I wasn’t working. I wasn’t doing a fucking thing. I had no talent, I had no training. I went to classes—dance classes, which I loved. But the drama classes were a joke. I spent a lot of time doing photographs—which are rolling in all the time now—leg art. They’d say, “Who’s got good legs and nice tits and isn’t filming? Okay, Ava, you’ll do; report to the stills gallery.” I was always available for pinups. I was nineteen. It wasn’t such a bad life, if you didn’t have ambition. I slipped into it real easy.
For a couple of months anyway I had no doubt that Mick was going to be my mate for eternity. We were seen everywhere together, Hollywood’s most devoted couple. Well, that’s what I believed, anyway. We were madly in love. Well, we were screwing a lot.
A week or so after we got back from our honeymoon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most godawful pain in my stomach. I was in agony. Mickey drove me to the Presbyterian Hospital. Like everybody in my family, I had a misplaced appendix, and they diagnosed a tubal pregnancy. Thank God, they had a wonderful surgeon there who realized, when they started to cut, that it wasn’t a tubal pregnancy at all but an inflamed appendix.
In those days you stayed in the hospital for three weeks after even a minor operation; now they have you up and walking the next day. So I came home and the first night I found evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed. On the fucking goosefeather mattress! That ain’t a very nice thing for a nineteen-year-old bride, quite pretty, too, to discover. I’d been away for three weeks and he’d already dragged somebody into our bed. I don’t know who the hell it was but I knew somebody had been keeping my side of the bed warm.
I remember it had something to do with a douche bag—somebody had been using my douche bag. I had what they called a tipped infantile uterus and I always used a vinegar douche. Except one time with Mickey I experimented with a rubber. I didn’t like it one little bit. No, no, no. But I never got pregnant, not until I was married to Frank anyway.
Anyway, I knew that someone had been using my stuff. I called Bappie. She said, don’t you dare touch it! Get the little bastard to clean up his own fucking mess. He denied it, of course. He played the little innocent. Nobody could pile on the applesauce like Mickey. He was the best liar in the world—well, Frank Sinatra can tell a good story, too. He sawed off a few whoppers in his day, but I don’t believe he was ever unfaithful to me. I’m leveling. I really believe that.
Anyway, Mickey tried to make up for that rotten douche bag business. In his fashion he did. He bought us a small house in Bel Air, which I helped to choose and decorate. It was my first taste of real film-star living. Metro renewed my contract, and gave me a small raise. I was getting small, walk-on parts but nothing to write home about. The first line I ever said on screen—I played a carhop girl in a drive-in—was “What will you have?” I did a lot of things like that. I played a hat-check girl, I did a lot of club scenes, I danced with a man in a ballroom scene. I’ve forgotten the name of that first film, except that it was also Fred Zinnemann’s first [American feature-length] movie. He became one of the great Hollywood directors; he put Frank Sinatra right with From Here to Eternity. Frank wouldn’t mess around with Zinnemann.
Mick also bought me the most beautiful diamond ring, a real iceberg—and asked for it back the following week to pay off his bookies. Talk about feast and famine, honey… although not many people knew about the famine side of that marriage. In true Hollywood style, they only saw the feast.
Actually, I didn’t mind the ring going back, well not too much, anyway—diamonds are an acquired taste and at nineteen I still hadn’t acquired it. Anyway, diamonds look tacky on a woman before she’s forty. But Mick promised he’d get me another one, twice as big. A diamond as big as the Ritz, he promised. He never did, but he always believed that he had a sure thing for tomorrow at Santa Anita, or a dead cert at the Del Mar track the day after. I’d like to say that sort of thing was a rare occurrence, but it wasn’t. His relationship with his bookies was built on eternal optimism. That’s why he’s so broke now, the poor darling. All those wives took him for a bundle but no more than the bookies did. He had a kind of cartoon resilience.
But once I knew he was still fooling around, even though he continued to deny it, I should have checked out right there. Even though I knew the girls he was screwing didn’t mean a thing to him, that’s what I should have done. He was just a lecherous sod who loved getting his rocks off. Everybody was fucking everybody in those days. Maybe it was the war! Lana Turner, who had become a good friend of mine, knew how distraught I was. She said a fuck meant nothing to men like Mickey. I should just brush it aside, she said.
I couldn’t do that, I told her.
“Well, if you’re not going to leave him, you must do something to let the little bastard know how you feel,” Lana said.
That night we had dinner at Chasen’s. Afterward, Mickey insisted on buying drinks for the whole bar. I knew that once he bought for the bar, he’d have to stay around until the bar bought drinks for him. It was a machismo thing. I left him to it and took a cab home.
When he came in at God knows what hour, I was fast asleep, or pretending to be—having ripped up every sofa and overstuffed armchair, every cushion and all the drapes in the house. It was overkill but I knew the marriage wasn’t going to last anyway. We were playing injury time with benefits—for both of us! We both liked screwing too much to give that up cold turkey. That’s what complicated it, I suppose.
But I must say, it’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love. Especially a husband.
I stopped typing. And read that line again:
It’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love. Especially a husband.
Tough, funny, vulgar, cynical, it was a classic Ava Gardner line.
It rolled off the tongue. I didn’t want to lose it.
The problem was I couldn’t reconcile it with something she had told me earlier—that she was “even more in love with all three of my husbands the day I left them than the day we married.”
I knew that sometimes she lied to me, of course. She was an actress and that’s what actresses do. Sometimes they say things for effect, sometimes to avoid a situation they don’t want to talk about, or simply because they’ve forgotten what they told you the first time around.
I was still trying to figure out which quote to go with—it made no difference to me; if there was a contradiction, I always used the quote that was most interesting—when I remembered another thing she’d said:
“It’s my fucking life. I’ll remember it the way I want to remember it.”
It still made me laugh.
16
It had been a couple of days since Ava’s irrational outburst when I dropped off a copy of the new Winston Churchill biography at her apartment. She had been expecting me to deliver an already overdue draft chapter of her own book. I saw the look of disappointment in her face when I handed her the Churchill volume instead. She thanked me with a rather distant smile. “How much longer is my fucking book going to be, baby?” she said. I asked her to be patient for a few more days. But her remark still rankled.
I knew that the delay was as much my fault as hers. I had let her get away with murder as an interviewee. She never stuck to an idea or story line. She talked in vignettes, snapshots, and digressive asides. She interrupted herself to tell dirty jokes. She was all over the place; she had no regard for continuity at all. Sometimes it was deliberate evasion. Sometimes she was plainly bored: “Jesus, Pete, I had no idea how fucking tiring this remembering back game was going to be!” And there were matters about which she was just naturally close-lipped.