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| Ava Gardner in 1952.VIRGIL APGER American actress Ava Gardner (1922 - 1990) spoke of her insatiable desire for sex |
The smallest husband I ever had, and the biggest mistake — that was how Ava Gardner described Mickey Rooney, who’d once been Hollywood’s top box-office draw.
‘But I do owe Mickey one thing: he taught me how much I enjoyed sex,’ she told me. ‘In bed, I’ve always known I’m on safe ground.’
Since the Forties, when Ava had discovered her power over the opposite sex, she only had to snap her fingers for men to come running. As well as Rooney, there was Frank Sinatra, John Huston, Howard Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, various bullfighters and just about every one of her leading men — from Clark Gable to Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum.
By the time Ava asked me to help her write an autobiography, however, she was in her mid-60s and well past her prime. Two strokes had distorted one side of her exquisite face and left her with a pronounced limp.
The lovers had melted away. Now she lived alone in a spacious flat in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge, and — for the best part of a year — the man she saw most frequently was me.
Her moods veered from mellow to dark and imperious when we touched on memories she preferred to leave undisturbed. She flatly refused, for instance, to say more than ‘a few lines’ about her first marriage: ‘This book is about me, Peter. Not about f***ing Mickey Rooney,’ she said.
Thankfully, she changed her mind. But you crossed Ava at your peril; after 40 years of movie stardom, she was accustomed to getting her own way.
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| Ava Gardner |
One evening, as I was leaving her flat, I leaned in to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face, meeting my lips with hers. Then she opened her mouth.
I felt that kiss in every bone and fibre of my body. She must have been aware of that, too.
Her breath was short and audible. The width of her mouth, the sensual fullness of her lower lip, that bold, feline stare and the assurance that came with her history — I was fully conscious that I was being kissed by a Hollywood sex goddess.
How many thousands of men, I wondered later, had fantasised about her as they made love to their wives or girlfriends?
Memories: Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney after their wedding, January, 1942 - but things soon turned sour for the Hollywood couple
But there were a dozen different reasons why I didn’t respond to her kiss. For one thing, she hadn’t kissed me out of love or desire.
What Ava wanted was what she’d once had: the adulation that came with stardom; her ability to incite men’s lust; the admiration she aroused as, draped in furs, she descended the steps of a plane on the arm of Frank Sinatra, or stepped bejewelled from a limousine beside Howard Hughes.
She wanted a reminder of her power — a reassurance that she was still desirable.
‘You didn’t react,’ she said reproachfully when we talked about it afterwards. ‘Weren’t you excited? Men usually react when I kiss them.’
I burbled something about having a professional relationship with her that was too valuable to complicate. The look she gave me was wry and amused.
‘You’re not afraid of comparisons, then?’ she teased.
Sex was important to Ava, and she believed sexual freedom was a woman’s prerogative. ‘I liked to f***. But f***ing was an education, too,’ she told me the first time we met.
(Ava swore like a trooper and readers should be warned that it is impossible to render her conversation accurately without expletives.)
Ava wouldn't sleep with Rooney, she was determined to be a virgin until her wedding day
Her highest praise for a man was that he was good in bed, or ‘in the feathers’ as she liked to put it.
The first to introduce her to such delights was MGM’s biggest star of the Forties, Mickey Rooney, then best known for his wholesome Andy Hardy films.
By contrast, said Ava, ‘I was a nobody, a starlet — not even a nobody.’
She’d come from a poor hillbilly family in North Carolina and had been training to be a secretary when an MGM executive saw a photograph of her face. Ava was promptly given a $35-a-week contract.
Twenty-four hours after arriving in Hollywood, she was hauled round the MGM lot by a publicist and introduced to Rooney, who happened to be wearing a bowl of fruit on his head for his role in Babes On Broadway. She longed to ask for his autograph, but was too shy to ask.
Later, after they had married, she asked him what had been going through his mind that day. He hesitated: did she really want to know?
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I figured you were a new piece of p***y for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn: I wanted to **** you the moment I saw you.’
Sparkling: Ava Gardner was first put off marrying Rooney, by his people, and then urged not to divorce him when things got tricky
Ava smiled. ‘Mick was always the romantic,’ she said. ‘I guess he meant it as a compliment but I was shocked. I was still capable of being shocked in those days.’
Rooney immediately laid siege to the newest starlet in town, taking her to dinner and nightclubs and asking her to marry him at the end of each evening. But she turned him down, and she wouldn’t sleep with him either: she was determined to be a virgin on her wedding day.
‘I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies — he knew it, too,’ she said.
