Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

Peter took me home that night and I poured out my heart to him. “I know that something’s going on,” I said, “and I know it’s been going on for some time. I don’t think it’s ever stopped. I’m leaving him, Peter. When he sobers up tell him goodbye for me.”

I didn’t know it then but there was a lot of Iago in Peter. If there was any lingering doubt in my mind about that marriage, Peter ended it right there. He told me, “There is a girl Mick’s seeing. She’s about fifteen. Mickey has to be careful. Her older sister is her go-between. She fixes meetings for him at the Lakeside Golf Course. It’s been going on for quite a while.”

I kicked Mickey out the same night. Or I did when he got home, whatever time that was! He moved out to his Ma’s place in the Valley. I wouldn’t take his calls. I was driving him crazy. One night he tried to kick my door down. When Louis Mayer heard about that, all hell broke loose. Eddie Mannix was ordered to patch things up between us.

Everybody was scared of Mannix. I wouldn’t have liked to cross him, but he always treated me with respect. He promised to try to get me some decent parts if I promised to behave. The usual route for an MGM contract player on the way up was to put her in an Andy Hardy movie: Donna Reed, Esther Williams, Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, they all followed that road. Not me. Uncle L.B. wouldn’t hear of it. Not even Mickey could persuade him to give me a break. I knew I was being punished.

Anyway, Eddie Mannix got me a role in Ghosts on the Loose, a Bela Lugosi picture with the Dead End Kids. It was a cheap loan-out to Monogram, an awful little Poverty Row studio—I think the whole picture took about ten days to shoot, and no retakes, ever! But I got my first billing on that picture, so it’s still kind of special to me.

Eventually I allowed Mick back in the house. Well, on and off I did. After all, we were still married and the sex was legal—and still pretty good, thank God. There was no point in giving that up just because we were semidetached, I told Bappie.

“You’re learning, kid,” she said.

I loved Bappie’s attitude to life. I learned a lot from her. She was a good drinker, too. Although she was never a morning drinker, like me—she said it spoiled her afternoon drinking! She lived in New York during Prohibition. She had a little flirt with R. J. Reynolds, the Winston cigarette heir. They went to all the high-class speakeasies. She was a happy drunk, too. She wasn’t compelled to get into mischief the way I was when I had a load on.

When I told her I was going to divorce Mickey, she was dead against it. She was also very practical. “Put some money in your purse first, honey,” she said.

It was good advice and of course I didn’t take it.

I knew that dumping Mickey was a risk. Career-wise, it could have been the end of me. Pretty starlets were ten a penny at Metro, and anywhere else in Hollywood. The turnover was frightening. If I stopped being Mrs. Rooney, they wouldn’t think twice about letting me go. But I really had no choice. Mickey was never going to change his ways. He was always going to be fooling around with some pretty new thing, and that wasn’t my idea of marriage.

Right up to the courtroom door, Bappie was pleading with me not to do it. I was filing for a formal separation, which was the first step to “splitting up the act,” as Mickey called it. That was on January 15, 1943—exactly one year and five days after we were hitched in Ballard. But it seemed a lot longer than that. It seemed like a fucking lifetime.

Mickey wasn’t happy—and neither was Louis Mayer, who set his attack dog Eddie Mannix onto me. Eddie liked me but I knew he had a job to do. He said, “You know, Ava, you’ll be finished at this studio if you try to take Mickey to the cleaners. Mr. Mayer owns this town. If you do anything to hurt Mickey’s career, you’ll never work in Hollywood again.”

I said I knew that.

Eddie was sympathetic. He said, “It was never going to work out with Mick, you know. He is never going to be a one-woman man, kid.”

I felt my temper rising. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that before?” I said.

“You didn’t ask,” he said mildly, but he was obviously startled by my language. So was I. Most people were afraid to say boo to him. “You got a mouth on you, kid. I give you that,” he said, and started to laugh.

I was lucky he didn’t fire me on the spot.

When he stopped laughing, he said: “Now listen to me, young lady. I’m going to give you some good advice. Mr. Mayer isn’t going to mind you telling it to the judge. He just doesn’t want you telling him more than you have to.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I truly didn’t. I was barely twenty years old. I could look smart and sophisticated as hell in those gallery pictures they took of me all the time. The truth was, I didn’t know beans when the bag was open.

He obviously saw my confusion.

“Mr. Mayer doesn’t want you to sue for adultery, kid,” Eddie spelled it out for me. He handled me like a baby. “Mr. Mayer doesn’t want Mickey’s name dragged through the courts along with a bunch of dames you reckon he might have shafted. He doesn’t want some shyster lawyer claiming Mickey beat you up, or did this, that, and the other,” he said.

The penny dropped. “I’m not going to name anybody,” I said. “I’ll sue the little sod for incompatibility.”

Actually, it was an idea I’d been discussing with Bappie, who’d been having her own marital problems with Larry Tarr. He was just as unfaithful as Mickey. Actually, so was Bappie, to be honest! But apart from that, they got on well together. Anyway, sue for incompatibility, Bappie said, that way nobody gets hurt.

“Incompatibility, you’d settle for that? Mr. Mayer would really appreciate that,” Eddie said. “I think the least said the soonest mended, don’t you?”

It was such a childish thing to say, the kind of rubbish you say to kids, I wanted to laugh. But the way he said it was so chilling, I thought better of it.

“Incompatibility then? That’s what you’ll go for? Can I give Mr. Mayer your word on that?” he said.

“Sure,” I said casually, but I really meant it. I knew that if I had sued Mick for adultery, and named some of the girls he’d been fucking, it would have blown his wholesome Andy Hardy image right out of the water. It could have destroyed his career stone dead. I truly didn’t want to hurt him. I knew that citing “incompatibility” was the cleanest and fastest route out of the marriage.

Eddie said, “You’re not as dumb as you look, kid.”

He asked me what I was going to do after the divorce. The question surprised me. I knew the final decree would take at least six months or maybe even longer to come through and I hadn’t planned that far ahead.

I said, “If the studio renews my contract, I’d like to try to make a go of acting.”

“I think you should,” he said.

A couple of weeks later, the studio renewed my contract and increased my salary.

It put my mind at rest.