“I went on the road with some of those guys for a while. That was the best time I had with Artie, touring with his band before we married. Louis Mayer wasn’t happy about it. Although we’d been divorced a couple of years, my name was still linked to Mickey’s, at least in the public’s mind, and the studio was putting pressure on me to break off the romance with Artie, or at least make it legal. Uncle Louis was still on his high moral horse about actors ‘living in sin.’
“My affair with Artie was hardly discreet, it was no hole-and-corner thing that’s for sure. I’d moved into his place in Beverly Hills the minute he asked me, which was about five minutes after we’d met. MGM was pissed off with me. At least they weren’t offering me much in the way of movies, although they didn’t can me either. I knew that was supposed to be a punishment. Boy, did they get that wrong!
“I did one film in ’45, a loan-out: Whistle Stop, with George Raft. MGM got five thousand dollars for me that time. I didn’t mind. I liked George. He was coming to the end of his career, and mine still hadn’t got started, but we dated a few times. He was a wonderful dancer—for his age! He must have been in his late forties at that time but he still had a good figure. I had to slap him down a few times to keep him in line. He still thought of himself as a lady-killer, a bit of a Casanova; apart from that he was okay. We had some laughs together. I told you, I first met him with Mickey when we used to go to the Friday night fights in L.A. He was going steady with Betty Grable in those days. They were a hot item for a while.
“Whistle Stop was my first leading role. I was very nervous, and I wasn’t very good. I still didn’t know my ass from my elbow acting-wise. But there was one scene that got me noticed. I kissed George with my mouth open! It was a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it. It was forbidden by the Breen office, but it had the guys in the audience hanging on the ropes. [“With the dynamics of Gardner and Raft in it, Whistle Stop is certainly not a dull place,” Variety noted.]
“Fortunately, it slipped by the Production Code people. They were very hot on what they regarded as lustful kissing in those days. But John Huston spotted it. He said it was the scene that got me the role in The Killers, my breakthrough movie as they call it today. It made me realize you didn’t have to be an actress to sell tickets at the box office!
“I was still as happy as Larry traveling with the band, hanging out with Artie and his literary pals. Guys like Sid Perelman, Bill Saroyan, John O’Hara. They were all bright, funny, interesting guys.
“Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. I was happy to do that. I was comfortable with all those guys. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. ‘You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now,’ he’d scream. He had a real phobia about me and tobacco fields.
“Ten days after he got his divorce from Betty Kern, we were married by the same judge who handed down his decree.
“For the first couple of months our marriage was fine, at least as far as I was concerned it was, although I was unhappy when he broke the band up. He said he didn’t want his wife on the road with a bunch of musicians. He said it wasn’t dignified. He was very hot on dignity. He once told me he couldn’t respect a woman who made a living as a movie star—‘movie acting has nothing at all to do with talent, it’s all about key lights and cheekbones,’ he said. I think he said that when I beat him at chess after he’d hired a Russian grand master to give me lessons. I guess I must have learned too well.
“I was already living in his house in Beverly Hills when we took the plunge. It was a beautiful big mock-Tudor place on Bedford Drive, full of books, records, pianos, harpsichords. I was twenty-two. I wasn’t up to it. I was still a kid. I still identify with that little girl. The cook, the gardener, my maid were all black. They were like family to me. Living with Artie was like going home in that sense. He wrote the number ‘Grabtown Grapple’ for me on Bedford Drive.
“Contrast that with Howard Hughes, the racialists’ racialist,” she said. “Howard wouldn’t piss on a black man to put him out if he was on fire. That’s a fact, nothing I say can change it, and if I’m going to remember things as they really were, I have to face it. I told you about the doctors Howard flew to Mama’s bedside when she was dying, didn’t I?”
I said she had.
“Anything Ava wanted,” she said, “Ava got. Anything.”
“You should have married him,” I said.
“Marry Howard Hughes? Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?”
“I’m kidding you,” I said, backing off.
“Artie played the clarinet the way Frank sang. They both knew how to bend a note, stretch a phrase. They could do that stuff better than anyone alive. Frank once told me he used to practice by singing to Artie’s music on the radio in Hoboken, although he said it was Tommy Dorsey who taught him about breath control. But Artie and Frank never played together, which is music’s loss. They were at the top of their game at the same time.”
“They were about the same age, weren’t they?”
“Frank was five years younger. He was born in 1915.” She yawned. “What time is it, honey?”
“Ava, it’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll get on with the stuff I have on Mickey and Howard. With luck, I might even make a start on Artie. This is good stuff, by the way. It’s been a wonderful session.”
“I hope you can make sense of it. It’s awfully muddled, honey. I must have covered the waterfront. You’ll have to sort it out.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I assured her.
“I won’t see you for at least a week?” She sounded disappointed.
“A break will do you good,” I said. “You really sound as if you need one.”
“Are you losing interest?”
“You don’t think that, do you?”
“You’re getting bored with me! I’m fucking boring you!”
“Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s a foolish thing to say.”
“Christ, when even your biographer gets bored with you! What kind of fucking book is this going to be,” she said.
“It’s going to be a wonderful book, Ava.”
“It had better be, baby. I’ve given it my best shot,” she said with a final touch of her old acerbity, and replaced the receiver.
I rang her straight back.
“Good night, Ava. Sleep well,” I said, and put down the phone.
And I still hadn’t asked her about the size of Frank Sinatra’s cock.
20
“I’m sorry, honey. You said it’d be all right to call you.”
“Ava, are you okay?” I said automatically. I’d been in a deep sleep. I checked the time. It was just after two o’clock, less than a couple of hours since we’d said good night. “Can’t you sleep?”
She sighed unhappily. “I went off like a baby as soon as my head hit the pillow. I woke up gasping for a cigarette.”
I reminded her of what the doctors had told her about her not smoking anymore.
“Fuck the doctors. They’re all quacks anyway,” she said. Her voice was so husky as to be barely audible. “I just can’t sleep, honey. If we could talk for a while, it would help,” she said.
I said of course we could, although I was surprised that she had anything new to talk about so soon after our marathon session earlier. What did she want to talk about? I tried to sound cheerful and encouraging but it wasn’t easy.