Viertel had known Ava since 1946, when she was an MGM starlet and married to her second husband and Viertel’s friend, the virtuoso clarinetist Artie Shaw. Each morning, Viertel had swum with Ava in the pool of the Shaws’ Beverly Hills house while Artie, who had literary ambitions, discussed books and writing with Viertel’s first wife, Virginia—known as “Jigee”—the former wife of novelist Budd Schulberg and onetime story editor for Sam Goldwyn. In 1956, Viertel was asked to write the screenplay for Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in which Ava was to play the aristocratic Lady Brett Ashley.
I knew that they had been close—“men are inclined to fall in love with Ava at sight,” he admitted—although he denied they had been lovers. A disclaimer, if not said out of modesty and guile, uttered for the comfort of his wife, who sat next to him as we lunched at the Marbella Club.
The son of Berthold and Salka Viertel—she was Greta Garbo’s friend and wrote several of her notable films of the 1930s—Peter had grown up in Hollywood and knew everybody. Over lunch he told lively anecdotes about Humphrey Bogart, Hemingway, John Huston, Orson Welles, as well as his parents’ famous friends in the Los Angeles refugee community, including Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, whom he had known as a child.
“Anyway, you want me to tell you about Ava,” he continued seamlessly as the coffee was poured. “Let me tell you something: nobody handles Ava Gardner. Artie Shaw was a smart guy, a regular polymath—as well as a male chauvinist shit of the first order—and he couldn’t handle her, and neither could Luis Miguel Dominguín, one of the bravest bullfighters in Spain.” He looked at me pointedly, as if waiting for me to say something.
“What about Sinatra?” I said.
He shook his head. “Sinatra, the poor bastard, never stood a chance, and he loved her probably most of all. He was too possessive of her; that was the problem, or one of the problems—no one is ever going to possess Ava.” He shrugged; he clearly didn’t want to get involved in her marital problems. “Let’s just say she’s a complicated woman, courageous, difficult… well, you’ll find out. She’ll promise you anything. She’ll be nice as huckleberry pie—until the day you get down to work. She’ll take it as a personal affront if she can’t seduce you, by the way—and if she does succeed, you’ll have the time of your life. But you won’t have the book you could have had, or Ava deserves.”
I expressed my doubt that she would still be sexually active. “Don’t forget she’s had a stroke,” I said, lamely.
“That won’t have stopped her,” he said, sounding very sure of himself. “The trouble will begin when you show her pages. She will hate them. She loathed my screenplay [The Sun Also Rises]. She sent it to Hemingway for his opinion, for Christ’s sake. No author likes what a screenwriter does to his book. Fortunately, Papa went easy on me. Hollywood had screwed up every one of his books; he was getting used to it, he said. Anyway, he was my friend.
“But even so, what Ava did was unforgivable, and unkind. But she craves second opinions. A second opinion is always Ava’s first weapon of choice. You’ll have to fight her all the way, and I warn you now she’s a money player. She knows what is good for Ava, or thinks she does, but that won’t necessarily be good for you or your book. No matter what she promised to get you on board, when it comes to the point, Ava isn’t going to condone a truly honest biography. Her language, using all the four-letter words, the booze, the scandals, the lovers she’s had—okay, plenty of actresses put out, but few have been as eager or as beautiful as Ava Gardner. I’m telling you, I know her, and she’s not going to admit to one tenth of that stuff.
“If only she would tell the truth about herself—or allow it to be told—my God, what a book that would be! But it’s not going to happen, and that’s a pity because everything she has ever done in her life, all that she has achieved, has been done and achieved on her own terms. I still love her, in spite of a couple of things she shouldn’t have done to me, and to others. She is still the proudest, the most liberated, the most uninhibited woman I know,” he said.
Deborah Kerr, who starred with Ava in The Night of the Iguana, and had been listening politely to her husband’s stories, chipped in with a wan smile: “I think what Pete is trying to tell you is that Ava’s a man-eater.”
I RETURNED TO LONDON that evening feeling none the wiser about how to deal with Ava, whom I still hadn’t met. She had canceled a couple of appointments, but we had talked on the telephone nearly every evening and despite her procrastination she talked eagerly about the book, throwing in ideas and opinions and some wonderful throwaway lines.
Eleven days after her first phone call, Ava invited me to her apartment, spaciously spread across the first floor of two converted fin de siècle mansions in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge. There were four bells on a brass plate screwed to the red-brick wall by the front door, with names written on cards fixed in small plastic slots by each bell. Her bell had the name Baker. “It’s my mother’s maiden name. I live like a goddamn spy,” she’d told me earlier.
I rang the entry phone and gave my name; the lock was released and I was told to go to the first floor, where her housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, met me and led the way to the drawing room. But before we reached it, Ava appeared in the hall wearing nothing but an angry scowl and a bath towel. “I loathe it when people spread bedtime stories about me.” She explained her bad temper and the reason why she had been delayed getting dressed for our meeting. (Later, when we had gotten to know each other a whole lot better, she admitted that she also wanted to see how I would react to her state of dishabille; she never to her dying day lost her pride in her sexuality.)
“I was in the tub when a girlfriend called from L.A. She said that Marlon Brando told her he’d slept with me; he reckoned we’d had a little thing going in Rome. That’s a goddamn lie, honey,” she said. She had called Brando on it right away. “I told him that if he really believed that I’d ever jumped into the feathers with him, his brain had gone soft. He apologized. He said that his brain wasn’t the only part of his anatomy that had gone soft lately. He said, ‘Ithn’t that punithment enouth, baby?’” she lisped, mocking Brando’s speech impediment. “That’s a funny line, isn’t it? How can you stay pissed with a guy who comes up with a line like that?”
As I followed her into the drawing room, she pulled the bath towel more tightly around her; she was clearly wearing no underwear.
She held out her hand. “Mr. Evans, good evening,” she said politely, as if remembering her manners. “May I call you Peter?” she asked, holding on to my hand and searching my face, slowly and quite openly.
“Of course,” I said.
“Call me Ava,” she said, releasing my hand with a nod of acceptance. “I must put some clothes on,” she said. When she returned she was wearing a gray tight-fitting jersey track suit and horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
“I don’t know about Jimmy Dean, Ingrid Bergman, Larry Olivier, Jackie O, and the rest of the names Marlon’s supposed to have carved on his bedpost, but my name’s definitely not one of them, honey,” she said, casually picking up the conversation where she’d left it. She was calmer now that she had finished dressing. “Marlon ought to know better than to make up a story like that. I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip.