Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

“Is that why you want to write a book?” I asked warily. “You want to put the record straight?”

“I’m broke, honey. I either write the book or sell the jewels.” Although it was what I had suspected, I was surprised at the frankness with which she admitted it. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added.

She tapped a cigarette out of a half-empty pack on the Adam mantelpiece, lit it with a gold lighter, and inhaled deeply. It was a slow, well-practiced performance—a routine I had seen her go through a dozen times on the screen—during which I got my first good look at her. Her luminous beauty had faded with age and hard living although good bone structure and a strong jawline still gave her face a sculptural force. The stroke she’d had two years earlier had partially paralyzed her left side and froze half her face in a rictus of sadness. It would have been a hard blow to bear for any woman, but for an actress who had once been hailed as “the world’s most beautiful animal,” it was a tragedy. And yet her sensuality hadn’t completely deserted her; in her composure, in her stillness, it was still there.

I tried not to stare, but she must have guessed my thoughts. “As if getting old wasn’t tough enough,” she said, with no sense of self-pity at all. She carried her limp left arm across her chest, holding it at the elbow. “Actors get older , actresses get old . Ain’t that the truth. But life doesn’t stop because you’re no longer a beauty, or desirable. You just have to make adjustments. Although I’d be lying to you if I told you that losing my looks is no big deal. It hurts, goddamnit, it hurts like a sonofabitch.”

She crushed out the cigarette with an irritable gesture.

“The thing is, I’ve survived; I dodged all the bullets that had my name on them. I have to be grateful for that. But it does remind you of your mortality when you hear them whistle by. You go on living knowing that from now on in, death is always going to be somewhere about. But I’ve had an interesting life; I’ve had a wonderful time, in parts. I’d be crazy to start squawking now.”

It was six o’clock.

“Tea—or something else? I’m a something else kind of woman myself.” She grinned at me.

Peter Viertel had warned me that she didn’t trust men who didn’t drink, and I suspected that this was more of a challenge, some kind of test, than an invitation. “Something else would be fine,” I said. She handed me a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. “You do the honors, honey,” she said.

“One thing you must understand about me from the get-go is that my vices and scandals are more interesting than anything anyone—including Mr. Limp Dick Brando—can make up about me. If we tell my story the way it should be told, maybe I won’t have fucked up my life completely,” she said, watching me open the wine.

I sensed that she was judging me as much by the measures I poured as by my reaction to what she was telling me. “Last month I was sixty-five years old. I’ve had a stroke—a couple of strokes, actually. I got both barrels,” she said as I handed her the drink. “But before they put me to bed with a shovel, we’ve got to finish this book, honey. I’ve lived an interesting life, goddamnit. I want an interesting book, one that tells it the way it was.”

“It’ll be a great book,” I said.

“And let’s make it a fast one, because pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby,” she said. She saw the look of surprise on my face, and laughed. “We might as well be honest with each other, baby; we are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

She held out her glass in a toast.

“Movie stars write their books, then they are forgotten, and then they die,” she said.

“You’re not going to die for a long time yet, Ava,” I told her.

“If our book doesn’t replenish the larder, honey, dying’s going to be my only hope.”

It had been my intention that first evening simply to break the ice, to discuss the areas of her life we would need to explore. Instead, we talked about a lot of things. I was not prepared for her frankness, or her wicked sense of humor. (“I saw Elizabeth [Taylor] on TV. ‘Yes, I had a little tuck under my chin.’ A little tuck! Jesus Christ! She’s such a wonderful actress.” And, “I liked to fuck. But fucking was an education, too.” And, “Who’d have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog.”)

At the end of the evening, she asked how I wanted to handle the deal. Before I could answer, she said she’d like Ed Victor to deal with the publishers (“I’m told he knows all the questions and all the answers.”), and she would have her business manager, Jess Morgan in Los Angeles, talk to Ed about our split. I said fine; it was as simple as that.

“So how will we do this thing with us, honey?” she asked. “I don’t like interviews.”

“I prefer conversations,” I said.

“I can handle conversations,” she said, seriously. “I never played a woman who was smarter than me.”

It was time to go. At the door, she shook my hand in a very English manner. Then she kissed me on the mouth—“the only real way to seal a deal,” she said. “Now that the meter’s running, let’s not waste any more time.”

I said I would call in the morning and fix a meeting as soon as possible.

“We’re gonna have fun, but don’t think it’s not going to be a bumpy ride, honey,” she said with a smile.

It was a smile I would get to know very well, for it conveyed a warning as well as warmth.

At five o’clock the following morning Ava phoned and said she wanted to start work on the book that afternoon. “I can’t sleep,” she said, when I mentioned the time. She suggested that we meet at four o’clock at her apartment. “It’s not my best hour, Jesus knows. I’m a night owl. Let’s make it five, okay? I don’t want to waste any more time, honey. We’ve frittered away too much of it already. Now time is of the essence, as they say.” She laughed wickedly at the trite phrase. “When you get to be my age, baby, you have to pay time more respect.”

Her enthusiasm was reassuring, and I said that five was fine with me. It would give me another hour to work on my novel, Theodora, only Ava still didn’t know about that yet. It was part of her attractiveness that she showed no interest in my life beyond our working relationship.

“How do you want to start the book, by the way?” she asked.

To be honest, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. I’d imagined that we’d begin with her childhood in North Carolina. That’s what I suggested.

“Jesus, honey, that’s so boring. It’s s o goddamn… boring , baby, don’t you think? We can come up with something a little better than that, can’t we?”

“Where would you start, Ava?” I was curious.

“I think we should begin with the story of my stroke—how I had to learn to control my bladder again; that was fun, having to train myself not to wet my goddamn pants every time I sneezed, or got excited?”

It was a funny idea and she made it sound outrageous, but I wasn’t convinced that it was the best way to begin her book, although her ebullience gave me a warm feeling toward her, a reminder of the moxie she had needed to get her through a stroke, which left her half paralyzed, temporarily speechless, and with a form of glaucoma that threatened permanent blindness at any minute.

“You don’t think people might find it a little too downbeat to open with that?” I said.

“Come on, they’ll love it. The irony of a screen love goddess peeing her pants, and having to learn to walk again. We start the book with my second childhood?” she said, and laughed again. “That’s funny, isn’t it? That would work.”