Living With Miss G (26 page)

After finishing
On the Beach
, we went back to the USA and began our
usual migrations between the places we liked—Palm Springs, Lake Tahoe and
New York. We gained and lost various friends and acquaintances during this
period. In Australia Bappie had fallen in love with Arthur Cole, a nice props
man working on the picture. They had married and returned to Hollywood to
live in Bappie’s house high in the Hollywood hills.

It was also during this time that David Hanna, whom we both liked
enormously and who was a good friend as well as a first rate business manager,
committed the worst sort of crime as far as Miss G was concerned: disloyalty.
He had written and published a book about Miss G without her having the
faintest idea of what he was doing.

I remember Miss G saying tartly, “There’s David; my secretary; my friend.
I trusted him. He worked for me for years. Okay, his book was probably the
most correct factually of all of them, but what the hell! In Melbourne, I was
paying him a thousand dollars a week. Stanley Kramer’s production company
was paying him the same salary. He had his own private secretary, and he comes
out with a book about me – Jesus Christ!”

You can see what I mean about being disloyal to Miss G even about a
Spanish omelet, let alone a book!
Another one to bite the dust was Walter Chiari, but he had been on the
skids for some time now. He hadn’t endeared himself to Miss G in Australia
with part of his music hall act, which was a rather cruel and mocking take-off of
Frank Sinatra.
There were worse crimes associated with Walter as far as Miss G was
concerned. Some time earlier she said to me, “You know, Rene, why is Walter
always showing off? He’s always sliding down banisters, taking a run at a
polished corridor, and sliding for twenty yards. He’s always the life of the party.
He can’t keep doing that on whiskey. He hardly drinks at all! When I’ve
mentioned my suspicions to his friends, they just look at me as if I’m crazy.
‘That? Certainly not! Walter’s an athlete. Walter’s a great sportsman. Walter
keeps himself fit.’”
“You mean drugs?” I said.
“I mean drugs,” said Miss G.
One aspect of society that Miss G could not countenance was the drug
scene. Her suspicions about Walter were eventually confirmed during one trip
when we were crossing by train from New York to L.A. They were sharing a
compartment with a bathroom. She saw traces of white powder on the edge of a
cabinet.
“Rene,” she admitted, “I saw these powder traces, and I knew something
wasn’t quite right. You know me, the best private eye in the movie business. I’d
been suspicious for some time. I brushed it off into a Kleenex and when we
reached L.A. I gave it to my doctor. He confirmed what it was. Walter is a
cocaine addict!”
Things didn’t end right there for them, but I was present at the final
banishment of Walter from Miss G’s life soon after. We were staying at an
apartment in Rome a few months after Australia. Walter had rung up and was
taking Miss G out to dinner. Miss G was dressing, and Walter had refused a
drink. When I returned from Miss G’s bedroom, there was Walter standing at
the table shaking this white powder from an envelope into folded scraps of paper
and sniffing it up his nose.
Such openness was unbelievable! I was shocked. I went into Miss G’s
bedroom and told her what I had seen. I couldn’t understand Walter. It was so
stupid! Miss G went out to talk to him. He was quite unapologetic and
countered, “This is great! You must try some.” For old time’s sake, Miss G went
out to dinner with him.
She never saw him again after that.
We particularly enjoyed New York because Frank Sinatra always let us use
his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. The love affair between them was still in high
gear, and there were daily phone calls. If they couldn’t reach each other by
phone there was an unending stream of loving cablegrams reinforcing their
undying devotion to each other.
Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly approved of Frank, and particularly of
his ability to handle Miss G, since I knew how difficult she could be. I often
grieved that they couldn’t get their act together instead of agonizing about it
from three or four thousand miles apart.
It was while we were there in New York that Nunnally Johnson paid her a
visit. He was an old friend of Miss G’s, a sweet man with a dry sense of humor.
Nunnally had been in the show and movie business since they first invented it,
which meant long before Miss G and I were born.
I made the martinis, and Nunnally said, “Ava darling, as you now reside in
Spain, isn’t it about time you made a film there?”
Old friends or not, Miss G’s look was suspicious. “Nunnally,” she said, “I
think you have something on your mind.”
“You’re right. A great Spanish part in a movie called
The Angel Wore
Red.
”
“A what?”
Nunnally took a deep breath. “A cabaret girl.” Miss G’s roar of laughter
could have been heard outside on Park Avenue.
“Nunnally, you old bugger, you mean a whore! Type casting me again,
huh? You know I’ve never worked the streets.” She thought about that for a
second and added, “Yet.”
Nunnally’s face tried a smile. “Its location is Spain during its civil war.
