“Mickey reckoned he made her pregnant when she was seventeen. Before he knew me. He probably did, although Lana always denied it. She had to, of course. She was in an Andy Hardy film with him. He said she had great knockers. First Mick, then Artie… she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too. Even so, I liked her. We became good friends. She’s a couple of years older than me. I thought she was so sophisticated. I started smoking because of her. I told you that story, didn’t I?”
“The slim gold cigarette case and lighter,” I said to let her know I remembered the story. It was late, she was tired, and I really didn’t want to encourage her. I again suggested she turn in. She said she would, as soon as she finished her nightcap.
“What are you drinking?”
“A little glass of red,” she said. “It’ll help me sleep.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Artie was difficult, he was complex, but I was stuck on him. I was crazy about him. I had it hard. He was smart as an apple. He always knew what I was going to say next. To tell the truth, I was always a little afraid of him. Not physically. Not the way I was scared of GCS [George C. Scott]. When GCS was loaded, he was terrifying—he’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea next morning what he’d done. I’d be lying next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding, and he couldn’t remember a thing. He just had no recollection at all.
“Artie was another kind of bully. He was always putting me down. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating sonofabitch. I don’t know which was worse: GCS’s physical violence or Artie’s mind games. He used to put me down so much I lost complete confidence in myself. When I went into analysis—that was something else he made me do—I insisted on taking an IQ test because I was at the point where I thought there was something seriously wrong with my mind. He had me thoroughly convinced that I was completely stupid.
“The analyst advised me not to take the IQ. I guess she feared the worst! But I took it anyway. Well, it turned out very well indeed. I didn’t have an enormous IQ but I did have rather a high one. I had a good head but I didn’t use it enough. I didn’t like studying. It was the same at school. I’m not a bookish person. Artie got through a book at least every two nights.
“This is nice wine, by the way,” she said.
“Finish it and go to bed,” I said.
“Am I boring you?”
“Not at all, but you said you were tired,” I said. “I’m only thinking of you.”
“I owe Artie plenty. He made me get an education. We must say that in the book. Give the guy credit where credit’s due. I enrolled in the University of California because of him. I more or less didn’t work for a whole year because of him. I was always happy to quit work. I never liked acting anyway. I took correspondence courses. I was doing very well. My God, I was doing well. B-pluses.”
“What year was that, Ava?”
“Forty-five. I also started hitting the bottle when I was with Artie. I drank with Mick, but that was kids’ stuff. Those rum drinks that seemed so innocuous, and tasted so good. With Artie I’d get properly drunk. I got drunk because I was so insecure. I was completely out of my depth. Artie was very well read. He was completely self-taught. He was an auto-something—what’s that word?”
“Autodidact?”
“An autodidact,” she said slowly, as if determined to remember it. “He always had his nose in a book. I had to get an education to keep up with him. He was mixing with a bunch of pseudointellectuals. I thought they were the real thing at the time. Most of them were Reds. I went to all those political meetings with him. I got seriously into socialism. Some of the books are still on my shelves. We’d go to the Russian consulate. We’d sit down to dinner and the vodka bottles would appear, and the caviar. We’d drink the vodka down the hatch. In one gulp, you know? That’s when I got a taste for the hard stuff.”
She paused. “People won’t think I’m settling old scores, will they?”
“Some might. But it’s honest,” I said.
“Oh, it’s honest, baby.”
“This is Hollywood history,” I said.
“That puts me in context, honey,” she said.
I wondered if I had said something to offend her and didn’t laugh.
“Artie was very conscious of being a Jew, you know,” she said. “He once told me a story that showed how vulnerable he was. I don’t know whether he was married to Jerome Kern’s daughter at the time, or who, because he married everybody, but he was at a posh Hollywood dinner party when they started talking about Jews. It turned out that they were all anti-Semitic. He said he sat there in silence for a while—apparently nobody knew he was a Jew—then he joined in with their snide remarks about Jews. He said he’d never forgive himself for his cowardice.
“I felt such sadness for him when he told me that story. All my protective instincts came out. I really felt his pain. It made me love him even more. I was still mad about him at that time. I decided I wanted his baby. But he was very wise. He was protecting me—and I’m sure he was thinking of himself, too—he said this is not the time to have a child.
“I don’t think in my heart I genuinely wanted a baby at all. I don’t think I really did. I just thought: I’m going back to school, I’m getting an education, I’m being the good wife, to make it perfect I’ll have a child. Maybe I was playing a part, who the hell knows?
“What the fuck, a few months later, he ditched me and married Kathleen Winsor, the woman who wrote Forever Amber—a fucking potboiler, he’d called it. He snatched it out of my hands and tore it to shreds when he caught me reading it. It was part of my self-improvement program. What did I know?
“Later I lost respect for him completely. He did a dreadful thing. He was called up before the Un-American Activities Committee in Washington and ratted on his friends. You just don’t do that. There was a writer who was very, very far left, but a wonderful man, Hy Kraft. He wrote Stormy Weather, the all-black Twentieth Century-Fox musical which starred my friend Lena Horne. Hy was Artie’s best man at our wedding. That’s how close they were. It didn’t stop Artie giving up Hy’s name to the Un-American Committee. Can you believe that? His own best man! I still to this day don’t understand how he could have done that. He suddenly became a super American patriot: I love America, I love the flag, I love this country. I think he was full of shit.”
She continued to talk in a reminiscent tone maybe for another twenty minutes, almost as if I wasn’t there.
“‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Frenesi,’ ‘Stardust.’ Remember those? ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You.’ You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing an Artie Shaw number being played. He was pulling down sixty thou a week in those days. That must be practically a million in today’s money. The money was pouring in. But that didn’t stop him watching the kopecks. He probably still has the first one-spot he ever made. If only his thrift had been contagious, believe me, I wouldn’t be talking to you now, baby! I didn’t take a penny from him, by the way. Not a fucking sou. I even paid for my own divorce.
“On the other hand, although he could be pretty rude about individuals, Artie didn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body. He was the first white bandleader to employ black musicians. Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, the trumpeter—they called him Little Jazz, I loved Little Jazz. Before the war, I used to listen to him and Artie on the radio—with Coleman Hawkins, and Teddy Wilson on the piano.