The Reluctant Star
David Denbey
19 August 2013
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.
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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.
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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:
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:
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.
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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:
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.
Published in the print edition of the August 26, 2013, issue.
David Denby is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of “Great Books” and “Lit Up.”
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