Living With Miss G (37 page)

“What did he do?” I asked.
“You know doctors,” Miss G said. “They have seen it all. He just gave me
one of those doctor smiles and said, ‘Didn’t you know that making you itch is
one of the oldest tortures in the world?’ I said, “No, I don’t know, and what are
you going to do about my itch? He gave me morphine. Thank God, I expected I
would become an addict, but I didn’t and slowly the damn thing went away.”
It was the start of Miss G’s recurrent illnesses. She never made much of
them. She would get a cold. She had a touch of the flu. I’d start the telephone
conversation saying, “Miss G, you sound great today.”
She would say, “Rene, you should know it’s just my Oscar award-winning
voice. I feel lousy.”
I said, “Miss G, when you feel all that bad, why don’t you come back here
to consult your own doctor?”
“I think they are all the same,” she said. “Maybe a bit cheaper over here.
Maybe when I’m on the verge of dying, I will come back.”
“Miss G, don’t say such things,” I said. I didn’t like the sound of it at all.
She didn’t ring for quite a while after that. Then she did.
“Rene, it all started with that flu. In London, everybody got the flu. I got
the flu, but you know me. Walking ad for health and strength. I would go to bed.
I’d get over it. I’d go swimming, walking, and racing with Morgan, and then
back in bed. And the doctor’s started me on antibiotics. As far as I can see,
nobody knows what’s in them, or what they are suppose to do, but they didn’t
do a thing for me. Then I get this new doctor, who as far as I’m concerned was a
congenital idiot.”
“How long have you had him?,” I asked.
“Long enough. I am slowly dying, and he arrives with this other doctor
who is supposed to be a genius. ‘Heart specialist,’ he tells me. Now I know I’ve
got both lungs full of fluid. I don’t need a specialist to tell me that, and he
doesn’t. He examines my chest and says, ‘You have powerful lungs.’ I think the
old bugger was referring to my breast rather than my lungs. ‘You will never
have a chest problem, you will never get emphysema,’ he said. I should have
said, ‘I already have emphysema. I’m smoking too much. I’m drinking too
much. I’m doing everything too much. Haven’t you got a pill for all these
complaints?’”
“But he didn’t?” I asked.
Miss G gave one of her loud cackling laughs, “You can’t tell doctors
anything. They know everything!”
Not long after that I got a call from Bappie. “Rene, Ava’s back across here.
She is in St. John’s Hospital.” Bappie didn’t have to tell me to go and see her.
She knew I would do that.
In her private room she was sitting up in bed grinning and telling me the
story with the usual mixture of Miss G’s outrage, horror, hate, alarm,
exclamation, exaggeration and loud laughter—even though she gasped a bit with
the laughter.
“You know me, Rene. I can’t stay in bed. I hate being sick in bed. It makes
me sicker. I lost my energy. God, I’m always busting with energy. I explained
all this to the doctors, but they couldn’t do anything about it except give me
more antibiotics. Every day I’d go across to a hotel pool and swim, and do yoga
exercises. When I took a deep breath, you know the deep down yoga breath, I’d
feel this great stabbing pain—awful like someone stabbing you in the chest.
Then it became really bad, and I got frightened, and I called Spolie Mills. You
remember the Mills?”
I sure did. They were old friends of Ava’s. Spolie was great.
“I said, ‘Spolie, I’ve got to go back to the States. I’ve got to. Can you help
me? Can you help me pack?’ She was over by taxi in fifteen minutes. She
helped me pack, helped me catch my plane. I had already called Bappie and my
doctor to tell them I was coming.”
“For a time, I felt okay, then suddenly I got this fiery feeling back in my
chest and it was worse. The stewardess took one look at me and knew something
was wrong. She took my temperature. As you know Rene, my normal
temperature is always two under normal, like my blood pressure, but now it was
103. We are about halfway between London and Los Angeles. I thought, I’m
never going to make it that far. So they stretched me out on two seats, and gave
me oxygen, and a sleeping pill or something, because I slept. In L.A.
