Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck in East Side, West Side, 1949
In 1949, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” released one of its typical productions. Based on a soap-opera-ish novel by Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side put MGM’s assets on show: Cyd Charisse (in a non-dancing role), Nancy Davis (soon to be Mrs. Ronald Reagan), James Mason (at his most suave), and Gale Sondergaard and Van Heflin (both Oscar winners). The headliners were Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner, appearing together for the first and only time. They portrayed the two women in Mason’s life, wife (Stanwyck) and lover (Gardner), and they were given a single scene to confront the situation. Stanwyck, the elder of the two, has the larger role of a wealthy Park Avenue woman: chic, well-mannered, cultured. Gardner gets the showier part as a trashy babe (a role Stanwyck might have played in her younger years).
Gardner, dressed in stark white with suitable cleavage, roams around the room like a restless tiger. She does most of the talking, warning Stanwyck that Mason will be available “only when I don’t want him…. I’ll call him and he’ll come running.” She tells Stanwyck to watch out because she knows men. Stanwyck stays calm. She doesn’t move a muscle, standing ramrod straight in a prim suit, matching hat and gloves, and double strand of pearls. When they are done deciding Mason’s fate (the female prerogative), Stanwyck sweeps confidently out the door, and then, alone and rattled, she starts to cry. This was Stanwyck’s famous trump card, her ability to make a rapid shift from tough to vulnerable. This was what you once got for your money from Hollywood: glorious junk enlivened by two fabulous and unique stars who knew what an audience wanted from them and who earned every cent they were paid.
Moviegoers had little trouble believing that Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck might fight over a husband. Gardner’s next movie in 1949 was The Bribe, and it costarred her with Stanwyck’s real-life second husband, Robert Taylor. Very quickly, Gardner and Taylor, two of the most beautiful people in movies, were having a hot romance. “Our love affair lasted three, maybe four, months,” Gardner wrote in her autobiography, Ava: My Story, adding that it was “a magical little interlude.” (What Stanwyck thought about it went unrecorded.) East Side, West Side’s conflict between wife and lover mirrored the conflict between the same two women off-screen. Here lies a challenge for the movie-star biographer: Where does East Side, West Side end and real life begin? It’s difficult for anyone to know, sometimes including the stars themselves.
Gardner went on to write her book with new ghosts (Alan Burgess and Kenneth Turan). It was published in 1990, shortly after her death that same year. Evans (who himself died in 2012 before the publication of this second book) reconstructed these “conversations” out of his notes from their meetings, his research (such as it was), and his recordings of their late-night telephone calls (taped without Gardner’s knowledge). His book is shameless but highly entertaining. He’s selling everybody’s idea of who Ava Gardner was—boozy and bawdy and beautiful—with a book cover that shows her in black underwear and fishnet stockings.
Evans claims to be giving us the “real” Ava Gardner because of his “secret” conversations. As proof he wasn’t bought, he includes negative comments from people who knew Gardner. Dirk Bogarde warns, “She will eat you alive.” Writer Peter Viertel says, “You’ll have to fight her all the way.” Gardner herself gave him fair warning: “It’s my fucking life. I’ll remember it the way I want to remember it…. I’m not asking for a literary masterpiece.” However, the Evans portrait is still the Gardner image we know, a cross between her roles as the playful “Honey Bear” in 1953’s Mogambo and the earthy Maxine in Night of the Iguana (1964). She’s sassy, capricious, seductive, unpredictable, and funny. She recalls, for example, her life touring with Artie Shaw’s band before she became his fifth wife:
I was still as happy as Larry traveling with the band, hanging out with Artie and his literary pals. Guys like Sid Perelman, Bill Saroyan, John O’Hara. They were all bright, funny, interesting guys.
Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. I was happy to do that. I was comfortable with all those guys. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. “You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now,” he’d scream. He had a real phobia about me and tobacco fields.
In Evans’s book she’s her own version of Norma Desmond, more wacky than demented, but not at all confused about what Evans wants from her and why.
By contrast, Victoria Wilson (vice-president and senior editor at Knopf) tries to find the real person. In 1,044 pages, the first of two volumes, she takes Barbara Stanwyck’s life and career only as far as 1940. Wilson spent fifteen years doing in-depth research, interviewing people who knew and worked with Stanwyck, and watching every film she made. She wants to tell the complete story of Stanwyck in the historical setting of her times.
Instead of illuminating Stanwyck, the historical commentaries tend to distance her, even diminish her. She almost becomes a supporting player in her own story, sandwiched among details about the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1934 failed campaign for governor of California by Upton Sinclair, Hollywood’s labor troubles, the rise of Hitler to power in Europe, etc., etc. In trying to lift Stanwyck out of a typical “star image” bio, Wilson nearly goes aground, but ultimately her book succeeds in several different respects: her fresh material on Stanwyck’s early years; a thorough understanding of the studio system; a deep appreciation for Stanwyck on film; and her awareness of Stanwyck’s independence, which allowed her to avoid typecasting.
In her first decade, by the time of Union Pacific in 1939, Stanwyck had played “midwestern farm women, New England factory girls, Park Avenue society women, business owners, prisoners, con artists, missionaries, mistresses, generals’ daughters, gamblers, wives, mothers, and sluts.” Wilson traces Stanwyck’s career, crediting the directorial skills of Frank Capra for first discovering her cinematic talent, as well as William Wellman, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, and Preston Sturges, whose script for 1940’s Remember the Night “released her” into comedy, which “lightens her” because she could “play the nuance.” Wilson describes movie plots in detail and eloquently defines Stanwyck’s acting strengths: “She was able to use her shoals of loss and regret, her feelings of being…the outsider…to create women on the screen whom audiences admired and knew to be true.” (Andre de Toth, who directed Stanwyck in 1947’s The Other Love, called her “the softest diamond in the world.”)
Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck were separated by fifteen years in age, and arrived in Hollywood more than a decade apart. Although both were famous stars, neither ever won a competitive Academy Award. (Gardner was nominated once for Mogambo and Stanwyck four times, for Stella Dallas, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, and Sorry, Wrong Number. She received an honorary Oscar in 1982 for her “unique contribution to the art of screen acting.”) Both were at the top during the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, but one difference between them is fundamental: Ava Gardner was a product of the “star machine” and Barbara Stanwyck was not.
Gardner, from a not very well off but stable North Carolina family, arrived in town with a minimum of security and no acting experience, but was fed into a system that might be expected to take care of her if she behaved. Stanwyck, coming from a hardscrabble background in New York, arrived from Broadway with the security of a contract and solid experience, but took up her career independently and never let anyone own her.
Gardner’s security came with a price. Unable to pick and choose, she was assigned pedestrian films she had to carry (The Great Sinner in 1949, My Forbidden Past in 1951). She wasn’t given many opportunities to grow as an actress. The studio didn’t need that from her, and because of her spectacular looks, she presented something of a casting problem. Who would believe Ava Gardner as a nun, or a rocket scientist, or a neglected working girl in a tuna cannery? She was born to grab the spotlight, and having shaped her image as “a magnificent animal” (her billing for The Barefoot Contessa, 1954), Hollywood was content to present her that way.
Gardner became resentful and restless, and began to carouse, have affairs, and create problems. She didn’t care if she caused a scandal, particularly when she took up with the married Frank Sinatra and became the most famous “other woman” of her time. Ironically, it was easy for her studio to fuse this off-screen behavior to her on-screen persona, and the role of “Ava Gardner,” bad-girl-good-time-gal-sex-symbol, became an unbreakable image.
Stanwyck’s independence meant that she could negotiate her films and salaries, but she had to accept that she had no priority in any studio’s plans for casting. She lost significant roles as a result, such as the lead in Dark Victory (1939), which went to Bette Davis. Wilson points out that a studio “would have steadily built her up picture after picture,” as MGM did with Gardner, but Stanwyck didn’t want that: “She found it a constraint.” Stanwyck had to fight to get good films, but she had her own supporters, including her first husband, Frank Fay (an established born-in-a-trunk performer), a shrewd agent, Zeppo Marx (the fifth Marx brother), and particularly director Frank Capra, who saw what she was capable of and who guided her in four of her earliest films. As curator of the Frank Capra Archives, I spent many hours talking to Capra about his career, and Stanwyck was a subject he loved. A great admirer of her talent, discipline, and professionalism, he always stressed that since Stanwyck was never owned by a single studio for any length of time, no specific image was created for her. She had to create her own.
