by Lee Server
Ava’s MGM education began with a speech coach, Gertrude Fogler, a plump, seventyish woman who worked out of a tiny office on a distant lot.
She was a relic of the coming of sound, when experts were first recruited to teach silent stars not to speak through the nose and to overarticulate all vowels, a job ridiculed mercilessly in Singin’ in the Rain. But Fogler was actually an innovative teacher whose methods included mental imaging and yoga breathing exercises. A grateful Ava Gardner remembered her as kindly and helpful in a confusing time. Many years later Gertrude Fogler would recall Ava’s first visit: “In walked this timid, self-effacing, miserable, beautiful child. She wore horrid old clothes, no makeup, and her hair was all awry, yet she was so eager to learn.”
To gauge the girl’s manner of speech Fogler had her read a story out loud. Ava’s unspoiled soul was manifest: When she reached an unhappy passage in the story, she choked up with sadness. For an hour each day they worked on losing her Carolina accent. To change her “ahs” to “ers,” Ava read pages of applicable words, deliberating over each final syllable. Fogler gave her exercises to alter her vocal style, trying to change her slow-rippling, honey-coated drawl to something faster, flatter, and more Midwestern, something more acceptable in the deracinated, common-denominator universe of MGM characters.*
To teach her how to act, Ava was sent to Lillian Burns. Admitted to the Metro family in the mid-thirties with vague credentials and an abundance of pep, Lilly Burns was another member of Mayer’s personal team of trusted advisers. She was a small, sultry-looking woman with a theatrical personality, the intense air and slashing gestures of a tiny Bette Davis. Some who received her coaching swore by her ability to mold a performer and nurture fledgling talent; others found her rigid and self-absorbed. She had a tendency to instruct everyone with the same “grande dame” movements and facial gestures, and some thought her goal was to make every actor resemble a version of herself. Her greatest success story, as far as Mayer was concerned, was Lana Turner, the studio’s reigning sex symbol, whose early star performances were considered to have been completely mimetic, every single facial gesture, body movement, and line reading slavishly copied from Burns (adding only a crucial 1,000 percent more sex appeal). Gene Reynolds, a child actor and in 1941 a juvenile lead at Metro (later the producer of the acclaimed television series M*A*S*H), recalled, “Lillian Burns was a lovely woman, but very vain. In her office—which was kind of a living room setup with some soft chairs and a coffee table—she had a couple of large mirrors, and while she was showing you how to play a scene or read some lines she was often looking right past you and looking at herself in the mirror. She loved to look at herself in the mirror! But she was very talented, and she helped a lot of people enormously. If you knew something about acting, then she would just make suggestions and go over a scene with you. And it was really only if you didn’t have a clue what you were doing that she made you give these manufactured performances.”
Lillian Burns assessed Ava’s ability. She told George Sidney (the two married later that same year) that Gardner had extraordinary natural presence but turned wooden with self-consciousness when she had to “act.” Burns would have her read a few lines and then read them herself, demonstrating what to do, complete with pauses, raised eyebrows, flared nostrils. It was the Lana Turner routine again, making the student learn by imitation, gesture by gesture. Ava found Lillian’s exemplary style corny, but she did what she was told. Sometimes Ava would be paired off to run lines with one of the other new starlets-in-training, such as Donna Reed or Leatrice Gilbert. Seventeen-year-old Leatrice Gilbert was there on a minimum-wage novice contract like Ava, but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Leatrice was the daughter of silent-screen actors Leatrice Joy and John Gilbert, the legendary romantic idol of the 1920s, one of MGM’s first and greatest stars, lover of Garbo and Dietrich, tragically gone at the age of thirty-six. “We met in Lillian Burns’s office,” Leatrice Gilbert (now Fountain) remembered. “We read a scene together. I liked her very much. She was not sophisticated at all, but she was very bright. Very matter-of-fact about everything, nothing drippy or saccharine about her at all, a real no-nonsense kind of girl. We just got along right away.
