“The truth is trickier than I thought, honey.”
“You’ve had a great life, Ava, an incredible life—the men you’ve loved, the incredible people you’ve known. You are more than just a movie star—”
“Being a movie star’s only half of it, honey,” she said.
“That’s my point, Ava. You shouldn’t settle for just another Hollywood bio, full of lies and hype. You deserve better than that.” I was surprised at how passionate I felt about it, and how protective of her I had become.
It was nearly closing time in the park when we reached Rutland Gate, where we came in. She held on to my arm tightly. “Trying to cross this road is about the most exciting thing left in my life,” she said.
6
“The Barefoot Contessa,” she said when I picked up the phone. There was no “hello,” no “good morning, honey.” Just the peremptory question: “The Barefoot Contessa—you saw it, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” I said. I was still half asleep. “You and Humphrey Bogart.”
“And?”
“And what, Ava?”
“And did you like the movie, honey?”
Being woken from a deep sleep at three in the morning, I found it hard enough to recall the plot, let alone give a critique of it. Nevertheless, it was the movie—or maybe it was simply the title—that her fans remembered best. “I haven’t seen it in a while. It’s one we’ll have to see again when we write about it,” I said cautiously. “They called you The World’s Most Beautiful Animal,” I said, remembering the advertising slogan.
“Thirty goddamn years ago I was, honey.”
“You were stunning,” I said. I felt on safer ground talking about her beauty than the merits of the picture. I had reservations about Joe Mankiewicz’s script; I suspected that its literate, cynical banter would have dated badly. His attempt to do a similar hatchet job on the movie business as he had done three years earlier on the theater in All About Eve—which won six Academy Awards including Best Picture—was not as incisive, or nearly as witty. “You were beautiful,” I repeated dully.
“It didn’t hurt to be photographed by Jack Cardiff. That’s the God-honest truth. I could be having the worst goddamn period, the worst goddamn hangover in my life, and Jack could still make me look good at six o’clock in the morning. He was a fucking magician.”
“John Huston said he could photograph what you were thinking,” I said.
“He’d photograph your soul if he could find enough light, honey.” She laughed softly at her own joke.
“Mankiewicz always got great crews around him, people he could count on,” I said.
“Mankiewicz was a sonofabitch,” she said. She nearly always said that whenever his name was mentioned. “I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me. [Costar] Ed O’Brien said it was a failure in our chemistry. It was more than that, baby. The sonofabitch hated me.”
There was a long pause on the line. I switched on the reading lamp, found my notepad and pen on the bedside table. You never knew what she was going to say from left field—that was part of the excitement of her calls, especially those in the middle of the night.
“But the sonofabitch was some writer, I’ll give him that,” she said, ending the silence on a forgiving note. “He wrote great parts for women; his women were up there with Tennessee’s and Papa’s. All those guys—Williams, Hemingway, Mankiewicz, the sonofabitch—they all wanted me to play their women. I played three of Papa’s—Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; Cynthia, the ex in [The Snows of] Kilimanjaro; and that lapful in The Killers. I was Maxine Faulk in Tennessee’s [Night of the] Iguana. I really brought that broad to life. And then there was Maria Vargas for Mankiewicz.
“Maria was a part we both knew I could kick into the stands. That role fitted me like a goddamn glove. I understood Maria Vargas”—the promiscuous café dancer who ended up as the Contessa Torlato-Favrini and a movie star—“I knew that lady inside out, in bed and out of bed. Especially in bed.” She started to laugh. “Why the hell wouldn’t I? The sonofabitch based the dame on me.”
The next hour seemed more like a debriefing than an interview. I barely said a word or asked a question. She told me stories about Mankiewicz, The Barefoot Contessa, Humphrey Bogart—another sonofabitch, apparently—and the first time she met Howard Hughes. She told me about her short-lived marriage to, and divorce from, the constantly unfaithful but passionate Mickey Rooney, and what fun Hollywood was in the 1940s if you ran with the crowd who could afford to frequent Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Mocambo’s, where she loved to dance, and the Brown Derby, preferably the Beverly Hills branch. She said she loved to swim, and play tennis at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. She talked about the mobster Benny Siegel, a regular at the movie colony restaurants in those days. She said, “I dated him once or twice, so did Lana [Turner]. But she liked gangsters. I mean, she really liked gangsters.” A lot of young actresses and starlets did, she said. You couldn’t avoid them if you were young and cute and worked in movies. Siegel was tall, nattily dressed, and a member of the toney Jewish Hillcrest Country Club. She said, “He could have been a movie star. But he didn’t get to first base with me.” George Raft introduced her to Siegel at Santa Anita, the track out at Pasadena, when they were making Whistle Stop in 1945. She said, “George loved to play the horses. All those guys did—George Raft, John Huston, Mickey, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Durante, Errol Flynn. Louis Mayer stabled his horses at Santa Anita. So did Fred Astaire.”
Higgledy-piggledy, she covered a lot of ground. She recalled scenes from her school days in Newport News, juxtaposed them with memories of her father’s death, and her awe at Artie Shaw’s intellectualism. She said, “I fell in love with Art’s mind in a heartbeat. We made a damn fine-looking couple.” It was a pity that he was a lousy dancer, but so was Frank Sinatra. Mickey was the best of the three. “But you can’t dance with a midget!” She was telling me stories I knew I could never have winkled out of her in normal interviews. She told me things I didn’t know enough even to suspect, let alone ask about. I must have had enough material for four or five chapters.
I switched to speakerphone, went into the kitchen, and made myself a pot of tea while she continued to talk. All of it was good stuff, some of it was priceless. I continued listening, sipping my tea, making notes.
Gradually, the humor, then the vehemence, started to go out of her voice.
I knew the signs.
I said, “You must be very tired now, Ava?”
She admitted she was.
I said it was late. She should try to get some sleep.
“Isn’t this interesting, honey?” It was a familiar question when she was losing the thread of a story, or the point of an anecdote. Or when she simply wanted an interview to end.
I said, “Ava, it’s very good. I just think you must try to get some sleep.”
“You don’t think people will think I’m settling old scores, telling tales out of school?”
“Some might,” I said. I stopped myself from saying, I hope so.
She said, “I’m just trying to be honest.”
“That is why your book is important, Ava. It is honest. It’s Hollywood history.”
“That puts me in context, baby,” she said dryly.
It was daylight outside. I knew she’d still be in bed with the curtains drawn tight, total darkness being the only way she could sleep at night.