Ava Gardner #1

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^ Thanks scriptgirl and Ngan for all your lovely pictures. Ava Gardner looks like such a graceful tennis player.

 

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Times of Malta
he way we were
The gawgaw and other superstitions


Ava Gardner; Dima Bilan; Edwige Fenech; Howard Hughes; Rex Stout; Ricky Martin; Saint Ignatius of Loyola...
All these people were born on December 24. And that, according to Maltese lore, makes them eligible for Gawgaw status.
Tradition held that it was “not nice” for anyone to share a birthday with Jesus – although, for some reason, the date ‘reserved’ for the Christ child was not December 25, i.e. Christmas Day, officially adopted by Bishop Liberius of Rome in 354, but Christmas Eve.
It was said that a person born on that day was destined to become a ghost on Christmas Eve, fated to haunt the streets until the dawn of Christmas morning... when the physical body would again come to life.
There was, of course an antidote for this curse – counting the holes on a sieve from dusk until dawn. Either way, the person would feel like a wet rag on the morrow; and not many people would believe the second option would have been the reason for this fatigue!
On the other hand, people who are born on Christmas Day proper are supposed to be immune to murders by hanging or drowning. The minus side of this is that they are gifted with “Sixth Sense” that allows them to see all manner of ghosts, ghouls, spirits and phantoms... although some cultures have it exactly the opposite... just as a black cat is good luck for some, and bad luck for others. The Irish believe that the gates of Heaven open at midnight on Christmas Eve, and therefore those who die then go straight to Heaven.
A poem dated 1525 says that it is not only the date of birth that matters, but also the day on which Christmas happens to fall that will affect the person’s life:
Yef that day that Cryste was borne. Falle upon a Sunday ...
what chylde that day borne be, A grete lorde he shalle be
Yf Crystemas day on Monday be ...
They that be borne that day, I wene,
They shalle be stronge eche on and kene...
Yf Crystmas day on Tuysday be...
Alle that be born there in may se,
They shalbe stronge and covethouse...
Yf Cyrstmas day the so the to say, Fall upon a Woydnysday
What childe that day borne ys, He shall dowghte and lyghte i-wysse...
Yf Crystmas day on Thursday be,
What chylde that day borne bee, He shalle have happy ryghte well to the,
Of deeds he shall be good and stabylle; Of speche and tonge wyse and reasonabylle...
Yf Crystmas day on Friday be,
The chylde that ys borne that day,
Shall long lyve and lecherowus be aye...
Yf Crystmas on the Saterday falle...
chyldren that e born that day,
Within a halfe a yere they shall dye, par fay.
In Malta, we are quite likely to have a mild winter – some foolhardy souls might even brave a dip in the briny to prove the point – but elsewhere there is the proverb that “A green Christmas makes a full graveyard”.
This distils the rural belief that mild winter weather is followed by more diseases in livestock and produce. The proverb does not refer to the custom of decorating homes with greenery – although for a time, even that was forbidden, since it was considered a pagan custom... for instance, Sweet By is the ancient laurel, the “glory herb” lorbeer or daphne, used as a wreath for heroes and poets. Indeed, the word “bachelor” in our college degrees comes from “bacca-laureus” or “laurel- berry” through the French bachelier.
Superstition and custom mish-mash in a nation’s folklore, such that no one knows where one begins and the other ends. Eastertide and Yuletide seem especially rife with these folk beliefs – perhaps because originally, the periods of the year in which these two major festivals lie were hitherto devoted to pagan deities, and several customs are but Christianised pagan rituals.
However, most people appear to agree that the first person to pass from near the door to the house (on the inside) on Christmas morning, was supposed to open wide the door, sweep the household’s troubles from the threshold, and welcome Christmas. For his pains, he was supposed to have good luck thought the year following, as did the first person in a household who heard the rooster crow.
That is – unless he took down the Christmas tree before the year was out, in which case, bad luck would dog him – or anyone else who did – throughout the next twelve months, up to the anniversary of the day in which he would have done it. It is also said that no decorations must be taken down until the twelfth night is past, but always before Candlemas.
It almost goes without saying that on Christmas Night, the bells of all the churches that have been destroyed by earthquakes, fire, flood, and landslides, may be heard tolling in unity, to celebrate this special time.
Many superstitions involve the greenery associated with Christmas – holly, for instance, was not supposed to be brought inside the house before Christmas Eve, lest a member of the family died during the year. It is said that myrrh plants will flower only for an hour on Christmas Eve... and some animals, if you listen carefully, will have acquired the power of speech on Holy Night, too.
Bales of hay carried around a church three times on Christmas Eve would meet the requirements of cattle far more efficiently than they otherwise would have done.
Even if you can’t bear the taste of mince pies – remember that eating one made by a different person in a different house, means a month of happiness.
For a full purse, you are to carry in your pocket a scale from a fish eaten at Christmas.

