Ava Gardner Read online

  Ava saw the young woman behind the wheel. For a moment a streetlamp flashed by at an angle to light up her face, and her eyes seemed to be glaring past Howard and directly at Ava.

  Now there were cars coming from the other direction, aimed for a head-on collision with the convertible. Howard took a sharp, sudden right turn into a deserted parking lot on Fairfax.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Ava yelled, pulling herself back into her seat.

  Then the sports car was in the parking lot with them and arcing around them till it was pointed at the passenger side of the car.

  Howard Hughes cried out, “Holy hell!” as Faith Domergue’s car shot forward at Ava’s passenger side door. The impact was only enough to leave the sedan trembling against its springs. Faith quickly backed up, returned to position like a bull about to charge, gunned her engine, and sped forward. Ava screamed and Hughes pulled her over him as the roadster crashed against the passenger door, backed up, tires squealing, came forward again—shhboooml, the metal of the sedan door crumpling inward and the big car heaving in a giant convulsion. Domergue’s car stopped moving. The front grille of Faith’s vehicle was smeared against the crumpled passenger door and the hood spurted steam.

  Another car had pulled up, and the driver got out, having witnessed the entire spectacle, and rushed over to see what could be done. Hughes urged him to get Ava away from there, take her home, and let him deal with the rest. Faith Domergue sat inside her steaming car and looked unhappy. Ava, too shocked to ask questions, made her way to the other man’s vehicle and was driven away.

  Howard called her the day after, explaining why she had nearly been killed by a crazed beautiful girl, how the girl was a bit delusional, an aspiring actress and so on, who had come to him for help with her career, a sad case, really, but he was going to make sure she got the proper medical help. To help her forget the upsetting night in the parking lot, he sent Ava with Bappie to Mexico City for a weekend shopping spree. He had every faith that Bappie, with his line of credit in hand, would help Ava think well of him again. One of his operatives, Charlie Guest, accompanied the sisters to Mexico and reported back on their every move.

  Bappie became very fond of Charlie. He had started out as Howard’s golf instructor. Soon he was being useful for a variety of odd labors, graduating to become one of the inner circle managing Hughes’s romantic interests, keeping track of many of the actresses and models and young beauties; he made introductions, handled surveillance, took care of a lot of the details of housing and transportation. He was a nice guy, a quiet drunk when he wasn’t working, with a world-weary, beaten-by-life style that Bappie seemed to find attractive. They began sleeping together. When Ava moved with Bappie to a two-bedroom bungalow in Bel Air, Charlie moved in with them. For Howard it was a bonus, having his own man right inside the henhouse. On the other hand, Charlie, in his cups, would eventually let Ava in on many of the details of Hughes’s busy personal life—the different girls stashed away, the relationship with Faith Domergue, the constant trawl for new prospects. It had all been a game with Howard, she realized. She was one of the pieces—perhaps, it was nice to think, the most valuable and desired of all of them—on Howard’s game board. From Charlie she would learn the extent of Howard’s spy network, the way he would send his teams to stake out a girl’s life—Ava’s included—taking photos, logging reports (she did not yet hear about the even more invasive room bugs and phone taps Hughes would put in place). She would confront him with her knowledge, Howard would apologize, say he was only trying to make sure she was safe. In time, of course, he would return to his sneaky ways, the snoops, the surveillance, and the intimate reports. It made you a little crazy yourself, being with Howard. She thought Charlie Guest had it right when he said that Howard did with his relationships just what he did with his airplanes, pushed to see how much they could take before they crashed.

  Their odd alliance continued. To keep Howard in her life was a great, luxurious advantage. She had been honest with him, made it clear there would be no romance and no marriage in their future. If he wanted to continue to offer his friendship and all the perquisites that went with it, she could have worse friends. There was as well an element of perverse play in what they had together. As Hughes seemed willfully, masochistically to punish himself in pursuit of her, so was there cruel pleasure to be derived in withholding herself from the man who could have everything.

