Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  “I got to watch her when she was doing one of her musical scenes, singing to her own playback,” recalled Marge Champion, the dancer- actress who played Ellie May Shipley in the film. “And it worked perfectly; everyone thought so when they watched her do it. She was this character, drunk and depressed, and sounded just like that character would, this sad romantic woman born on the levee. Today they never would have taken her voice off the film. Back then they were so concerned that everything had to be perfect.”

  For Show Boat, Ava was reunited with her first Hollywood director— George Sidney, the man who had coached her through a screen test on her arrival at Culver City. At the outset they shared a private joke: Back in 1941 his chief concern had been to get her to lose her “Deep South” accent; now, for the part of Julie, he was going to have to help her find it again. It had been a remarkable ten-year ride for both of them, from short subjects to Β features to their standing in 1950 making MGM’s most expensive film of the year. Sidney took great personal pride in his eye for talent when he thought of the raw, noncomprehending nonactress he had first met and had endorsed to the front office back in 1941 and the woman who was now giving him what he felt was an artful, nuanced performance and radiating with the star quality that was the rarest talent of all.

  “She was just such a wonderful gal,” recalled Howard Keel, the great baritone singer-star of Metro’s fifties musicals. “A wonderful actress in that thing, my God, and her singing had a wonderful huskiness to it, she sounded very natural. She was really a great gal and we were great friends. We would get together at the end of the day, me and Ava and Katie [Grayson]. And I think we helped her a lot, just being together. Kathryn Grayson was a wonderful gal and a lot of fun, a lovely, lovely woman.” (“Graycie,” Ava once said of her friend and costar, “had the biggest boobs in Hollywood…with her they didn’t need 3-D.”) When they were finished filming in the evening the stars often got together in Ava’s dressing room, where cocktails were served despite the studio edict against alcohol on the lot. “She didn’t give a shit about what they said anyhow,” Howard Keel remembered. “We’d sneak some in for the end of the day. Tequila.

  Doesn’t show on your breath as much. Listen, when Ava wanted to do something, she did it. She was a real wonderful, independent character, and no one was going to handle her.”

  “She was a straightforward, honest, terrific person,” said Marge Champion. “People underestimated her all the time. She was not only one of the most beautiful women you ever laid eyes on but she was also smart about many things and had an instinctive knowledge of what was good for her—except when it came to men! She was one of those people who broke the rules all the time. Spontaneous. A real child of nature. She lived just below where we lived in the Hollywood Hills. We were above her, very close to the top of the canyon, and we had a swimming pool and she would just come up and go have a swim. And she always skinny-dipped. And one time she was out there and a boy came to make a delivery and couldn’t find anybody in, and he was looking over the wall to get our attention at the pool. And I wondered what he would have thought if he’d known he was looking at Ava Gardner naked in the pool. But it didn’t faze her. She was a straightforward person who did whatever she wanted.”

  Much of the filming was done on and around the studio-constructed Cotton Blossom, a 171-foot paddle-wheel river craft that was said to be the largest single combined prop and set ever used in a Holywood production. Made to move by a motor-driven length of steel cable, it lay on a track at the concrete bottom of MGM River, a three-quarter-mile stream that was now done up to look like assorted segments and ports of the Mississippi but had previously portrayed the rivers Thames, Amazon, and Yangtze. There had been discussions of substantial location shooting on the real Mississippi, but eventually George Sidney had settled for a brief jaunt with a small camera crew to grab some evocative footage at Vicksburg and Baton Rouge and other spots along the river. Despite the fact that all principal photography was done within the walls of the Culver City studio, the production was not without its unpredictabilities. A fire that broke out on the Cotton Blossom one night threatened to destroy the film’s title character. A more persistent danger came from a marmoset that was part of the showboat’s menagerie. The monkey bit his trainer, attacked a prop man, nipped Kathy Grayson on the arm, and finally got his claws into Ava Gardner. She had been posing for some publicity stills, holding the animal on her arm, when George Sidney noticed on Ava’s blouse a growing red stain around one breast. The monkey had dug his claw into her erect nipple and she was bleeding. Very carefully the beast was extracted from the flesh, and Ava was hurried to a nurse’s attention.

  In New York City, while Ava filmed, Frank appeared on his new CBS television series (the Frank Sinatra Show), broadcast each Saturday night at nine. The show caused little stir. The weekly television appearances, like the successful Palladium engagement in London, could not stop the air of failure that continued to attach to the performer’s name. Sinatra was understandably miserable, seeing his career spinning downward and crip- plingly in love with a woman whose affection for him seemed uncertain to last. He spent much of his time alone, a bundle of self-pity. The hangers- on were dismissed. What was the good of a king’s entourage if you didn’t feel like a king? He often left the television studio on his own, slumped and silent, wandering into the night. His favorite restaurant was Patsy’s, a homey Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street off Broadway. In Patsy’s, Frank was still a hero undiminished, and one night in late November—while Ava was in Hollywood filming her most prestigious assignment—he was having dinner, sitting by himself, as he had done for many nights past. As he was getting ready to leave he spoke to Pasquale Scognamillo, the owner, asking him what they would be serving for Thanksgiving dinner the next day. On the holiday most Americans spent at home with their families, Sinatra was planning to come by himself to Patsy’s. Scognamillo told him something, then slipped away and removed the sign near the cash register that said, CLOSED FOR THANKSGIVING; when the singer had left (the New York Times reported), Scognamillo went around to his staff to invite them to come back the next day with their families for Thanksgiving dinner. He said, “I don’t want Mr. Sinatra to eat alone.”

