Hollywood And Mallorca - Ava Gardner

Of the Hollywood greats who attached themselves to Mallorca in any particularly prominent fashion in the 1950s, Ava Gardner's greatness was greater than others. Unlike Errol Flynn, her star was still in the ascendant, her fame enhanced - sort of -by her marriage to Frank Sinatra. That marriage, her third and last, was her longest (six years). But it was as shaky as the two previous shorter marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw. Ava Gardner, member of Hollywood royalty, a renowned beauty and a femme fatale, separated from Sinatra after just two years of their marriage. They finally divorced in 1957, by which time Gardner had been living in Madrid, on and off, for six years. If Mallorca was able to shine with the glow of some Gardner stardust, Madrid was able to beam with headlights full on. But that - the glow from the stardust - was and is a myth.

It was said of Gardner that she drank Madrid for fifteen years (she moved to London in 1967) and that there was no man in Madrid who had not slept with her or who had not drunk in the same bar as Ernest Hemingway, with whom she was friendly. Just one of the stories about her time in Madrid involved the exiled former president of Argentina, Juan Perón. She lived above Perón in an apartment on the Calle Doctor Arce. He denounced her because of the noise from the parties that would take place night after night.

The Ava Gardner association with Mallorca began in 1955. In that year she visited Robert Graves in Deya for the first time. There was, and neither of them sought to deny it, a great deal of mutual attraction, but it went no further than that. In his poem "Not to sleep", Graves expressed how he felt and how insomniac he became when Ava came to stay: "Will she be wearing red, or russet or blue; Or pure white? - whatever she wears, glorious; Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy."

The relationship with Graves and his family should have afforded Gardner a Mallorcan reputation that was of a more sophisticated nature than that of Errol Flynn. Perhaps it did, but her Madrid reputation was not lost as she crossed the sea to the island. This said, while there are documented tales of Flynn and his drinking, a greater discretion has been shown towards Gardner, though as I noted in yesterday's article, Riki Lash has intimated that in addition to alcohol she was partial to the odd joint as well.

Gardner's Mallorca connection was, in truth, never that strong. Of tourist destinations, it is fair to say that Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava has made far more of a connection (there is a statue to her that overlooks the sea). It was here where Gardner first fell in love with Spain. She came to make the film "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" in 1950. James Mason was her leading man, and among the cast was a bullfighter-turned-actor called Mario Cabré. Stories of a romance between the two may only have been for publicity, but during the time she was filming she began to develop other passions, very Spanish ones - those for the bullfight and flamenco.

On the face of it, therefore, Gardner might have seemed ideal for giving a more positive image of Spain to the wider world. But that wasn't the case. Ex-president Perón was not the only one who objected to her partying. The regime was not exactly enamoured of her either. She represented everything that it rejected. Single, divorced, a drinker, a woman of questionable morals, she may have been a celebrity whose fame went round the world, but hers was not an image that the Franco regime craved. When Hemingway, one of her closest friends and allies and who was a regular visitor to Spain, committed suicide in 1961, her relationship with the regime became ever more tempestuous. The Minister for Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga, famously stood her up when she invited him for drinks. She wasn't to leave Spain until 1967, but as far as the regime was concerned, it would have been happy to have seen the back of her well before she did ultimately go.

There is a good deal of rewriting of history where these Hollywood greats and their Mallorcan promotional role is concerned. Gardner, for one, was never cultivated as some sort of "face" of Mallorca. The regime may have wanted Hollywood and the film industry to have helped it with its image, but this was help sought on its terms. Gardner and her reputation were not among those terms. She may have spread awareness of Mallorca among Americans, but as far as what were to become the key tourism markets, her involvement with Mallorca, together with Flynn and others, had negligible influence.

Hollywood And Mallorca

They've been remembering the time when Tarzan came to Mallorca just lately. He didn't swing in on some jungle vines and take up residence in a tree house atop a pine. He landed at the airport, no doubt sampled the produce of vines and settled for more comfortable accommodation, such as the hotel Taconera in Cala Ratjada. Tarzan was Johnny Weissmüller. He came to Mallorca on three successive summers - 1971 to 1973 - having first been invited, so it is said, by Errol Flynn.

Remembering is one thing, getting the remembrance right is another. Weissmüller certainly did come to Mallorca in the early 1970s, but as for the Flynn connection, well, the recollection has it that Weissmüller was invited in 1969, which would have been pretty difficult, as Flynn had been dead for ten years by then.

Weissmüller was one of numerous Hollywood stars who found their way to Mallorca in the 1950s and 1960s. It would appear that, unlike some others, he was a pretty much down-to-earth sort of a guy - not something you might have expected for someone who had spent almost his entire cinematic career up a tree. He would go out and meet the locals, even spending time with Sa Pobla's drum and cornet band. But if he hadn't been aboard the Flynn yacht that would typically navigate the summery waters of 1950s' Mallorca, he would, by comparison with others from Hollywood, have been something of a Johnny-come-lately.

Flynn was, to no small extent, responsible for this Hollywood interest, albeit his association with Mallorca was an accident. In 1950, en route to Gibraltar from Monte Carlo, bad weather caused him to seek safe haven, and he found it in Pollensa. He wasn't the first to be captivated by the island's north coast, and so for the remainder of that decade, he became a regular visitor. Flynn's yacht, "Zaca", was about as legendary as the man himself, and this yacht may or may not have had fellow Hollywood legends on board. Orson Welles, Ava Gardner (and maybe Weissmüller) were among those who supposedly joined Flynn on his cruises around the island.

Of these stars' links with the island, the best known are probably those of Ava Gardner because of her not infrequent stays with Robert Graves in Deya. But there is a lesser known story about Ava and Mallorca, and it is one to do with a singer who was big news in the 1960s, Johnny Valentino.

Johnny, who is still with us and still performing, met Gardner in Madrid. He met her and fell in love with her. To this day, however, he refuses to be drawn on what the full extent of their relationship may or may not have been. Johnny, by the way, acquired his stage name because he once lived in Peguera where a neighbour was Natacha Rambova, the one-time wife of Rudolf Valentino. 

Of Orson Welles, not a great deal is known of his association with Mallorca. He was far more intimately associated with mainland Spain. Welles's last film, "F For Fake", supposedly contains scenes shot in Mallorca, but there is no evidence that it did. Ibiza was used as a location.

What can be said of these Hollywood greats is that their relationships with Mallorca and Spain were not the product of the close ties between Hollywood and the wider cinema industry and the Franco regime which developed in the 1950s. Flynn, for example, just happened on Mallorca by chance and then chose it as a subsequent holiday destination. The links with Hollywood were far more formal and systematic than that.

When reference is made to Spain's economic miracle of the 1960s, it is often overlooked just how important American influence had been well before this. US foreign policy plus very specific commercial interests, such as those of American Express and Hilton Hotels, had been at work from the early part of the 1950s. And when the Franco regime looked for an influential means of propaganda, it found a willing accomplice in Hollywood, though it must be said that it was a relationship not without some reservations. The regime's Ministry of Information and Tourism believed that American film studios were "the sector most easily penetrated by Judaism and communism".

Nevertheless, the relationship was such that in 1959 the American film producer Samuel Bronston relocated his entire production operation to Madrid. He was responsible for "The Fall of the Roman Empire" and, more notably, "El Cid". The regime was so delighted with the latter that it was officially declared to be a film in the "Spanish national interest". 

Such epics were a long way from Johnny Weissmüller's output. His Tarzan days were years in the past. When he came to Mallorca in the '70s, he hung out with a drum and cornet band. He was still a star but that star had long waned.

Photo: Errol Flynn and "Zaca".