‘He wasn’t what I’d call a handsome man, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was . . . well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey!
‘The little sod wasn’t above admiring himself in the mirror. All 5ft 2in of him! The complete Hollywood playboy, he went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge. He was incorrigible.
‘He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films — Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on.’
For months, Rooney sent his chauffeur-driven limousine every night to the shabby flat where Ava shared a pull-down bed with her sister. At smart restaurants, he’d take her from table to table, introducing her to stars including Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and W.C. Fields.
Ava, however, was still a naive and shy country girl. ‘At least,’ she said, ‘I learned not to wipe my knife and fork on the napkin. I swear to Christ, that’s what I did at the first smart dinner party Mickey took me to in Hollywood!
‘He said to me afterwards: “You made a little faux pas at dinner, sweetheart.” I was too dumb even to know what a faux pas was. But I learned pretty fast.’
Eventually, he wore down her resistance and she accepted his umpteenth proposal. The first thing he did was to take his fiancee to meet his ‘Ma’ — a small woman sitting cross-legged on a sofa and drinking a bottle of bourbon.
Ava recalled: ‘Ma looked at me for a second or two, as calm as custard. “Well,” she said — these were her first words to me: “I guess he hasn’t been in your pants yet, has he?’”
Ava loved telling this story — though, at the time, she said: ‘I wanted to curl up and die.’
Worse still, the studio head, Louis B Mayer, was furious about the engagement, convinced that fans would desert the Andy Hardy movies if Rooney tied the knot. ‘Why doesn’t he f*** her? He f***s all the others. She ain’t the f***ing Virgin Mary,’ he complained.
The disintegration of her first marriage seemed to fascinate her, as if she still couldn’t figure out why it had gone sour so quickly
According to Ava: ‘Mayer went down on his knees and begged Mickey not to marry me.’ Rooney, to his credit, put his career on the line by defying him.
Finally, acting on Mayer’s orders, an MGM fixer called Eddie Mannix — ‘with a face like a raw potato in shades’ — railroaded them into a secret ceremony on January 10, 1942, as far away from Beverly Hills as possible. ‘It was not a memorable occasion, honey,’ said Ava.
More memorably, it was also the date she discovered her own prodigious appetite for sex. ‘I caught on quickly,’ she remembered. ‘Very quickly. I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly.
‘Mickey was tender; actually he was sweet. He couldn’t have been a better first lover for a lady.
‘We were discovering new things about each other all the time — like he was athletic in the sack, and I was pretty verbal, and we were both very, very loud. It was a hoot, and we made sure there was always time for a quickie.
Held firm: Peter Evans has revealed that he was kissed by Ava Gardner - but refused to let it affect their professional relationship
‘I’d been holding back a lot of emotions, honey. We s****ed each other silly for the whole year we were married. We did it for a bit longer than that, actually. I was making up for lost time.
‘We s****ed on and off, right up to the time he went into the army in 1944. S***, we made love the night he enlisted. We had dinner at the Palladium for old times’ sake and then we . . .’
She hesitated. ‘It makes me sound like a nympho, doesn’t it, doing it when we were in the middle of a divorce?’
The disintegration of her first marriage seemed to fascinate her, as if she still couldn’t figure out why it had gone sour so quickly.
‘If the sex hadn’t been so good, it wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. It’s a pity nobody believes in simple lust any more,’ she said.
After a longish silence, she said wearily: ‘I’ve made so many f***ing mistakes in my life. I wake up at night thinking of all the f***-ups I’ve made. It’s a shame that it didn’t work out with Mick. I was hopelessly in love with him. For a couple of months, anyway, I had no doubt that he was going to be my mate for eternity.’
Two months after the wedding, Ava had to go into hospital to have her appendix out.
When she came home, she said: ‘I found a hairpin — evidence that Mick had been s***ing somebody in our bed. On our f***ing goose-feather mattress!
‘That ain’t a very nice thing for a 19-year-old bride — quite pretty, too — to discover. I’d been away for three weeks and he’d already dragged somebody into our bed.
‘He played the little innocent. Nobody could pile on the apple-sauce like Mickey. He was the best liar in the world — well, Frank Sinatra can tell a good story, too, but I don’t believe he was ever unfaithful to me.’
That was the first time she kicked Rooney out. To ward off scandal, Mayer despatched Eddie Mannix — the man with the potato face — to offer her a film role if she’d take her husband back.
‘Good old Eddie came up with a role in Ghosts On The Loose, for which I got my first screen credit,’ said Ava, who’d been doing pin-up photographs until then. ‘It was a nothing part in a rinky-dink movie, but I kept my side of the bargain, too.’
