by Lee Server
Another brief encounter was with Kirk Douglas, then a fairly recent arrival in Hollywood. They met during an appearance on a radio program, went out together, and had, according to Douglas, a very lusty liaison. This apparently coincided with a High Holiday, taxing his endurance, as Kirk would chivalrously recall: “Being a Jew I always fasted on Yom Kippur. And let me tell you, it’s not easy to make love to Ava Gardner on an empty stomach.”
She had an equally short fling with Vinícius de Moraes, the Brazilian vice consul to Los Angeles (later the co-composer of an ode to another emerald-eyed beauty, “The Girl from Ipanema”). One night at a party, according to Moraes, Ava turned to him and said, apropos of nothing and with a weary amusement: “Yes, I am very beautiful, but morally, I stink.”
Ava’s longest-lasting relationship in this period was with another promising young actor new to the movies, Howard Duff. He was twenty-nine when she met him, a good-looking, athletic guy with soft eyes and a deep, expressively resonant voice. Before the war, he had been a disc jockey and regional theater actor. His career began to fall into place after he got out of the service in 1945: He landed the title role on the Sam Spade radio series, playing the Dashiell Hammett detective hero with a self-mocking brio. Then Mark Hellinger discovered him for the movies, putting him in a featured role in Brute Force, Hellinger’s prison drama follow-up to The Killers. He and Ava had first met on the set of Brute Force, where Ava had come to visit Burt Lancaster, the film’s star. Duff was then in the middle of a love affair with Yvonne De Carlo, another luscious postwar temptress (Howard Hughes would come after her, too), but Ava would become an instant infatuation, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He told himself, “Ihave to have her if it kills me.”
They did not meet again until several months later, in New York, where Duff was making Naked City, again for Hellinger.*
Ava joined Mark and several people from the film at their table at the 21 Club. She and Duff chatted, paired off, headed to Greenwich Village for a lobster dinner. They consumed their crustaceans, and, already loaded on champagne, they went on a downtown bar crawl, drinking their way from Bleecker Street to Chinatown. Ava had an iron constitution and an insatiable thirst, and the drunker she got, Duff saw, the more restless she became, rushing them from place to place, inexhaustible, her temper racing up and down the scale from angry hellcat to purring pussy, with little or no motive for each mood change. Duff on that first night out with her gave some grave wonder to what he was getting himself into, but not enough to step away.
“We hit it off at once,” Ava would say. “He was warm and generous, fun to be with, and it wasn’t long before we were sharing the same bed.”
It was in many ways the first serious relationship she had ever had in which she could call herself a full and equal partner. Neither the naive teenager who married Mickey nor the walking inferiority complex of her years with Artie Shaw, with Howard Duff she felt evenly matched. If she was a bigger star, he was a well-paid performer with a rising profile, some finding in his good-humored swagger and deep voice the qualities of a new Gable (a potential that, as it happened, was not to be reached). For a while they seemed perfectly in sync: physically, sexually, emotionally, al- coholically. By day they ran around in T-shirts and blue jeans, wolfing down burgers and shakes at Dolores’ drive-in, playing volleyball at the beach, arriving unannounced to skinny-dip in their friends’ swimming pools; by night they were one of the town’s beautiful couples, well- dressed, one hundred proof; in bed they were dynamite. There was one problem and it only grew: Howard fell in love with Ava, and Ava did not want to be in love. The more he began to need her, the farther she would pull away. The early unalloyed pleasure that they had taken in each other’s company became compromised by frustration, jealousy. They would fight, split up, heatedly reunite. She would refuse to see him for weeks at a time. And so love became anger became hate became pain became love again. There were public spectacles: squabbling at the Beachcomber, their favorite restaurant, and suddenly the air filled with four-letter words and with almond duck and chicken chow mein.
“She treats me like a dog,” Duff would cry to all who would listen.
