Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

But was Ed a better agent than Lazar? That was what Ava had asked. Both were über -agents—one past, one present, one chalk, one cheese, one a straight arrow, the other Swifty Lazar. In their own way, both were giants. Ava knew all this perfectly well. She was too smart not to have checked out Ed before she agreed for him to represent her in the first place. So what more could I say about him that she didn’t already know?

Finally, I said, “Ava, there are three things you must remember about Ed Victor. One, he’s a big fan of yours; two, he loves to make money for his clients; and three, he’s determined that your book is going to make you very rich, indeed.”

“Has he put a figure on that, honey?” she asked quietly. “I’d like him to get a little more than Swifty got Betty Bacall for her book. Can Ed do that for me?”

I’d heard a figure of half a million dollars mentioned, and if she delivered the goods, especially about her time with Sinatra, I’d also heard that it could go as high as $800,000, even more. But I didn’t want to tell her that. Instead, I said: “A fourth thing you must remember about Ed Victor is that he likes to see the look of surprise in an author’s eyes when he tells them what the offer is. I think you’re going to be very surprised, Ava.”

There was a long silence on the line before she said in a low voice: “I like surprises, honey.”

Her suggestion that I contact Irving Lazar was forgotten. At least, she never brought up Swifty’s name again, and naturally neither did I.

A WEEK LATER, AVA asked me to go for a walk with her in Hyde Park Gardens. I picked her up at her flat in Ennismore Gardens and we walked through the quiet afternoon streets of Kensington. She leaned into me as she held on to my arm; her weight made me aware of her limp. She wore a gray woolen coat and hat; a Burberry checked cashmere scarf was pulled high across her mouth as if she was determined not to be recognized. Although, in black horn-rimmed glasses, and her eyes devoid of makeup, she looked more like a smart Knightsbridge matron than the Hollywood icon she was. We crossed the busy Kensington Road into the quiet of Hyde Park Gardens.

“Before the goddamn stroke, I often used to run around this park before breakfast, the whole nine yards,” she said. “It was the best cure for a hangover there was. I used to run a lot in those days,” she added with a sly smile.

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“You should be. It’s no spitting distance. I once bet Grace Kelly that the park was bigger than her spread in Monaco. I had no idea whether it was or wasn’t but I bet her twenty dollars it was. She got one of her palace flunkies to check it out—and I was right! The park’s bigger than the whole of her old man’s principality.”

“Did she pay up?”

“Grace was tight with a buck but she always paid up. She sent over the twenty dollars—with a magnum of Dom Perignon from Harrods, and a note pinned to an almighty pack of aspirins saying they were for the hangover I was going to get! She knew me too damn well. I do miss her. There aren’t many people I miss, but I do miss Gracie Grimaldi.”

“Who else do you miss, Ava?”

“I miss John Huston—especially now the sonofabitch is across the river. He knew me better than anyone alive, better than I knew myself. The world is an emptier place not having him at the end of the line.”

“You said he made a serious pass at you once,” I said.

“More than once, honey,” she said, with a nostalgic smile.

“Do you want to talk about that?” I said.

“It might make me cry,” she said. “God, I miss him.”

“Well, you knew him a long time,” I said.

“Since 1946,” she said, “just after the war. John had written The Killers, which was based on Hemingway’s short story. They would call it my ‘breakthrough movie’ these days. John had written the screenplay with Tony Veiller, although John’s name wasn’t on the credits. He was still in the army. He’d probably been moonlighting, I guess that was the reason they didn’t use his name. Anyway, I’d been invited to dinner at his house near Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. I went with a friend of his, Jules Buck, who’d worked on The Killers, and Jules’s wife, Joyce.

“John must have been forty then, I was twenty-four, he was already a successful screenwriter at Warner Brothers. He was tall and rangy. He had a craggy, Irish face—one of his wives said it was full of cruelty. I don’t think cruelty was the right word, although he did have a cruel streak in his humor. He had women eating out of the palm of his hand. He was divorced, and on the prowl the night I went out to his place at Tarzana. I fell for him at once.”

“At the dinner party?”

“Yeah, pretty much. But he made a pass at me first. I was twenty-four, I had divorced Mickey Rooney after only a year, I’d had an affair with Howard Hughes, and was in a bad marriage to Artie Shaw—I couldn’t blame him for thinking I’d be a pushover. He chased me around the bushes. I was as stewed as he was. But I didn’t sleep with him.”

“Do you mean that evening—or you never slept with him?” I said. It was probably the most direct question I had asked her about her intimate relationships.

She stopped and gave me a long quizzical look. “I was still married to Artie Shaw,” she said, then smiled. “John was pissed when I wouldn’t stay the night with him. We’d been fooling around. But I wasn’t going to jump into bed with him on our first date, as much as I wanted to. I don’t think many women said no to Johnny. He was a spoiled sonofabitch.”

We continued walking slowly, her weight leaning against me. “Anyway, Artie hadn’t discarded me at that stage. I was loyal to my husbands.” She was good at ducking questions she didn’t want to answer.

After a while, she stopped and we sat on a park bench. “Actually,” she said, catching her breath, “John had invited Evelyn Keyes to dinner that evening. She’d played Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister in Gone With the Wind. He was dating her at the time, but the way John told the story it wasn’t anything serious. But she was pretty—and smart. When she heard I was going to be at dinner, she wouldn’t come. ‘I’m not going to compete with Ava Gardner,’ she said. ‘I’m not that dumb!’

“Anyway, a few days later John ran off to Las Vegas with her and they got hitched! John said it was all her idea. He did seem a bit bemused by it, I must say. Naturally, the marriage didn’t last more than five minutes. And listen to this, Miss Keyes later became Artie Shaw’s eighth wife!” She laughed softly. “A small world, huh?”

She stood up, she took my arm, and we resumed our walk.

“But I made three good movies for John. They can’t take those away from me,” she said sadly.

“Peter Viertel says Huston was a great joker,” I said.

“The best. Did I tell you the time I played Lily Langtry in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean ? John had set up a complicated tracking scene for Lily’s arrival in Langtry, Texas, the town named after her by Judge Bean. I looked piss-elegant, I have to say. I was about fifty then. It might have been the last time I looked truly beautiful on the big screen. Lily is met at the railroad station by a grizzled old-timer, played by Billy Pearson. Pearson was an ex-jockey, one of John’s cronies. John collected characters. Billy takes Lily’s hand and helps her down from the carriage and they start to walk up the high street with the camera tracking ahead of them. It must have been a four-minute take. The train had stopped where it was supposed to stop, right on cue, with the sun going down. I didn’t want to fuck it up. I was hitting my marks and feeling good. We’d almost got to the end of the take, when Billy Pearson says: ‘You don’t know how nice it is to welcome you, Miss Langtry. How’d you like an old man to go down on you after your long journey?’ That was John’s idea of a joke. It broke me up. God knows what it cost the studio. It was half a day’s work done for.”