He was in no hurry to ask about Ava. We chatted amiably for twenty minutes; we had many mutual friends, and there was no shortage of amusing gossip and trade talk to exchange. We eventually studied the menu. We both ordered fish with a chilled Pouilly-Fuissé.
“How is Ava behaving?” he finally asked.
“Good days and bad days,” I told him.
“How good are the good days?” he said.
“Good enough to make me stop worrying about the bad days,” I said.
“And Theodora?” he asked. “How is that coming along?”
“It’s not. I’ve decided to put it on ice for the time being.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Ava’s too demanding,” I said. His suggestion that I continue to work on Theodora during the day and Ava at night had not been very practical, I told him.
“Well, it was worth a try,” he said philosophically. But his smile gave the game away: he had never expected me to be able to work on both books at the same time anyway.
“I’ll be able to understand Theodora better when I can give her my full attention,” I said casually.
“Why is that?” he asked quietly with sudden curiosity in his voice.
“I’m discovering a lot from Ava about movie actresses of a certain age,” I said as inconsequentially as I could. The question had surprised me and it was the best I could come up with.
“Such as?” he persisted.
“Oh, you know. Their vanities, and insecurities. The self-protective fibs they all tell. The delusions they have about themselves. Some touches I’d like to give to Theodora,” I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about Ava at that point. I didn’t want to tell him her doubts about the book’s frankness. I definitely knew it would be a mistake to mention her disquiet at seeing her ribald language repeated so accurately on the page. Her dialogue was one of the book’s strengths. I didn’t want to put doubts in his mind; I didn’t want to spoil his lunch. Anyway, I was convinced that these were problems I could handle, or more likely she’d simply forget all about them, the way she dealt with most of her problems.
“Do you like her?” Ed suddenly asked, watching my face closely.
I said I did, very much. “She’s smart. She’s funny. She can be difficult, though.”
“In what way?”
“She’s like Onassis. She doesn’t respond to question-and-answer interviews. She’s a lady who likes to lead,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully. After a moment, he asked, “Is she going to deliver all that she promised?”
“I’m sure she will, Ed,” I said.
“No second thoughts?” he said. He was a perceptive bastard. But that was what made him such a brilliant agent.
“Was it just the Louis Roederer Cristal talking? Is that what you’re asking me?” I avoided a straight answer.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said, and laughed. “Is she still drinking?”
“Of course, but she can handle it. It doesn’t seem to have affected her memory. You won’t be disappointed,” I said with assurance, although a conversation I’d had with Ava a few nights earlier did bother me.
“I STILL DON’T KNOW whether I’m doing the right thing going ahead with this lousy goddamn book, honey,” she’d said. Her voice was raspy. It was one of her early hours of the morning conversations. “Frank’s not going to be happy when he finds out that I’m writing a fucking book,” she said.
They were still close, and I was surprised that she hadn’t told him. They talked all the time on the phone, although she hadn’t seen him for at least five years. “We live in different worlds, honey. We get along best when we’re apart,” she said.
“Are you going to tell him about the book?” I knew that it was a stupid question the moment I asked it.
“I’ll have to choose my moment. I don’t want to do it on the phone. He’ll find out sooner or later. I’ll have to choose my moment,” she said again. “I don’t want him to hear about it from someone else.”
When they were first married, she said, they had agreed that neither of them would ever write their memoirs.
“That was a long time ago, Ava,” I reminded her.
“Nineteen fifty-one,” she said. “November 7—a Wednesday,” she added with ironical precision.
“The whole fucking world’s press was on our necks. Reporters loved making a scandal out of our lives, and Frank’s behavior never helped. He hated the press. He loathed reporters with a passion. They were all sonsofbitches. I don’t know how they did it but those creeps always knew where to find us, and how to get a rise out of Frank.”
Sinatra was obviously on her mind. I got up and went to my study, and started making notes.
“Boy, they were good at that, those hacks,” she went on with that curiously fierce and at the same time oddly amused way she had of recalling the bad times with Sinatra. “He hated being called Frankie; they called him Frankie. Except in Mexico. In Mexico, they went one better: they called him Mr. Gardner. You can guess what he thought of that! When he was flying high, he’d been a cocky bastard. That was his nature. It was part of his charm. Now they were killing him for it.”
“Reporters have long memories,” I said.
“As well as long knives,” she said.
“Once, Frank was on a comeback tour in Europe. I was making a movie in England. Knights of the Round Table, a piece of medieval malarkey. Robert Taylor was Lancelot; he did all the fighting. I was Guinevere, all I had to do was sit around and look pretty. I was good at that. But I got fed up with it after a while. I flew off to Italy to catch a few of Frank’s gigs. I had to have been in love with him to sit through those performances. Let’s say he was not at his best. He was playing to half-empty houses. The Italian press felt he was patronizing them.
“One evening they must have paid the guy who worked the spot to turn it on me in the middle of one of Frank’s numbers. The audience started chanting: Ava, Ava, Ava. It was embarrassing for me and humiliating as hell for Frank. I got up and walked out. So did Frank.
“They quieted down once I’d left. Frank went back on and finished his act, which I thought was brave of him. When he got back to the hotel that evening he blamed me for the disturbance. We had another fight, of course. The next day I flew back to England to face the music for taking the run-out.
“It didn’t matter a damn, of course. The studio didn’t even know I’d gone. It gave more hokey dueling time for Bob and Mel Ferrer. But I had to be punished for going AWOL, and another year was added to my contract. That way they could keep you under contract for a hundred fucking years if they wanted to.”
She paused. “Are you making notes of this, honey?” she said.
“Maybe I should,” I said hesitantly. I didn’t want her to know I always made notes of her three o’clock in the morning calls, or when she didn’t realize she was saying anything useful or indiscreet. I never told her that, of course. I didn’t want to inhibit her. “You should keep a diary, Ava,” I said.
“I don’t have to, honey. I’m talking about my life. Some things you never forget.”
After a pause, I said: “Anyway, you were telling me about Frank.”
“It was all about Frank in those days. I once won a bet with Bappie that she couldn’t find a single picture of Frank in which he wasn’t snarling at a photographer. It was a nightmare time. Our affair. The collapse of his marriage to Nancy. His kids begging him to come home. He was going through a terrible time. We both were. It was hell, but it was worse for Frank. Nancy was taking him for practically every penny he had.