She sat in the chair Jack Cardiff had lit for her and slowly moved her face around, feeling the warmth of the key light on her cheekbones… tilting her head so the light made her eyes shine. “Tricks of the trade,” she said.
I took her through some questions Snyder might ask her, and rehearsed her possible replies. She wore black silk stockings and high heels, which showed her legs—of which she was still extremely proud—to advantage. She had settled on a little black Jean Muir dress she’d worn before. She smoked several cigarettes, not finishing any of them.
“They’re here,” she said when the doorbell rang. She stood up and waited by her chair. It was as if somebody had called “Action.” She was on.
“Hello, I’m Ava Gardner,” she said, holding out her hand, the model of sobriety. She wasn’t the first movie star these men had ever met, and she was no longer in her prime, but they were bowled over. She sat down, crossing her long legs. Carefully catching Cardiff’s key light, which put the frozen side of her face into shadow, she exuded elegance and sensuality with all the composure of Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises. I opened the champagne and began to fill their glasses. To my surprise, and relief, Ava discreetly lifted the neck of the bottle with her little finger before I’d poured little more than a taste into her glass.
“I guess my first and most important question, Miss Gardner, is why do you want to write your book?” Snyder asked pleasantly.
Ava was ready for that one. “Well, Mr. Snyder, my business manager, Jess Morgan, in Los Angeles, told me I either had to write the book or sell the jewels,”—she spoke in a tone so dulcet and Southern that Max Steiner could have set it to his score for Scarlett O’Hara—“and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added with a small sensuous smile. She even made it sound like the first time she had said it. Restraining her usual ribald language, she continued to talk easily and convincingly about herself. She made wicked remarks about the famous people she had known—a few of them “intimately but not well, honey.” She smiled at Snyder knowingly. “Elizabeth Taylor is not beautiful, she is pretty—I was beautiful,” she said, describing her looks in the past tense. It gave her self-appraisal a sense of reality and acceptance. She went on like this for more than an hour, her stories sometimes funny, sometimes indiscreet, but always interesting. There was no question that she made an impression. Ed and Snyder were beguiled.
“You were great,” I congratulated her when they had left. She had drunk very little; the second bottle of Cristal remained unopened in the fridge.
“Aa-vah Gahd-nuh,” she mimicked herself. “That was pure Tobacco Road, Johnston County, honey. But God, I so wanted a pee,” she said.
“Why didn’t you just go to the bathroom?”
“But they would have seen my limp,” she said.
“That was silly, Ava,” I told her.
“Sure it was.” She clapped her hands. “Now let’s open that other bottle of Cristal before I die of fucking thirst.”
9
Newport News has bad memories for me. It’s where Daddy died. He was so weak and so hurt from his coughing at the end. In the mornings, before I went to school, I would go to the hospital and comb his hair, and shave him with his own cut-throat razor, which I think had been his Daddy’s. He loved watching me soap up the shaving lather in his old mug. ‘You make a good barber, Daughter,’ he’d say. He was fifty-nine years old—born 1878, he was younger than I am now, fahcrissake. Some men can still be young in their fifties, even in their sixties—I’ve had leading men as old as Daddy was when he died; even Clark Gable was up there, he was fifty-something when we made Mogambo. And he could still get the girl! But the years weren’t good to Daddy, they just ground him down physically. I would follow his progress on a chart above his bed in the hospital, and it sank a little more every day. The last day I went in to shave him, he waved me away. It was a very little wave. He managed a weak smile. He said he wanted to sleep but I knew he meant he wanted to die. When I went back after school that day, the nurses were putting screens around his bed. And that was that. He passed in a goddamn public ward in a town he hated. Nothing can be sadder than that, fahcrissake.”
THAT EVENING I SHOWED a draft of this material to Ava. Was there anything she wanted to add, or change? She read it quietly without saying a word. She closed her eyes and remained silent for a while. I didn’t say anything, and waited. She read it again more slowly. Then read it a third time.
“You think the stuff about Gable being old is okay?” she said eventually. “It isn’t too cruel, is it? It doesn’t make me sound too bitchy?”
“You do say that he could still get the girl,” I said.
She didn’t smile.
“Do we have to say ‘fahcrissake’?” she said. “It makes me sound like a fucking fishwife.”
“We can take it out but it’s what you said, Ava.”
“I said ‘fahcrissake’?” she said.
“Twice,” I said.
“Screw you,” she said.
It was the first copy I had shown her and I tried not to let her see how anxious I was. Would she like it? Was she going to be difficult? I hadn’t put words in her mouth but I had turned her answers to my questions into prose, and sometimes I’d cut together quotes and ideas from separate interviews about her father’s death to make a convincing whole. Was she going to understand why I’d had to do that? I’d also done my best to imitate her voice but would she recognize it on the page? More importantly, would she accept it? Her reaction to the relatively mild “fahcrissake” was a worrying start, although it did amuse me.
She removed her glasses, and looked at me quizzically. “What do you think, honey?” she said.
I remembered Peter Viertel’s warning that she could make a writer’s life hell if he showed any weakness. “Never let her get the upper hand, kid,” he’d said. If she senses uncertainty in a writer, his life won’t be worth living, he’d said.
“I think it’s a good start,” I said firmly.
“It’ll be better when you take out the second ‘fahcrissake,’” she said.
“Okay,” I said. It seemed like a reasonable compromise to me.
It was seven o’clock. Was I going to open the wine, or were we going to sit and look at it all evening? she said.
“You know, when Daddy was alive I had no problems. I had a charmed childhood. Life was sweet,” she said as she watched me open the bottle of Good Ordinary Claret that I had brought from Berry Brothers in St. James’s. “The worst thing that had happened to me was failing a sewing exam! I’d made myself a little dress—that was the exam, to make a dress. I bought some brown linen and made a little princess style dress, with a round collar and round cuffs in pink. I made it as easy as possible for myself. That sewing teacher bitch hated it. Maybe she just didn’t like pink and brown. Anyway, she failed me, the bitch. It hurt my pride but I’d already decided I wanted to be a secretary anyway.”
I poured the wine and handed her a glass. She sipped it thoughtfully, and said it was good.
“When Daddy died I thought nothing as painful as that could ever happen to me again. He’d made me feel special, although I’m sure my life was no more special than any of the other kids brought up in the Depression. I didn’t expect very much from life but Daddy made me feel loved. He made me feel safe. No daddy can do more than that for his daughter. It would be nice if you could work something like that into the story somewhere. Have you got enough material to do that, honey?”
“I think so. I’ll come back to you if I need more,” I said.