In January 1948, Ava began work on yet another loan-out to Universal. This made the third out of her last four films to be made for the rival studio. The projects Metro had promised to develop for her had yet to come to anything. A part she had voiced an actual interest in, that of the young bride in Cass Timberlane, from the Sinclair Lewis novel, which Louis Mayer had hinted might be hers, went instead to Lana Turner. It was as it had been since her arrival at the studio—MGM had one sex symbol and they did not not know what to do with another one.
Universal was being charged $75,000 for fifteen weeks of Ava’s services in One Touch of Venus. The production was based on the Broadway musical by Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman, and Kurt Weill, as adapted for the screen by Harry Kurnitz and Frank Tashlin, with most of the songs excised, the story of a statue of Venus that springs to life when kissed by a department store clerk. While Metro stubbornly resisted exploiting Ava’s rising public profile, Universal confirmed it in the most literal way, casting her as the goddess of love and beauty. Studio flacks announced this ultimate typecasting and press releases made much of Ava Gardner’s mythic beauty, positing her physical superiority to all previous depictions of the deity, with the inclusion of her measurements for the benefit of Greco-Roman scholars:
Bust: 35¾
Waist: 23¼
Hips: 34
Neck: 12½
Thighs: 19 inches
Calves: 13
Ankles: 7½
To help in the creation of a proper life-size statue to be used in the film, Ava was sent to pose for New York sculptor Joseph Nicolosi. Several hours each day for two weeks she assumed a position in the studio at Ni- colosi’s Malibu home. At first clad in a two-piece bathing suit, she saw the sculptor repeatedly stop work to approach her and stare with concern at the swimming costume. It seemed that the fabric disturbed him as an interruption of the body’s natural line; the Anatolian Venus, Nicolosi sighed dramatically, had worn no such garment. “Would you like the bra off?” Ava asked.
Nicolosi averred that it would surely aid the cause of art, and so Ava, after a steady stream of what she described as “hot drinks,” unhooked the swimsuit top and resumed her stance with breasts bared. Further sighs of dissatisfaction from Nicolosi eventually resulted in her rolling the bottom of the bathing suit to just below the pubic mound (the mons veneris, indeed). Sometime later, prompted by a reporter and sculpture enthusiast eager to hear more details of these modeling sessions, Nicolosi said, “Miss Gardner gives an appearance of slenderness but possesses the roundness and fullness in the necessary places which set her apart from the emaciated female whose cadaverous outlines most American women seem determined to achieve.”
In early February the sculptor proudly unveiled his finished work to producer Lester Cowan and was met with a torrent of invective.
“Are you crazy? Her tits are showing/ How are we gonna put that in a movie?”
The sculptor had to go back and create a more modest goddess. Another piece of art was created, a small souvenir knockoff of the Nicolosi statue, an idea cooked up by the Universal publicity department, to be sent to select members of the press as a promotional giveaway. Someone in the art department created the eight-inch clay version of Venus, and before it was sent out for casting, publicist Bob Rains decided that as a courtesy they should show it to Ava first. “I took the clay model over to her dressing room. I said, ‘Ava, you want to take a look at this? What do you think?’ She looked it over and laughed. She said, ‘That’s not my figure.’ And then with a cute smile on her face she pinched off some of the clay from the chest area and stuck it to the rear end. She smoothed it on with her finger and made the fanny bigger. She said, ‘That’s more like my ass.’ I was startled but amused. I took it back to the department and told them what happened and everyone broke into hysterics.”
The film’s flesh-and-blood Venus needed her own bodily adjustments. For most of her scenes Ava wore a chiffon drape, a classic Grecian “goddess gown” designed by Orry Kelly, the silk material too flimsy to hide the effect of a cold spring on the actress’s breasts. Many good takes had to be discarded because of the prominent visibility of her erect nipples, a problem that eventually dissipated after prop man Roy Neal was assigned to follow Ava everywhere with a portable heater.
