Frank & Ava: In Love and War

PROLOGUE

This is a story of love and war that begins in the 1940s, Hollywood’s so-called golden age, when celebrity and stardom were different from what they are today. It is a story about a love that was real, not a publicist’s arrangement, love between two of the biggest stars in the world. It was a time when no paparazzi lurked around corners—until these two stars came along.

It was the era of flight, but not jet flight. It was a time when there was no Internet, no television, and all phones had cords. News, if you heard or read it, was usually received the next day, or the day after that, and by then it hardly mattered.

The Depression was winding down, but it had left devastating scars. Poverty and struggle were evident everywhere. Kids signed up for the military, lying about their age, because it was at least something to do. It was work.

For relief, there were radio and the movies. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theater, which 95 million people in a nation of 132 million did at least once a week.

There were some exceptions, but movies weren’t really that good. They didn’t have to be—they were the only game in town, and because the studios that produced films also owned the theaters, they could smugly guarantee that none would do badly. Movie making was a billion-dollar business, the sixth-largest industry in the United States.

In Hollywood, the studios were called dream factories, emphasis on factories. Stars were like factory workers—certainly well paid, but not celebrities the way they are today. There was no actors union then. Even the big stars were treated like studio property. In one four-year period at Warner Bros., Humphrey Bogart acted in twenty-nine gangster films. It was work.

Sex was different then. It was a powerful motivator—people often married for it, and marriages lasted longer. There was no birth-control pill. For many, there was only abortion, and that was illegal. Families were often large. Only one in six marriages ended in divorce.

In Hollywood, though, the marriage rules were different, and lightly enforced. It was an era when the Caddy was king and nighttime glamour was an evening in a dinner club with a band and dancing. Sex was everywhere. Hollywood was where promiscuity prospered, long before the love-in sixties and the swinging seventies. On location, nothing counted.

Onto this playground came Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. In Hollywood, their ambitions and sex drives found their place. Everybody was fucking everybody, said Ava. Maybe it was the war. Frank was married at the time, which made her a home wrecker, and so there was notoriety and shame and all of the things that tabloids and fan magazines quickly learned to exploit.

Their affair became America’s first reality show, with photographers and reporters pursuing Frank and Ava, filing photos and stories from hotels and movie sets around the world.

Their affair led to a tempestuous marriage and a lifelong relationship that was either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to them, depending on how you interpret events. This is the story—for better and for worse—of their remarkable lovers’ quarrel as they battled their way toward what they hoped would be a Hollywood ending.

1

She Can’t Act, She Can’t Talk, She’s Terrific

When Ava Gardner arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1941, all she knew about Hollywood was what she had read in the fan magazines back home in Smithfield, North Carolina, where her mother had taken her to the Howell Theatre, at age nine, to see reigning heartthrob Clark Gable and blonde bombshell Jean Harlow in Red Dust. After three scorching days of travel, Ava stepped off the Super Chief in a cheap summer dress and white wedge sandals, carrying a cardboard suitcase with most of her possessions. The eighteen-year-old beauty did not smoke, did not drink, and was a virgin. She was a stranger in a strange land.

Earlier that summer, in the Manhattan offices of the MGM publicity department, Ava laughed about her chances of fame and fortune before the train started its trip across the continent to Hollywood. Well, if I make it big there, she told the staff, I’ll marry the biggest movie star in the world.

Would you like to see the biggest movie star in the world? a publicist asked. He had a photo behind his back, and it wasn’t of Clark Gable, as Ava had anticipated. It was of Mickey Rooney.

Six months after this playful exchange, Ava Gardner would indeed marry MGM’s biggest moneymaker, Mickey Rooney. When the marriage failed, Ava would marry (and divorce) bandleader Artie Shaw, and have numerous affairs on and off the set, and star in movies with Burt Lancaster, Robert Taylor, and, yes, Clark Gable, in Mogambo, a remake of Red Dust, the movie she had seen with Mama.

