Thursdays in December | 27 Movies
She was stunningly beautiful and glamorous, yet earthy and uninhibited at the same time. Actress Ava Gardner — TCM’s Star of the Month for December — was one of the biggest silver screen icons. Once dubbed “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal” in a publicity campaign, her image was often distorted by the gossip columnists, news of divorces and Hollywood myths. Born Dec. 24, 1922, her legend is still discussed 100 years after her birth.
She was the “the good-bad girl, the tough-soft, hard-drinking, straight-shooting beauty who could keep up with any guy,” director Peter Bogdanovich wrote in a 2006 New York Times book review. Italian director Federico Fellini is said to have modeled Anita Ekberg’s character after Gardner in the film La Dolce Vita (1960). She was immortalized when she put her hands in the cement outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Cole Porter mentioned her in a song lyric.
But who was the real Ava Gardner?
To many, she was a loyal friend. When much of Hollywood stayed away from actress Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco — worrying they would upstage the bride — Gardner was one of the few actors who attended to support her friend, Gracie, according to Grace Kelly’s biographer.
In 1984, Debbie Reynolds couldn’t reach her daughter, Carrie Fisher. Reynolds knew Carrie was in her London hotel room, so she called Ava, who lived in London, to ask if she would check on Carrie. Carrie was having a difficult time during this period, and Reynolds was concerned she was in distress, Reynolds wrote in her autobiography.
“I’ll sure as hell take care of it,” Reynolds quoted Gardner in her book. Gardner went to Carrie’s hotel room, where she found her, called a doctor and stayed with Carrie until she was sure she was out of danger.
“You want a friend? You can’t do better than Ava Gardner,” said playwright Tennessee Williams. “Good Lord, do not ask her a question, any question, unless you want the unvarnished, peppery truth. She will level you with honesty, kindness, appreciation, open and pure love.” Williams said it took a lot to get on her bad side, but you didn’t want to get there.
Gardner was uninhibited. She didn’t like the restrictions that came with Hollywood and the publicity department. She purchased a home in Spain in 1955 and lived abroad for the remainder of her life.
“She never believed that the image they saw was what she really was,” said her close friend, singer Lena Horne. “And she had a big mouth like mine. We had no subtlety, no discretion and before we thought, we spoke, which in those days was not always the right thing to do.”
At her core, Ava Gardner remained an often shy, unpretentious woman from North Carolina.
“She was surprisingly shy, yet spoke her mind fearlessly (and often colorfully), who thought little of herself as an actress, who lived in a man's world yet managed not to be fooled into losing sight of who she was,” Bogdanovich wrote. “She remained, ultimately, free to be herself, no matter what the price.”
The girl from Grabtown, N.C.
On Christmas Eve 1922, the Gardner family welcomed Ava Lavinia Gardner, one of seven children born to Jonas and Mary (Mollie) Gardner. Jonas was a sharecropper, and though Ava said they were poor, she said she had a happy childhood. “If you're going to be poor, might as well be poor on a farm,” she told author Peter Evans in an interview.
The Gardners hit hard financial times after the family’s barn and cotton gin burned down in a fire. The family moved to Brogden, N.C., where Mollie was the caretaker of the Brogden Teacherage, a boarding house for teachers. When the teacherage closed in 1934, Ava moved with her parents to Newport News, VA., where her mother was a caretaker for a boarding house that catered to shipyard workers, according to the Ava Gardner Museum historians. Jonas Gardner died in 1938 while they were in Newport News. Eventually returning to North Carolina with Mollie, Gardner continued her education.
From Tar Heel to Starlet
Fate turned the Southern girl into Cinderella in the type of story that seems straight from a Hollywood script.
It was the summer of 1939 and 18-year-old Gardner was visiting her older sister Beatrice, known as Bappie, in New York City. Bappie’s husband, professional photographer Larry Tarr, photographed Gardner and displayed her photo in the window of his studio. Wanting Gardner’s phone number for a party, a man called Tarr’s photo studio asking for her contact information and claiming to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios. Rather than calling the man back, Larry Tarr hand-delivered photos to the MGM New York office, which yielded a screen test for Gardner, according to the Ava Gardner Museum historians.
Gardner’s screen test was with Marvin Schenck. “I don’t think he could understand a word I was saying. My accent was as Tar Heel as it gets,” Gardner said in an interview with Peter Evans. Though Schenck may not have been able to understand her Southern accent, he liked what he saw and delivered a silent screen test to MGM.
