Living With Miss G (12 page)

The film should have been enchanting. It read wonderfully on the printed
page. It had been an evocative legend. It had been a poetical, magical conception
of long-past history. How hard was it to recapture through the camera’s lens?
Pandro S. Berman, the producer, did not think so. He had already made a great
success with a film adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, starring Robert
Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Pandro also knew on the back lot of MGM’s
British Borehamwood location stood a real big and beautiful castle that they had
used in
Ivanhoe
. Dust it down, stick it up in the countryside, and King Arthur
could be recreated. All you needed was a lot of extras dressed in shining armor,
waving swords and shields about and orating like Hollywood Hamlets. You’d
get real class. Get them on horses draped in old carpets, chasing up and down
hillsides, and cowboys and Indians would have real competition.

The film illustrated Pandro’s thinking with great accuracy. Unfortunately,
wherever they filmed in England it rained. The extras demanded more money,
and they had a point. Sitting on a horse in heavy armor in the pouring rain was
no fun. They moved those scenes across to Ireland where the government
allowed them to use the Eire army for little more than the price of a few pints of
Guinness. The rain was even heavier. The mud was thicker. The nightlife was
non-existent. Afterwards one critic wrote, “Reflecting her disinterest in the role,
Ava played Guinevere with a wooden graciousness, looking tired and
uncomfortable in many scenes.”

“God Almighty!” said Miss G. “What was I doing in costume drama
anyway?”
Between the English and Irish locations Miss G got time off to take a short
European concert tour with Frank. From London she rang me, saying, “Rene,
honey, I’ve just got to spend more time with Frank. We’ve got to spend more
time together or else this marriage is going to drift apart from lack of use.”
Frank’s concerts began in Naples, wandered through Germany, and ended
in Sweden. They were a total disaster. No one in Europe seemed to want to see
or hear Frank in concert. Everyone wanted to see Miss G in the flesh to make up
their own minds if this was the most sexy and sinful woman in the world or just
another Hollywood doll. Frank got this message very quickly. In Scandinavia he
decided to quit, and they returned to London.
I got another phone call from Miss G. “Frank’s flying straight home. I’ve
still got some dubbing to do, but Frank’s had enough and is not waiting for me
to finish. It’s one of the ‘I’ve got my own career to consider’ situations. I guess
you can say we’re still apart.”
It did not take a great deal of intelligence to understand that their marriage
was slowly and painfully drifting to a close. It was not difficult to identify the
incidents that caused the final break. One of these took place about two years
earlier. Miss G and I had been staying at a rented house in Lake Tahoe, going
for solitary walks in the woods. When Miss G prefaced one of those walks with
my full name, “Mearene, let’s go for a walk,” I knew she had something serious
to discuss. We hadn’t gone far when she said, “Frank wants me to lend him
nineteen thousand dollars.”
“Have you got nineteen thousand dollars?”
“No, but I guess I can raise it from Charlie Feldman.” At that moment he
was her agent.
“What does he want it for?”
“It has something to do with his Palm Springs house. You know how he
loves the place. He’s paying off the lawyers or paying off Nancy from taking it
over. It’s about all he’s got left.”
That conversation took place even before they got married. Now we’re in
1953, and things are falling apart pretty rapidly. Rumors say Frank might be
nominated for an Oscar for his role in
From Here to Eternity
, and his record
sales are recovering. Frank’s beginning to climb high again. Miss G comes into
one of the rooms in Pacific Palisades, and Frank’s talking on the phone. As she
enters she hears him say, “Well, if only I can get rid of her, it will all work out.”
Oh baby, Miss G is certain he is referring to her, and Frank didn’t even deny the
charge. Miss G was very hurt.
She said coldly, “I’ll tell you how you get rid of me. Just pay me back my
nineteen thousand dollars, and I’ll go and file for divorce.” It was a pretty
dramatic confrontation. It was not one of those “Rene, I’m leaving—tell Hank to
bring the car around” moments.
This time it was serious. Frank did not move back to his office. He moved
into a rented house in one of the canyons. It was from there that he rang Miss G
and said, “I’ve got your nineteen thousand. Why don’t you come around and
collect it?” She went across, and Frank was waiting in the lounge. He had a
bunch of dollar notes in his hand, and as she walked in he threw them up into the
air so that they scattered all over the floor.
When she was telling the story I said quickly, “I hope you had the good
sense to pick them all up.”
“You bet your ass I did,” said Miss G. “Every one of those dollar bills.
Then I left, probably for good.”