 

[scriptgirl]

calireview

In his heyday in the early 1970s, Scott’s films earned more than any other male actor’s, except for Clint Eastwood. He was, according to critic Stanley Kauffmann, “an authentic actor star.” The designation, as opposed to a mere movie star like Tony Curtis, was important. Scott, who had been a stage actor before he worked in films, could maintain a legitimate, artistic imprimatur, whereas someone like Curtis was seen as more frivolous in the eyes of those who measure artistic enterprise.

However, Curtis at least appeared in two great movies. Looking over the list of Scott’s films it is notable how reliably good he is in even the worst of them, but how poorly most of them have withstood the test of time. Early in his career, he made his mark in supporting roles in three distinguished films, Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler and Doctor Strangelove. But many of the ones in which he starred are completely forgotten. Patton (for which he famously refused an Academy Award) was a profoundly conventional war film, today rarely seen. But does anyone even remember, let alone watch, The New Centurions? Rage? Oklahoma Crude? The Day of the Dolphin, in which Scott co-starred with Trish Van Devere, one of his wives, and a number of marine mammals? Or The Formula, in which he was paired with Marlon Brando, also famous for turning down an Oscar?
Scott’s story – at least as told by Sheward – is not exactly riveting. A mere chapter is devoted to his childhood. His father, an executive with a Michigan milk distributor, was a hard case, and his mother died when he was only eight. When his father remarried and started a new family, Scott felt unwanted. After a stint of a few years in the Marines, in which he saw no action, Scott became an actor, first at college and then in theatre in Michigan. Upon arrival in New York, there were some lean years, but once Scott achieved success on the stage – at age 30 in a memorable production as Richard III – his triumph was meteoric. Within a couple of years he was also appearing in films and television.
However, far from appeasing him, success did nothing to calm Scott’s torment. According to Sheward – who gathered his information from printed matter (mostly journalism) and interviews with dozens of people who knew the actor – Scott was, to say the least, a piece of work. A hardcore alcoholic, he confessed to a fellow actor that he downed a quart of vodka a day, washed down by beer. He would frequently go into drunken rages and get into fights. In the early chapters of the book it is almost comical how many of these fights end up with the actor’s nose getting broken. (So many fractures gave him, to say the least, a distinctive mask.) His violent episodes were so numerous that at a certain point, Scott hired bodyguards – not to protect him, but to protect other people from him.
After a while the anecdotes are no longer funny, particularly when they involve beating women. Ava Gardner suffered a broken arm and collarbone, and had a hank of her hair torn out by the actor, and actress Marian Seldes says that Scott tried to strangle her while drunk, apparently mistaking her for a random demon. Scott was one of those actors who drank while he worked, and often functioned, except for those binges in which he would disappear during three days’ shooting of a film (costing the producers hundreds of thousands of dollars) or miss a week’s worth of shows (to the disappointment of theatergoers who paid good money to see him).
His contempt for audiences was notable. The producer Theodore Mann recalls that he had to promise Scott there would be no “blue haired ladies” in the stalls of the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York before the actor would agree to perform there. During one performance, Scott literally jumped off the stage and ran after a woman who had been snapping photographs. Some male colleagues tended to find Scott cordial, while many of the actresses who worked with him felt he was cold and distant. (Lee Grant remembers that he asked her not to touch him after she innocently put her arm around him in one scene.)
Although there are 350 pages of text to Sheward’s book, as well as numerous appendices and indices, Scott remains something of a shadowy figure. While the author is exhaustive when recounting the various triumphs and failures of the actor’s life and career, he offers no overarching reflections about Scott as a man or an actor, and no cohesive narrative drive. There is no contemplation of the actor’s technique, only fragments of what the critics said about him. There is no greater context to the description of Scott’s films, only reports of how much money they made or lost. His relationships to various mistreated wives and mistresses, and ignored children, are accounted for, but we don’t have any idea what they may have meant to the actor.
Readers may find Rage and Glory further marred by Sheward’s style. The author is the executive editor and theatre critic for Back Stage, an entertainment-industry trade weekly, and much of the prose is written with the breathless buzz that marks such publications. A film director is referred to as a “helmer,” while screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky is called a “scribe.” Scott and director John Huston are reported as being “palsy walsy” on a film set, and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is described as a “Southern fried scorcher.” It is hard not to be irritated by Sheward’s description of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as “a character study of melancholy Russians, lamenting their unrealized selves between sips of the samovar.” Or for that matter with his characterization of columnist Suzy as a “single-monikered gossip reporter.” Did he think we might mistake her for a double- or triple-monikered gossip reporter?
As I read Rage and Glory I wondered how Scott’s life might have played out in the hands of another author. If any affinity exists between Scott and Sheward, it isn’t evident in the pages of the book. The fact that a man is insufferable doesn’t mean he isn’t interesting, and even worthy of our sympathy. But Scott is neither in Sheward’s hands. One wonders if the author felt battered by so much accumulated material – readers may very well. When Scott dies in the last chapter – in part for refusing surgery for an aneurysm after various heart attacks, because it meant he would have had to quit drinking – I felt a sense of relief. I wondered whether Sheward, and even the actor himself, felt similarly at the end of the road.

