“A party isn’t a party without a drunken bitch lying in a pool of tears.”
Ava Gardner is best known for the sultry femmes fatales she played during the late film-noir period. Signature role: The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Born to a poor farming family in North Carolina, she signed a standard contract with MGM after her photographer brother-in-law submitted her portrait to the studio. With no acting experience, she immediately received voice and diction training to get rid of her Southern accent. Gardner spent years playing bit parts before landing the breakthrough role of Kitty Collins in The Killers (1946), with Burt Lancaster. She received her one and only Academy Award nomination for her lead role in John Ford’s Mogambo and became Hollywood’s requisite “love goddess” for a time, as Rita Hayworth’s career went into decline. Gardner enjoyed a high-profile romantic life: she dated Howard Hughes, then married Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and most famously, Frank Sinatra, who reportedly cried when their relationship finally ended. She had a second career in 1970s disaster movies.
WE HAD A WONDERFUL TIME, that was all she would say. Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra had met before. Years ago, at Mocambo, back when she was still married to Mickey Rooney. Sinatra had led with a soft open, something to the effect of wishing he’d gotten to her first. Gardner found him charming. They’d bumped into each other a few times since, at various nightclubs, and there was the time she agreed to be a cheerleader for his charity baseball team, the Swooners. There’d even been a dinner date once, after she’d left Artie Shaw. They’d kissed a bit at the end of the evening, but he was still married to Nancy, and had kids, so she hadn’t let it get too far.
This time, though, was different. They were at Darryl Zanuck’s house in Palm Springs for a party. It was fall 1949. Sinatra, as usual, was flirting with her like crazy. She put up with it for a while, then reminded him once he got too pushy that he was still married. No, he insisted, he and Nancy were finished. For good. And seeing as he was now available, would she be interested in going for a drive?
Gardner grabbed a fifth of whatever for the road. While Sinatra, quite famously, had a predilection for Jack Daniel’s, to Gardner the type of booze hardly mattered—it all tasted like hell to her anyway. So bottle in hand, she climbed into Sinatra’s Cadillac convertible and the two of them sped off into the desert night, swigging all the way. By the time they came to a stop in the little town of Indio, the streets were deserted. Sinatra pulled her close. They kissed. And kissed. And at some point during their escalating passion, Sinatra reached into his glove compartment and pulled out a gun. Scratch that—he pulled out two guns. Both Smith & Wesson .38s. Naturally, they began to shoot up the streetlights. A hardware store window. Several rounds that ended up who knows where. Sinatra hit the accelerator and they kept on shooting, all the way back to the highway.
It was a few hours later when Sinatra’s publicist, Jack Keller, received a phone call from the Indio police station. They had a story that hadn’t yet reached the press—not just a story about Frank Sinatra’s drunken arrest, but a story of his drunken arrest while out with a famous actress who wasn’t his wife—and if Keller wanted to keep it under wraps, he would need to get to Indio fast. (The police back then were so much more amenable.). Keller immediately called a friend who managed the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, borrowed $30,000, and took a charter flight out of Burbank. By early morning, he’d paid off anyone who might be inclined to talk: the cops, the hardware store owner, some poor drunk schmuck who’d been grazed by one of the bullets. Sinatra and Gardner were released without further incident.
Gardner, for her part, denied any of this ever happened. When she returned to the house she was renting in Palm Springs and her older sister Bappie asked how her night with Sinatra had been, all she said was, We had a wonderful time.
FOR A NOTORIOUSLY fierce drinker, Ava Gardner never much enjoyed alcohol. There were years in which she would wander parties two-fisted, a glass of liquor in one hand and a bottle of Coke to drown it out in the other. But however bad it may have tasted to her, what Gardner did enjoy was being drunk—in fact she loved it.
Forget wine and beer, they were way too slow. Even cocktails were too diluted. No, Gardner was a gal who liked to get hammered and get hammered fast. Her drink of choice was a concoction of her own invention that she called Mommy’s Little Mixture.
Everybody behaves badly. Give them the proper chance,” says Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises. It’s an observation that would prove true not only for the characters in the book, but also for the actors hired to play them some thirty years later.
It was 1957 and Twentieth Century–Fox, headed by Daryl F. Zanuck, arguably the last of the movie moguls, was mounting an adaptation. The story centered around disillusioned American and British expatriates adrift in post-WWI Europe. The action, such as there was, involved a booze-fueled trip from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, to see the bullfights—in contemporary parlance, something of a road movie.