“One day they sent us off together to the beach to do a photo shoot. This was what you did when you were under contract and you were a nobody. They took your picture with a firecracker for the fourth of July, and maybe one of the magazines or newspapers printed it and mentioned your name or at least mentioned the studio. They were always sending you out to do publicity photographs and pinups. They took us out to the beach, early in the morning before anyone else was there. I was told to put on this kind of two-piece tigerskin bathing suit. Now, I was skinny as a rail, and I had just had a very short haircut, so there I was with a boy’s haircut and no bosoms whatever. And Ava came out with her lovely long hair, which was kind of reddish brown and down around her shoulders, and wearing this beautiful white spandex bathing suit that showed every curve, and those greenish eyes flashing, and we were supposed to toss a ball back and forth on the beach. And she would catch the ball, and the photographer would snap. And she looked like a sexy goddess, and I never felt so totally embarrassed in my life. I said to her, Oh my God, I look terrible next to you!’ And she was so sweet about it. She said, ‘No, no, no, we’re just different types. You’re the Katharine Hepburn type.’ “
Ava and Bappie had moved almost immediately from their costly hotel room to cheaper lodgings they found at the Hollywood Wilcox, renting by the week an efficiency apartment with a pull-down bed and small kitchen facilities. Bappie got herself a salesclerk job at one of the big stores on Wilshire Boulevard. Ava followed a wearying routine: up and out by dawn for the three-bus transit to Culver City. Classes in speech, drama, and soon dance and singing lessons too. It really was like going back to school. Except that at Rock Ridge High or Atlantic Christian you weren’t likely to come within a few yards of Clark Gable arriving for work—as she did one morning and was struck dumb with awe—Clark Gable on a motorcycle and wearing big goggles and looking grimly hung- over, but otherwise as dazzling a sight as he had been in Red Dust or Gone With the Wind.
Nearly every day she spent some hours posing for photographers: sometimes long, formal sessions in the portrait studio, other times improvised work around the back lots or on the beach at Malibu or by a hotel swimming pool or anywhere else a bathing suit or short skirt might conceivably be worn. There were “cheesecake” shots meant to show off her figure—personality and holiday and gimmick and gag shots, photos of her swinging a tennis racket, milking cows, and feeding chickens. For one image, reflecting the dog days of summer, she held a thermometer in one hand, an ice-cream cone in the other, and perched her swimsuited bottom on a giant block of ice. It had not been easy at first, being the object of such direct attention from strangers, the photographers and assistants posing her, guiding her body this way and that, fingers bluntly rearranging her clothes as if she were a department store mannequin. The swimsuits were tighter, thinner, more revealing than anything she or any other girl had ever worn at Holt Lake. Inevitably, as the work became routine, her ingrained reserve began to lessen, although there would still be uncomfortable moments when the man behind the camera seemed to want more than she was willing to give, wanting her to lean her cleavage still lower or arch her buttocks higher in the air. She would hear Molly’s voice in her head at such moments, or see her reproving gaze and go cold. Nevertheless the figure in the printed results no longer showed much in common with the tentative girl in a straw bonnet in Larry Tarr’s shopwindow. In the cheesecake photos she was youthful sexiness personified, a sprightly dazzler of an American teen. In the formal portraits, some by veteran masters of light and shadow like Clarence Sinclair Bull, she was something else again: enticing, mysterious, and erotic, a dark dream of succulent desirability.
“She came up to my office one day,” recalled Berdie Abrams, then in her second year in the studio publicity dep
artment. “She came in very quietly, almost snuck in, because this was when she first started and was afraid of everything. And she says, ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m really curious to see what my pictures look like.’ So I said, ‘Well, c’mon.’ And I went and pulled out the drawer of her stuff they had taken. And I spread the pictures out for her to look at, and she studied them. And you want to know something? Those were some stunning photos of her. She was the most beautiful woman on the lot, absolutely, nobody compared to her. But not only that, she couldn’t take a bad picture. And that was rare, y’know; everybody has a bad side. And she looked at the pictures for a little while, and when she was done she straightened up and kind of shrugged, and she said, ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘From the way people went on so, I thought I was better-looking than that….”‘
The studio contract Ava had signed included what was generally known as a “morals clause,” a turgid proscription of any activity that would “shock, insult or offend” the community or public decency or otherwise bring shame upon the motion picture industry. Any violation meant instant dismissal. The clause was reflective of the high standards of MGM. Wasn’t Louis B. Mayer the man who did more than anyone to fight the stereotype of a licentious Hollywood, presenting to the world an upright, stern corporate image (his three-piece suits were emblematic in a land of plaid blazers and tennis shorts) and in his films a cinematic espousal of prudence, patriotism, and good clean living? Ava, in time, would come to jeer at this presumption of moral superiority. She would learn to see Metro’s aura of rectitude as a front like those propped-up facade movie sets behind which was a great deal of dirt and garbage.