Both Stanwyck and Gardner knew Hollywood for what it was. Gardner kept the cheap coat she wore when she first arrived to remind herself where she came from. She preferred to hang out with nonprofessionals and lived as simply as she could. (“I’ll go on living according to my own standards,” she said.) Stanwyck, a disciplined professional who was friendly with her film crews, made similar statements: “It would be the same with me if I were a waitress in Peoria or a chambermaid in Oshkosh instead of a film actress in Hollywood.” Both women knew that fame was transient. “Movie stars write their books,” said Gardner, “then they are forgotten, and then they die.” Stanwyck warned Robert Taylor, when he first saw his name in lights, “The trick is to keep it up there.” She was coldly realistic about the world she lived in. “When you are up in Hollywood, you are accepted; when you are down, it is as though you do not exist.”
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born in North Carolina on Christmas Eve, 1922. Her father was a farmer who lost his property, and after cooking and cleaning in a girl’s dormitory, her mother opened a boardinghouse. Contrary to popular belief, Gardner was neither desperately poor nor uneducated. (“I’m tired of reading about how Ava grew up in poverty working in the fields,” said her sister, Inez. “We were poor, it’s true, but…actually we had a fairly good life.”) After graduating from high school, Gardner attended the Atlantic Christian College in Wilson, North Carolina, where she studied to be a secretary.
Her life changed forever when, in the summer of 1941, she went to New York to visit her older sister Beatrice (“Bappie”), who had married a photographer. When he placed a photo of the young Ava in his display window, it was spotted by a clerk in MGM’s legal department who called it to the attention of his superiors. Within no time, Gardner made a screen test that was by all accounts terrible. One of the Hollywood studio bosses who saw it was said to have exclaimed, “She can’t act! She didn’t talk! She’s sensational!” George Sidney, in charge of new talent at MGM, said, “Ship her out here. She’s a good piece of merchandise.”
On August 23, 1941, with a $50 per week standard contract, Gardner arrived in Hollywood on the Super Chief accompanied by Bappie as chaperone. She was eighteen years old, had one pair of shoes, carried a cardboard suitcase, and spoke in an unintelligible southern drawl. MGM fed her immediately into their star-making system. She was given lessons in how to walk, talk, sit, and stand. Her hair was done and redone. She posed in countless cheesecake photos, wearing bathing suits, filmy nightgowns, pirate outfits, tutus and tights, and Santa Claus hats.
She worked up the ladder from extra to bit parts to supporting roles, and within less than six years, she had married and divorced twice (actor Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw), dropped her southern accent, and learned to use her natural sexual magnetism for the asset it was. In 1946, wearing a tight black dress with one strap over her shoulder, she sat at a piano and crooned “The More I Know of Love” to Burt Lancaster in The Killers. Suddenly, she was a star. Although Gardner adopted an “I don’t care” attitude toward her success, those who observed her during those years saw it differently. One said, “Her indifference was a pose. Her drive was extraordinary and ruthless.”
Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, Stanwyck was farmed out to friends and relatives, her mother having died when she was four. (A drunk had caused her mother, pregnant with her sixth child, to fall from a trolley. A few months after her death, the father deserted his family.) Stanwyck dropped out of school at the age of fourteen. Unlike Gardner, she really was poor and uneducated. Needing to work, she followed her older sister Millie into show business, and began dancing in chorus lines at a young age. By the time she was sixteen, she was touring in the Ziegfeld Follies.
Her life changed when she was cast in a dramatic role in a Broadway play, The Noose, in 1926. She brought the house down as a desperate girl pleading with the governor to spare the life of the man she loves. With her name changed to “Barbara Stanwyck,” she opened spectacularly on Broadway in Burlesque in 1927, and by 1929 she was offered a contract to come to Hollywood to make a movie called The Locked Door. In 1928 she had married Fay, famous for his wit, his charm, and his alcoholism.
Mr. and Mrs. Fay arrived in Hollywood together in 1929, also on the Super Chief, but under different circumstances from Gardner’s. The Fays were already successful, posing on the back of the train with Irving Berlin and movie mogul Joe Schenck. Stanwyck, leaning on her husband, carried a fur coat, was stylishly dressed, and had a contract to star in a Warner Brothers sound motion picture for $1,500 per week. From the first day of her decades-long career in movies and television, Stanwyck was recognized as a leading actress. No cheesecake photos or experimental hairdos.
Wilson wants to define who Stanwyck was on screen across four decades in a myriad of roles, and also seek out the facts of her reclusive private life. Evans presents a one-dimensional Gardner, but Wilson, an unabashed admirer of Stanwyck, describes, but doesn’t analyze, some apparent contradictions in Stanwyck’s life. Stanwyck is the orphan who so badly wants a family that she lets Frank Fay bully her adopted son, Dion. She herself ultimately banishes the boy to military school, instructing him to refer to her as “my mother, Barbara Stanwyck.” She’s down-to-earth and democratic on the set, but yells at her brother, Byron, who wants to wed a woman she doesn’t like, “You’re going to marry some dumb little extra?” Most inexplicably, she remained doggedly loyal to Fay, whose drunken binges and abusive treatment of her were well known, until she finally sought a divorce for “grievous mental suffering” at the end of 1935.
Do we really care who someone slept with in 1940? What matters about Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck is to be found on the screen, not in their diaries. They were early career women, ending up alone and self-supporting. They are “alive” today because their onscreen images represent a peculiar type of female power.
Gardner’s manufactured image was so much a part of the culture that she didn’t even have to appear onscreen to be palpably present. In The Barefoot Contessa, she “enters” with a click of castanets, a swaying beaded curtain, and a moving spotlight, but she’s not seen. Her dance around the nightclub floor is depicted only by its impact on the close-up faces of the male spectators.
Stanwyck became one of the greatest interpreters of female vulnerability the movies ever had. In Clash by Night (1952), she plays a former good-time girl trying to do right by her stolid husband, but she’s tempted by a sexy and knowing Robert Ryan. Alone in her kitchen, feeling the heat, she tries to pour herself a cup of coffee. Her hand starts to shake, the cup starts to rattle, and she just can’t do it. Finally, she gives up and breaks down weeping, the hardbitten woman showing the audience who she is, and doing it with nothing but a coffee pot.
Both actors could be dangerous on film. Gardner destroys men through sex and by being beautiful enough to drive them mad, but Stanwyck lifted male destruction to an art form. In Double Indemnity (1944), with nothing but an ankle bracelet and a blond wig, she lures Fred MacMurray to murder her husband. She’s both comic and cruel in The Lady Eve (1941) as she reveals past amours on her wedding night to the hapless Henry Fonda, and horrifically cruel in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) when she jabs a cigarette lighter in Richard Rober’s eyeball. Late in life, when most stars had long since retired, she played a steely matriarch in The Thorn Birds (1983) on TV, and was unafraid to enact an older woman’s sexual desire.
I met both Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck in the 1980s. Both were tough and wary, but vulnerable in different ways. Gardner was past her prime, a bit puffy around the eyes. She walked toward me with feline grace, and despite everything, she was nothing short of spectacular. Stanwyck showed no sign of age whatever, other than her white hair that she had been refusing to dye for decades. She had the body of a teenager and she was swathed in a sequined bright red sheath. Both women wanted to make it clear that “I’m still here.”
Gardner and Stanwyck died within five days of each other in January of 1990, Stanwyck at age eighty-two and Gardner at sixty-seven. Evans furthers the legend of Ava Gardner as the woman who liked sex and booze and did it her way. (To paraphrase John Ford, when the image becomes legend, print the legend.) Wilson, in the first of her two volumes, tries to see Stanwyck objectively, tracing all the facts about her she could find. But no one will ever know who they really were. They were too good at playing roles, both on and off the screen.
First glimpses of Gardner were often designed to stun, but Hollywood rarely knew what to do with her, and she didn’t care enough, she said, to work it out for herself.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), a bitter fable about the movie business, gave the picture’s star one of the most craftily prepared entrances in the history of cinema. The setting is a night club in Madrid. A dancer named Maria Vargas is performing, but Mankiewicz shows us only the reactions of the crowd: the men rapt and ravenous; the women irritable. As Vargas finishes her act and goes backstage, three men from Hollywood arrive to meet her. She refuses to come out, but Harry Dawes, a down-on-his-luck writer and director (Humphrey Bogart), barges into her dressing room, where he notices her bare feet below a drawn curtain; she is embracing her lover. Dawes teases her, and, enraged, she yanks the curtain aside. Then, at last, we see her: Ava Gardner, with her thick black hair, bowed lips, cleft chin, and green eyes, wearing a scarlet necklace that matches her lipstick, and a white peasant blouse pulled off one shoulder. Admiration struggles against disbelief: how could anyone look that good?
