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When Looks Could Kill
A Review by David Thomson

How is it that, as late as 2006, a high-minded magazine can still find space for a couple of thousand words on Ava Gardner, squeezed in between, say, a full account of the latest Proust translation and a critical analysis of torture and American law? Is it that men are always feeble-minded enough for there to be a business in it -- getting a look for a few cents, the old Nickelodeon idea? I mean men as described in the blurb to Lee Server's book: "It is said men literally had to support themselves against buildings when [Ava Gardner] walked by."

Now, I'm not claiming this, and I don't think Server says it; but it is the sort of hope that book blurbs are given to -- and one has to admit that, especially in tropic climes, where the cement is not all it ought to be, there is a good deal of lolling against structures by men who have nothing else to do. And so it is that, more than fifteen years after her death, and largely impervious to the relentless and anonymous horde of very beautiful women that just keeps coming, we have a 608-page book about this fabled North Carolinian beauty -- but only sixteen pages of stills!

Who could deny the legendary appeal in the story of a sharecropper's daughter from the back country who went all the way to Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Barefoot Contessa, and Bhowani Junction because a still photograph found its way to the New York offices of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where a genial man named Al Altman (not content with discovering Joan Crawford) called in Ava Gardner and had her pose and stroll around a tiny vestigial set and then shipped the screen test to the West Coast, where homely, squat men in dark rooms studied it and -- having reached out for something solid to steady themselves -- whispered, "Get that girl out here!" And so it happened, on a seven-year contract, starting at $50 per week. This was 1941, a war was coming, and so on.

With the warmest will in the world, the official lechers at MGM in the early 1940s determined that while Ava Gardner took a very arresting picture, she seldom bothered to act and had difficulty being understood outside the North Carolina back country. In those years, 1941 to 1945, or from the age of nineteen to twenty-three, when beauty like hers is most sumptuous, Ava Gardner had only brief spots in several studio pictures, and usually without credit. Not that she despaired or wasted time. With carnal splendor on her hands, she passed the time by marrying Mickey Rooney for a few months in 1942-1943. Rooney was a sex hound himself, but it always got him: Ava, in her panties, sauntering around the house saying, "Let's fuck." His career slid, but he recorded for posterity that she was unique "down there," and like "a little warm mouth."

Mickey was twenty-two, just two years older than Ava, and one of the most popular and highest-paid stars in the world, as established by the Andy Hardy pictures, his several teamings with Judy Garland, and his performance as Young Tom Edison. It is true that by the time it was over he had married an awful lot, but Ava was his first wife, and she made such inroads on his bounce and freshness that there were executives at MGM complaining that he looked as old as Judge Hardy. Her conjugal darkening of the Mick was perhaps the best early tribute to her spell as a lover. But a couple of years later, she found another husband, Artie Shaw, the fascinating big-band leader and self-declared mastermind, nearly as beautiful as Ava and certainly as sexually notorious, but every bit as famous for being an intellectual prick.

We still don't know what Ava did with Mickey and Artie, and despite Lee Server's diligence over six hundred pages, he doesn't know either. A root consequence of that is to stress the gulf, in her heyday, between Ava's true wanton self and what she could get away with in her pallid films. What brought Ava to life on screen was the postwar blooming of noir: first in a small picture, Whistle Stop, and then as the treacherous lover Kitty Collins opposite Burt Lancaster in The Killers, she became a famous face. The Killers still works, in its skillful opening out of the Hemingway short story (where the two killers come looking for Ole Anderson) into a fatalistic reprise of time nagged on by an insurance agent's urge to find the missing money. It was directed by Robert Siodmak, a minor master, and wondrously shot by Woody Brendell, but much of the writing was handled by John Huston, the kindly womanizer and deft storyteller who always had it bad for Ava.

The Killers may still be Ava's best picture; it is the one where she is least encumbered by the need to act. All we have to do is soak her up and cross our fingers. She photographs like a dream, and leaves the middle-class audience to trust that she is trouble and dangerous to know. The film turns on how far Burt Lancaster, her chump, can't just fuck her and dump her; he has to fall in love, and so he furnishes one of the great secrets of noir -- that the more beautiful a woman is, the more unreliable she is going to be. Viewers of this film can still see, I hope, the kind of misogynistic panic that existed within America's most hard-boiled genre -- a dread of exultant sex and of women who put nothing in life beyond its pleasure (not even homeland security).

That was a clue to her gaze. She was often called "gypsy" or "Spanish-like." Server notes the way in which white trash in our race-addled country wonder about a dash of coffee in their au lait. He mentions Elvis, and he could have read Faulkner. But he misses Ava's feeling for color or mixed blood in friends and parts -- to say nothing of her odd name, which came from a beautiful aunt and the mist of palindrome. (Her given name, now forgotten, was Lucy Johnson.) She had ravishing looks; but it was the way that focus seemed fixed on the distant or the ultimate, rather than on anything immediate, that was most seductive. She never seems to have known what it was about.