International Airport, there was Bappie waiting for me. God knows how I got
down those plane steps and across the tarmac. No way am I going with Bappie
back to her house in Rincona Drive. She pushed me into a taxi and we raced to
St. John’s.”
“Have they found out what it was?” I asked.
“My dear doctor rushed across and found my temperature was 105 and
called a chest specialist. He took one look at my chest x-rays and said, ‘This
woman has double-pneumonia, and she’s had it for a hell of a long time. Her
lungs are a mess.’”
“What are they giving you now?” I asked.
“Usual stuff, more antibiotics. I don’t think they know what I’ve got. They
have given me every test known to mankind–even tested me for AIDS. Seems to
me I’ll just have to live with it and get over it.”
And she did. I visited her regularly, and she was always the old outrageous
Miss G. But she wasn’t well. She said, “Rene, my temperature keeps going up
and down. Darling, I don’t know how high. Sometimes my brain feels as if it’s
boiling and, of course, I’m not supposed to smoke or drink. Got any booze with
you?” She said that with a wicked grin.
Next time I went to see her, she had another story. “The other day it took
two nurses to help me to the loo, and I was gasping for breath, so I thought I’d
better give up smoking. I remember I asked John Huston once when and how
did you do it. He was then living with a can of oxygen. He showed his teeth at
me and said, ‘When you have to darling, when you have to.’ I asked this nice
doctor who makes his rounds here the same question. He has given up smoking,
and I know his need is as great as mine. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you don’t inhale,’
and I nearly have a seizure laughing, because he knows as well as I do that a real
smoker inhales automatically.”
Miss G never gave up smoking.
Then it happened. I remember the minute, I remember the hour, and I
remember the day the phone rang. It was Bappie. “Rene,” she said. “Ava’s had a
stroke.”

She was wearing a dressing gown and sitting in a chair. Her face was puffy
from cortisone treatments, and the left side of her mouth was pulled down.
When she smiled at me, the smile was a little twisted, and it took a big effort for
me not to show that my heart sank. It really sank, and I thought, “Dear God, all
that beauty, all that beauty?”

Out of Miss G’s twisted mouth came the straight, no bull, no asking-forpity voice, no tears, no recriminations, but explanations coming in a flood tide.
She was going to tell me all about it whether I wanted to hear or not. She made
it sound so normal.

She explained, “I’m sitting in this chair after dinner. The nurse and I had
been watching this old funny Lou Costello movie. Full of laughs. I felt nothing,
only this little tingling in my palm, no headache, no falling about, nothing, just
sitting here in this room. I suppose the nurse knew something was wrong,
because she said, ‘Well, it’s about time we got you to bed. You’ve had a long
day.’ I don’t remember what I replied. I guess I was obedient and climbed into
bed, and she must have called the doctor, because in fifteen minutes Bill Smith
was there smiling down at me and doing little tests. ‘Now close your eyes and
point your left hand and finger at your nose,’ he said, and my hand was
wavering and doing all sorts of funny things, and I was laughing and he was
laughing because it seemed so like the hokey Lou Costello movie we’d been
watching. So I went to sleep happy as a clam. Next morning I woke up and I
was paralyzed. The left side all gone. I had no feeling there at all.”

“You didn’t feel frightened or anything?” I asked.
“No, mentally and emotionally, I wasn’t at all frightened. I don’t know
what protects stroke patients, but I wasn’t at all. I know I’m strong, but when I
tried to walk, I suddenly realized that this left leg wouldn’t move and neither
would this left hand and arm. There was no sort of fear or hysteria. The brain
must play funny tricks on you, because in one way it protects you probably from
going crazy. Being the active person that I’ve always been, if I had realized that
I was paralyzed, fully paralyzed, I guess I might have jumped out of the window
if I could have gotten there.
She took a deep breath and went on, “They said it will come back. You’ve
got to work on it. You’ve got to exercise. You have got to feel it coming back.”
She looked at me and gave me another of the twisted smiles. “Well, you know
how I like exercise.”
