Ava Gardner Read online

  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

  AVA GARDNER

  “Love Is Nothing”

  LEE SERVER

  St. Martin’s 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. Martin’s 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, 1922—90. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.G37S47 2006

  791.4302’8’092—dc22

  [B]

  2005051697

  First Edition: April 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Terri

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Ava

  PART ONE

  1. Goddess Country

  2. Zombies at the Beachcomber

  3. Femme Fatale

  4. Venus in Furs

  PART TWO

  5. Frankie Goes to Hollywood

  6. Torrid Was Your Blood

  7. Tempt Me to Madness

  PART THREE

  8. Spanish for Cinderella

  9. Sun and Shadow

  10. Vita, Dolce Vita

  11. “Love Is Nothing…”

  PART FOUR

  12. Venus Falling

  Sources

  Filmography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  Ava

  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 rain—local 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 woman’s 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 brief—for 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 dancer’s 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. “I’m a plain simple girl off the farm,” she liked to say, “and I’ve 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 studio’s 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 life—not her acting—got 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 hap
py-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 feet—skeptical of her talent, fearful of her independence—still gave her the utility parts as the leading man’s 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.

  She took no pride in her career, saw acting as an embarrassing ordeal. Psychiatrists wrestled with her issues of self-esteem. Friends called her a dedicated contrarian, someone you could depend on to do whatever she was asked not to do. She cursed the burdens of stardom, the prying of the press, the studio’s hypocritical codes of moral conduct, as she reveled in her privileges and pursued a scandalous romance with a married man. The affair demonized her as a home wrecker but fed her status as a symbol of sexual allure, made her more famous and popular than before. She would rise above the strata of movie stardom to some even more rarefied atmosphere, on the cover of every magazine everywhere, one of the handful of pop deities who made the whole world want to follow their every move.

  The illicit romance became legit, but even in marriage the couple remained a scandal. They loved each other as if love were a battle to the death. When the obsession, the jealousy, and the destruction became too much she ran away, kissed off a husband and the industry town she despised in one flight, left America for new horizons, and never looked back. She was searching for something in her new surroundings, without and within, but finding it was something else.

  In Europe and in adventures around the world she became the glittering expatriate, her life a hotly reported tale of glamour and sex and mad love. Existence became a daily contradiction as she craved her privacy and dignity but lived in headline type for the world to see, complete with front-page-worthy love affairs, drinking binges, public spectacles, and violence. She became first the prototype and then the caricature of jet-set decadence, a founding mother of la dolce vita, queen of the night, in constant flight from the paparazzi. Pleasure took the place of love, and love became something to be feared or at best enjoyed at a distance and in memories of what had or might have been.

  Along the way she had turned into a good actress. Not that she wanted to hear about it. Professional compliments still made her uncomfortable and shy. You must be thinking of some other dame, she would tell people when they said something nice. She worked only for the loot, she would say, only to finance her extravagant devotion to fun and forgetting. Deep down, she would say, I’m very superficial.

  The clock ticked toward midnight, and the face that had once awed the world began to go away, lost to age and assorted excesses. She escaped again, another new beginning. A quiet life at last, a return to common sense. There was peace in this but regret as well, time to look back and think about choices made and things gone wrong.

  Screen goddesses, if they lived long enough, became Dorian Grays in reverse, placing themselves out of sight, hidden from the public in their cloisters in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, London, ravaged by time as their celluloid faces remained on view around the world, always the same, never growing old. Reclusive, she would watch herself on television late at night; see the films like moving scrapbooks, animated memories of amazing places and extraordinary people, touchstones for experiences, some that had been all but forgotten. She would look at her image of forty and nearly fifty years before and ask herself—not immodestly but with uncertainty and a sense of wonder—if anyone had ever been so young or so beautiful.

  Life every now and then behaved as if it had seen too many bad movies, Bogart said, at the funeral in the rain. She was who she was, said the Reverend Bradshaw. The camera craning forward, Spanish guitar on the sound track, slow dissolve.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Goddess Country

  She was born in Johnston County in the red-dirt heartland of North Carolina, beyond Smithfield, at the western bend of the old Grabtown Road. The baby was delivered from her mother at ten o’clock that December 24, 1922, healthy, noisy as hell. In the morning family and friends gathered around a candlelit Christmas tree and cheered the new arrival and everyone had a look at the infant girl and listened to her yell. Two cakes—one chocolate and one white coconut—were baked to honor a twice-blessed day—a Christmas/birthday ritual forever after. Though one cake was intended to honor the baby Jesus, the girl would come to think of them both as tribute to her alone. They named her Ava Lavi nia Gardner, the first after a beautiful maiden aunt, and the second because it sounded so pretty.

