Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

I knew that she was only doing the book for the money; the fact that her heart wasn’t in it didn’t really surprise me. But I still hoped that if I could persuade her to let me tell her story in the same uninhibited way she talked to me privately, her book would have an edge and a humor that no other movie star’s biography had. No other actress’s memoirs anyway. Little by little I was beginning to understand her, and I’d be disappointed if she pulled the plug on the book now.

“Have you thought any more about where you’d like to begin, Ava?” I was determined to be positive.

She poured a little more wine into her glass, filled another glass and handed it to me. “Not too early for you, is it?”

It was but I said no.

She said: “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning. Maybe there’s some truth in what you say. But maybe you’re wrong, too. But what the hell—we’ll start with my childhood, okay? That’s what you want, isn’t it? What the fuck difference does it make where we start? We can always change it if it doesn’t work, right?”

I knew that she would at least want an option on the last word. “It makes sense, doesn’t it—to start at the beginning?” My relief felt like a shot of adrenaline.

She said, “Maybe it’s the only way people are ever going to make any sense of my fucked-up life. My God, it’s probably the only way I’m going to make any sense of it. It’s the later years that get me mussed up. Sometimes I can’t even remember the movies I was in , but some of the ones I saw as a kid come back clear as daylight.” She sipped her wine. “I’m sorry I lost my temper this morning. I shouldn’t have made such a song and dance about it. But you did provoke me,” she said.

I said it was obviously a misunderstanding. I was sorry, too. “It was too early in the morning. We should never discuss serious matters before breakfast.” I hoped that she would take the hint, although I knew she probably wouldn’t.

“This isn’t going to be easy for me, honey. My memory isn’t all it used to be. I will lose the combination a few times. You’ll have to help me out with the dates and a lot of the names and places.”

I said I’d sort out those details with research.

She had an air of wanting to get on with it, and that was encouraging. I told her that I would run two tapes, one for her to keep and play back later to remind her of what she’d said, forgotten to say, or would like to add. I would give her a copy of the transcripts as soon as I’d typed them up. Later I would write draft chapters for her comments and any corrections she wanted to make.

Did she really make over a hundred movies? I asked her. I was curious.

“I don’t know, honey. Eighty, ninety, a hundred maybe. I don’t have a clue. I did a lot of hokey movies when I was starting out at MGM. Good and bad, mostly bad. Maybe it’s a blessing I lost track. A lot of my stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor. A lot more should have. You’ll have to help me out with that stuff, honey. We might even discover some lost Ava Gardner masterpieces. That would be fun. It would be a goddamn miracle, too.”

I reached for the Sony VOR microcassettes and switched them on. “Shall we start?” I said. That was usually the signal for her to find some excuse to delay the interview: a further question about the ground we intended to cover, a need to visit the bathroom… but before I asked my first question she was off.

Iwas born in Grabtown, North Carolina. I was named after Daddy’s spinster sister, Ava Virginia. She lived with Mama and Daddy all her life. I guess she never had the marrying gene—but neither did I. You only have to look at my record to figure that one out! I gave it a shot three times, but none of them stuck. The marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw were hit-and-run affairs, both of them were over and wrapped up in a year. The marriage to Frank Sinatra… well, that did a little better. Anyway, on paper it did. On and off it did. It lasted seven years on paper—if you counted all the goddamn splits and the injury time we played. And there were plenty of those, honey, believe me. I tried to be a good wife. I tried to be any kind of wife; the plain fact is, I just wasn’t meant to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. After Frank—we married in ’51, separated in ’53, divorced in ’57—I knew that a happy-ever-after marriage was never going to happen for me. The marriages to Mickey and Artie were easy come, easy go. I called them my ‘starter husbands’! You only had to sneeze and you’d have missed both of them. My marriage to Artie Shaw might have lasted a little longer if I hadn’t asked John Huston for advice. John was the last person in the world anyone should go to for advice of any kind—let alone advice about their marriage. Although what Huston said didn’t matter a damn one way or the other. Artie was determined to get rid of me anyway. He already had my replacement lined up, fahcrissake. You know how many times John Huston was married? Five times . Jesus, I needed my head examined asking Huston for advice about my marriage. Although it’s true I was pretty sloshed at the time, and so was he. The pair of us, sloshed to our bloody eyeballs. It was the first time he invited me to his place in the [San Fernando] Valley. They were thinking of using me in The Killers , which he’d written [with Tony Veiller].

“God, I was beautiful then; that was the first time I looked at myself on the screen and didn’t want to hide with embarrassment. Huston clearly fancied me—although he struck out with me that night. I was a married lady, I told him—but I also knew he had his hands full with Olivia de Havilland and Evelyn Keyes at the time. He was screwing a lot of women in those days. He knew how to give a girl a good time. He had plenty of stamina, but his romances never lasted. Actually, the following weekend he went off to Las Vegas with Evelyn and married her. I’m not saying he married her because he struck out with me but that’s what he did. Anyway, when he’d got tired of chasing me around the bushes, I asked him what I should do about Artie.”

The marriage was not that good but it was not that bad either. She and Artie Shaw had been married for less than a year and it could have gone either way, she said. But Huston, aged forty, with all the gravitas and cunning of an older man—“he wanted to get into my pants, honey,” she said with her own measure of wisdom—told her: “You know damn well that it’s not going to work, kid—just get the hell out while he’s still got the hots for you.”

Although she knew that Huston had no feelings about it one way or the other—“John loved giving mischievous advice; causing trouble always gave him a kick in the pants,” she said—“I picked up my shoes and shuffled out of Artie’s life. He didn’t seem to have minded too much, I have to say.”

It was entertaining stuff, she could always make me laugh, she could always do that, but the narrative was a mess, the continuity nonexistent. It was clear that the strokes she’d had a couple of years earlier had affected her ability to concentrate—the wine obviously didn’t help—and she was all over the place, lost in the debris of her past.

Rather than try to dig her out, I just shut up and listened. The material was all grist for the mill, nothing would be wasted; her tone, her cynicism and ribald vocabulary, would be invaluable when I attempted to reproduce her voice on the page. But, first, if she was going to deliver the goods, she had to come clean about herself; she had to stop sidestepping the interesting truths, and ducking the painful ones. I already suspected that, in spite of her promises, she never intended to be totally frank with me about her life. (“Do you think I’m crazy? Of course I’m not going to tell the whole truth,” I later learned she admitted to Michael Winner the day she told him she was going to write her autobiography. “I’m going to say things that leave the impression with people that I want left with them,” she said.)