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Ava Gardner #1
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reel classics
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^cute
aiya..how badthey don't look alike
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I think Ava gardner was short-sighted but I'm not 100% sure.
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The Guardian
Ava Gardner by Lee Server. 551pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Her three marriages were essays in fame. Her first in 1942, at 19, to pint-sized star Mickey Rooney, then one of MGM's biggest assets and an experienced skirt-chaser despite his wholesome screen image, happened when she was barely a signed-up starlet. Rooney was forced to marry because she wouldn't come across otherwise. Her second husband, jazz star Artie Shaw, gave the uneducated Gardner a reading syllabus, sent her to therapy and, for reasons he never explained, moved them into a modest rented house in suburban Burbank, which they shared for a time with its owners and their teenage sons. The third husband was Sinatra. By then she was the bigger star, a perpetual cover girl and tabloid sensation, epitome of an emerging jet set (which can equally be taken for a life on the run), her movie career almost incidental to her celebrity, and indistinguishable from her often exaggerated notoriety. Asked by a reporter what she saw in Sinatra - a 119lb has-been - she replied demurely that 19lb of it was ****.
Based on her wisecracks, Gardner's career could have benefited from a couple of Billy Wilder pictures. As a starlet she set the social pace: boozing, swearing, taking her pick of men; ahead of her time. Her acting break came in 1946 with The Killers with Burt Lancaster. Rarely has anyone been more sexual on screen doing so little; she gave Lancaster an erection during a screen kiss, to the hilarity of the crew. Like her lover Robert Mitchum - the subject of Lee Server's previous biography - she claimed not to take acting, or fame, seriously. Mitchum introduced her to the hipster life of LA jazz clubs and she revelled in his notoriety (just after his dope bust). Not one to stand on ceremony, she phoned Mitchum's wife to suggest she give him up and let someone else have a turn. Years later, Mitchum, no slouch on a bender and still married, ducked a reunion, declaring that she would be the ruin of him.
Gardner liked bull-fighters, as Sinatra found out to his cost, and was doted on by macho, dangerously sentimental drunks (Hemingway, and directors John Ford and John Huston), and always hovering in the background was creepy Howard Hughes, forever unrequited. Their strangely modern relationship involved surveillance and stalking on his part. His wedding present for her marriage to the hated Sinatra was a letter containing a mistress's confession, listing the singer's unusual sexual proclivities.
Before boredom set in she was sustained by the banter and loose intimacy of movie sets. MGM loaned her out for too many bad films and her studio contract meant she earned less than contemporaries. She chose European exile over Hollywood and, in spite of her liberal values and lack of racial prejudice, moved to Franco's Spain (with its advantages of a muzzled press). She was barred from Madrid's Hotel Ritz for peeing in the lobby. By then life was an exhausting round of insomnia, booze, forced gaiety, mood swings, tantrums, and being driven around by a chauffeur while consuming an entire thermos of gin in the back of the car. One observer perceptively notes that drunks who survive have a knack of finding people to look after them, but Gardner was lucky all the same. Her affair with George C Scott was characterised by booze and violence. He beat her up badly enough to put her in hospital while they were shooting The Bible.
The later years, spent alone in London, amounted to a sad settling down and a gathering of dignity as she came to terms with the illusion of her independence as it turned to loneliness. She had always known that she was a victim of the Pygmalion gaze. Many of Server's interviewees suffer from luvvie-gush, remarking on Gardner's extraordinary beauty and her gutsy personality (she was a North Carolina farm girl and always considered herself as such), but only one gets close to understanding the difficulties of being such a precipitous beauty, how facing beauty of that kind was a not completely pleasant experience for the beholder, as being near her produced "a kind of vertigo".