  Hughes carried on, obsessed with her, determined to possess her body and soul. It didn’t help matters that she was still not officially free of her husband. Aware that Mickey Rooney had been sniffing around her of late, looking to make a reentry in his almost-ex-wife’s life, Hughes urged her to go to Las Vegas and finalize her divorce with a six-weeks’ residence rather than waiting the entire year for the California decree (since 1931 the renegade state of Nevada had offered streamlined marriage and divorce laws in addition to legal gambling).

  It was a good idea, Ava thought, to get it done with Mickey and move on with her life. And so, at the end of July 1943, with Howard’s blessing and financing and with one of his minions to fetch for her, Ava headed into the desert. “She just wants to get it over with,” Bappie told a reporter.

  She checked into the Last Frontier and remained there for much of the next six weeks. Even the isolated resort showed the tumult of the war. Soldiers were everywhere, and all across the lobby and up and down the halls were stressed families and straggling kids come to visit their husbands and fathers stationed at the training camps outside town. Many of these camp followers, to the dismay of the management, had turned the swank lodging into something more like a hobo jungle, cooking on little burners in their rooms, hanging laundry from the windows. There were young lovers on a last weekend together, tearful girls saying good-bye to their soldier boyfriends about to go off to the unknown. Ava Gardner—there to divorce a movie star, enjoying the patronage of a millionaire twice her age—could only look upon it all as upon a scene from another world. Each morning after breakfast she lay by the pool in one of her hundreddollar swimsuits from I. Magnin, oiled and glistening in the 115-degree summer heat, under the Nevada sun. Each day went by like the last. On the forty-second day her divorce was granted, and she returned to Los Angeles a single woman again.

  The funny thing was, she went looking for Mickey and not the other way around. The studio had given her a nice part, a funny part. One of the casting guys said, “This is a cute piece. You could do something with this if you wanted.”

  It was another in the Dr. Gillespie series (until 1942 the Dr. Kildare series, when Lew Ayres, in the title role, had refused military service as a conscientious objector and the names Ayres and Kildare became anathema to Louis B. Mayer), hospital dramas starring Lionel Barrymore and now a newcomer, Van Johnson. The innocent yet tawdry plot of Three Men in White concerned Gillespie’s attempts to test the resolve of Dr. Van. Ava was to play, along with blond starlet Marilyn Maxwell, a tongue-in-cheek temptress. There was in the part a little sex, a little romance, and a touch of comedy. She rehearsed at home, but the rehearsals would end with a cry of despair.

  “I can’t act! I can’t do this fucking thing!” she would scream to Bappie, who was blandly feeding her Van Johnson’s lines.

  Mickey had been her greatest acting coach by far. Whatever his faults, he was a brilliant actor, and when he talked her through a performance and told her how to feel and the technical tricks he knew by the million, she could understand and know what she was doing and make it work. She called her ex-husband. “Mick, can you help me?”

  Baby, anything.

  They went to a quiet place for dinner and went over the dialogue, and Mickey was a great help. He showed her which lines she wanted to throw away and which ones to really sell. How to use her eyes to let the camera know she had something on her mind but didn’t want to come right out and say it. They went over the lines, and they finished dinner and had a drink, and then they went to bed.

  She hadn’t intended anyt
hing like that to happen. But the evening had been so nice, he had been charming, she had been horny. What could you do?

  It became a little thing they had. It wasn’t every night or even every week. But now and again he would call and say, “How about dinner tonight, Ava?” Or, “How’d you like to go see Dorsey tonight at the Palladium?” and now and then they would end up spending the night together.

  They would sometimes make a game of Hughes’s spying, Ava said, and evade the pursuit cars and the detectives staked out on the street. What Ava didn’t know was that Hughes had her home bugged with recording devices, devices in every room. One day when he returned to LA from business in the East, Hughes was brought up to date with his surveillance agents, and when it came to the report on Ava Gardner he learned that she had not always been alone, that the tapes from her bedroom had recorded evidence of sexual activity, and that some of the recordings were very loud.

  One night Ava had come home after dinner out and gone right to bed. She was tired, had to be at the studio by dawn the next morning, and made it an early night. She had been asleep for a while when the lights suddenly came on and she awoke to see Howard Hughes standing over her and glowering like an irate vampire.

  “Howard! What are you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to you!”

  “Get out of my room at once!”