She made bad pictures: an almost comic shot at Dostoyevsky, with Gregory Peck, in The Great Sinner; My Forbidden Past, with Robert Mitchum; Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, pretentious kitsch in which that gaze seems to see the inward O of surreal desire; Julie in Show Boat, though she was hurt that they didn't use her singing voice; a dreadful Hemingway story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (with Peck again); Mogambo, John Ford's re-make of Red Dust, where Ava took the Jean Harlow part, Grace Kelly was Mary Astor, and Gable was Gable again; Guinevere in Knights of the Round Table; and The Barefoot Contessa. Maria Vargas in that film was a role sought by many actresses. Ava got it because of the "gypsy" thing and because she had a streak of the barefoot. (But only a streak: loaned out by MGM for $200,000, she received just $60,000. There is always missing money.) But despite the attentions of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz and the great Technicolor cameraman Jack Cardiff (who had also shot Pandora and the Flying Dutchman), the picture is a foolish, verbose melodrama. Against all expectations, Ava got her Oscar nomination not for that, but for Mogambo.

By the time of The Barefoot Contessa, Gardner was thirty-two, and well aware that her looks were in decline because of natural aging, the application of vodka and gin, and her most abiding melodrama, the one she called Francis. Server reckons that Sinatra and Gardner had met often at Metro in the 1940s without anything magnetic occurring. When he saw her once with Rooney, he apparently leered and asked, "Why didn't I meet you first?" -- as if such priorities meant anything to him. Then one night they both quit a party at Zanuck's, took a bottle in a car, and drove out into the desert. They fired guns and -- like slaves to scenario -- they got it on. They were both drunk, and sobriety was their enemy ever afterward.

They married in 1951 and planned to divorce three years later, except that in their sadomasochistic way they stayed loyal until her death. (By now, of course, the saga has been unloaded in several biopics. Marcia Gay Harden was OK as Ava; she got the toughness, the instability, and the lust. It's just that she looked like 10 percent of Ava.) They needled each other. He was ruined by guilt over the loss of his Catholic marriage. He was also the wreck of his own stardom, in urgent need of rebuilding -- but once he was back, after Maggio and meeting Nelson Riddle, he was more arrogant than ever. They fought, and they were about the same weight. Still, it was she who said that even if he was only 110 pounds, ten of that was cock. A goddess still couldn't say that in an American picture; but it may be the last thing history recalls about Sinatra. And just as he was gripped by insecurity, so he treasured her ease until the end. As long as they were apart, Sinatra was fond and caring. There is no doubt that he wired her money in her forlorn last years. Too little! she sneered. You thank God that they never had a kid.

The best opportunity that Gardner had came in 1956, with George Cukor's adaptation of the John Masters novel Bhowani Junction, in which the lead is an Anglo-Indian girl, a half-caste, pursued by several men. Gardner was never more beautiful, and Cukor did remarkable work in the difficult circumstances of India and Pakistan. The studio -- MGM again -- hated the picture, suspected that its fuck-around heroine was unsympathetic, and hacked the film to pieces. Server makes a good case for the tragedy of what befell the film, but he never really persuades us of how deeply Ava felt or how much she knew to fight for her career. In life, she was a brave woman and her own boss, but in pictures she did as she was told and relied on luck.

The Sun Also Rises was a travesty, but it encouraged her taste for bullfighters. 55 Days at Peking was ruined by Nicholas Ray's illness and her own loss of belief. The Night of the Iguana and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean were further gestures from John Huston, and when he cast her as Lily Langtry in the latter -- she has just one scene -- it was out of fondness for an uncertain career, but one that he had started, in the way that a guy might light a match. There were other love affairs, most notably the ugly violence that tied her to George C. Scott -- he played Abraham and she was Sarah, for Huston again, in The Bible. Scott was a far more serious actor, and Gardner was way over the hill. But he was infatuated to the point of madness by her, so he beat her up if she was disobedient or imperfect. (Years earlier she had been the violent one in a ruinous bond with Howard Hughes.) She was only sixty-seven when she died of pneumonia, living in London. She had sold some jewelry and tried a tell-all book to make ends meet. But she had lupus and suffered a stroke. When he heard of her death, Sinatra went into retreat for a night and a day.

Ava Gardner had countless lovers, and it is likely that not even six hundred pages allows Server to list them all. As a book, this is a lot less compelling than his revelatory study of Robert Mitchum; but a male author, I daresay, took heart in discovering the ways in which Mitchum did care and just masked his artistic soul. Yet Ava Gardner had really given up the ghost: she really didn't care, or care to be cared for. Beach boys, bullfighters, actors, and everyone else fell for her in the way her reputation ordered them to fall for her. They glimpsed a battered honesty and a country-girl simplicity. But there was no reaching or holding this woman. She knew her own curse: that she would have to grow older and plainer. So she drank and insulted arrogant men until they slugged her. After that, she behaved according to the country wisdom -- that her beauty, coming from nature, belonged to everyone and to no one.

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