Ava Gardner by Lee Server. 551pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Her three marriages were essays in fame. Her first in 1942, at 19, to pint-sized star Mickey Rooney, then one of MGM's biggest assets and an experienced skirt-chaser despite his wholesome screen image, happened when she was barely a signed-up starlet. Rooney was forced to marry because she wouldn't come across otherwise. Her second husband, jazz star Artie Shaw, gave the uneducated Gardner a reading syllabus, sent her to therapy and, for reasons he never explained, moved them into a modest rented house in suburban Burbank, which they shared for a time with its owners and their teenage sons. The third husband was Sinatra. By then she was the bigger star, a perpetual cover girl and tabloid sensation, epitome of an emerging jet set (which can equally be taken for a life on the run), her movie career almost incidental to her celebrity, and indistinguishable from her often exaggerated notoriety. Asked by a reporter what she saw in Sinatra - a 119lb has-been - she replied demurely that 19lb of it was ****.
Based on her wisecracks, Gardner's career could have benefited from a couple of Billy Wilder pictures. As a starlet she set the social pace: boozing, swearing, taking her pick of men; ahead of her time. Her acting break came in 1946 with The Killers with Burt Lancaster. Rarely has anyone been more sexual on screen doing so little; she gave Lancaster an erection during a screen kiss, to the hilarity of the crew. Like her lover Robert Mitchum - the subject of Lee Server's previous biography - she claimed not to take acting, or fame, seriously. Mitchum introduced her to the hipster life of LA jazz clubs and she revelled in his notoriety (just after his dope bust). Not one to stand on ceremony, she phoned Mitchum's wife to suggest she give him up and let someone else have a turn. Years later, Mitchum, no slouch on a bender and still married, ducked a reunion, declaring that she would be the ruin of him.
Gardner liked bull-fighters, as Sinatra found out to his cost, and was doted on by macho, dangerously sentimental drunks (Hemingway, and directors John Ford and John Huston), and always hovering in the background was creepy Howard Hughes, forever unrequited. Their strangely modern relationship involved surveillance and stalking on his part. His wedding present for her marriage to the hated Sinatra was a letter containing a mistress's confession, listing the singer's unusual sexual proclivities.
Before boredom set in she was sustained by the banter and loose intimacy of movie sets. MGM loaned her out for too many bad films and her studio contract meant she earned less than contemporaries. She chose European exile over Hollywood and, in spite of her liberal values and lack of racial prejudice, moved to Franco's Spain (with its advantages of a muzzled press). She was barred from Madrid's Hotel Ritz for peeing in the lobby. By then life was an exhausting round of insomnia, booze, forced gaiety, mood swings, tantrums, and being driven around by a chauffeur while consuming an entire thermos of gin in the back of the car. One observer perceptively notes that drunks who survive have a knack of finding people to look after them, but Gardner was lucky all the same. Her affair with George C Scott was characterised by booze and violence. He beat her up badly enough to put her in hospital while they were shooting The Bible.
The later years, spent alone in London, amounted to a sad settling down and a gathering of dignity as she came to terms with the illusion of her independence as it turned to loneliness. She had always known that she was a victim of the Pygmalion gaze. Many of Server's interviewees suffer from luvvie-gush, remarking on Gardner's extraordinary beauty and her gutsy personality (she was a North Carolina farm girl and always considered herself as such), but only one gets close to understanding the difficulties of being such a precipitous beauty, how facing beauty of that kind was a not completely pleasant experience for the beholder, as being near her produced "a kind of vertigo".
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Film Monthly
va Gardner possessed such luminescent beauty that both sexes experienced a sharp intake of breath and weak knees when seeing her for the first time.
As the ultimate movie love goddess, no film, movie, photograph or publicist’s adjectives could ever do Ava justice. Her life of volcanic excess proved to be similarly elusive until Lee Server’s Ava Gardner, “Love is Nothing”.
Server, who perfectly captured Robert Mitchum’s laconic laissez-faire in Robert Mitchum, ‘Baby, I Don’t Care’, follows with another captivating chronicle of one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars.