You are a cabaret girl who falls in love with a priest fleeing from the Fascists.”
“Spain!” screeched Miss G. “A prostitute who falls in love with a priest!”
Sex between a whore and a man of the cloth!” Her laughter could now have
been heard in Grand Central Station.
“You’ve no hope,” she said. “We tried to make
The Naked Maja,
the film
about Goya, in Spain. That period was two hundred years ago, and the Spanish
authorities threw us out. What chance have you got with a civil war that started
the day before yesterday?”
Nunnally nodded his head and was not put out. “We have taken note of
that. Other locations have been investigated.” His eyebrows fashioned two
question marks. “It could be moved to Rome.”
“I like Rome,” said Miss G. “Who’s playing the priest?”
Nunnally’s smile was sweet as Devon cream. “We’ve been talking to
Frank Sinatra.”
This time Miss G’s laughter rattled the pictures on the wall. “Frank in a
dog collar, singing Ave Maria! You’ve got to be kidding!”
Nunnally said, “MGM and I are only at the consultant stage. We think it
unlikely that Frank would agree. We have Dirk Bogarde in mind also.”
“For you, honey, I’ll do it,” said Miss G. “That is after I’ve seen the script
and you’ve talked to Morgan Maree.”
Morgan Maree had been Miss G’s business manager for some time now,
and she loved him dearly.
Miss G had been right. The Spanish authorities said, “Forget it.” The
Italian film makers were delighted, and Titanus Productions took over.
I was too busy to go with Miss G to Rome for
The Angel Wore Red,
but
she kept me informed of what was going on.
Dirk Bogarde accepted the role of the defiant, passionate priest willing to
risk his life for his faith. Miss G played the Spanish whore, Soledad, whose only
relationship with the cabaret was that she could pick up clients at the bar. Miss
G liked the part.
The priest, while fleeing through her village cold and hungry, his pursuers
aiming to kill him, meets Soledad. She hides him. She does not understand what
he’s trying to do, but she recognizes a fellow human, who like herself, is
defeated. As the days pass, she begins to realize that for the first time she has
met a man who desires not her body, but her soul—a man who is gentle, decent,
kind and caring.
In turn, the priest, thrown into close proximity with this blowsy, attractive
and vibrant girl, is confused. She has saved his life, and he senses an intimacy
that threatens both his piety and his celibacy. If Bogarde, Miss G, and Nunnally
Johnson had been allowed to work out the film the way they understood it, it
might have been a fine movie. But that wasn’t to be.
Much later Dirk Bogarde put the whole thing into perspective in his book,
An Orderly Man.
He wrote that
The Angel Wore Red
was “a perfectly frightful
film about a priest and a tart in Spain during the civil war. The film opened,
apparently to ten Eskimos in North Alaska, closed the next day and sank without
a trace.”
He also wrote: “It was a magnificent part for Ava. It could have done for
her what ‘Two Women’ did for Sophia Loren. She really put her heart into it. I
think she was anxious to be more selective and make better pictures. She played
it without makeup, without a bra, with holes torn in her dress. The word came
from Hollywood. They put a corset on her and tidied her up. The life went out of
Ava after that.”
Miss G had a lot of experience with the box-office motives of MGM and
the top Hollywood production companies and was not really dismayed. The film
was a financial disaster rarely shown in either the US or Europe.
Sometime after that Miss G got fed up with living out in the country at La
Bruja, and we moved into a posh apartment in Madrid at 8 Calle Del Arce. ExArgentine dictator Juan Peron lived in the apartment below us. Miss G’s was
two apartments converted into one, and she commissioned an interior decorator
to turn it into something beautiful. He certainly did.
There were two floors. Downstairs was a large living room, a suite with an
office, a bedroom and bath, which was my domain. The colors were soft orange,
green, red, and brown. All warm colors. In the wide entrance hall was a grand
piano. The living room and dining room were gorgeous with lovely paintings
that came from God knows where. Drapery was light green with tassels and
ropes. The dining table was immense, a pale green antique.
Upstairs the apartment reached all across the house, Miss G’s bedroom,
dressing room, bath and office. The mirrored bedroom cupboards filled all four
walls, and off from that ran a huge bathroom. Everything was decorated in
shades of green, off-white and beige. On the roof, we had our own patio where
we could sunbathe and enjoy barbeques.
It was from this apartment that we commuted to the location of the only
film she ever made in Spain while living there: 55
Days at Peking.
Sam
Bronston induced her to play in it. Sam was living in Spain at the time and
famous for the epics he had produced there, especially
El Cid.
But what an
astute guy like Sam was doing thinking he could make an epic out of
55 Days at
Peking
, we will never know. Who wanted to know what the Boxer rebellion was
about, and who cared?
