CHAPTER 12

 

 

Kathryn flipped through the albums next to her record player.

Dinah Shore Sings the Blues? Too depressing.

By the Light of the Silvery Moon with Doris Day? Too sweet.

She skimmed through Anita O’Day, Fred Astaire, Kay Starr, and Bing Crosby, but nothing seemed right. Eddie Fisher Sings felt too earnest, and she wasn’t even sure how Christmas Day in the Morning with Burl Ives had got there.

She came to Sinatra Sings His Greatest Hits. What would Ava do if she walked in and heard her husband’s music? Would she think it a cute gesture? Or would she let loose with a string of cuss words and leave?

Three sharp knocks rang out. Ava Gardner opened the door and strode in like she owned the place. “I love how people around here still keep their doors unlocked.” With the barest brush of mascara and a hint of lipstick, she still managed to fill Kathryn’s living room with a radiance that few women enjoyed.

“Come on in!” Kathryn blew her a welcome kiss.

Ava bunched her hands together, threading and unthreading her fingers like shoelaces. She was usually so laid back that she gave Tallulah Bankhead a run for her money. Every slink of her hips and smirk on her lips seemed to say, “Cast me in your movie or don’t; renew my contract or don’t; stay the night or get out of bed. It’s all the same to me.”

But there was no “Go on, baby, give it your best shot” in the way Ava let her handbag slip onto the coffee table.

Kathryn lifted up two albums. “Kay or Jo?”

Ava pointed to Jo Stafford, so Kathryn placed Portrait of New Orleans onto her record player and let a jazzy trumpet meander through the villa. As she crossed to her liquor cabinet, Kathryn watched how Ava knotted together her fingers again and wondered if asking for a favor might not be such a great idea. But the days had blurred into weeks.

“I was so glad to get your call.” Nostalgia tinged Ava’s voice. “There are times I wish I still lived here. Life seemed so easy, didn’t it?”

Kathryn twisted off the top of a bottle of Bristol Cream Sherry and pulled out a matching pair of lead crystal glasses. “But you were with Artie Shaw back then. As I recall, that marriage wasn’t any walk in the park.”

“More like a walk off the gangplank.”

Ava accepted Kathryn’s sherry and they clinked glasses. “Good to see you, ol’ neighbor of mine.”

Kathryn led her to the sofa, where she made a point of slipping out of her shoes, hoping her guest would do the same. She wanted Ava to feel relaxed and at home when she asked for the favor she had in mind.

But instead of following Kathryn’s lead, Ava crossed her legs and fidgeted with the hem of her skirt as her eyes skipped about the room like nervous crickets. She sipped the cream sherry and let out a long breath. “I gotta say that when you invited me to lunch, I wasn’t expecting a home-cooked meal from one of America’s most beloved housewives.”

As far as Kathryn knew, the Sunbeam – Betty Crocker – Westinghouse advertising ménage à trois was still under closed-door negotiations. “Where’d you hear that?”

Ava shrugged slyly. “Around.”

“Around what? Stonehenge? You’ve been in England shooting Knights of the Round Table all summer.”

“You of all people should know that branches of the grapevine extend past the eastern seaboard.” She flicked her wrist, sending the tiny music charms on her bracelet tinkling against each other. “I think it’s funny—you’re about as useful in the kitchen as I am. But if mum’s the word, my lips are sealed.”

“Thank you,” Kathryn said, “but it’ll be a minor miracle if this idea even clears the starting gate.”

Although she came off sounding like she couldn’t care less, Kathryn was desperate for Leo’s idea to gain traction. Now that her show was off the air and she was back to being just another columnist among dozens, her income had plummeted. Leo had promised her “tons of filthy lucre” if this deal went through, and she would need all the lucre she could lay her hands on to pay Dudley Hartman.

“And by the way,” she told Ava, “if by ‘home-cooked meal’ you mean a bag of nosh I hauled home from Greenblatt’s Deli, then yes, I’ve prepared everything by hand.”

Ava held her sherry glass out for a refill. “Is this lunch business or pleasure?”

“A bit of both,” Kathryn hedged. She refilled Ava’s glass and topped up her own, although she’d barely touched it.

“Ain’t it always?” Ava didn’t sound particularly miffed. “Let’s get the business part over with first. Knights of the Round Table, I assume?”

