“It’s unnecessary, honey,” she said softly, and put the phone down.
At least we were back on “honey” terms. I typed up the conversation, cleaned my teeth, and decided to finish the draft of the honeymoon material before I turned in.
15
“How much longer is this fucking book going to take, baby?” Ava demanded as soon as I entered the apartment. It was 12:30 P.M., too early in the day to expect her to be at her most winning, but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so disagreeable either.
“The delay doesn’t seem to concern you anywhere near as much as it concerns me. For you, there will always be another book. For me, this is it. This is my one shot, baby. I’m not asking for a literary masterpiece, fahcrissake. If I’d wanted a literary fucking masterpiece, I could have asked Robert Graves to write it for me,” she said, referring to the late English poet and novelist, a devoted admirer whom she equally adored. “I just want a book that’ll pay the fucking mortgage now, baby, not next year. Time’s not on my side, you know that, fahcrissake. You’re causing me a lot of fucking grief. You and I have a problem, baby.”
I knew that she was becoming anxious about the time I was taking to finish the chapters to submit to Dick Snyder, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by the frustration and anger in her voice, but I was. I hadn’t regarded the pages I left with her the previous evening as in any way final but I thought at least they would have reassured her.
Her anger was paralyzing. And when she’s in that kind of mood, Dirk Bogarde had warned me, and so had Peter Viertel, you just had to duck and weave and keep your distance. “Jesus, she can be tough on her friends,” Viertel had said with feeling, concluding a story about her displeasure at a scene he had written for her in The Sun Also Rises. “Just remember, she believes that writers only respond to pressure,” he’d said wryly.
Forewarned, I didn’t argue with her. When she was in that frame of mind, there was nothing I could say that would not be wrong. I didn’t even remind her that I had written several chapters she had loved, drafted a few more, which I was sure she was going to like, and was continuing to interview her two or three times a week. I’d also been moonlighting on my novel Theodora but, heeding Ed Victor’s advice, I hadn’t told her about that at all.
Fortunately, I hadn’t planned to do any work with Ava that day. I had simply dropped by to hear what she thought of the new draft pages, and to give her a copy of the final volume of historian Martin Gilbert’s official biography of Sir Winston Churchill. She had met the English statesman aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in the south of France in the 1950s; along with FDR, he was a hero of hers. Gilbert had footnoted Ari, my biography of the Greek tycoon, and I’d hoped that this tenuous link might elicit some odd detail that would unlock a memory Ava could be unconsciously holding back. It was a ploy I’d successfully used before in interviews, and, indeed, it would later remind her of a boozy evening she’d spent with Churchill aboard Onassis’s yacht in Monte Carlo. (“W.C. had had his share of vino and was feeling no pain, I was downing ouzo,” she recalled.)
But right now, reeling and dazed at her outburst, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I just wanted to get out of the apartment as soon as I could.
She hadn’t stood up, and I kissed her forehead. “Let’s talk later,” I said.
She was too angry with me even to tell me to fuck off.
THAT EVENING, READING THROUGH the transcripts of the interviews I needed for the next chapter, I was surprised and reassured to see how much ground we had covered. Pinned to the top sheet was a heavily underscored note reminding me of her reply when I questioned something she’d said that contradicted the reference books: “It’s my fucking life, hon. I’ll remember it the way I want to remember it.”
Reading the line again made me laugh as much as it did the first time she said it when we’d been arguing over the infallibility of memory versus the reliability of research. Then she’d stuck to her guns as only Ava could when she was in the wrong.
It was now eleven o’clock. She still hadn’t returned the call I made earlier in the evening. I had no idea whether she wanted me to continue with the book or not. I wouldn’t have put money on it either way. I didn’t want to call her again that evening but neither did I want to give up hope. It would be a disappointment if she decided to give me the bullet, but if she did… well, I’d be devastated and embarrassed; it would hurt my professional pride. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have missed the experience for the world.
She was infuriating, bawdy, frank, and unreasonable. She was also kind, affectionate, trusting, and often touching.
And I adored her.
Meanwhile, using a reporter’s guile to write around the gaps in the interviews, and keeping as many of her epithets as I could, I would try to finish a draft of the chapter that night and show it to her the next day.
I still hoped that they wouldn’t be the last pages I’d get a chance to show her.
Slowly, I began to type:
Mick and I were crazy in love, even though we were still almost strangers to each other when we married on January 10, 1942. We’d seen each other practically every day since I arrived in Hollywood with Bappie the previous summer. But most of that time had been spent in nightclubs and at the Santa Anita racetrack. We had never had a serious conversation about anything. We had never made love. That was no way to get to know a person well—certainly not well enough to marry them.
I was nineteen. What the fuck did I know?
The war had been going for a month. Nothing had worsened; that is to say it hadn’t yet touched us, except that Mr. Mayer said that he wanted Mick to go out on the road selling war bonds to show his patriotism—and, oh, by the way, he said, as if it were something that had just popped into his head, Mick could also do a little promotional work for the latest Andy Hardy movie!
Uncle L.B. never missed a trick.
But the trip didn’t start out well. We were driving up to San Francisco when we heard the news that Carole Lombard, Clark Gable’s wife, had been killed in a plane crash over Las Vegas. That was when we knew there was a war on. She was on her way back from her own war bond tour, and Mickey was devastated. So was I, although I was never close to her, I was more of a fan than a friend. Mick, of course, was a great friend of both of them, and Clark was beyond grief.
A few years later, when we made The Hucksters together, and became close, Clark took his wallet out of his back pocket and showed me the last cable Carole had sent him on that tour. It was in a cellophane wrap. It said, HEY PAPPY, YOU BETTER GET IN THIS MAN’S ARMY. He joined the air force soon after that, even though he was in his forties. He was my hero when I was a kid. He was still my hero when we made our first movie together, and until the day he died.
Anyway, we left Mick’s Lincoln Continental in San Francisco. God, he loved that car; there was a gold plate on the dash saying that it was a personal gift from Henry Ford to Mickey Rooney, which I always thought was a bit chintzy. Ford later gave Clark a similar car. But Mickey was proud of the fact that he got his first. Anyway, as I said, we left Mick’s in San Francisco for the studio to pick up and take back to the studio while we took off on a whistle-stop tour selling war bonds and Mickey’s new movie. Chicago, Boston, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Washington, God knows where else.
But wherever we went, thousands of screaming bobby-soxers were there to mob him. I swear to you, they were every bit as wild as Frank’s fans when he was at the top. It was phenomenal. Mick called them his San Quentin quail club. But the enthusiasm, the hysteria of those kids made me understand why Mayer was so fucking desperate to keep our marriage off the front pages.