Ava Gardner: Twilight of the Goddess

Gardner had come to Hollywood on a fluke. Her 19-year-old sister was married to a photographer and living in New York when Ava made her first trip out of North Carolina at 16. Her sister's husband recognized her sultry beauty and took some pictures, which he put in his storefront window. An MGM representative who saw the pictures and wanted a date (he didn't get one) sent the photos to the studio and Ava ended up getting a screen test in New York. Her Southern accent was so thick they decided not to use sound. "The test was for people who were simply beautiful and had no talent," she said. "There wasn't a thing that I could do. I couldn't act--I was the first to be eliminated in high school plays. I had no training whatsoever. I was just a pretty little girl. But I loved the idea, because I loved movies." She turned to the right, turned to the left, walked fullface towards the camera, and by the time she was 18, in 1940, she and her sister were setting up in a Los Angeles apartment.

Gardner was given a standard starlet contract, seven years starting at $50 a week, and a tour of the MGM lot. On her second day she was brought in to watch Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland making Babes on Broadway. Rooney, who was then as big and bright a star as any at MGM, took one look at the fresh new property and fell for her. "He asked if I would go out with him," Ava remembered, "but I pretended that I had a date. I didn't know a soul, but it was that old Southern thing, you know, 'I'm busy.' It was sort of a game that Southern girls played, to be rather unattainable. Not to be had. Then I couldn't wait until he called again and asked a second time, so I could say, 'Yes.' "

"I learned to slouch," she laughed, recalling how she tried not to tower over the 5'3" Rooney whenever they went out and the photographers were; snapping. "I had a very particular slouch that I did, like the way Princess Diana does when she's with Charles. On our wedding day I took my heels off for the photographs."

She wore a tailored blue suit that day because she didn't have the money to pay for a wedding dress and was too proud to ask Mickey to buy one for her. "I wouldn't accept it," she said. "Though I regret never having been married in white. I couldn't afford a big wedding dress and I didn't accept charity. That's just how I was brought up."

Ava told me she was still a virgin on her wedding night, and said that when she asked for some new panties to wear under her nightgown, her sister told her she didn't need to sleep with panties any longer. "So there I was naked underneath my nightie and so shy and frightened," she recalled. "I didn't drink then but I had about four glasses of champagne. I was one frightened young lady. [But] I caught on very, very quickly," she admitted with a laugh. "It was a beautiful evening but I'm not going to tell you step-by-step what happened in bed. I just can't talk about those things, they are too personal."

Eight months after Rooney and Gardner had married, it was over. Ava rarely bad-mouthed the men she married, though by the time she talked with me she was coming to believe that she'd "protected them long enough." You have to go to Mickey Rooney to get a sense of what went wrong.

"I had no real idea of what marriage was," Rooney confessed in his 1965 autobiography. "I thought that marriage was a small dictatorship in which the husband is the dictator and the wife is the underling. What an impossible sonofabitch I must have been. To this day, I don't think Ava has forgiven me for my selfishness, my stupidity, and my clumsiness in those beginning moments of marriage." Rooney also noted that "the quality of rage has always been part of Ava." One time she narrowly missed his head with an inkwell. Another time she took a knife and cut up the furniture. She also threatened to kill him. On the night they broke up, she told him to "Get the hell out!" When he later phoned and attempted a reconciliation, she hung up on him.

Howard Hughes was next. "He would appear after every breakup of every marriage or every love affair," Ava said. "Howard was Johnny-on-the-spot. He even arranged to have some of my affairs broken up."

She told me that Hughes had wanted desperately to marry her. "I could give you anything in the world to make you happy," she claimed he told her. "If you want to work, I'll get the greatest stories for you, the best directors; if you don't want to work, if you like boats, I'll get another boat and we'll sail. We can do anything in the world you like." Gardner laughed when she recalled how there "were tears in Howard's eyes while he was telling me how much money he had. Jesus Christ!" But she said she turned Hughes down because she didn't love him. "There was no chemistry. With me it's always immediate or nothing. I either fall in love quickly or I don't fall in love at all. I've never sort of grown to love."

Like others, Ava found some of Hughes's behavior strange. She said he didn't like blacks or Jews, and he had such an aversion to dust that he would have his entourage of cars pull off Nevada roads when cars passed in the opposite direction while he sat with a tissue covering his face ("You had to sit in the car until the dust settled"). But, she said, "It's not true that Howard wore gloves and didn't shake hands with people. I remember one of his guys saying to him, 'Howard, you are so afraid of germs, yet you go to bed with broads.' He was just very shy."

Artie Shaw came along in 1945. He had been married four times before, to such starry beauties as Lana Turner and Evelyn Keyes, and Ava became wife number five. He saw in her a mind unformed, and just as Arthur Miller would appeal to the insecure Marilyn Monroe, Shaw's intellect was a powerful draw for Ava. He gave her books to read, had her enroll in courses at UCLA, and brought her to his psychiatrist to be analyzed. For awhile, she cast herself in the role of his obedient student. But not for too long. "With Artie I used to run away," she said. "I'd go swimming in someone else's swimming pool, then come home with dripping wet hair and he'd say, 'Where the hell have you been?' Still, I always came home."

Then one day she didn't come home, but even then, she confessed, "I was in a bad state. I was madly in love. He called one day and I was thrilled. I went to his office to see him. He didn't bother to come by, but I went flying over there like a damn fool. And what he wanted was to ask me if I minded if he went to Mexico to get a quick divorce to marry [novelist] Kathleen Winsor. I was crushed. I said, 'Yes, of course.' So he did, he married her. And that was that."

What she told the divorce judge, which was dutifully reported in The Los Angeles Times on October 25, 1946, was that Shaw "disregarded even my smallest wish. And he persisted in humiliating me every chance he got. 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 tried to say something he would shout, 'Shut up!' "

But as she explained to me, "It was just simply that we couldn't get along together. It was difficult going to court in those days because the only way you could get a divorce was on mental cruelty or some such jazz, so you had to make up stories."

Gardner established herself at last as a movie star. She did The Killers with Burt Lancaster (it was his film debut). In The Hucksters she got to act opposite her childhood idol, Clark Gable. ("I adored Clark Gable," she told me. "I was in love with him from the time I was a child. When we were working together I would suddenly look at him and I'd go to pieces. I'd forget my lines and stammer.") She made a memorable goddess in the film version of Kurt Weill's musical stage hit One Touch of Venus. And she acted with Gregory Peck and Walter Huston in The Great Sinner, darkened her complexion for Show Boat, and got critical raves for Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Then she met and married Frank Sinatra.

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