Ava’s movie was MGM’s first CinemaScope film, and the first CinemaScope production shot in Britain. It was also the first one not produced by 20th Century-Fox. Under Louis B. Mayer’s stewardship, MGM had always set the gold standard. The studio’s acknowledgment that they were using a rival’s technology flashed a neon sign that, despite Dory Schary’s assertions, Hollywood’s former leading studio was unlikely to regain its primacy.

Kathryn nodded.

Ava sighed. “It’s the usual stuff. Robert Taylor’s very nice, Mel Ferrer not so much. I could have had an affair with any number of people but I’ve got my hands full with ol’ Frankie, so I didn’t. The costumes are lovely. The scenery, too. It’s all uncomfortable armor and clanking swords and lines like, ‘It’s the valley of death. The Devil himself has plowed it under.’ I’m not even sure I know what that means.”

“Do you care?”

Ava replied with a light laugh. “It was an excuse to run away to Merrie Olde England.”

Statements like these presented Kathryn with an ethical juggling act. On the one hand, they were a pair of old neighbors getting together for an overdue catch-up. But on the other, she was a prominent gossip columnist clinking sherry glasses with a world-famous movie star married to an equally well-known singer.

From the glittering, shiny surface she presented, it would seem that Ava Gardner had everything that society deemed worth chasing: looks, talent, success, money, marriage, fame. And yet here she was confessing she wanted to run away.

The friend in Kathryn wanted Ava to feel she could confide in her, but the gossip columnist was aching to pick up her pad and pen, sitting two feet away.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ava said accusingly.

“Like what?”

Ava drained her glass and set it beside Kathryn’s pad, tapping it several times with a fingernail. “We’re still talking on the record.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You’ll know when we’re not.”

They weren’t sitting in public—surely that must have given her a clue that Kathryn’s invitation to lunch had an ulterior motive. “So Knights of the Round Table was an excuse to run away from what—or who?”

“Frank’s great in the sack, but oh brother! Outside the bedroom, he’s exhausting. His career is on a downward spiral right now, while mine is all hands on deck and man the battle stations. Everything with him is such a drama. Even that cameo I did in The Band Wagon last year. I was on set for one goddamned day, and you should have heard him.”

“So when you told him that Knights was a four-month shoot in England, I bet that went down well.”

Ava cast her eyes over to Kathryn’s kitchen. “So what did you get at Greenblatt’s?”

“Tuna salad on rye.”

“And pickles?”

“Why bother going to Greenblatt’s if you don’t get the pickles?”

“Any chance we could eat outside? I’ve spent all week watching Frank record Swing Easy. He’s hoping to project a fresh, hip image so that the public will—Jesus! I’m already bored to death. Some wife I am, huh?” She jumped to her feet. “I don’t mind if it’s a little chilly. It’ll be nothing compared to England. What those people call ‘summer’ is a joke. All two and a half weeks of it.”

 

 

They had the entire patio area out back of the main building to themselves. The house painters had done a terrific job sprucing up the place. Its fresh coat of light terracotta glowed in the sun through the daisy bushes and lemon trees.

Ava set two bottles of Schlitz beer on a wrought iron table and cast her eyes around the pool area. “Is the bougainvillea still as glorious as I remember? The summer Artie and I lived here, I got it into my head that I needed to exercise my mind and my body, so I took up swimming. Marcus gave me some lessons. How is he, by the way?”

“Good, as far as I—”

“By the end of that summer, I was a swimming machine, plowing through the water like a goddamned mermaid! But I also decided to read every book on the bestseller list. I started with Forever Amber. Christ knows why. The damned thing was nearly a thousand pages long.”

“Probably because everybody was reading—”

“So there I was, sitting in that villa.” Ava pointed across the pool to number eight, where Arlene now lived. Next to it lay the rectangular patch of newly turned dirt where Gwennie’s tulips should soon come into bloom, brightening the place with winter color. “I was reading about little orphan Amber when Artie comes in and says, ‘What the hell is that?’ He grabs it out of my hand, calls it ‘a pile of stinkin’ fuckin’ trash’ and throws it clear across the room. Like he’s the goddamned Literary Police.” She bit off half a pickle spear and chomped it with her mouth open. “That was the beginning of the end, let me tell you.”

“The Razor’s Edge might’ve been a better—”

“Do you remember who that bastard married three days after our divorce came through? Kathleen Winsor. Do you know who she is?”