In the midst of it all came Frank Sinatra, the most popular singer on the planet, the entertainer of the century, the womanizer of the ages—in full pursuit of Ava, a brunette bombshell, the Jean Harlow of her time.

How quickly and easily everything had unfolded. Before the age of thirty, Ava had three brief, wild marriages, and had become a major film star as well as an international sex symbol. It was like one of those breathless stories you might read in a fan magazine.

*   *   *

Ava Lavinia Gardner was born a farmer’s daughter on Christmas Eve, 1922, in a house without water or plumbing in a tiny crossroads hamlet called Grabtown, not even on the map, seven miles east of Smithfield, North Carolina, population 5,574. Because of the proximity of her birthday and Christmas, two cakes were baked to celebrate that day—one chocolate, for the family, and a white coconut cake, for baby Ava, both according to mother Mollie’s recipe. It became a custom that would continue through the years.

Ava was the youngest of five daughters and two sons of Jonas and Mollie Gardner, tobacco sharecroppers who also operated a boardinghouse for teachers. The family was poor. At school, Ava rotated two sweaters, one to wear and the other in the wash.

Jonas Gardner, a lean man of Scots-Irish ancestry, died when Ava was fifteen. He did everything slowly, so deliberately and so well, Ava later remarked. He was her idol. There wasn’t an impulsive bone in his body, she said. He used to make us lemonade and I can see him now, sitting at the kitchen table, rubbing the lemons hour after hour so they’d be soft and the juice would literally pour out of them when he finally got around to that part of the operation. I’ve never tasted anything like it. No booze was ever so good. Ava grew up playing in the tobacco fields, and assisting her father when the tobacco was aging in barns, where the furnaces had to be stoked to maintain a steady temperature for six or seven days until the leaves were cured. I used to love it, she said. I would stay the night with Daddy, sleeping with him.

At home, she remained the family baby. As her older sisters were married or nudged out of the house to get jobs after high school, Ava was cuddled and coddled. Her sisters bought her special bras to save her breasts from the fate of theirs—strapped against their chests in the Jazz Age style of the day. I’d get out of doing the dishes, Ava said years later. I can see Mama now, cleaning every room every day as though she were expecting Sunday visitors. But I never offered to help her. I should have, I suppose, and now I wish I had.

Mother Mollie was a woman of strict Baptist principles, who did not, or could not, bring herself to explain the facts of life to her daughters. When Ava had her first period and thought she was bleeding to death, it was not to her mama she rushed, but to the warmhearted black lady who worked in the Gardner household, who comforted her and explained what was happening. Mama had instilled in Ava a fear of the consequences of sex. On Ava’s first date, a school prom, the lad tried to kiss her at the doorstep, and Mama came out of the house, scaring him away.

After a year at secretarial school, Ava came under the influence of her eldest sister, Beatrice, the family rebel, who lived in New York City with her second husband, a professional photographer. Beatrice was called Bappie, a name Ava bestowed on her when the youngster could not pronounce her given name. Bappie, nineteen years older than Ava, had movie stars in her eyes. When she won a pair of green shoes—once worn by movie star Irene Dunne!—in a charity auction, she gave them to Ava, who kept them on a shelf in her bedroom to look at, but never to wear.

Ava talked Mollie into letting her visit Bappie in New York during the summer of 1939. Bappie’s husband, Larry Tarr, took photos of the sixteen-year-old beauty and displayed one in his Fifth Avenue studio window as a sample portrait. A young clerk in MGM’s New York office saw the photo and—hoping for a date—pretended to be a talent scout for the studio. He inquired about the model’s name, and Larry Tarr used the occasion to send an array of photos to the MGM office. Ava soon found herself doing a screen test for the studio, including an audio sample, for Ava sang in the church choir and knew all of the old spirituals. She had a sweet singing voice, but her southern drawl was so heavy that few could understand her, so the technician sent the screen test to Hollywood—without audio. She can’t act, she can’t talk, said studio chief Louis B. Mayer after viewing it. She’s terrific. He rose to leave the screening. Give her to Gertrude and Lillian and let her have a year’s training, he said. Then test her again. A contract was issued. Beauty carried the day.

