Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing"

Lee Server’s Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing” (N.Y. St. Martin’s Press, 2006) entertains, enlightens, and flows as smoothly as single malt scotch. It’s a fun addition to Server’s Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care (2001). He knows film noir well, and has a clear grasp of the personal and economic forces and behind-the-scenes soap operas of show business. Bread and circuses, indeed.

Ava Gardner (12/24/22-1/25/90) came from a large, poor family in Brogden, North Carolina, that took a beating during the Great Depression. Her father died before it ended, and her mother slowly declined. The family had to move to Newport News, Virginia, which Ava hated, much preferring her Tar Heel locales. (Newport News is pretty awful even today.) The main thing about Ava that stood out when she was growing up was her aesthetic beauty. Server speculates that what may have given her that special twist of fate was a touch of French Huguenot blood. Luck also played a huge role, a la Woody Allen’s Match Point. Ava took college classes and expected vaguely to become a secretary, but her sister Beatrice (“Bappie”) came down from New York City and invited her to visit, which she did. Enchanted and enchanting, Ava was photographed and her image put on display, which caught the eye of a talent agent, which led to her being invited to a screen test, which led to her and Bappie moving to California.

Ava signed a seven-year contract with MGM, and while being shown around the production lots, caught the eye of Mickey Rooney, who immediately plotted to marry her. This was 1941, and Ava was all of nineteen years old. Little Rooney wasn’t much older and was already a millionaire, the biggest paid star of the industry. Ava, in a surreal daze, was literally taken around to all the high rolling hot spots by Rooney, whose instantly fanatical obsession with her inspired him to propose marriage 25 times! It seems hysterical from a distance, but at the time, Ava was in emotional turmoil and did not find Rooney attractive in the least. So why did she end up marrying him? Server points out that she relented on December 9, 1941 – just two days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was in shock, and he exploited the context. But though they were married the following January, he blew it by playing too much golf, leaving her to her own devices. She learned about sex, but other than that, they had little in common. All the money in the world could not prevent her from seeking separation and divorce. If marrying the little imp seemed reckless, divorcing him was true wisdom.

Enter Howard Hughes, the richest man in America. One of his obsessive specialties was keeping an eye out for beautiful women in dire straits. He began wooing her, and they became friends, which is how she wanted things to remain. He flew her around, showered her with gifts, sent medical help to her dying mother, and proposed marriage (he had, in fact, multiple proposals of marriage on the table with numerous women, and was “engaged” to a seventeen year old who at one point tried to ram her car – a gift from Hughes – into Ava when she was riding in another car with Hughes). In short, Ava realized that Hughes was touched in the head, and again, no amount of money could tempt her into going against her instinctive physical repulsion. She went on to date Artie Shaw, and Hughes had her spied upon and wiretapped for years.

While dating and then marrying the cerebral and emotionally abusive Shaw, Ava finally achieved her major breakthrough in movies in 1946, first with Whistle Stop and then with The Killers. If she’d had a whirlwind of a life up to that point, things soon became even wilder.

To be continued. Viva Ava!