Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

“I loved the movies, but I never had any interest in being an actress. One time, I tried out for a play in high school. I was the first kid to be eliminated. Out! Don’t call us! We’ll call you! Fuck, I was bad. I was so bad, honey. But that was after the Teacherage closed in the Depression. Mama had found a job running a boardinghouse in Newport News, Virginia. It was a big navy base and shipbuilding town in the North.”

She began massaging her arm, a sign that she was getting tired. “Honey, I don’t want to talk about me anymore. Not tonight. I’m exhausted.” She finished her wine and put the glass down. After a small pause, she tapped the empty glass with her forefinger. “Okay, just one more,” she said, and began to laugh. “Just one more—Jesus, how many times have I said that in my life?”

“I’m not surprised you’re tired. You’ve been up since dawn,” I reminded her, and poured the last of the wine, which wasn’t very much, into her glass.

“Did I wake you this morning? Oh Christ, I woke you, didn’t I? I’m sorry about that, honey,” she said, and laughed again.

“You should laugh more often,” I said.

“When I was young I laughed a lot—that’s because I liked to laugh in bed,” she said.

“We got through a lot of good stuff today,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You did all the heavy lifting,” I said. “My turn comes when I’ve typed up what we’ve done today, and I can start work on the manuscript.”

“Did any of it make sense, honey?”

“It will have to be expanded in places,” I said truthfully. “But basically I’m thrilled. You covered a lot of ground.”

“I can remember all those things a hundred years ago, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday. When I called you this morning, I was going to call the whole thing off,” she said. “I had one foot out the door.”

“I’m pleased you changed your mind,” I said.

She asked me what plans I had for the next day. If I were free, we could have another session, she said. “I’ll be ready to talk about me, if you’re willing to listen,” she said.

Absolutely, I said.

“I like working with you, honey. I like having somebody to dance with,” she said.

Ava canceled our appointment the following day, and was incommunicado for several days after that. I caught up on my reading, including a slim, skin-deep biography of her written in the early 1960s by a film unit publicist. I transcribed several of the interviews I had taped; I wrote up the notes of our telephone conversations, including her nocturnal calls, which were often the most interesting and were becoming more frequent. She seemed to have forgotten the argument we’d had the night I told her I wouldn’t help her to die. At least she hadn’t mentioned it again, and neither had I.

It was over a week before I finally reached her on the phone, and my euphoria, following the promise of the last interview, had turned to a sense of unease again.

“I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls, honey. I promise you, you’ve been in my thoughts,” she said, as soon as she heard my voice.

“I hope the book’s been in your thoughts, too,” I said, and regretted it immediately. A Sinatra record was playing in the background, one of his slow numbers, a sure sign that she was feeling low.

“I had a real bad week, honey. I felt just godawful. I wouldn’t have been any good to you.”

“What was it? Flu?” There had been a lot of it about.

“I don’t know, honey. I had blinding headaches, like the worst goddamn hangovers ever. And not just in the mornings either— before you ask. How is Ed Victor making out? What’s happening there? Any sign of a deal yet?” She ran the sentences together, in the same tone, closing off one subject and starting a new one before I could ask another question about her headaches.

It was the first time Ava had asked what was happening with the publishers. She had shown no interest in the business arrangements since her acceptance that Ed would handle the book for both of us. I told her truthfully that I didn’t know what the current situation was, although I understood the proposal was attracting a lot of interest in New York. I also knew that Ed was talking to a couple of the major publishing houses in New York, but I didn’t want to tell her that; he liked to announce those developments to a client himself. “Are you ready for some good news?” was his favorite opening line when he had a deal lined up. I didn’t want to spoil his surprise.

“Ed’s such a good agent,” I told her. It was no more than a casual remark, an en passant comment, but she picked up on it.

“You think so? Really? Better than…” She hesitated as if thinking of a suitable agent with whom she could compare him. “. . . Swifty Lazar, for instance?”

In his day, Irving Paul Lazar—Humphrey Bogart dubbed him “Swifty,” a name Lazar detested, after he arranged three deals for Bogie in a single day, on a bet—was considered one of the best agents around. He had made deals for Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Clifford Odets, Truman Capote, Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, and dozens of other big-name celebrities of the past. He sold ideas and people as well as books and plays. He put together a lucrative television deal for Richard Nixon with David Frost when Nixon was still in the wilderness after Watergate. He would move in on any deal that took his fancy—“with or without the author’s permission.” (“Everybody who matters has two agents: his own and Irving Lazar,” a Hollywood wit once said.) But, according to Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief, who knew him well and dealt with him many times as a publisher, Lazar never claimed to be an agent at all. “He described himself as a deal maker and thus did not feel bound by the normal rules of agenting. Sometimes, he took his 10 percent from the buyer, sometimes from the seller—sometimes it was rumored, in the old days, from both,” said Korda in amused awe at Lazar’s legendary chutzpah.

By this time, however, Lazar was over eighty years old and clearly past his outrageous prime. I didn’t want to say that to Ava. They were old friends—he had known her since before her marriage to Sinatra—but surely it must have been as obvious to her as it was to me.

“Swifty Lazar! That’s a name from the past,” I said.

“He’s still in the game, honey, believe me,” she said. She told me about the fabulous deals he had done, his amazing energy, the money he had made for his authors! “He knows about our book, by the way,” she said, eventually coming to the point. “He loves the idea of it. He thinks it’ll make a fabulous movie. He’s very interested.”

“I bet he is,” I said as noncommittally as I could. “How does he know about the book, Ava? Have you talked to him?”

“He called me last night from New York. He said Peter Viertel told him about it. He knows you, by the way. Has he called you yet? He said he was going to. He said he had lunch with you at Claridge’s.”

“It was a long time ago. I’m surprised he remembers.”

“He remembers everything. He doesn’t forget a thing. So what do you think, honey? He says he got $350,000 for Betty Bacall’s book and that was ten years ago [ Lauren Bacall: By Myself, published in 1979]. We should talk to him, don’t you think?” The question was wary, testing; she obviously sensed my unease. “At least let’s find out what he has in mind. It can’t do any harm, can it? He’s still full of piss and vinegar.”

Whether Ava wanted Lazar, or thought she needed him, or whether her suggestion was to test my loyalty to Ed Victor—or perhaps Lazar’s intrusion had raised questions in her mind about Ed—I had no idea. Maybe I was becoming paranoid, but Ava’s suggestion that I call Lazar seemed to me to be dangerous. Apart from the fact that his intervention in a deal was always likely to cause complications—later to be told as hilarious anecdotes by Lazar himself—apart from that, Ed was my friend as well as my agent, and I wouldn’t go ahead with the book without him.