The final break came when again Frank rang up and was apparently in bed
with one of his floozies. He taunted her with that fact. “You’re always accusing
me of being in bed with some dame. This time you are right; I am.” It was after
this incident that we made our usual exit to Palm Springs in order to “finally get
things worked out,” to quote Miss G’s own words.
We talked about Frank and what she should do in this situation. We
wondered if this was really the end. She said sadly, “Rene, I don’t know what
love is, do you? We have outrageous fights and say dreadful things to each
other. I’m certain I’ll never speak to him again as long as I live, and if I see him
on the street I’ll throw up. Then he comes into a room, and those blue eyes look
across at me, and he’s smiling that smile, and there’s that tenderness between us
again. How can you explain our ups and downs, sudden hatreds and angers?
Then comes the calm in the eye of the storm. Rene, why can’t we make a go of
it?”
I said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” We discussed Frank’s great
success in
From Here to Eternity
. I said, “He must have worked so hard on that
film.”
“He sure did,” answered Miss G. “Frank can be a real asshole on a set. He
doesn’t want to rehearse. He only wants to do one take. It is okay for him.
Before
From Here to Eternity
he never had a director who wanted to control him
or anyone who wanted to oppose him. Then Fred Zinnemann did in
From Here
to Eternity
, and Frank began to think, ‘Well, there may be something in this
stuff.’”
“Funny, really, Rene. Fred was the director on that early film I did,
Kid
Glove Killer
, and he gave me the very first line I spoke in a movie. Frank’s no
fool. You know that Rene. This time he was working with three great pros,
Zinnemann, Burt Lancaster, and Montgomery Clift. He saw what they did–how
they chipped away and carpentered and sweated time and blood and brain over
what they were doing. Frank loved them and set up great friendships. He worked
with them and learned from them. Frank wasn’t going to be left out as the
booby. He was going to be as good as they were. For almost the first time in his
life he was working with and as a team. Rene, the man’s an actor. The greatest
love of his life is singing to an audience. Then he’s acting; he’s wooing them.
He’s acting his part with the lyrics and the cadences with that beautiful phrasing
of his. He’s acting for you.”
I always thought that Miss G knew Frank much better than anyone else in
his life, including his mother. Miss G was more in love with him than any other
man she ever knew; that includes Mickey and Artie and all the lovers. It was
now all dissolving, and there was nothing she could do about it. Tears did not
help.
We returned from Palm Springs as Miss G had made up her mind. She
knew that MGM was about to rent her out to United Artists and Joseph
Mankiewicz to play Maria Vargas in
The Barefoot Contessa
. Its locations in
Rome and other parts of Italy would keep her away for several months. It was
emotionally impossible to keep up the pretense of a happy relationship and still
move around in Hollywood society. Miss G wanted out. Rome was as far out as
Miss G could get for the time being. She knew that even there she would have to
make a decision. It was better to make a clean break and end the marriage.
For that purpose, she went to see Howard Strickling, MGM’s veteran and
well respected head of publicity. He agreed with her opinion. The usual
diplomatic statement was issued: “Having reluctantly exhausted every effort to
reconcile their differences, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra can find no mutual
basis on which to continue their marriage.”
Miss G had kept her vow. She had not left Frank when he was down. After
the immense success of
From Here to Eternity
, helped by the furor it created
with the love scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in each
other’s arms in the shallows of a Pacific beach, Frank had begun his climb back
to what would become fantastic prosperity and success.
It was not a climb back to happiness. He could not believe that he had lost
Miss G. Within days, rather than weeks or months, Frank began to realize what
had happened and was desolate—much more than Miss G, who had been
realistic when it came to the collision point. Frank had just let it ride, basking in
his return to public favor, thinking it would all come out right in the end. He
returned to his easily accessible entourage of men, a group Miss G hated. We
called them the “Gee, you were terrific Frank” men. Their self-serving applause
was sweet music in Frank’s ears.
Frank had indeed lost Miss G as a wife for one simple reason. Much later
in an interview she summed it up: “I was happier married to Frank than ever
before in my entire life. He was the most charming man I’d ever met–nothing
but charm. Maybe, if I’d been willing to share him with other women, we could
have been happy.”
She had put her finger squarely on the reason for her almost insane
jealousy — Frank’s apparent need to bed every girl that came into sight. One
has to admit it is a commonplace masculine obsession. Most men applaud such
ambitions, and maybe a few girls do too. Miss G, in my opinion, deep down was
old fashioned about infidelity. When you were married you were faithful. What
else was the point of marriage? If you didn’t want to abide by that definition, as
far as she was concerned, you were not welcome in her bed.
