Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

“Then I made the mistake of letting him con me into telling him about my affair with Mario Cabré when I was making Pandora [ and the Flying Dutchman ]. I still don’t know if I told him to clear the air or to start another fight or simply to hurt him. He’d convinced himself I’d slept with Mario before I admitted it anyway. But I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to come clean.”

Sinatra’s records had completely fallen off Billboard ’s list of top tunes. His agent said it was all over for him: he could no longer draw flies, he said. In April, MGM had had enough and fired him.

“They were pissed off with his attitude. Louis Mayer was pissed at me for sticking with him. If I hadn’t been making the studio such a barrel of dough on the crappy loan-out pictures they were putting me in, I’d have been out on my ass, too. He did a record with Harry James that was so bad, I cried when I heard it. I couldn’t listen to it with him. Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass. No matter what I did, his having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills—most of them, actually—made it all so much worse.”

Nancy got her divorce on October 31, 1951, charging her husband with mental cruelty; seven days later, November 7, Ava and Frank were married at the Philadelphia home of the brother of Manny Sachs, the head of Sinatra’s record label, Columbia. It seemed a bit too soon to Ava but she went along with it.

BAPPIE SAID, “YOU HAVEN’T told Frank that Howard Greer made that dress for you, have you?”

“Why not?” Ava said absently. This was a couple of days before the wedding. The dress had just arrived from Hollywood and she was trying it on for the first time. “It was a simple little gray and pink number. Howard Greer was a wonderful designer but you usually couldn’t wear a stitch under his things. He made quite a few things for me. They were often sheer at the top, no straps—you couldn’t wear a bra. The whole thing was like a second skin. The dress he made for my wedding was a little more respectable than that, but it had Howard’s distinctive cut.”

Bappie said, “ Why not? Are you fucking crazy, girl? Who introduced you to Howard Greer?”

“The penny dropped. Howard Hughes, I said, appalled. Howard Hughes was a great tit man and loved Greer’s designs. He sent all his girls to him.

“‘Exactly, Howard Hughes. Frank’s going to love that when he finds out you’re marrying him in one of Howard Hughes’s blue-eyed boy’s creations,’ Bappie said.

“Frank hated Howard Hughes. He was jealous of all my previous lovers but especially of Howard. And Artie Shaw, of course.

“‘Well, Frank’s not going to find out, is he?’ I said, although anyone who knew anything at all about fashion would recognize it as a Howard Greer design straight off.

“‘Well done,’ Bappie said sardonically.”

“This conversation never happened, okay?”

It was Bill Edwards, vice president of marketing for MGM International, and a friend of Spoli and Paul Mills. Through them, he had become close to Ava. He thought she was one of the wittiest, most self-deprecating actresses he knew. He was an old friend of mine, too. We had been young reporters together, and I trusted him totally.

“What conversation?” I said.

“Have you ever invited Ava to dinner—to your place, I mean?”

“Not yet,” I said, puzzled. She hated going out at night. Although it was less noticeable than she believed, she was conscious of the frozen look of her left profile as a result of the strokes. She never accepted dinner invitations.

“It would be pointless to ask. She just wouldn’t come, to my place or to anywhere else,” I protested.

“You should at least invite her. She’s upset about it.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told Spoli.”

“Spoli has never mentioned it to me.”

“Maybe Ava told her not to, but I’m mentioning it to you now. I really think you should ask her,” he said again.

A former MGM publicist, Edwards had spent half a lifetime dealing with actresses. Like Greg Morrison, he knew them inside out, their vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies; he especially loved Ava’s down-to-earth take on life. He had first met her at the Millses’ apartment in London shortly after she had completed Mogambo in Kenya when she was in London doing the post-sync work on the picture and seemed in no hurry to return to California—and Sinatra.

If he believed that I should invite her to dinner, there must have been a reason.

“Okay, I’ll ask her,” I said. Accompanied by Bill, Ava came to my place for dinner with me and my wife.

Ava didn’t wait to be invited to sit at the table. She sat down where the light was to her advantage.

“The canvas behind you, Peter, is that the one you told me about? Your favorite guests are invited to sign?”

“Yes, do you want to sign it?”

“Let me think of something.”

We had a lovely dinner, and Ava regaled us with her story of one night spent with four New York garbage collection men.

She was in New York for the premiere of one of her movies, followed by the customary party at one of the city’s top hotels.

Naturally gifted with a low boredom threshold, she rapidly tired of the company. “It was like watching a drunk count his change,” was her expert opinion, “and I soon went AWOL [Asleep With Open Lids], so I kicked off my shoes, made the usual powder room excuse, left the table and started walking back to my hotel.”

She was walking along Fifth Avenue when The Barefoot Contessa was spotted weaving her way by the team of a city garbage truck doing its nightly round. “Hey, Ava!” shouted the driver in his familiar New York way, “you can’t walk alone like that in a city like this. Hop in, we’ll give you a lift.” Which she did, squeezed between two sons of toil in the cab and guarded by two more riding shovel at the rear.

Arriving at the hotel and noting the night was still young, she invited them in. “Come on up boys and we’ll tie one on.” Which they did, the festivities reaching three in the morning when they were interrupted by a knock on the door and the night manager entered. “I think he was English,” Ava recalled, “because he was very polite and apologized, profusely, I think is the word.” He said there had been complaints. Not about the noise, but because the garbage truck had been parked in front of the hotel all night. “Not the sort of thing we are used to, you see,” he concluded apologetically. So the truck was moved to another spot, and the party continued. One of the best she had ever hosted, recalled Ava.

Then Bill told us how after a particularly heavy night, he had found himself walking with Ava and Spoli through the streets of Kensington in search of “some fresh air.” It was that period when London was teeming with coffee and burger bars all sporting pseudo-American titles on their shop fronts. They were approached by two young American tourists who asked if they knew where The Great American Disaster was. Ava was not looking her best but was on the ball. “You’re looking at her, kid,” she told them.

After midnight when Ava and Bill had left, I looked at the canvas on the wall to examine the new addition. It was a caricature of a chicken squeezed between Rex Harrison and David Hemmings with a speech bubble saying, “The chick got her corn tonight.” It was signed “Ava.”

Peter Evans sat down to write the final chapter of this book on Friday morning, August 31, 2012, with his notes in front of him on his desk. The manuscript was due the next day, and his goal—to finish the book he had begun writing with Ava Gardner a quarter of a century ago—was finally in sight. Sadly, he never got to write “The End,” because at about 11:30 A.M., he had a massive heart attack and died.