Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

There was an edge of obstinacy in her voice, as if she had already made up her mind that this was how the book would begin. I’d planned to use her stroke as a set piece—but not in the opening chapter, and certainly not in the way she suggested. “You really think that’s a good idea, Ava?” I asked cautiously. Both Dirk Bogarde and Peter Viertel had said that she could take offense for the most abstruse reasons, even when she was sober, and I knew I might be on tricky ground.

“You don’t think so, honey?” She sounded surprised, but still perfectly friendly. “We start the book with me back in diapers, a sixty-something old broad back in diapers?” Her voice had a cajoling quality. But the idea conjured up a troubling image. I still couldn’t think of a more inappropriate way to begin her story. Perhaps she was testing me, perhaps I hadn’t got the joke—it was, after all, five o’clock in the morning, and I was still half asleep.

“I don’t want a book that’s downbeat; I don’t want a ‘pity me’ book, honey. Jesus, I hate those kind of books.”

I agreed that that would be a mistake.

“Let’s at least start off with a few laughs,” she said.

The stubbornness in her voice had hardened. I knew that she wasn’t joking.

“It had its funny side,” she said. “I fell down in Hyde Park with a friend who’d had a hip operation and neither of us could get up again. People must have thought we were a couple of drunks rolling around and walked on by. Tell me that’s not funny? Thank God, nobody recognized me. Or maybe they did and thought, There she goes again!”

Of course it was funny. It would make a wonderfully funny piece; it would win the reader’s sympathy, and her fans would identify emotionally with her dilemma. But it was a question of balance. The stroke had been the most desperate and demoralizing episode of her life, and the idea that we treat it in such a trivial, lighthearted way in the first chapter was not only perverse and illogical, it was plain stupid. She didn’t seem to understand—or even want to acknowledge—the seriousness of the stroke she had suffered, or the courage she had displayed in her fight to overcome it.

Even if I wrote the episode as black farce rather than in the lunatic Lucille Ball fashion she suggested, it would still diminish her mystique, it would destroy her legend; all the things that she was admired for, the qualities that had sustained her box office appeal for so long, would be jeopardized. It would deprive her book of its heart.

I knew there would be arguments—she had been a movie star for forty years; getting her own way was in her DNA—and times when I’d simply have to roll with the punches. I decided to say as little as possible and hope that eventually she would see reason and change her mind. The one thing I didn’t want to do was trade shots with her at five o’clock in the morning when I was still half asleep.

“You don’t like that opening?” she pressed me impatiently.

“It’s a funny idea, Ava. I think it could be quite poignant, too. But I wonder if it’s the best way to begin your story?”

“You really don’t like it, do you?”

“No, I really don’t. But maybe I’m missing something,” I said, in spite of my determination not to get into an argument with her so early in the morning. “Maybe you could persuade me to change my mind, but I rather doubt it.”

“Then how should we begin it? You’re the writer.”

I tried to think of what I could say that might divert her, and undo the damage I had obviously done with my last remark. Had she read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ? I quoted Holden Caulfield’s opening line: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like…”

“I didn’t have a lousy childhood. I had a happy childhood—well, it definitely wasn’t lousy anyway,” she said. “I don’t think childhood is an interesting place to start anything, honey. Where I was born, what my childhood was like! Jesus! It has no come-on . I made over a hundred movies in my time, one thing I learned was that the opening scene has to have sucker bait, honey. I learned from the best… John Huston, Tennessee Williams, Papa Hemingway, John Ford, Joe Mankiewicz, the sonofabitch. I worked with them all. They knew how to tell a story. You want to second-guess Hemingway, Tennessee Williams? You know how to tell a story better than those guys? I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”

I had obviously been put in my place but let it pass. I remembered Dirk Bogarde’s warning that “she can go from solicitous to savage in three seconds flat.” I must always ignore her when she’s in that kind of mood, he said.

“You have to show the bait, honey,” she repeated. Why didn’t I want to start with the story of her stroke? Didn’t I think that was interesting? “I almost died fahcrissakes! That’s interesting to me, goddamnit. It was one of the most frightening things that ever happened to me in my entire life,” she said. “I almost bought it, honey! I almost died.”

She was not being rational. I knew that she couldn’t defend that argument and continue to justify the case for beginning the book in the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way she proposed. But I knew that it would be futile to attempt to point that out to her in her present mood. I was wide awake now and had the sense to bide my time, and try to change her mind later.

“Ava, I’m not saying it isn’t interesting. I’m certainly not saying it wasn’t frightening. Of course it was. It must have been terrifying. I just don’t think it’s the best place to start, and it would deprive us of a really compelling ending,” I said in an attempt to preserve at least the appearance of reasonableness. “But it’s your book.”

“You’re damn right, honey, it is my book, and that fucking stroke ruined my looks and put paid to my career, that’s why I’m having to write the fucking thing in the first place. I can’t believe you said it isn’t interesting.”

“That’s not what I said, Ava,” I said, hoping we could finish the conversation, and I could catch up on a little more sleep before it was time to get up.

I heard her light a cigarette. “You know what? I think you just want to call all the plays, honey. And I won’t have it.”

She sounded so petulant, it was almost childish, and I wanted to laugh, only I still didn’t know her well enough to risk offending her any more than I already had. I suggested that we talk about it at a less ungodly hour.

“Five A.M. is not an ungodly hour, baby. I call it studio time, although it’s been a while since I got up at that hour to make a movie,” she said in a more agreeable tone. “We’ll finish this conversation later. I’ll see you at four.”

“Five,” I reminded her, but she’d already hung up.

I ARRIVED AT FOUR, to be on the safe side. Ava, in bare feet and blue jeans, wearing a man’s black V-neck sweater over a white linen shirt, was waiting for me in the drawing room. She wore no makeup, or very little I could see, and that must have taken a lot of confidence two years after suffering a stroke that had frozen half her face. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She was standing in front of the Adam fireplace on which stood a near-empty glass of wine. I thought she was still angry with me. Nor was I sure that she would go ahead with the interview, or even the book, after our conversation that morning.

Weeks had passed since she asked me to ghost her memoirs. We’d had dozens of telephone conversations, and three or four “script meetings” as she called them, but we still hadn’t gotten down to a serious interview. We would discuss ideas and the subjects we needed to cover but her manner would change abruptly the moment I suggested that we switch on the tape. She became cautious; the spontaneity went out of her voice. She would even attempt to clean up her language, and I missed the profanities that enlivened our private conversations. It was like Bogart without the lisp.