by Lee Server
Jacobsen escorted her out of his office and down the hall to see his boss, a department head named Marvin Schenck, a relative of the Loew’s Inc. president, Nicholas M. Schenck. A sequence of events followed that was much like what had occurred in the first room. She answered questions, she read pages, she looked left and right and straight ahead. Schenck and Jacobsen huddled. They whispered. They stared.
Schenck said: “Test her.”
Al Altman is an underappreciated auteur of the American cinema. His films, short, sometimes experimental in nature, never seen by more than a small, select audience, were nonetheless highly influential and frequently featured some of the biggest names in movie history. Altman was MGM’s New York screen test director. A Massachusetts accountant and amateur magician (a pal of Harry Houdini’s) when he met Louis B. Mayer in the 1920s, he had been sent to New York to sign up Broadway talent when Mayer relocated to California. It was Altman who, in 1924, had discovered Joan Crawford. She had been hoofing in a speakeasy when Altman put her before a camera; MGM saw the test and turned her down, but Altman persisted, shooting her twice more before the studio finally signed her. It was the kind of story that brought tears to Louis Mayer’s eyes— how close they had come to losing that gold mine!
Altman’s ability to spot potential screen talent became one of the studio’s most valued assets. In later years he concentrated his efforts on directing tests, an art of his own invention. Altman used a variety of methods to bring out the best in his subjects on-camera, including interviews and improvisations, sometimes whipping up psychodramas, sometimes barking out odd, surreal instructions to a startled actor (“A large horse is coming at you—now it’s going up the wall!”), sometimes reshooting several times if he thought someone had something special that wasn’t coming across, trying to let the performer show off his or her range within a few minutes of screen time and to give them their best shot at a studio contract. He then often worked at editing the test reel to a perfected final cut, as diligent as any director aiming for an Academy Award, though Altman’s film would never be seen by more than a handful of executives on both coasts. Among those whom Al Altman introduced to the movie camera were James Stewart, Bob Hope, Henry Fonda, Franchot Tone, and, in preparation for The Wizard of 0{, an entire diminution of Munchkins.
Through the years Al Altman had interviewed or tested hundreds of pretty girls, some of them the”special friends” of executives, known as “must-tests,” some of them very pretty indeed, but he had seen few women in all those years he had ever chosen to describe as beautiful. It was an arbitrarily high standard, but by Altman’s definition a beautiful girl was a true rarity—a “freak.” And the teenage girl from North Carolina he met at the Loew’s Building that summer in 1941 he would identify as one of these rare creatures. “My father was not someone who often talked about women’s looks or anything like that,” his daughter, Diana Altman, would recall, “but he always said that Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”
They did the test over in Hell’s Kitchen at the Fox Movietone News studio,on the cramped soundstage on the first floor. Ava wore a long flared print dress with a lacey scooped neck, a pair of high-heeled shoes she borrowed from her sister, and her favorite chain necklace with a little stone. Her long hair was combed up high and back in the fashion of 1941. Al Altman brought her to the small set they had created—a sitting room with a cane chair, a table, a curtained window. They escorted her onto the wooden-platformed set, and she stood there for what seemed forever as the men fixed the blindingly bright lights and others adjusted the big movie camera and a couple of others did things she couldn’t see, moving around in the darkness beyond. At last the camera turned and a man stepped in front of her with a board with her name and those of the director, cameraman, and soundman written in chalk. Also chalked in was her height, five feet six, and her weight (118 pounds), held right up to the camera lens (how embarrassing! she thought). The slate was cracked, and Al Altman asked Ava to tell them her name, where she was from, what she did back there—who her favorite movie stars were. Then Altman came over to her on the living room set, told her that they wanted to show how she moved, and guided her through a simple piece of action. Ava walked across the small set holding a vase of flowers, which she placed on the table. She swiveled, turned her head. Her upper lip seemed to fold under as she tried to smile, her mouth gone very dry with nerves and the heat of the lights. They did it again, maybe three or four times, then switched to a medium shot, Ava holding the vase in her hands and staring at it, looking away. They moved over to stand her before some plain backdrop paper and posed her for close shots, Ava moving her head and eyes at Al’s direction, looking left, looking right, looking at last directly at the camera.