First glimpses of Gardner were often designed to stun. When she was young, she was the most beautiful woman in the movies, more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe—both of whom were better actresses. Monroe, despite her stern tutelage by Lee Strasberg and Arthur Miller, brought humor to much of what she did. Taylor had a driving ambition that led her to focus relentlessly on a part. In “The Barefoot Contessa,” after that startling entrance, Gardner looks lost during most of the movie, though it’s not really her fault. Maria Vargas, who quickly becomes a Hollywood star, is supposed to be an earthy proletarian from the Madrid slums, yet she speaks perfect English and carries herself haughtily. She goes to bed with working-class men, but you never get more than a glance at that side of her life, so her imperious manner, combined with the soulful palaver that Mankiewicz wrote for her, comes off as a humorless imposture. Mankiewicz finally lets us see Maria dance—a provocative Americanized flamenco—but, except for that moment, the part is nearly unplayable. So were many of Gardner’s roles. Her career stretched from the early nineteen-forties to the mid-eighties, but Hollywood rarely knew what to do with her, and she didn’t care enough, she said, to work it out for herself.
What Gardner could play—and did play successfully, in a few films—was a stylized version of herself. Her talent was for directness and pungency, for sexual longing and wrathful regret. She tried to live on her own terms, and her independent temperament is one of the most memorable things about her. She avoided the casting couch, but had the kind of freewheeling sex life that had always been available to powerful men. Before she was thirty, she had been married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra; she slept with many of her leading men and, occasionally, like Maria Vargas leaving a little something for the poor, with crew members. She drank and she liked to brawl, and for long stretches she withdrew from the movie colony to live in Spain, whose flamenco-and-bullfighting popular culture never struck her as a cliché. She was a Hemingway type of woman; she often drank with the writer, and even played Lady Brett in “The Sun Also Rises” (1957), but the movie built around her was miscast and tedious. Through all this, she attained what few Hollywood actresses can: a distinctive personal voice. In conversation, she was blunt, profane, and often searingly intelligent.
Gardner died in 1990, at the age of sixty-seven, but her voice comes alive in a new book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” (Simon & Schuster). In 1988, retired and partially paralyzed by strokes, Gardner was living in the Knightsbridge section of London. Running out of money, she approached Peter Evans, an English journalist who had written biographies of Aristotle Onassis and Brigitte Bardot, and asked his help with a memoir. She told him, “I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” They worked in a haphazard fashion. She would drink late, and then call him. (“Were you sleeping, honey?” she asked, at three in the morning. “I miss Frank. He was a bastard. But Jesus I miss him.”) Evans took notes and, in the morning, turned them into orderly speech. Soon, he began meeting with Gardner in her flat, where, on his first visit, she greeted him wearing a bath towel.
Eventually, they settled into long conversations, but there was a problem: Gardner’s natural candor struggled against her fear of violating confidences. She and Sinatra, her last husband, had been divorced for thirty years, but they were still close. She gave Evans juicy material—high times and low “in the feathers,” in Hollywood clubs and restaurants, and on movie sets all over the world—then angrily shut down. “Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember?” she said. At times, the project was just too much. “I’m so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner,” she told him at one point.
Evans worked with her fitfully for months and, from time to time, gave her pages to read. Then, apparently, she had second thoughts, because Evans’s text suddenly halts. In a brief epilogue to the book, Ed Victor, Evans’s literary agent, tells what he thinks happened. It seems that Sinatra disliked Evans and thought that Gardner was revealing too much to him, so he may have ended the collaboration by giving her the equivalent of what she would have been paid for the memoir.
In any case, shortly thereafter, she started over with two ghostwriters, Alan Burgess and Kenneth Turan. The book, “My Story,” which is amusing but somewhat cautious, came out a few months after her death. Then, in 2006, the biographer Lee Server published “Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing,” a chronicle of Gardner’s life that tells every tale of her wildest moments. Finally, in 2009, with the permission of Gardner’s executors, Evans began turning his transcripts into a book, but he died in 2012, before he could finish. The manuscript, twice abandoned, turns out to be a bristling look at Hollywood attitudes and sexual manners in the pre-feminist period, when a woman could hold her own only by giving up as much as she took.
Ava Gardner’s “discovery” story rivals Lana Turner’s visit to the soda fountain. Gardner was born in 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, and she grew up poor. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer who became a sharecropper; her mother ran boarding houses. In the spring of 1941, when Gardner was eighteen and enrolled in a secretarial course, she visited her older sister, Bappie, who was living in New York. Bappie’s husband, a photographer named Larry Tarr, made a portrait of Gardner. Wearing a print dress and a straw hat, she looks like the prettiest girl at the county fair. Tarr put the picture in the window of his studio, where an office boy from Loews, M-G-M’s parent company in New York, saw it and, hoping for a date with Gardner, presented himself to Tarr’s receptionist as an M-G-M employee. He never got the date, but the portrait made it into the right hands, and, in short order, M-G-M gave Gardner a screen test, followed by a seven-year contract, starting at fifty dollars a week.
A publicist named Greg Morrison was on hand when Gardner arrived in Los Angeles. More than forty years later, he summed up the moment in a note to Peter Evans:
She’s 17 or 18 with one pair of shoes, cardboard suitcase, leaving everybody in her life to enter the MGM University. They teach her to walk, talk, sit, sleep, shave her legs, shake hands, kiss, smile, eat, pray. Her ass is great, fine tits, short but good legs, great shoulders, thin hips, fix the toes, do the hair—clean it, but don’t touch the face. Everybody and every camera is drawn to that face. The town is jammed with pretty, but not like that—the eyes, the mouth, are from another world. She becomes the “armpiece du jour,” learns what they want. Learns how to do it without giving her soul away, and learns everything but how to Act. In her whole shitkicking, barefoot life she never really learned to pretend, nor did poverty give her much humor, certainly none about herself.
It’s the voice of Old Hollywood in its purest form: cruel yet sympathetic, and shrewd. The studio “educated” her, as Morrison described, and for five years put her mostly in walk-on roles. Her first big part came in “Whistle Stop” (1946), in which, violating the Hays Code, she gave George Raft an ardent, openmouthed kiss. The scene caught the attention of John Huston, and within months she had a role in “The Killers,” a noirish adaptation of the Hemingway story, which Huston co-wrote (uncredited) with Anthony Veiller. It’s not a major role, but Gardner, crooning at a piano in a black gown that displays her famous shoulders, is so devastating that you understand immediately why Burt Lancaster’s vulnerable, defeated boxer, from the moment he looks at her, doesn’t stand a chance. Despair and death follow.
After “The Killers,” Gardner might have remained a seething sex goddess. Many of the previous generation of female stars—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford—were high-strung, demanding women who put together long and productive careers. But Hollywood in the forties and fifties wanted something else; it wanted young women who were low-strung and sultry. Lana Turner, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and, in even more exaggerated form, Yvonne De Carlo, Jane Russell, and Jayne Mansfield were as much projections of male fantasies as living women. But it’s hard, perhaps impossible, to survive as someone else’s fantasy. Pulled this way and that by the culture’s erotic dreams and by the gray light of reality—“Men go to bed with Gilda,” Rita Hayworth grimly noted, and “they wake up with me”—many of those women had difficult lives, and some had careers cut short by alcohol or illness.
Gardner was too sharp-tempered to play slow-witted girls, as Lana Turner and Kim Novak did (though she didn’t play intellectuals, either), and too proud to be constantly available and yielding in her roles, as Hayworth and Monroe were. Gardner went in a different direction. The studio removed all traces of her North Carolina drawl, and, with her collaboration, managed to turn a bright, feisty woman into a hollow beauty. She played refined types with boring elocutionary precision—not only Maria Vargas but the demigoddess Pandora, in Albert Lewin’s preposterous, art-conscious “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951). She played Guinevere, listlessly, in “Knights of the Round Table” (1953), and what Hollywood saw as semi-exotics: the biracial Julie in the remake of “Show Boat” (1951); an Anglo-Indian clutching at Stewart Granger in “Bhowani Junction” (1956); and, in “The Naked Maja” (1958), Goya’s model. “I never played a woman who was smarter than me,” she told Evans, which was both a boast and a lament.
