining room, where a young newlywed couple was posing for pictures.
"Excuse me... ma'am," I heard the photographer say to Ava. "Would you mind moving just a bit? You're in the picture."
Ava looked at the young man with the camera, then at the smiling couple next to her. She hesitated for just a moment--perhaps reflecting for that second on a thousand other moments before ten thousand other cameras. And then she smiled ever so slightly before stepping out of the picture.
At one time, Ava Gardner was probably the most photographed woman in the world. In the '40s and '50s she was often called the world's most beautiful woman. MGM had made her, along with Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable, one of the sexy pin-up girls young men lusted after. But if virtual invisibility seems a harsh fate for a glamour queen of Gardner's stature--and the decline most definitely had to have stung--she, more than some of the others of her kind, was protected by a lifelong distaste for much of what she represented.
Ava had always resented the cheesecake commodity part of her career. "I really had very little to contribute," she told me of her early years in the business, "so I played a lot of hatcheck girls, and did mob scenes, extra scenes, dancing scenes, just to have the experience of being on a set. I spent years at that. If the studio wanted a photograph to advertise a film they'd say, 'Who is it that has a good pair of legs and a good pair of breasts and is pretty and not working?' And it was always Ava because she was never working. So I spent a lot of time doing publicity stunts. Sitting with skis on a sand dune down at the beach, posing on a block of ice, crap like that. So there are ten million photographs of me. There was no terrible, great ambition to be a big star. It sort of just gradually happened without my doing very much about it."
Of course Ava didn't have to do very much. Her beauty was so real and so original that her name alone could conjure up wild flamenco nights and abandoned sensuality. We knew her as the woman who drove the richest, most powerful, most talented men in the world to outlandish behavior. Mickey Rooney fell head-over-heels in love when he first laid eyes on her. Howard Hughes was tormented that she refused his proposals and was driven to violence with her. Band leader Artie Shaw tried to make her over in his image. Frank Sinatra crooned melancholy songs of heartbreak when she left him. Howard Duff loved her, Robert Walker belted her, matador Luis Miguel Dominguin followed her to America, Robert Graves wrote stories about her, Hemingway approved her as the film heroine of some of his greatest novels, and George C. Scott went so out of his mind over her that he had to be given injections and locked up while on location for The Bible.
And she didn't provoke these responses because she was nice to everyone. She could be imperious with men she disagreed with politically, like John Wayne, or just didn't care for, like Kirk Douglas. She wasn't afraid to speak her mind about these things either. "I can't stand that man," she said of Paul Newman right off the bat when I first visited her in 1986. "He's one of my unfavorite actors. He's an egomaniac and so false. He's 'on' all the time."
It was summertime in London that day I met her. She was standing at the top of her stairs with Morgan, her corgi, barking by her side, and she was wearing a white blouse, a pink floral patterned skirt, and a disarming smile. "Come in, I'm upstairs," she said. "Close the door, because there are often cameramen with long lenses hiding in the trees across the way. They're always snapping my picture and publishing the ugliest ones. But I've learned to ignore them. I ignore everything."
I was there because I was writing a book about John Huston and his family, and Ava figured into the story. "You know I never contribute to any book about people I've known," she said as we settled on chairs in her living room, "like Grace Kelly. But with you, when John said, 'If you don't mind,' I said yes."
Huston had cowritten Ava's first really noticeable movie, The Killers (1946), and had directed her in The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Bible (1966), and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). She had appeared in 58 films between 1942 and 1980 and had worked with directors of the caliber of George Cukor (_Bhowani Junction_), Stanley Kramer (_On the Beach_), Mervyn LeRoy (_East Side, West Side_), John Ford (_Mogambo_), Joseph Mankiewicz (_The Barefoot Contessa_), and John Frankenheimer (_Seven Days in May_), but Huston was by far her favorite director, and one of the people she most admired, right up there with Hemingway and Robert Graves. Huston's endorsement went a long way with Ava, and she talked freely not only of him, but of things that had little or nothing to do with my book at all.
I knew from talking with Huston and with Ray Stark that Ava was press-shy. And I'd read what her On the Beach director, Stanley Kramer, had once observed. "Ava Gardner has a fixation about the press," he'd said. "She hates them, and she blames them for everything bad that has ever happened to her." Kramer claimed that when he finally persuaded Ava to hold a press conference in Melbourne, "she was terrified. She began to shake as soon as they started asking personal questions."
I could see for myself that Ava hated microphones and tape recorders. It was one of many aspects of the glamour business she couldn't bear. In general, her attitude towards Hollywood, including acting, was one of deep ambivalence. She just didn't seem to care enough to take her work as seriously as, say, Elizabeth Taylor. I knew that more often than not, she had to be coaxed into playing some part, and when I asked her why, she took a long drag on her cigarette and said matter-of-factly, "Look, I never wanted to do anything, as far as motion pictures were concerned." Then why did she? "It's a good living," she shrugged, as if that was answer enough.
