Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

“You can never tell these days,” she said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

I didn’t mind, I said. No, I was not gay.

Bisexual? she asked, playfully.

Not bisexual, either, I said.

“I’ve known plenty of guys who are, you’d be surprised,” she said. “In Hollywood, a lot of guys don’t know whether they’re Arthur or Martha.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but later—in an interview published shortly after Ava’s death in 1990—Artie Shaw recalled how she had showed up at his apartment in New York late one night saying she needed to ask him some questions. “When you and I were in bed together, was it okay?” Shaw assured her that he had no complaints. According to Shaw, “She heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, then there’s nothing wrong with me?’” Shaw said, No, of course not. What did she mean? He said she told him, “With Frank it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me.” Shaw said he always thought Frank was a stud. Ava told him, “No… I just wanted to know that it’s not my fault.” But the episode probably affected the rest of her marriage to Sinatra. Though there may have been a touch of irony in her tone when, in 1966 when he married Mia Farrow, she said: “I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy,” there was also perhaps a hint of justification, too.

“Anyway, I’m straight,” I told her. I probably sounded stuffy but I didn’t mean to. Did she really think I was gay?

The other night when I left, she said, she had kissed me on my mouth. Did I remember that? Of course, I remembered, I said. Wasn’t I surprised? she asked. Who could forget it, I said. You didn’t react, she said reproachfully. Well, I won’t forget it, I assured her.

She had been standing with her back to the door as I prepared to leave. I’d leaned in to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face, meeting my lips with hers. Then she opened her mouth. I felt that kiss in every bone and fiber of my body. She must have been aware of it, too. Her breath was short and audible. The width of her mouth, the sensual fullness of her lower lip, that bold, feline stare and the assurance that came with her history—I was being kissed by a Hollywood sex goddess. How many thousands of men had fantasized about her as they made love to their wives or girlfriends?

But there were a dozen different reasons why I had not responded to her kiss. Ava had not kissed me out of love—though perhaps out of affection. I was certain that she was impelled by desire, but not for me. What Ava wanted was what she had once had: the adulation that came with stardom; her ability to incite men’s lust; the admiration she aroused as, draped in furs, she descended the steps of a plane on the arm of Frank Sinatra, or stepped bejeweled from a limousine beside Howard Hughes. What Ava wanted was a reminder of the power she had relished then, a reassurance that even after two solitary, sexually barren years, she was still desirable. Ava past her prime was still something else.

So now when she said I hadn’t reacted, there was no petulance, she was simply registering that it was unusual. “Weren’t you excited? Men usually react when I kiss them.”

“That would be a terrible mistake, Ava,” I said. “We have a professional relationship that’s far too valuable to complicate with… you know.”

It was a lame finish. The look she gave me was wry—and amused.

“You’re not afraid of comparisons, then?”

“No,” I said.

“No hard feelings, then?”

“No hard feelings,” I said.

That made her laugh. “Good. I want you to be happy,” she said.

“You’ve made me very happy,” I said. She had kissed me. But she did so out of loneliness and out of need, maybe nostalgia, too. And I think we both knew it.

Later, when she told Spoli Mills about the incident—she told Spoli everything —she changed the story sufficiently to protect her self-respect: I had made the move on her ! She had told me it would be a mistake.

Her reputation and ego were intact.

We hadn’t talked for a couple of days, not about the book anyway. On the third evening, she called and was all business: “We haven’t talked about Mogambo yet, have we?” No, I said, we hadn’t. “Well, that’s important. I think we should talk about that. I got an Oscar nod for that one.”

It was the first time she had mentioned her Academy Award nomination for her role—playing the original Jean Harlow part—in John Ford’s remake of the 1932 Red Dust . There was I thought a hint of pride in her voice when she acknowledged her nomination, although she didn’t dwell on it.

“What about the marriage to Frank?” she hurried on. “We need to talk about that, don’t we? We’ve covered most of the other Frank stuff, but I don’t think we’ve dealt with the actual wedding in Philly, have we? We don’t have to dwell on it but we should at least mention it.”

“We must.”

“It was a circus. We went to Philadelphia to keep it quiet. The press found out, of course. My God, it was a circus.” After a thoughtful pause she said, “What else? I suppose we’ll also have to talk about the abortion, too.”

“I think so,” I said, although the question surprised me. She had mentioned it once before but not in any detail. I knew she had probably had a couple of abortions, but this must have been the one she had in London during the making of Mogambo. The one she’d told me John Ford, a curmudgeonly Catholic, had tried desperately to talk her out of.

“ Okay. Wedding, Mogambo, abortion,” she said briskly, like a chairperson setting an agenda. Her serious tone amused me, and surprised me, too. Her sense of commitment had been… well, coquettish to say the least, and I told her how pleased I was that she was determined to get on with it.

“Sometimes I don’t know whether I want to get on with it or not, honey. That’s the God’s truth. I’m tired of remembering. I’m sick of trying to remember what he said, what I said. What he did, what I did. I’m sick of trying to explain myself all the time. Don’t you get tired of asking the same fucking questions all the time?”

“It’s my job,” I said.

“Are we nearly there, do you think?”

“I told you writing a book isn’t easy or quick.”

“Thank God I didn’t have kids.”

We hadn’t discussed her feelings about not having had a family, although she had now put her abortions on the agenda, so I knew it was on her mind. “Do you regret not having had kids?” I said casually, suspecting it would still be a touchy subject.

“Oh Christ, Peter,” she said wearily. “More fucking questions. What do you want me to tell you? I regret not having had a family? I’m sorry I partied too much? Is that what you want me to tell you?”

“That wasn’t—” I started to say.

“How many people do you know who haven’t made mistakes in their lives, who’ve lived completely without vices, baby?” she said fiercely before I could answer, then immediately apologized: “I had a lousy night,” she said. “I nearly called you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

After a moment of hesitation, she said, “Let me ask you something. What happens if we don’t finish the book?”

“I don’t get paid, for one thing,” I said in what I hoped was an amused tone. But she wasn’t amused.

“I have to tell you, honey, I’m at the lowest ebb of my life right now, and it’s worse every day. It’s been nearly a couple of years since I had those strokes. I’m a whole lot nearer to dying than living. I feel that. There’s almost no corn left in Egypt, baby,” she said grimly. It was the line she had used at one of our earliest interviews, and reminded me of how far we had come since then, and how much further we still had to go. “We must finish this fucking book before they put me to bed with a shovel,” she said with sudden anger.