She might have helped herself if she had fought for better roles. But that wasn’t her fight. A key to her resistance may be suggested by remarks she made to Evans as she recalled her happiness in being loved—“possessed,” as she put it—by her father:
To be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved. But later if anyone tried to possess me—oh boy, I was out of there. That was something Frank never understood. He just couldn’t deal with it, and I couldn’t explain it to him. Probably because I couldn’t understand it myself.
Her father died in 1938, when she was fifteen, and it’s possible that after losing him she struggled to hang on to her selfhood so strongly that she couldn’t completely give herself over to a musical genius, much less to a fictional character.
She liked the fast times, the soft Hollywood nights filled with swing bands and torch singers. In 1942, at nineteen, she married her first lover, Mickey Rooney, who was at that time an enormous box-office draw for M-G-M as the wholesome Andy Hardy. Rooney would take her to the Cocoanut Grove, where Tommy Dorsey’s band played, and abandon her for hours while he sat in on drums. “That’s where I learned to drink, I mean to drink seriously—not just the Beachcomber’s zombies,” she said, “although they were damn lethal, too, but real grown-up-girls’ drinks.” Rooney was unfaithful, dishonest, and self-righteous—it was still a time when men were astonished, even hurt, when women refused to accept the lies they told them. Gardner left him after a year, but they had frequent, bittersweet reunions before the divorce came through. “It’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love,” she told Evans. “Especially a husband.”
After an interlude in 1943 with Howard Hughes, who continued to pursue her for the next twenty years, Gardner met the bandleader Artie Shaw. She revered Shaw for his erudition (he was a great reader), and married him in 1945. Shaw gave her books, but even when she read them he brutally insulted her ignorance. When they socialized with the likes of S. J. Perelman, William Saroyan, and John O’Hara, she told Evans, “Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. ‘You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now,’ he’d scream.”
She was able to distill the good times and the bad and also express what she knew of life—what she felt of desire and desperation—in two extraordinary performances. The first was in “Mogambo” (1953), a remake of Victor Fleming’s “Red Dust” (1932), one of the most openly sexual films of the pre-Code era. In Fleming’s movie, set on a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia, Jean Harlow, barely clothed at times, fights a proper married lady, played by Mary Astor, for Clark Gable’s affections. Two decades later, John Ford set and filmed the story in East Africa, with Gable, still hanging in there, as a big-game trapper with a camp in Kenya. This time, he is fought over by Gardner, playing a stranded American showgirl, and the flawless Grace Kelly, cast as a demure married Englishwoman who is highly attracted to him. Kelly is very good, but it’s Gardner’s movie. Outfitted in tightly belted safari slacks, her body is shaped like a Martini glass. She’s completely at ease, even joyous, as she cavorts among the tents, plays with a baby elephant, tosses a snake out of her bed, and teases and vamps her way into Gable’s arms. Gardner isn’t raucously funny, like Harlow, but she’s more womanly, and more grievously wounded, her eyes flashing, when Gable rejects her for Kelly. She fights her way back, of course, and bags the hunter. Gardner received her only Oscar nomination for the performance, but she said she was relieved when she didn’t win—she wasn’t eager to take herself more seriously.
Sinatra accompanied her to Africa. When they started their affair, three years earlier, in 1949, the bobby-soxer adulation of the war years was dying out; it was the beginning of the Sinatra Troubles. He and Gardner played lawlessly together, maybe as a way of fending off his despair. She told Evans:
We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town—Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were—with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.
By the time they married, in 1951, Sinatra’s career had almost completely stalled, his voice frayed from a hemorrhage of the vocal cords. Gardner stuck by him, often selflessly, as he tried to regain his footing. As a married couple, however, they were hapless. Reporters pursued them everywhere, playing them off against each other, and Sinatra flew into rages, which only encouraged the press. Each accused the other of infidelity and of putting career before marriage. During the shooting of “Mogambo,” they hurled pots and pans at night, causing Gable and Kelly to poke their heads out of their tents to find out what was going on. To Gardner’s relief, Sinatra went back to the States to audition for the role of Maggio, in “From Here to Eternity.” He got the part, and it relaunched his career. They didn’t divorce until 1957, but the marriage was over, and she escaped to Spain and the company of writers and matadors. Emissaries from Hollywood had to prove their mettle by drinking and clubbing with her for nights on end before she would talk business.
Much of what she knew of romantic failure shows up in her other great performance. In John Huston’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play “The Night of the Iguana” (1964), she plays Maxine, the widowed owner of a ramshackle hotel on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Gardner was in her early forties, and her face and her body had thickened, but, in a loose-fitting poncho, her tangled hair pulled back tight, except for a few stray tendrils, she was volatile and ripe. The Southern drawl that M-G-M had made her drop returned in alternating shades of malice and kindness. Again, she is fighting for a man—Richard Burton’s alcoholic defrocked minister—who is drawn to an honorable, well-bred woman, played by Deborah Kerr. (Maxine is not strictly honorable; she frolics with a couple of beach boys from time to time.) Burton’s fretful drunk and Gardner’s Maxine, needy and fragile, offer each other touching consolation. “I really brought that broad to life,” she told Evans, and she didn’t have to pretend much to do it. The performance makes you think of the actress she could have been if she had played other Williams heroines, or had persuaded her writer friends to fashion roles around her own remarkable self. But we’ll have to settle for a few performances and for Evans’s book, in which a journeyman writer and an often regretful star made a small monument for themselves in the largely forgotten wastes of Hollywood’s corrupt but enticing history. ♦
Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Ava Gardner, the Second-Look Girl
Ava Gardner knew how to pose for the camera. She’d slit her eyes, throw her head at an angle, and the photographer would somehow catch something about her — not elegance or grace, exactly, but something that was strong, sexual, and almost animal, as if she were zeroing in on you, weighing your merits, and readying to pounce. And for most of the ’40s and ’50s, she was Hollywood’s most alluring femme fatale, an image solidified both on and off the screen.
Gardner was the youngest of eight children, raised in near-poverty in North Carolina, where she acquired a “Pure Tobacco Road South” accent and a predilection for drama. She was beautiful but without talent, always “picked last” for the school plays the same way that I was “picked last” for every team that didn’t have the word “math” in its title.
While visiting New York, Gardner’s brother-in-law, an established photographer, had her sit for a session. He was so pleased with the results that he put it in the front window of his shop, all senior-picture like. (Do you think Ava was posed with her pick-up truck and rifle the way people did for senior pictures in my town? HOTTT).
Some tool who worked for the local movie theater had made a practice of posing as an MGM talent scout in order to procure phone numbers from pretty girls. He tried the same on Gardner, but all she and her family heard was “she should call MGM.” The tool didn’t get Gardner’s number, but her photo, now in the hands of the New York MGM office, was raising eyebrows.
Realizing that Gardner couldn’t act and couldn’t speak in a way that people North of the Mason-Dixon line could understand, the New York office arranged for her to shoot a silent screen test. She looked to the left, she looked the right, then she walked around just enough to show off a spectacular pair of legs, purportedly prompting the MGM bosses in Hollywood to exclaim “She’s can’t act; she didn’t talk; she’s sensational! Get her out here!”
Gardner was signed to a standard seven-year contract at $50 a week, but that didn’t mean she was a star. MGM signed hundreds of beautiful girls every year to similar contracts: Some would go on to make varsity, some would languish on JV, and some were just there to give blow jobs to the coaches, as it were. Gardner was somewhere between blow-jobber and JV, given walk-on roles in B pictures but rarely allowed to speak, even as she slaved to rid herself of her Southern twang.
When not playing a pretty face in the background, the publicity office made ample use of her looks, putting her in the publicity materials for films in which she may or may not have appeared. She also posed for a shit-ton of “leg art,” a.k.a. pin-ups, which the studio would print en masse and use in generalized publicity campaigns. These pin-ups required Gardner to pose in all sorts of weird and faux sexy ways:
As a witch on a broomstick? Check.
Weirdly crouched on a fake beach with high-waist shorts? Check.
Seducing you while drinking a really thick vanilla milkshake? Check.
Wearing a sweater atop something that can only be described as an industrial sized firework? Check.
Air-humping on the beach? Ohmygod check.
What’s even more fascinating then air-humping, however, is that Gardner was stuck as a B-girl despite the fact that she was married to the biggest star at MGM — bigger than Clark Gable, bigger than Joan Crawford. For when Gardner arrived on the studio lot in 1941, she had become the immediate target of one Mickey Rooney, who, at all of 21, had been Hollywood’s biggest box office draw for three years running.
