Ava Gardner was one of the greatest female Hollywood stars of her day, and the most beautiful. Today, in the final extract from a new book- based upon interviews that were suppressed during her lifetime- she tells author PETER EVANS about her most famous relationship of all, with third husband Frank Sinatra, and how their tempestuous rows drove him to reportedly attempt suicide.
As usual, her phone call came in the middle of the night. ‘Did I wake you, honey?’ she asked softly, without preamble.
No one else in the world sounded like Ava Gardner. There was always a sense of weariness, a hint of a recent bender in her voice, even when she was stone-cold sober.
Cheek to cheek: Ava Gardner's third and final
marriage was to singer Frank Sinatra. Gardner said Sinatra was the true
love of her life
Sinatra had been the third — and last — of her ex-husbands. Alarmed at her use of the past tense, I asked if he’d just died.
‘Not as far as I know, honey. Bastards are always the best survivors.’
We chatted for a long time, as we always did when Ava — then aged 65 — called me at 3am. We talked about her lovers, the films she’d made, her mistakes and missed opportunities — one of which, she said, was turning down the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.
Her career was over now: two strokes and the passing years had put paid to that. When I reminded her that she’d once been hailed as ‘the world’s most beautiful animal’, she said: ‘Thirty goddamn years ago, I was, honey!’
She paused. ‘I’d be lying to you if I told you that losing my looks is no big deal. It hurts, goddamnit, it hurts like a sonofabitch.
‘But life doesn’t stop because you’re no longer a beauty, or desirable. You just have to make adjustments.’
Even in her blackest moods, she never indulged in self-pity.
‘You can sum up my life in a sentence, she said: “She made movies, she made out, and she made a f***ing mess of her life. But she never made jam.” ’
By 1988, Ava had ended up alone and short of money — which was why she’d asked me to ghost-write her autobiography. I was flattered, but if I’d had any sense, I’d have turned her down.
It’s not as if her friends hadn’t warned me. Peter Viertel, the scriptwriter husband of the actress Deborah Kerr, told me she’d never condone a truly honest account of her life.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he added. ‘Nobody handles Ava Gardner. Sinatra, the poor bastard, never stood a chance, and he loved her probably most of all. He was too possessive of her; that was the problem — no one’s ever going to possess Ava.’
Deborah Kerr, who’d starred with her in The Night Of The Iguana, chipped in with a wan smile: ‘I think what Pete’s trying to tell you is that Ava’s a man-eater.’
Shortly afterwards, I started visiting Ava at her flat in Knightsbridge, London, and then fielding regular calls at 3am, when she couldn’t sleep.
Hollywood legends: Gardner was dismissive of her
previous two marriages. She called Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie
Shaw her 'starter husbands'
Connection: Ava Gardner met Frank Sinatra when
she was 19 and married to actor Mickey Rooney. The glamorous pair hit it
off from the moment they met
Passionate: Gardner and Sinatra were married
from 1951-1957. They had an intense love affair when they met. Sinatra
was married at the time
Marriages one and two — to the actor Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw — had lasted barely a year each: ‘I called them my “starter husbands”. You only had to sneeze and you’d have missed both of them,’ she said.
‘The marriage to Frank Sinatra . . . well, that did a little better. It lasted seven years on paper — if you counted all the goddamn splits and the injury time we played.
‘I tried to be a good wife. The plain fact is, I just wasn’t meant to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.’
However, she was still in touch with Sinatra. He was a sentimental man, she said: he’d sent her some of his early recordings when she suffered the strokes, and he never forgot to call on her birthday, Christmas Eve.
Ava herself, however, never called him. When I asked why, she said: ‘He’s a married man, honey.’
This seemed a bit rich, given that he’d also been married when he and Ava started a tumultuous affair in the late Forties.
But back then she insisted that the marriage to Nancy had already been on the rocks.
Or as she put it: ‘The ball and chain was well and truly smashed before I came on the scene.’
