“He wants to marry her, Mr. Mayer,” Peterson told him.
“Tell him he can’t,” said Mayer. “He belongs to MGM. Tell him a married Andy Hardy would break the hearts of all those little girlies out there who want him for themselves. Who knows what that would cost—him, me, the studio?”
“I’ve already told him, L.B. I’ve told him that at his age he should still be playing the field, and having fun. He won’t listen,” said Peterson.
“Is he slipping her the business?”
“He swears he’s not, L.B.”
“Why doesn’t he fuck her? He fucks all the others.”
“He says she’s holding out like no dame he’s ever known, L.B.”
“She ain’t the fucking Virgin Mary,” Mayer said.
“He says it’s giving him terrible headaches,” Peterson said.
“He should just boff her and get her out of my fucking hair.”
“This was before he wanted to become a Catholic,” said Ava, who loved to tell the story of Mayer’s meeting with the hapless publicist. “One of his daughters, I don’t know whether it was Irene or the other one, Edith Goetz, talked him out of it. She said people would laugh in his face—a short, fat, famous Russian Jew—if he converted to Catholicism. Well, in Hollywood they definitely would have.
“I liked Les, and I think he liked me. He was devoted to Mickey, of course. But he knew which side his bread was buttered. And who can blame him? Mayer was the boss of bosses. He was the king. They all owed their careers to him. Afterward, after Mick and I were hitched, I asked Les whether there was anything Mayer liked about me?
“Les had to think about that. ‘Well, he once told me you obviously had cunt power,’ he said.
“I said, ‘Am I supposed to be flattered by that, Les?’
“He said, ‘Well, that’s just about the highest compliment L.B. can pay a girl, honey.’”
Nevertheless, the idea that his most profitable star—the hero of the lucrative Andy Hardy franchise, who made more money for him than all his other stars put together, and who had been voted three years in a row the most popular star in the universe—had fallen in love with a hillbilly starlet was intolerable.
“I swear to God, I had no idea of the fuss I was creating. I had no idea that Mayer—uncle L.B. as Mickey called him—had ordered Mick to stop seeing me. He’d actually forbidden it! That shows you the power Mayer wielded in those days. And it shows the power—and the guts—Mickey had to stand up to him the way he did. I still hadn’t met the man! I didn’t know that he considered me the devil incarnate. I didn’t know that he thought I was going to eat his fucking meal ticket.
“I had to hand it to Mick. While all this was going on, he hadn’t said a word about it to me. He must have been under enormous stress, poor darling. I still hadn’t agreed to marry him but he was laying his whole career on the line in the hope that I’d eventually say yes. The man must have been fucking insane. Believe me, when L. B. Mayer leaned on you, you knew you were being leaned on. He would use charm, threats, floods of tears to get what he wanted. He could destroy careers. God, he was a piece of work. He was manipulative, cunning, and profoundly sentimental. He treated his stars as if they were his own children. He could wrap them around his finger—especially Mickey. L.B. was the best actor on the lot. He could turn on the tears like a faucet. He and Mickey were the best criers on the lot. I’d have paid good money to be a fly on the wall at those meetings.”
In spite of Mayer’s efforts to keep the relationship quiet, the gossip columnists—Louella Parsons, who would become Ava’s bête noire, Jimmie Fidler, Sidney Skolsky, Hedda Hopper—eventually got on to the story. “They always mentioned that I was a North Carolina beauty and much taller than Mickey. Their bulb pressers always managed to get pictures that made me look as if I towered over Mickey—which, of course, I did. Mick never seemed to mind, but it embarrassed the hell out of me. The way those press people kept on about it made me feel like a freak. I offered not to wear my high-heeled shoes when we were together but Mick wouldn’t hear of it.
“I was spending a lot of time in the picture gallery doing ‘leg art’ for Clarence Bull’s people. At least that’s where I was when I wasn’t having voice lessons to get rid of my hopeless accent. Mickey didn’t want me to lose it. He said he was just beginning to understand what the fuck I was talking about! Anyway, Clarence Bull was the man who did those great portraits of Garbo. He shot all the studio’s important stars—Kate Hepburn, Harlow, Grace [Kelly], Lana Turner. Lassie! He didn’t bother with me until much later, after I’d divorced Artie Shaw but before I married Frank. But I was getting a lot of space in the papers and magazines with that cheesecake stuff.
“Mama must have collected every one of those clippings. Bappie found them in her bedroom after she died. She was my biggest fan. She was my only fan—well, her and Mickey Rooney. She was thrilled when she read that I was dating Mick. She must have known that already, of course—Bappie and I wrote her every week—but reading it in the newspapers made it real for her. It was news to her when she read in a local rag that I’d soon be appearing in a new MGM picture at the local Raleigh movie house. It was news to me, too. I still hadn’t made a single movie at that point.”
From August to November 1941, Ava managed to keep Rooney at bay and on heat. “I was having a ball. It was a fast life but we were both kids, we could handle it. One night we’d had a nightcap at Don the Beachcomber, which was often our last stop off before Mick took me back to Wilcox Avenue. The Beachcomber had become a favorite spot of mine. They served the best zombies in California. They tasted so good and seemed so innocuous. Have you ever had a zombie?”
I said I didn’t think so.
“Oh, you’d remember if you had: Bacardi, dark rum, light rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, apricot brandy, orange juice, a sprig of mint, and a cherry. Only I always told them to hold the mint and the cherry!”
“Very sensible,” I said.
She smiled. “I might have been floating a little bit, but I definitely wasn’t drunk. I swear I still hadn’t ever tied one on in my life at that stage. No matter what time I’d gotten to bed I always woke fresh as a daisy. I definitely knew what I was saying that night when Mick again asked me to marry him.
“‘Okay, Mick,’ I said.
“‘I asked you to marry me,’ he said. He sounded stunned.
“‘I know you did, and I said okay—but not until I’m nineteen,’ I said.
“I think I was a bit stunned myself. Maybe I’d heard what a rough time L.B. was giving him over me. Maybe I felt guilty about that. I really can’t remember. I just remember thinking: why the hell not? Mama was saying marry him, Bappie was saying Do it, do it! He’s a nice guy! What’s keeping you?
“So I said okay. But I still had this thing about being a virgin on the day I was married—and nineteen years old. I don’t know why I wanted to wait until I was nineteen, perhaps because Mama was nineteen when she married Daddy, and it always seemed like it was the right thing to do.”
It had been a good session and we both knew it.
“I must try a zombie next time I’m passing Don the Beachcomber,” I said.
“But you must get them to hold the mint and the cherry,” she said. “That’s the secret of a good zombie.”
13