The Divine Ava Gardner
AVA GARDNER was, in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, a movie star of the old-fashioned kind, who married big fish like Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, led a passionate, tempestuous life, made a powerful impression even on people she only met for a short time, and suffered when she was not in love. She was warm to her friends, frosty to her enemies, and saw things that other people didn’t see.
Ava was born in Grabtown, North Carolina in 1922, among towns like Pine Level, Four Oaks and Smithfield. She was the youngest of seven children of Jonas and Molly Gardner. Jonas was a sweet, quiet cotton and tobacco farmer. Ava loved him deeply, and felt safe in his company, happy to be his daughter. He had a sister named Ava, so he didn’t call his daughter Ava; he called her “Daughter” and she loved that.
But Jonas Gardner lost his land and became a sharecropper. He died in 1938 when Ava was 15 or 16. Ava knew the local preacher and tried to get him to come to her father’s bedside and say a prayer for him, but the preacher never came. After that, Ava was done with religion, or certainly with the Christian church. Molly Gardner ran a series of boarding houses; by 1943, she was dead, too, of a uterine cancer which Ava worried would strike her, too.
By the age of 13, Ava Gardner was strikingly beautiful, with sleek black hair and green eyes. She was a tomboy who liked to go barefoot. She never had a fantasy life, as so many actresses do as girls, never imagined herself as a queen or a duchess, or anything but what she was. She thought of her beauty as the result of “dumb luck, biology and North Carolina mud.” Her schooling, in Wilson County, was spotty and she was shy in certain ways — yet also fearless and audacious. Men came around; she liked them strong but refused to be possessed by anyone.
In 1941, when Ava was 18 and training to be a secretary, she visited her older sister Bappie in New York City. Bappie’s husband, Larry Tarr, was a photographer with a small studio. Larry Tarr posed Ava in a print dress and a straw hat, and put the picture in the studio window.
A man walked by on the street, and liked the picture. He worked for Loews, which owned M-G-M. He stepped into the photo studio and claimed he was an M-G-M talent scout and could get a screen test for the girl in the picture in the window. That wasn’t true; he was just trying to wangle a date with Ava. Ava wouldn’t go out with the guy.
But Larry Tarr figured, ‘What the hell?’ and sent the photo to M-G-M — and, before long, M-G-M offered Ava a screen test in New York.
The M-G-M people said, ‘Walk toward this movie camera… Now, turn and walk away. Rearrange these flowers for us.’ They wanted to see if her beauty came through the camera; if she could take direction; and if her gestures were sure and natural. When Ava tested well, M-G-M gave her a seven-year contract. It started at only $50 dollars a week, but still. She packed a cardboard suitcase and left for Hollywood.
M-G-M set her up with a speech coach who told her to lose her thick North Carolina accent. The word “on” sounded like “own” when Ava said it, and “oil” came out “oh.” “Talking” sounded like “TOE-ucking” and “stayed” was “stied.”
She was in a number of good movies — but never a great one. She kissed George Raft in “Whistle Stop” (1946) in a way that made millions of men sigh and wish they could be kissed by a girl like that.
Director John Huston saw “Whistle Stop” and cast Ava as the femme fatale Kitty Collins in “The Killers” (1946). Huston was fascinated by an “earthiness bordering on the roughneck” which he felt Ava was trying to conceal. She played her part well and told a bad guy with just the right teasing menace, “You touch me and you won’t live till morning.”
It was the era of the “femme fatale” — Mary Astor in “The Maltese Falcon,” Gene Tierney in “Leave Her To Heaven,” Rita Hayworth in “Gilda.” These were beautiful women, mysterious and dangerous, playing strong men off against each other, screen sirens luring men to their death, as the sirens of Greek mythology had lured sailors onto the rocks where their ships and lives were wrecked.
In real life, Ava still liked her men strong. She once said of John Ford who directed her in “Mogambo”: “The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!” She was blunt, profane, and took as lovers Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, John Huston, Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, Robert Mitchum, and George C. Scott. Scott beat her up several times when he was drunk. Howard Hughes once made her so angry she knocked HIM out by hitting him in the head with a paperweight.
