Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [189]
Everyone was smitten with her. Albert Lewin, recalled the cinematographer Jack Cardiff, “thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he used to just gaze and gaze at her. And we would shoot her, and he would say, ‘I want to do another close-up. Closer.’ And we would do that. And then he would say, ‘Let’s do another one. Different angle.’ Then one more, ‘Closer.’ And on and on like that.”
But her biggest admirer was the bullfighter: the rumors were true, kind of. His name was Mario Cabré, he was thirty-five years old, and he was a second-rate torero but a first-rate self-promoter. He was playing a bullfighter in the film, one of Ava’s suitors, and so he figured, why should fact not mirror fiction? He was instantly bewitched by her, but also saw her as his ticket out of Palookaville. To complicate matters, the MGM unit publicists were eager to promote a romance in order to distract the world from the grand opera of Gardner and Sinatra.
And then there was Ava herself, incessantly complicated. In her autobiography she is at great pains to dismiss Cabré as a mere nuisance:
Someone had passed on to him the concept that there is no such thing as bad publicity: if you want to be famous you’ve got to get into the headlines. And what greater opportunity could he have than an attempt to replace Frank in my affections? His motivation was cynical self-interest. His declamatory rhetoric about this great passion in his life, his love for me and mine for him, made headlines in Spain, America, all over the world, and that’s all he cared about. He gave interviews saying I was “the woman I love with all the strength in my soul,” wrote the most idiotic love poems imaginable, and then marched off to recite them at the American embassy in Madrid.
Initially, I suppose I thought this was vaguely amusing, and since we played lovers in the same film, no one was exactly encouraging me to come out and publicly say he was a nuisance and a jerk. But when he started to involve Frank in his shenanigans, saying he would not leave Spain alive if he came on that visit, Mario became a major pest.
It must be remembered, however, that Gardner dictated her memoir (to not one but three successive ghostwriters) toward the end of her life, when she was sick and the beneficiary of numerous gestures of goodwill, including money, from Frank Sinatra. In the spring of 1950, by the testimony of her colleagues on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, it was a different story: she was initially resistant, but then not so resistant, to the charms of the handsome torero. At first he was just a very good-looking Spaniard. But when he fought that bull, “it just got into her blood right away,” recalled the set dresser John Hawkesworth. “The excitement and the color and the drama of the thing, she loved it.”
Sinatra’s arrival, on the other hand—he landed in Barcelona on May 11—was an unwelcome surprise. Maybe he wanted to test her. If so, he found the true Ava: When he arrived in Tossa de Mar, she was off someplace with Cabré, and the crew had to distract Frank with a poker game until she could be found. Then she waltzed in, all smiles and wreathed in that perfume, and all his questions—Where had she been? What had she been doing?—evaporated.
“Oh, what a lovely surprise!” Ava exclaimed, at the sight of him. “Darling! How great!”
The next few days were a combination of melodrama and low comedy. Upon hearing of Sinatra’s arrival, the torero swore that he would kill the singer. Director Lewin had the good sense