Ava Gardner

Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922 – January 25, 1990) was an American screen actress who worked on film and television. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time.

Biography

Early years

Gardner was born in the small farming community of Brogden, Johnston County, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children (she had two brothers and four sisters) of poor cotton and tobacco farmers; her mother, Molly, was a Baptist of Scots-Irish descent, while her father, Jonas Bailey Gardner, was a Catholic of Irish American and Tuscarora Indian descent. While the children were still young, the Gardners lost their property, forcing Jonas Gardner to work at a sawmill and Molly to begin working as a cook and housekeeper at a dormitory for teachers at the nearby Brodgen School.

When Ava was 13, the family soon decided to try their luck in a bigger town, Newport News, Virginia, where Molly Gardner found work managing a boardinghouse for the city's many shipworkers. That job did not last long, and the family moved to the Rock Ridge suburb of Wilson, North Carolina, where Molly Gardner ran another boarding house. Gardner's father died of bronchitis in 1935. Ava and some of her siblings attended high school in Rock Ridge and she graduated from there in 1939. She then attended secretarial classes at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson for about a year.

Gardner, who by age eighteen had become a stunning, green - eyed brunette, was visiting her sister Beatrice in New York in 1941 when Beatrice's husband Larry, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait. He liked the results and displayed the final product in the front window of his Fifth Avenue studio.

New York and Hollywood: MGM

In 1941, a Loews Theatres legal clerk, Barnard "Barney" Duhan, spotted Gardner's photo in the Tarr Photography Studio on 5th Avenue in New York. The photo had been taken in 1939 by the proprietor, Ava's brother-in-law Larry Tarr, who was married to Ava's older sister, Bappie (Beatrice). At the time, Duhan often posed as an MGM talent scout to meet girls, using the fact that MGM was a subsidiary of Loews. Duhan entered Tarr's and tried to get Ava's number, but was rebuffed by the receptionist. Duhan made the offhand comment, "Somebody should send her info to MGM," and the Tarrs did so immediately. Shortly after, Ava, who at the time was a student at Atlantic Christian College, traveled to New York to be interviewed at MGM's New York office. She was offered a standard contract by MGM, and Ava left school for Hollywood in 1941 with her sister Bappie accompanying her. MGM's first order of business was to provide her a voice coach, as her Carolina drawl was nearly incomprehensible.^[1]

Marriages and relationships

Mickey Rooney

Soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, Gardner met actor Mickey Rooney; they married on January 10, 1942 in Ballard, California. She was 19 years old. Gardner made several movies before 1946, but it wasn't until she starred in The Killers opposite Burt Lancaster, that she became known as a movie star and sex symbol. (Rooney and Gardner divorced in 1943, mainly because Rooney wouldn't give up his partying ways). Rooney later rhapsodised about Gardner's performance in bed, though upon hearing this Gardner retorted "Well, honey, he may have enjoyed the sex, but I sure as hell didn't." She once characterised their marriage as "Love Finds Andy Hardy".

Howard Hughes

After divorcing Rooney, Gardner was pursued by businessman and movie producer Howard Hughes, who offered her any sum she named, as much jewelry as she wanted and movie stardom if she married him. Of Hughes, Gardner said, "I just never loved Howard. He so irritated me. I once knocked him out with a paperweight."^{[citation needed]} Hughes had her followed by private detectives and when Gardner broke off their relationship and started dating actor Howard Duff he responded by having a car that he had purchased for her taken apart, piece by piece, and left in her driveway.^{[citation needed]}

Artie Shaw

Her second marriage was to clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw from 1945 to 1946 and it was even more disastrous than the first. It was during this marriage that Gardner began to drink and take refuge in therapy.

Frank Sinatra

The third and last marriage was to singer and actor Frank Sinatra from 1951 to 1957.

Sinatra left his wife, Nancy, for Ava and their subsequent marriage made headlines. Sinatra was treated poorly by gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the Hollywood establishment, and his fans for leaving his "good wife" for this exotic femme fatale. His career suffered, while Ava's prospered -- the headlines only solidified her sexy screen siren image. The marriage to Sinatra was stormy -- passionate fighting, jealousy, numerous separations. Gardner used her considerable clout to get Sinatra cast in his Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity (1953). That role and the award revitalized Sinatra's acting and singing careers. During their marriage, Ava became pregnant, but she terminated the pregnancy due to the volatility of her marriage. She had always wanted children, but she said years later, "We couldn't even take care of ourselves. How were we going to take care of a baby?" Gardner and Sinatra remained good friends for the rest of her life.

