“One thing we don’t have right now, Ava, is time. The clock’s running and it’s important that we have at least half a dozen chapters for Ed to show Richard Snyder as soon as possible. It’ll be quicker and easier for me if we concentrate on one subject—”
“And it’s easier for me when I can say things as they come into my head,” she said angrily. “Why the hell shouldn’t I tell you what comes into my head? You should be pleased, at least you know I’m not holding anything back. That’s how I did it with the shrink and it seemed to work fine for her.”
“The shrink and the Artie Shaw story can wait, Ava,” I said bluntly. I hadn’t meant it to sound aggressive, or like an ultimatum, but it did. I knew we were on the edge of another argument. She knew it, too. She looked at me steadily for a long moment, in silence. I imagined she was making up her mind whether she wanted to continue with the book or not. Then she said quietly: “Let’s get on with it, honey. Where the fuck was I?”
I felt duly reprimanded for interrupting her flow. “The publicity man was taking you around the sets. He’d introduced you to Mickey Rooney,” I said.
“He said, ‘Mickey, this is Ava Gardner, one of our new contract players.’ Mick did another quick soft-shoe shuffle and bowed even more elaborately, like a courtier or something. The people on the set were laughing like mad at him. He loved an audience, of course. He was always at his best when he was in the spotlight. I just wanted the ground to open and swallow me up.”
She fell silent for another long moment. Then she said, “I remember asking him one evening, shortly after we were married, what he thought of me that first time we met. We had a kind of truth game we used to play in bed. We’d spend a lot of time in the sack in the early days, a lot of time: talking, laughing, making love. We were still getting to know each other really. Mick was only a couple of years older than me, but he’d been playing the vaudeville circuits since he was a kid. That was some education. He had all the street smarts in the world when I met him. I must have seemed so fucking awkward, so fucking gauche. Anyway, I asked him what went through his mind when he saw me on the set that day. He said did I really want to know?
“Of course, I said, although I didn’t expect he would tell me the truth. New husbands seldom tell the truth to their new brides—at least none of my three ever did! And especially Mickey!
“He said, ‘Okay, when Milt Weiss said you were a new contract player, I figured you were a new piece of pussy for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you.’”
Ava smiled. “Mick was always the romantic,” she said. “I guess he meant it as a compliment but I was shocked. I was still capable of being shocked in those days.”
She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke drift out slowly through her mouth and nostrils. It was a seductive piece of business. Men had fallen in love with her because of that performance. I had seen her do it a dozen times. It took me a while to realize that she never finished a cigarette once the performance was over. She used it to play for time, to avoid an issue, often to change the subject. As I watched her crush out another barely smoked cigarette, I asked why she didn’t give up smoking altogether.
“I used to smoke Winstons. They had the highest content of nicotine and tar around. A pack could keep the smile on Marlboro Man’s face for a month. I was smoking three packs a day. I hardly had enough breath to get from my bed to the bathroom. I called John Huston and asked him how he stopped. He said, ‘Honey, when I had to.’ A few days later he died of emphysema. It’s such a hideous disease. To think I only started smoking to make me look sophisticated—after I saw the gold cigarette case and gold lighter Lana Turner carried around all the time. The dumbest move I ever made.”
“You once said that marrying Mickey Rooney was the dumbest thing you ever did,” I said, getting her back to the subject of Rooney.
“Yeah, well Mickey… you have to remember, I was eighteen! August 1941. I was still a virgin. That was a long time ago, honey. A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework since then. The studio photographer took a bunch of pictures of us, with Mick mugging it up. The whole business took five minutes, tops. But that evening, he called me and asked me out to dinner.
“I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five-foot-two of him! The complete Hollywood playboy, he went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge. He was incorrigible. He’d screw anything that moved. He had a lot of energy. He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s a funny line.”
She looked uncertain. “Let’s think about it, honey. I’m not sure that you should use Lana’s name… not until I’m pushing the clouds around anyway.” She had used that line a few times now. I should have paid more attention to it.
She said, “Anyway, Mick called me that night and asked me out to dinner. I said no. I wasn’t playing hard to get. I wasn’t into that Southern Belle shit. I was just too shy. I said I was busy. That was a stupid thing to say. Who the hell was I busy with, fahcrissake? It had taken about six minutes flat to unpack my only suitcase and brush my teeth. I didn’t know a goddamn soul in Hollywood, except my sister. And I’m busy?”
Rooney continued to call her; she continued to say no to his invitations. But he was funny and cajoling and persistent. “He could talk like all creation,” she said. He would call her every day from his dressing room in the lunch hour, between calls to his bookmakers, and again late in the evening. On the phone, she lost some of her shyness with him; she laughed at his jokes, and enjoyed the gossip about the stars he shared with her. He was laying siege to her. She was flattered.
“Every conversation ended up with him asking me to have dinner with him. Finally I just ran out of excuses. I thought the hell with it, and said okay—but I have my sister Bappie staying with me, I told him!”
“‘Fine, bring Sis along, too,’ he said, bang-off. He was like Frank Sinatra in that way. He said he’d call Dave Chasen and pick us up at seven. The last thing I wanted was for him to see where we lived—in a goddamn walk-up on Wilcox Avenue!
“‘We’ll meet you at the restaurant,’ I said desperately. He wouldn’t hear of it. That wasn’t his style. His chauffeur-driven limo arrived at exactly seven o’clock.
“The only other time I’d seen him he was wearing that Carmen Miranda shit on his face. I’d seen him on the screen a hundred times but that was in black-and-white. His looks in the flesh, without the Carmen Miranda makeup, came as a shock. He still wasn’t what I’d call a handsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was… well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!”
Chasen’s was run by Dave Chasen, an ex-vaudevillian, like Rooney. Along with Romanoff”s, the Brown Derby, and Perino’s, it was the place to eat and be seen. And Rooney made sure that Ava was seen. He took her from table to table, introducing her to the celebrity diners. Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and W. C. Fields were all regulars. But caught up in the whirlwind that was Mickey Rooney—“and after a glass or two of champagne, and I wasn’t used to booze at all in those days, I was feeling no pain”—Ava couldn’t remember who she met that night, except for Jimmy Durante, who gave an impromptu performance of his classic number, “Inka Dinka Doo.”