Living With Miss G (3 page)

The first time in those late months of 1946 that I mentioned to Miss G that
she was a film star her laughter almost cracked the martini glasses.
“Film star! Rene, you must be joking!” she said. “I arrived in Hollywood,
when – around four years ago. I was supposed to be earning a salary of fifty
dollars a week, but for the first year all they doled out was thirty-five because
there was a little clause in the contract giving MGM the right to stop payment
for twelve-week lay-off periods. “If Bappie hadn’t come to Hollywood with me
– because of Mama’s insistence that I had to have my older sister look after me
– and she hadn’t gone downtown and got a job at I. Magnum’s we’d have
starved to death! As it was, we lived in one crummy room with a pull-down bed,
a gas ring, and a kitchen-cum-bathroom as big as a closet. Film star! More like
slave laborer. I don’t think you sat around just looking pretty at MGM; they
worked you hard eight until five.”
Miss G had just arrived home from MGM. I could always tell what sort of
day she’d had by the look on her face, the smile or no smile, the slight
abruptness or the loud, “Christ, where are the martinis?”
I served them. She sat on the settee, sipped hers and said, “Where’s
yours?” Miss G always made that point, unless she saw the glass clasped in my
hand. I never drank a martini with Miss G unless invited.
“I’ve got it here,” I said. I sat and waited. She smiled, “Got called into Mr.
Mayer’s office today.” I sat still and waited. Miss G liked to take her time over
her daily recounts. “Told you the first time I got that invitation that his face
looked as if it had skied down a steep hill and run into a brick wall. He’d heard
that Mickey Rooney was planning to marry me. Marriage would ruin the Andy
Hardy series. Mr. Mayer suddenly might find his top box office star too old for
the job. Disasterville.”
“So this time?” I questioned.
“Arrived at his office…”
“A big office?” I interrupted.”
“His office was about the size of a tennis court. Mr. Mayer sat at the far
end at a big desk. Paintings and photos of the famous race horses he owns were
all along the walls. You feel you might have to break into a gallop to get to his
desk. This time he is smiling and waves me to a chair. “Make yourself
comfortable, Ava. You’re looking very pretty today.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mayer.”
“I think you did very well in
Whistle Stop
.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mayer;’ I said. “I didn’t mention the fact that as MGM
had rented me out to United Artists for several thousand dollars, MGM had done
very well too."
“‘I wasn’t quite so taken with
The Killers
,’ Mr. Mayer went on. ‘Bit savage
I thought. A whole film about two hired killers who set out to murder a man
who’s betrayed another set of crooks. Not much of a happy ending was it,
Ava?’”
“No, Mr. Mayer.”
Miss G said she didn’t mention the fact that, for the second time in
succession, MGM had hired her out for a nice fat fee to Universal Studios.
“’I thought
Whistle Stop
a more suitable vehicle. Got along okay with
George Raft?’” Mr. Mayer asked.
“Sure did, Mr. Mayer.”
Miss G gave me one of her sly grins. “As I’ve told you, Rene, I got on
great with George. He was a lovely man. He was sweet as a pussy cat and
married. He was solid Catholic, but thought a little roll in the hay was a
legitimate perk from time to time. As soon as he knew I hadn’t the time, we
became great friends.”
She continued, “So Mr. Mayer cleared his throat for the shock
announcement. “‘I just wanted to tell you, Ava, that we’ve just bought the film
rights to Frederic Wakeman’s best seller,
The Hucksters
. Hard hitting stuff about
the radio industry’s advertizing tricks. We’re casting Clark Gable in the lead,
bringing over a young English actress, Deborah Kerr, to play opposite him, and
you will play the part of Clark Gable’s girlfriend.’”
Miss G’s face was lit up. I’d never seen her so happy. I said, “Great!”
The doorbell rang. I put my glass down and said, “Now who the hell can
that be?” and made my way towards the door with Miss G saying, “If it’s
anybody we don’t like, just say I’m not in.”
I opened the door and fainted. Well metaphorically, I fainted. There he
stood, towering over me—the dark hair, the crinkled eyes, the wide smile.
“Hi. Is Ava in?” Clark Gable!
For years even before we even knew each other, Miss G and I, plus another
hundred million or so women had seen
Gone With the Wind
and fallen in love
with Rhett Butler. Now he was standing outside our door! I managed to make
my tongue move and my voice speak.