In 1900 a dozen European powers plus Japan and America had been
cynically exploiting China in dubious trade deals and financial chicaneries for
over a century. Their bloated embassies crowded the walled city of Peking, and
their contempt for all things Chinese was offensive. In the past there had been
many rebellions against them.
Now the Boxers, an extremist group supported by hundreds of thousands
of angry citizens, decided to rise again. They were encouraged by Empress
Dowager of China who decreed that all foreigners should be slaughtered. Flora
Robson gave a life-like impersonation of the blood-thirsty old bird. The ragtag
soldiery attached to the embassies, led by the redoubtable Marine Major, played
by Charlton Heston, defended the walled city resolutely.
In some mysterious manner Miss G became the Major’s mistress, and it
did occur to both Miss G and me that having got her name on the billing, they
didn’t know what the hell to do with her. Someone said, “For Christ’s sake get
some sex into the picture! Make her Charlton Heston’s mistress.” Heston gave
her a glare occasionally, but plainly he thought he had more important duties to
perform.
The characters were cardboard, the script ridiculous, and the sets secondhand, having been used in a previous Sam Bronston Roman epic that had been
produced in Spain. The first director, Nicholas Ray, had a heart attack and had
to be replaced. The superb cast members: Charlton Heston, David Niven, Flora
Robson, Robert Helpman, John Ireland, Paul Lukas, Leo Genn and Elizabeth
Sellars, all wandered around trying to work out how they had managed to get
themselves stirred into such an epic stew.
“Fifty-five days!” shrieked Miss G. “It felt like fifty-five years!” She was
particularly incensed by the 1500 Chinese extras flown in from the USA because
they couldn’t find a twentieth of that number in Spain.
Their main job was to riot. In one of their riots they had to charge through
the Imperial Palace wrecking everything in their path. They were enthusiastic
and didn’t know the difference between Ava Gardner, Samuel Bronston or
Adam and Eve for that matter. One of their fanatical rushes through the Imperial
Palace, with Miss G enjoying one of her few acting opportunities, they found
her directly in their path and steam-rolled over her.
Miss G was bruised and not amused. She was also not amused by her
dialogue, such as, “Mad Americans inside, mad Boxers outside and mad
Russians all over the place.”
“As far as I’m concerned, that was what was really wrong with
Fifty-Five
Days at Peking,
” she said.
Miss G was granted an early exit from this melodrama when they ran out
of “mistress” things for her to do, and she was re-routed to get badly wounded
while smuggling vital medical supplies to the beleaguered hospital.
Her description of the end of that ordeal was graphic: “Jesus, Rene,” she
complained. “I’ve spoken lots of crazy closing dialogue in my time, but nothing
like this. There I was lying in the hospital. I’m full of bullets and apparently
suffering from a very rare infection which was about to kill me, and there is the
doctor waving a knife over me as if he’s about to operate on a piece of sirloin. I
think, what is he doing looking for my fatal infection with a knife? So I protest
weakly, ‘You won’t find it with a knife doctor.’ He shouts back, ‘But you must
live!’ I don’t like that idea, so I gently expire, whispering ‘I have lived.’ I really
should have yelled, ‘Let me out of here!’”
Miss G was very pleased to be relieved of acting duties before the relief
forces arrived to rescue the Marine Major and the embassy staff from a terrible
fate. I think the whole garrison felt the same way as Miss G. We returned to our
apartment and hopefully kept Dictator Peron awake all night, stamping out our
frustration in noisy flamenco.
We returned to Hollywood for Miss G’s next movie,
Seven Days in May.
Miss G’s part wasn’t all that big, but she had an important role helping to
unmask the Fascists hidden away in the US high command. We had a few
chuckles about the fact that once again she was somebody’s mistress.
This time she was the discarded mistress of her old friend Burt Lancaster.
He played the leader of the conspirators, the sinister top US Air Force General
planning to replace the President with someone from his Fascist allies. This was
in order to prevent the President from signing an impending nuclear arms
agreement with the Soviet President.
Kirk Douglas played the sharp-eyed senior officer who got wind of the
plot. It was a fast- moving contemporary plot given credibility by the eyeball-toeyeball confrontation between Lancaster and Douglas, with Miss G gently
fluttering around to keep the confrontation at fever heat. Naturally, the President
of the United States beat all the plotters.
We went back to Madrid after that and stamped even harder on Dictator
Peron’s ceiling. He complained to the police, and two officers arrived sternfaced at our front door. Miss G invited them in. They were both young and
good-looking. Miss G was full of apologies. “So sorry, officers. We are just
rehearsing for our next film. Would you care for a small cognac?”