Living With Miss G (36 page)

One among the bunch of films Miss G made in the seventies was
The
Cassandra Crossing.
I was with her in every movie or television film she made
in the seventies and eighties, indeed everything she did until the end of her life.
In between times I was spending a lot of time in Sacramento trying to build up a
hairdressing business I had started.

I think Miss G summed up her part in
The Cassandra Crossing
very well:
“I’m a middle- aged, very rich lady with a young lover who is a heroin addict
and a drug smuggler, a real nice type. I’m also married to an important, ruthless
arms-manufacturer who makes millions out of killing people. However, I don’t
love either of them. In this role, I’m not an emotional woman. I’m a realist. I just
play with men. I don’t take life or other human beings seriously.”

Miss G then gave one of her big grins and added, “Makes a nice change. In
real life, it’s always been the other way around, men taking me for a ride.”
The film was made in the Cinecitta Studios in Rome. They had built this
really beautiful mock-up of the luxurious express train there. And, as Miss G
was to spend weeks with Sophia Loren, Ingrid Thulin, Richard Harris, Lee
Strasberg, Burt Lancaster, and Lionel Stander, it was nice to be able to lounge in
first class carriages, have a drink and chat with old friends without having a
camera peering at you.
Sophia Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti was producing the picture, and even
though the drama aboard an express train had been done time and time again,
this one was quite original. A trans-European express was hurtling through
Europe and about to pass through Iron Curtain countries when a passenger fell
ill with a deadly and contagious virulent bacillus. Naturally there was a medical
genius aboard who was able to identify such mysterious diseases, even if he
can’t do anything about it. It now becomes very awkward when lots of people
become very sick and start to croak. Mainly nasties died, not many of the
goodies, and certainly not one of the major characters. Certainly no one in their
right mind would want to kill off Ava Gardner or Sophia Loren before we have
had a good look at them.
The tension was heightened when the train was shunted off into quarantine
in a very suspicious area of Poland, and all sorts of troubles began. All got over
their difficulties and ended up happily ever after. I mean, what are films made
for?
Miss G’s continual chant was, “Thank God for directors, cameramen, and
writers!” These were the props she relied on. Still, she almost dropped dead
when a couple years later she was cast as a television reporter and had to talk
directly to the camera in
City on Fire
.
“Rene,” she yelled, “as a movie actress you never, never, never look at a
camera. Now I’ve got to stare one in the face. In a movie, people say something
to you, and you answer them. That’s called dialogue. Now I’ve got to go on
yakking about all the disasters that happen in the city of Montreal without a cue
line to answer. I’ll never do it!”
I replied, “Miss G, you know you will.”
And she did.
First of all, she settled down with lots of dialogue with her co-stars Shelley
Winters and Henry Fonda. She was delighted with her first frontal attacks on a
camera. “They were wonderful,” she said. “They just prop up what you’ve got to
say on a card below the camera, and you just read it.” She began to laugh.
“Trouble was, I’d forgotten my glasses, so I had to learn the bloody lines after
all.”
That movie,
City on Fire,
and two others she made around the same time,
The Sentinel
and
Priest of Love
, were the last of what you might call “cinema
movies” that Miss G made before the television people got hold of her. In
February 1980 she appeared in
Harem
, an ABC Special Sunday presentation,
together with her old friend from
Mayerling,
Omar Sharif, and Sarah Miles.
Maybe it attracted a large audience. The only magazine ad I ever saw showed
Sharif resting on an oriental rug with a nubile harem girl in close proximity and
half a dozen others waiting their turn in the background.
In July 1980
The Smithfield Herald
in North Carolina featured a
photograph of Smithfield’s Mayor Kenneth B. Baker wearing an Ava Gardner
tee-shirt and signing his proclamation that August 2
^nd
be declared “Ava Gardner
Day.” This was to honor the 45 movies she had made, and the fact that she had
been born and spent her childhood years in the nearby rural Grabtown and
Brogden communities, and was therefore a local heroine. Miss G sent a letter of
thanks, along with her regrets that she could not be present for her special day.
She also sent all the home-folks her love.
In 1983 she flew back to Hollywood for the television recording of John
Huston’s Life Achievement Award presentation by the American Film Institute.
Miss G began referring to herself as a comfortably well-off old lady who does a
film now and then but is really far happier simply walking her dog.
She was pushed off that comfortable perch in 1985 when CBS-TV wanted
a big name in its nighttime TV soap opera,
Knott’s Landing,
to compete with
stars Joan Collins and Linda Evans on other primetime soaps.