The film was originally scheduled to be directed by Irving Reis, a man Ava had gone out with on several occasions. Whether his dropping out of the production suddenly and leaving for New York had anything to do with their personal connection is not clear. He was replaced by veteran William Seiter, who had begun working in Hollywood as a Keystone Kop and had directed more than one hundred movies since 1919, an underrated moviemaker with a deft touch for comic romance. He got Ava to give her most relaxed and confident performance to date. Not a demanding part and not a complex performance, but one of simply radiant charm: funny and cute and sexy. Ava exuded a happy-go-lucky eroticism, like a Vargas girl come to glorious life, looking more spectacularly beautiful than ever in this, her first real star vehicle, a production virtually designed around her personal charisma and physical appeal.
The male lead in Venus was Robert Walker, the winsome MGM star of See Here Private Hargrove and The Clock with Judy Garland, in the war years the movies’ representative of all the shy, small-town nice boys who had gone away to fight. For all that he played mostly comic parts there was a sad vulnerability to Walker on screen, and even more so in real life. He was a deeply troubled man, probably a schizophrenic, and at the least dangerously depressed and alcoholic (Metro would eventually force him to undergo psychiatric treatment at the Menninger Clinic). When the woman he had loved since they had met as teenagers at college, the woman who had since become known as movie star Jennifer Jones, had left him to be with producer David Selznick, Walker had plunged into a very dark despair from which he would never really escape. His personal life was in such disarray at the time of One Touch of Venus that he had moved into his trailer at the studio to cut himself off from the outside world.
Tentatively he had come to befriend his beautiful, flimsily clothed costar, and soon enough after that he was under her spell, entranced by her looks, delighted by her attitude. Walker professed to hate the movie business and most of the people in it and found in Ava a seeming soul mate. After what he saw as his betrayal by a success-obsessed Jones, Walker melted over Ava’s lack of ambition. Making goo-goo eyes at her at lunch one day, Walker said, “You know, it isn’t fair; you should get top billing in this picture.”
Ava laughed. She said, “Who wants it?”
Walker had tried to remain sober for the picture, but when Ava had invited him out, he went, and when the drinks started coming, he drank them. Ava had had one of her periodic breakups with Howard Duff, and Bob Walker seemed eager to fill the empty place. Many nights they went out together, Walker drinking till he was insensible. Ava, for the record, denied they were ever lovers, saying only that when he had gotten drunk after dinner she had taken him to her place to sleep it off. Others, including David Hanna, Ava’s future manager, and Walker’s biographer, Beverly Linet, who would speak to Walker’s best friend and right-hand man, and to Howard Duff, revealed evidence of a more intense relationship of some sort, however much the intensity was one-sided.
One day Walker knocked on Ava’s dressing room door, and the baritone voice of radio’s Sam Spade said, “Yes, this is Ava,” followed by the sound of two people laughing inside. Ava and Howard had evidently made up. Walker paced around the area until Duff left, then confronted his costar in jealous fury. The two screamed at each other, and Walker suddenly grabbed her and slapped her across the face. Ava knocked him out of the way and ran from the room.
She refused to speak to him again for the rest of the filming. Duff had wanted to go and have it out with the guy, but Ava had said to forget it. Walker became contrite, begging her for forgiveness. She refused. One day she returned to her dressing room and found scrawled across the door a single word. CUNT.
Filming ended. She left the studio. Walker continued to call her until she had her number changed.*
Nearly two years after Ava’s breakthrough in The Killers, MGM had finally come up with a starring part for their star at her own studio. The Bribe was another tropical-exotic thriller like Singapore, this one set in a fictitious Caribbean republic populated by smugglers, expat derelicts, and the usual extraordinarily beautiful nightclub singer, another hodgepodge of bits and pieces of other, better movies, To Have and Have Not, The Lady from Shanghai, with the hard-boiled voice-over of Double Indemnity, and a variation on Kitty Collins’s little black dress. The poor, unfocused script by Marguerite Roberts left the viewer constantly feeling as if he had walked in at the middle of the picture. It was, though, a handsome production with outstanding deep-contrast cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg, and a stylishly filmed action climax during a raucous street carnival. The cast was a strong one, with Robert Taylor as the romantic lead opposite Ava, Charles Laughton, John Hodiak, and Vincent Price. Laughton was pleased to know the young actress, offering her tips on the phrasing of her lines, advising her as well to read out loud from the Bible as an exercise in speech and cadence. Vincent Price recalled Ava as the one Hollywood actress who fully lived up to her rep as a sex symbol. “My god she was sexy, let me tell ya.”
