She stopped and smiled at me. “What else can I tell you?”
“I don’t know? What else can you tell me?” I said. It had been a good session and she was looking tired. I didn’t want to push her. I was happy to wrap it up for the night.
“We shared the same birthday: December 24. We were both Christmas Eve Capricorns,” she said. “Apart from that, we didn’t have much in common. I was a good dancer, he was bloody awful. I don’t know why he always insisted on dancing with me. I dreaded it. In fact, apart from Mick, who wasn’t bad but a bit lacking in the height department, none of my husbands was any good on the dance floor. Frank and Artie both had two left feet.
“What else? He was born rich. I wasn’t. He was a WASP. I definitely was not. He was a racist. You know I’m not. When I told him that my closest childhood friend, Virginia, was black, he didn’t call me for about six weeks. I think he was sulking! He could be a sulky bastard. I didn’t give a damn. Fuck him! He wouldn’t employ blacks in his aircraft plants? Fuck him! Fuck all bigots.”
She lifted her glass in a toast to scorning bigots.
“To hell with all bigots,” I said, and raised my glass.
“Is any of this stuff usable?” she said, suddenly serious again.
“Of course it is. You mustn’t have any doubts. I’ll hardly need to touch it.” It was not the first time she had questioned the value of her story, or how she was telling it.
“I ramble too much,” she said. She checked the wine. It was nearly all gone; she poured a little into her glass, then the rest into mine. “I’m all over the place.”
“I can pull it together. That’s my job. It’s good stuff,” I told her again. “I promise you, it’s all there.”
“The amazing thing is, Howard was in my life, on and off, for more than twenty years but I never loved him. I don’t think he ever really loved me, although he was a dogged sonofabitch. He wanted me to marry him so much. He was driving me crazy. I thought, Shit, I’ll marry the man and be done with it. I mean it was not a bad move marrying Howard Hughes, the richest man on the planet. I was still waiting for my California divorce from Mickey to come through. That was going to take a year, I reckoned.
“Howard didn’t want to wait that long. He wanted me to go to Nevada to get a divorce. I went up to see Louis Mayer—I was still a good little MGM starlet—and told him I wanted a quickie divorce. It was no skin off his nose. But he was still in his Catholic phase and gave me another stern lecture on marriage being sacrosanct. ‘Wait the year, show some respect to Mickey!’ he said.
“Anyway, we never did tie the knot. He stayed loyal and generous. He was always keen. But I eventually drifted out of the marriage zone, I guess.
“It’s a pity—we might have had such a damned good time together,” she said, paraphrasing Lady Brett with a smile.
It was late. She was tired, and I had to go.
“It’s time for bed,” I said.
“Oh, I wish it were, honey,” she said.
19
The size of Frank Sinatra’s penis had been on my mind for weeks. I don’t know why it was bothering me so much, but it was. It went back to an incident several years earlier in Kenya during the shooting of Mogambo. John Ford, the crusty, hard-drinking director with whom Ava had an erratic and feisty but strictly professional relationship, had asked her to explain to a visiting English diplomat what she saw in Sinatra—“that one-hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married to,” as Ford referred to her husband.
“Well, there is only ten pounds of Frank,” she said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but there’s one hundred and ten pounds of cock.”
It was one of the many outrageous anecdotes told about Ava, and whether it was true or apocryphal, it was now part of her legend.
Snyder was keen to get her to repeat the story to me, so that we could include it in the book in her own words. I certainly wanted to use it. It was a classic Ava Gardner story, and I happened to believe it was true. Spoli Mills had assured me it was, so had Dirk Bogarde. My problem was that there seemed to be no easy way to bring the subject up without sounding coarse or inappropriately inquisitive.
IT WAS A SUNDAY evening and I was about to call Ava to discuss the material we would need for the next chapter when, at eight o’clock, the phone rang.
“Hi, honey.”
“Ava, hi,” I said, surprised by her call at that hour.
“What are you up to?” she said.
I’m thinking about how I can ask you about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock, would have been the honest answer. But I ducked it.
“I was just about to call you,” I said.
“I’m going to try to get an early night, honey,” she said. “I’m beat to the chops. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”
“Go to bed now!” I said sternly. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“There was a time when I never wanted to go to bed. Not to rest anyway,” she said.
I said I believed her and laughed.
“I had stamina in those days. I could dance all night, go straight to the studio at six. After a nap in Hair and Makeup and a glass of champagne, I’d be ready for my close-up at nine, thank you Mr. DeMille. I don’t know how I did it. I sure couldn’t do it now. The makeup man would say, Oh boy you went to bed early last night, didn’t you? I puffed up with sleep; I never puffed up with alcohol. But I was never late, I always knew my lines. I’d learn them on the way in. But I figured that was all I had to offer: to be on time and know the words. Because once I got there, I wasn’t much of an actress! But sweet Jesus, I loved those days!”
“They must have been fun,” I said, although I had my doubts. “You should sleep well tonight.”
“It’s got to be better than last night, honey.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said. She sounded low, and I really meant it.
“What good would it have done, honey? I’d have just kept you awake, too. It’s bad enough I can’t sleep,” she said. “Anyway, I need you fit and well and writing.”
“Insomnia’s not contagious. You should have called me,” I said.
“The small hours are a bitch. Thoughts get stuck in your head and go round and round. They haunt you all fucking night.”
“What kind of thoughts, Ava? Tell me about your ghosts,” I said cheerfully to encourage her.
“God, you’re a prying bastard. You sound like a fucking shrink. I know practically nothing about you—and you want to know everything about me.”
“That’s my job.”
“Asking about my ghosts?”
“The things that keep you awake at night,” I said.
“I don’t know, honey. It’s usually shit that goes straight out of my head the next morning. Thank God.”
“You can’t think of a single thing that keeps you awake at nights? Nothing stays with you, nothing sticks? I can’t believe that, Ava,” I said.
After a silence, she said: “All kinds of fucking things keep me awake at nights: thoughts about dying, how much it hurts to breathe, thoughts about why I don’t have any sexual energy anymore. And this fucking book keeps me awake at nights, too. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t started it.”
“Writing a book is damn hard work, Ava. But just think of the money,” I said.
“I should have thought of that last night,” she said, and laughed. The laugh became a cough, as it increasingly did at this time. I heard her take a drink. “I don’t know why I’m laughing, honey, but I like the way that sounds.”