The inconstant Gardner
‘I’m so f ***ing tired of being Ava Gardner,” said Ava Gardner, shortly before her death in 1990. It’s not hard to appreciate her fatigue. For decades the tabloids had been following and encouraging her rambunctiousness.
It was all in a day’s work for the star to scuffle with photographers. Nor were co-stars and suitors immune from her flying fists. She once hit Shelley Winters with a bottle. Howard Hughes was knocked unconscious with a brass ashtray.
Gardner met her pugilistic match, however, with George C Scott.
He beat her up at the Savoy, followed her to Rome and beat her up again, and their final bout was in Hollywood. “I’d be lying there next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding . . . There was so much blood,” she remembered, almost wistfully.
But is she herself remembered? Not really. Nevertheless, it is her awkwardness, her hesitancy, which is of interest. There was never much between Gardner and the camera. She was exposed, unprotected, her personality, as Humphrey Bogart says in The Barefoot Contessa, “wide open to be hurt badly”.
Gardner was born in North Carolina in 1922, her parents dirt-poor sharecroppers. As a result of a filmtest she was bidden to Los Angeles, where she was cast by MGM in Maisie Goes to Reno and within days met Mickey Rooney. He was short and liked big, tall girls. They were married in 1942.
“The smallest husband I ever had, and the biggest mistake I ever made,” she reflected later.
In fairness, she’d been warned. “Once he gets into your pants,” Louis B Mayer predicted, “he’ll be tired of you and he’ll chase after some other broad”. He did.
Gardner never sought tranquil types, and she liked having flings with bullfighters so much she rented a villa in Madrid. She was frequently between men. In October 1945, she married Artie Shaw, the bandleader, and divorce proceedings commenced within a year.
She was immediately courted by Frank Sinatra, whom she married in 1951. Sinatra was envious of all the bullfighters and kept threatening to commit suicide. Gardner told him to go ahead.
Though, in her day, Gardner was called “the world’s most beautiful animal”, she is one of those Hollywood icons who, seen through 21st-century eyes, has a touch of Dame Edna.
Maintaining she always hated the cinema, Gardner retired in 1972 to Kensington.
She had no family, no children, no partner. “The highlight of my day is walking the dog” — that, and getting drunk every night with fruity character actor and neighbour Charles Gray.
Not wanting to be seen as ageing and pathetic, Gardner rejected the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. Apart from cameos in disaster pictures like Earthquake or straightto-video films with Roddy McDowall, she effectively vanished. Her ashes were scattered in North Carolina.