“Absolutely,” I said.
“You must tell me if they’re boring,” she said. After a pause, she began to read slowly: “Nineteen eighty-six, before the stroke, was one of the best years of my life. I’d lived sixty-four years of great activity: work, play, and a bit of mental activity as well, but mostly physical. I loved sports and was good at almost all of them.”
She stopped reading, and said thoughtfully: “Even as a little girl on a farm—and nobody knew about gymnastics and all that jazz—I won a blue ribbon doing very simple exercises. I lost the ribbon in my Daddy’s cotton gin, or his sawmill, I forget which. I loved gymnastics. Had I had the training I might have been an Olympic star instead of a movie star and been a much happier human being. Another thing I loved was music. I used to go to Selma, North Carolina, near where we lived, to watch my sister Myra have piano lessons. She was never keen on the piano, but I was. It was a shame, Mama and Daddy couldn’t afford lessons for me, too. At first I kept my disappointment to myself. But one day, I couldn’t hide my frustration or jealousy any longer. I bit the keys off the teacher’s piano. I had a terrible temper as a child.”
“You bit the keys off the piano?” I said incredulously.
“I had strong teeth.”
“That’s very funny, Ava.”
“It’s true. You could see the tiny teeth marks in some of the keys. I wanted to dance, too. But again, Mama and Daddy couldn’t afford the lessons. It’s really terrible being poor as a child. But if you’re going to be poor, be poor on a farm. I told you that before, didn’t I?”
“I think so. But it’s good to be reminded,” I said.
“I played baseball with the boys and outran most of them and climbed higher trees and towers and God knows I have the scars to prove it. To get back to 1986,” she said, and slowly resumed reading from her notes:
“It was a really healthy year. No booze, few cigarettes, I cut right down—actually I was still smoking like a fiend—but I had a very healthy diet. I was really getting myself together. I played tennis twice a week, swam every day, no matter the weather. I walked my little dog, Morgan, in the park for at least an hour a day.”
She paused for a moment. “I must have lost six, seven, eight pounds,” she said reflectively. “I was beginning to look good naked again. I decided to have some new dresses made by my darling friend, Franka… then came the fucking strokes,” she said.
“That must have been devastating,” I said.
“It was the last thing in the world I expected. I was so happy. Work was coming in. My name meant something on the marquees. Producers liked to use me for the name. I did a nice turn as an art patroness in Priest of Love. I was in William Faulkner’s The Long Hot Summer with Jason Robards, and Harem with Omar Sharif. I’d played his mother, I’d played his wife. I said maybe next time I’ll have a face lift and play your daughter. He said don’t bother with the face lift! He is a nice man, a charming man, but he won’t leave the gambling alone. What else? I had a run in Knots Landing, I played Agrippina in A.D. with James Mason. It was television and they weren’t the biggest roles, but they were important parts, important character roles, and the money was good.”
“You’d come a long way since the early days at MGM,” I said.
“I was still afraid that people were going to catch on to me. But at least I was fucking fit. Those fucking strokes turned my life upside down. Didn’t I cover most of this stuff last night?”
“No, this is new,” I said.
“I don’t want to sound sorry for myself,” she said.
“You won’t.”
“I don’t sound full of shit, do I? I don’t want to sound full of self-pity.”
“You are the gutsiest woman I know,” I said.
“Franka’s dresses are still hanging in the closet. They are beautiful but I still haven’t been able to wear any of them. They probably don’t fit me any longer. If I were the crying type, I would sit down and cry like hell. There they hang and here I sit,” she said. “It’s a bitch thinking back over your life, having to remember things you’d rather forget.”
“I don’t want you to forget a thing—not until we’ve finished the book,” I said.
“I have a few more notes. Do you want to hear them?” She sounded hesitant.
“Of course I do. They have your voice in them,” I said.
“It’s my fucking voice, honey,” she said dryly.
“Unmistakably,” I said.
“These are the notes I wrote up before I thought of doing the book. I was very low. These were just for me, a kind of journal. It was probably my lowest point.”
Hesitantly, she began to read: “Now it is 10:30 at night and I’m going to bed. After having various vitamins, and cider and honey, which is supposed to be good for the arthritis in my neck—which is a perfect drag. They told me that I would have to have an operation, but there is no real assurance that an operation will do the job. And certainly they can’t operate until I stop smoking, which is about the only pleasure I have left in life.
“So I go to bed after an injection to stop my left side jumping and driving me crazy, which will last me five or six hours. Then what will I do? Go mad. Kill myself? I don’t much care. [The swelling in] my arm will go down after a few moments in bed. But this is not something to give anyone hope or courage after a stroke.
“Being left in a semiparalyzed condition, with the threat of emphysema at any time if I continue smoking, scares the hell out of me. Even if I stop now, most of my lung power has gone. I’ve certainly lost all courage, something I always had, no matter what. I have no hope. No hope from my doctors and certainly none for myself.
“I wake reluctantly every day, thinking, Now what? Another day of pain and therapy—and, after one year and a half, no progress. Why bother? Why bother to get out of bed? I suppose I should be grateful for all the sixty-five years of health and fun and complete life. But I’m not. I’m bitter and I’m angry. And I wish to God I’d died. There is no joy and no happiness in the future. Shit. But that’s the way I feel. I don’t want to be half a person. I don’t want to be.”
She stopped reading. I could feel her despair. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. After a long silence, she said: “It’s such a bore, Pete. Life is a bore.”
“When did you write that, Ava?”
“I don’t know. It’s undated. I guess when I thought I was going to kiss myself goodbye,” she said.
“I’m pleased you didn’t,” I said.
“Sitting around, just waiting. If I were a great intellectual, I’d sit and read and study, but I’m not. I’m just a very ordinary woman. I don’t want to paint. I don’t want to write. I want to go out and play tennis, I want to swim. I’m purely a physical piece of machinery. Or I was.”
“I think we should use it just the way it is,” I said.
“Not until we take the ‘poor little me’ stuff out of it,” she said in a tone I knew was nonnegotiable.
21
Ed Victor mentioned it casually over lunch: had I asked Ava about the size of Frank Sinatra’s penis yet? He knew I hadn’t, of course. I said it was a difficult subject to introduce into a conversation. “I can hardly say, ‘Oh by the way, Ava, I heard that you told John Ford that Frank’s penis is enormous. One hundred and ten pounds of it. Can we talk about that?’”
Ed gazed calmly at me while he mused over the problem. Finally he agreed there was no easy way to broach the subject. “But you’ll think of something. You’re the writer,” he said. It was his usual solution to a problem when he couldn’t think of an answer.