Milt Weiss, a young MGM publicist, and sister Bappie accompanied Ava on the train to Los Angeles, because that was how ladies traveled in those days, and that was what Mama wanted for her baby. When Bappie learned that Hedy Lamarr, MGM’s reigning goddess, would arrive on the same train, she proclaimed, That makes two movie queens on board!

*   *   *

The drinks were strong and the conversations lively at Ruth Waterbury’s home when Ava walked in on the arm of Milt Weiss. The publicist had called ahead and asked Ruth—the editor of Photoplay magazine—if he could stop by and show the new starlet off. Naturally, the moment Ava walked in, the party was ruined, Waterbury wryly recalled. The men were knocked speechless. They had never seen so much young beauty before, and I doubt if they ever will again. The women were kayoed, too, not only by Ava but also by the men’s reaction to her. Ava was shy, but knew how to be slightly flirtatious in her charming southern way. This was her first night in Hollywood, and she was learning to operate on a mixture of instinct, charm, and looks. Tomorrow would be busy, said Milt, and they made a quick exit. We were all relieved when Ava and the agent left, said Waterbury. But the conversations suddenly died. Everybody else left right after them. There was no putting that party together again.

*   *   *

No other lot in Hollywood knew a more spectacular and storied history than MGM, the celebrated real estate where The Wizard of Oz and most of the outdoor scenes in Gone With the Wind were filmed. It was where Myrna Loy and William Powell sipped martinis and walked their dog, Asta, where Katharine Hepburn met Spencer Tracy, where Judy Garland sang and danced down the yellow brick road. It was where Mickey Rooney said, repeatedly, Let’s put on a show! Here Mama’s favorite, Clark Gable, reigned as King of Hollywood for twenty-seven years.

The studio was a loose collection of buildings and soundstages, a self-contained entertainment factory that measured some five square miles in Culver City, south of Los Angeles, with its own police and fire departments, bank, post office, hospital with a physician and nurses on call, a swimming pool, commissary, a blacksmith’s shop, city streets, western scenes, several lakes, and a fifteen-acre jungle. There were dozens of lavish dressing rooms, bungalows for the big stars, and a little red schoolhouse for child actors. One longtime publicist who was a former circus barker kept four elephants—from his circus days—as pets.

MGM produced the biggest films, paid the biggest salaries, and grossed the largest revenues. Walking through the commissary in that vintage year of 1941, you could have seen, picking at their salads, Jimmy Stewart, Hedy Lamarr, Greer Garson, Lionel Barrymore, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Red Skelton, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Van Johnson, Marsha Hunt, Robert Benchley, Spring Byington, Gladys Cooper, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, and many others—including Louis B. Mayer, the founding father, who was in his fifties now, but still very much in power.

L.B. was a short, barrel-chested man with thin white hair, round glasses, and an owlish, gruff expression that someone said made him look like a small-town high school principal. At fifty-six, he still worked until 8:30 P.M., minimum, with three secretaries. His birthday, celebrated on the Fourth of July, was a real holiday on the lot, with a huge party and entertainment by some of the top actors in the commissary, an event that everyone was commanded to attend.

Mayer had come out of a Russian ghetto, and he felt a great debt to the America that had permitted him to grow so powerful. He fancied himself a guardian of American family values. His favorite product was the Andy Hardy movie series, idealized sagas of small-town life, with Mickey Rooney as the devilish but good-hearted kid, learning life’s lessons with his mom and pop and his wise old grandpa. L.B. truly believed the myth—and he loved the money it made for the studio, and for himself. At one million dollars a year, Louis B. Mayer was regularly named the country’s highest-paid executive.

