The Cursed Life of Fat Woman Ava Gardner
In 1988, aged in her 60s and partially paralyzed by a series of strokes, Ava Gardner contacted a British journalist named Peter Evans. She is living in Knightsbridge, but is relatively poor: he has written biographies of Brigitte Bardot and Aristotle Onassis, and she hopes a book about her can be profitable for both. “Either I write books or sell jewelry,” she told him, “and I’m a bit sentimental about jewelry.”
or a few months, by phone and in person, at unusual hours of the day and night, Gardner tells Evans stories about her life – and how it went. Growing up on a tobacco plantation in the southern United States, as it was discovered by accident, Gardner was married to Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra and bandleader Artie Shaw when she was 30 years old – it turned out to be always unhappy. Drunk, brutally honest, and too free to fit easily into the tight shirt of the Hollywood studio system, it was Gardner’s life, not the movies she made, that became her work. her most enduring art.
Evans learned a number of hair-raising stories from Gardner’s experiences on set, in clubs and in various gentlemen’s bedrooms. And, of course, her sweetest recollections involve Sinatra, the great thwarted love of her life. “I miss Frank,” she whispered regretfully during a late-night conversation. “He is an asshole. But God, I miss him.”
There were more explosives left, but the project stalled when she abruptly cut off communication. It seems that Sinatra didn’t like Evans and was worried that his ex-wife was drying too many dirty clothes. Gardner died just two years later, and Evans’ book was not published until after his own death in 2012.
“I’m tired of being Ava Gardner,” she told Evans at one point: beauty and fame cost her dearly, and she ended her days of oppression by own legend. She was born 100 years ago on this Christmas Eve, and lives a life full of contradictions, both blessed and cursed.
Fortunately, she has great beauty, which is evident from an early age. The youngest of seven children, Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina. Her parents were poor farmers, they became poorer as Ava grew up. However, she was close to her parents, especially her father, Jonas Gardner, who died of bronchitis when she was 15: that loss hardened her and helped shape her life. .
In 1940, while studying to be a secretary, she visited her sister Beatrice, or ‘Bappy’, as she affectionately called her, in New York. Beatrice’s husband, a commercial photographer named Larry Tarr, offered to take a formal photograph of Ava to send to their mother as a gift, and was so pleased with the result that he displayed it. displayed it in his shop window on Fifth Avenue. An MGM scout saw it and Gardner, 18, was called to the studio’s Manhattan office to inspect the display.
While the camera was rolling, she was asked to walk towards the camera, turn away, arrange some flowers: the talent seeker didn’t ask her to speak, because her southern accent was too strong, he thought that would be annoying. The clip was sent to Hollywood, and a famous telegram was sent back by studio boss Louis B Mayer. “She can’t sing,” he wrote, “she can’t act, she can’t talk – she’s amazing!” Soon after, she was offered a contract by MGM and left for Hollywood in 1941.
Ava, in her early days, was upfront about her shortcomings. Then she said, “There is nothing I can do. “I couldn’t act – I was always the first to be eliminated in high school plays. I have no training, I’m just a pretty girl. But I like the idea, because I love movies.”
For three or four years, she was a reliable and charming substitute at MGM, and beyond. “I really had very little to contribute,” she recalls, “so I did a lot of the girls in the hats, and did the crowd scenes, the extras, the dance scenes, just to have the experience. experience like on a movie set. I spent many years there. If the studio wanted a photo to promote a movie, they’d say, ‘Who’s got a nice pair of legs and a nice and pretty breast that doesn’t work?’ And always Ava because she never worked.”
Close
Ava Gardner Receives Only Oscar Nomination As Clark Gable In Mogambo
That all changed in 1946, when Gardner was cast as Kitty Collins in Robert Siodmak’s noir thriller. the killers. Burt Lancaster plays Swede Anderson, an unlucky ex-boxer who gets lost in the crowd. More dangerous, however, is Kitty, a satin siren that lures the Swedes to their doom. “Do not retreat from this kind of danger!” The film’s trailer plays, and Gardner is horribly handsome as the sly seductive woman.