At 18, she was a North Carolina teenager traveling to Hollywood for a contract. However, when it was time to go west, her mother Mollie had to stay home, because she was ill. Bappie went in her place to chaperon.
Gardner didn’t find immediate fame in films. From 1941 to 1944, she appeared in uncredited roles. You might spot her as a carhop in Kid Glove Killer (1942) or a girl at a USO canteen in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944). Gardner’s first credited film roles were in the East Side Kids comedy, Ghosts on the Loose (1943), and the Dr. Gillespie film, Three Men in White (1944).
But what did get Gardner’s name in the headlines was her first marriage to one of Hollywood’s top film stars: Mickey Rooney.
Gardner first met Rooney while she was getting a tour of the MGM studio lot. She was brought on the set of Babes on Broadway (1941), where she met 21-year-old Rooney dressed as Carmen Miranda for a scene. From that moment, Rooney was smitten and called Gardner for a date until she relented. On every date, Rooney proposed marriage and every time, Gardner turned him down, according to Rooney’s autobiography. Until one day she agreed but said she wanted to turn 19 first, according to Gardner’s memoir. The two married on Jan. 10, 1942, and were divorced by May 21, 1943, the same day Gardner’s mother died of uterine cancer. Gardner was married a second time to clarinetist Artie Shaw in October 1945. The two were married a little over a year, divorcing in October 1946.
Stardom
After several glamorous bit parts at MGM, Gardner finally made her big break with Universal’s 1946 film noir The Killers, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Producer Mark Hellinger saw Gardner in the film Whistle Stop (1946) with George Raft and knew he had found his Kitty Collins, according to Burt Lancaster’s biographer. Directed by Robert Siodmak, the film was not only transformative for Gardner, but it was also the first film of actor Burt Lancaster.
“I liked Mark Hellinger at once, because I could tell he saw me as an actress, not a sexpot,” Gardner wrote in her memoir. “He trusted me from the beginning, and I trusted him. And he gave me a feeling of responsibility about being a movie star that I’d never for a moment felt before.”
While the roles that followed may not have been as meaty as Kitty in The Killers, she was now solidified as a star and — for better or worse — a femme fatale.
After that, she appeared in The Hucksters (1947) with Clark Gable, the film noir The Bribe (1949) with Robert Taylor and Charles Laughton and East Side, West Side (1949) with Barbara Stanwyck.
“In breaks during the filming of The Bribe, Charles Laughton … used to take me aside and read me passages out of the Bible, then make me read them back with the right cadences and stresses,” Gardner wrote in her memoir. “…He was the only one in all my film years who took the time and went out of his way to try and make an actress out of me.”
During this string of successes, Gardner starred in her first of three films with Gregory Peck, who became a lifelong friend. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book The Gambler, the two co-starred in The Great Sinner (1949). The film’s cinematographer George Folsey said Gardner “behaved like the farm girl she was, without any pretense,” according to Peck’s biographer.
Peck and Gardner co-starred again in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), a Hemingway story that was only 17 pages long. To beef up the story for the film, screenwriter Casey Robinson wrote flashbacks dealing with the women in the life of Harry Street, played by Peck. One of those women is Cynthia, who Robinson wrote with Gardner in mind, according to Peck’s biographer. During this time, Gardner was married to singer and actor Frank Sinatra, who wanted Gardner with him in New York City for his club appearances. Gardner agreed to do the film if she could shoot her scenes in 10 days.
Gardner’s film role in a Technicolor musical was one that her close friend Lena Horne wanted: Julie LaVerne in Show Boat (1951). Julie is a woman with a black mother and a white father and was a character Horne performed in a vignette in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). “The production code banned interracial romance on the screen, so the studio gave the part to my good friend, Ava Gardner,” Horne says in That’s Entertainment III (1994). “Though she was one of my few good friends, I was deeply disappointed that I didn’t get the part.”
Gardner told Horne that she didn’t understand why they didn’t cast Horne, because director George Sidney had Gardner memorize Horne’s version of Julie from Till the Clouds Roll By. “I know it (Horne not getting the role) weighed very heavily on Ava too,” said Show Boat co-star Marge Champion. The loss was something that Horne felt for many years, according to Horne’s biographer. Gardner also faced disappointment when her singing voice was dubbed.