She married three times. The first marriage came in 1942 when she was only 19 and she married Mickey Rooney. It was a smart marriage from a career standpoint; Rooney was an A-list actor, making big money with the Andy Hardy movies. Ava would see more and better scripts as Mickey Rooney’s wife than as a single.
But on the human level, the marriage was awful. Since Mickey Rooney was supposed to be about 16 years old in the Andy Hardy movies, M-G-M didn’t want anyone to know he was married, so the ceremony was held virtually in secret. Rooney had constant affairs with other women. Ava always felt his problem was that he was 5'2.” Other men towered over him, and he felt he had to compulsively prove his virility.
Rooney was completely thoughtless toward Ava. Once, she came home from the hospital after getting her appendix out, and found another woman’s hairpins in her bed. Mickey would take Ava to a nightclub, then leave her alone at a table for hours while he sat in on drums with the house band. After a year of marriage, Ava divorced Mickey Rooney.
In 1945, she married again, becoming the fifth wife of Artie Shaw, the jazz clarinetist, composer and bandleader. Shaw had amazing musical gifts, and Ava was impressed that he read a lot and knew a great many books well. But he’d been badly scarred as a child by a scornful father, a difficult mother and cruel anti-Semitism. Artie Shaw was narcissistic and explosive. He didn’t seem able to give or receive love, he tried to control and manipulate his wives, and he boasted about a string of lovers, then raked them over the coals in retrospect. Betty Grable was a lover Shaw wrote off as “rather — coarse.” Of Ava Gardner, Shaw would say: “Her beauty ruled her.”
Shaw knew that Ava was touchy about her childhood poverty. When she took off her shoes and curled up on a couch, he might scream: “You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now!” He introduced her to successful writers like S.J. Perelman, William Saroyan and John O’Hara — then told her to keep her mouth shut and listen when he was talking to them.
Ava screamed right back at Artie. (She sometimes said, “When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace.”) They divorced in 1946 — another one-year marriage. Afterward, Ava took an IQ test just to prove to herself that Artie had been dead wrong when he told her she was stupid.
By 1949, she’d moved on to Frank Sinatra who had passion and anger to match hers. Life with Frank was never dull, not a single day, not a single evening.
On their very first date, she and Frank got drunk together, drove out of Palm Springs and into the California desert. Arriving in the town of Indio, they took a couple of .38’s from Frank’s glove compartment and started shooting up the town — streetlights, storefronts. Ava knew it was wrong, but for the rest of her life she chuckled at the memory. You never knew what would happen when you spent an evening with Sinatra.
In 1951, Ava married Sinatra — her third and final marriage. She also talked to Harry Cohn on Sinatra’s behalf, helped her husband get a part in the film “From Here to Eternity.” Sinatra made the most of it; he won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. By 1953, his voice had recovered, too and he released “Songs for Young Lovers” and in 1954 “Swing Easy.”
But things were not swinging with Frank and Ava. If she loved him, she also hated him. Frank absolutely wanted to possess and dominate Ava, and she fled from that behavior. Nelson Riddle once said: “Ava taught him how to sing a torch song. She taught him the hard way.” In 1957, Ava divorced Frank. It struck her that all three of her husbands had been gifted, stubborn only children, indulged by stardom and allergic to compromise.
To Sinatra, Ava was the love of his life, his grand passion, the one who got away. The two of them splitting up never made sense to him. It was wrong, unfair. Deep in her heart, he was sure Ava still loved him. Frank had a lot of charm, a lot of friends, a lot of talent, time and money to invest. Ava had never married again. Somehow, Frank was sure he’d find a way to get Ava back in love with him again.
Ava kept in touch with Sinatra through the years, but she also kept her distance. Whenever Frank saw Ava, he was desperate to get back with her, and she could see and feel it, and taste it if she let him kiss her. Ava thought of Frank Sinatra as a gifted, wayward son, someone to take in, to be kind to, but wary of. She knew she’d been right to break up with this tormented man.