His office was cavernous, about half as large as the lounge of the Radio City Music Hall, reported New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross. Mayer presided behind a huge creamy white desk covered with four creamy white telephones, overlooking a vast expanse of creamy white carpet. The walls were paneled in creamy white leather, and there was a bar, a fireplace, leather chairs, couches, and a grand piano, all creamy white. His desk, on a raised dais, was positioned so that the visitor, always looking upward, was made to feel like a recalcitrant child in the principal’s office. L.B. got the idea from Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia Pictures (the salt mine of studios), who got the idea from Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It made L.B. the prophet and all those sitting before him the disciples, said Jerry Lewis. A great device for his need to dominate.

Mayer insisted on absolute punctuality on the part of visitors, who had to be impeccably dressed. Men were required to wear a jacket and tie. Joan Crawford came from a set in a swimsuit and bathrobe, and was sent home to change. Most of Mayer’s top executives—Eddie Mannix, Benny Thau, and Sidney Franklin—were also short. Esther Williams, the gorgeous five-foot-eight swimming star, said that she felt like Snow White with the Dwarfs whenever she was in Mayer’s office for a meeting. A story, probably apocryphal, was told of a somewhat proper actress entering the office one day and asking, Don’t you usually stand when a lady enters the room? Madam, replied the diminutive L.B., I am standing.

Mayer was like a Jewish father (or mother, perhaps) who kept a vigilant eye on his film family. When Lana Turner’s nights on the town elicited the wrong kind of publicity, he summoned her to his office—and demanded that she bring her mother. In an emotional, disappointed tone, he told the young star that keeping late hours and making the papers endangered her wonderful future. He actually had tears in his eyes at one point, so I started crying, too, recalled Lana. Then L.B. jumped up and shouted, The only thing you’re interested in is… and he pointed crudely to his crotch.

How dare you, Mr. Mayer! said Lana’s mother righteously as they marched out. In front of my daughter!

Mayer was a micromanager, a stickler for details. One had to be a demagogue on little things if you wanted to have your way on the big things. He was also the best actor on the lot. He asked director John Huston to come to his house one Sunday for breakfast. A script in progress wasn’t what L.B. wanted. He told Huston about Jeanette MacDonald and how he had instructed her to sing Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life by singing the Jewish Eli, Eli for her. She was so moved, recalled Huston, that Mayer said she wept. Yes, wept! She who had the reputation of pissing ice water!

By way of demonstration, Mayer sang the song for Huston. Mayer said that if Huston could make the script into that kind of picture, he would crawl to the director on his knees and kiss his hand, which he then proceeded to do. I sat there and thought, this is not happening to me, said Huston, who left in a cold sweat, with Mayer’s words echoing in his ears: You can only try! Try, John! Try!

Nepotism ruled. Mayer’s relatives and friends of relatives were everywhere. George Sidney, who directed Ava’s screen test, was the son of Louis K. Sidney, pioneer producer and vice president of MGM. His wife was Lillian Burns, who worked in the drama department. Actress Norma Shearer’s husband, legendary producer Irving Thalberg, had died in 1936, but he was still an influence at the studio. Her brother Douglas was head of the sound department. We are a business concern and not patrons of the arts, said obsessive memo dictator David O. Selznick, who earned L.B.’s esteem (and his daughter Irene in marriage) by making two Westerns concurrently, with two scripts and two leading ladies, shooting all action material at the same time, making two of them for the price of about one and one-eighth, memo’d Selznick. Such stratagems advanced Selznick’s standing among producers, but it didn’t hurt that there was reportedly an inscription in the commissary men’s room: The son in law also rises. The studio was like a Jewish resort in the Catskills.