Gardner had come to Hollywood on a fluke. Her 19-year-old sister was married to a photographer and living in New York when Ava made her first trip out of North Carolina at 16. Her sister's husband recognized her sultry beauty and took some pictures, which he put in his storefront window. An MGM representative who saw the pictures and wanted a date (he didn't get one) sent the photos to the studio and Ava ended up getting a screen test in New York. Her Southern accent was so thick they decided not to use sound. "The test was for people who were simply beautiful and had no talent," she said. "There wasn't a thing that I could do. I couldn't act--I was the first to be eliminated in high school plays. I had no training whatsoever. I was just a pretty little girl. But I loved the idea, because I loved movies." She turned to the right, turned to the left, walked fullface towards the camera, and by the time she was 18, in 1940, she and her sister were setting up in a Los Angeles apartment.
Gardner was given a standard starlet contract, seven years starting at $50 a week, and a tour of the MGM lot. On her second day she was brought in to watch Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland making Babes on Broadway. Rooney, who was then as big and bright a star as any at MGM, took one look at the fresh new property and fell for her. "He asked if I would go out with him," Ava remembered, "but I pretended that I had a date. I didn't know a soul, but it was that old Southern thing, you know, 'I'm busy.' It was sort of a game that Southern girls played, to be rather unattainable. Not to be had. Then I couldn't wait until he called again and asked a second time, so I could say, 'Yes.' "
"I learned to slouch," she laughed, recalling how she tried not to tower over the 5'3" Rooney whenever they went out and the photographers were; snapping. "I had a very particular slouch that I did, like the way Princess Diana does when she's with Charles. On our wedding day I took my heels off for the photographs."
She wore a tailored blue suit that day because she didn't have the money to pay for a wedding dress and was too proud to ask Mickey to buy one for her. "I wouldn't accept it," she said. "Though I regret never having been married in white. I couldn't afford a big wedding dress and I didn't accept charity. That's just how I was brought up."
Ava told me she was still a virgin on her wedding night, and said that when she asked for some new panties to wear under her nightgown, her sister told her she didn't need to sleep with panties any longer. "So there I was naked underneath my nightie and so shy and frightened," she recalled. "I didn't drink then but I had about four glasses of champagne. I was one frightened young lady. [But] I caught on very, very quickly," she admitted with a laugh. "It was a beautiful evening but I'm not going to tell you step-by-step what happened in bed. I just can't talk about those things, they are too personal."
Eight months after Rooney and Gardner had married, it was over. Ava rarely bad-mouthed the men she married, though by the time she talked with me she was coming to believe that she'd "protected them long enough." You have to go to Mickey Rooney to get a sense of what went wrong.
"I had no real idea of what marriage was," Rooney confessed in his 1965 autobiography. "I thought that marriage was a small dictatorship in which the husband is the dictator and the wife is the underling. What an impossible sonofabitch I must have been. To this day, I don't think Ava has forgiven me for my selfishness, my stupidity, and my clumsiness in those beginning moments of marriage." Rooney also noted that "the quality of rage has always been part of Ava." One time she narrowly missed his head with an inkwell. Another time she took a knife and cut up the furniture. She also threatened to kill him. On the night they broke up, she told him to "Get the hell out!" When he later phoned and attempted a reconciliation, she hung up on him.
Howard Hughes was next. "He would appear after every breakup of every marriage or every love affair," Ava said. "Howard was Johnny-on-the-spot. He even arranged to have some of my affairs broken up."
She told me that Hughes had wanted desperately to marry her. "I could give you anything in the world to make you happy," she claimed he told her. "If you want to work, I'll get the greatest stories for you, the best directors; if you don't want to work, if you like boats, I'll get another boat and we'll sail. We can do anything in the world you like." Gardner laughed when she recalled how there "were tears in Howard's eyes while he was telling me how much money he had. Jesus Christ!" But she said she turned Hughes down because she didn't love him. "There was no chemistry. With me it's always immediate or nothing. I either fall in love quickly or I don't fall in love at all. I've never sort of grown to love."
Like others, Ava found some of Hughes's behavior strange. She said he didn't like blacks or Jews, and he had such an aversion to dust that he would have his entourage of cars pull off Nevada roads when cars passed in the opposite direction while he sat with a tissue covering his face ("You had to sit in the car until the dust settled"). But, she said, "It's not true that Howard wore gloves and didn't shake hands with people. I remember one of his guys saying to him, 'Howard, you are so afraid of germs, yet you go to bed with broads.' He was just very shy."
Artie Shaw came along in 1945. He had been married four times before, to such starry beauties as Lana Turner and Evelyn Keyes, and Ava became wife number five. He saw in her a mind unformed, and just as Arthur Miller would appeal to the insecure Marilyn Monroe, Shaw's intellect was a powerful draw for Ava. He gave her books to read, had her enroll in courses at UCLA, and brought her to his psychiatrist to be analyzed. For awhile, she cast herself in the role of his obedient student. But not for too long. "With Artie I used to run away," she said. "I'd go swimming in someone else's swimming pool, then come home with dripping wet hair and he'd say, 'Where the hell have you been?' Still, I always came home."