Divorced, a second group of rules came into play. What was good for the
gander was also good for the goose. Miss G was certainly one of the prettiest
geese around. Miss G was lucky. She had the beauty and the money to adopt this
attitude, and as the years went on she did make the most of it. Tens of millions
of women around the world are treated as cattle and have no hope. Miss G was
the one that got away.
Before she left for Italy to make
The Barefoot Contesssa
, Miss G took me
aside. She knew I was a bit disappointed about being left behind. “Rene,” she
said, “you’re being left in charge here because you have got work to do.
Important stuff.”
I blinked a bit and said, “Such as?”
“You are going to sell the house in Nichols Canyon.”
“Bappie’s house?” I replied, realizing at once that I’d made a mistake.
“It ain’t Bappie’s house,” shrieked Miss G. “We only loaned it to Bappie
and Charlie because we moved into Pacific Palisades with Frank, and now that’s
more or less over. What the hell do we need two properties for?”
“But Nichols Canyon is already being sold by a realtor.”
Miss G spread her hands in despair. “You know what Bappie does. She
tells anybody the realtor sends that the house is not for sale.”
“But Bappie….”
“Bappie is insisting on coming to Rome with me. She’ll play the grand
dame in whatever place we rent. When you have sold the house you can rent an
apartment for Bappie and store all her stuff there.”
“Bappie will go stark raving mad,” I said.
“I hope so,” said Miss G.
Bappie was twenty years older than Miss G and myself and used the
experience gap as a mallet to drive her opinions like nails into our misinformed
skulls. As time went on, we got tired of her dictatorial attitude. In her youth and
middle age Bappie was an attractive woman. All five Gardner girls were
attractive and got their warlike independence from their fiery Irish mother. None
were as gorgeous as the last little creature to appear from her mother’s womb,
Ava Lavinia. If fireworks were needed she would supply them.
Bappie was bossy, vociferous, dogmatic and self-righteous. She was also
cheerful, optimistic, level-headed, and reliable. I guess Bappie thought she was
just a sweet, normal woman. When Mama Gardner was sick and faced with the
fact that her young and beautiful daughter was being lured away to Hollywood,
Bappie gave up her husband and her good job in New York to go with Miss G as
guardian angel. Within six months of her arrival, Miss G was married to Mickey
Rooney and after that looked after herself. One difference between the two
daughters was that while Miss G never looked at Hollywood through rose
colored glasses, Bappie took one look at the waving palms, sunny skies and
shining Pacific Ocean and decided that her hat would hang beside it
forevermore. She took trips like the one she was now taking to Rome, but for the
rest of her life Hollywood was home.
I started off high on Bappie’s list of undesirables. At the top of her list
stood niggers, Jews and Dagos. As she grew older, this got a little complicated,
as Hollywood contained a lot of highly talented, friendly Jews and her soon-tobe Dago friend Frank Sinatra. That left me. As time went by I became part of the
general wallpaper of her life, and I don’t think she even noticed my color.
Occasionally we were even co-conspirators, in the nicest way, in steering Miss
G away from some of her more hare-brained plans.
But even despite Bappie’s strong personality and our fears that she’d push
back, selling the house in Nichols Canyon was no great hassle. The realtor was
overjoyed at having someone in the house to show clients around when they
knocked on the door. Within three weeks, it was sold.
I also found an apartment and moved Bappie’s belongings across. The
moving men had obeyed my instructions to the letter. Included in the load were
three huge cases containing half empty bottles of gin which Charlie had secreted
away as comfort in his hours of need.
For
The Barefoot Contessa
, MGM loaned Miss G out to a new company
formed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who was collaborating with United Artists. Joe
and his older brother Herman were thought of as whiz-kid geniuses of that
period. It cost Joseph two hundred thousand dollars and ten percent of the profits
after the first million. Miss G heard about that from Joe halfway through the
film, and, as she was getting only sixty thousand dollars, her admiration for
MGM slipped even lower down the scale.
Miss G did make one slight slip at her first meeting with Joe when she
said, “Well, have I got pretty feet?” as if they were going to appear on the
billboards instead of her beautiful body. Joe responded without a trace of humor,
“Ava, I think the movie will need a little more than that.” Although the film did
take a long time, Ava and Joe got on well.
In the film, Joe had himself portrayed as the witty, satiric man-of-theworld observer, looking at Hollywood’s cloud-cuckoo land with revealing
intensity and showing what a foolish place it really was. Humphrey Bogart
narrated and played that part in his usual scathing manner, giving Miss G pep
talks and warnings from time to time. His voice-over explanations were a
cumbersome way of telling the audience what was going on.