Then it was done.
Al Altman said, “Thank you very much, Miss Gardner.”
Ava stepped out on the hot pavement on Tenth Avenue. She stood in front of the building in the summer sun, began to breathe again. And that was that. She had been terrible, she knew, the way she must have looked, mouth dry, lips sticking together, holding those terrible flowers. No one would ever put anybody into the movies after seeing a routine like that. The heck with it. She had been given a screen test by Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, and not many people could say that, it would be a little story she could tell her grandkids someday. She was sure she would hear nothing more from anybody.
“My father described that test as a disaster,” Diana Altman remembered. “He just thought the whole thing was a mess. She had been so awkward, could hardly move or look up, couldn’t talk.”
Al Altman had three choices after shooting a test: Ship it to the studio in California, shoot the person again and try and improve the results, or shelve it. To go as far as testing a person on film was already an investment by the studio, so Altman did not dismiss anyone out of hand, no matter how unpromising. And film, he had learned from nearly twenty years of experience, was a tricky medium: Sometimes it captured something you did not know was there. That evening Altman and some others from 1540 went to the Fox Movietone screening room to watch what they had done that day (in addition to Ava, Altman had shot tests of singers Vaughan Monroe and Hazel Scott).
Ava’s test began. Al Altman’s daughter, Diana, remembered him telling the story many times: “He said that when Ava’s face came on that screen every guy in the room fell madly in love with her.”
In the portion of the test—now presumed lost—when Ava spoke her responses to Al Altman’s prompts, she was said to have been awkward and difficult to understand. In the moments of her moving across the screen in the long homespun dress with flowers in hand she appeared tall and lean with a small bust and a long torso, pretty but not inordinately appealing. The silent close shots, though, head and shoulders and then a facial close-up, almost spectral against the blank backdrop, were something else, alive and alluring, a glimpse and no more, but a flash of something the stiff body movements and requested expressions and awkward speech had seemingly tried to deny. The large, shadowed eyes especially, for a moment looking straight into the lens, were filled with a flash of hypnotic fire, as if some other presence within had suddenly revealed itself. It was in those few seconds, a hundred frames of film perhaps, that her future was decided.
Al Altman eliminated the sound elements from the test and edited together the best shots, less than two minutes altogether.
Altman said, “Ship it.”
Ten days later someone called Ava from New York and told her they had liked what they saw in Hollywood and had a contract for her to sign. “Will you be ready to go to Hollywood within a week?”
Molly Gardner had gone with her daughter Inez to see a doctor in Raleigh. The pains and bleeding that had plagued her for a long time had continued, gotten worse. The doctor’s diagnosis was cancer of the uterus, inoperable. Nothing could be done. She had to stop working and just take it easy, the best thing for her now. It was decided that Molly would move in with Inez and her husband.
And what about California and MGM?
That was decided, too. Of course Ava had to go. Molly wouldn’t hear of Ava not going, such an opportunity. And Bappie would go with her, an eager volunteer.
“Somebody has to see that you drink your milk and eat your vegetables,” Bappie said. (Larry Tarr would be left to find nourishment unaided.)
The contract ran for seven years, with one-way clauses that allowed the studio alone to abrogate the deal almost at will (many “seven-year contracts” were severed within a year). Salary was fifty dollars a week, with periodic raises to the end of the contractual term. Ava looked through the pages of small type and strange phrases, shrugged, signed.
In New York, Ava and Bappie boarded the Twentieth Century Limited for the journey to Los Angeles, three days’ travel with a change to the Super Chief in Chicago. A young Metro publicity man named Milton Weiss traveled with them, assigned to make sure no harm came to the new employee before the West Coast boys got a closer look at her. Ava sat by the window, looked out at the people on the platform gliding away, at her reflection in the blackened tunnel, at the meadows and factories and homes going by. She didn’t show much excitement, Bappie would remember. She was an odd girl, her baby sister, not like other girls her age. Bappie herself could hardly hold on to her own enthusiasm, heading for Hollywood, and a free ticket to boot.
