“The most evil man I have ever known”- Ava Gardner Ava Gardner with lover George C. Scott in 1965. Director John Huston introduced Gardner to Scott in Rome in 1964, when the two were cast as Sarah and Abraham in the director’s upcoming “The Bible: In the Beginning”. Ava said later, “If I had any female intuition at all, the mention of that name should have set off every internal alarm within earshot. Because the trouble that Abraham and Sarah were having on the biblical front was nothing compared to the storm between George and me that was about to break behind the scenes.” Initially, the relationship looked promising. The actress confessed, “I admit that I liked him immediately. He was smart and funny, but there was something odd about him.” She was about to find out just how “odd” he was. While Ava was known for her drinking, Scott was in a horribly different league. The actress said, “When he drank he became an animal. Most men, when they’re drunk, might at the very worst, slap you, but he was a sadist.” Scott subjected Gardner to horrific physical abuse, that resulted in her hospitalisation and near disfigurement. It was not just confined to the periods when the actor was intoxicated. In her posthumously published memoir, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations”, she recalled, "I was scared to death of him." On numerous occasions, Scott broke down the door of her hotel rooms, whether in Rome, London, or Hollywood, and beat her so severely that she was left "not only black-and-blue, but bleeding." During a particularly savage attack at London’s Savoy Hotel, Scott smashed furniture and bottles, threatened Gardner's assistant with the broken glass, and nearly killed the actress, attempting to strangle her and rendering Gardner unconscious. Though Scott was never arrested - Ava was too frightened to take action against him - the Savoy banned the actor for life because of his destruction of hotel property. When she tried to end the relationship, Scott attacked her again, and Ava cowered in a corner, sobbing. The situation became so dangerous that her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra, sent mob-affiliated hoodlums to threaten Scott and warn him off after another brutal assault at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Remarkably, Scott proposed marriage, but with Sinatra’s support, she succeeded in ending the relationship for good. Gardner said to friend of my parents, who was one of her confidantes, “I still have nightmares about him. He wasn’t normal. He was evil. He was the most evil man I’ve ever known.”