Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

I should have said no right there. I wasn’t a ghostwriter. I was working fifteen hours a day to finish my third novel; an interesting biography was on the stocks; I really didn’t need this kind of distraction. But this was Ava Gardner calling me. Only a fool would say he wasn’t interested. Or not be tempted. Although we had several mutual friends, the closest we ever got was the twenty minutes between my departure from, and her arrival in, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, during the filming of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana in 1963. Richard Burton, who was playing the unfrocked minister T. Lawrence Shannon opposite Gardner’s man-hungry Maxine Faulk, told me that I should stay on a couple of days and meet her. “She’s not a movie star; she’s a legend. She’ll either love you or hate you. Either way, you won’t forget her,” he said. But I had to go.

Twenty-five years later, I still hadn’t met her, and had no idea why she had asked me to ghost her story.

“It’s okay, I checked you out, honey,” she said, anticipating, but not answering, my unasked question. She gave me her London telephone number. “Call me tomorrow evening, after six, not before. I come awake after six,” she said. She apologized for the late hour, said good night, and replaced the receiver. I made a note of the conversation, and the time: it was 11:35 P.M.

The following morning, before I called my friend and agent, Ed Victor, I read everything about her I could lay my hands on. “Ava Gardner has seldom been accused of acting,” wrote the film historian David Shipman in 1972. “She is of what might be termed the genus Venus, stars that are so beautiful that they needn’t bother to act. It’s enough if they just stand around being desirable.” But even after she had acquired a reputation as a neurotic drinker, with a pathological urge to self-destruct, her sensuality continued to animate nearly every part she played. Her taste for matadors, millionaires, and wholly inappropriate men had become notorious. She believed that sexual freedom was a woman’s prerogative. Her affairs had brought her final husband, Frank Sinatra, to the brink of suicide, taken her lover Howard Hughes beyond the edge of madness, and provoked George C. Scott to bouts of near-homicidal rage.

She undoubtedly had a life worth writing about, and of course I was interested. Nevertheless, I knew that a couple of years earlier she’d had a stroke and hadn’t worked since. The question was: how much of her tumultuous life would she be able to remember—or prepared to own up to, even if she remembered plenty? But by the laws of the game that publishers play, Ava Gardner was still a catch. It was not every day that a Hollywood legend offered to tell a story that was so full of history, scandal, and secrets.

I called Jack Cardiff, a friend of mine. He was one of the finest cinematographers in the world. He had photographed Ava in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and The Barefoot Contessa . They had known each other for forty years and were Knightsbridge neighbors. I explained the situation.

“She’s always sworn that she’d never write a biography. How the hell did you get her to change her mind?” he asked, with incredulity in his voice.

“I didn’t get her to change her mind. I didn’t get her to do anything. And I haven’t agreed to write it yet,” I said.

“Don’t kid yourself, pal. If Ava Gardner wants you to write her book, you’ll write it,” he said.

I said that it could be a very short book, indeed, if the stroke had loused up her memory.

“She might occasionally forget where she put her car keys, but she’ll remember what she needs to remember,” he said. “But let me give you a word of advice. Nobody becomes a movie star by putting all their cards on the table—and there’ll be plenty she’ll want to forget. She’d be mad not to keep the lid on some of the things that have happened in her life. She’ll give you plenty of problems, with Ava there are always problems, but sure as hell amnesia won’t be one of them.”

The timing of the book was a more immediate problem. The late hour of her phone call on Sunday evening might have given her offer a greater sense of urgency. I definitely had the feeling that she wasn’t prepared to be kept waiting. A sexagenarian, in poor health, she had lived extravagantly, drunk to excess. It was unlikely that she had much of an income coming in from her old movies. It was rumored that Frank Sinatra, thirty-one years after their divorce, still picked up her medical bills, and maybe other bills, too. Even so she was probably still feeling the pinch.

I told Ed Victor what had happened, and about my talk with Cardiff. I’d still like to give it a shot, I said, but I didn’t think I’d be able to stall her until I’d finished my novel.

He agreed. “But it would be a pity to let her go. She’s got one of the greatest untold stories in movies. Her very name epitomizes Hollywood in its heyday,” he said. “I think we should do whatever we have to do to move it on, don’t you?”

To further complicate things, the heroine of my novel Theodora was a movie star of the same vintage as Ava. He advised me not to mention this to Ava. “Actresses are never comfortable knowing they have a rival, even if she’s only a character in a book,” he said. He proposed that I work with Ava in the evenings, and continue to write Theodora during the day—“or whichever way round she wants to play it, but it sounds as if she might be at her best after dark,” he said cheerfully.

I CALLED AVA THAT evening, after six as she had suggested, and, as Jack Cardiff had prophesied, I got my first surprise.

“I have to tell you, I have a problem with this book idea, honey. I’m in two minds about the whole goddamn thing.”

The sense of accusation in her voice, the implication that the book had been my idea, stunned me. Before I could remind her that she had approached me, she explained that she had remembered a conversation with John Huston when he was writing his autobiography, An Open Book. Her favorite director, Huston had cowritten The Killers, the movie that, in 1946, rescued her career after a dozen forgettable B movies ( Hitler’s Madman, Ghosts on the Loose, Maisie Goes to Reno ) and set her on the path to stardom.

“I loved John. God, I miss him. He had a great life. He lived like a king, even when he didn’t have a pot to piss in. His entire life was a crap shoot. He even loved foxhunting, fahcrissake! I hope to Christ there are hounds and foxes wherever the old bastard is now.”

The problem was she had recalled that Huston once told her that writing his book was like living his life all over again.

“Second helpings was perfect for John. He even got a kick out of remembering the bundles he’d dropped at Santa Anita, the poor bloody elephants and tigers he’d shot in India—reliving all that stuff, the drunken brawls—was no end of fun for Huston. But do I want to go through the crap and mayhem of my life a second time just for a book, honey? The first time, you have no choice. Lana Turner says that life is what happens to you while the crow’s-feet are fucking up your looks. Lana has a name and a story for every goddamn wrinkle in her face. I’m not saying my own looks don’t give the game away. Nothing I can do about that anymore. A nip and tuck ain’t gonna do it. The thing is: do I have to put myself through the mangle again?”

It sounded like something she had thought about a lot. I was only disappointed that she hadn’t thought about it a lot before she involved me. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary tirade: cynical and anguished as well as sad and funny. It made me want to write her book more than ever. I had no idea whether it was a game she was playing to test me. All actresses liked to be cajoled and wooed a little, of course; I remembered what John Huston had said when she was having misgivings about playing the role of Maxine in The Night of the Iguana : “I knew damned well that she was going to do it; she did, too—she just wanted to be courted.”