Rooney met Gardner and asked her out on a date, but she deferred because of Southern manners and the fact that he only came up to her chin. But Rooney was persistent: He was hot shit, and he would have his hot date. Gardner eventually gave in, but refused to marry Rooney until she was 19. When she did agree, the wedding had to be approved by the MGM brass and chaperoned in full.
So they got married. Can you imagine being married to Mickey Rooney? The star with the face of an 11-year-old boy? Wouldn’t you just play connect-the-dots with his freckles? I mean, isn’t there something really wrong with this picture?
But Rooney was also a bit of a dick — there are heartbreaking stories about the way he treated Judy Garland when she was head-over-heels for him in the late ’30s — and the marriage to Gardner lasted but a year.
Gardner then started hanging out with Howard Hughes. This is the point in the post when your vision of her turns to one of Kate Beckinsale dressed in an emerald green dress playing hard-to-get with Leonardo DiCaprio in a Scorsese film. Hughes promised her the world — if you want boats, Ava, I’ll buy you all the boats! All of them! I’ll put you in all the movies! Every last one of them! — but the spark wasn’t there, and she refused his repeated marriage proposals.
Instead of Hughes, Gardner decided to marry band leader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, who had already gone through four wives, including Ms. Lana Turner. Gardner liked that Shaw was a smarty-pants who stayed up late to discuss world affairs, philosophy, and “long hair music” with his friends. But Shaw was pretty much the worst sort of autodidact, shaming Gardner for all that she didn’t know. According to Gardner, “If I remained silent when we were with friends he would say, ‘Why don’t you talk? Have you nothing to contribute?’ But when I tired to say something he would shout, ‘Shut up!’”
OH MY GOD DOES THIS GUY SUCK OR WHAT. It’s one thing to play the clarinet, I mean, I can get over that, so long as you don’t carry it around in a little clarinet purse, but it’s quite another to marry Ava Gardner and then mentally abuse her. But Gardner did her best to appease Shaw, taking extension classes at UCLA before the huge bastard up and left her for a writer of popular women’s fiction. IRONIC.
During this period, MGM continued to ignore her, lending her to Universal for The Killers, a noir based on Hemingway’s truly incredible short story. This film was a revelation, and made stars of both Gardner and Burt Lancaster.
Crucially, Gardner plays a classic femme fatale, slinking and double-crossing her way through the film in skin-tight gowns. Obviously now is the point when you turn down the volume on your work computer and watch this clip from the film, starting at about 7:00.
First, just look at that back. Now look at that dress. I really don’t understand why we don’t wear asymmetrical dresses at all times. If you need me, I’ll just be in my closet cutting one strap off of all of my dresses.
Now look at the way she plays Nice Girl but actually Super Mean Girl / Steal-Your-Boyfriend in Ten-Seconds Girl? That voice, the way she completely ignores the existing Girlfriend-Unfortunately-Dressed-Like-An-American-Doll while talking to Hubba Hubba Burt Lancaster — and how Lancaster clearly only has eyes for Gardner from that point forward?
And this, dear Hairpinners, was what Ava Gardner came to mean in the minds of millions of Americans. The fact that she had already gone through two husbands only helped to amplify the image, as did the string of similarly femme fatale-ish roles that followed. This girl had a devilish look in her eye, was clearly bad news, could drink you under the table, and could steal every man in sight. But oh my actual god was she beautiful.
When Humphrey Bogart saw the film, he proclaimed, “Whatever it is, whether you’re born with it, or catch it from a public drinking cup, she’s got it.” (I don’t know about you guys, but maybe I got “it” from going in a nasty Idaho hot tub?)
In the wake of The Killers, Gardner became a huge f-ing deal. Her picture was all over the fan magazines, while her personal life and stream of boyfriends provided ample dish for the gossip columns. As the Saturday Evening Post explained,
The way the public thinks of her goes something like this: “Here’s a girl who, at the age of 23, had already been married and divorced twice, both times for men nobody has ever though of calling Little Lord Fauntleroys. The gossip columnists have linked her name with various members of the Hollywood wolf pack, and a girl who photographs the way she does and acts those movie hotchas as convincingly as she acts them is bound to be a warm dish in private life too.
Hollywood wolf pack! Movie hotchas! I just had to look that up on urbandictionary.com and apparently it means “Mad Hottie!” Or maybe that’s just what some eighth grader with too much time on his hands decided it meant? Either way, the gossip industry worked hard to portray Gardner as out “every night with a new beau, dripping orchids and mink, and probably having a heavy late date or two afterward.” (Seriously, though, what’s a heavy late date? Morning sex? A 4 a.m. snack of french fries? I’m so confused.) Gardner insisted that she was staying home, hanging out with Zero Boyfriends, and wearing granny pajamas, and I’m sure the truth was somewhere in between.
Case in point: this picture of her being all free and white blousey on a bicycle.
It’s clear that Gardner wasn’t lying around in asymmetrical dresses all the time sipping martinis. But I’m also not so sure that she was a granny pajama or no-boyfriend type of girl.
Whichever was the case, MGM realized it had a huge star on its hands, immediately casting her in a string of pictures and donning her “the second-look girl.” Between 1948 and 1952, Gardner appeared in 13 films, but between hits she became embroiled in a scandalous, tumultuous, roller-coaster of a relationship.
The relationship was with Frank Sinatra, and began when Sinatra’s career was at a low and his marriage to Nancy Sinatra, the mother of his three children, was in shambles. Ever since moving to Hollywood, Frank had cheated on his wife repeatedly and flagrantly, but their Catholicism had prevented a divorce. At some point in the late ’40s, however, Sinatra began having heavy late dates with Gardner while his wife stayed home and cared for their newborn child. Frank and Nancy separated on Valentine’s Day 1950 and were divorced in 1951, allowing Sinatra and Gardner to marry 10 days later and making Gardner a certified home-wrecker.
Obviously this was a bit of an asshole move on both of their parts. But oh shit was it good gossip, fueled by rumors of apparent suicide attempts (during one fight over the phone, Sinatra got so angry that he fired a gun — apparently into a mattress — to scare Gardner into thinking that he had shot himself).
The old biddy gossip columnists moralized and condemned while the fan magazines did their best to explain why the marriage wouldn’t work. Modern Screen, for example, insisted that “Ava is a girl with simple tastes. She likes blue jeans and shirts, no makeup, lots of children and family ties. Frank is a city boy who goes in for natty clothes, hectic night life, and strange acquaintances. All Ava wants is a house of her own, a husband of her own and babies of her own.”
I CALL BULLSHIT, FAN MAGAZINE. That’s like when Us tries to tell me that all Jennifer Aniston wants is a baby and that’s why she’s doing so much yoga in Hawaii with her new man. . . . .when we all know that she’s actually just tanning, maintaining her triceps, smoking weed, and having her own heavy late dates. I get so stabby when national magazines try to turn every story with a woman at its center into cry for babies. (But I do love how Modern Screen hints at Sinatra’s “strange acquaintances” a.k.a. THE MOTHERFUCKING MOB.)
Gardner had always been a fighter — she and Hughes had thrown things at each other all the time, and she and Shaw routinely got in screaming matches. But she and Sinatra fought on an entirely different level, in part because Gardner’s career was soaring while Sinatra’s was hanging around in the toilet.
Obviously this was a recipe for disaster. It’s like Gardner was the gorgeous high-powered CEO going off to make millions every day, and Sinatra was the mopey yet talented boyfriend who sat at home in his underwear, eating cereal with whiskey for breakfast. With his movie and music contracts cancelled, Sinatra could only get jobs in the equivalent of Indian Casinos. He was a sad sack indeed, and increasingly resentful of Gardner.
So Gardner did what anyone would do in her place: She got f-ing sick of his whining, pulled some strings to get him a job, and flew to Europe. But she didn’t just get him any job. She got him a choice role in Burt Lancaster’s From Here to Eternity.
Have you seen this movie? Burt Lancaster! Monty Clift! Donna Reed as a prostitute! Making out on the beach in shorty shorts! So hot right now! Sinatra won an Academy Award for his performance, effectively putting his career back on track. But the rejuvenation had come at a price, and when Gardner left to shoot The Barefoot Contessa in Spain, it was clear that the marriage was beginning to unravel. Each was accusing the other of cheating, the fan magazines were fueling rumors of each other cheating, each was indeed actually cheating.
Confidential Magazine did its best to fuel the scandalous fire, using photos of Gardner with Sammy Davis Jr., taken during a break from a photo shoot for Ebony, to insinuate a romance between the two, despite the fact that Sinatra himself had been present at the shoot.