Then one day she didn't come home, but even then, she confessed, "I was in a bad state. I was madly in love. He called one day and I was thrilled. I went to his office to see him. He didn't bother to come by, but I went flying over there like a damn fool. And what he wanted was to ask me if I minded if he went to Mexico to get a quick divorce to marry [novelist] Kathleen Winsor. I was crushed. I said, 'Yes, of course.' So he did, he married her. And that was that."
What she told the divorce judge, which was dutifully reported in The Los Angeles Times on October 25, 1946, was that Shaw "disregarded even my smallest wish. And he persisted in humiliating me every chance he got. If I remained silent when we were with friends he would say, 'Why don't you talk? Have you nothing to contribute?' But when I tried to say something he would shout, 'Shut up!' "
But as she explained to me, "It was just simply that we couldn't get along together. It was difficult going to court in those days because the only way you could get a divorce was on mental cruelty or some such jazz, so you had to make up stories."
Gardner established herself at last as a movie star. She did The Killers with Burt Lancaster (it was his film debut). In The Hucksters she got to act opposite her childhood idol, Clark Gable. ("I adored Clark Gable," she told me. "I was in love with him from the time I was a child. When we were working together I would suddenly look at him and I'd go to pieces. I'd forget my lines and stammer.") She made a memorable goddess in the film version of Kurt Weill's musical stage hit One Touch of Venus. And she acted with Gregory Peck and Walter Huston in The Great Sinner, darkened her complexion for Show Boat, and got critical raves for Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Then she met and married Frank Sinatra.
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.
"It was a bit of a problem," Ava told me cautiously of the Scott business, unwilling even to mention Scott's name. "He was going through a very bad state. He's a fine actor, but he can't handle alcohol. There were days when things got a little rough."
But it was more than a little rough. Gardner didn't want to talk about Scott at first, but eventually she called my hotel. "In order to protect somebody I don't care much about I didn't tell you about someone I do care about," she said. "But I'd have to see you to tell you." She paused, then said, "Oh hell, I'll tell you now, why not?" And she told me about the time she went to Scottsdale, Arizona, to film her part as Lily Langtry in Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.
"I had been at a health farm and from there Reni and I drove to Scottsdale. We lived in this little motel. There was one door on one side and one door on the other. A car stayed around the clock outside and there was always somebody there. We didn't know who he was or what he was doing there. When I left I didn't know that John had put a guard on both doors. I found out later that George C. Scott was working in the same little town and John had a guard at my door 24 hours a day. And he never mentioned it to me."
With Ava willing to talk about Scott, I brought up The Bible again. "John was the first person to jump up when he attacked me," she said, "and there were plenty of others around. The other man [Scott--she again had trouble mentioning his name] was a coward and John was not. He prevented what could have been a nasty incident."
Why didn't she just stay away from him? I wondered.
"First of all, darling, to keep him sober was impossible," she said. "When we were doing The Bible he was in a nuthouse with bars on the windows, he was locked up two or three times. And John would send me to get him out. And Reni said, 'Missy, don't go there to that fucking crazy man, he'll kill you.' But I was sent to get him out and calm him down. They used to give him injections to calm him down when he got absolutely crazy and then they locked him up. He'd stay there for two or three days, get off the booze, go through his withdrawals, and then John would say, 'All right honey, would you go and get George?' So I'd get him out of the nuthouse and we'd start all over again. When George is sober he's highly intelligent and God knows a wonderful actor. But when he drinks he goes absolutely crazy."
The following day Ava called again and invited me to hit some tennis balls with her, but I couldn't make it. "That's too bad, darling," she said. And as if she were punishing me, she purred, "I'm going to have apple and raspberry pie with pure English cream. Give me a ring and we'll do it another time."
But there would be no more time to play tennis with Ava. Several months after I saw her in that summer of 1986, she suffered a debilitating illness that became her final decline. It began with a flu that turned into double pneumonia. She came to Los Angeles for treatment, and less than two weeks later she suffered a stroke while watching a Laurel and Hardy movie on TV. The left side of her body went numb and her speech slurred. She had to learn to walk again. She recovered sufficiently to return to London, but there she had a relapse and had to begin all over again. For a woman as athletic and physical as Ava Gardner was, the paralyzing stroke was severely depressing. But she returned again to Los Angeles, and went through more physical therapy. When I went to see her, I brought champagne, which she sipped. Then, when she wanted to bring her laundry to her sister's, I helped her put on a sweater before she went down the elevator and entered the lobby, where photographers were waiting, but not for her.
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Lawrence Grobel is the author of The Hustons and Conversations with Capote, and writes for Playboy, The New York Times and Redbook.