“Miss G,” I said. “It was the same with my legs after my car accident. I
thought I’d never walk, but you can see that I did.”
Every time I came back to see her after that she had made some
improvement. Soon she could move her left leg again and start to walk by
herself, though it was a slightly stumbling walk. Her face and mouth recovered
almost completely, but from now on it was always slightly puffed from the
cortisone she needed to take.
Now she wanted to go home. California had never been home to her. She
liked London, and she liked the English countryside because the vistas were
smaller and it reminded her of North Carolina. She had lived in England twenty
years and made many friends—good friends. She loved Carmen, her small
ferocious Colombian maid, even though there was always a small war
simmering between them about who was the boss of the household.
She loved her neighborhood with the friendly pub just around the corner.
She loved Betty, her cool, pretty and intelligent secretary who worked with her
for years and kept her life in order. And she particularly loved Morgan, her
handsome, bouncy, brown and white Welsh Corgi who knew he owned the
neighborhood and from Miss G’s balcony barked his head off at any low-class
dog who dared to come under his vision. Carmen also loved him with deep
devotion.
Miss G was constantly on the phone giving me news of her condition, and
she had bad days and good days. One of her more memorable conversations
concerned her exercise program. The phone rang and I picked it up. Miss G said,
“Rene, I’ve broken my back.”
I took a deep breath. “Miss G, how did you break your back?”
“I fell off my trampoline and broke my back.”
“Miss G, what were you doing on a trampoline?”
“My therapist put me on the trampoline. It is all her fault.”
“Miss G, are you sure you’ve broken your back?”
“Well, it feels as if I’ve broken my back.”
Miss G had not broken her celebrated back. She had forgotten to hold onto
the mantelpiece to do her gentle jumping. It was one of her bad days. Other
terrors were real.
“Rene, the other night I was trying to get into my nightie, a simple
procedure. My arm is no good, so I stick that one in first. Then I was captive
inside my own nightie. Getting claustrophobic inside a black hole. I couldn’t get
out and it was terror. I was screaming with frustration. Fortunately, Carmen
heard me and came to the rescue and calmed me down. By God, it is
frightening.”
In the summer of 1989 Miss G said, “Rene, you know I’m doing my
autobiography with this guy who is helping. Can you come across for a few
weeks? He’s recording all the questions and I’ve told him you can remember
everything far better than I can.”
It was a lovely English summer. When I arrived Morgan barked from his
balcony—his “office,” Miss G called it—his place at the top of the first flight of
stairs, outside the door. Carmen eyed everyone with intense suspicion, including
me. Miss G was up and down. It was impossible to comfort her, because she was
so intuitive and so damned honest, that she knew you were being unrealistic.
She had to face the facts, the plain hard truth.
“I’m constantly tired,” she said. “Or I’m in pain or just uncomfortable. I’ve
been through, and am going through, terrible emotional and physical trauma.
Rene, remember how I ran, swam, and raced around, and I can’t do any of that,
and it’s hard to face. It’s replaced by anger and frustration that I’ve never
experienced before. You can’t dress yourself properly; you can’t eat properly;
you can’t even cut up your meat; you can’t stand up at a party with a drink in
one hand and operate with the other.
“You can’t go out with your friends and do anything on equal terms. You
have to ask people to help you up stairs. You have no desire to dress pretty or
even properly. You can’t run and throw balls for Morgan, and he wonders why
not. Other people have to do it. I can’t even cook, which I love to do. The looks
have all gone too, but that doesn’t matter because I never valued them very
highly.”
I thought sadly, “Frank Sinatra did, and millions of movie-goers did too.”
Miss G continued, “The thing that’s keeping me alive is this
autobiography, so let’s start remembering.” So we started our sessions.
“Rene,” she questioned, “you got any deep, deep regrets?”
I thought and said, “I don’t think so. Have you?”