As unfounded as (most) of the rumors were, they drove Sinatra crazy. The two fought more and more, cheated more and more, and the marriage eventually ended in divorce in 1957.
And here’s where Gardner’s life takes a sweet turn. She divorces Sinatra and moves permanently to Spain, which she had fallen in love with during the filming of Contessa. Having at this point appeared in no less than three Hemingway adaptations (The Killers, Kilimanjaro, and as Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises) she becomes BFF with Papa himself. Hemingway introduces her to all sorts of bullfighters, the hottest of whom she seduces full-on Lady Brett-style. According to lore, she accompanied Hemingway to his villa in Cuba, and after skinny-dipping in the pool, Hemingway ordered his staff “The water is never to be emptied.”
Gardner with Hemingway and hottie bull fighters during the glorious Third Act of her life.
Gardner continued to appear in films through the ’60s, most notably The Night of the Iguana, where she hung out with Dick and Liz and 5,000 paparazzi, and The Bible, where she drove George C. Scott so mad with desire that he had to be locked inside his trailer. Like the other sirens of the classic era, she slowly faded into obscurity, eventually resorting to appearances on Knot’s Landing and obscure low-budget films in order to pay the bills.
Gardner continued to appear in films through the ’60s, most notably The Night of the Iguana, where she hung out with Dick and Liz and 5,000 paparazzi, and The Bible, where she drove George C. Scott so mad with desire that he had to be locked inside his trailer. Like the other sirens of the classic era, she slowly faded into obscurity, eventually resorting to appearances on Knot’s Landing and obscure low-budget films in order to pay the bills.
Gardner never married again, and spent her twilight years having heavy late dates with whomever she pleased, keeping an apartment in London, and hanging out with her small dogs before dying at the age of 64 from emphysema. Frank Sinatra wept like a small child when he heard the news of her death, and that water is totally still in Hemingway’s pool. Not too shabby for a Hotcha from North Carolina.
Previously: Rock Hudson, Hollywood’s Most Eligible Bachelor.
Anne Helen Petersen is a Doctor of Celebrity Gossip. No, really. You can find evidence (and other writings) here.
Three Men and a Goddess
Once Hollywood’s most irresistible woman—wed to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra—by 1988 Ava Gardner was nearly broke, ravaged by illness, and intent on selling her memoirs. But the man she chose as her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, had his own problems, not least a legal war with Sinatra. In an exclusive from the book that wasn’t published in either of their lifetimes, Gardner spills the seduction-to-split secrets of her three marriages
Right, Ava Gardner with Frank Sinatra, at the Hollywood premiere of Show Boat, 1951. (“I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass.”) Left, Ava two years later.
Photographs: left, © Sunset Boulevard/Corbis; right, by Murray Garrett/Getty Images.
You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey: She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life. But she never made jam.
In the first week of January 1988, Ava Gardner asked me to ghost her memoirs. Since I had never met Ava Gardner, the call, late on a Sunday evening, was clearly a hoax. “Sounds great, Ava,” I played along. “Does Frankapprove? I don’t want to upset Frank.” There was a small silence, then a brief husky laugh.
“Fuck Frank,” she said with a faint southern drawl. “Are you interested or not, honey?”
I should have said no right there. I wasn’t a ghostwriter. I was working 15 hours a day to finish my third novel. But this was Ava Gardner calling me. Only a fool would say he wasn’t interested.
“I’m told we’d get along fine, but who the hell knows? You’ve been a journalist; I hate journalists. I don’t trust them,” she said. “But Dirk Bogarde says you’re O.K. Dirk said you deal from a clean deck, and you’re not a faggot. Don’t get me wrong. I get on fine with fags, I just prefer dealing with guys who aren’t. Dirk reckons you’d break your ass to get the book right. Are you taping this?” she suddenly asked sharply. “This is between the two of us, right?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I’ll tell you when the meter starts,” she said. I assured her again that I wasn’t taping her. However, I was making plenty of notes.
Eleven days after her first phone call, Ava invited me to her apartment, spread across the first floor of two converted fin de siècle mansions in Ennismore Gardens, in the Knightsbridge section of London. Her bell had the name Baker. “It’s my mother’s maiden name. I live like a goddamn spy,” she’d told me earlier. Her housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, met me and led the way to the drawing room.
“I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip,” Ava told me that day. “I know a lot of men fantasize about me; that’s how Hollywood gossip becomes Hollywood history.”
“Is that why you want to write a book?,” I asked warily. “You want to put the record straight?”
“I’m broke, honey. I either write the book or sell the jewels.” I was surprised at the frankness with which she admitted it. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added.
The stroke she’d had a year and a half earlier had partially paralyzed her left side and frozen half her face in a rictus of sadness. It would have been a hard blow to bear for any woman, but for an actress who had once been hailed as “the world’s most beautiful animal,” it was a tragedy. I tried not to stare, but she must have guessed my thoughts. “As if getting old wasn’t tough enough,” she said, with no sense of self-pity at all. “Actors get older, actresses get old. But life doesn’t stop because you’re no longer a beauty, or desirable. You just have to make adjustments.”
MGM’S GOLDEN BOY
‘Why don’t we start with my first husband, Mickey Rooney?” she said during one of our later conversations. “I was still practically a child anyway.”
“You were 19,” I said.
“Only just,” she said defensively. “I was still a virgin. Going to the fights every Friday night in L.A., that was an education. We’d go along with George Raft and Betty Grable. Mickey always insisted on sitting ringside. Those little bantamweights were the worst—they’d nearly kill each other to entertain us. That fact bothered me more than any of the rest of it—the things people would do to please you if you were famous enough, and there was nobody more famous than George Raft, Betty G., and Mickey in those days. You have to remember Mickey was bigger than Gable in those days. At least, his pictures took more money than Gable’s, although they each earned the same five grand a week when $5,000 was real money. [Rooney, in his 1991 autobiography, gives a much lower figure, saying his contract took him up to $1,250 a week in 1941.]
“I can remember that first meeting with Mick very clearly—probably because he was wearing a bowl of fruit on his head. He was playing this Carmen Miranda character—do you remember Carmen Miranda? She was a Brazilian dancer, a hot little number while she lasted. Mickey was playing her, complete with false eyelashes, false boobs, his mouth smothered with lipstick.
“It was my first day in Hollywood. I was being hauled around the sets to be photographed with the stars. He came over to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mickey Rooney.’ He did a little soft-shoe-shuffle kind of dance, and bowed to me.
“I remember asking him one evening, shortly after we were married, what he thought of me that first time we met. We had a kind of truth game we used to play in bed. We’d spend a lot of time in the sack in the early days, a lot of time: talking, laughing, making love. I must have seemed so fucking awkward, so fucking gauche. Anyway, I asked him what went through his mind when he saw me on the set that day.
“He said, ‘O.K., when they said you were a new contract player, I figured you were a new piece of pussy for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you.’
“I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s a funny line.”
She said, “Anyway, Mick called me that night and asked me out to dinner. I said I was busy. That was a stupid thing to say. Who the hell was I busy with, fahcrissake? It had taken about six minutes flat to unpack my only suitcase and brush my teeth. I didn’t know a goddamn soul in Hollywood, except my sister. And I’m busy?”
Rooney continued to call her. “Every conversation ended up with him asking me to have dinner with him. Finally I just ran out of excuses. I thought the hell with it, and said, O.K.—but I have my sister Bappie staying with me, I told him. ‘Fine, bring Sis along, too,’ he said, bang-off.”
His chauffeur-driven limo arrived at exactly seven o’clock. “He wasn’t what I’d call a handsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was … well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!”
Under the name of Mickey McGuire, the Brooklyn-born son of vaudevillians, comic Joe Yule Sr. and chorine Nell Carter, Rooney had appeared in dozens of two-reel comedies for a B-picture unit before changing his name to Mickey Rooney. Rooney was soon cast as Puck in [William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt’s] A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, in 1934, MGM gave him a contract. But Rooney really hit the jackpot in 1937 with A Family Affair, the first of his Andy Hardy family series. By the time Ava arrived at MGM, in the summer of 1941, he was the hottest property the studio had, turning out multiple Andy Hardy movies a year. Musicals with Judy Garland and movies with Spencer Tracy—including Captains Courageous and Boys Town (1937, 1938)—had further enhanced his popularity.