I was out of my mind with jealousy. Wasn’t I beautiful enough for him? Wasn’t I sexy enough? What were the others doing that I wasn’t doing?
Rooney, for his part, tried to make amends by buying her a diamond ring — ‘a real iceberg’ — but asked for it back the following week to pay off his bookies. Ava soon knew, however, that he was still ‘fooling around’.
‘Everybody was f***ing everybody in those days. That doesn’t mean I let Mick off the hook. I brought up his cheating all the time. “I’ve had it with you, you little s***!” I’d scream.
‘He’d look all hurt and innocent—a real Andy Hardy look. Boy, he was some actor. He’d say that no one could love me more than he did. No one could be more faithful than he was.
‘Not once did he admit to two-timing me. Neither did he ever say he was sorry. I wasn’t stupid and I resented him treating me as if I was. His lies were a kind of sadism toward me, as if I didn’t matter.
‘His unfaithfulness was tearing me apart. I had visions of him having sex with other women. I’d go into towering rages trying to figure out who they were.
‘His unfaithfulness was tearing me apart. I had visions of him having sex with other women. I’d go into towering rages trying to figure out who they were.
‘I was pretty certain he’d had Lana [Turner]. I was out of my mind with jealousy. Wasn’t I beautiful enough for him? Wasn’t I sexy enough? What were the others doing that I wasn’t doing — or [what was I] doing wrong?’
Their marriage came to an end in a bar. ‘Mickey had been drinking throughout the evening and was as high as I’d seen him,’ Ava recalled.
‘He was showing off, the centre of attention as usual. I was just sitting there, looking beautiful as usual. We’d had a big argument over something before we came out, and he was completely ignoring me. ‘Finally, he took out this little book full of girls’ numbers. With the guys egging him on, he started reading off their names and saying what they were good at in bed — in front of me!
‘That was it! I left. Peter Lawford took me home and I poured out my heart to him. “I know that something’s going on,” I said to him. “When he sobers up, tell him goodbye for me.” If there was any lingering doubt in my mind about that marriage, Peter ended it right there. He told me, “There’s a girl Mick’s seeing. She’s about 15. It’s been going on for quite a while.”
‘I kicked Mickey out the same night. I wouldn’t take his calls. I was driving him crazy. One night, he tried to kick my door down. When Louis Mayer heard about that, all hell broke loose.’
Hot couple: Ava cheek to cheek with Frank Sinatra, a man she believes 'never cheated on her'
Again, she was persuaded to allow Rooney back home. ‘Well, on and off. After all, we were still married and the sex was legal — and still pretty good, thank God.’
But it soon became clear to her that they had to divorce. ‘Mickey was never going to change his ways. He was always going to be fooling around with some pretty new thing, and that wasn’t my idea of marriage.
‘I knew that dumping Mickey was a risk. Pretty starlets were ten a penny: if I stopped being Mrs Rooney, they wouldn’t think twice about letting me go. But I had no choice.
‘Mickey wasn’t happy [about my decision] — and neither was Louis Mayer, who set his attack dog on to me again. Eddie Mannix said: “You know, Ava, if you do anything to hurt Mickey’s career, you’ll never work in Hollywood again.”’
But Ava had already decided she wasn’t going to name names. ‘I knew that if I sued Mick for adultery,’ she said, ‘it would have blown his wholesome image right out of the water. It could have destroyed his career. And I truly didn’t want to hurt him.’
Mannix was impressed. ‘You’re not as dumb as you look, kid,’ he said. A couple of weeks later, the studio increased Ava’s salary.
She could have asked for half of Rooney’s wealth, but she was never greedy when her marriages ended. Instead, she settled for $25,000 and a Lincoln Continental. When the final decree came through on May 21, 1943, Mickey called her to say: ‘It’s not too late to change your mind. I’ll be more than happy to take you back, kid. No questions asked!’
Ava sighed. ‘Just for a moment, a nanosecond, on hearing his cocky, confident voice, I wondered if it really was what I wanted,’ she said. ‘We’d both behaved badly and said appalling things, but perhaps that just showed how much we cared for each other.
‘Anyway, I didn’t rise to the bait. I said: “Are you f***ing crazy? Get it into your head, Mick, those days are over. We’re finished. We blew it, honey.”
‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I still loved him. I loved him even more than on the day we married.’
Rooney made it plain there were no hard feelings. ‘Don’t let a little old divorce between friends spoil your day, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It happens all the time in Tinsel Town. It means nothing.’
Extracted from Ava Gardner: An Indiscreet Memoir 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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