If that was what she was doing now, I decided to play along. I told her that I understood her anxieties; her apprehension was normal. “I don’t blame you, Miss Gardner,” I said. “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Writing about yourself must be like looking at your reflection in a mirror when you’re nursing a God Almighty hangover.”
To my surprise, she burst out laughing.
“Well, let’s not beat about the bush, honey,” she said. Her laugh became a racking cough. When she stopped there was a long silence. I heard a lighter click a couple of times, followed by a deep intake of breath as she drew reflectively on a cigarette. “How long would it take to write this stuff, honey?” she asked. I said that it would depend on many things—how long the interviews took, how good her memory was, how well we got on together.
“I’m told we’d get along fine, but who the hell knows? You’ve been a journalist; I hate journalists. I don’t trust them,” she said. “But Dirk Bogarde says you’re okay. So does Michael Winner. Dirk said you deal from a clean deck, and you’re not a faggot. Don’t get me wrong. I get on fine with fags, I just prefer dealing with guys who aren’t. Dirk reckons you’d break your ass to get the book right. That’s what I need—a guy who’ll break his ass to please me.”
As she became more relaxed, her uncertainty about doing the book seemed to lessen. I asked whether she had read anything of mine. She said that she had read one of my novels and Ari, my biography of Aristotle Onassis. She had known Onassis, and been a guest on his yacht Christina. She said that my book was “on the money, but the horny little fuck had other attractions beside the dough.”
What are they? I asked. I was genuinely curious.
“If he hadn’t had a dollar he could have snapped a lady’s garter anytime he liked. I understand what Jackie Kennedy saw in him besides the fortune. She never fell for him, like Maria Callas. He was a primitive with a yacht. Mrs. Kennedy would have appreciated that. A primitive with a yacht,” she repeated. “For some ladies that’s an irresistible combination.
“Did Ari ever tell you his views on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata—about the morality of broads who bargain with their pussies? He might have said ‘cunts’ I can’t remember. He probably said ‘cunts.’ He was always trying to shock me. It became a game between us. I tried to shock him, he tried to shock me. I don’t think he ever shocked me, although I think I managed to surprise him once or twice,” she said with evident satisfaction.
We talked for a while about Onassis, whom she clearly liked. “I never slept with him, although it was tempting, it would have been interesting. Are you taping this?” she suddenly asked sharply, with suspicion in her voice. “This is between the two of us, right?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I’ll tell you when the meter starts,” she said.
I assured her again that I wasn’t taping her, which was true; however, I was making plenty of notes. To change the subject, I told her that her first husband, Mickey Rooney, was coming to London shortly in his nostalgic Broadway success, Sugar Babies.
“Mickey, the smallest husband I ever had, and the biggest mistake I ever made—well, that year it was. Pearl Harbor in December [1941], spliced to Mickey in January [1942]. It was the start of the goddamnedest, unhappiest, most miserable time I’d ever had. He wasn’t an easy man to live with, God knows. It was really a fucked-up marriage from day one. I was nineteen years old. Jesus! I was just a kid! A baby!”
She talked about her days with Rooney, losing her virginity to him on their wedding night, when he was the biggest star on the MGM lot, and she was a starlet. “But I do owe Mickey one thing: he taught me how much I enjoyed sex—in bed, I’ve always known I was on safe ground.”
I said that was very funny.
“If I get into this stuff, oh, honey, have you got something coming.”
There was a long pause in which I could sense her making up her mind. Finally, she said: “Well, okay, if this book is going to happen, honey, I guess I’d better see you up close and personal. I trust Bogarde, but I’m a gal who likes to buy her own drinks.”
When shall we meet? I asked her.
“I’ll call you,” she said.
“DON’T THANK ME. SHE will eat you alive; you know that, don’t you? I haven’t the faintest idea whether I’ve done either of you any favors putting you together. Maybe it’s a book she should never write, maybe she should remain an enigma,” Dirk Bogarde told me over lunch at La Famiglia, a favorite Tuscan restaurant in Chelsea. I’d known him a long time; when I was starting out in journalism and he was a Rank contract player going nowhere, I ghosted an article for him in Films and Filming, a now defunct movie magazine. Although he could be caustic and touchy—bitchy even—I enjoyed his company and wicked humor, and could take his ribbing in my stride. Now in his late sixties, he had been a handsome and popular leading man in British films in the 1950s and early ’60s. His performance as a working-class manservant who seduces and corrupts his aristocratic master in Joseph Losey’s The Servant launched him as an international star. His reputation grew rapidly in such films as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and Death in Venice, in which he played the dying Mahler character; and as a masochistic concentration camp doctor in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. Then a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for which he had high hopes, turned out badly and he stopped working for twelve years. When we met for lunch, he had semiretired from acting and was writing novels, literary criticism, essays, obituaries, and fragments of autobiography for the London Daily Telegraph.
He said, “Before you start with Madam, old chum, a piece of advice: remember that she is essential to the Hollywood myth about itself. You tamper with that at your peril. She is very dear and adorable. I am devoted to her. She can also be outrageous—Dom Perignon at 5 A.M. in Makeup: ‘The only way to make filming fun,’ she used to say—but she is terribly conflicted about herself, especially about her fame. Most well-known actors are, but she especially, pathologically so. She may never make another movie, that stroke has buggered up her career for good, I imagine, but if she lives to be a hundred she will never go into oblivion, she will never be forgotten. She will try to spin you the expurgated version of her life. She will often be evasive and capricious and sometimes bloody tiresome—the obstacles and diversions she will throw at your feet!—but you must persevere if you wish to get to the truth. Trust me, the truth is something else. You must already have heard that she’s more fun when she’s had a tipple or two. But when she’s had more than a tipple or two, watch out! She can be rough, and bloody unpredictable. But always show her respect, yet not too much reverence. She’s smart, she’ll know the difference. And she will eat you alive.”
When we said goodbye, he repeated with a bleak smile as he got into the cab in the King’s Road: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, chum: she will eat you alive!”
With slightly more trepidation, I continued to wait for her call.
2
“It’s true then what they say: the world is so full of madmen that one need not seek them in a madhouse,” Peter Viertel greeted me when I arrived in Marbella, on the Spanish Costa del Sol, where he lived with his second wife, the English actress Deborah Kerr. Although they had come to meet me at the airport, I could see he was not happy that I had ignored his advice not to accept Ava’s offer. “Don’t even think about it, if you value your sanity; she was a ballbreaker then, and she’ll still be a ballbreaker. But she’s also beautiful and smart, and you’re going to go ahead with her book whatever I say,” he’d said when I called him from London to seek his advice on how to handle her.