In the novel, folks drank and talked and sometimes wandered off together. They clung to each other and got on each other’s nerves—and somewhere along the way realized the things that were supposed to be important weren’t important and that they were all, as it turned out, a lost generation. During the production, everybody behaved much the same.
The script was written by old Hollywood hand Peter Viertel (Beat the Devil, White Hunter Black Heart), who was also a personal friend of Hemingway’s. It was Viertel’s idea to cast Ava Gardner as the female lead, Lady Brett, but then no good deed goes unpunished. According to Viertel, at first she loathed his screenplay. So much so that, to his annoyance, she took it to Hemingway, with whom she also was friends. Gardner had met Hemingway a couple of years earlier in Madrid. At the time of their meeting, though still married to Frank Sinatra, she was engaged in a passionate affair with the legendary Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, as well as having just recovered from a tussle with some kidney stones. She and the great writer instantly became pals. Hemingway called her Daughter, she called him Papa. There was even a visit to Cuba.
Now Gardner was asking Hemingway what he thought about this latest adaptation of his work. She had, after all, already starred in two others, The Killers (which made her a star) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. But Papa was not at one of his high points. Suffering from liver disease and told to stop drinking, he was pounding it back nonetheless—drunk and depressed and certain that all the other screen portrayals had been crap. Still, he eventually supported the script. Regarding Gardner as Lady Brett, “I guess you’ll do. You’ve got some vestiges of class.”
It was a less than enthusiastic endorsement. Even more so, considering that Gardner had drunk daiquiris with him at El Floridita and swum naked in his pool at Finca Vigía. Hemingway had even asked her for an expelled kidney stone, apparently for good luck. Her confidence in the role now shaken, Gardner would need some convincing. Certainly, Lady Brett’s promiscuity should not have been unfamiliar terrain. Gardner by this time was separated from Sinatra and dating Italian movie star Walter Chiari, but there would be others—with Ava, there were always others.
In fact, cast alongside her were Tyrone Power in the lead role of Jake Barnes and Errol Flynn as a besotted Mike Campbell. Both were former friends of Gardner, more than friends even, though time had not been kind to them. Power, after having finally fulfilled his contract with Twentieth Century, had been talked into this one last studio picture. Still, he claimed to be done with Hollywood, done with silly costumed adventures—he would be dead within two years.
As for Flynn, he, too, was done, maybe finished is more accurate. Overweight, his looks wrecked by decades of dissipation, he had lost his fortune and was a tax exile, more or less living aboard his yacht Zaca. Like Hemingway, his liver was shot, but he was committed to soldiering on. Flynn, too, would be dead within two years. Perhaps Fox should have called it The Sun Also Sets.
The film was to be shot in Morelia, Mexico, not Pamplona, Spain. The only newcomer, picked for the role of sexy young matador Pedro Romero, was twenty-seven-year-old Robert Evans. Naturally, most of the cast hated him. Zanuck himself had chosen Evans after watching him dance the tango at New York’s El Morocco. Never mind that he was a Jewish American, the son of a dentist, and had never seen a bull. Zanuck had cast him against the wishes of Hemingway and the film’s director, Henry King. After arriving at the hotel in Morelia, where it was a hundred-plus in the shade, Evans was introduced to the film’s screenwriter, Viertel. Opening the door to his hotel room, Viertel took one look at Evans and said, “You play Pedro Romero? Uh-uh, not in my film.” Then slammed it shut.
Before Evans had even shot a scene, a cable was sent to Darryl Zanuck, “WITH ROBERT EVANS PLAYING PEDRO ROMERO, THE SUN ALSO RISES WILL BE A DISASTER” It was signed by all the principal actors, as well as King and Viertel. Only Flynn had refused to add his name. Though given the fact that he was smashed by two every afternoon, his support only meant so much. Still, the two men would strike up a friendship, which for Errol at that period in his life meant someone to go drinking and whoring with. And that they did.
Not so surprisingly, when handed the role of a bankrupt drunk, Flynn succeeded in nailing the part. It was to be his best performance in years, some say ever. Power predicted, “Flynn is likely to walk off with an Academy Award for his work in this picture.” Sadly, he was not even nominated, though he received some of the best reviews of his career.
