“It makes us awfully vulnerable to her whims. She turns men around like no other woman I know. The problem is, she prefers strong lovers—but wants her writers and directors to be weak as piss. That’s a pity because she is so much better with men who stand up to her. Guys like John Huston. He doesn’t put up with her nonsense—and neither should you, by the way!”
Viertel stopped and looked at me solemnly for a long moment, as if deciding whether I was up to the task of taking her on. “Anyway, that’s the way to play the game, but it’s easier said than done,” he’d said, and burst into laughter. “Don’t let it worry you, not many of us can handle Ava. Not when she turns those green eyes on us.”
I could feel her green eyes on me now. Nevertheless, I was determined to make my point. “Ava, I really don’t think we should mess with your dialogue. I love it the way it is. It would be a mistake to try to gentrify it.”
“Well, I think it’s fucking vulgar, I won’t have it, honey,” she said again.
“It’s uninhibited, but that’s you, Ava,” I tried again.
“It’s crass, honey. All those fucking cuss words are undignified.”
“Without a few cuss words, it just wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t sound like you, Ava,” I said.
“An occasional cuss word might be fine, honey. But this stuff is full of fucking cuss words. Anyway, I hate foul-mouthed women.”
I managed not to laugh. There was a long silence on the line.
“Am I still going to see you this evening?” she eventually said, abandoning the argument, convinced she’d had the last word.
“I hope so. That was the plan, wasn’t it?” I said tentatively.
“We have to get on with it. We’ve wasted enough fucking time on this book. Say hi to Ed for me, by the way. I like him,” she said and put down the receiver.
I ARRIVED AT HER apartment at 7:30. The wine had already been opened and left to breathe on the coffee table beside a couple of glasses. It was a bottle of Berry Brothers’ Good Ordinary Claret, the wine I had introduced her to a few weeks earlier. I saw it as a peace offering. “Where do you want to begin, baby?” she said, all business. “We’ve really got to move our asses. We’ve got to finish this goddamn book. Where did we get to? Where shall we start?”
“Why not pick it up with you waiting for your decree absolute from Mickey,” I told her. I switched on the Sony VORs, a tape for her, one for me.
“Do you have to use those bloody things? They inhibit me. I start thinking twice about everything I say. Can’t you just take notes? If I say anything interesting you can just jot it down, can’t you?”
Perhaps it was a kind of reprisal for not being at her beck and call that afternoon, or for not wanting to clean up her language. But I was not bothered. “I’m okay taking notes,” I said easily. “In some ways I prefer it.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised. She had no idea that I made notes of nearly all our telephone conversations. “But isn’t a tape easier for you?” she said. I didn’t know whether she was being awkward or unduly solicitous of my time.
I said, “Transcribing a tape takes twice the work, but it does have its advantages.”
“What advantages are they?” she said.
“Well, for starters, next time you question the number of swear words you use, I’ll just play you the tape and we can count them,” I said.
She smiled sweetly. I think she was genuinely amused. “Okay, I’m waiting for my decree absolute,” she said as she filled my glass thoughtfully, “but still screwing the ass off Mickey—”
“I didn’t write that,” I said.
“And you’re not going to use it either,” she said.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “I thought that is what you said.”
“I said I was sex mad—at least with Mickey I was.” The idea seemed to amuse her.
“So it’s a matter of semantics: I can’t say you were screwing the ass off Mickey but I can say you were sex mad?” I said seriously, pretending to make a note of the distinction.
“Mick was still the only man I knew in a biblical sense,” she said, ignoring my feeble joke. “I never cheated on any of my husbands. Until I got that legal piece of paper in my hand, I wanted to remain faithful to Mickey. What bloody sentimental things kids are.”
“Well, I think it would be a shame to lose it. It’s a titillating fact, but it’s your call.”
“What’s a titillating fact, honey?”
“That you and Mickey continued sleeping together while waiting for your divorce to come through. But it’s your call,” I said again to show how reasonable I was being.
“That’s right,” she said flatly. “It is my call.”
“But you did say you wanted an honest book. To admit you continued sleeping with Mickey… that’s honest, isn’t it? I would love to use it, of course I would,” I said again. “I think it’s important, but no matter.”
“Why is it important?”
“Well, maybe not important per se, but it’s a lovely insight,” I said.
“How is it an insight? Insight into what, fahcrissake?”
“It tells us a lot about you at that age.”
“Don’t be so fucking obscure, Peter. What the fuck does it tell us?” she said, no longer hiding her impatience.
“That you and Mick were still good friends, still close, in spite of the divorce,” I said, but I knew that was pussyfooting around the point I really wanted to make. “It tells us that you were a young woman who liked sex a lot,” I added bluntly.
She was never careful about hiding her disapproval when I said anything she considered to be out of line and I didn’t know how she would react to my bluntness. I was surprised when she said mildly: “You could say that, honey.”
“So it’s all right to say that you and Mickey continued to make love while you were waiting for your divorce to come through? You wouldn’t mind if we said that?” I was pushing my luck. “It was a long time ago, nobody’s going to complain. It’s not a hanging offense, for God’s sake.”
She thought about it for a moment without smiling. “We’ll see, honey. Let me think about it,” she said, and changed the subject. “Anyway, I was determined to keep my nose clean, when Howard Hughes arrived on the scene.”
“I thought Artie Shaw came next?” I said. The more I could keep her on some kind of track the easier it would be for me.
“Artie was my next husband. Howard Hughes was the next man in my life. He was the first thing to come around after Mick. He came around about five minutes after I filed for divorce, as a matter of fact.”
“Did you know him?” I said.
“I knew of him, of course. He was one of the most famous men in America. But I’d never met him.”
“He called you out of the blue?”
“Yes and no,” she said.
“What does that mean, Ava?” Pinning her down could often be a struggle.
“Nothing was ever an accident with Howard,” she said. “He had people meeting every plane, train, and bus that arrived in Los Angeles with a pretty girl on board. He had to be the first to grab the new girl in town. It was a matter of pride for him. When he read the story of my divorce in the papers—it was all over the papers, on the radio; Mickey’s name made it headlines, not mine—Howard decided I was the new girl on the loose.”
“Okay.”
“On the phone I thought he’d said his name was ‘Howard Hawks.’ That was another thing about Howard Hughes: he mumbled a lot. But Howard Hawks was famous, too. He was one of the most important directors in Hollywood. He had directed one of my favorite movies, Bringing Up Baby. It was a wacky screwball comedy with Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant. I thought he must have me in mind for a new picture.