  Hughes, disconcerted, admitted he had expected to find her in bed with a man. His spies had screwed up their report, Ava decided, and Howard had come running to expose her. She was shaking with anger. The damned man had gone too far. She pulled on her clothes, stormed outside, screaming at the richest man in the world.

  “I won’t be fucking spied on! I’m not your goddamn property, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  Hughes reddened, opened his mouth to speak. Words seemed no good. His hand lashed out at her as hard as he could, straight at the face, knocking her backward across the couch. The slap had caught her on the eye, stung badly.

  Howard stepped back and turned away in instant dismay at what he had done. It was too late. She gave a cry of rage, reached for something, anything, finding a heavy ornamental bronze bell. As Howard came toward her she launched it at him right between the eyes. The bell emitted one flat, echoless ring as it met with flesh, bone, and teeth.

  Howard stumbled, blood running from his face. Ava scrambled around again and found a wooden desk chair, dragging it along the carpet and then swinging it into the air. As Ava remembered it, the housemaid tackled her and stopped her from crashing the chair down on his head and neck and killing Howard Hughes. She was dragged back while Bappie and Charlie Guest rushed over and knelt to help the injured aviator. Trails of blood ran down from his nose and mouth.

  “Oh, honey, look what you did to poor Howard!” Bappie said.

  “Fuck poor Howard!” Ava said. “He’ll never hit me again.”

  The maid came with a steak to put on Ava’s swollen eye, and an ambulance came for Howard Hughes.

  In a diary Faith Domergue kept in the 1940s, she made this entry: “There is a strange quirk in Howard, stranger than all of his other peculiarities. Once he has become involved with a project or a person, he cannot let them get away from his control. Once owning something he has to own it for always.…And it is the most self-destroying element of his character.”

  Hughes would not let a few stitches or a lost tooth get in the way of his obsession with Ava Gardner. “He stuck to me like molasses,” she complained. His men continued to follow her, continued to file their reports, photographs, telephone transcripts. How did you get rid of the man? She insulted him, ignored him. On the inauguration of his new Constellation aircraft, meant to be a well-oiled publicity event, he kept a planeload of VIPs waiting at the gate for hours while he tracked her down on the telephone and begged her to come along. He paced among the celebrities, fuming, “Damn her, damn her. ...” He called again, begged some more.

  Ava was one more difficulty in what seemed to Hughes a vast sea of difficulties to be encountered throughout 1944. Potentially disasterous unraveling business deals with the government put him in a state of constant duress. A car accident that shot him through the windshield was one more blow to a head that had already sustained the impact of numerous airplane crashes (and one bronze bell). There was increasing evidence of brain damage, inherited biological flaw or chemical imbalance, a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hughes himself believed he was having a nervous breakdown.

  One day in October he disappeared without a trace. No one connected with his various businesses had any clue where he was hiding (or did not admit it if they did).

  Ava had no more idea what had happened to him than did anyone else.

  After years of the Metro executives struggling to keep him out of uniform, Mickey Rooney had at last been called into service. On June 13, 1944, he would begin a new career as a buck private. Mickey was proud to go. He had not been happy with the way the studio had made him look as if he were evading his duty. Now he was in, a soldier for the war, and whatever happened happened.

  Mickey called and asked Ava to go out with him the night before his induction, and she agreed. It was a sad, sweet evening. They went to the Palladium as they had so many times before, from the first weeks they had known each other, and they talked only of the good times they had known. Full of sentiment and pride and vodka, she told Mickey she would be waiting for him when he got out.

  They wrote to each other. Ava’s letters were affectionate, Mickey’s full of passion and plans for the future. When he had not received word from her for some time he tried to phone her at home, but Bappie or the maid fielded every call. Ava was out or working late or they just weren’t sure where she was right then. He would try again many times.

  One late night in the barracks somebody woke him up and said he had a long-distance call.

  It was Ava. Mickey gushed, but she stopped him at once, said he would have to stop writing to her, stop calling. She said it was over between them. She had someone else. Mickey told her how he felt. It couldn’t end. He loved her too much.

  They spoke, but there was nothing more to be said. And after a while he realized that the line had gone dead. He found himself crying, alone in the corridor by the public phone. He cried for a while, and then, when he had pulled himself together, he went back to the room with the other GIs and went to sleep.