Why not?” Miss G said. “Everybody is watching
Dallas
or
Dynasty,
so if I
don’t do it now I never will.” So off we went to the CBS studios in Los Angeles
for a three-month stint. At $50,000 a program, her business manager had
brokered a good deal.
At first she was scared out of her wits. “Rene, you know how much I rely
on a director, sticking to his coattails, getting to know him. Jesus! Here they use
a different director for every episode!”
Her television part was Ruth Galveston, wife of billionaire Paul Galveston
whom she married on his deathbed, thus inheriting his dough. She was a hard,
ambitious woman, and
Knott’s Landing
producer Larry Kasha was not only
surprised, he was enthralled. “She’s just wonderful,” he said. “I can’t get over it.
She’s professional, knows her lines, is very respectful, and very prepared. I love
her. She is nothing like the star thing you always hear about. She really is an
actress.”
I could have told young Larry that Miss G had been behaving like that
through all her film career.
She was still nervous. “Christ!” she said, “In one of those episodes, I forgot
every line I was supposed to say. No one’s going to offer me another job after
this, I promise you. I look like hell among those babies.”
She was talking rubbish. She looked great among “those babies.” What’s
more, those babies both loved and respected her, and CBS was very interested in
expanding her part and keeping her on in the series. They too had caught onto
the idea that, unlike old soldiers who just “fade away,” a great star like Miss G
just keeps on getting better and better.
Figures of a million dollars for Miss G to continue with the series were
now making headlines. But Miss G had made up her mind. Seven episodes of
Knott’s Landing
were enough. She missed London, and she missed her dog,
Morgan. Besides, she had already been penciled in for another monster
television film.
I have a pretty good idea that when NBC started running the Biblical telefilm
A.D.
in March 1986, twelve hours of it spanning five consecutive nights of
glorious color, a lot of people changed channels.
Miss G played Agrippina, ambitious mother of the crazy Nero and seducer
of Emperor Claudius, but as everybody in the five-part series was either
slaughtered, raped, whipped, crucified, or annihilated in some manner, seduction
seemed only one of the more civilized sins.
It covered the decades after Jesus’ death but introduced events with Old
Testament history, then chunks of the Gospel according to St. Luke delivered
practically verbatim, and rumbled on through a string of loony Roman
Emperors.
It employed thirty-three famous actors and 350 others with additional
speaking parts. To film it Producer Vincenzo Laabella rented a section of
Tunisian desert to erect his magnificent fake palaces. It cost 25 million dollars.
It was an epic. A big, dumb, colorful epic. As one critic observed, much of its
dialogue seemed like unfathomable Shakespeare. No one really cared. No one
had the stamina to care. But it will probably be repeated at Easter for years to
come.
Miss G and everybody involved with
A.D
. enjoyed it, and everybody got
paid.
After
Knott’s Landing
and
A.D
., Miss G was seen by television producers
as a considerable asset. She avoided most offers, but she agreed to play in the
four-hour television movie of William Faulkner’s
The Long Hot Summer
. Her
business agent had first sounded Miss G out about the movie. “They want you to
play Jason Robards’ mistress,” he said.
“Mistress!” yelled Miss G. “Mistress! I’m old enough to be a motherly old
wife by now.”
“Mistress,” her agent repeated firmly. “One hundred and sixty thousand
dollars.”
“I’d be anybody’s mistress for that,” said Miss G.
It was a lie. Miss G only did what she wanted to do, and the money could
go hang. She was intrigued with the idea of playing with these two young
television upstarts, Don Johnson of
Miami Vice
fame and Cybill Shepherd of
Moonlighting.
And especially with one of her favorite stars, Jason Robards.
But Miss G also did it because not only did she like Faulkner and the cast,
but she especially liked the young director Stuart Cooper, who had spent three
years arranging and directing
A.D .
and with whom she got along so well.
Cooper also adored Miss G and lectured reporters about her peerless qualities:
“You know this old saying that some people have this affair with the camera
lens and some people don’t. Well, Ava has it. I’ve never seen an actress throw
dialogue away the way she does. She says the line and says it with the right
inflexion and absolute accuracy. She says it and gets rid of it. Then she plays
between the lines. She plays the subtext.”
I could have informed young Cooper that at the age of sixty-two Miss G
had served a very long apprenticeship, but I guess he knew that already. He went
on: “It’s there in her eyes and that’s what the camera picks up. Her walk; I’ve
never seen an actress walk across a set the way Ava does. I mean she has a
magical walk. Where she gets it, I don’t know, but no one I’ve ever seen can
move so gracefully from A to B and with this kind of erotic quality.”
