“Did Mayer tell you why he sent for you and Mickey?” I said. “Did he give you his blessing?”
“Eventually he got around to it, I guess. I don’t actually remember a blessing. He gave us the whole business about marriage being sacred, about not running away and getting a divorce at the first sign of trouble. He had a list of all the solid Hollywood marriages he knew of—Eddie G. Robinson, Paul Muni, a whole list of them. We should copy their examples, he said. Well, he was getting religion at that time,” she said.
14
The day after her meeting with Mayer, Ava was summoned to Howard Strickling’s office. The publicity chief was one of the good guys at the studio, she said. “He was the man who taught me never to sue no matter what lies the scandal sheets wrote about me—and I never did. He said that magazines like Confidential wanted you to sue because the publicity would boost their sales, and they had no money to pay you damages anyway. When one rag reported that Clark Gable had been slammed in the pokey for drunk driving, Howard flatly denied it. Clark might occasionally sip a small glass of wine with his dinner, he said, but he would never dream of driving afterward. Clark—a small glass of wine! And the press believed him! Howard was a very persuasive man. He got most of us out of jams at one time or another,” she said.
Strickling was waiting for her with the studio’s general manager, Eddie Mannix. Ava had never met Mannix before but she knew that he was close to Mayer. “Mickey said he did Mayer’s ‘dirty work’ for him, and Frank later told me that he had Irish Mafia connections in New Jersey. Whether that was true or not, I don’t know.”
But in all likelihood, Sinatra was right. Mannix had been a ticket scalper at the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey when Joe and Nick Schenck had taken him on as their bodyguard. When they sold the Palisades in the 1930s to concentrate on their movie interests, they took Mannix with them to keep an eye on the studio activities on the West Coast. By the 1940s he had become a trusted Mayer man.
Ava still had no idea why Mannix had sent for her. “I thought he was going to get on my ass about something. I don’t know—too many late nights, keeping Mick up dancing till the early hours. Howard hadn’t given me a clue what it was about, he didn’t say much at all, but I felt more comfortable with him there. Then Mannix began discussing the wedding. Until that moment, I hadn’t given it all that much thought. I don’t think Mick and I had discussed the actual wedding at all, not the ceremony, not in any practical terms anyway. It seemed strange to be sitting there with this old Irishman, this complete stranger, discussing my wedding. He had a face like a raw potato in shades, that’s how I still remember him.”
She laughed; then said, “But he was always sweet to me, despite the fact that he was about to piss on me—and that was only because Louis Mayer had ordered him to. It was nothing personal. That was his job, to carry out Mayer’s orders,” she said.
“Ava, are you making this up?” I said warily.
“Mayer had gone down on his knees and begged Mickey not to marry me. I was not Uncle L.B.’s flavor of the month.”
I was still puzzled. “Why would Mayer order Mannix to piss on you, Ava?”
“Do you want to hear the fucking story or not, honey?”
“Of course I do,” I said.
Mannix, she said, told her that the studio had worked out Mickey’s shooting schedule on his new Andy Hardy picture and the perfect date for their nuptials would be January 10, 1942. “I had no idea he wanted to discuss our wedding plans—he didn’t look like a fucking wedding planner to me, nor to anyone else, I imagine—but suddenly I got this crazy fucking notion that MGM was going to take care of everything: a reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or the Beverly Wilshire, a star-studded guest list, one of the studio’s top designers to create my bridal gown. I was carried away. After all, Mick was MGM’s biggest star, he was one of the most successful movie stars in the world. Of course his own studio would want to put on a show for his fans! I just got carried away, honey. I don’t blame Eddie Mannix. I let my imagination run away with me.”
“I know what’s coming, Ava,” I said.
“I was a kid. I was nineteen years old. I didn’t see it coming at all, honey,” she said.
“Mannix was there to do Mayer’s dirty work,” I said.
“He was there to piss on my parade, honey,” she said.
There would be no white wedding, no glamorous guest list, just a hole-and-corner ceremony someplace as far away from Beverly Hills as possible. Mannix told her that this was to avert Mickey’s fans turning her big day into a circus—“into a ‘fucking donnybrook’ were his exact words, I’ve never forgotten them,” she said.
But Ava knew that in spite of Mayer’s earlier lecture about the importance and sanctity of marriage, he was not prepared to break the hearts of millions of adolescent girls and risk destroying the fan base of the studio’s most valuable asset.
THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE on the morning of January 10, 1942, in a tiny Protestant church in a village called Ballard in the Santa Ynez Mountains, California. Ava wore a smart navy blue suit and a corsage of orchids. The wedding party consisted of Ava and Mickey, Bappie, Mickey’s father, Joe Yule, Ma, and Mickey’s stepfather. Rooney’s personal publicist and minder, Les Peterson, also attended with a studio photographer.
“I think Larry Tarr was there, too—Bappie’s husband, the guy who took the picture of me that started it all. By this time, their marriage was on the skids; Bappie had had a little fling with the manager of the Plaza, where we stayed when we first arrived in Hollywood. Anyway, Larry might have been at the wedding. I can’t remember. It was not a memorable occasion, honey,” she said.
After the ceremony, the guests drove straight back to Ma’s place in the Valley in one car—“Larry must have been at the wedding because there was a tremendous drunken brawl at Ma’s place that night and my sister said Larry was in the thick of it, as usual,” Ava remembered in a later interview at Ennismore Gardens—and the bride and groom, and Les Peterson, took off for the Del Monte Hotel on the Monterey Peninsula in Rooney’s Lincoln Continental, a gift from Henry Ford.
“I liked Les. He was a young guy, but already quite bald. It wasn’t his fault he was tagging along on our honeymoon. But I was pleased he was there that first night. I invited him to our suite for a glass of Cristal. I still wasn’t much of a drinker at that time but I had a glass of champagne, and another glass of champagne. Les kept trying to excuse himself and I kept hanging on to him. Oh, one more glass. Talk about first night nerves. We were going through the Roederer’s Cristal like it was tap water. I was scared out of my fucking wits. I didn’t want Les to leave us. I would have felt a whole lot more relaxed if Mick and I had got it on weeks before. But I was so determined to be a virgin on my wedding night, I’d barely let him give me a belly rub.
“All week, I had been saying to Bappie, What am I going to do? What am I going to do? She’d say: Relax, you’re going to do fine, honey. Nature will take its course. Just open wide! That was funny but it did nothing to gentle me down. She finally bought me a sexy negligee. She sent me off with that—and a douche bag. ‘That’s all a girl needs on her wedding night, honey,’ she said, and as usual she was right.”