Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

It was a deliberate betrayal of our deal but I wasn’t surprised, and it didn’t disturb me. She was broke, she sorely needed the money, and I was convinced that I would get to the truth when I started asking the hard questions once we got into the stuff that sold books.

What concerned me right now was that she still expected the book to be wrapped up in a couple of months. “Pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby,” she had warned me, but she had no idea, and I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, how long a good book—the book she deserved, paying the kind of money she needed, the book I knew it could be—was going to take to write. I’d leave it to Ed Victor to break that news to her when he’d worked out a deal with the publishers. He was good at that sort of thing.

Ava shook a cigarette out of the pack and sighed as she began to search for her lighter among the cushions on the sofa. There was a small silence. Now that I was beginning to know her better, I knew that this wasn’t an invitation to interrupt.

“Okay, concentrate, Ava. Concentrate ,” she said to herself sternly.

She turned to me: “You’ve got to help me, baby. I’m struggling here. Tell me exactly what you want to know.”

“I’d like to know more about your childhood,” I said. “Can we go back to that?”

“Jesus, that Holden Caulfield crap again, Peter,” she said. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“People are fascinated with the childhoods of famous people,” I told her.

“You really think so?” She didn’t seem convinced. “Why don’t we start with my first husband, Mickey Rooney?” she said. “Why don’t we start there? I was still practically a child anyway.”

“You were nineteen,” I said.

“Only just,” she said defensively. “I was still a virgin. That would be a good place to start, when I was still chaste?”

“Fine. Let’s start there,” I said. I made no attempt to argue with her. I just wanted to get on with it. There would be plenty of time for arguments when we stopped being polite to each other, which would happen when I started asking about the intimate stuff that publishers would want to know when a sizable advance was being asked.

“Well, I laughed a lot with Mickey Rooney,” she said slowly, as if searching for a tone of complete candor. “I laughed with Artie Shaw, too—but not so much, and sometimes when I shouldn’t have, I guess. It needled him when he couldn’t figure out why he made me laugh. He was smart as a whip, about politics, about communism, about jazz, about all sorts of things, but he wasn’t smart about women at all—although he’s had other wives since then, including John Huston’s old ex, Evelyn Keyes, so maybe he’s learned a thing or two about ladies since my day in the hay with him.”

I was amused at how quickly she had lost the Mickey Rooney thread. “But I have to say, what education I got, I got from Artie—the schoolroom kind of education that is,” she said. “He was always trying to improve me and I always wanted to learn stuff. He definitely got me into reading books, which I’m grateful for.”

Did she still read a lot? I asked.

“Not so much since my stroke,” she said. “I haven’t done a lot of things since the stroke.”

It was a stupid question.

“Where were we?” she said.

“Mickey Rooney?” I told her.

“Mickey. Well, I got another kind of education with Mickey. Going to the fights every Friday night in L.A., that was an education. We’d go along with George Raft and Betty Grable. Betty loved the fights as much as Mickey did, but I dreaded those Friday nights. Mickey always insisted on sitting ringside; he could never get close enough. I used to cover us with newspapers, to keep us from being smothered in blood. Those little bantamweights were the worst; they’d cut each other to pieces—they’d nearly kill each other to entertain us. That fact bothered me more than any of the rest of it—the things people would do to please you if you were famous enough, and there was nobody more famous than George Raft, Betty G, and Mickey in those days. They were legends.

“‘You’re walking in the shadow of giants,’ Mickey used to tell me. He was an egotistical sonofabitch, but he was right about how famous they all were. Not me so much, Jesus, not me at all, I was just starting out—I was just famous for being the first Mrs. Mickey Rooney—‘Arm candy’ they’d call me today. You have to remember Mickey was bigger than Gable in those days. At least, his pictures took in more money than Gable’s, although they each earned the same five grand a week when five thousand dollars was real money,” she said. “Movie stars were gods and goddesses in those days.”

She stopped looking for her lighter and slipped the cigarette back into the pack. “Filthy habit anyway,” she said, shaking her head. “I can go on all day long about the mistakes I’ve made in my life. I’m a real expert on the saddles I’ve put on the wrong gee-gees. That the kind of stuff you want, honey?”

“All I have to do is listen,” I said.

“Good. I hate smart-ass questions,” she said.

I was still keen to get her to tell her story in some kind of chronological order, if only to make it easier for me when I came to put the jigsaw together. I again suggested that when we completed the Mickey Rooney section, I’d like to go back to her childhood.

“Why?” she said, with fresh irritation in her voice.

“Among other things, you said it would help you to make sense of your life,” I said.

“To make sense of my fucked-up life ,” she recalled her exact words with glee.

“Well, to begin with, I was a way afterthought,” she said slowly. “Mama, you know, poor baby, she’d had her family all finished: four daughters and a couple of sons, and suddenly I arrived in her midlife on Christmas Eve 1922. Mama and Daddy must have thought they were all through with babies! What a Christmas present I must have been! That little bundle of joy must have fucked up everything. I’ve been fucking up other people’s lives ever since. Mama and Daddy needed me like a hole in the head.”

“Money was tight?” I said.

“You could say that. Daddy was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer. There aren’t many more precarious ways of making a living than that, honey. There was never enough money. Daddy’s ass was always in some kind of sling or another. It was a struggle for them but they got by and I always felt loved. There was always milk on our doorstep. If you’re going to be poor, be poor on a farm, that’s what I say. I remember when I started out in movies, in the forties, one of the Hollywood papers said we had been dirt poor. It was a story some MGM press agent must have put out to make my life sound more interesting than it was. That pissed me. Dirt poor! It made it sound as if we were white trash. I didn’t even mind being called a hillbilly but dirt poor crossed a line. There were plenty of hard times, no question. We were often broke, but never in our lives were we dirt poor. I resented it when reporters put it in their stories. It made me mad.”

It was the first time since I’d known Ava that we’d talked about her family to any degree, and I was surprised at how strongly she cared about her past.

“I want to get this right in the book,” she said deliberately.

I said I did, too.

“I might have worn hand-me-down frocks, and had dirty knees, maybe I didn’t always scrub them as often as polite little girls should—but we were never dirt poor . I was the goddamnedest tomboy you ever met. In the summertime, I went barefoot, that was what farm kids did. Of course, we were poor. It was the Great Depression, everybody was poor. It cost you just to breathe. But being hard-up didn’t make us dirt poor, fahcrissake.”