Gardner Ava - Ava Gardner: love is nothing

AVA GARDNER

Also by Lee Server

Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don t Care

Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo

The Big Book of Noir

Over My Dead Body

Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground

Danger Is My Business

Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures

Love Is Nothing

LEE SERVER

St. Martins Press New York

AVA GARDNER: LOVE IS NOTHING . Copyright 2006 by Lee Server. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Index by Peter Rooney

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Server, Lee.

Ava Gardner : love is nothing / Lee Server. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Filmography: p.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-312-31209-1

EAN 978-0-312-31209-1

1. Gardner, Ava, 192290. Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN2287.G37S47 2006

791.43028092dc22

[B]

2005051697

First Edition: April 2006

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Terri

Some who knew their old movies said it was all just like the one of hers with the funeral at the beginning and the end and the blue-gray clouds and the black umbrellas and the mourners in the rain.

Sunset Memorial Park lay at the western edge of Smithfield in a small, flat expanse of trimmed lawn and looping drive open to the main street below and to the surrounding houses and mobile homes. An assembly of five hundred or so stood silently in the rainlocal people and old acquaintances and fans and the ones who had read about it in their morning news and come out to have a look.

There were people who had known her long ago but not since who remembered her with proprietary fondness, and there were others who had known her only on the big screen or on the late show on TV but were pleased and proud that she had come home to her birthplace after so long a time away. There were some in the crowd who were there in the hope of seeing a celebrated face or two, one or another of the famous womans famous friends. A stretch limousine had rolled up the gravel driveway and stopped close by the grave and no one had come out and people had looked through the smoked glass windows, eager to know who was inside. (It was a hairdresser from Raleigh.)

At the grave site those who could claim more direct ties to the deceased sat on folding chairs within a roped-off enclosure, randomly protected from the weather by a leaking black canopy. In the front row was sister Myra with her children and their kin, and among them a stranger to Smithfield, the raven-haired South American woman who had come with the body from another country far away, now sitting with head bowed and weeping without pause. Great bundles of red and pink roses and tulips surrounded the cherrywood casket. The largest and most extravagant of the floral arrangements had been ordered from a local flower shop by a former husband of the dead woman; the check that came from California carried the signature of the man himself, and the florist would regret not keeping it as a souvenir, but it had been a very large order and a very big check.

Presiding at the grave was the Reverend Francis Bradshaw of the nearby Centenary United Methodist Church. He had not known the deceased personally (she had not lived in Smithfield for nearly fifty years), but he was a friend of her family, and it was to their world that she had now returned. The eulogy was brieffor a woman about whom a few million words had been written in her lifetime. She was authentic, genuine, said the Reverend Bradshaw, but no saint. She was who she was. In the movie there had been more to go on. It was Humphrey Bogart then remembering a dead star as he stood in the rainy Italian cemetery, with the good lines by Joe Mankiewicz, the lighting by Jack Cardiff, and the color by Technicolor.

She was who she was: Ava Gardner. Actress, love goddess. Resident of London, Madrid, Hollywood, and Grabtown. She liked jazz and driving too fast and nights that went on forever. She loved gin and dogs and four- letter words and Frank Sinatra. Once upon a time she was thought to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She had luminescent white skin, eyes like Andean emeralds, eminent cheekbones, a wide, sensuous crescent mouth, a sleek, strong body that moved with a feline insolence, and a dancers grace. She played temptresses, adventurers, restless women, in the movies and in private life. On the silver screen she conveyed a powerful image of dark desirability. To see her in the flesh was said to have made the blood race, the hair on the arms stand up. To know her more intimately was to surrender to mad passions, to risk all. Im a plain simple girl off the farm, she liked to say, and Ive never pretended to be anything else.

Hers was the old rags-to-riches story, a Cinderella rewrite, the barefoot country girl who became a reluctant movie queen. Fate or luck or genetic coding had given her an extraordinary appearance and the brains, style, and whatever were the incalculable ingredients for stardom (whether you were born with it or caught it from a public drinking cup, like the man said, she had it). As an unknowing teenager, she had gone direct from small town to the picture capital, drafted by the mightiest of the dream factories. At first it was not at all certain what she had to offer beyond her youthful beauty. A reluctant performer, she was modest and self-conscious, nervous to the point of illness before a camera. Coaches, publicists, and photographers set to work revising her to the studios standards, doing away with her backwoods accent, unpolished movements, and uncouth manners, trying to make her into someone else before she was quite sure who she was. She felt humbled, full of resentment. She nurtured a defiant rebelliousness that would drive her forever after.

In the beginning her social lifenot her actinggot all the attention. She was famous if at all for her famous admirers, movie stars, swinging bandleaders, mad millionaires. Her mother far away would see the pictures and the stories in the gossip columns and wonder what her little girl was getting up to, but Ava could take care of herself (and the millionaire had the stitches on his face to prove it). She married for love, no matter what anyone said to the contrary, once and then again, and again after that. The first husband was too young at heart, the second one too cold. Love became her terrible habit, something hopeless to resist, impossible to get right. In the end she would find it, the one that she knew was forever, but that one became the most impossible of all.

She had been around a lifetime in starlet years when her break finally came. It was in one of those pictures that began to appear at the end of the war: dark, spiritually ravaged stories for a grim, wised-up populace that no longer believed in happy-ever-after, only lust and temptation and doom. A carnal, dangerous angel in the chiaroscuro dreamscape of film noir, she was a success at last. Smoldering in black satin, she loomed over Broadway, eight stories larger than life.

She became at once the principal sex symbol for the movies new dark age. Audiences responded to her style, an impudent, provocative blend of sweater girl and spider woman, the all-American accessibility of Lana Turner and the dark exoticism of Dietrich or Lamarr. Her cynical demeanor and sometimes less than wholesome glamour made her fit company for the new generation of male stars, Lancaster, Mitchum, Mason, Peck (in his surly early years), the corps of unsmiling, morally ambiguous men of postwar cinema. She played noir temptresses and big-city vamps and a statue of Venus sprung to succulent life, but never the girl next door. Audiences tuned in to her private persona as well, the one that seemed not so different from her screen image, the playgirl who lived for kicks, the denizen of nightclubs, the temptress who brought powerful men to their knees. Her popularity soared. Her acting grew in assurance, charisma, and variety. The studio execs dragged their feetskeptical of her talent, fearful of her independencestill gave her the utility parts as the leading mans bland leading lady, but in between there would come unusual projects and distinctive roles to which she would bring unique presence, elements of style, personality, and personal history. Her greatest films are hard to imagine without her.