The news that Mickey and Ava were an item soon spread around the studio. Eventually Les Peterson, Rooney’s personal publicist and minder, decided that it was time to warn L. B. Mayer of the seriousness of his star’s interest in Ava. “I swear to God, I had no idea of the fuss I was creating,” said Ava. “I had no idea that Mayer—Uncle L.B., as Mickey called him—had ordered Mick to stop seeing me. That shows you the power Mayer wielded in those days. And it shows the power—and the guts—Mickey had to stand up to him the way he did.”
In spite of Mayer’s efforts to keep the relationship quiet, the gossip columnists eventually got onto the story. “They always mentioned that I was a North Carolina beauty and much taller than Mickey. Their bulb pressers always managed to get pictures that made me look as if I towered over Mickey—which, of course, I did.
“Wherever we went, thousands of screaming bobby-soxers were there to mob him. Mick called them his San Quentin quail club. But the enthusiasm, the hysteria, of those kids made me understand why Mayer was so fucking desperate to keep our marriage off the front pages.
“It’s a shame that it didn’t work out with Mick. The idea of being married had always appealed to me, and I was hopelessly in love with him by this time. We lived in a tiny apartment on Wilshire in Westwood that we’d rented from Red Skelton. One bedroom, living room, kitchen, and a tiny dining room. Oh God, Mickey and I were out practically every night of our lives together. We danced, he drank a fair amount—I was catching on pretty fast.
“A week or so after we got back from our honeymoon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most god-awful pain in my stomach. Mickey drove me to the Presbyterian Hospital. Like everybody in my family, I had a misplaced appendix. In those days you stayed in hospital for three weeks after even a minor operation. So I came home, and the first night I found evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed.” (Rooney has denied ever being unfaithful to Gardner.)
‘No wonder, when I think of that marriage now, I think of nightclubs: the Palladium, Ciro’s, the Cocoanut Grove, where we danced to Tommy Dorsey’s band. Guys didn’t trouble me much—most of them knew I was Mickey’s wife—but that’s where I learned to drink, I mean to drink seriously. All the clubs were hot on under-age drinking, but Mick would slip me dry martinis in coffee cups. Sipping a dry martini out of a coffee cup seemed as glamorous as hell to me.
“That doesn’t mean I let Mick off the hook. I brought up his cheating all the time. I couldn’t help myself. We fought constantly. ‘I’ve had it with you, you little shit,’ I’d scream at him. He’d look all hurt and innocent—a real Andy Hardy look. Boy, he was some actor. He’d say that no one could love me more than he did. No one could be more faithful than he was. Not once did he admit to two-timing me. Neither did he ever say he was sorry.
“Nevertheless, when he was feeling flush, or had made a big score at the track, he would try to placate me with nice pieces of jewelry. I remember a beautiful pair of diamond drop earrings. But quite a few of those peace offerings had to go back when the bookies came knocking.
“Anyway, in spite of the humiliation of knowing Mickey was cheating on me, I still wanted him to want me. In the end, I started throwing in a few curves of my own. For instance, after we’d made love—and we never stopped doing that, we never got bored with each other in bed, that’s for sure—I’d say things to him that I knew would hurt him. I’d taunt him about his height. I’d tell him I was tired of living with a midget.
“I know that it hurt him because he told other people what I’d said. He told Peter Lawford, for instance, who repeated it to me. It was always a mistake to tell Peter Lawford anything. I liked him, but he was a terrible gossip. Lawford worshipped Mickey. He’d made two movies with him, A Yank at Eton and Lord Jeff, and was always hanging around. He often sat with me at the Grove, keeping me amused, when Mick was sitting in with the band. He was there the night I finally made up my mind to leave Mick.
“Mickey had been drinking throughout the evening and was as high as I’d seen him. A whole bunch of his regular sidekicks were there. We’d had a big argument over something before we came out, and he was completely ignoring me. I knew that he’d been spoiling for a fight all evening. Finally, he took out this little book full of girls’ numbers. Too drunk to give a damn, and the guys egging him on, he started reading off their names and saying what they were good at in bed—in front of me!
“That was it! I left. I kicked Mickey out the same night. Or I did when he got home, whatever time that was! He moved out to his ma’s place in the Valley. I wouldn’t take his calls. I was driving him crazy. One night he tried to kick my door down. When Louis Mayer heard about that, all hell broke loose.
“I knew that dumping Mickey was a risk. Careerwise, it could have been the end of me. If I stopped being Mrs. Rooney, they wouldn’t think twice about letting me go. But I really had no choice. Mickey was never going to change his ways. I knew that if I had sued Mick for adultery, and named some of the girls he’d been fucking, it would have blown his wholesome Andy Hardy image right out of the water. It could have destroyed his career stone dead. I knew that citing ‘incompatibility’ was the cleanest and fastest route out of the marriage.
“A couple of weeks later, the studio renewed my contract and increased my salary.”
THE MARRYING BANDLEADER
‘Ava, that’s it for this evening,” I told her after one long phone session. “You really sound exhausted. I think you should take a few days off. I’ll wrap up your divorce from Mickey, and I have plenty of material on Howard Hughes [the millionaire filmmaker, with whom she had an affair] I can use.”
“How long is that going to take, honey?”
“Maybe four or five days,” I told her optimistically. “We’re getting there. I might even be able to cover some of the Artie Shaw years.”
“The Artie Shaw year, honey,” she corrected me with droll precision. “We married in ’45, October 17. He dumped me one week after our first anniversary. The bastard broke my heart.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to encourage her. It was getting late. I wanted her to go to bed.
“Avraham Ben-Yitzhak Arshawsky,” she mused. “Don’t you love that name? His mother called him Arthur. Arthur! He had issues with his father. But it was his mother who drove Artie into the arms of the shrinks, although Lana [Turner]—a couple of wives before me, she was wifey number three, I was number five. There have been eight of us altogether, so far.
“He’d just come out of the navy when he met Lana. He was deaf in his left ear from when he was bombed at Guadalcanal. Lana was 18. The classic MGM starlet. Artie had an I.Q. of—I don’t know what it was. It was right up there. The intellect isn’t connected to the pelvis, he told me once when I asked what had attracted him to her. [Gardner’s chronology is wrong. Shaw married Turner in February 1940, when she was 19. They divorced seven months later, and he enlisted in the navy in 1942.]
“Mickey reckoned he made her pregnant when she was 17. He probably did, although Lana always denied it. She had to, of course. She was in an Andy Hardy film with him. He said she had great knockers. First Mick, then Artie … she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too. Even so, I liked her. We became good friends.
“Artie was difficult, he was complex, but I was stuck on him,” she continued. “To tell the truth, I was always a little afraid of him. Not physically. Not the way I was scared of G.C.S. [George C. Scott, with whom she had an affair while they were making The Bible: In the Beginning]. When G.C.S. was loaded, he was terrifying—he’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea the next morning what he’d done.
“Artie was another kind of bully. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating son of a bitch. He used to put me down so much I lost complete confidence in myself. When I went into analysis—that was something else he made me do—I insisted on taking an I.Q. test, because I was at the point where I thought there was something seriously wrong with my mind. Well, it turned out very well indeed. I didn’t have an enormous I.Q., but I did have rather a high one.
“I owe Artie plenty. He made me get an education. I enrolled in the University of California because of him. I more or less didn’t work for a whole year because of him. I took correspondence courses. I was doing very well. B-pluses.”
‘What year was that, Ava?”
“Forty-five. I also started hitting the bottle when I was with Artie. I drank with Mick, but that was kid stuff. With Artie I’d get properly drunk. I got drunk because I was so insecure. I was completely out of my depth.
“He always had his nose in a book. He was mixing with a bunch of pseudointellectuals. Most of them were Reds. We’d go to the Russian Consulate. We’d sit down to dinner, and the vodka bottles would appear, and the caviar. We’d drink the vodka down the hatch. In one gulp, you know? That’s when I got a taste for the hard stuff.
“Artie was very conscious of being a Jew. He once told me a story that showed how vulnerable he was. I don’t know whether he was married to Jerome Kern’s daughter at the time, or who, because he married everybody, but he was at a posh Hollywood dinner party when they started talking about Jews. It turned out that they were all anti-Semitic. He said he sat there in silence for a while—apparently nobody knew he was a Jew—then he joined in with their snide remarks about Jews. He said he’d never forgive himself for his cowardice. All my protective instincts came out. I really felt his pain. It made me love him even more. I decided I wanted his baby.