“Onassis and Churchill,” she said. “I’ve regretted missing the opportunity
all my life. A real big ache.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Two of the great heroes of my life were Roosevelt and Churchill. I met
President Roosevelt on his birthday at the White House in wartime. He invited a
crowd of Hollywood stars to look around and watch him give his radio “fireside
chat.” I got there because I was married to Mickey Rooney. I’ll never forget how
President Roosevelt polished his glasses and started off in that wonderful
theatrical voice. It was so thrilling. I was mesmerized, absolutely mesmerized.
President Roosevelt had been part of my life since I was a little girl reading
the political bits out of the newspaper to my Daddy, who was dying of
pneumonia in a lousy little room in Newport News, Virginia. Only a few years
later, the same President Roosevelt had wished Mickey and me well in the
future, and now he was talking to all of America in front of me. It moved me to
tears.” Her voice broke and the tears came again.
I gave her time and said gently, “And Churchill?”
Miss G thought about it. “It was probably one of those times when I was
scuttling around Europe and you were back in the States. I had gone off to
Monte Carlo to spend a few days with Grace Kelly. You know I went to her
wedding, because we were eternal friends after those months of filming
Mogambo,
when she fell in love with Clark Gable, and Frank was pining away
waiting for his role in
From Here to Eternity.
She continued, “I was staying at Grace’s house—sorry,
palace
—with
Prince Rainer, the family, the whole lot. So Grace and I had a few drinks and
exchanged a few memories, like we are doing now, and Grace said, ‘Why don’t
we go down to the harbor for a change?’”
“And quick off the mark after my few drinks, I said, ‘Grace, what do you
mean? A couple of middle-aged dolls picking up sailors?’ Grace screamed. I
screamed. We embroidered on the theme and finished collapsing with tears in
our eyes. Then Grace took a deep breath and said, ‘Ava, I mean go down to the
harbor and meet Aristotle Onassis on his yacht.’”
“Well, I wasn’t sure that after-dinner drinks with Greek billionaires was
my forte, and I said so.”
“‘The point is,’ continued cunning little Grace, picking her words as if she
was making little stitches in the conversation, ‘His guest is Winston Churchill.
Would you like to meet him? I think he usually stays up pretty late polishing off
a few brandies.’”
“I said, ‘Winston Churchill? Oh my God, Winston Churchill!’ I was crazy
about Winston Churchill. The same way I was crazy about President Roosevelt.
Churchill and Roosevelt had saved my world, and let nobody doubt that, and I
was deeply grateful to them for that.”
“So off we go in Grace’s chauffeur-driven car down to the harbor. We
arrived at the yacht and went aboard. Rene, it wasn’t a boat, it was a mansion.
The walls were stuffed with Renoirs, Gauguins, Cezannes, Monets, God knows
how many great masterpieces he had attached to the walls or bulkhead or
whatever they call them. I particularly remember the Picassos and Dalis. I didn’t
care for them very much, but as it wasn’t my yacht, I couldn’t complain.”
“They’d all finished dinner and were sitting around the table drinking and
smoking, and everybody seemed to like the idea of two ancient ex-movie stars
joining the party. Churchill was, to put it mildly, perhaps a teeny-weeny bit
tipsy, but as we were too that made us level. We sat across the dinner table, me
looking at Churchill through a haze of my cigarette smoke, and he looking at me
through a haze of his cigar smoke. I don’t know what the hell we talked about,
but it certainly wasn’t the Battle of Britain. I mean what does a foolish little girl
from North Carolina have to tell Sir Winston Churchill, except ‘I love you,’
which, since Lady Churchill was also sitting at the table, wouldn’t have gone
down as smoothly as the special Onassis oozo that was sliding between my
lips.”
“That was the first point raised by Churchill. He peered across and said,
‘What is that you’re drinking?’ When I told him he said, ‘Well perhaps I had
better try some of that.’”
“Anyway he took a great fancy to me, and as I already had a great fancy
for him we spent the next three or four hours, or it could have been longer
,
chatting about Christ knows what, and it was one of the most wonderful times of
my life. We arrived back at the palace a little dizzy, but very happy. Then I went
back to Spain.”
