“Anyway, a few days later John ran off to Las Vegas with her and they got hitched! John said it was all her idea. He did seem a bit bemused by it, I must say. Naturally, the marriage didn’t last more than five minutes. And listen to this, Miss Keyes later became Artie Shaw’s eighth wife!” She laughed softly. “A small world, huh?”
She stood up, she took my arm, and we resumed our walk.
“But I made three good movies for John. They can’t take those away from me,” she said sadly.
“Peter Viertel says Huston was a great joker,” I said.
“The best. Did I tell you the time I played Lily Langtry in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean? John had set up a complicated tracking scene for Lily’s arrival in Langtry, Texas, the town named after her by Judge Bean. I looked piss-elegant, I have to say. I was about fifty then. It might have been the last time I looked truly beautiful on the big screen. Lily is met at the railroad station by a grizzled old-timer, played by Billy Pearson. Pearson was an ex-jockey, one of John’s cronies. John collected characters. Billy takes Lily’s hand and helps her down from the carriage and they start to walk up the high street with the camera tracking ahead of them. It must have been a four-minute take. The train had stopped where it was supposed to stop, right on cue, with the sun going down. I didn’t want to fuck it up. I was hitting my marks and feeling good. We’d almost got to the end of the take, when Billy Pearson says: ‘You don’t know how nice it is to welcome you, Miss Langtry. How’d you like an old man to go down on you after your long journey?’ That was John’s idea of a joke. It broke me up. God knows what it cost the studio. It was half a day’s work done for.”
We continued our walk very slowly toward the Round Pond.
“Who else do I miss? Well, Frank—or rather I miss my fights with Frank. We’d better not say that. I miss a lot of things: playing tennis; Spain I miss, of course, and dancing to flamenco music late at night.” She smiled sadly. “Those days are over, baby.”
We walked in silence for a while.
“I’m not a quitter, honey. I just get tired, that’s all,” she said apropos of nothing I had said, but I suspected it was to let me know that she understood what was bothering me. “I just felt so awful last week. I couldn’t have worked. I thought I was going to die.”
“You wouldn’t do that to me,” I said. “We have a bestseller to write.”
“I’m not a quitter, honey,” she said again. “We’ll finish the goddamn book if it kills me. I was just so low, baby. I brought Morgan [her Welsh corgi] for a walk in the park to try to clear my head. That didn’t work. I had a memory lapse that was terrifying. I couldn’t remember Morgan’s goddamn name. He ran off into the shrubbery, I couldn’t even remember what the hell he looked like, what color he was, nothing. My mind was a total blank.”
I could understand her forgetting Morgan’s name. I couldn’t get my head around her failure to remember what he looked like, I said.
“I remembered fuck-all, honey. It was a complete memory loss. My mind was a complete blank,” she said again.
“Did you tell your doctor what happened?”
“I didn’t bother. I’ve been forgetting things for years. Anyway, next day I was fine. There are still some things I can’t remember—names, faces, what I had for dinner last night. But for a few hours, I thought my whole memory had been wiped out.”
“A memoirist without a memory would be a problem for both of us,” I said.
“I know quite a few people who’d be damned pleased to hear that news, honey.”
I urged her to talk to her doctor. “You should have a brain scan, at least get a checkup,” I said.
“Dirk Bogarde said it was hysterical amnesia. He reckoned the same thing happened to him in France last year. He said it was nothing to worry about. He said it was a temporary condition.”
“For God’s sake, Dirk’s not a doctor, Ava.”
“Yeah, what the fuck does he know?” She grinned.
“Ava, I’m serious. You should get a checkup.”
She squeezed my arm reassuringly. “When he fell down the stairs, he told people he’d had a stroke. He was just pissed out of his skull. I love Dirk, he is such a drama queen.”
“Will you talk to your doctor? I think you should.”
“We’ll see. Let’s not talk about this anymore, honey. Let’s talk about something else.”
“When I couldn’t reach you last week, I was afraid you might have changed your mind about the book again,” I told her, obediently changing the subject, and immediately regretting it.
“That’s still a possibility,” she said dryly.
Ava never made it easy, and I didn’t want to be goaded into another argument about whether she should go ahead with the book or not. “You know how to keep a fellow guessing,” I said.
“You can’t teach an old broad new tricks, honey.”
I laughed but I knew that she probably meant it—her throwaway lines, especially the funny ones, always contained a grain of truth.
“Anyway, I’ve been beating my brains out trying to think of things that’ll make my childhood interesting for you. Maybe that’s what started off the goddamn headaches,” she said, giving me an accusing look.
I said that I didn’t want the book to make her ill. “Writing an autobiography should be fun.” I lied, of course. An autobiography is never easy and always painful to write truthfully.
“Well, I’d enjoy it a whole lot more if…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“If what, Ava?” If I had been wise, I wouldn’t have pressed her. She had, after all, a gift for getting to the point when she needed to. But her hesitation made me curious. “It’s important. What would make you enjoy it more?”
“Honey, we’re getting in awful deep with some of the personal stuff,” she said, after a long pause, as if she were still trying to sort out her feelings. “Is it really necessary to put down exactly what Mickey Rooney said, what I said, what Frank Sinatra did next, and all the rest of that stuff? My own bad behavior, I can live with that—some of it, anyway. I have no choice. I’d just rather not have to remember all the shitty things people have said and done to me. I’m happier not remembering, baby. Little of it seems pertinent now, anyway. Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember? You can make it up, can’t you? If I had lost my memory, you would have to have made it up, most of it, wouldn’t you? The publicity guys at Metro did it all the time. Who the fuck knows the difference anyway? The difference can just be our little secret, can’t it, baby? Let’s make it easy on ourselves. We can do that, can’t we?”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m tired, honey.”
“It’s a terrible idea, Ava.”
I was astonished at the suggestion, especially after our last session a couple of weeks earlier which had gone so well. So far, I had gone easy on her. I hadn’t pressed her about Mickey Rooney, I never had to. That stuff just flowed out of her; she needed no prompting at all. Since my faux pas about Frank Sinatra the night she first called me, I had barely mentioned his name. He was always going to be a tricky subject and, unless she brought him up, I’d decided to leave that phase of the book until I had the rest of it pretty well wrapped up.
I said, “I thought you wanted a truthful book, Ava. I thought that was the deal.”