*   *   *

Shortly after Ava’s arrival, Milt Weiss took her for a tour, including a visit to the set of Babes on Broadway, where Mickey Rooney was dressed for his Carmen Miranda number, bedecked in a skirt, a fruit hat larger than his head, and platform-soled shoes, which added some height to his diminutive stature. When he espied Ava behind the cameras, it was lust at first sight.

She had narrow ankles, perfect calves, full thighs, a tiny waist, a bosom that rose like two snowy mountain peaks, an alabaster throat, a dimpled chin, full red lips, a pert nose, wide green eyes beneath dark, arched brows, a wide, intelligent forehead and chestnut-colored hair that looked as if it had been stroked a thousand times a night ever since she was old enough to handle a brush, he recalled approvingly in his memoir, Life Is Too Short. At lunchtime that day, as Ava walked into the studio commissary, Rooney told his cronies that he was going to marry that girl.

Rooney, two years older (and four inches shorter) than Ava, was the biggest box-office attraction in the world, and—at twenty—still a convincing teenager in the studio’s Andy Hardy movies. He was also a relentless womanizer—Lana Turner called him Andy Hard-on—and a regular at a brothel called T&M Studios, off Santa Monica Boulevard, where young women were made up to look like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, and other stars of the era.

When Mickey asked Ava for a date, though, she said no. He continued to pester, and she continued to turn down his requests. That only made me want her more, he said, not just so I could go to bed with her. I wanted to make her the mother of my children.

*   *   *

Ava drew a low salary, even by entry-level standards: At fifty dollars a week, plus acting, speech, and grooming lessons, she was a steal. Her salary was actually thirty-five dollars, because a clause in the contract gave MGM the right to stop payment for a twelve-week layoff period. If Bappie hadn’t come to Hollywood with me … and she hadn’t gone downtown and got a job at I. Magnin’s, we’d have starved to death, Ava later recalled. As it was, we lived in one crummy room with a pull-down bed, and a kitchenette as big as a closet. Film star! More like slave laborer.

There was no equity among the starlets in residence. Esther Williams—who had an agent—signed on, shortly after Ava’s arrival, for $350 a week. Of course, both lasses’ salaries paled beside the one thousand dollars a week that Lassie earned as top dog around the studio, where he was known as Greer Garson with fur.

Beyond salary inequities, contracts gave the studio the right to rule on all professional decisions in an actor’s life. The studio decided which film she or he would make, who else would be in it, who would produce and direct it. The studio had the right to loan an actor out to another studio for any film that the other studio wanted to make. The loan-out fee went entirely to MGM, which paid the actor his regular salary out of its profits on the loan.

The studios used promotional films and stories in cooperative magazines and newspapers to create an image of themselves as exciting workplaces, with wardrobe and makeup departments for pampering the stars in their dressing rooms or at tables in the commissary. It was like a big game of pretend. Except for the small handful of top stars, working at MGM was like being part of an assembly line in a robber baron factory where the product was pictures, as they were then called. Movie theaters in those days offered a double bill from Thursday to Saturday and another from Sunday to Wednesday. MGM supplied their chain of movie houses with four B movies—or program pictures—every week, along with the occasional big-budget picture. I don’t think you sat around just looking pretty at MGM, said Ava ruefully. They worked you hard eight until five.

Director Elia Kazan termed the men who created Hollywood marvelous monsters. He knew them all—Mayer and his enforcer, Eddie Mannix; B. P. Schulberg; the Warner brothers; Darryl Zanuck; Spyros Skouras; Harry Cohn; David Selznick; and Samuel Goldwyn. The front office and the producers had the power; the rest of the lot—writers, actors, directors, composers—were mere employees. The execs were responsible for artistic decisions, not the artists. They were industrialists, said Kazan.

Recruited from Broadway in 1946, Kazan arrived in Hollywood with high hopes. I’d be working at the greatest film studio in the world, he wrote, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the home ground of ‘more stars than there are in the heavens.’ I’d be a director among many famous directors whom I admired. I’d made it. Instead, he found himself dumped into a perfectly structured organization … an industrial compound where a relentless conveyor-belt style of productivity depended on a constant ingestion of new creative talent, but the artists counted for little or nothing apart from their ability to deliver the goods.

