On Saturday, we revealed Ava Gardner’s account of her tumultuous marriage to Mickey Rooney, plagued by his infidelities. Today, in the second part of this series, she tells Peter Evans about her violent relationships with Howard Hughes and George C. Scott, her adoration of musician Artie Shaw, and her affair with Robert Mitchum.
Why had they been arguing? All Ava Gardner could recall was that her latest boyfriend had suddenly punched her hard in the face, dislocating her jaw. Instead of bursting into tears, she coolly smashed an onyx ashtray over his head — and probably killed him.
“There was blood on the walls, on the furniture — real blood in the Bloody Marys,” Ava told me years later.
The man lying on the floor was billionaire Howard Hughes, then reputed to be the richest man on the planet. And he wasn’t moving.
Panicking, Ava did what movie stars used to do when in trouble: she called the film studio. MGM head Louis B. Mayer, fearing scandal, sent his men to handle it.
“Louis Mayer nearly had kittens—he was convinced I’d whacked the b*d,” Ava said. “His boys got me out of there so f** fast, my feet didn’t touch the Orientals.”
Hughes eventually recovered and asked Ava to marry him.
Ava Gardner’s life, as I discovered while helping write her autobiography, was filled with drama, violence, and sex. Even in her mid-60s, after two strokes, she still prided herself on captivating men.
One day, when her publisher visited her in Knightsbridge, I saw a glimpse of the old Ava. She was worried about her appearance and called Jack Cardiff, a leading cinematographer who had photographed her in Pandora And The Flying Dutchman and The Barefoot Contessa. Cardiff set up a light to flatter her features and advised me to compliment her looks.
The next day, Ava sat in the light as the publisher arrived. She tilted her head to make her eyes shine. The publisher was utterly bowled over.
At 20, newly divorced from Mickey Rooney, Ava was catnip to men. Aviation billionaire Howard Hughes quickly pursued her. “Nothing was ever an accident with Howard,” she recalled. He always sought out the newest girls in town.
Though Hughes was not much for personal hygiene or appearances, he had a remoteness that reminded Ava of her father. His wealth never impressed her, despite his gifts of diamonds and furs and bumping generals off flights for her. His idea of a date—dining alone in an empty club with an orchestra—felt like a staged performance to her.
While he proposed frequently, Ava found the experience of dining a deux in an empty restaurant lacking atmosphere. “It felt as if we were a couple of actors being served by other actors on a candlelit stage,” she said.
Once, she asked him, “Couldn’t you have invited a few extras along to cheer the place up a bit?” Regularly, as the lamb chops arrived, he’d ask her to marry him, and she always said no.
Ava recalled, “Although Howard was crazy about me (this was before I realized he was just plain crazy), we still hadn’t slept together. I enjoyed the power I had over him. I enjoyed his frustration.”
Despite rumors about Hughes’ prowess, Ava found them wrong. “I’ll say this: he knew how to take his time with a lady. He was a patient sonofabitch, the complete opposite of Mickey Rooney. As a lover, Howard Hughes was a pleasant surprise. He didn’t have Mickey’s vivacity, but his timing was nearly always perfect. He taught me that making love didn’t always have to be rushed. ‘Slow down, slow down, kid. We’ll get there!’ he’d say. He was like a f*****g horse whisperer. We usually had a good time in the feathers.”
In hindsight, she thought she should never have gotten involved with Hughes.
Howard Hughes’ conversation was heavy-going, except when he talked about his passions: planes and women. “Lana Turner, Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers, Jean Peters, Kate Hepburn, Linda Darnell—oh my God, he had so many women!” Plus, he was shockingly racist. “When I told him my closest childhood friend was black, he didn’t call me for weeks. He wouldn’t employ blacks in his aircraft plants. F*** him! F*** all bigots,” Ava said, raising her glass of red wine.
Hughes was a control freak, while Ava was exceptionally independent. “The mix was too volatile: our chemistry was the stuff that causes hydrogen bombs to explode. ‘Till death us do part’ would have been sooner rather than later if we’d tied the knot.”