“Love is nothing but a pain…” said Ava, concluding the sentence with an exact anatomical locale. For Gardner, love and pain became a swirling, kamikaze-like froth of high-speed existence before decades of overload finally broke her down.
A literal ‘Tobacco Road’ refugee from Grabtown, North Carolina, Ava’s beauty was instantly recognized in a quickie M.G.M screen test and she was signed to a long term contract. Stardom was not instantaneous. The legendary studio’s overstocked production line moved at a glacial pace and Ava’s southern brogue and total lack of acting experience required considerable polish.
After six years of small parts and loan-outs in dreck such as “Ghosts on the Loose” (1943) with Bela Lugosi, it finally took Mark Hellinger casting her in Universal’s “The Killers” (1946) to make her a star.
“It was sex-two-and extra”, wisecracked the fast-talking Hellinger when asked why he chose Ava for the starring role. Gardner’s striking performance as a lethal femme fatale who double-crosses Burt Lancaster remains a seminal screen performance. After “The Killers”, Gardner never had to glance backwards for stardom, but many of her subsequent films didn’t do her justice.
She shined in several pictures including “Show Boat“(1951), Mogambo” (1953) and “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954) when her beauty wasn’t used to hype poorly designed material. Gardner lacked confidence and acting was always a chore. Only craftsmen directors like John Ford and Joe Mankiewicz were able to bring out her considerable talent.
It is Ava Gardner’s publicly private life that is presented in mesmerizing fashion by Server.
She was a virginal teenager at M.G.M. until bending to the incessant blandishments of that diminutive superstar and Hollywood sharpie Mickey Rooney. After a whirlwind honeymoon on Rooney’s terms at Pebble Beach, “…sex and golf and sex and golf”, Gardner’s high octane jealousy is piqued Mickey’s incessant philandering. She moves on to charismatic bandleader, Artie Shaw who quickly became as coldly demeaning as he was with his other seven wives. Ava becomes more case-hardened, yet increasingly vulnerable, looking for love in all the right and wrong places.
Ava’s craving for sex, booze and wild times quickly rose to tsunami heights and the wave failed to crest for many years. Although she held off an ardent Howard Hughes, Gardner was forever restless, fearing loneliness over all else. No matter how bored or free of spirit though, no other relationship in the star’s life rivaled her thermonuclear marriage to Frank Sinatra.
The seismic pairing of both rags-to-riches superstars that pegged the Richter scale of destructive passion became the centerpiece of Gardner’s life. Ava and Frank’s unbridled desire for one another was as unchecked as their inability to coexist without screaming invective and hurled bric-a-brac. Yet it was a love that endured like a flame of pure fire.
If all of this sounds like a prurient show business gossip biography, it isn’t.
Gardner’s life is depicted in an upbeat, attuned style. Polemics and titillation are refreshingly absent from a mesmerizing story supported by superb research. Server fondly brings Gardner to life as a warm, refreshingly unpretentious star whose appetites eventually overwhelmed her spirit.
Whether defining amnesia as, “noir’s version of the common cold” or recalling Mark Hellinger placing a censor’s letter about ‘The Killers’ script in a file labeled ‘**** You’, the author’s ability to imbue cinematic history within the narrative is peerless.
In the end, a desiccated Gardner iteratively listens to Sinatra’s records in her London flat as her health fails. The poignancy of Ava Gardner’s destructive quest for love will bring a lump to your throat.
va Gardner possessed such luminescent beauty that both sexes experienced a sharp intake of breath and weak knees when seeing her for the first time.
As the ultimate movie love goddess, no film, movie, photograph or publicist’s adjectives could ever do Ava justice. Her life of volcanic excess proved to be similarly elusive until Lee Server’s Ava Gardner, “Love is Nothing”.
Server, who perfectly captured Robert Mitchum’s laconic laissez-faire in Robert Mitchum, ‘Baby, I Don’t Care’, follows with another captivating chronicle of one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars.
