Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

“I hope you’re joking.” I tried to assuage her worries. “Nobody’s going to put you to bed with a shovel,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound like a joke to me,” she said.

I felt rebuked.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, WE had dinner at Ennismore Gardens, cooked by Ava’s longtime housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, who ate with us. Ava, in bare feet, and wearing her familiar gray track suit, seemed in no hurry to start work in spite of her assurances the previous evening. She entertained us with stories about her friend Charles Gray, a notoriously camp and bibulous English actor who lived a few doors down. His aura of suave insincerity was eminently suited to villains—he played Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the boss of SPECTRE, in Diamonds Are Forever —and Ava adored him. Although one sensed that Carmen did not share her enthusiasm—he undoubtedly encouraged Ava’s consumption of alcohol—and may have been responsible for banning him from the apartment. (They continued their relationship from their nearby balconies, often drinking into the night.)

“Did I ever tell you about the time Salvador Dali came calling in Madrid?” Ava eventually asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“The Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. He must have been about fifty,” she began contemplatively. “Although fuck’s that got to do with anything. I was running away from Frank, we’d been married a year, and I was desperately trying to break up with him. I knew I just couldn’t live with him anymore, I still loved him, Jesus, I loved him. But the marriage was never going to work. Financially, emotionally, physically, every fucking whichway it was never going to work. I told you about the time at the Hampshire House in New York? When he said he couldn’t stand it any longer and was going to kill himself? I heard this fucking gun go off? Haven’t I told you about that night?”

“Not yet,” I said. She was off on a tangent. I didn’t try to stop her. A word, a name, the mention of a place or a time, could open a whole new vein of memories and anecdotes. Scenes and conversations came back to her in short rushes of recall. Piecing her stories together was always a challenge.

“We were still waiting for his divorce to come through. Nancy kept changing her mind about whether she wanted to go through with it or not. Meanwhile, her lawyers were trying to screw Frank for every penny he had. I was commuting between the studio in California and Frank in New York. It put a strain on both of us.”

She had landed the part of Julie, the black girl who was passing for white, in Metro’s remake of Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat. She collapsed during costume fittings and was rushed to the hospital in Santa Monica.

“I know some people said it was an abortion that time, too, but it wasn’t, I promise you. To be honest, I don’t know what the hell it was—a viral infection, a nervous breakdown, exhaustion—but it wasn’t an abortion. All I know is that I was bloody sick. I was kept in for nearly a month. I must have been genuinely ill because I was in St. John’s and they don’t fuck around. St. John’s is the same joint I was in when I had the strokes thirty-odd years later. A small world, huh?

“Anyway, I heard this gun go off. We’d been fighting, of course. And drinking. Every single night, we would have three or four martinis, big ones, in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon.

“It was another one of those nights I ended up refusing to sleep with Frank. I was half asleep in my room across the suite and heard this gunshot. It scared the bejeezus out of me. I didn’t know what I was going to find. His brains blown out? He was always threatening to do it. Instead, he was sitting on the bed in his underpants, a smoking gun in his hand, grinning like a goddamn drunken school kid. He’d fired the gun into the fucking pillow. What a night that was!”

She seemed amused at the memory. “At least his overdoses were quieter.”

“Overdoses?” I pretended to be surprised, although the stories of Sinatra’s mock suicides, now well documented, were familiar to me, along with the incident of his attempt to gas himself at record executive Manny Sachs’ apartment in New York. My feigned ignorance on a subject could often encourage her to divulge an unexpected nugget of information. “You mean he tried it more than once?”

“All the fucking time. It was a cry for help. I always fell for it.”

After a pause, she said: “Anyway, I was telling you about Mr. Dali.”

“Yes,” I said, grateful that she had remembered.

“I was running away from Frank again. I’d finished Mogambo, and was about to start The Barefoot Contessa. I was just hitting my stride career-wise, and making some decent money—despite the fact that MGM still pocketed most of it under the contract I signed when I was eighteen. I was looking for a house to buy in Madrid. I really loved Spain, the pace of the place, the climate; I thought I could put down roots there, at least for a year or two.

“I was staying at the Castellana Hilton. I was one of the few Americans living in the city at that time. Dali asked me to go to an exhibit with him. He came up to my room like a whirlwind in a cape. He was as mad as a fucking hatter. He had this silly waxed mustache like a string of licorice twirled up at the ends. He carried a rhinoceros horn with colored candies, which looked like violets, in the top of it.

“‘Oh chérie, you must have one, you must have one.’ They were about the only words I understood. If he’d been offering me a drink, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I thought, what the hell is this stuff? I didn’t want to touch it. It could have been anything! He was gabbling away in Spanish, French, some Catalan, I think, but no English at all. I smiled and nodded. I had no idea what he was saying. The whole thing was fucking crazy… surreal , right?”

She ordered tea and cucumber sandwiches from room service, hoping that the plebeian English ritual would restore some sanity to the sense of madness. But something must have been lost in translation—there was clearly plenty of room for confusion, she admitted—for Dali seemed to take offense at the word cucumber.

“Perhaps it means something different in Catalan, I don’t know. He swept his cloak over his shoulder and flounced out. Unfortunately he collided with the waiter arriving with the tea and cucumber sandwiches and went ass-over-head. The rhinoceros horn, colored candies, the whole kit and caboodle went flying.”

She threw her napkin down on the table. “I could never take Surrealism seriously after that,” she said. “Let’s talk about the wedding in Philadelphia.”

We took our drinks into the sitting room. She curled up on the sofa and took out a small notebook, in which she had scribbled pages of dates. “I’d been seeing Frank since the end of ’49,” she said thoughtfully. “I went to his birthday party in New York in December. That was on the 12th.” She didn’t open the notebook, which she played with like a talisman between her fingers. “His marriage was already on the rocks. Let’s make sure we put that in, honey: the ball and chain was well and truly smashed before I came on the scene. But he was a good dad, I’ll give him that.”

“But it was hardly a sotto voce romance, was it?” I said.

“Frank moved in with me the day Nancy announced she was taking the bus to Reno. That was St. Valentine’s Day, 1950,” she said precisely, still not checking with the notebook. “I’d taken a house in Pacific Palisades that belonged to a dance director at Metro. It was a beautiful place on the ocean, but Frank couldn’t settle. I’ve told you about that time, haven’t I? He was constantly moving in and out, in and out. Never quietly either! He was picking fights with everyone. Especially with me. Things got so bad between us I felt sick the moment I heard his voice. Figure that out!