“I think we should concentrate more on the career,” she said. “Let’s talk more about that, about the movies I made. I must have made over a hundred fucking movies if you count all the early quickies, the turkeys I did, when I was learning my trade.”
“Sure,” I said, happy to change the subject.
AROUND SEVEN THAT EVENING, we met at Ennismore Gardens. She wore a plain oatmeal sweater and a matronly plaid skirt that fell just below her knees. It wasn’t the most flattering length for her marvelous legs—legs about which director George Cukor once remarked, “When she crosses the screen, you’re bound to follow her.” And he was gay. She poured the wine. “Who was the young man who delivered the pages yesterday?”
“My brother,” I said.
“I thought he might be. He looks like you. What’s his name?” Michael, I said. She questioned me about Mike, my family, my wife. “Are you faithful to your wife?” she asked, looking straight at me as she handed me my drink.
“None of your business,” I said, surprised by the question.
“I don’t see why not. You know everything about me. I know fuck-all about you.”
“You checked me out didn’t you?”
“Only professionally,” she said.
“Who did you ask?”
“None of your business, kiddo.” She gleefully repeated my own riposte. She knew I was aware of the people with whom she had checked me out: Dirk Bogarde, Peter Viertel, Deborah Kerr, Spoli and Paul Mills, and Bill Edwards, an MGM marketing executive—the same mutual friends I had questioned about her!
“I didn’t know you had a brother but you know all about my brothers,” she said with feigned petulance.
“I’m your ghost, I’ve got to know these things.”
“A girl has a right to some privacy.”
“That’s not the way it works, Ava.”
“Okay, what else can I tell you? I’ve told you everything, for fuck sake. You know about my sisters, my Mom and Dad, my ex-husbands, my lovers. You know about my first period, fahcrissake. You even know about my Grandpa in the crazy farm. I’ve never told anyone about Grandpa Gardner, fahcrissake,” she said, but there was a hint of humor in her petulance.
“That’s because the book is about you. Next time, you can write a book about me and ask the questions.” It was a joke but she didn’t laugh.
Even so, it was true what she said: she knew almost nothing about me. She had scarcely ever asked me anything more inquisitive than would l like a drink? Like many actors, especially those who have become legendary movie stars, she was almost without curiosity about other people. Did being at the center of a world where others are peripheral—planets circling the star—create, bit by bit, a dividing line between reality and make-believe? Between the person you pretend to be and who you really are? Can such a woman ever be sure which side of the divide she belongs on?
Like most actors, Ava told outrageous and exaggerated stories about herself and other actors in order to entertain and amuse her friends; a story that started out as a risqué anecdote, told over and over, in time became accepted as fact even by Ava herself. “Is that true, Ava,” I asked her after one of her booze-fueled late-night recollections about an incident involving a young actor with whom she’d reputedly had a torrid affair. “Probably.” She shrugged indifferently.
Since the 1940s, when she was getting started, and discovered her power over the opposite sex, she had only to snap her fingers for men to come running; there was Sinatra, of course, John Huston, Howard Hughes, Hemingway, bullfighters—an indication of how demanding she was can be judged in bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín’s reply when asked, just before his death in 1996, whether he regretted not marrying her: “No. She would have left me no time for the bulls!”—and just about every movie star she had played opposite from Clark Gable to Robert Taylor and Bob Mitchum.
Naturally, I was dubious about some of her stories. Did she really turn down the role of the predatory Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate? I’d heard stories that director Mike Nichols never felt that she was right for the role—it was said that he always saw Anne Bancroft in the part, which she finally played—and reluctantly agreed to meet with Ava at her hotel in New York only after she called him and announced peremptorily, “I want to see you. I want to talk about this Graduate thing.”
When Nichols arrived at her hotel, the St. Regis, Ava was surrounded by a group of admiring young men whom she promptly dismissed (getting rid of lovers, she told me once with some pride, was a skill she had perfected at an early age). Nichols recounted, “Theatrical and over the top, she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, ‘All right, let’s talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.’”
It sounded right. It sounded exactly like Ava. “I never was one of those actresses whose clothes fell off all the time—at least not on camera, honey,” she said. When I eventually asked her about the episode, she at first claimed not to remember it.
“You don’t recall meeting Mike Nichols at all? At the St. Regis, in New York?”
“I might have done. It was a long time ago.”
“It was 1966.”
“Oh, I remember,” she said, suddenly changing her tune. “He made me cry.”
“Why did he make you cry, Ava?”
“He wasn’t very… simpatico.”
“Was that why you turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson?”
“I told him I couldn’t act,” she said. “That was the same thing as turning it down. I said I was no actress. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” she said, running the sentences together to avoid a response. It was a politician’s trick, and made me smile.
“Go ahead.”
“Are you gay?”
“I thought you said Dirk Bogarde told you I wasn’t,” I said.
“He said you weren’t a faggot. There’s a difference. I can’t stand faggots, I get on well with gays.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Gays make the best ‘walkers.’ They are good company. You can tell them your secrets. They are useful to have around. They bathe a lot. A woman can even go to bed with a gay. At a pinch.”
“But not with a faggot?”
“Faggots… they’re something else. They are cruder.”
“I’ve never heard that definition before.”
“You have now. So, we’ve established you’re not a faggot… are you gay?”
No woman had ever asked me that before. Was she softening me up for a confession? The idea offended my masculine pride, but I was curious. “Do you think I am?”
“You can never tell these days,” she said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
I didn’t mind, I said. No, I was not gay.
Bisexual? she asked, playfully.
Not bisexual, either, I said.
“I’ve known plenty of guys who are, you’d be surprised,” she said. “In Hollywood, a lot of guys don’t know whether they’re Arthur or Martha.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but later—in an interview published shortly after Ava’s death in 1990—Artie Shaw recalled how she had showed up at his apartment in New York late one night saying she needed to ask him some questions. “When you and I were in bed together, was it okay?” Shaw assured her that he had no complaints. According to Shaw, “She heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, then there’s nothing wrong with me?’” Shaw said, No, of course not. What did she mean? He said she told him, “With Frank it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me.” Shaw said he always thought Frank was a stud. Ava told him, “No… I just wanted to know that it’s not my fault.” But the episode probably affected the rest of her marriage to Sinatra. Though there may have been a touch of irony in her tone when, in 1966 when he married Mia Farrow, she said: “I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy,” there was also perhaps a hint of justification, too.