“Y – yes, she is. I’ll tell her you are here. Please come in.” I darted away in
front of him, my face creased up, and my mouth trying to fashion the name.
“Who?” said Ava, puzzled.
Before she could say any more, Mr. Gable had accepted my invitation and
with about three strides was in our bijou apartment. “Hi, Ava,” he said. “I hope
you don’t mind me dropping in unannounced like this. You’ve heard about
The
Hucksters
?”
“Yes, only about an hour ago,” Miss G replied. “Please sit down. Can we
get you a drink? We’re on martinis.”
“Celebrating, I hope,” Gable said.
“Well sort of,” said Miss G.
“Got any Scotch?” Gable asked.
By the grace of God we had. And I began to learn that Mr. Gable liked his
Scotch mahogany-colored. That is big whiskies!
Gable was so sweet. He wanted Ava to talk about her part, to want to do it,
but as Miss G had said to me a thousand times, “For goodness sake, I don’t
choose my parts. When MGM says I’m playing this part, I’m playing that part.”
Gable knew that, but he wanted to set her at ease, encourage her, and give
her confidence. Mr. Clark Gable was a great guy. Later I said, “Clark Gable
comes to talk to you and you insist you are not a star, huh?”
As much as I was always insisting on this status for her, Miss G never had
an easy time accepting it. In my mind, though, she’d been a star from the very
start – just maybe not a film star. At age nineteen and after only six months in
Hollywood, she’d married Mickey Rooney, reputedly the highest paid actor in
the business. She was on the glamour bandwagon. Their divorce after just over a
year of marriage made headlines all over the globe. Nice young married couples
didn’t do that.
Then apparently she was the girlfriend of one of the richest men in the
world—Howard Hughes—and she’s also dating Howard Duff, who gossip has it
desperately wants to marry her. She’s photographed with other wealthy, goodlooking guys in various restaurants and night clubs, and she’s totally beautiful.
So the magazines and gossip columnists love this stuff, and her reputation as a
sexpot starts to form.
However, at heart, she is still a pretty little milkmaid waiting for Mr. Right
(we’ve talked about Artie Shaw, and he doesn’t count). And she is working
bloody hard at MGM. In 1942 alone, the first year of her indoctrination, she
made five appearances in films.
“Rene, love,” said Miss G explaining her activities during her introductory
year in the business. “Mainly they used me for publicity stills which were
distributed all over the country, you know, ‘girlie’ bathing suit stuff to help the
war effort or at least give the boys a bathing suit treat.”
“But didn’t you appear in five films that year?” I reminded her.
“I was wallpaper, Rene, wallpaper! A face in a crowd of teenagers, a
dancer swirling on a crowded floor, someone walking down a street. MGM had
scores of ‘starlets’ like me. Fifty bucks a week, and the option to fire you after
the first three months or any three months after that if they didn’t like you. It
was a constant turn-over. It was cheap labor; okay, it was a job. They trained
you and nobody twisted your arm to sign the contract.”
In her very last picture of 1942, Miss G finally got out of the crowd scene,
got a tiny part all to herself, about thirteen seconds worth of individual attention.
The movie was
Kid Glove Killer
, and she was a car-hop glimpsed at a hotdog
drive-in. At least she met a young actor named Van Heflin, also in the cast, and
his wife Frances, and that started a long friendship.
The director was Fred Zinnemann, starting his rise to the very top, and who
later would give Frank Sinatra his great opportunity when he was down on his
luck, in
From Here to Eternity
.
The year 1943 had continued with short appearances in all manner of
quickie films, including
Pilot No. 5
and a cast that included Franchot Tone,
Marsha Hunt, Gene Kelly and Van Johnson. Miss G was “Girl.”
Some others in those early years were:
Young Ideas
,
The Lost Angel
,
Swing
Fever
, all in 1943;
Three Men in White
,
Maisie Goes To Reno
, and
She Went To
The Races
. They were all quickie films to meet the boom-times of wartime
Hollywood.