 

[scriptgirl]

USA TODAY

oadside treats on I-95
By Kitty Bean Yancey, USA TODAY
It's safe to say that no one knows the off-ramps of Interstate 95 as intimately as Stan Posner and his wife, Sandra Phillips-Posner.

At Exit 95: The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C., features gowns and other memorabilia.
Stan Posner
The Montreal-based married twosome spend nine weeks a year on the north-south artery, getting off at every exit from just north of Boston to the Florida border. Just in time for the snowbirds who'll be hitting the busy north-south highway, this month brings the third edition of their Drive I-95 (Travelsmart, $22.95), an exit-by-exit guide to services, attractions and oddities.

The book, which is sold at stores and via drivei95.com, also details radio stations to listen to along the way, auto repair facilities and hiding places favored by cops waiting to nab speeders.

This year's edition spotlights a travel trend — pet-friendly lodgings — mentioning 356 places to stay with Fido or Fluffy.

Another trend the couple note is that gas station auto mechanics are disappearing as garages turn into mini-marts. On the other hand, restrooms are cleaner than they used to be.

"We have rarely come across a yucky bathroom anymore," Sandra says. "Now they're serving food (at gas stations), they have to be cleaner."

And in the age of chains, mom-and-pop motels, B&Bs and eateries with local flavor still can be found.

"We tend to think everything has been homogenized, but (just off I-95) you can get into the little town and find the little restaurant where the locals go," Sandra says. "When you go to these mom-and-pop places, you'll feel like you have friends along the way."

Some way stations with local color that the two have discovered:

• Honey, the money-taking dog at Crazy D's American Fireworks El Cheapo Gas Station near Hardeeville, S.C. (Exit 5; 843-784-5086). The cocker spaniel is trained to fetch customers' bills on command and bring them to the cashier. If money is fake or a foreign currency, she'll drop it.

• Frank Pepe Pizza Napoletana in New Haven, Conn. (Exit 47; 203-865-5762). This venerable pizzeria is worth a detour, authors say. Try the signature pie with white clam sauce.

• Mister Mark's Fun Park near Florence, S.C. (Exit 164; 843-669-7373; mistermarksfunpark.com). It's a boon for traveling families with restive kids, says Stan. "There's miniature golf, go-karts, batting cages and arcade."

• The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C. (Exit 95; 919-934-5830; avagardner.org). A fan kissed by a young Ava Gardner established this roadside attraction to pay homage to the film star, who hailed from North Carolina. Movie posters, costumes worn by Gardner and scripts are displayed.

• Tailwinds Farm B&B near Rising Sun, Md. (Exit 100; 410-658-8187; fairwindsstables.com). "You can stay on a horse farm and go horseback riding," Sandra says. Bed and breakfast costs $85 for two.

 

[scriptgirl]

Washington Post

One Woman Riot
Lee Server's Ava Gardner: "Love Is Nothing" (St. Martin's, $29.95) wore me out. It's not just that this biography of perhaps the most beautiful Hollywood star ever sprawls over 500 pages. Gardner was a tireless boozer, fornicator and brawler, and the account of her marriages, affairs, tantrums, sulks, seductions, confessions and generally erratic behavior soon becomes tedious. Especially as you watch Gardner make the same mistakes over and over -- such as agreeing to another reconciliation with her third husband, Frank Sinatra, despite overwhelming evidence that they were poison to each other. You get the sense of someone dancing on a treadmill.

A native of North Carolina tobacco country, Ava Gardner got to Hollywood via a photo in a New York shop window, which caught the eye of an MGM talent scout. The studio signed her up, put her through its in-house finishing school and then all but lost sight of her. It took another studio, Universal, to make her a star, in "The Killers" (1946), a film noir based loosely on a Hemingway story.

