When I showed Ava the revised first chapters of her memoir, more than twenty thousand words, she read them at a single sitting in complete silence. I sat in an armchair opposite her, sipping a glass of wine, watching her facial expressions, trying to judge her reaction to the pages. I knew there would be passages that she wouldn’t like and things she would want changed; some she would definitely cut.
She was a slow reader. She wore a gray track suit, her legs tucked beneath her. Some pages she went back to and read again. Once she read a whole chapter twice. Her expression never changed. Based on our interviews, her asides and ad-libs, the gossip and thoughts we had exchanged in our middle-of-the-night telephone conversations when her defenses were down, the copy was funny and frank, a God-honest read. She was candid about herself and others. I had ignored her request to tone down her profanities, which she said made her sound like a “fishwife.” Her expletives had a kind of eloquence of their own and I’d let them fly.
I knew I had betrayed her confidences and repeated many of her funny but strictly off-the-record remarks. It was a deliberate risk I had taken to make the book as honest and edgy as she was herself. I knew I had gone too far in places, but this, I told myself, was to be my bargaining chip—when push came to shove, I’d be prepared to forsake a certain amount of vulgarity to keep one indiscreet revelation. It would be an interesting game to play.
But the torrent of invective I expected her to unleash any moment at the liberties I had taken never came. She continued to read on in absolute silence, the rustle of the read pages falling to the floor the only sound in the room.
Her sustained concentration eventually began to unnerve me. The idea of bargaining chips went out the window. I began to think of what I would say when her anger finally erupted—what lines would I fight for? which would I sacrifice? And if she fired me as her ghost, what would be my parting shot then? Several excellent exit bon mots went through my mind. “Fuck you, Ava!” was my favorite.
She finished reading the revised chapters. The discarded pages were scattered around her, on the sofa, across the floor. She removed her glasses, and began cleaning the lenses with a Kleenex. I was now sure she was preparing to give me a severe scolding before she let me go.
“It’s good, honey,” she finally said.
The sense of relief—and surprise—went through me like a shot of adrenaline. I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t objected to a single four-letter word, nor complained about the amount of material I had lifted from our private conversations and her off-the-record stories.
“I’m pleased you like it,” I said.
“I didn’t say I liked it, honey,” she said. “It’s too fucking close for comfort, honey.” After a pause, she added: “But I’m sure the publishers will love it.”
“It needs polishing,” I said out of sheer relief. She had read it as carefully as I had seen her read anything and I couldn’t believe she had accepted it without a fight. She sipped her glass of wine that had remained untouched by her side. “You okay with the language?” I said.
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“I’ve used a few words you asked me not to use,” I said.
“So I noticed,” she said dryly.
My first response was to laugh. “And you’re happy with all that?” I said. I knew I was pressing my luck but I didn’t want her to have second thoughts after we delivered the copy to the publishers. “If you have any doubts, it’s best you tell me now,” I said.
“I think it’s got to be all or nothing, don’t you, honey?” she said.
“I’m sure that’s right, Ava,” I said.
“What the hell. The publishers are going to love it,” she said again after a thoughtful silence.
I still had to be certain. “You don’t want to discuss it with Spoli, or with Paul Mills?” I said. I regretted it immediately.
She turned the question over in her mind. “Do you think I should?” She looked at me steadily.
I said I’d rather she didn’t. I knew what they’d say, and so did she.
“They’re wise old birds,” she said. “Especially Spoli.”
“They’d still be second-guessers,” I said. We’d had this discussion before, I reminded her, and I really didn’t want to get into it again. “They have already made their views plain, Ava.” I knew that the more people who become involved in a manuscript, especially when they’re friends, well-meaning friends, with their own prejudices and ideas about the story line, the more muddled it can become. But if she wanted a second opinion, it was up to her, I said.
“It wouldn’t bother you?” she said.
“Apart from the fact it’ll add months to the schedule? No, it doesn’t bother me,” I said.
“Balls,” she said.
“I don’t want to write anything that would hurt you, Ava.”
“Then you’d prefer me not to show it to them?” she persisted.
We were going around in circles. I said, “It’s your decision, Ava.”
She poured herself a second glass of wine, then another for me. “I trust you,” she said after another thoughtful silence. She sounded unusually hesitant and I didn’t comment. “Anyway, I agree, too much discretion would bore the pants off people, right?” she said eventually.
I lifted my glass in a toast. “I’ll drink to that,” I said.
“What happens now, honey?” she said. She put a cigarette in her mouth but didn’t light it.
“I don’t want to show anything to Dick Snyder until we have another couple of chapters in the bag. Now I know you’re okay with what we’ve done, we should be able to move ahead much faster,” I said.
She removed the cigarette from her lips and crumbled it in an ashtray. “Just remember, I’m not getting any fucking younger, honey,” she said.
ALTHOUGH IT CONTINUED TO be impossible to get her to express her thoughts in any coherent order, we settled into a successful, if occasionally tetchy, working relationship. I would spend a session digging into a period of her life, sometimes into a particular incident I thought was interesting; the following session, preferably the next evening, we would discuss the reasons for her behavior and why she had reacted in a particular way. I’d then write a first draft for her to read and see if there was anything we could add.
For example, a few months after her marriage to Rooney, Peter Lawford, another young MGM contract player—who became a somewhat mischief-making confidant—told Ava about the little black book of girls’ telephone numbers Mickey still kept and continued to use. She hadn’t wanted to expand on this in our interviews; in the draft, I had her conclude tamely: “I was pretty angry when I found out!”
“Pretty angry? Are you kidding me? I was fucking furious, honey. Goddamn fucking furious, baby. What young bride wouldn’t have been? I was spitting blood. If we’re going to use that story, let’s use all of it, honey,” she said.
That night, she said, she had gone through Rooney’s pockets while he slept and found the little black book. “Most of the names were starlets and bit players. I knew some of them. They were the regular studio pushovers—Bappie says back home they were called sharecroppers. Others were the kids I told you about, the ones who had to put out at the end of the month when the rental was due. Anyway, I set fire to his fucking little book. But I always used it against him whenever we had a fight: What about Lana, was she a good lay? I never fucked Lana, he’d insist. Well, her name was in the fucking book, I’d say. And so was my fucking bookie’s, sweetheart, and I never fucked him either, he’d say.”
A week had passed since she told me about the night Mickey again asked her to marry him and she had at last said yes. I suggested we pick it up from there.