Once, Hughes bought her a new Cadillac and offered to have it serviced by his mechanics. “We’d just had a tremendous fight, and I’d actually blacked his eye. I wasn’t expecting any favors until the swelling had gone down.” After picking up the car, she drove two miles before the engine fell out. “That was Howard’s idea of a practical joke. It took me years to see the funny side of that prank.”
“I don’t know why Howard stayed around so long. We fought all the time, but I fought with all my men. It was my way of loving, I suppose. Our intimacy never deepened. I could laugh with Mick, I could cry with Frank, but with Howard, there was always this kind of shortfall. He’d only take me in his arms if he wanted sex—or to stop me from hitting him.”
“The amazing thing is that he was in my life, on and off, for more than 20 years—but I never loved him.”
During the first stage of their affair, Ava fell wildly in love with the band-leader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, then a big heart-throb of the jazz scene.
Much to Hughes’ chagrin, he was quickly (if temporarily) dumped. When Ava told him that the bandleader wanted to marry her, he warned: “It won’t last five minutes. He doesn’t love you; he just loves the idea of sh**ging you.”
Sadly, said Ava, Hughes was right. “We married in ’45—October 17. Artie dumped me one week after our first anniversary. The b*****d broke my heart.”
At that time, Shaw, earning the equivalent then of $1 million a week, was already tiring of fame and had embarked on a lifelong mission to educate himself. The people he hung around with were all Left-wing ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ — as Ava described them — and she told me she’d ‘gotten seriously into socialism’ herself. Indeed, she still had the books to prove it.
“We’d go to the Russian consulate,” she recalled. “We’d sit down to dinner and the vodka bottles would appear, and the caviar. That’s when I got a taste for the hard stuff.”
Chiefly because she felt inadequate, she soon started drinking to excess.
“Artie was difficult, he was complex, but I was stuck on him,” she explained. “I was crazy about him.
“He was smart as a whip: he always knew what I was going to say next. To tell the truth, I was always a little afraid of him. Not physically. Not the way I was scared of GCS [the actor George C. Scott, with whom she had an affair in the Sixties]. When GCS was loaded, he was terrifying—he’d beat the s*** out of me and have no idea next morning what he’d done.
“I’d be lying next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding, and he couldn’t remember a thing.
“Artie was another kind of bully. He was a dominating sonofabitch.
“I don’t know which was worse: GCS’s physical violence or Artie’s mind games. He used to put me down so much I lost complete confidence in myself.”
Ava’s poverty-stricken rural childhood and basic high school education had left her ill-equipped to shine in Shaw’s milieu. Cruelly, he told her to keep her mouth shut, sit at the feet of his friends and absorb their wit and wisdom.
“I was happy to do that. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. ‘You’re not in the f*****g tobacco fields now,’ he’d scream.”
With Shaw’s encouragement, Ava started seeing a psychoanalyst six times a week—”I felt like a character in a New Yorker cartoon”—and enrolled in a correspondence course on the humanities at the University of California. To her surprise, she got mostly B pluses—and a high score on an IQ test.
She also all but stopped making movies. “Artie once told me he couldn’t respect a woman who made a living as a movie star—‘Movie acting has nothing at all to do with talent; it’s all about key lights and cheekbones,’ he said.
“I think he said that when I beat him at chess—after he’d hired a Russian grand master to give me lessons. I guess I learned too well.
“But I owe Artie plenty,” she said generously. “He made me get an education. Give the guy credit where credit’s due.”
Still madly in love, she decided she wanted his baby. He refused—wisely, she realized later. “I don’t think in my heart I genuinely wanted a baby at all. Maybe I was playing a part; who the hell knows?”
One day, Shaw caught Ava reading the bestseller Forever Amber, by Kathleen Winsor. Snatching it from her hands, he derided the book as “a f*****g potboiler” and tore it to shreds.
“A few months later, he ditched me and married Kathleen Winsor,” said Ava. “If I’d paid more attention to those Freudian manuals he was always laying on me, I might have smelled a rat. But I had no idea.
“Our marriage had lasted just about a year when he called the cab on me—but I loved him just as much as I loved Mick Rooney at the end of that marriage.
“A couple of months after our divorce, I fell apart when Artie married Kathleen. It taught me a lesson, though. It taught me that hypocrisy isn’t just the province of movie producers.”
