Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [246]
I felt that unless you were prepared to devote practically all your time to your child in its early years it was unfair to the baby …
Not to mention the fact that MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies. If I had one, my salary would be cut off. So how would I make a living? Frank was absolutely broke and would probably continue to be (or so I thought) for a long time … [T]he fact that I was pregnant would be showing quite plainly long before [Mogambo] was finished, so Jack Ford had to be told for starters. I felt the time just wasn’t right for me to have a child.
The time would never be right. She was at best ambivalent and at worst terrified; the prospect of motherhood held no charms for her. As the adored and magically splendid baby of the Gardner family, she was the world’s child; there was no room in her life for others. (For all Nancy junior’s starry awe about her, Ava wasn’t always particularly friendly to Frank’s children.) And having a baby would change her body, and she knew where her bread was buttered. “I often felt,” Ava wrote, “that if only I could act, everything about my life and career would have been different. But I was never an actress—none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.”
It wasn’t just that she felt she couldn’t act. Usually she didn’t want to, much. “The truth is that the only time I’m happy is when I’m doing absolutely nothing,” she wrote in her memoir. “I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamned duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”
Nice work if you can get it. “Let’s put it this way,” Ava told Hedda Hopper before leaving for Africa. “I was going to be a secretary. But I’d rather be a star than a secretary … I’ll go along with acting so long as it gives me financial security.”
Oddly enough, though, she was having more fun making Mogambo than she’d ever had on a picture before. Ford was a great director, despite his surliness—or maybe because of it. He was a strange cat: a self-invented character and natural storyteller, obsessed with manliness (and perhaps a closeted homosexual), prone to the most outrageous verbal cruelties … It was said he was the only man who could make John Wayne cry. Ava was made of sterner stuff. She brought the director around, after he’d zinged her early on, by telling him to take that handkerchief he was always chewing—nervous habit—and shove it up his ass.1 That did the trick with John Ford. He put his arm around her shoulder, took her aside, and said, “You’re damn good. Just take it easy.”
Besides, the part she was playing, the tough and careless sexual firecracker pioneered by Harlow in Red Dust, was made-to-order for Gardner. “For someone with my naturally irreverent temperament,” she recalled,
playing a sassy, tough-talking playgirl who whistles at men, drinks whiskey straight from the bottle, and says about wine, “Any year, any model, they all bring out my better nature,” was a gift from the gods. I never felt looser or more comfortable in a part before or since, and I was even allowed to improvise some of my dialogue.
Ava sparkled in Mogambo. At the peak of her charm and beauty and wry elusiveness, she seemed, for the first time in her movie career, like the best possible version of herself on-screen. Even by her own account, she would never again be quite as good. No doubt the slightly sadomasochistic waltz she did with Ford—tension and release—helped her achieve that ease. It also didn’t hurt that the director was more than a little in love with her.
She was well aware of Ford’s devotion. But that didn’t make it any easier to tell him she wanted to leave the shoot after less than three weeks and have an abortion. He was a devout, if highly conflicted, Catholic; and this was, after all, the early 1950s. “Jack Ford tried quite desperately to talk me out of it,” she