Kathryn hadn’t seen Ava rant like this before. Her hopes of guiding the conversation in a different direction ebbed. “The author of Forever Amber.”

“Ain’t that the limit? Husbands—blagh!” She raised her Schlitz. “You’ve got the right idea, honey. Keep yourself single and avoid the melodrama.”

As Ava slugged herself with more Schlitz, Kathryn sensed it was now-or-never time. “I have a favor to ask.” It wasn’t until the confession was out that she realized Ava had spoken at the same time. “What did you say?”

Ava unleashed a honking laugh. “I said that I need a favor from you. It’s why I jumped at the chance to come over. If I hear Frank warble ‘Jeepers Creepers’ one more time, I’m going to lose my ever-lovin’ mind. If I go out for lunch without him, he hits the roof. The only reason I’m here is because it’s you and the Garden of Allah. He’s got fond memories of this place and he respects you. As soon as I could see the first hint of him relenting, I beat it out of there so damned fast.”

“Is that why you’ve been so jumpy?” Kathryn asked.

“I could ask the same thing.”

“What?”

“Take a look at your pickle.” Kathryn’s kosher pickle had snapped in half, but she couldn’t remember doing it. “I guess we’re both a bit distracted.”

“You want to go first?”

Ava dropped her sandwich onto her plate. “I need to get out of LA.”

“But you only just got back.”

“Sinatra and his goddamned jealousy. It drives me batty! If I stick around, I’ll end up planting a knife between his ribs.”

“Let’s try and avoid that scenario.”

“You get the lowdown with what’s going on around town before everybody else. I was hoping—I mean, I know it’s a long shot and all—but perhaps in a movie that’s shooting outside LA. Canada, maybe? Mexico?”

“What about Rome?”

Ava clamped a firm hand around Kathryn’s wrist. “Perfect!”

Marcus had recently written about how Jean Negulesco told him that Joe Mankiewicz wanted to cast Rossano Brazzi in his next movie and so it might be in Marcus’s interests if he took tons of photos of Brazzi on the Three Coins set. Recently, Kathryn heard that Mank had signed Brazzi, but was still looking for the female lead.

“How would you like to work for Joe Mankiewicz?”

It was a redundant question to ask any actress after what he’d done for Bette Davis in All About Eve.

Ava’s face filled with excitement. “Is this the one about the naked duchess?”

“Barefoot Contessa. Would MGM consider lending you out?”

“If I beg the right people. Who else is in it?”

“Bogie.”

“Oh boy!”

“Lauren will probably be with him and Marcus is still there. It’ll be a mini Garden of Allah reunion.”

Ava clapped her hands. “This gets better and better!

“I could put in a call to Mank’s office and plant a seed. He owes me a favor after I wrote a positive item about his Julius Caesar.”

Ava started strumming the patio table hard enough to chip a nail. “I’d really owe you one.”

Kathryn put down the remainder of her tuna sandwich and wiped her mouth. “I’ve heard that Winchell is squiring you to the opening of The Wild One.”

Ava shot her a side-look. “You can blame Harry Cohn for that. Frank’s been nominated for Supporting Actor on From Here to Eternity and Harry doesn’t get much of a crack at Oscar bragging rights, so he asked Frank to let me accompany Winchell to the Wild One premiere in exchange for getting fully behind a campaign to win Frank an Oscar.”

“How do you feel about that?” Kathryn asked.

“I’m a Hollywood actress. I’m used to getting shoved around like cattle. The question is, what do you want from me?”

“I was hoping that perhaps when the conversation starts to run a little dry, you could suggest Winchell call me when he’s in town.”

“Is that all?” Ava jammed her cigarette butt into the remainder of her sandwich. “I could do that without getting out of bed.”

“If he presses you for more information, tell him that I had you over for lunch and that I hinted at a story that’s so big, you got the impression that I didn’t know how to handle it.”

“Why don’t you call him up yourself?”

“Because I need him to think it’s his idea. Plant the seed that I need someone with Winchell’s status and influence, and he’ll come running.”

She lit up another cigarette, took a breath, and shook her head. “Male vanity. They make it so easy, don’t they?”

“Ordinarily, I’d agree with you,” Kathryn said, “but Winchell’s a cunning little swine.”

“Yeah, but he’s still a man.” She slouched in her chair and slung an arm over the back. “You leave it to me, honey.”