A newcomer like Ava Gardner learned from the grapevine or, less fortunately, from experience, that bad behavior among the Culver City hierarchy was endemic. One heard the stories passed around at lunch or whispered in the makeup room. There was Eddie Mannix, the studio’s bulldoglike general manager and longtime Mayer confidant who had beaten his mistress so violently that she required multiple abdominal surgeries. And Ben Thau, the stone-faced executive of whom it was said that he “pissed ice water,” another notorious serial predator in the hallways and offices of MGM. And Arthur Freed, the producer of The Wizard of Οι, Babes on Broadway, and most of the classic Metro musicals, who, in a meeting in his office with Shirley Temple in 1941, exposed his penis to the then-twelve-year-old child.
Mayer himself was a recurrent if often inept lecher, offering the casting couch to select actresses, especially faded stars in need of a comeback and a paternalistic spanking. Judy Garland, a Metro employee from the age of thirteen, would recall Mayer, in his office, routinely groping her adolescent breasts. These men—most of them short, middle-aged, and ugly, surrounded by young and spectacular-looking women (some of these admittedly with more ambition than scruples)—regularly traded a key to the kingdom in return for physical pleasures, and what they couldn’t get by trade they were often raring to grab.
“A young woman starting out on her own was in a very vulnerable position at the studio,” recalled Leatrice Gilbert. “There was a lot of lechery and abuse.” One evening, she would remember, Ben Thau had lured her to his house on the pretext of giving her some mementos that had belonged to her late father, John Gilbert. Thau answered the door in a bathrobe and nothing else. “And suddenly he made the big move on me. I was seventeen and a virgin and scared to death and I just ran out of there.…But you heard of bad things happening to girls at the studio all the time.”
Ava would have her own close encounter with one of the squat wolves from the executive floor during her first week at work. An exec had invited her to see a new movie in his projection room, and the moment they were alone the man groped and tried to kiss her while growling some mixture of job offers, sweet talk, and vague threats. She got away and hid herself in someone’s office in the publicity department and later told the tale to publicity chief Howard Strickling, who was known to be a decent guy. He told her he would have a talk with the man and make sure he would never do anything like that again. Ava was upset and Strickling told her to hold on, he was sure she was going to be a big star and she couldn’t let one unfortunate incident ruin her great future. Then he told her not to tell anybody what happened.
Ava willed herself to forget about it, though it was not easy, and sometimes the memory would come back and she would flare up in anger and want to find the man and do what she should have done instead of running and hiding—do something with her shoe that he wOuld have a damned hard time forgetting. What made it worse, she thought, was how hard she had tried not to draw the wrong sort of attention. There was gossip about some girls at the studio that did not bear thinking about, and Ava had pointedly tried to not let anyone get the wrong idea about her. She turned away from men who attempted to flirt and turned down invitations to parties and after work get-togethers. It was tempting to mingle or go out with a boy, but it was intimidating, too, when you didn’t know what you were getting into (it didn’t help matters that she was shy of speaking at will, aware that her Carolina accent struck some people with horror).
She had even turned down a date with a movie star.
When they met that first day on the Babes on Broadway set, he in his eyecatching Carmen Miranda costume, Mickey Rooney had beamed from ear to ear, looking upon the newly arrived starlet like a boy contemplating the world’s largest ice-cream sundae. “Everything in me stopped,” he would write in I.E., his 1965 memoir. “My heart. My breathing. My thinking.” In another minute he was called back to the set and Ava had gone on her way. But Rooney had not been able to put her out of his mind. He sent one of his hangers-on to talk to Weiss the publicist, find out her story. With new female contract players you never knew if they were already the special interest of someone higher up (in Rooney’s words, “potential pussy for the executives”). He saw her for the second time in the studio commissary; they chatted, he fawned over her, asked her to come out to dinner that night. She said no.
