Mr. S Read Free Page B

probably made him hate Phillips even more. “Georgie Porgie, pudding n’ pie, kiss this girl and make her sigh,” Mia greeted me in a playful singsong voice, as if she hadn’t seen me for years, though I had just been with her at the Bel Air house that afternoon. I thought she was high, high as a kite. “Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,” she insisted, dragging me out to the floor while John Phillips went into the men’s room to smoke a joint, or do something stronger. “John won’t dance,” she complained.
    We danced for what seemed an eternity. I kept looking back to the men’s room to see when John was coming out, but he must have been having a wild time in there. Frank had never told me not to go out with Mia; on the contrary, he was grateful for what he called my “babysitting” her to keep her out of his orbit. And he never, ever spoke one bad word about her. But he never said anything good about her, either. At any rate, given the pending divorce, the scene at the Candy Store, innocent as it was, made me uncomfortable. Each dance felt as if it would never end. “Sunshine of Your Love.” “This Guy’s in Love with You.” “Love Child.” But when the DJ put on“Somethin’ Stupid,” the previous year’s number one duet by Frank and daughter Nancy, it was time to give up the floor. Mia didn’t see the humor, or the horror, of the situation. I’m not sure she was even aware what the song was. Finally, John Phillips returned, stoned and smiling. I left Mia in his hands and went out into the night. The air of Beverly Hills never seemed more refreshing.
    I went up to Sunset and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ava had had a wonderful time at the Count Basie concert and was in great spirits, unusual given her loathing of Hollywood and its denizens. She was so up that she insisted we go for a nightcap in what was then Hollywood’s lion’s den, the Polo Lounge of the hotel. This was the place with the banana leaf wallpaper and the Philip Morris midget and the telephones at every banquette, where, if you were anybody in the business, you had to be paged. The polo players like Darryl Zanuck and Howard Hawks who inaugurated the place were gone, but everyone else would come there. I hadn’t been in the Polo Lounge for nearly two years, since the big fight there where Frank’s friend Jilly Rizzo broke a phone over the head of a powerful local businessman who had asked Frank, Dean, and a crew of their friends to hold down their noise. As Ava and I entered, the lounge was crawling with lizards like Paramount studio head Bob Evans, another guy Frank hated, not least because he was the executive in charge of Rosemary’s Baby .
    Evans had even more women running through his house than Frank did. Because he and his brother were big Seventh Avenue garment tycoons, they had endless model connections on both coasts, and Bob was using them strategically to do sexual favors for everyone and rise to the top in showbiz. That night Evans was so surrounded with starlets that he didn’t even look up to notice Ava as we made our way to a back booth. He had been a bit player in Ava’s 1957 film The Sun Also Rises , and she had thought he was so miscast as a matador that she, Hemingway, and Tyrone Power all signed a telegram to Darryl Zanuck demanding that Evans be fired. Zanuck refused, issuing his famous command, “the kid stays in the picture.” Evans could deliver pussy, and pussy always trumped talent in Hollywood. Ava figured Evans still resented her and was ignoring her, gloating that now he was on top, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t have cared less. At forty-five, she was, for a Hollywood goddess, way over the hill, yet she was somehow relieved to be there, to be earning her living doing character parts rather than star turns. To her, acting was a job, not a passion. Now the heat to be fabulous was off. The paparazzi cameras had stopped clicking. The Bob Evanses of the world had stopped looking up.
    London was a fresh