“The phone rang soon afterwards, and it was Onassis on the line. ‘Ava,’ he
said, ‘We’re going to go on a voyage, a tour through the East Indian islands,
stopping where we please, and then finally heading across to the East Coast of
the States and up to New York. It’s going to take six weeks. Aboard there is
going to be only Sir Winston, Lady Churchill and Winston’s private secretary.
Nobody else. Sir Winston has asked personally if you would care to go with
us.’”
There was a long pause from Miss G, and I could tell that even distanced
by the years she was troubled and upset by the memory. I urged her on. “So
what did you do?”
She replied, “I made a fool of myself. If I’m not a fool, tell me. I don’t
mind for a second that I didn’t get all those jewels from Howard Hughes, or
make some of those super movies they offered me, but to say what I did in
turning down a special invitation from Winston Churchill? ‘No, I couldn’t go at
the moment. I had things coming up.’ You know the usual sort of rubbish.”
“Was it the thought of Onassis?” I asked.
“Yes, but that was ridiculous. I was shy and frightened. I didn’t want six
weeks with Onassis on that yacht. I was sure the man wasn’t going to rape me,
but I thought it might be a tricky situation.”
“Miss G, you were probably right.”
“No, I wasn’t Rene. Listen darling, I am a very strong lady, and I could
have fought off that man because it is very easy to say no, and anyway I’m not
sure that he cared a damn about me.”
“But you were taking no chances?”
Miss G raised her voice. “No, it was not that at all. You know as well as I
do Rene, that when you say ‘no’ most men will back off. All decent mean will
and most indecent men will. If they are crazy or rapists, that’s a different matter.
So there was no reason at all why I shouldn’t have gone. I wasn’t doing a film. I
wasn’t in love. There was no reason on earth why I shouldn’t have gone and had
that wonderful experience. I had three chances Rene, three chances. When they
got to the Canary Islands, Onassis rang again, and said, ‘Ava, the invitation is
still open. I’ll send my private plane to Spain to pick you up, so that you can join
us here.’”
“And I said no again. He called one more time. Again he said he would
send the private plane, so that I could join them for the last bit of the islands and
then go on to New York.”
Miss G stopped and drew in a deep breath. I could see she was angry with
herself. I helped her out.
“Miss G, we’ve all got regrets.”
“I know Rene, but there are regrets and then regrets. Winston Churchill
was one of the great men of our time, and I was a stupid little girl who had
nothing to do except sit around Madrid and go out to flamenco every night. I
couldn’t bother to take six weeks off to spend it in the company of one of the
most fantastic men of this century. I’ve had great times with intelligent men like
Adlai Stevenson, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, long letters between
myself and Henry Miller, but why did I duck out of this one?”
She was very upset. I tried to change the subject, lighten the atmosphere. I
said, “Well, I know one date you ducked out of in the neatest possible way.”
She cocked her head. “When, with who?”
“
The Return of the Pink Panther,
” I reminded her. “The guy who rang us
up saying you must come to Paris. ‘We are doing three episodes of
The Pink
Panther
with Peter Ustinov. Let’s discuss it,’ he said. He sent us the tickets, met
us at Orly airport, drove us in, gave us a great dinner, and took us to that
marvelous hotel. He went up in the elevator with us to our rooms and said, ‘We
have this suite here for Miss Gardner and myself. The maid can have the smaller
room along the corridor.’”
Miss G gave one of her great yells of laughter, and said, “And I gave him
one long cold look and said ‘I think Rene and I will share the suite, and you will
take the small room down the corridor.’ The impertinence!”
I ended the story. “There was the note pushed under the door the next
morning. He was afraid, due to various differences, he felt he would not be able
to work with Miss Gardner.”
Miss G said, “I don’t think there was ever any plan to do three episodes at
all. I bet Peter Ustinov knew nothing about it.”
So we went on browsing through our memories. Miss G said, “You know
Rene, I never knew until recently that Ingrid Bergman used to live in Cheyne
Gardens. What is that, only about half a mile from Ennismore Gardens? We
never met. She would have laughed if she knew how I forged her signature.”