She’d first encountered Frank in Hollywood, she told me, just after she’d married Rooney at the age of 19.
Fiesty: The rocky relationship involved multiple break ups. Gardner dated other men to make Sinatra jealous
‘He said something banal, like: “If I’d seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.” I paid no attention to that. I knew he was married. He had a kid, fahcrissake! He was a terrible flirt — he couldn’t help it.’
A few years later, she bumped into him at a party in Palm Springs, just after MGM had dropped his film contract.
‘He was kissing the bottle at that time. We went for a drive in the desert and we really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town — Indio, I think it was — with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the glove box.
‘We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody. Somebody with a badge. He usually did.’
They fell violently in love. But the year in which they waited for his divorce to come through was, she said, ‘a nightmare time.
Our affair, the collapse of his marriage, his kids begging him to come home...
‘Nancy was taking him for practically every penny he had. She played hardball, but I couldn’t blame her.’
In the meantime, Ava said, she and Frank were ‘fighting and boozing, breaking up, getting together again. It was madness. Things got so bad between us that I felt sick the moment I heard his voice. Figure that out!
‘I dated other guys just to punish him. Frank was doing his share, too: I know he was seeing [the actress] Marilyn Maxwell again. She was one of his regulars when he married Nancy.
‘I took off for Spain to make a movie and I had a fling with the bullfighter [Mario Cabré] who played my lover in the picture.
‘I was drunk. He was handsome. It was a terrible mistake, period.
‘Telling Frank about it wasn’t too bright either. I fell for the oldest con in the world: he said it didn’t matter a damn if I’d slept with Mario or not — if I told him the truth, it would all be forgotten.
‘So I told him the truth and, of course, it was never forgotten. He brought it up every goddamn argument we had. Even when we weren’t arguing, he’d bring it up.
‘He never forgave me. He wanted to kill the poor bastard.’ She paused. ‘You know, Frank’s eyes do the most incredible thing when he’s angry. They turn black. I swear to God, they become as black as the ace of spades. It’s frightening. It makes your blood creep the way he does that.’
While they were torturing each other with affairs, Nancy kept changing her mind about whether she wanted to go ahead with the divorce. The strain was all too much for Sinatra, who announced to Ava that he was going to kill himself.
That day, she said, ‘We’d been fighting, of course. And drinking. Every single night, we’d have three or four martinis — big ones — then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon.
‘It was another one of those nights I ended up refusing to sleep with Frank. I was half asleep in my room across the suite when I heard this gunshot.
Tell all: In exclusive interview, Gardner reveals Sinatra overdosed on several occasions
Love triangle: Sinatra was romantically involved with actress Marilyn Maxwell (right) during his marriage
Multiple marriages: Ava Gardner married actor Mickey Rooney when she was 19. They divorced a year later
‘Instead, Frank was sitting on the bed in his underpants, a smoking gun in his hand, grinning like a goddamn drunken school kid. He’d fired the gun into the f***ing pillow. What a night that was!’
Ava actually seemed amused at the memory. ‘At least his overdoses were quieter,’ she said. Overdoses — you mean he tried more than once? ‘All the f***ing time,’ she said. ‘It was a cry for help. I always fell for it.’
But you still went ahead with the wedding . . ?
‘November 7, 1951 — only days after his divorce from Nancy became final.
A day that will live in infamy. It was too soon, but that was Frank all over — he was always in such a f***ing hurry.
‘Plenty of people told me I was mad to marry him. Lana Turner had had an affair with him: “I’ve been there, honey,” she told me. “Don’t do it!”’
Within a year, said Ava, she was already trying to break free. ‘I knew I just couldn’t live with Frank any more. I still loved him — Jesus, I loved him.
‘But the marriage was never going to work. Financially, emotionally, physically, every f***ing which-way . . .’