Carefully directed, Gardner could turn in an intelligent performance, but most of her 70-odd movies are slop. Off-camera, she gave off sparks of wit, as in her assessment of John Ford, who directed her in "Mogambo": "The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!" And she never failed to make an impression. What Server calls "her often desperate joie de vivre" inspired the one-woman riot played by Anita Ekberg in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." But in the end Gardner epitomizes the empty-vessel syndrome that seems to afflict so many movie stars: Without a script or a director, the poor woman had no idea what to make of herself. ?

 

[scriptgirl]

TIME

Hughes and His Hotties

The upcoming The Aviator will star Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, but who will play the tycoon's legendary love interests?

THE ACTRESS Cate Blanchett

WHO SHE PLAYS Screen siren Katharine Hepburn

WILL IT FLY? Let's see--Blanchett has already played the Queen of England and an immortal elf. That should be a good warm-up

THE ACTRESS Serendipity's Kate Beckinsale

WHO SHE PLAYS Legendary beauty Ava Gardner

WILL IT FLY? Note to aspiring starlets everywhere: avoid inviting comparisons between your looks and Ava Gardner's

THE ACTRESS No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani

WHO SHE PLAYS Original bombshell Jean Harlow

WILL IT FLY? Stefani is blond, she's brassy, she probably can't act...basically, she's perfect

 

[scriptgirl]

Seattle Times

MYSTERY OF THE MELUNGEONS
By Carol Morello
The Washington Post
THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE WHITE. The truth was shrouded in secrecy: They are a mix of European, African and Native American. Abe Lincoln, Elvis and Ava Gardner might have been Melungeon. Millions of the rest of us might have Melungeon blood, too.

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WISE, Va. - It usually begins simply enough. A blue-eyed, olive-skinned child asks a parent: Who am I? Where did our family come from? In the mist-shrouded hollows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the answers long have been evasive.

When Brent Kennedy started questioning his origins, an aunt doused old family documents and photographs with gasoline and set them ablaze. Another relative told him, "I hope you burn in hell."

Mary Ramsey Cameron's grandmother to this day refuses to discuss the family tree. But a sympathetic aunt once whispered a melodic word that she implored Cameron to keep hush-hush:

Melungeon.

For generations in Appalachia, the word has been an epithet and worse. Melungeons, who have a mixed European, African and American Indian heritage, have been maligned and denied basic rights. They have been pushed off fertile land, barred from schools and from voting.

Now something extraordinary is happening on Stone Mountain and along Tennessee's Newman's Ridge - two bastions where Melungeon ancestors retreated from land confiscations but could not escape slurs. Descendants of the men and women who desperately tried to hide their backgrounds so they and their children could pass as white are researching and proudly embracing their mixed Melungeon roots.

"It's a betrayal of my ancestors," acknowledged Kennedy, a University of Virginia administrator whom many credit with sparking the interest in Melungeon studies. But "I'm also liberating them. We are finally getting to the point where we are justifying who they were."

`Leading a movement'

About 1,000 people who are or suspect they may be Melungeon gathered in this Virginia town recently for a conference exploring often-arcane theories about their origins. Many said they hope to set an example for Americans of all races.

"Some people don't accept or tolerate differences. Our mission is to show the world we are all one people. Who better to teach that than those of us who are mixed?" said Connie Clark, head of the Melungeon Heritage Association and a Wise high school teacher who educates her students on their Melungeon links.

"Our ancestors were persecuted. We were raised believing we were white. And now we're saying we are not white. Race doesn't matter.

"Here we are, poor Appalachians, and we're leading a movement."

Millions of descendants?

There probably would be no Melungeon movement if Kennedy hadn't gotten sick in 1988.

He couldn't walk. His vision blurred. His joints throbbed. After being diagnosed with sarcoidosis, he began reading up on a disease primarily found in people of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent. Odd - Kennedy's relatives always had said they were Scotch-Irish. After delving into his background, he became convinced they were Melungeons.

Kennedy quit his job as a fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations in Atlanta and moved home to Wise - to unravel not just one family's past but the elusive mystery of the Melungeon people.

Even the numbers of Melungeons are little more than guesses. Researchers believe some 75,000 people are proud of their Melungeon background. Another 250,000 know they're Melungeon and don't want to know anything more about it. Theoretically, millions unknowingly could have a Melungeon ancestor.

Lincoln and Elvis, maybe

Family surnames often are a hint. Mullins, Goins, Collins and Roberson are classics. Some Melungeons suspect Abe Lincoln, Elvis Presley and Ava Gardner all may have had Melungeon blood.