That young Cooper! He was a real sharp perceiver.
Still, the world had changed. Before production began Miss G said, “Rene,
remember how we used to look at those actors and producers and say, “But they
are so old! How times alter. Now we look and say, ‘Jesus, they are just kids!’
About time we thought of quitting.”
We did quit, but not in the way Miss G had imagined.
We started off filming
A Long Hot Summer
in Thibodaux, Louisiana, about
eighty miles southwest of New Orleans. It was Cajun and Bayou country,
swamp country, big wide black rivers, mosquitoes breeding, millions of
nameless bugs trying to grab a bite. Alligators with noses above the water
waiting for a bigger bite. Country dotted with those romantic plantation
mansions. White pillars like in
Gone With the Wind.
Feathery moss hanging
from the trees. Accents like thick cream.
When we arrived we found they had already been filming and were behind
schedule, so we were marooned with nothing to do in a motel for a few days.
Miss G made valiant attempts to stay healthy. There was a pool, and she swam a
lot, walked and played tennis. She found the climate and the humidity very
trying. A lot of bugs bit her. In fact, she always swore she caught some disease
down there, but no one will ever know whether that was true or false.
Miss G did what was required of her, and then the unit moved north to
Marshall, Texas, which is only about twelve miles across the border from
Louisiana. More location and filming, and I had a feeling that Miss G was
suffering.
Stuart Cooper was pushed hard by his shooting schedule. His Hollywood
producers had promised him eight weeks shooting and then screwed him down
to thirty seven days. He was not pleased at all when one of them told him, “It’s
only television. It doesn’t matter.”
Cooper reported hotly, “I told the producer, I don’t care if it’s only going
to be shown on a two-inch postage stamp. It’s going to be the best!”
At the end of the film he was still enthusiastic about Miss G. “She had so
little to do in
A Long Hot Summer
,” he said. “I wish the part had been bigger,
something that she could really get her teeth into, because when you have
someone like Ava Gardner around, you want to let her go, let her paint. The
stuff we are talking about is so intangible. There is a diamond there. It is special.
It can’t be taught, and you can’t learn it. You either have it or you don’t.” He
could have been writing Miss G’s epitaph.
Miss G had “it” all right. She was born with it. Her performances on the
screen were exactly the same as they were in real life. As she always said, she
could not act, she could only be herself.
In the closing stages of the film Miss G began to crack up. “Rene, I have
got to get out of this or I’m going crackers. I’m feeling terrible.”
I said, “Miss G, there is only a couple more weeks to go.”
“Rene, I can’t stand it here. I want to go home. I want out of this part. Do
you think Stuart will understand?”
“Sure he will, but he won’t be able to do anything about it. It won’t be his
decision. It will be the producers back in Hollywood.”
This was the very first time that Miss G had ever tried to pull out of a job. I
couldn’t understand it, but she was dead serious. “Anyone can play this part,”
she said. “Anybody can fill in.”
I did not like to remind her that she had already played a lot of the part and
nobody could fill in. I said, “Why don’t you ring the agent? See if he can do
anything.”
She did and came back with this report: “They won’t budge. He says why
don’t I try and talk to them myself.” She did. When she put down the phone, she
turned to me, her expression hopeless. She had been told, “Miss Gardner, I’m
very sorry. We are not buying your talent; we’re buying your name. At this point
in the film to replace you would be very expensive and very difficult.”
I said, “Let’s ask Stuart if he can speed your part up.”
He did, and we were out of there within a week and back in Hollywood.
Miss G said she was still feeling “off.” She flew back to London. I went back to
my hairdressing salon in Sacramento. It was more than two weeks before she
rang me. That was strange, since she often was on the phone damn near every
day.
“Are you all right, Rene?” she asked.
“Sure, aren’t you?”
“Well, I am now, but Jesus, I’ve been sick as a dog. No, twice as sick as a
dog.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Miss G explained, “I had hardly got back to the flat when I woke up in the
middle of the night with a thick horrible rash that you wouldn’t believe. Long
red streaks and welts all over my body from head to toe. Can you believe? From
head to toe, some of them the size of my finger! My face was swollen. I looked
a wreck. I called Carmen (she was Miss G’s new maid) and she didn’t know
what it was. Poor thing, why should she? I was itching, itching all over, in my
hair, on the bottom of my feet, all over. God, it was awful! So I called the
doctor. Yeah, in the middle of the night. They do that sort of thing in England.
He rushed around because I told him I was certainly dying of some terrible
disease. I almost screamed at him, saying, ‘I thought a kidney stone was the
worst pain I could have, but this worse.”