Taylor thought so too. A mutual attraction sparked. She found him a “warm, generous, intelligent human being.” Like Gable, Taylor—born Spangler Arlington Brugh—was a diligent pro, doing the job of movie star like a reliable factory worker, fueled by a never-ending intake of black coffee and cigarettes, an outdoorsman away from the studio, happier ranching or flying his airplane than attending parties and premieres. Since 1939 he had been married to Barbara Stanwyck, though he assured Ava that the marriage was on the rocks. Taylor was a careerist of the old school and not a troublemaker (his would end up the longest unbroken star contract in Metro’s history). He feared negative gossip, scandal, and the application of the dreaded “morals clause”—and perhaps even more he feared the wrath of his ball-busting wife (who, when his desire for her had waned, spread word that he was impotent, adding fire to an already floating rumor that he was homosexual); an affair had to be carried out in the strictest secrecy. Ava herself enjoyed provoking the town’s decency watchdogs, but she agreed to Bob’s undercover conditions. Oddly, Taylor’s “safe house” for their sexual encounters was the home of his mother, Ruth. One night, postcoital, Taylor had slipped out of bed and run straight into the woman, who had words with him. Ava, wrapped in the sheets, heard Taylor pleading: “Mother, would you rather I go to a cheap hotel?”
For two months or so they enjoyed their secret love affair. By day on the banana republic sets of The Bribe they would plot intrigue and mime an adulterous passion, and by night they would do it again for real.
Ten months later Ava would be working in a film with Barbara Stanwyck. Originally Ava had been intended to play the lead role in East Side, West Side, but the veteran star had become available and Metro had simply decided to make a switch. “So they moved me into the smaller role. It was a much better part. Metro always treated me like that, but that time it worked to my advantage.”
East Side, West Side was a glossy look at love and jealousy among the Manhattan elite, with Ava displayed more erotically and sumptuously than ever in strapless evening wear by studio costume designer Helen Rose. As the melodrama piles up and a homicide plot kicks in, her playgirl character becomes the victim of a deadly rival, the Amazonian blond Beverly Michaels. Among the cast it was Stanwyck who more likely harbored murderous designs on Ava; despite their best efforts, word of her affair with Robert Taylor did reach Stanwyck’s ear, and she had placed Gardner on her enemies list forever. Filming East Side, West Side she avoided even being introduced to the younger actress. Although Taylor and Ava were never agai
n intimate, Stanwyck suspected them for years, and once sent an emissary to Rome with her husband with orders to keep an eye out for “that Gardner girl,” who was also in Europe—though in another country, a thousand miles away (as it happened, Taylor’s spare time in Rome would be taken up, this time, with an Italian starlet).
The Great Sinner began as an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. The produced screenplay was something both more and less, a confabulation of the Russian writer’s life and work with a bit of Crime and Punishment thrown in for good measure. “I thought it was a pretty interesting idea,” said Christopher Isherwood, co-credited with the screenplay. “Rather than simply film the book, to see how it came to be written. Well, there had been a writer on it for a long time before me, a Hungarian. And I never really had the time to work on all the ideas that I might have had. I rather think the film had too much MGM and not enough Dostoyevsky. I would have liked to make it the other way round.
“I met Ava Gardner at the studio, and of course she was most beautiful. Was she good in the film? I don’t think I ever saw it.”
The film explored the world of gamblers winning and mostly losing around the tables of the luxurious casino at the Wiesbaden spa in the 1860s. Gregory Peck was the visiting Russian writer, finding material for his next book the hard way by nearly killing himself with a newfound gambling addiction. Ava took the role of a Russian general’s daughter, Pauline Ostrovski, a hedonist and adventuress whom Peck’s Fedor calls “one of the most corrupt women I’ve ever met.” Pauline’s corruption would ultimately be tempered by love, and she becomes his muse, at least in the final cut, nursing him out of the casino and onto the bestseller list.