She paused thoughtfully. “What year was that?”
“You started shooting Barefoot Contessa at the beginning of ’54,” I said.
“My God,” she said in a small voice. I heard her refresh her nightcap and wondered what she was drinking at three o’clock in the morning. She didn’t sound drunk. “Frank and I had been married barely a couple of years. The marriage was obviously unraveling even then. Maybe I’m remembering some things wrong. It was a long time ago. I get mixed up, honey,” she said. “That fucking stroke didn’t help one little bit. You’ll have to sort out the dates later.”
She had told me that she had never cheated on any of her husbands. This couldn’t have been true if she had started the affair with Luis Miguel Dominguín. But I let it pass. This was not the time to question things she had said in earlier conversations. As she often reminded me, it was her life and she’d remember it any way she wanted.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Ava?”
“Yeah, I’m here, honey,” she said after a moment.
“I thought you had fallen asleep on me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m just surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did. Although it was over long before it ended.”
“It must have been a difficult time for you,” I said sympathetically.
“It was a bad time for Frank. Poor darling, he was so insecure. He was broke. He didn’t have a job. He was hanging on to his place in Palm Springs by the skin of his teeth. It was the last real asset he had. If he’d lost that, it would have been the end of the line for him. He had made a lot of enemies in his good years, before the bobby-soxers found somebody new to throw their panties at. Nobody wanted to be around him. There were no hangers-on. He didn’t amuse them anymore. He couldn’t lift a check. There was nobody but me. He had burned most of his bridges with the press. There was a catalogue of disasters: His voice had gone. MGM had let him go. His agent had let him go. So had CBS. On top of all that, the poor bastard suffered a hemorrhage of his vocal cords and couldn’t talk, let alone sing, for about six weeks. That’s when I saw through those people. I saw through Hollywood. Naive little country girl that I was, I saw through all the phoniness, all the crap. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I go back there today I realize just how right I was. It’s just awful, it’s still false, the yes-men and bullshitters are all still there.”
“At least your career was on the up,” I said.
“Thank God. Time magazine put me on the cover in 1951, just before we married. They called me Hollywood’s most irresistible female, or some rubbish like that. A Time cover was a great accolade in those days. It was almost as sought after as an Oscar. We all wanted one—except Frank. Time was on his SOB list since they said he looked flea-bitten in some movie or other. He took that very personally. He could hold a grudge longer than anyone I know, even against friends. He turned against Sammy Davis for years after I did a Christmas spread with Sam for one of those big black magazines. They made up, on the surface they did, but Frank never really forgave him, he was always slapping him down. People thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.”
“What was that about, Ava?” I said.
“Frank had just made a film with Shelley Winters [Meet Danny Wilson]. It wasn’t very good. They sent out invitations to the premiere in New York. It wasn’t a big do, I don’t remember too many faces being there, but Sammy was sweet enough to come. He gave me a little pair of drop earrings, engraved AS [Ava Sinatra]. When he asked me to do a shoot with him for the Christmas cover of Ebony I think it was, I could hardly say no.
“He came round to the Hampshire House with his photographers. I dressed up in a pretty red dress, Sammy put on a Santa Claus suit and wore a hokey white beard. I spent all afternoon on a picture session with him, something I wouldn’t normally do. Frank wasn’t there, but my sister was, my maid Rene was there. I was on the wagon. I ordered Coca-Cola for everybody. When the session was finished they took some informal shots of Sammy and me—me on the sofa, Sammy sitting on the arm, looking happy, looking festive, that sort of thing. He put his arm around me in a friendly way.
“It must have been a couple of weeks later, Howard Hughes tipped me that Confidential magazine was planning to run a story claiming that Sammy and I had had an affair. They have pictures, he said. Frank hit the roof when I told him. ‘Did you screw him?’ he screamed. Of course I didn’t, I said. Frank went through the whole there’s-no-smoke-without-fire routine. How could he even think that? I said. Was he crazy? ‘How the fuck does your boyfriend know all about it then?’ he yelled. Howard was always ‘my boyfriend.’ Frank would never call him by his name. I said, ‘I’ll sue the fuckers, Frank. I’ll sue their asses off.’
“‘Yeah, do that,’ he said.
“I was so naive. I thought it would be easy to kill the story. Whitey Hendry, who ran MGM’s private police force, had a lot of muscle in that town. He could keep most of the studio’s scandals under wraps. He said he’d get back to me. Instead I got a call from Howard Strickling, the head of studio publicity. I liked Howard. I had a lot of respect for him, everybody did. He’d been with the studio forever. He said, ‘Ava, I don’t want you to sue this rag. It’s a piddling, jerkwater outfit. If you sue you’ll get a small apology and no money—but they will get enormous publicity around the world. It’ll hurt you, it will hurt the studio.’
“‘You’re not going to do anything about it?’ I said.
“He said, ‘Of course we are. We are going to ignore it.’”
I heard her sigh. “All my fucking ghosts,” she said.
“We’ve got some good stuff, Ava. It’s been our best session yet.” I said, and meant it, although I knew that the narrative would need some fixing.
“You think so?”
“I know so. We probably have enough material for several chapters. The Bogart material is terrific.”
“You think so?” she said again.
“We should always work through the night,” I said.
“You, me, and my ghosts,” she said.
“Good night, Ava,” I said, but she had put the phone down and the line was already dead.
23
Burning the midnight oil, I finished the draft of the next couple of chapters in three days and couriered them over to her with a friendly, businesslike note:
Dear Ava,
I hope you’ve caught up on your sleep, and are feeling better. I am a great believer in the healing powers of sleep. Grab as much of it as you can, I say. One can never dream to excess!
As promised, here are the drafts of the chapters we discussed. I think they work well, and move at a good pace. I’ve wrapped up your marriage to Mickey, continued to develop your relationship with Howard Hughes, and segued into your marriage to Artie Shaw (1945). It stops just short of your breakthrough movies (Whistle Stop; The Killers) in 1946.