He crept back to his cronies at the lunch table, hurting but elated and told them that was the girl he was going to marry.
Mickey Rooney: born Joe Yule, Jr., in 1920, in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn, New York. The son of small-time vaudevillians, he grew up a nomad amid the seedy glamour of variety and burlesque houses, surrounded by jugglers, baggy-pants comics, and long-legged showgirls. His cradle was a drawer in his parents’ backstage dressing room. Almost literally born a performer, he was said to have stolen his first scene at the age of one and a half when he crawled onto a stage in the middle of an actor’s monologue and brought the house down. Not much later he was doing his own act, singing, drumming, telling jokes in a custom-made tuxedo. When welfare workers in one city came investigating a possible violation of the child- labor laws, he had to pretend to be an adult midget. His parents split up when he was four, and his mother, Nell, settled with her boy in Los Angeles. She spent much of her time foisting him on movie producers. In one picture he got to play a midget again. His big break came at the age of six: He won the title role of “Mickey McGuire” in a new series of cheap two- reelers based around the character of the tough little urchin in the popular Toonerville Trolley comic strip. After a while the producers came up with a scheme to “do away” with licensing payments to the creator of the comic strip by making their little star change his name legally to that of the character he played, which he did (Joe Junior’s mother, for consistency, changed her name to McGuire, too). The series ran its course after fifty two-reelers, while the cartoonist finally won a lawsuit that incidentally required the young actor to stop calling himself Mickey McGuire on screen or off. The boy was at once out of a job and out of a name, a has- been at twelve.
It was around that time, too, he stopped growing. They tried stretching exercises and mechanical devices—nothing worked. He would top out at a hair over sixty inches, the size of a boy for life.
A publicist at Universal came up with his new name, this one with no legal injunctions against it. Davi
d O. Selznick saw him cutting up at a charity Ping-Pong match and, knocked out by his energy and talent, elbowed him into his new production, Manhattan Melodrama. Mickey played Clark Gable’s character as a child. The picture was a hit, helped along by all the free publicity when John Dillinger went to see it and got shot to death by G-men on his way out of the theater. Metro signed the fourteen-year-old to a long-term contract. For a while he simmered, stealing scenes from the edge of the frame (it was said that his on-screen energy could take the spotlight even from “a cooing baby playing with a forlorn puppy”). Then in 1937 he appeared in the first of what would be known as the Hardy Family series, enormously popular, gentle comedy- dramas about the household of a small-town judge. Mickey Rooney played Judge Hardy’s son, Andrew—a rambunctious, lovelorn American teenager—and following the audience’s response, he was soon made the focus of the series. The diminutive, not particularly handsome young man (his face was cruelly reckoned by one critic to resemble a squeezed grapefruit) became Metro’s hottest property, rushed into films that in their variety (comedies, dark dramas, musicals) revealed the scope of a phenomenal performing talent. By 1939, with the regular Hardy installments and stand-alone hits like Boys Town and Babes in Arms, he was the box-office champion of the world.
“He was just one of the most gifted people, just amazing,” remembered Gene Reynolds, a fellow Metro child actor and a supporting player in several Rooney vehicles. “No education to speak of…at the Little Red Schoolhouse there at MGM they could never find him, they were always chasing him down for a lesson.…I think he could barely read…but he was just naturally talented, intuitively smart: He taught himself to play piano, write music, dance, a great golfer. Anything. On those musical numbers everyone would rehearse all day, all week, from Monday to Friday. And Mickey would not show up. No one could find him all week. He would be off at the track or somewhere. He would come in on Friday morning—everybody else had been working on the number all week long—and he’d say, Okay, show me what I do.’ They would walk him through the damn thing, do this, now it’s a time step, then this—by noon he had the whole thing and be gone, hop in his car, and drive off to the races. It was all too easy for him.”