  They were reunited at Christmas. Frank brought with him from the East some more disquieting news. There was some new committee in Washington, a bunch of busybodies led by Senator Estes Kefauver, supposed to be investigating some sort of shadowy organization they were calling the Mafia. Frank explained it was some kind of bullshit anti-Italian jazz these bluenoses had been trying to put over for years—what the hell kind of name was Estes?—but some of Kefauver’s investigators, probably egged on by someone like that creep Lee Mortimer, whom Frank had punched in the mouth a few years before—well, some of these investigators were looking him over now. They had some snapshot of him shaking hands with Lucky Luciano or something, and maybe they were going to haul him in to their committee and grill him like he was a criminal, smear him with guilt by association, ruin what was left of his career. He could see all his friends in the press having a good time putting him on the front page as a friend of killers and white slavers. Some of those guys they talked about, sure he knew them, Frank told her; they owned a lot of nightclubs where he worked. So why didn’t they investigate every Dave and Dora who came in from the sticks to sit at a ringside table for his shows? They were doing business with those same guys. (Frank would find a well-connected lawyer to talk things out with the Kefauver people, and the investigator agreed to take Sinatra’s testimony in a private session in a New York office, at three in the morning.)

  For Christmas Frank gave Ava a puppy. It was a Pembroke Welsh corgi they named Rags. The puppy became her beloved baby and she became devoted to the breed, and from then until the day she died a pampered corgi or two would be a member of the family.

  In April 1951, Metro had begun test screenings of Show Boat. There was some trepidation regarding the public’s reaction to Ava Gardner in this ex
pensive production. It was her first film made at the studio since all the bad publicity regarding the affair with Sinatra (the reaction to the aberrant Pandora was not considered indicative of anything box-office-wise). There were preview screenings in West Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, and other neighborhood theaters. At each preview, the audiences were asked to note their reaction on little cards the studio supplied. Dore Schary and advisers peered at the responses, peered again, and smiled. Not only was there little or no evidence of negative attitude toward Ava Gardner, she was testing as far and away the strongest and most positive element in the film. At the Picwood Theater in West LA her performance was rated “excellent” on 248 of 312 report cards, nearly 50 percent higher than any of the other players, and rated much higher than the film itself.

  At the Bay Theater in Palisades her numbers were even higher. Each subsequent screening brought similar results. Here and there a few viewers criticized Ava as overacting in her big scenes, some women respondents looked unfavorably at the scenes of Ava drunk, and one knowing fellow strongly protested the studio not using Judy Garland as planned, but the great majority were positive in the extreme:

  “Ava Gardner stole the show.”

  “Gardner’s great.”

  “Ava Gardner was wonderful.”

  “Ava was so lovely.”

  “Ava Gardner was marvelous. I’ve never cried so hard in a movie since Johnny Belinda.”

  “Ava Gardner was superb in the scene where she was drunk.”

  “Miss Gardner excels anything she has done in the past.”

  “Best scene Ava Gardner with no makeup.”

  “Congratulations to Miss Gardner she is learning to act.”

  “Let Ava sing her own songs!”

  “Best scenes Ava singing.”

  “Best scene Ava Gardner telling Howard Keel about the baby.”

  “Dramatic scene of Ava Gardner on the riverboat. I have to admit she’s better than I ever expected.”

  “Scenes like most everything Ava Gardner was in.”

  “Ava did better than Helen Morgan.”

  “Colored fellow who sang and Miss Gardner deserve extra mention.”

  “Where has Gardner been keeping that voice?”

  “Ava Gardner is terrific.”

  “Ava Gardner is tops.”

  “Ava Gardner a sensation.”