MGM movies originated on the lot—rarely on location—where the studio had a special large stage and staff for rear projection. The powerful art department designed, built, painted, and put up backgrounds for scenes that were staged, just barely directed. Other scenes were shot with a process screen behind the actors, showing moving traffic on a street so that it looked, unconvincingly, like they were traveling down it. This was the cost-efficient way that Metro made movies, with control of lighting and other conditions, no matter what time of year.

The cost-accounting cynicism at MGM was so thorough that the studio brandished it on the lion’s head logo, where the motto was Ars Gratia Artis, art for art’s sake, very loosely speaking. Spencer Tracy recalled producer/director Mervyn LeRoy, at lunch in the commissary, raving about a book he’d bought. It’s got everything, he said. Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But, he added, I think I can lick it.

*   *   *

The popular press exploited the Hollywood glamour game, and collected fat revenues for movie ads in their pages. Ava was part of the annual crop of what Life magazine, in a 1940 cover story, called the world’s most envied of girls. Starlets, usually discovered by roving talent scouts, had little or no acting experience. At all times they are told what to do, what to say, how to dress, where to go, whom to go with, reported the weekly. Only if they obey implicitly and only if, in addition, by some magic of beauty, personality or talent, they touch off an active response in millions of movie fans, will a few of them know the full flower of stardom, with its fabulous rewards of fame and wealth.

Of course, stardom could happen. Lana Turner was discovered, according to studio lore, as she sipped a soda in a Hollywood ice-cream parlor while cutting a secretarial class at her high school. This led to an interview with MGM director and producer Mervyn LeRoy, who began guiding her career. In her first movie, They Won’t Forget, Lana spoke not one line, and was murdered in the first reel. She removed her blouse beneath a skintight sweater, however, and jiggled along a street, thus becoming the original sweater girl. Stardom followed.

It was all beauty and it was all power, Lana explained. "Once you had it made, they protected you; they gave you stardom. The ones who kept forging ahead became higher and higher and brighter and brighter and they were stars. And they were treated like stars." The star system was big business. When the actor or actress didn’t personally own the appropriate clothes, the studio stepped in and provided what was needed to maintain the glamour and glitz—and protect its considerable investment.

Stars had drivers, bodyguards, and were accustomed to having assistants, valets, cooks, maids, servants, houseboys, secretaries, lackeys, toadies, hangers-on, all ready to run for cigarettes, speak only when spoken to, mind the pets, run for popcorn at previews, take notes, sign autographs (when no one was looking), bring the car around, do their hair, and answer their phones.

For every Lana success story, hundreds of starlets struggled for supporting roles; countless others never appeared in front of a camera. The studio was full of them, sexy young women who wanted to make it in Hollywood, said Mickey Rooney. Most often, he recalled, "Hollywood ended up making them because some of the women were there, first and foremost, as potential pussy for the executives at MGM."

The casting couch? It was real. Thanks to studio publicity, unknown starlets often became celebrities in their hometowns and would do almost anything rather than return home. L.B.’s office featured a private elevator for transporting secret visitors to the Mayer of Hollywood, who fell in love often. Benny Thau, the top casting producer at MGM, made directors cast the women he was sleeping with in their films. He couldn’t fire us if we said no because we had long-term contracts, said producer Gottfried Reinhardt, but we never wanted to alienate him. He was too powerful.

Elia Kazan said that the studio heads thought of every film they made, no matter how serious the theme, as a love story. Consequently, they cast by an elemental rule: Does the actress arouse me? I believe this rule of casting is not only inevitable but correct, and quite the best method for the kind of films they made, said the director. "The audience must be interested in a film’s people in this elemental way. If not, something