Siodmak, an old-fashioned hardcore, was so worried about Gardner’s ability to up her game for a high-pitched climax that he bullied her to show his emotions. . But she’s not one to take it easy and always gives what she gets: “When I lose my temper, honey,” she once said, “you can’t find it anywhere.”
Her performance in the killers – cat-like and sinister elegance – has elevated Gardner to MGM’s totem column, but picking her will always be difficult. By this stage, the studio had, through speaking lessons, erased her Southern accent, and as an actress she would always be strangely reluctant to come out. Not passive enough to be one of the docile sex goddesses of the 1940s, and too gritty to play the good girl in romantic comedies, she mostly played delicate women with suffocating expressions (in movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman or Knights of the Round Table) and quirky aliens, such as the biracial Julie in the 1951 remake of Show boat.
Video of the day
In the hands of MGM, this tough, witty and challenging woman has become a hollow beauty. It’s only in two or three movies that we get a glimpse of the kind of actress she could be – and more of that in a moment – but in the meantime, her private life of Ava is becoming the top headline.
In 1942, she married Mickey Rooney, who was then a huge MGM star as Andy Hardy, a sane and honest character. Rooney was actually unfaithful and self-righteous, and the marriage lasted only a year. After being passionately pursued to death by Howard Hughes, Ava married Artie Shaw in 1945, but the marriage didn’t get any better.
Shaw is an intellectual, a quality that Ava admires, and the pair have socialized with writers such as William Saroyan and SJ Perelman. However, Shaw did not expect Gardner to contribute to these lofty conversations, as she told her biographer Peter Evans years later. “Artie said all I had to do was shut up, sit at their feet and absorb their intelligence and intelligence. But if I take my shoes off and put my feet up on the couch, he’ll go crazy. ‘You’re not in the damn tobacco field now,’ he would scream.
However, the great melodrama about Gardner’s life will come to Sinatra. The couple began their affair in 1949, when he was still married to his first wife, Nancy. When Nancy found out she locked him out of the house, he and Gardner married in 1951. From the beginning, their relationship was passionate and fickle, and they had so much in common. . Traditionally, smoking, drinking, swearing, and fighting were not seen as keys to a happy marriage, and during a conversation with Evans, Ava remembers driving around a desert town with Sinatra, getting drunk and shooting out the window.
Close
Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner in the 1950s
Gardner helped with the career of Sinatra, which was disappearing in the toilet when she met him, and it was she who helped land him the role in From here to eternity that changed his luck. But they fought like cats and dogs, not helped by the constant attention of the paparazzi. They separated in 1953, filed for divorce in 1954, but he continued to sing about her in coded form in his famous torch songs, and the pair would remain friends. until the end of life. Sinatra manages Gardner’s finances when they come to an end and pays her medical bills.
Meanwhile, on screen, Ava had to showcase her abilities in two remarkable performances. First, John Ford’s Mogambo (1953), she delivered a nuanced and traumatized portrayal of an American showgirl stranded in Kenya who is constantly vying for the attention of Clark Gable’s big game hunter with Grace Kelly is dignified and sane. Because Mogambo, Gardner received his first and only Oscar nomination but didn’t seem too bothered about not winning. She never took herself too seriously.
Her best performance, however, is arguably in John Huston’s film. Iguana Night, adapted from the 1964 play by Tennessee Williams. Richard Burton has been cast as Lawrence Shannon, an outcast and drunk preacher who arrives at a hotel on the Mexican coast run by a hardened widow, Maxine. Faulk (Gardner) runs. Shannon is attracted to another guest, a sweet and high-minded painter, played by Deborah Kerr. But Maxine knows what Lawrence really wants and accepts his presence in her life with resignation.
“I really brought that to life,” she told Evans years later, and maybe Maxine wasn’t one of those reach. Ava had regrets, but didn’t mind them. After Sinatra, she moved to Spain, dated bullfighters, drank with Hemingway and lived her life to the fullest. By the time she died in 1990, she had become unfit for modern Hollywood, but also an enduring legend.
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/the-cursed-life-of-femme-fatale-ava-gardner-42205824.html The Cursed Life of Fat Woman Ava Gardner