Ava Gardner quoted in ‘Ava: Life in the afternoon’
“Thank you for letting us join your table,” said the elegant brunette as she and two companions sat down at the other end of a table for six at a packed Italian restaurant, Via Carota, in New York’s Greenwich Village. If graciousness is ever unnecessary, this seemed one of those instances. The table in question was intended to be shared and tucked into a storeroom, crammed with cartons of wine bottles and extra chairs. I looked up at a woman with the Hollywood glamour of an earlier era. The friends I was staying with and I returned to devouring an exceptionally fresh dish of artichokes with mint, pecorino and orange. The delicious tuna I ordered was so piquant with chilli I imagined it was made by a rogue South Indian sous chef. A little while later, the best panna cotta dessert ever arrived at the table, unusually savoury with olive oil and sea salt. I stopped to talk to the chef, Jody Williams, praising the food and service effusively. “Not bad company, either,” she quipped, before seguing into a discussion with my friends about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s terrific acting in the BBC series The Honourable Woman and Jake Gyllenhaal’s last movie.
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Talk about sleep-walking through life: We had just shared a table with my favourite actor in Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal, the star of Brokeback Mountain and Southpaw, and his actress sister who had greeted us as they sat down and I had not even realised it. The problem is that Gyllenhaal now sports a beard (which he needed for Everest, a retelling of a 1996 ascent that ended in tragedy) whereas in my mind’s eye he is in perpetuity a baby-faced sheep herder in Brokeback Mountain. Moreover, at dinner, Gyllenhaal and his sister had been treated as if they were any of us by the waiters and Williams. In Greenwich Village, there are few breaches of etiquette more unforgiveable than seeming star-struck. Paranoid that I would gawk at Gyllenhaal, my host had consciously blocked my view of him. I felt a little cheated.
It turned out that Jake Gyllenhaal had just come from recording an interview with Stephen Colbert on the Late Night show on CBS. It is a hilarious star turn, with Gyllenhaal even agreeing to take a giant bite of a frozen cheesecake and insisting Colbert eat from the same spot on the cake where he left off. The Huffington Post breathlessly reported that anyone watching the episode would come away with a crush on the star. Gyllenhaal’s relaxed demeanour is matched minutes later by Apple’s Tim Cook, who almost buckles over with laughter at Colbert’s gags; a threat to impale him with a fondue fork if the then upcoming iPhone 6 required a new charger plug and a recording of Siri, the iPhone valet, demanding a raise. To watch the show that evening was to develop a crush on the informality of America.
My brief stop in New York, en route to a Jaipur Literature Festival event in Boulder, Colorado, was like being on a movie set rather than in a real city. An ex colleague and I had lunch with our chief of reporters in the late 1980s at Fortune magazine at a French bistro just steps away from Central Park, preening in the afternoon sun. I was platonically infatuated with her from my first job interview, thinking she looked like the actress Lauren Bacall. Twenty-five years after hiring us and now in her seventies, she refused to let us pay as if we were still cub reporters. A childhood friend and I met at the Museum of Modern Art and were drawn into a one-hour discussion on those prostitutes defiantly staring back at you in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I meet two former bosses of mine from my last job at ilili, a black and red fantasy of a Lebanese restaurant that was so jammed on a Monday night it seemed like a nightclub. The waiter’s solemn advisory that the restaurant recommended the Chateau Musar red we were drinking be decanted for 20 minutes was met with hoots of disapproval.
A week later, though, my host in New York and I were still weighed down by flashbacks of that dinner at Via Carota, wondering if we ought to have said something — anything — as we left the table. Was it rude not to, he asked? He had previously seen Gyllenhaal dining with the late Heath Ledger at another Italian restaurant and bizarrely wondered if that coincidence was worth bringing up. (Definitely not.) By then, I had read Rex Reed’s brilliant profile of Ava Gardner. It is a reminder that any encounter between a celebrity and a fan is over-burdened with unrealistic expectations. As infatuations go, this is the most unrequited of them all. Gardener refers to the fans waiting to mob her in the hotel lobby as “creeps” and dresses in mufti before taking the service elevator to avoid them. I recently watched a video of Gyllenhaal getting into his car after recording that Late Night show. Giddily boisterous on set minutes earlier, he went through the motions signing a few autographs, as sombre as someone at a funeral. It made me glad we had not spoiled the moment by talking to him at our shared table. There are times when a movie star just wants to eat spaghetti.