Yet, whenever she got in trouble, Frank was the one she went to, knowing he’d do anything to protect her.
Ava moved to Madrid, spent time with writers and had affairs with matadors. If someone from Hollywood showed up wanting her to do a picture, she expected them to take her out on the town a few times to help her make up her mind. She wanted Hollywood to know that she didn’t need Hollywood.
In 1964, she made her last good movie — Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana” directed by John Huston. She played Maxine, a handsome, volatile woman in her late 40’s, sparring with a more well-bred woman, played by Deborah Kerr, for the love of the alcoholic ex-clergyman played by Richard Burton.
Burton and Kerr accepted the roles as soon as Huston offered them but Ava insisted on being wooed. She led Huston and his producer, Ray Stark, on a merry nighttime chase through the gin joints and flamenco clubs of Madrid.
While making the picture, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, she had two Mexican boyfriends, and did a lot of waterskiing. Huston encouraged her to talk like North Carolina, and she did.
Ava smoked Winston cigarettes — often three packs a day — and got emphysema from all of her smoking. She also had an auto-immune disorder. She lived on a handsome square in London, at 34 Ennismore Gardens. “Fortress Gardner” she called it, and it had iron grilles over the windows and a false name on the door. It was the home of someone who was all done making films and did not want attention.
So Peter Evans, an English journalist, was surprised when Ava asked him if he would help her write a memoir. He came to her home, passed by the big framed photo of Frank Sinatra in the foyer. Evans asked Ava, ‘Do you really want to do this? If so, why?’ Ava had always been averse to publicity about her private life. She’d been preyed on by journalists who wrote for scandal sheets. Her relationship with journalists had been adversarial, as Sinatra’s had been. So why the change?
She told him she was disturbingly low on money. She said, “I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I’m kind of sentimental about the jewels.” So Peter Evans and Ava Gardner began to meet. Ava would tell rambling stories, as Evans took notes. He was struck by how strongly she still felt about Sinatra. (“I miss Frank. He was a bastard. But, Jesus, I miss him.”)
It wasn’t an easy business for her to recall her life, or to decide what she would allow in the book. It was exhausting to exhume the tangled past unless she could laugh about it. One day she told Evans: “I’m so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner.” Sometimes she would tell Evans a story and then say he could use that only “when I’m pushing clouds around.”
Then one day she abruptly said there would be no book. Evans never found out why. It’s quite possible that Sinatra asked her how much money she needed and then sent it to her, on condition that she abandon the memoir. That would have been like Sinatra.
When Ava died in London in 1990, of pneumonia, she was 67 years old. Her body was brought back to North Carolina, and she was buried in the Sunset Park Cemetery in Smithfield. Her jewelry, costumes, photos and various ephemera ended up in the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield.
She acted quite capably in films like “Mogambo” (1953) and “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954). It’s entertaining to see her bawdy character in “Mogambo” run circles around Grace Kelly, playing a fine, uptight lady.
But no movie ever fully caught how lovely, how bewitching Ava Gardner was in real life. In “One Touch of Venus” Ava played a classical statue of Venus which comes to life — but the film never comes to life. “The Barefoot Contessa” had a great entrance for Ava, playing a Spanish dancer in Madrid. But the movie doesn’t hold together, and some of her other films, like “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” are awful. In 1953, she went sleepwalking through her part of Guinevere in “Knights of the Round Table.”
Ava never pressured Hollywood directors or producers for a certain kind of role, for that certain role that she could have made famous. If Hollywood didn’t know how to best use her talents, Ava didn’t quite know what to make of herself, either.
She was a much more captivating presence in life than, say, Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart. But in the film “All About Eve,” Bette Davis found in the role of Margo Channing the perfect vehicle for expressing herself. In “Casablanca,” Bogart found in Rick Blaine a role more compelling than he ever was in real life.
It’s a pity that Ava Gardner never found her own personal “All About Eve.”