Gardner continued to act with top stars, such as Robert Mitchum in My Forbidden Past (1951), Clark Gable in Lone Star (1952) and again with Robert Taylor in Ride, Vaquero! (1953) and Knights of the Round Table (1953). She was also photographed by famed cinematographer Jack Cardiff in the ethereal film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), co-starring James Mason. Film director Martin Scorsese says the film is like “entering a strange, wonderful dream.”
Gardner met one of her lifelong friends on the set of another film, Mogambo (1953), Hollywood newcomer Grace Kelly. The two bonded while filming on location in Africa. A remake of Red Dust (1932), Clark Gable reprises his role that he played in the original film. Gardner was cast in the role Jean Harlow played in the 1932 version, and she received her only Academy Award nomination for Mogambo.
The film’s director, John Ford, initially was unhappy with the casting of Gardner and was not shy to let her know it. However, after a rough start to filming, Ford eventually told her, “You’re damn good. Just take it easy.” The two got along for the rest of filming, Gardner wrote in her memoir.
During the filming of Mogambo, Gardner’s husband, singer and actor Frank Sinatra, received word that he won the role of Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953). He and Gardner had campaigned for the role, and the casting revitalized his slumping career. Sinatra won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Maggio.
Gardner then won the highly sought after role of Maria Vargas in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The film was a commentary on the film business, like Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), which gave an inside look at stage performers. Gardner wrote in her memoir that she felt she understood the character, the no-name dancer who quickly rose to fame. Making this film wasn’t a pleasant experience, however, she also said some of the scenes were among her personal all-time favorites. She particularly enjoyed the flamenco dancing, a style of dance that she became passionate about in her free time.
Gardner ended the 1950s with her third and final film with Gregory Peck, On the Beach (1959). Based on the best-selling book by Nevil Shute, the film is about nuclear warfare, and while the rest of the world has been destroyed, only Australia remains. According to Peck’s biographers, he considered this one of Gardner’s finest performances,.
Stepping back
In 1955, Gardner purchased a home in Spain, where she loved the music and culture. It was a respite after life in Hollywood. She didn’t enjoy the restrictions of the film community or attention from the press.
Though she continued acting throughout the 1960s, her roles were less frequent, but also had more depth. In 1960, she co-starred with Dirk Bogarde in the Spanish Civil War drama, The Angel Wore Red (1960), playing a prostitute. In 1964, she co-starred in the political drama Seven Days in May, directed by John Frankenheimer.
She was directed by her longtime friend, John Huston, in the film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, The Night of the Iguana (1964). Co-starring with Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon, Gardner was initially worried she would be out of her depth as an actress. However, Huston convinced her to perform in the Williams adaptation, and he was pleased. “For my money, Ava’s performance in this film is the greatest thing she has done on the screen so far,” Huston said. Gardner in turn enjoyed working with Huston and acted in two more of his films: The Bible (1966) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).
In 1968, Gardner moved to England, and though she acted in the 1970s and 1980s, she largely enjoyed a quiet life with her corgis. She appeared in some disaster films like Earthquake (1974) and City on Fire (1979). She also performed in a reoccurring role in the primetime soap opera, Knots Landing, in 1985. But in 1986, Gardner was forced to stop acting after suffering a stroke, which weakened the left side of her body, according to the Ava Gardner Museum. She passed away in England on January 25, 1990, at age 67 and was returned home to North Carolina for her final resting place.
Remembering Ava
Today, the myths and tabloid stories about Ava Gardner are still bandied around. Her romance and marriage to Sinatra (1951 to 1957) are still often discussed. But she was much more than the headlines. Ava Gardner’s great-niece Ava Thompson, co-trustee of the Ava Gardner Trust, would like her to be remembered for more than her beauty.
“She should be remembered as an accomplished actress … She became so familiar with the movie industry that by the time she was making her last film with MGM, The Naked Maja, she arrived in Italy to do her filming to find the movie set in disarray with no complete script,” Thompson said in an interview conducted by the Ava Gardner Museum. “She jumped in and was working in the production department to move the movie towards final production.”
Thompson, who was named for Gardner, also would like her aunt to be remembered for her generosity. In 1986, Gardner established the Ava Gardner Trust, which continues to contribute funds to various charities.
