“Just think of the money,” I said again. It would be a disaster if she backed out now. The book was beginning to have a definite shape in my head. I was even beginning to enjoy working with her. It was fun discovering little things she wanted to hide, and finding ways of slipping them into the copy, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. It was a game we played. I’m sure she knew that as well as I did.
Several moments passed, her coughing stopped. She said reflectively: “You are right about the ghosts. Last night I couldn’t get the picture of Daddy dying out of my head. I kept thinking how bloody lonely he must have been in that hospital ward in Newport News, waiting for me to visit each day when I got home from school. Fifty years ago and it was as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday. The way his eyes lit up when he saw me come into the ward. The way he said, ‘You make this place feel like I’m home, Daughter.’ I guess that was the first time I realized he was dying.”
“How old was he then, Ava?”
“Fifty-nine. Younger than I am now, fahcrissake. He must have known he’d never make it to sixty.”
“That’s no age.”
“He was born in 1878.”
“It must have been a hard life,” I said.
“He was just waiting for it to end. He was burnt out. Life had burnt him out. He knew he was dying.”
“You really think so?”
“When he said I made him feel like he was home, the way he looked at me. He knew all right. He wanted to reassure me he was going to be fine. He was telling me he was ready to go, and I mustn’t worry. He was very good at telling you things, making things clear, without spelling them out.
“I remember telling him I wanted to be a good daughter. I wanted him to be proud of me. He said, ‘You’ve done fine, Daughter.’ I don’t think they were his last words, but they’re the last words I remember.”
“We must use that in the book,” I said, already making a note of it.
“Don’t you dare! Don’t even think about it!”
The vehemence in her voice surprised me. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want you to that’s why not, honey. Jesus Christ! That’s just between the two of us,” she said.
It was a poignant moment and I didn’t want to lose it. It was the kind of detail that gives a memoir substance and authenticity.
“But this is wonderful material, Ava. It’s the kind of stuff that makes a book a page-turner. I can see it as a number one bestseller now.”
“I don’t want you to mention it, okay? Push it, I promise I won’t ever trust you again.”
“But it tells us so much about your closeness to your father. It’s a wonderful insight into your relationship with him. It hits exactly the right tone. It explains the kind of remarkable man he was.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what a remarkable man Daddy was,” she said.
“But people don’t know that, Ava. It’s the kind of detail that will distinguish your book from the cut-and-paste jobs that most movie stars settle for in their memoirs. I think you should talk about the sleepless nights, the things that keep you awake,” I said.
“My ghosts?”
“We all have them.”
“Most women are close to their fathers. I think of my mother, too, I was close to her, but Daddy’s the one I see in my dreams.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Ava. It’s such an intimate detail. The clarity of that memory after fifty years, isn’t that worth mentioning? I think it’s extraordinary.”
“I wish I hadn’t mentioned it,” she said, but there was hesitancy in her voice.
“Don’t you think it would give a kind of closure to your childhood? I think it would,” I said.
After a silence, she said: “It’s mawkish.”
“Not in this context,” I said.
“In any fucking context, honey. It’s schmaltzy.”
“A little sentimental maybe,” I said, giving a little tactical ground. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Let me write it up. You can see how it reads. You might like it better on the page. Let’s think about it?”
“I don’t want a sentimental book. I hate sentimental books,” she said. “Daddy was never sentimental. Neither was Mama. They both dealt with what life threw at them and moved on. Let’s move on, honey.”
“Nothing is too sentimental if it reveals genuine feelings. Not if it’s true,” I said.
“Let it lay, baby.” There was a sudden abruptness in her tone, a dogged finality. “Jesus, you want to louse up my image? Forget it,” she said.
I decided not to ask what she thought her image was. Later I would use the incident, write it up, and see what she said then. Perhaps next time around she wouldn’t feel so strongly about it; she might not even comment on it at all. It had happened before. I kept forgetting how important it was to write around her moods.
“Ed Victor told me a lovely story about his dad,” I said. I didn’t want to end the discussion about her father on such a negative note. “The night before Ed was to meet you for the first time, he called his dad in the States. His dad was about to have an operation for colon cancer. Ed knew he was a fan of yours and told him that you were a new client of his. He said he was going to have dinner with you the next day. He knew it would cheer him up.
“His dad said, ‘You’re having dinner with Ava Gardner?’
“‘Tomorrow,’ Ed said, knowing it would impress him.
“His dad thought about that for a moment, and said, ‘Well, just be careful, son!’
“‘Why should I be careful, Dad?’ Ed said, puzzled.
“‘She’s a very beautiful woman, son. She might try to seduce you.’”
Ed’s story made her laugh, as I knew it would.
“Ed’s dad sounds like a very nice old boy,” she said. “I hope the operation was a success?”
“He never woke up from it. He was in a coma for about a month and then passed away.”
“Oh my God, that’s so sad. He obviously loved his son very much,” she said. I could see she was moved by the story.
I said, “Ava, that’s it for this evening. You really sound exhausted. I think you should take a few days off. I have plenty of material I can be working on. I’ll wrap up your divorce from Mickey, and I have plenty of material on Howard Hughes I can use.”
“How long is that going to take, honey?”
“Maybe four or five days,” I told her optimistically. “Let’s say a week?” Surprisingly, she didn’t argue. “We’re getting there. I might even be able to cover some of the Artie Shaw years,” I said.
“The Artie Shaw year, honey,” she corrected me with droll precision. “We married in ’45, October 17. He dumped me one week after our first anniversary. The bastard broke my heart.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to encourage her. It was getting late. I wanted her to go to bed.
“Jacob Ben-Yitzhak Arshawsky,” she mused. “Don’t you love that name? His mother called him Arthur. Arthur! That has no music in it at all. His mother was always a problem. His parents split when he was a kid. His mother, Sarah, was Austrian. She was a Jewish albatross around his neck all her life. She was crazier than a quilt. He could barely stand to be in the same room with her.
“He had issues with his father, too. He had issues with most people but he really disliked his father. He was a Russian. But it was his mother who drove Artie into the arms of the shrinks, although Lana [Turner]—a couple of wives before me, she was wifey number three; I was number five, there have been eight of us altogether, so far—didn’t help.
“He’d just come out of the navy when he met Lana. He’d served in the Pacific. He was deaf in his left ear from when he was bombed at Guadalcanal. He’d had a nervous breakdown when he was discharged. I think Lana did, too. They were two messed-up people. Lana was eighteen. The classic MGM starlet. Artie had an IQ of—I don’t know what it was. It was right up there. The intellect isn’t connected to the pelvis, he told me once when I asked what had attracted him to her.