Peter Evans and Ava Gardner
AVA GARDNER
The Secret Conversations
For my family.
Prologue
Her phone calls in the middle of the night had fallen into a habit. I picked up the receiver on the first ring, an old newspaperman’s trick.
“Did I wake you, honey?” she asked softly, without preamble.
“It’s 3 A.M.,” I said, checking my watch. “Of course you didn’t wake me.”
“It’s me,” she said.
“I know it’s you, Ava.” No one else in the world sounded like Ava Gardner. Nobody I knew anyway. There was always a sense of weariness, a hint of a recent bender in her voice, even when it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning, even when she was stone-cold sober.
“You said I could always call, no matter what time it was,” she reminded me. “Were you sleeping, honey?”
“Just dozing,” I lied. She sounded low. “Can’t you sleep?”
“I miss Frank,” she said after a small silence. “He was a bastard. But Jesus I miss him.”
“Was? Is he dead?”
“Not as far as I know, honey.”
Sinatra would outlive her, she said. “Bastards are always the best survivors.”
We talked for a long time, as we always did when she called me in the night. We talked about the films she had made, her mistakes and missed opportunities, one of which, she said, was turning down the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. We talked about bullfighters; John Huston, whom she adored; restaurants; her favorite dogs; her lovers. She told me about the days when she swam like a champion, played tennis, and could dance all night. She talked about the lousy prices secondhand dealers were offering for her dresses and couture gowns. “I could hoist the price if I put my name to them, but that’d be telling the world Ava Gardner’s hanging on in there by the skin of her teeth,” she said.
“You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey: She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life. But she never made jam,” she said.
She could make me laugh even when she woke me up at three o’clock in the morning. She could make me laugh even when I would have liked to throttle her.
She had pulmonary emphysema, or feared she had, the lung disease that had recently carried off John Huston, and I knew that she was afraid of dying painfully and slowly as he had. So much of her life had been caught up with his. “Huston had all the courage in the world. I told him he should just put a gun to his head—he loved playing with fucking guns—and pull the trigger when the pain got too much. But the stubborn bastard wanted to die game. He always had a cruel streak in him even when the cruelty was directed at himself,” she said.
I heard the clink of a bottle against a glass.
“You know this thing called Exit, baby?” she asked, after a long silence.
I said I had but she ignored me.
“They help you switch off the lights when you’ve had enough,” she said. “There was an old lady, Mrs. Chapman, a neighbor of mine. She’d had a stroke and didn’t like it one bit. She belonged to Exit. I’d go up and sit and listen to her once in a while. She was a classy old broad, full of piss and vinegar. She must have been quite pretty once, too. She said that when you get to the point you can’t take it any longer, these people help you close your account, and make sure you do it right first time—they give you pills, a bottle of brandy, or Scotch, if that’s your poison.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Her mind was always full of surprising twists and turns but this was the first time she had told me that she wanted to kill herself. Not straight out like that anyway. No matter how smart you think you are, there are times when you don’t know what to say, because there is nothing wise or comforting you can say.
“Ava, I hope you don’t mean that,” I said.
“I’m getting close to that point, honey. I’m so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner,” she said.
There was pain in her voice. I still wanted to say something reassuring but I knew it would be a lie and she would spot it at once. I said nothing.
“When I don’t want to be around anymore, I don’t want any retakes. I don’t want to recover next day and find myself the lead story on the six o’clock news. I’d like to do it in one take,” she said. It was, she said, and began to laugh, something she had never managed in her whole movie career. “I never missed my mark but I didn’t always manage a scene in one take either. It would be nice to finally break the habit of a lifetime,” she said.
When the time came, she said, would I take her to the people at Exit? “I’m not afraid of dying, baby. I just want you to hold my hand, I want you to be there when I go, that’s all,” she said. “Will you do that for me, when the time comes, baby? Will you promise to be there for me, honey?”
“I won’t help you die, Ava. I can’t do that,” I said. I knew she scorned cowardice as much as she despised disloyalty, and she made me feel guilty on both counts. I almost told her that I was a Catholic, but caught myself in time. “I’m sorry, Ava.”
“I thought you were my friend,” she said.
“I am, Ava,” I said.
“I thought you loved me,” she said.
“I do, Ava,” I said.
“Obviously you don’t love me enough. You don’t understand friendship at all. If you loved me, if you were my friend, you’d help me die when I want to go. Fahcrissake, honey, my body’s failing every which way, you know that. I’m falling apart here. And you refuse to help me the one way you can. You don’t love me at all, baby.”
She said that she wanted to go to sleep now. “Shit, I’m going to have a peach of a head in the morning, I know that,” she said, perhaps to let me know she was angry at herself, too.
I told her that I loved her, whatever she thought.
“The thing is, honey, I’d have helped you. If you came to me and asked, I’d have done it for you, baby,” she said, and put the phone down.
I went to my study and wrote down everything she had said, as I always did. I knew that she was always at her most honest at that hour.
1
In the first week of January 1988, Ava Gardner asked me to ghost her memoirs. Since I had never met Ava Gardner, the call, late on a Sunday evening, was clearly a hoax. “Sounds great, Ava,” I played along. “Does Frank approve? I don’t want to upset Frank.” There was a small silence, then a brief husky laugh.
“Fuck Frank,” she said with a faint but still unmistakably Southern drawl.
“Are you interested or not, honey?” she said.
Only Ava Gardner could have made the ultimatum sound both threatening and so full of promise. She had been called “the most irresistible woman in Hollywood,” and “the world’s most beautiful animal.” Such encomiums were typical of the hype that was de rigueur in the Hollywood marketing machine of the 1940s and ’50s, but they were not inappropriate. Ava Gardner’s whole life had been defined by her beauty and the many and various lovers it ensnared—and she famously devoured. In another age, in another world, she would have been a grande horizontale. She had seduced, been seduced by, married to and divorced from, lived with and walked out on, some of the most famous names of the twentieth century. She had toyboys before Cher had toys, although it was unlikely that any of them remained boys for very long in her company. “Are you interested or not, honey?”
I should have said no right there. I wasn’t a ghostwriter. I was working fifteen hours a day to finish my third novel; an interesting biography was on the stocks; I really didn’t need this kind of distraction. But this was Ava Gardner calling me. Only a fool would say he wasn’t interested. Or not be tempted. Although we had several mutual friends, the closest we ever got was the twenty minutes between my departure from, and her arrival in, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, during the filming of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana in 1963. Richard Burton, who was playing the unfrocked minister T. Lawrence Shannon opposite Gardner’s man-hungry Maxine Faulk, told me that I should stay on a couple of days and meet her. “She’s not a movie star; she’s a legend. She’ll either love you or hate you. Either way, you won’t forget her,” he said. But I had to go.