Later that first evening, Milton Weiss came back to the compartment with news. On the same train with them was MGM’s latest star, Hungarian import Hedy Lamarr. People were falling over one another trying to get a look. And could you blame them? She was gorgeous.
Bappie said, “That makes two movie queens on board!”
Ava stared out the window, and the train rushed on into the Midwestern night.
They arrived in Los Angeles on August 23. The sun was shining. In the station courtyard there were palm trees, and there were fragrant red roses whose color seemed amplified as if by electricity. A company car brought them to the stately Plaza Hotel on Vine Street in Hollywood. Bappie plopped down on a bed, saying she would sleep for the next twenty-four hours. Ava had to get herself ready to go out almost right away. Milton Weiss was coming back to take her to a party at the home of journalist Ruth Waterbury, where there would be other press people, a chance to show off the studio’s latest purchase and maybe get her name into the papers and fan mags. Weiss drove a slow scenic route, pausing on a hillside curve so Ava could watch the sunset. In those days before the war, before the freeways, and before the skies became copper with soot, Los Angeles was among the more pleasant places on earth, with endless clear vistas and the air smelling not of industry and exhaust but of sage and wildflowers and ocean.
At the party the men, many of them reporters and studio publicists, began to congregate around the new arrival. “Like tomcats in heat,” Ruth Waterbury would remember. This was supposed to be the place, the movie capital, where pretty girls were a dime a dozen, but it was just like Holt Lake all over again.
In the morning Ava saw her new place of employment for the first time. Behind high walls, imperious sandstone buildings fronted a sprawling complex that stretched across 117 acres of Culver City, a city in itself, though in places it more resembled a storybook kingdom. There were offices, cottages, laboratories, barnlike soundstages big enough to house zeppelins, a barber shop, a hospital, a schoolhouse, a Western Union office, a stable, an artificial lake, a stretch of railroad track, a street of New York tenements, a vaguely medieval castle, and a portion of African jungle. This was MGM, the dream factory supreme, the most celebrated and successful purveyor of filmed entertainment in the world. Approximately four thousand people worked there, from horse wranglers to linguists. One hundred or so at a given time were contracted actors, a roster divided among stars like Gable, Garbo, and Crawford; featured players and character actors like Marjorie Main, Frank Morgan, and Reginald Owen; and an assortment of presumably promising newcomers who could be put to work in insignificant parts while being groomed for bigger things.
Milton Weiss gave her the guided tour. He took her around to the various departments, to makeup, hair, and costume, places she would be coming back to every day, Weiss told her. They went past dressing rooms with the embedded names of cinema legend and Weiss told her maybe she would have one of those one day (she would, Norma Shearer’s, the largest dressing room of all—one day). They strolled up the cavernous driveways between the great soundstages, passing the costumed extras looking like Arizona ranch hands or South Sea cannibals. Weiss wanted to show her a working set, maybe give her a chance to watch a scene being filmed, and though many of these were closed to visitors they found one open— it was a Busby Berkeley picture, a “youth musical,” they were calling Babes on Broadway. They entered the soundstage and moved toward the set where the unit was in rehearsal for a scene, a raucous comic turn, a parody of Carmen Miranda, the exuberant Brazilian entertainer, singing “Mama, Yo Quiero.” Impersonating Carmen Miranda was the star of the picture, and in the summer of 1941 the twenty-year-old man who ranked—for the third year in a row—the most popular star in the movies: Mickey Rooney. He was wearing at this time a spangled bra and skirt, a fruited turban, had rouged cheeks, and his lips bore a thick coating of red lipstick. A famously short young man, he stood now on high platform heels favored by Miss Miranda. You know who that is, don’t you? Weiss whispered in Ava’s ear. She stared in wonder at the person Weiss identified as Rooney: She had last seen him as an impish boy on a big screen in North Carolina. Not that he looked much like a girl now (or anything else she had ever imagined). For a brief while they stood at the edge of the busy film set. Then Weiss nudged her; they had better be getting along.