But historical records sometimes are sketchy and amorphous. Family sagas often are clouded with unfilled blanks and outright lies. When records do exist, Melungeons variously were described as "Portyghee," Indian, white or "free persons of color." Who could blame Melungeons for shunning census takers? Some historical accounts were contemptuously racist.

"The Melungeons are filthy, their home is filthy," read a 1891 report in the magazine Arena. "They are rogues, natural born rogues, close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly and, to use their own word, sneaky. In many things they resemble the Negro. . . . They are an unforgiving people, although . . . they are slow to detect an insult, and expect to be spit upon."

Theories of ancient roots

Kennedy thought there had to be a more balanced, complete explanation of how Melungeons came to be a much-vilified "tri-racial isolate," as academics tag them. Kennedy began attracting a group of academics, physicians and fellow Melungeons interested in probing Melungeon origins.

Partly through research, partly through extrapolation, they have proposed a raft of theories, which Kennedy outlined in a controversial 1997 book called "The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People; An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America."

They believe they carry genes of sailors, explorers and indentured servants who coupled with American Indian women in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

One thread suggests they may have links to Portuguese and Spanish settlers left behind from the Spanish colony of Santa Elena, today Beaufort, S.C. Another theory traces them to Ottoman Turks and Moors who were galley slaves aboard Spanish ships and may have been freed by Sir Francis Drake on Roanoke Island, N.C. Still another possible connection is Turkish and Armenian craftsmen working in Virginia settlements in the mid-1600s.

Some believe their very name, Melungeon (pronounced meh-lun-jun), may be a derivation of the Turkish Mulun can, which translates as "damned soul." As Anglo-Saxons moved to the New World, the theory goes, the dark-skinned people with European features who already were there were shoved off fertile land into the hinterlands until they ended up in Appalachia's hardscrabble mountains.

Theories need confirmation

None of this has been proved to the satisfaction of most academics. And some critics suggest the focus on exotic Turkish links is an attempt by some to distance themselves from their black ancestry.

Virginia DeMarce, a former president of the National Genealogical Society, notes that Melungeon is neither a race nor ethnicity but a melange of racial genes that differs in every Melungeon family. She dismisses the theory of a Turkish link as undocumented fantasy, and many academics concur.

"It's a myth designed to give them some self-esteem they never had," said David Henige, a University of Wisconsin historian who specializes in African oral traditions. "They fail to realize it's not accidental that there is no evidence of these things."

Research into Melungeons can be as significant for some African Americans as it is for white Melungeons. For Kevin Hayes, an IBM technical manager in Atlanta, it may help explain why he and his mother were born with sixth fingers that were amputated at birth and why an aunt has diseases more typical among Mediterranean people.

"The African-American community is more accepting of not being pure African," said Hayes, who discovered Melungeons while searching a genealogical Web site. "This country is a greater melting pot than most people imagine. People of mixed heritage need to acknowledge it and speak out about it if we are going to have any hope of overcoming racism."

Science is beginning to shed light on origins discarded or forgotten generations ago. DNA tests in 1990 on blood samples from 177 Melungeons are consistent with Mediterranean, especially Portuguese, traits. Testing for Turkish links is just beginning.

"It's at least possible," said archaeologist Chester DePratter, an adviser to the Melungeon Heritage Association. "The evidence is there for some things, and others you need to be cautious about interpreting."

For many Melungeons, the debate over their roots is as much about class as it is about race. It's a message to non-Melungeon folk in Appalachia, and to the world at large: The days of judging us are over. We're judging ourselves now.

"Appalachia is that place where you ain't never gonna get white enough, but spent an incredible amount of time trying," said Darlene Wilson, a Melungeon sociologist. "You can't have a middle class unless you've got an underclass. America needed Appalachia the way Appalachia needed Melungeons."

"This is about Appalachian people taking control of saying what we are," said Bill Fields, publisher of the Melungeon newsletter Under One Sky. "The academics don't like it, but we're telling ourselves our own history. That hasn't happened before in this part of the country."

 

[scriptgirl]

Washington Post

Washington, D.C.: Good afternoon. Did Sinatra ever try to convince Ava Gardner to come back after their divorce? Why was a man so blessed with talent, fame, and money so bitter?

Anthony Summers: He tried time and again from the 1950s almost until Gardner's death in 1990 to "try again." I think one has to try always to separate the personality from the artist. Sinatra was a very Italian Italian-American, and those of his generation simply did not leave their wives and children. That was simply not something allowable in the culture. Yet he'd done that because of his consuming love for Gardner. Only to walk into disaster after emotional disaster. "Bitter"? Perhaps that's not the word. Perhaps, rather, desolated by loss - which is exactly what comes through in so many of his songs.

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