  Her people were from the Piedmont plateau, the wide central strip of rolling hills between the Allegheny Mountains and the low-lying coastal plain and wind-whipped barrier isles to the east. Her bloodlines were a composite of the Piedmont’s migrant herds: English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, a drop or two of French Huguenot. They had come to North Carolina over the previous century and a half, come down the Pioneer Road, down the Great Valley Road in the era of European settlement of the Carolina backcountry that started in the 1750s. Few whites lived in the region before that time. Neighboring Virginia and South Carolina were settled and prospered, but North Carolina long resisted greater colonization due to its hazardous Atlantic harbors and the lingering stigma of Roanoke Island, the death-cursed lost colony where English America had falteringly begun. The land was as it had been since its creation, granite mountain, forest and foothill, ancient seabed plain, home to wildlife and for ten thousand years to scattered tribes of Amerindians: the Bear River, Cape Fear, Catawba, Cheraw, Cherokee, Coree, Chowan, Eno Hatteras, Kajawee, Meherin, Nachapunga, Neuse River, Occaneechi, Pamlico, Saponi, Secotin, Sissipahaw, Sugaree, Tuscarora, Waccamaw, Wateree, Waxhau, Weopomeoc. A young London-born naturalist and Crown surveyor named John Lawson would make the first formal exploration of the interior lands, traveling far along the upper reaches of the Neuse and beyond, visiting the tribal settlements and recording the unspoiled terrain and abundant natural resources. He would publish an avid account of his experiences in a volume titled A New Voyage to Carolina, producing much interest in the forgotten colony and helping set off a wave of migration to inland North Carolina that would last for more than a hundred years. Now arrived newcomers by the thousands from Virginia, Pennsylvania, England, Wales, Ireland, half a million from the ports of Ulster alone. The wilderness was cleared for farmland, the hills and valleys echoed with English drinking songs, Scottish reels, and Goidelic hymns, and the Native American tribes were all but eliminated by war, smallpox, and syphilis. Some years after the publication of A New Voyage to Carolina, and in thanks for spreading the good word about their homeland, some Tuscarora Indians would find John Lawson and stick his body full of sharpened splinters of kindling and set them on fire.

  The backcountry settlers were scattered across a rural landscape in a region without cities and only primitive transportation routes before the railroad came, limiting trade with the outside world. The residents of the Piedmont
were simple farmers, most of them, working fifty acres or less. They were known as plainspoken, self-reliant, ornery, blessed with an innate suspicion of government, politics, and religion (at least until the irresistible hegemony of the Baptists). On the subject of slavery—the explosive national issue that would one day be settled in an apocalyptic conflict, state against state—North Carolinians of the central and western counties were widely if not deeply ambivalent. Few farmers in the region owned slaves—few could afford to—but the wealthy planters who did owned enough to bring the black population in the Piedmont up to 30 percent and the culture of slavery thrived openly. In Smithfield, the county seat, there was a large slave market (not far from the present site of the Ava Gardner Museum) where as many as three hundred humans were sold on the block in a single day. “Dey uster strip dem niggers stark naked,” said former slave Josephine Smith of Johnston County recalling activities in the Smithfield market, “an’ gallop ‘em ober de square so dat de buyers could see dat dey warn’t scarred or deformed.” Family on Ava Gardner’s mother’s side were slave owners, with modest stock, at the time of the Civil War; her mother’s mother, Elizabeth Forbes Baker, then of Edgecombe County, was willed the ownership of two adult slaves in her father’s possession—”1 woman Maryann and 1 man Jim”—though with the outcome of the war she was not to collect on this inheritance. A flesh- and-blood link with the time of slavery remained well into the twentieth century. Growing up in Johnston County in the 1920s and ‘30s, Ava Gardner would cross the path of many an elderly African American who had been born and sold as human property.

  North Carolina seceded from the Union in 1861, giving some 150,000 troops to the Southern cause, one in three never to return alive. A farmer from Wilson County, James Bailey Gardner was among those North Carolinians who would wear the Confederate gray and he would be one of the lucky ones who came back alive and unharmed. He was a farmer, as his father had been before him, working a parcel of land his father had cleared in western Wilson County. Since 1853, James Bailey had been married to Peninah Batts, a planter’s daughter, whose American roots went back nearly two hundred years to the first Atlantic colonies. Their union would be blessed with seven offspring before Peninah’s untimely death in 1867. That same year Gardner claimed a new bride, the teenage Mary Dilda, twenty-two years his junior. With her his issue would grow by another half dozen: Cynthia, Benjamin, Charles, Warren, and in 1878, Jonas Bailey, and two years after that their last, a daughter named Ava Virginia.