Ernest Hemingway

She divorced Sinatra in 1957 and headed to Spain where her friendship with famed writer Ernest Hemingway led to her becoming a fan of bullfighting and bullfighters. "It was a sort of madness, honey," she said later of the time.

Oscar

Gardner was nominated for an Oscar for Mogambo (1953). She lost to Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Many thought Gardner's greatest performance was as Maxine Faulk in The Night of the Iguana (1964), for which she was not nominated. Grayson Hall, as the repressed Judith Fellowes, however, was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category.

"Off-camera, she gave off sparks of wit, as in her assessment of John Ford, who directed her in Mogambo: 'The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!'"^[2]

Gardner also had a recurring role as Ruth Galveston on the television series Knots Landing in 1985.

London: the last years

She moved to London in 1968, undergoing a hysterectomy to allay her worries of contracting the uterine cancer that had killed her mother. After a stroke in 1989, which left her partially paralyzed and bedridden, Frank Sinatra paid her $50,000 medical expenses. Her last words were 'I'm tired' to her housekeeper Carmen. She died of pneumonia in London, England at the age of 67 in 1990. After her death, Sinatra's daughter found him slumped in his room, face wet with tears, unable to raise his voice above a whisper. Ava was not only the love of his life but also the inspiration to one of his most personal and magic songs, "I am a fool to want you", recorded after their separation.

Grave

Gardner is interred in the Sunset Memorial Park, Smithfield, North Carolina; the town of Smithfield now has an Ava Gardner Museum.

Lesbian Rumours

Printed in The Daily Mail on July 15 2006 were extracts from a new biography of Gardner written by Lee Server. It contains a story of Frank Sinatra bursting into a restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1952 at which Gardner, Lana Turner and a companion were having dinner and screaming at them 'Lesbians! You're a bunch of lesbians! All of you Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!'

Lana Turner

A biography has previously alleged that Sinatra found Gardner and Turner in bed together and Gardner admitted an affair with Turner and a number of other high-profile female stars to the journalist Michael Thornton. When asked why she denied it at the time she replied that the morals clause in their contracts meant they would have been terminated had such information been made public. Ava's new biography Love is Nothing... discusses this issue in that Turner later reportedly told people that what really happened was that she, Ava and a male friend were sitting down to eat dinner when Frank happened upon them.

Betty Grable

Gardner is reported as saying that it was a visit to New York to see Cole Porter's musical Du Barry Was a Lady starring Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr and 23-year old Betty Grable that made her realize she could have feelings for another woman.

'From the moment Betty walked onto that stage, she just blew me away. I couldn't take my eyes off this gorgeous creature and I began to realise, with some embarrassment, that I found her physically attractive. She had a very sexual way of delivering her lines, with that pouting little mouth that made every word look like a kiss to the audience.'

Years later Gardner met Grable in Hollywood and tried to tell her about the effect she had had on her. According to Gardner, Grable just rolled her eyes and fell about laughing before saying 'Well honey, I can think of one big thing we've both had in common' (she was referring to Artie Shaw).

After leaving Shaw, Gardner went to stay with the self-confessed lesbian agent Minna Wallis, sister of the Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis. Minna made no secret of her admiration for Gardner who said 'she was just crazy about me, but at least she wasn't trying to get me pregnant. I had a deep-down fear of child-bearing.'

After the marriage to Sinatra ended, Gardner fled to London where she began an affair with Britain's reigning sex symbol Christine Norden, the openly bisexual mistress of movie mogul Alexander Korda. One of the reasons for the volatility of her marriage to Sinatra was her dalliances with, among others, Lana Turner and Barbara Payton. One day Sinatra arrived home to find all three women 'lying around with not many clothes on', to quote Payton.

In London her friends were almost exclusively homosexual.

Her principal friend was Charles Gray.

Trivia

• She met author J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford University in November 1964. Neither was aware of the fame of the other.
• Gardner was portrayed by Kate Beckinsale in The Aviator (2004). In the 1998 TV movie The Rat Pack she was portrayed by Deborah Kara Unger. In the TV mini-series Sinatra she was played by Marcia Gay Harden (1992).
• Lee Server, a biographer of Gardner's) calls 'her often desperate joie de vivre' inspired the one-woman riot played by Anita Ekberg in Fellini's La Dolce Vita."^[3]
• In her autobiography, Ava: My Story, Gardner, a native Southerner, displayed a long memory for slights by recalling that when The Barefoot Contessa was released in 1954, "a lot of people thought it was either too talky or, like the good folks of Tupelo, Mississippi, who banned it from their town, too risqué for public consumption."
• After much pressure from Universal Studios, Gardner accepted the role of "Remy Graff" in the 1974 disaster film Earthquake simply because she wanted to spend the winter in Southern California.

Filmography

References

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