I could tell she was amused, and I remembered it was the game she played with producers. “I like to make them think I’m indifferent about a role or a film they want me to do. That always gets them hot,” she’d once told me.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” I said and changed the subject: “Can’t you sleep?”
“I wanted a ciggie so badly. Old habits die hard.”
“You didn’t give in?”
“Frank says it’s easy to give up smoking. He says he quits every day,” she joked, ducking the question.
“That’s very funny,” I said. I wanted to get back to sleep. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Frank smokes less than I ever did,” she said, again ignoring my question. “He never smokes during the day. He never inhales anyway. Watch him next time he’s on. He’ll take two or three drags and stub it out.
“Smoking is part of his image. He does it with a lot of class. Although Bogart did it better. It was an art form with Bogie.
“But it killed the poor bastard in the end. He must have been smoking sixty a day when we made The Barefoot Contessa. He had a contract to promote one of the tobacco companies. He needed no encouragement. Chesterfields, I think it was. He said it was the best deal he ever signed. His dressing room was like a foggy day in London town every fucking day.”
It was obvious that she wanted to talk. It was her way of getting through the night. Spoli Mills said Ava used to keep her awake at night and now that was my role. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to my night’s sleep since temazepam,” she said.
“If you want, we could talk about making Barefoot Contessa. We haven’t covered that period yet.” I gave in to the inevitable. “What was it like working with Bogart? Shall we talk about that?”
“He would often ruin our scenes together with his coughing fits. It wasn’t the happiest movie I ever worked on,” she said.
“Why was that?”
“Did you know him?”
“Bogart? No.”
“He was a bastard,” she said flatly.
“In what way?”
“In every way, honey. Mank [director Joseph L. Mankiewicz] liked to shoot long scenes, he was a dialogue man. Bogie hated learning lines. He knew every trick in the book to fuck up a scene and get a retake if he felt a scene wasn’t going his way. Marius Goring [the English actor who played her lover, Alberto Bravano, a South American millionaire] was on to his games. He called him Humphrey Bogus.”
“Why didn’t Bogart like you?”
“Probably because he knew that it was my film, not his. He wasn’t happy that I got the part. A lot of better actresses than me were up for it. Bogie didn’t approve of me. He had no respect for me at all. He never tried to hide it.”
“That never came over in the film.”
“He was a good actor.”
“So are you,” I told her.
“He knew that I was being paid more than he was getting. That was another thing that pissed him. The money wasn’t because I was such a great fucking talent, because I wasn’t. But I was a box office name by that time. I’d just come off a run of big pictures: Show Boat, which made MGM a fucking fortune, Pandora [and the Flying Dutchman], Snows of Kilimanjaro. It doesn’t get much better than that. Mankiewicz had to pay MGM a fortune to get me. My name on the billboards put bums on seats, as they say now.”
“Do you know how much Mankiewicz paid for you?”
“I can tell you exactly how much, honey: two hundred grand plus ten percent of the gross over the first million.” There was pride in her voice as well as anger.
“That was a lot of money.”
“I didn’t realize how hot I was. The two hundred grand–plus was the figure that stuck in Bogie’s gullet. It pisses me, too, because the greedy bastards at MGM grabbed most of it. I was still under contract. The studio was making a fucking fortune out of me. I was their milch cow. I took home less than seventy grand for that picture. Bogie still pissed and moaned that I was getting more than he got, but he banked his usual hundred thou. It didn’t make him any nicer.
“I told you, it wasn’t the happiest film I ever worked on. I’d gone into it with such high hopes. Mankiewicz had gotten a wonderful performance out of Linda Darnell in A Letter to Three Wives a couple of years earlier, and another stunning performance from Anne Baxter in All About Eve. He’d gotten a reputation as a woman’s director, although I don’t think he was ever as good as George [Cukor, who directed her in Bhowani Junction]. George was gay; Joe wasn’t. George understood actresses, Joe liked to screw ’em.
“I told Mankiewicz going in that I wasn’t much of an actress. But I understood Maria Vargas [the contessa of the title]. She was a lot like me. That was an understatement! If he’d help me, I said, I thought I could deliver a performance we could both live with. Well, something went wrong. I didn’t get any help from him at all. He was a complete bust. I read somewhere that he knew it, too. He told a reporter he didn’t think he was as much help to me as he would have liked. He got that right. The only good thing on that picture was Eddie O’Brien. He deserved his Oscar. I first met him on The Killers. He was a wonderful actor, and knew I was struggling. He would say little things, like: ‘Don’t be in a hurry to say that line. Wait a beat. It’s a good line, it’s important.’ Eddie knew more about Maria Vargas than Mankiewicz did—and Mankiewicz created her!”
“But he based her on you, right?”
“Down to the soles of my feet, honey. Later he said she was based on Rita [Hayworth]. That was crap. There was too much shit in the script about my affair with Howard. Joe even included the scene in which I nearly whacked the bastard.”
“Whoa, you nearly killed Howard Hughes?”
“I hit him with an ashtray. I think it was onyx. Anyway, it was heavy. I practically had him laid out on a slab. We fought all the time but I nearly put a lily in his hand that night.”
The memory of it made her laugh until it became a cough. She said she’d tell me the story later. It was worth a whole chapter, she said. “It’s funny now but Louis Mayer nearly had kittens when he heard about it. He was convinced I’d killed the guy.”
“Tell me more about The Barefoot Contessa,” I said.
“It could have been called Howard and Ava, it was so fucking obvious. But Joe swore till he was blue in the face that it was based on Rita’s life. Howard was a friend of his—most of those guys stuck together like shit—but he was on to him like a fucking tiger once he’d read the script. I didn’t give Howard the script, by the way; Mankiewicz was convinced I did, but I know that Howard got it from Johnny Meyer, although Johnny denied it,” she said.
Mankiewicz had used Meyer as the model for the publicity man Oscar Muldoon, whom Edmond O’Brien had played as a sweaty, sycophantic press agent, for which he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
“The film had wrapped and was ready to be shipped but Howard still demanded changes. It must have cost Mankiewicz a small fortune. The Hughes character, a Texas tycoon [played by Warren Stevens], became a Wall Street big shot. They had to dub pages of dialogue to remove the clues that pointed to Howard. I felt sorry for Joe. We had our differences but he always stood up for me when Bogie was being difficult.
“By this time Bogie was feeling his age. He looked burnt out, like Daddy at the end. I still admired the sonofabitch on the screen, I just didn’t like him very much as a man—and he had no respect for me at all.
“He knew I was dating Luis Miguel Dominguín. It wasn’t much of a secret. Frank had heard about it in New York. Luis Miguel was the most famous bullfighter in the world. Bogie was furious that I was giving Frank a hard time. He loved Frank like a brother. They started the Rat Pack together. ‘I don’t know why you want to two-time Frank with a goddamn fruit,’ he’d needle me. ‘I never had you down as a dame who’d go for a pantywaist.’ Stuff like that. Luis Miguel was one of the bravest men I knew. He was definitely no fruit, I can tell you that. Bogie knew it, too. It was his way of winding me up. He was always trying to get my goat.”