  *There were, of course, numerous exceptions to the studio’s “middle American” rule, including Garbo, the cast of Anglophiliac productions like Mrs. Miniver, and scattered character players with comic twangs and Noo Yawkisms, but the typical MGM screen talent tended to be nonregion-specific American: A look at the contract roster from one year in the 1940s shows that just eleven out of eighty stars and featured players were foreign, and some of these were musical specialty performers like pianist Jose Iturbi.

  *The movie had a brief cult following among teenage doofuses who caught repeat screenings in the belief that you could hear Bela Lugosi screaming the word Shit during an on-screen sneeze, a wild transgression in 1940s cinema; on examining the footage my guess is that the inscrutable Hungarian merely mispronounced the word Ah-choo!

  THREE

  Femme Fatale

  She was introduced to him at a party by her high-spirited, flame-haired good friend Frances (Mrs. Van) Heflin. Fran told each the other’s name, but she needn’t have bothered as Ava knew who he was and he— Artie Shaw—was probably not listening anyway. The two locked eyes, the grinning Frances Heflin got out of the way, and the thing began.

  She had been listening to his music, loving his music, since she was sixteen or so; danced to his records a thousand times, lain before the amber glow of the Philco for a thousand nights, hearing that fantastic sound, “Begin the Beguine” and “Moonglow” and “Frenesi,” the melodic swing and the soaring spirals of the leader’s clarinet. No longer a starstruck kid, she had married a movie star and knew many of the famous faces of Hollywood, but this was something else, like meeting a god.<
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  Shaw, too, in his own way, was mightily impressed. He had never heard of Ava Gardner—if he had even bothered to hear Frances say the name— didn’t know what she did and most likely did not care, but the impact of her face and body was staggering. “She was,” he would later say, “the most beautiful creature you ever saw.”

  They chatted, or Artie talked and Ava listened, and basked. She had never heard such talk, so many words, so many big words, but even if she didn’t know what the hell he was talking about she gave herself over to it till it sounded as rich and enveloping as his music. Though she felt intimidated by the evident gulf in their intellectual capacities, she was pleased to feel that he liked her enough to share with her his complex and never- ending views of the world. After a while Ava said she thought she would like to get away from the crowd, get a drink somewhere, and did Artie want to come?

  Shaw said that he did. (Fifty years later: “What are you going to say, No? You’d have to be an idiot.”)

  They went somewhere. And then the next night and the next. They went to intimate places, sat in booths over candlelight, and drank wine and talked. She would tell him how much his music had meant to her. And he would say something she would find exciting and dramatic, telling her how it was to make an ugly piece of wood come to life and how when you were really playing well it was better than anything, even sex.

  She had until then known of him only as a musician and a notorious lady-killer, husband of Lana Turner, among others. She found him a brilliant, complicated man. The fact that he so clearly didn’t give a shit what other people thought of him made his intimate revelations to her seem then all the more privileged. He told her how she had found him at the end of a terrible time, returning into the light from the most anguished and despairing time of his life. The war had come. There had been a line in Time magazine: It had read that to the average German, America meant “skyscrapers, Clark Gable, and Artie Shaw.” It sounded like a special responsibility. A few months after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the navy. He spent his first months in service on a minesweeper. Sailors would come up to him with mocking admiration: “Can I shake the hand that held Lana Turner’s tit?” Then the navy decided they wanted to use him in his natural habitat and let him lead a military band. He put together a first-rate group of guys—the Rangers—and they went off to the Pacific to entertain the troops, ferried from island to island, tramping into the jungles. They came under attack by Japanese bombers. They were on Guadalcanal during some of the worst fighting. People were wounded and killed all around them. The homesick soldiers wept when they heard Shaw and his band playing the old hit songs in the jungle ten thousand miles from home. The strain was enormous. He returned to America an emotional wreck. He lay in his bed and couldn’t leave it, so depressed and disgusted with the world that he couldn’t find a reason to get up. A friend led him to May Romm, a famed, unconventional psychotherapist, a European refugee then living in Los Angeles. Months of work brought him back to the world. He was finding his music again, he was playing again, he was forming a new band.