Everything was fine. It was a perfect wedding night, except she was terribly shy, she said. “But I caught on quickly. Very quickly. I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly. Mickey was tender, actually he was sweet. He couldn’t have been a better first lover for a lady. He’d been around quite a bit, of course—and marriage didn’t stop him for very long either.”
The following morning, Ava woke up with “the teensiest hangover”—and the start of her menstrual period. “I was soaked. All the excitement and everything had brought it on two weeks early. I couldn’t get out of bed because I realized what had happened. Mick had already gotten up and wanted me to go with him to play golf. I was too embarrassed to tell him what had happened. I told him that I had a splitting headache. I knew he’d understand that,” she said.
So while Rooney spent the day on the golf course, Ava—too shy to ask the hotel staff to take care of the situation—occupied herself washing the blood off the sheets and from her bridal negligee. “There was so much blood. I never saw so much blood. Well, not until GCS [George C. Scott] beat the bejesus out of me in Rome,” she said.
I WAS WORKING LATE into the night on the first draft of her honeymoon chapter and having doubts about whether I should use her George C. Scott line at that point, or keep it for later. It was simply a matter of construction. Scott had not yet made an appearance in the book and I was wondering if I could use the line more effectively when I came to write about her torrid affair with him in Rome in 1964—she played Sarah to Scott’s Abraham in John Huston’s The Bible—when their drinking often became dangerously uncontrollable and he regularly beat her up.
I was still turning the question over in my mind when Ava called.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “What’s happening?”
It was a funny question to ask at two o’clock in the morning, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion about a small technical detail that could be easily fixed in the editing.
I told her I had been working on the story of her honeymoon.
“Which one is that, honey? I had three,” she said.
“Your first one—the one with Mickey Rooney,” I said.
“How I lost my virginity. What do you think of that stuff?”
I told her that I thought the whole episode, from the wedding ceremony in Ballard to the wedding night, was touching and funny.
“You don’t think a little too much detail, honey—the blood on the sheets, and all that stuff?” she said. There was a dangerous hesitation in her voice. “Maybe I’ve been a little too graphic?” she said.
“It’s perfect, Ava,” I told her firmly. “It’s very honest. I’m sure a lot of young women will identify with that situation. I don’t think we should change a word of it.”
“Bloodstains are hard to get out of bedsheets,” she said. There was still hesitation in her voice.
“It’s perfect,” I said again.
“You don’t think it makes Mickey sound too fucking… well, too fucking insensitive? For not noticing I’d been bleeding—for going off to play golf for the day?”
“Maybe he had noticed, and was being discreet,” I said.
“You think so, honey? You really think that’s possible?”
“I think it’s definitely a possibility. After all, he was a young guy,” I said. I knew I had to choose my words carefully. “I think you should just leave it as it is, and let people make up their own minds.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Anyway, I want to read it first,” she said unnecessarily, for that was already our arrangement.
She would see it as soon as I’d finished it, I said. “I promise you, Mickey comes out of it fine,” I assured her.
“I hope so. I don’t want to hurt him. Poor darling, he ain’t got a fucking cent. He’s been raked over the coals for millions by those goddamn wives he kept getting married to after me. What is it they say? The fucking you get for the fucking you got?”
It made me laugh, as she meant it to. She continued to speak kindly of Rooney, and amusingly of his passion for golf. “I had to learn to play golf quickly otherwise I’d never see the boy,” she said. “I became very good at it, too. It became the best game I played and the one I liked least.”
I was pleased she had dropped the negative discussion about the blood on the sheets. “What other games did Mickey play?” I asked.
“He played the horses. He was at the track a lot. He played a lot of gin rummy, usually with Les. He continued to be a fanatical golfer but whenever he got in a slump, he’d break our clubs,” she said. “He had a real Irish temper. He took up tennis—which I adored. I was still playing it when I had my stroke.”
It was almost 3 A.M. “You must be tired,” I said.
“I’m fine, but I’m keeping you up,” she said in her special tone of sympathy. “You’d better get some sleep.”
“You, too, Ava,” I said.
“Good night, honey.”
Three minutes later she called me back.
“Did I wake you?”
“I was about to brush my teeth.”
“I’m still not sure whether we should use that stuff about scrubbing the bloodstains out of the sheets while Mick was out on the golf course,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Is that okay, we won’t use it? Or okay—okay what?”
“It’s okay, we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said, keeping it as light as possible.
“But you do understand my concern, don’t you, baby?” she said.
“Not really, Ava,” I said. I knew that was a mistake the moment I said it.
“I think people will find it distasteful,” she said.
“I don’t see why they should,” I said. “It’s frank but it’s not distasteful.”
“It’s unnecessary,” she said.
“I think it’s honest.”
“We’re not going to have a fight are we, baby?” she said.
“I hope not. I’ve already explained why I think it’s so good, Ava.”
“I have a head like a fucking sieve these days. Tell me again,” she said.
“First of all, and most important, a lot of women and young girls are going to understand that situation,” I said. “If it hasn’t happened to them, it’s happened to someone they know. It will strike a chord with a lot of women.”
There was also a directness about it that was pure Ava Gardner and that was why I was determined not to lose it, although I didn’t tell her that. After I had finished explaining it to her, there was silence on the line. I tried to remember how many times she had called me “baby”; more than twice was not a good sign.
The silence continued. I said: “Ava, it’s gone three. We’re both tired. Why don’t we discuss it tomorrow?”
“I’m not tired. I’m going to be awake all fucking night worrying about it,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll put it in the draft, we’ll sleep on it. You can always remove it at the editing stage, if you still don’t like it. It’s your book,” I said.
“Then why put it in at all, for fuck sake?” she said. Her voice had hardened.
“You might have a change of heart,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“I know you are, Ava. But I’d hate to lose it, and things get forgotten if they’re not in the first draft,” I said. I knew it wasn’t a convincing argument, it might not even have been true, but I didn’t want to give her an inch. She wasn’t a woman you should ever give an inch to. Anyway, I wanted her to know how determined I was to keep it in. I wanted her to understand how good and important her observation was.