“Once he’d recovered—and realized that my acceptance didn’t mean I was going to make out with him that night—Mick was all business. We’d announce our engagement on Christmas Eve at a birthday bash for me at Romanoff’s, he said. Then there was this odd sort of silence. I wanted to hear violins play but there was just this awful silence.
“‘Is there something wrong, honey?’ I asked.
“He said, ‘There’s a problem, sweetheart.’
“He sounded so fucking serious. I thought he might be having second thoughts about the marriage thing. ‘What’s the problem?’ I said.
“‘Who are we going to break the news to first—Ma or Uncle L.B.?’ he said.
“I was just thankful he didn’t throw in old Louella [Parsons], too. Anyway, we tossed a coin, and Ma won. I had a feeling she always would!”
Ava’s first meeting with her formidable future mother-in-law was one of her favorite stories. “I would replay it in my head whenever Mick did something so outrageous I wanted to kill him. I only had to think of that meeting to make me laugh, and all was forgiven. You had to forgive any boy who had a mother like Mick’s Ma,” she said.
“I was nervous and very shy. Ma was sitting cross-legged on the sofa with the Racing Form across her lap, a bottle of bourbon by her side, and a big glassful in her hand. Did you ever see the comic strip Maggie and Jiggs?”
I said I hadn’t. It was an American strip.
“Well, Ma was a dead ringer for Maggie, even the tight, little curls were the same—like carroty Ping-Pong balls. The scene was bizarre. It’s something I’ll never forget: Ma sitting in this big, beautiful house Mickey had bought her in the [San Fernando] Valley, sipping her whiskey, and studying the horses. She had divorced Joe Yule; she was married to Fred Pankey, a cashier at the studio.
“Mick said, ‘Ma, I want you to meet Ava. We’re going to get married.’
“She looked at me for a second or two, her expression didn’t change. She was as calm as custard. ‘Well,’ she said, these were her first words to me: ‘I guess he hasn’t been in your pants yet, has he?’”
This was always the starting point to Ava’s story about her future mother-in-law. She loved telling it. “God Almighty, what a meeting that was. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. Today I would think it was one of the funniest opening remarks I’d ever heard, but then I just wanted to curl up and die.”
On the way back from the Valley that evening, Mick asked Ava what she thought of Ma.
“She certainly knows her son,” Ava said, who rather liked her once she had gotten over her embarrassment and the shock of meeting a woman who could cuss better and more often than she did.
“That was the easy part,” Rooney told her. “Wait till you meet Uncle L.B.”
THE PLAN WAS TO announce their engagement at a party at Romanoff’s on Christmas Eve. But after Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, Rooney jumped the gun and gave the story to Hedda Hopper. “It was a slap in the face for Mayer. He’d gone down on his knees and begged Mickey not to marry me. The story of Mick’s defiance was the talk of the town. Not many people stood up to L.B. and lived to tell the tale.”
Ava still hadn’t met Mayer but a few days before her nineteenth birthday, Rooney told her that Uncle L.B. wanted to see them both in his office the following morning.
“I didn’t want to go. Mick said Uncle L.B. wanted to give us his blessing. I doubted that. He wouldn’t touch Mickey, of course, not right away, but men like that have long memories. I felt much more vulnerable. Old Uncle L.B. could make me disappear in the middle of the next scene, if he wanted to!”
Ava and Rooney arrived at Mayer’s office together at eight o’clock the following morning. Mayer summoned Rooney in first. “While Mickey was talking to Mayer, I sat in the outer office with Ida Koverman. She’d been Mayer’s secretary forever. If L.B. dropped dead tomorrow, she could have run the whole show,” Ava said.
Koverman had been Herbert Hoover’s secretary before he became president. It was through Koverman—a widow rarely known to smile, it was said—that Mayer became interested in politics and began making big, fat donations to the Republican Party. “It was Mayer who made me realize that I could never be a Republican. He would call you up if you voted the wrong way, or went to the wrong rally. God knows how he knew but he always did. Later, I became a great Henry Wallace fan when he ran for president against Harry Truman on an independent ticket [for the Progressive Party]. Jesus, did I get a lecture for that! Mayer’s idea of a Red was any liberal; anybody who was not an out-and-out Republican was a dangerous pinko.
“Anyway, there I was, sitting in Ida Koverman’s office, scared half to death, waiting to meet Uncle L.B., wondering what the hell was keeping Mickey so long. Ida was giving me the silent treatment. I remember her first words to me were, ‘You know, young lady, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.’ Between that and his Ma saying ‘so he hasn’t been in your pants yet,’ I should have been warned. I should have walked out of there right then. In fact, I was just about to do just that when Ida said, ‘You can go in now, young lady.’”
Mayer’s office, paneled in buttery leather, was no larger than a small ballroom. A furled American flag stood behind his desk; on the wall photographs—from his favorite racehorses to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—testified to the range and grandeur of his friends and interests. Mickey sat across the room beside a table containing a family Bible, the Hollywood trade papers, a silver statuette of the Republican elephant, and photographs of his wife, Margaret, and their two daughters, Edith and Irene.
Mickey introduced her as “My future wife, Uncle L.B.”
“I’m delighted to meet you, young lady,” Mayer said.
“He was perfectly polite. I could see why some people said he had plenty of charm when he wanted to use it, although he did remain seated behind his enormous desk. I didn’t think that was very polite. He was not an attractive-looking man, which wasn’t his fault, but he made me uncomfortable the way he looked at me through his small, round, gold glasses. I’m sure he wouldn’t have objected if I’d genuflected to him,” she said.
Fifty-six years old, Louis B. Mayer was the highest salaried man in the United States, and as proud of that fact as he was of the studio that bore his name. Below average height, he had a mottled-pink face, a thin, hard mouth, and a large head of thinning white hair. But neither his expensive suits nor the rose-colored polish on his manicured fingernails could detract from the power of his body.
He lectured them about the state of the country, the problems of the movie business, the genius of his London shoemaker. Told them how much he loved Clark Gable and respected Spencer Tracy and always trusted his own judgment. “I put your boy here in a couple of pictures [Captains Courageous, Boys Town] with Tracy and made your boy a star,” he said to Ava meaningfully. “He explained why the chopped liver at the Beverly Hills Derby was better than the chopped liver at the Vine Street Derby,” she said.
“He was very sure of himself, and could be very funny, too. I don’t know whether he meant to be, but he was.” My whole life is making movie stars, she mimicked his liturgical cadence. All the billboards in the world don’t make a movie star. Only Louis B. Mayer can make a somebody outta a nobody. “Well, you couldn’t argue with that,” she said.
I laughed. “Is that how he spoke?” I said.
“I think he had voice lessons later,” she said. “Anyway, he was very polite to me. Very paternal, although he could be a bastard if he didn’t take to you, or got a grudge against you. Even when charm was coming out of his ears, you knew you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. That’s why Mick was so brave to stand up to him the way he did over me. I’m sitting here talking to you now because Mickey Rooney had the nerve to tell Louis B. Mayer he was going to marry me and if he didn’t like it to go fuck himself. Frank Sinatra had the same rage in him, the same defiance. Artie Shaw was capable of it, too, but not so much. I’ve always found that attractive in a man,” she said.