While the young Evans and the older Flynn were out tearing up Morelia, Gardner was suffering from loneliness (Walter Chiari was not in town) and had begun insisting that Viertel sleep in her bedroom. There was nothing romantic about it, no sex involved, more that she needed something of a teddy bear to help her through the night. As Jake Barnes points out in the novel, “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” Given the arrangement, it is difficult to know whether or not Viertel should be envied.
But soon enough Zanuck arrived on location to help quell all the unrest. After a few minutes of watching Evans with red cape aswirl pivoting about the bullfighting ring, Zanuck grabbed his bullhorn and shouted, “The kid stays in the picture.” Almost forty years later, that line would become the title of Evans’s best-selling autobiography. According to Evans, at a party later that night, he walked over to Zanuck’s table and, without asking, led Gardner out onto the dance floor. They danced together for the next forty minutes, not a word between them, a defining moment that won over the entire cast. Apparently, Evans was a hell of a dancer. The requisite love affair with Gardner would soon follow.
And yet, despite having seduced another rising young actor, Gardner remained lonely and in her own strange funk. Like Power and Flynn, it seemed she, too, had become old or at least believed herself so. Another famous line of Hemingway’s:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
To Gardner, she had aged in a similar manner—and it was on the set of The Sun Also Rises that she suddenly felt old. Her wrinkles appeared to be deepening, there were rings under her eyes, hangovers hurt more than they used to. For sure the tequila wasn’t helping, Gardner still knocking it back at night, creating riots in restaurants, bedding Mexican playboys, staging mock bullfights at nightclubs with famous matadors. She demanded that all roving photographers be barred from photographing her on set, while all the time peering uneasily in mirrors. She was, after all, thirty-four—the best years, it seemed, were behind her.
In this at least, Gardner was pretty much right. Regarding her fate, decades later and nearing the end, she would sum it up quite succinctly, “A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework.” Within a month after production had wrapped, she was finally granted a divorce from Sinatra.
As for the film itself, The Sun Also Rises no longer really holds up. In truth, it never held up—though Evans’s performance was actually viewed very favorably. Maybe bullfighting is like dancing—certainly, Zanuck was one hell of a producer. In fact, witnessing Zanuck’s power on set, Evans was inspired to leave acting and become a producer himself. He would go on to run Paramount (the first and only actor to head a major studio). During a legendary twenty-five-year run, he produced, among other films, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Godfather. He became one of the defining producers of New Hollywood—picture a very tan man with sweeping hair and oversized sunglasses stepping out of a bathroom with white powder on his shirt. Prone to all manner of excess, Evans would blow through seven wives, never mind the countless actresses, models, hookers and … well, hookers.
But back in 1957, he was just a kid with a picture out. Later that same year, during game seven of the World Series, he spotted Ernest Hemingway in the stadium stands. Given Evans’s positive reviews, he confidently strode over to say hello. Reminiscent of Viertel, Papa only offered up a quick look, then without a word turned back to Mickey Mantle at the plate. “Everybody behaves badly.”
ORIGINALLY OPENED IN 1925 as the Red Spot, the Formosa Café was at first a single red trolley car. It wasn’t until some twenty years later that the café hit its stride. In 1945 Lem Quon, who started out as a cook, became part owner and gave it the Chinese-American cuisine and laid-back vibe—red booths, Chinese lanterns—for which it is still known.
The old adage, “Location, location, location,” rings true for the Formosa. It was located just east of what was initially “the Lot” studio but became the original United Artists Studios, then later Goldwyn Studios, then later Warner Bros. This prime placement made it a de facto backup commissary, and the procession of stars it drew during each successive ownership is astounding, as can be seen in the endless black-and-white photos that line the Formosa’s walls.
Due to its longevity and studio proximity, the Formosa can boast a list of celebrity patrons that dwarfs most any joint east of the Polo Lounge: John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Bugsy Siegel, Sinatra, Elvis, James Dean, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Bogart, and Warren Beatty were proud patrons, as are more recent recruits like Johnny Depp, Nicholas Cage, and Brad Pitt.
In addition to numerous other films, the Formosa was used as a location in L.A. Confidential—the scene in which gangster Johnny Stompanato is out dining with the “real” Lana Turner. Vince Jung, Lem Quon’s grandson, still runs the place, and unlike most other Hollywood landmarks, the Formosa has defeated numerous attempts to have it shut down or razed.