“I don’t think in my heart I genuinely wanted a baby at all. I just thought, I’m going back to school, I’m getting an education, I’m being the good wife—to make it perfect I’ll have a child. Maybe I was playing a part, who the hell knows?
“What the fuck, a few months later, he ditched me and married Kathleen Winsor, the woman who wrote Forever Amber—a fucking potboiler, he’d called it. He snatched it out of my hands and tore it to shreds when he caught me reading it.
“Later I lost respect for him completely. He did a dreadful thing. He was called up before the Un-American Activities Committee in Washington and ratted on his friends. You just don’t do that. There was a writer who was very, very far left, but a wonderful man, Hy Kraft. He co-wrote Stormy Weather, the all-black Twentieth Century Fox musical, which starred my friend Lena Horne. Hy was Artie’s best man at our wedding. That’s how close they were. It didn’t stop Artie giving up Hy’s name to the Un-American Committee. Can you believe that?”
She described their life together. “I was happy traveling with the band, hanging out with Artie and his literary pals. Guys like Sid Perelman, Bill Saroyan, John O’Hara. Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. I was happy to do that. I was comfortable with all those guys.
“I was unhappy when he broke the band up. He said he didn’t want his wife on the road with a bunch of musicians. He said it wasn’t dignified. He once told me he couldn’t respect a woman who made a living as a movie star—‘Movie acting has nothing at all to do with talent, it’s all about key lights and cheekbones,’ he said. I think he said that when I beat him at chess after he’d hired a Russian grand master to give me lessons.
“Artie played the clarinet the way Frank sang. They both knew how to bend a note, stretch a phrase. Frank once told me he used to practice by singing to Artie’s music on the radio in Hoboken, although he said it was Tommy Dorsey who taught him about breath control. But Artie and Frank never played together, which is music’s loss.”
“They were about the same age, weren’t they?,” I asked.
“Frank was five years younger. He was born in 1915.”
THE GOD OF SEX
‘Can you remember the first words you exchanged when you first met Frank?,” I asked her one evening in her apartment.
“I was with Mickey in the studio commissary. We had just gotten married. Frank came over to our table—Jesus, he was like a god in those days, if gods can be sexy. A cocky god, he reeked of sex—he said something banal, like: ‘If I had seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.’ I paid no attention to that. I knew he was married. He had a kid, fahcrissake!
“Another time, I met him at a party in Palm Springs. I hadn’t seen him for about a year. He was having a tough time. MGM had dropped his contract. He asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘The usual. Making pictures. You?’ He said, ‘The usual. Getting my ass in a sling.’
“He was kissing the bottle at that time. We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town—Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were—with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.
“I took off for Spain to make a movie [Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 1951]. I had a fling with the bullfighter [Mario Cabré] who played my lover in the picture. My mistake was telling Frank about it. He was always banging on at me about guys he suspected I’d slept with. I’d slept with Mario once. He was a handsome devil. It was a one-night stand. I was drunk. He was handsome. It was a terrible mistake, period.”
“You mean telling Frank about it?”
“Doing it—telling Frank about it wasn’t too bright either. He followed me to Spain. He wanted to kill the poor bastard.”
I could believe it. I’d had my own run-in with Sinatra, but I didn’t want to tell her that.
“I fell for the oldest con in the world. Frank said it didn’t matter a damn if I’d slept with Mario or not, it was in the past. He just wanted me to be honest with him. He said if I told him the truth, it would all be forgotten. So I told him the truth, and, of course, it was never forgotten. He brought it up every goddamn argument we had. He never forgave me.”
“But he still married you,” I said.
“November 7, 1951. A day that will live in infamy. Only days after his divorce from Nancy became final. It was too soon, but that was Frank all over,” she said. “Plenty of people told me I was mad to marry him. Lana Turner had had an affair with him after she divorced Artie. ‘I’ve been there, honey,’ she told me. ‘Don’t do it!’
“The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. Bappie said I was Frank in drag. There was a lot of truth in that. He was the only husband I had that Bappie didn’t approve of straight off the bat. I’m not saying she disliked him. On the contrary, she thought he was great—but not for me. I should have listened to her.”
“Why didn’t you?,” I said.
“He was good in the feathers. You don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers,” she said.
‘Frank knew I was dating Luis Miguel Dominguín. Luis Miguel was the most famous bullfighter in the world. Bogie [Humphrey Bogart] was furious that I was giving Frank a hard time. He loved Frank like a brother. They started the Rat Pack together. ‘I don’t know why you want to two-time Frank with a goddamn fruit,’ he’d needle me. Stuff like that. Luis Miguel was one of the bravest men I knew. He was definitely no fruit, I can tell you that.” She paused thoughtfully. “What year was that?”
“You started shooting The Barefoot Contessa at the beginning of ’54,” I said.
“Frank and I had been married barely a couple of years. The marriage was obviously unraveling even then. I’m just surprised it lasted as long as it did. It was a bad time for Frank. Poor darling, he was so insecure. He was broke. He didn’t have a job. He was hanging on to his place in Palm Springs by the skin of his teeth. It was the last real asset he had. If he’d lost that, it would have been the end of the line for him. He had made a lot of enemies in his good years, before the bobby-soxers found somebody new to throw their panties at. Nobody wanted to be around him. There were no hangers-on. He didn’t amuse them anymore. He couldn’t lift a check. There was nobody but me. He had burned most of his bridges with the press. There was a catalogue of disasters: His voice had gone. MGM had let him go. His agent had let him go. So had CBS. On top of all that, the poor bastard suffered a hemorrhage of his vocal cords and couldn’t talk, let alone sing, for about six weeks. That’s when I saw through those people. I saw through Hollywood. Naïve little country girl that I was, I saw through all the phoniness, all the crap.”
“At least your career was on the up,” I said.
“Thank God. Time magazine put me on the cover in 1951, just before we married. They called me Hollywood’s most irresistible female, or some rubbish like that.”
‘Anyway, [one night] I heard this gun go off. We’d been fighting, of course. And drinking. Every single night, we would have three or four martinis, big ones, in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking scotch or bourbon.
“It was another one of those nights I ended up refusing to sleep with Frank. I was half asleep in my room across the suite and heard this gunshot. It scared the bejesus out of me. I didn’t know what I was going to find. His brains blown out? He was always threatening to do it. Instead, he was sitting on the bed in his underpants, a smoking gun in his hand, grinning like a goddamn drunken schoolkid. He’d fired the gun into the fucking pillow.”
She seemed amused at the memory. “At least his overdoses were quieter.”
“Overdoses?” I pretended to be surprised, although the stories of Sinatra’s mock suicides were well documented. “You mean he tried it more than once?”
“All the fucking time. It was a cry for help. I always fell for it.
“He did a record with Harry James that was so bad, I cried when I heard it. Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass. No matter what I did, his having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills—most of them, actually—made it all so much worse.
“I got 140 grand for Show Boat, even though the bastards finally dubbed my voice for the musical numbers. But I wasn’t complaining, and it kept us afloat—in more ways than one! We were both drinking far too much. Jesus, we were really knocking it back, and fighting all the time.
“Anyway, that’s the time we made this stupid pact never to write our memoirs. Some of the papers offered damned good money for Frank to tell our story. A tabloid, the New York Daily Mirror I think it was, or it might have been one of the syndicates, I forget now, but they offered more than he got for Meet Danny Wilson, a crappy little movie he’d just made with Shelley Winters. He needed the money badly, but he told them to get lost. He had principles, I’ll give him that.”
“It’s been 40 years, Ava. Frank’s not going to hold you to it after all this time, is he?,” I said.
“He’s never written his memoirs,” she said.
“Maybe he’s never had to,” I said, reminding her of her present difficulties.
“You’re not listening to me, baby. Frank was flat broke when we tied the knot. I don’t know where those stories came from that the Mafia was taking care of him. They should have been. But the fucking so-called Family was nowhere to be seen when he needed them. It really ticks me when I read how generous the Mob was when he was on the skids. But I was the one paying the rent when he couldn’t get arrested. I was the one making the pot boil, baby. It was me!”
After months of collaborating, Gardner learned that Evans and the BBC had been sued by Sinatra in 1972 for mentioning his Mob associations. She withdrew from the ghosted autobiography and produced a book with another writer. She died in January 1990. Sinatra would die in May 1998, and Artie Shaw in December 2004. With permission from Gardner’s estate, Evans decided to publish their interviews. He died on August 31, 2012.
Adapted from Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner, published by Simon & Schuster; © 2013 by the estate of Peter Evans and the Ava Gardner Trust.
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