Sinatra, she said, had been ‘flat broke’ by the time they exchanged vows. ‘His voice had gone. His records weren’t selling. His movie contract had been dropped. His agent had let him go. His confidence was shot.
‘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 c**p.’
She may have been genuinely furious on Sinatra’s behalf, but Ava herself was becoming a fully-fledged star.
Time magazine had just put her on its cover, calling her ‘Hollywood’s most irresistible female’. It had also described Sinatra as ‘flea-bitten’.
‘Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and Frank was on his a**,’ she reflected. ‘I don’t know where those stories came from that the Mafia was taking care of him.
They should have been, but the f***ing so‑called Family was nowhere to be seen when he needed them.’
It must have been a difficult time for you, I said. ‘It was a bad time for Frank. Poor darling, he was so insecure.
‘I was the one paying the rent when he couldn’t get arrested. I was the one making the pot boil, baby.
But having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills — most of them, actually — made it all so much worse.’
All smiles? The couple married just days after
Frank Sinatra's divorce from wife Nancy became final. Gardner was warned
by friend that the marriage was hasty
To the wrath of her producer, she skipped off to Italy to see a few of Sinatra’s gigs. ‘I had to have been in love with him to sit through those performances,’ she said wryly. ‘Let’s say he was not at his best. He was playing to half-empty houses.
One evening, they must have paid the guy who worked the spotlight to turn it on me in the middle of one of Frank’s numbers. The audience started chanting: “Ava, Ava, Ava.”
‘It was embarrassing for me and humiliating as hell for Frank. I got up and walked out. So did Frank.
‘Later he went back on and finished his act, which was brave. But when he got back to the hotel that evening, he blamed me. We had another fight, of course.’
In one of our 3am calls, she told me about yet another terrible fight, which took place after she’d innocently posed with Sinatra’s friend, Sammy Davis Jnr, for the Christmas cover of a magazine, fuelling rumours that she and Sammy were having an affair.
It was nonsense, she said. ‘But Frank hit the roof when I told him. “Did you screw him?” he screamed. Of course I didn’t, I said. But Frank went through the whole there’s-no-smoke-without-fire routine.
‘He turned against Sammy Davis for years afterwards — Frank never really forgave him.’
Allure: The classic beauty had a tempestuous love life and was known as a vixen
Icon: Gardner spoke of her insatiable desire for sex. She and Sinatra are said to be the loves of each other's lives
‘My sister said I was Frank in drag — there was a lot of truth in that. She thought he was great, but not for me. I’m just surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did — although it was over long before it ended. I should have listened to her.’
Why didn’t you? ‘Frank was good in the feathers. You don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers,’ she said.
She was still in love with him when they divorced — just as she had been with Rooney and Shaw.
‘Practically every song Frank recorded,’ she told me, ‘has a memory for me. I’m A Fool To Want You — that’s one that stands out. He wrote some of the lyrics himself; they were very personal.’
She lowered her voice to a murmur: ‘I’m a fool to want you / To want a love that can’t be true / A love that’s there for others, too . . .’
POSTSCRIPT:
After I’d recorded 40,000 of Ava’s words on tape, she suddenly pulled the plug on her autobiography. This didn’t come as a total surprise: she’d often complained that she was revealing too much of her life for comfort.
But it was Sinatra — once she’d told him about the project — who’d provided the final straw. My name, it seemed, rang a warning bell — because I’d once said it was rumoured that the Mafia had helped get him his role in From Here To Eternity.
That was enough to ignite Sinatra’s anger — and probably compensate his ex-wife with a lump sum.
Another writer was hired to produce a bland, sanitised version of her life, and Ava died soon afterwards in 1990.
More than two decades on, her estate granted me permission to use the unsanitised tapes of our conversations.
Adapted from Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations by Peter Evans, to be published by Simon & Schuster on July 2 at £20. © 2013 The Estate Of Peter Evans. Order a copy via amazon.co.uk
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