“Love is nothing but a pain…” said Ava, concluding the sentence with an exact anatomical locale. For Gardner, love and pain became a swirling, kamikaze-like froth of high-speed existence before decades of overload finally broke her down.
A literal ‘Tobacco Road’ refugee from Grabtown, North Carolina, Ava’s beauty was instantly recognized in a quickie M.G.M screen test and she was signed to a long term contract. Stardom was not instantaneous. The legendary studio’s overstocked production line moved at a glacial pace and Ava’s southern brogue and total lack of acting experience required considerable polish.
After six years of small parts and loan-outs in dreck such as “Ghosts on the Loose” (1943) with Bela Lugosi, it finally took Mark Hellinger casting her in Universal’s “The Killers” (1946) to make her a star.
“It was sex-two-and extra”, wisecracked the fast-talking Hellinger when asked why he chose Ava for the starring role. Gardner’s striking performance as a lethal femme fatale who double-crosses Burt Lancaster remains a seminal screen performance. After “The Killers”, Gardner never had to glance backwards for stardom, but many of her subsequent films didn’t do her justice.
She shined in several pictures including “Show Boat“(1951), Mogambo” (1953) and “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954) when her beauty wasn’t used to hype poorly designed material. Gardner lacked confidence and acting was always a chore. Only craftsmen directors like John Ford and Joe Mankiewicz were able to bring out her considerable talent.
It is Ava Gardner’s publicly private life that is presented in mesmerizing fashion by Server.
She was a virginal teenager at M.G.M. until bending to the incessant blandishments of that diminutive superstar and Hollywood sharpie Mickey Rooney. After a whirlwind honeymoon on Rooney’s terms at Pebble Beach, “…sex and golf and sex and golf”, Gardner’s high octane jealousy is piqued Mickey’s incessant philandering. She moves on to charismatic bandleader, Artie Shaw who quickly became as coldly demeaning as he was with his other seven wives. Ava becomes more case-hardened, yet increasingly vulnerable, looking for love in all the right and wrong places.
Ava’s craving for sex, booze and wild times quickly rose to tsunami heights and the wave failed to crest for many years. Although she held off an ardent Howard Hughes, Gardner was forever restless, fearing loneliness over all else. No matter how bored or free of spirit though, no other relationship in the star’s life rivaled her thermonuclear marriage to Frank Sinatra.
The seismic pairing of both rags-to-riches superstars that pegged the Richter scale of destructive passion became the centerpiece of Gardner’s life. Ava and Frank’s unbridled desire for one another was as unchecked as their inability to coexist without screaming invective and hurled bric-a-brac. Yet it was a love that endured like a flame of pure fire.
If all of this sounds like a prurient show business gossip biography, it isn’t.
Gardner’s life is depicted in an upbeat, attuned style. Polemics and titillation are refreshingly absent from a mesmerizing story supported by superb research. Server fondly brings Gardner to life as a warm, refreshingly unpretentious star whose appetites eventually overwhelmed her spirit.
Whether defining amnesia as, “noir’s version of the common cold” or recalling Mark Hellinger placing a censor’s letter about ‘The Killers’ script in a file labeled ‘**** You’, the author’s ability to imbue cinematic history within the narrative is peerless.
In the end, a desiccated Gardner iteratively listens to Sinatra’s records in her London flat as her health fails. The poignancy of Ava Gardner’s destructive quest for love will bring a lump to your throat.
scriptgirl
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thinkexist.com
“For the loot, honey, for the loot.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
About: Money quotes.
Add to Chapter...
“Some people say Liz and I are whores, but we are saints. We do not hide our loves hypocritically, and when in love, we are loyal and faithful to our men. [On the subject of her multiple marriages]”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
Add to Chapter...
“I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.”
dulceana83
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
“For the loot, honey, for the loot.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
About: Money quotes.
Add to Chapter...