All at once there was a parting of bodies and a sudden spangly, fruited rush in their direction, Mickey Rooney clomping over in his high heels. The introductions were made, Ava smiling shyly. Rooney shifting his turban to a rakish tilt.
They spoke for a few moments only, then he had to go, and Weiss led Ava away. Rooney glanced back at his departing visitor. Then he glanced back again.
When she came back to the studio the following day it was no longer to sightsee but to work. A new test had been scheduled. She had to be made ready, moved as on an assembly line from department to department. Wardrobe ladies charted her five-foot-six-inch height and her measurements—thirty-four-twenty-thirty-six, then handed her over to the wizards of hair and makeup. The cosmeticians and hairdressers circled around, studying, touching, mumbling with enthusiasm or often dismay, delineating what needed to be done with her numerous previously undetected flaws. Ava seldom wore makeup, only a layer of Tangee Red on her lips; now she became masked in pancake and blush, and her mouth turned into a smear of glowing scarlet.
Ann Rutherford, an M GM ingenue best known as Andy Hardy’s perky girlfriend, Polly Benedict, remembered seeing Ava on her first day in the makeup chair. “We were introduced and she was lovely, just darling. And I saw them getting her made up, and the makeup man was busily attempting, against his better judgment, to fill that dimple in her chin. Some brainless producer thought she would look better without that ‘defect,’ and the makeup man was filling it in with mortician’s wax!”
Ava—for the time being—succumbed to everything except an attempt to pluck her eyebrows in advance of penciling them back in. She objected with a violent squawk. The thick dark eyebrows would remain more or less intact.
The director of her new test was George Sidney, a savvy showbusiness veteran at twenty-five (he had acted in a movie opposite Tom Mix when he was four), the son of Metro executive L. K. Sidney, and a highly regarded troubleshooter at the studio, writer and director of award-winning short subjects, experimenter in stroboscopic and 3-D cinematography, and since April, a director of feature films (his work, in the years ahead, would include The Harvey Girls, Show Boat, Scaramouche,
and Kiss Me Kate). He was considered a discerning judge, especially of young talent, directed numerous in-house tests, and was one of those who regularly weig
hed in on the screen tests from New York. Sidney had seen Ava Gardner in her silent debut and advised the studio to sign her.
Sidney: “She was a sexy gal. You can’t believe what a sexy gal she was. What was she, seventeen, eighteen? She had great skin, great eyes. She was from a small-town country background. And I think she found the whole thing very strange. And I think she thought we were all a little crazy. She would give you a look as if to say, Are you sure you have the right girl? She didn’t think she belonged there, but it was plain that she had something. There is a spark, a glow that comes off certain performers; they don’t even know they have it sometimes.”
He shot a simple test. Ava was seated in a swivel chair so he could film her from every angle. She read some lines of dialogue and answered a few simple questions about herself. She looked sensational, but it was clear to the director she was not ready for the big leagues yet. Her self- consciousness was almost painful to see. And the voice had to be trained. It was a beautiful, sexy speaking voice that Sidney heard, a sexy, Southern accent with a low, throaty tone and a raucous laugh; but you couldn’t have that regional accent then in a Hollywood movie, this despite the phenomenal success of Gone With the Wind two years before. (The general consensus then was that actors had to sound as if they were from nowhere in particular. It would have presented the same problem if she had come to them with a strongly regional accent of any sort.)
Together Sidney and Louis Mayer looked at the new test. The girl, it was decided, might work out. Yes. Maybe. It was too soon to tell. “At the studio under Mr. Mayer at that time they could train you if they were interested in you,” George Sidney would recall. “They didn’t just give up on you. They had an incredible program for young talent. They had almost a university within the studio walls. And I showed the test to Mr. Mayer and he saw that she had something.” Mayer, said Sidney, had an ability to see talent that didn’t even exist yet. A terrific feeling for talent. And Mayer said, “Let’s get her some coaching and see what happens.”