But another film was made that year which gave Ava Gardner a very tiny
part, but at least a name – Katy Chotnik, and almost certainly influenced her
career in a near incredible manner. The producer was one of the young and
trusting refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe employed by MGM. His name
was Seymour Nebenzal. The picture was
Hitler’s Madman
, another quickie
rushed out on a small budget and an inadequate production—a film that received
scant critical or public attention, a film which left no discernable mark in movie
history. But its horrific subject would survive forever in world history. It
concerned the true story of two young Czech parachutists trained in Britain and
dropped near Prague in the spring of 1942. Their mission was to assassinate
Reinhard Heydrich, Gauleiter of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s evil subordinate who
had formulated the policy of The Final Solution – the slaughter of all European
Jews. Heydrich was assassinated.
The ensuing manhunt did not discover who had carried out Heydrich’s
killing, or where they might be hiding. To the Nazi powers who now gripped all
Europe in an iron fist, this was an outrage. An example must be made which the
whole world would understand. Hundreds of Prague citizens were murdered in
concentration camps, but that was not enough. Some more draconian measure
must be taken. Lidice, a small mining village about twenty miles outside Prague
– which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination or
protecting its perpetrators – was the target chosen for annihilation. At dawn on
June 10, 1942, it was surrounded by S.S. troops with artillery and tanks.
All the men and teenage boys were shot, one-hundred and ninety in all.
The women and children were shunted into trucks to be taken mainly to
Ravensbruck concentration camp; practically all were never to be seen again.
In the line of young and attractive girls lined up for that transportation was
Katy Chotnick, the part Ava Gardner played in that film. In that film, the camera
panned slowly across those girls who knew that were destined for intolerable
horror or death. It paused only for a second on Ava’s figure in shapeless peasant
dress, dark hair fluffed around her face, and on Ava’s fierce expression – a
glowering intensity of sheer hatred.
To the movie audience, Ava Gardner was unknown. They forgot the scene
as soon as they left their seats. But Seymour Nebenzal did not forget it.
Mr. Mayer might have kept Miss G playing in cardboard cut-out-ofpeaches-and-cream parts yearning to play opposite Lassie, until she was too old
to matter. Strange really that L.B. Mayer, who was a very astute film maker, did
not sense that potential in Miss G. Plainly, Mayer was more interested in good
honest family films with happy endings, and nothing was wrong with that.
Mayer also liked owning beautiful racehorses, so it was strange that he did not
discern he had quite an exceptional young actress filly cantering around in his
own film stables.
It was noticeable later in MGM’s
The Hucksters
, the film she appeared in
with Mr. Gable, that Miss G was wearing one of the most skin-fitting, bosomrevealing, hung-on-by-flimsy-bows-on-the-shoulders, black dresses in the
history of movies. Mayer had obviously caught on by then.
But that was still a year or so down the road, and for the moment, Seymour
Nebenzal was well ahead of Mayer. He’d been alerted to Ava Gardner’s
potential by
Hitler’s Madman
, and as its producer he had the opportunity to
study her during the production. She was beautiful. She had been married twice
to famous men. She must, therefore, be a female with intense attraction. Perhaps
she could be blended into that role which so few actresses can play
convincingly; the lovely wanton, good-time girl for whom anything goes.
Seymour Nebenzal wanted Miss G with a passion that could only be
assuaged by money. Indeed he had to wait three years while Miss G played in
seven more dumb MGM films as a complete nonentity until he could get his
hands on her again. And by this time, he was working for United Artists. He
offered MGM five thousand dollars – Miss G’s salary for a whole year – to loan
her out for a limited number of days. With alacrity, L.B. Mayer agreed.
Whistle Stop
was not a good picture. Its plot was ridiculous. Miss G’s role
as the slightly shop-soiled babe who has been hanging around Chicago’s hot
spots for the last two years, and returned to her home town to rescue her exlover from a never-do-well existence, was daft. The fact that her lover was
George Raft, at that moment fifty years old while Miss G was a flawless twentythree, was daft. The fact that her main endeavor was to fix George in gainful
employment in a nightclub was not only ludicrous but beyond comprehension.
All his life, George Raft had been playing nightclub roles. He looked as if he
had been born in a nightclub. He got the job.
The relevant word was nightclub. At last Seymour Nebenzal had got Ava
out of the concentration camp line-up and into the dim-lit world of movie
nightclubs. She could stand next to the shiny black piano in a slinky black,
sequined dress, alabaster white limbs shining in the spotlight, totally sexy,
totally gorgeous, the girl every man in the whole wide world wanted to go to bed
with.