“Some people say Liz and I are whores, but we are saints. We do not hide our loves hypocritically, and when in love, we are loyal and faithful to our men. [On the subject of her multiple marriages]”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
Add to Chapter...
“I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.”
dulceana83
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
scriptgirl
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same source as above
“I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
Similar Quotes.
Add to Chapter...
“What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
“I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
Similar Quotes.
Add to Chapter...
“What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.”
Ava Gardner quotes (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. 1922-1990)
scriptgirl
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from myspace
http://www.myspace.com/AvaGardnerFilmFestival
http://www.myspace.com/AvaGardnerFilmFestival
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Associated Content
Ava Gardner Fest 2007 Hits Smithfield, North Carolina
By Jesse Schmitt, published Sep 16, 2007
Published Content: 492 Total Views: 101,552 Favorited By: 15 CPs
Contact Subscribe Add to Favorites
Rating: 3.3 of 5
12345
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Ava Gardner was a very famous movie actress whose presence graced the screen for more than five decades. However if you're at all familiar with Johnston County, North Carolina, then you may know that Ava Gardner was a product of this tiny area of the country. Every year The Ava Gardner Fest takes place in downtown Smithfield, North Carolina, as people pay tribute to her legacy with events which run this year on September 29 & 30th from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, there is something for everyone.
While traveling through this wild and varied country of ours, you will come across many an interesting landmark, tribute, and commemorative orifice; anything to put an obscure town on the map and set it apart as something of a destination. Just ask the folks in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to whom they owe their allegiance and they'll have no problem telling you about their most famous resident; you know, "Dollywood"?
However traveling down the I95 Corridor in a Southerly direction a tiny sign alongside the road caught my eye: Ava Gardner Museum. So we took the time to stop in and see what this museum and the town of Smithfield, NC was all about.
Smithfield, in Johnston County, is a quaint little town with a pretty well refurbished main drag where there are well manicured trees and storefronts that lead to the Ava Gardner museum. Once I located 325 Market Street and stopped in to speak with the woman at the front desk, I got a little bit different impression. The very polite woman at the desk was named Eunice and she had a little bit of a frazzled personage about her. When I commented on the well maintained Market Street area just off of the highway, Eunice wasn't as impressed:
"Well they've needed to tend to this area for years! It's always something!"
Ava Gardner Fest 2007 Hits Smithfield, North Carolina
By Jesse Schmitt, published Sep 16, 2007
Published Content: 492 Total Views: 101,552 Favorited By: 15 CPs
Contact Subscribe Add to Favorites
Rating: 3.3 of 5
12345
Font Font Grab this
Ava Gardner was a very famous movie actress whose presence graced the screen for more than five decades. However if you're at all familiar with Johnston County, North Carolina, then you may know that Ava Gardner was a product of this tiny area of the country. Every year The Ava Gardner Fest takes place in downtown Smithfield, North Carolina, as people pay tribute to her legacy with events which run this year on September 29 & 30th from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, there is something for everyone.
While traveling through this wild and varied country of ours, you will come across many an interesting landmark, tribute, and commemorative orifice; anything to put an obscure town on the map and set it apart as something of a destination. Just ask the folks in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to whom they owe their allegiance and they'll have no problem telling you about their most famous resident; you know, "Dollywood"?
However traveling down the I95 Corridor in a Southerly direction a tiny sign alongside the road caught my eye: Ava Gardner Museum. So we took the time to stop in and see what this museum and the town of Smithfield, NC was all about.
Smithfield, in Johnston County, is a quaint little town with a pretty well refurbished main drag where there are well manicured trees and storefronts that lead to the Ava Gardner museum. Once I located 325 Market Street and stopped in to speak with the woman at the front desk, I got a little bit different impression. The very polite woman at the desk was named Eunice and she had a little bit of a frazzled personage about her. When I commented on the well maintained Market Street area just off of the highway, Eunice wasn't as impressed:
"Well they've needed to tend to this area for years! It's always something!"
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