  “Her ever-increasing box-office popularity”—wrote someone or other in a Quick magazine article titled “Ava Gardner: Too Much Spice?”— “makes her a hot potato the studio doesn’t want to drop.” A tide had turned. As the new year—1951—proceeded, observers of the Zeitgeist, those observers with their own Hollywood column, speculated that the public had gradually begun to come around to Ava’s side in her recent and controversial affair of the heart. It was thought that the publicity about Nancy’s sizable maintenance award and the very duration of the affair had begun to make people see things in a new light: Was the real story in fact that Nancy was the bitter woman standing in the way of what appeared to be Ava’s true and lasting love? Especially when they were able to see the actress so sympathetically and romantically embodying the role of Julie Laverne, people could now believe—even some of those who had once written letters addressed to “Bitch” and “Jezebel”—that they had perhaps been wrong, jumped the gun, not seen the big picture of a woman who had fallen in love, whatever the consequences. Those who devoured gossip columns and movie magazine scoops were now in the fullness of time coming to the conclusion that they would after all be much more entertained in reading about glamorous, romantic Ava Gardner and her spirited affair with Frank Sinatra than about Frank and his now presumed clinging, stay-at-home wife. (It was, to be clear, interest in Ava first and foremost that drove the press and public attention in the affair; in this period the actress’s image would be on more than three hundred magazine covers while Sinatra’s would adorn not one.) Having stood her ground, toughed it out, and come out the winner, Ava’s reaction to the change in perception was more or less as it had always been: They could all mind their own fucking business.

  Pleased with the reaction to Show Boat, Dore Schary had happily granted Ava time off to be with Sinatra in New York. She arrived in Manhattan filled with a new confidence, already hearing great things about her work in the movie and with promises of a sizable increase in salary and bonuses for her next contract renewal that would bring in as much as a million dollars per year. Sinatra by contrast had no good news to share. His state of mind at her arrival is best summed up in the recorded performance he gave at Columbia Records’ Thirtieth Street studio on March 27. On that day he recorded a new song written by Jack Wolf and Joel Herron. After the writers heard what Sinatra had done with it, how he had transformed the song by his interpretation, the two decided, rather unusually, to credit him as a co-composer. It was called “I’m a Fool to Want You,” an operatic torch song sung to a femme-fatale love object of colossal, all-consuming destructiveness (one whose kiss, according to the lyrics, “the devil has known”). After performing the song—one take only—in a devastatingly dramatic fashion, like a passionate musical suicide note, Sinatra was said by some to have come away from the microphone in tears—mythmaking perhaps; “A bullshit story,” says Mitch Miller—others claimed that he finished, then silently, abruptly, left the studio without looking back. Anyway, he wasn’t smiling.

  Ava went with Frank to see him do his live television show. It was disconcerting, amateurish. “Stagehands running in and out,” she’d recall it. “You never knew what camera was on you. I got a nervous breakdown just watching.” The whole thing seemed low rent: They had Frank telling bad jokes and doing sketches that sounded like leftovers from an old burlesque act. On April 25 Sinatra began a two-week engagement at the Paramount Theater, the scene of the Voice’s midforties triumphs, when the girls had swooned in the aisles and the crowds on the street outside the theater had tied up traffic on Broadway. Appearing with him at the Paramount—and guesting at the same time on the television show— were Joe Bushkin and his orchestra. Bushkin went back with Frank to the Dorsey days and had written one of his first hit songs, “Oh, Look at Me Now” (and Frank had also introduced Bushkin’s wartime ditty, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin When the Yanks Go Marching In”). “This was a tough period for Frank,” Joe Bushkin remembered. “He was not drawing. Some shows, like the supper show, the theater would be half empty. I remember Frank coming to the theater one morning and he said, ‘You know, Joe, the only autographs I’m being asked for now are from process servers.’ He was in a tough spot. He owed a lot of money, and he had to pay Nancy. And he’d say to me, ‘I have no idea how the hell I’m gonna come up with the money I need to get semi-even with all this.’ Well, he was making some good money but he was very good about spending it, you know. And this was a time he was really in love with Ava. But she could be rough on him. She was very independent, and she didn’t tolerate any nonsense from a man that she was with, you know? And if there was something that he said, she would kind of blow up, you know? Like all of a sudden she’s yelling, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ That kinda thing. She was always the bandleader in that duo. That’s a way of putting it: She was the bandleader.”

  It was not all bad news. Frank told Ava that Nancy had begun to crack, he believed that there might be something happening any day on the divorce front. And there was another hopeful development—a studio, Universal, had finally offered him a movie. It was called Meet Danny Wilson, and unlike that candy-box, kissing-bandit shit they had made him do at Metro, this was a part with some balls, a nightclub singer on the rise all mixed up with dames and mobsters. It was a part he could really sink his teeth into, he told her, identify with—matter of fact, the wiseguy screenwriter seemed to have had Frank’s real life in mind when he was writing it, but he was going to let that pass for the moment. The deal was a one- shot flat-rate twenty-five grand, the picture to be shot in the summer back in Hollywood.

  Before they retu
rned to Los Angeles, Ava told Frank she wanted to meet his parents, still living across the river in Jersey. Even more, she wanted him to see his parents again—they had had a feud, Ava thought something to do with finances, and Frank had not spoken to them in nearly two years.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “If we’re gonna get married I need to meet your goddamn folks.”

  “Did you hear what I said? No!”

  So Ava made the call to Hoboken, and Mrs. Sinatra invited them to dinner that same night. It turned out to be a good call indeed. Dolly Sinatra greeted her with a warm embrace, crying, “You’ve brought my son home to me!”