AVA GARDNER

Seldom does a star’s screen image accurately mirror her real life. But Ava Gardner, who always played an alluring mantrap, cast her spell over many an interesting male. The men in her life included Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, bullfighter Manolete and most famously, Frank Sinatra.

She became an international sophisticate, a jet-set demondaine, but Ava Lavinia Gardner was born in 1922 far, far from the milieu that became her world. As the barefoot, tomboy daughter of a dirt poor cotton and tobacco farmer in North Carolina, little Ava, the youngest of seven children, watched her family scrape along, lose their property and work hard just to survive. By the time she became an adult, her green-eyed, brunette looks were extraordinary. She was born for the camera with an exotic, high-cheekboned face and a willowy, curvaceous body. In fact a photograph jump-started her on the road to fame.

Eighteen-year-old Ava was in New York visiting her sister who was married to a professional photographer. He took her portrait and displayed it in the window of his studio. A man posing as a talent scout just to meet girls came into the studio and tried to get Ava’s phone number. When rebuffed, he quipped that “Somebody should send her to M-G-M.” Her brother-in-law did just that and soon Ava left college and went to Hollywood with a contract.

The studio did not change Ava Gardner’s name, but they groomed her and insisted that she work with a voice coach to get rid of a Southern drawl that made her impossible to understand. (Later in her career, she was amused when she had to be coached to get it back for her role as tragic Julie LaVerne in “Show Boat.”) She appeared in 24 very minor, often non-speaking, roles until 1946 when she got her big break starring opposite Burt Lancaster in “The Killers.” After that, she got top billing in over 40 films including such hits as “The Hucksters” 1947 (with Clark Gable), “One Touch of Venus” 1948, “The Snows of Kilamangaro” 1952 (with Gregory Peck), “Knights of the Round Table” 1953 (with Robert Taylor), “Mogambo” 1953, “The Barefoot Contessa” 1954, “The Sun Also Rises” 1957 (with Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn), “On the Beach” 1959, “The Night of the Iguana” 1964 (with Richard Burton), “Earthquake”1974 (with Charlton Heston).

Even though she played opposite scores of Hollywood’s handsomest leading men, her personal life was every bit as romantic and dramatic. Mickey Rooney was the reigning star when Ava came to town and he fell in love with her at first sight and the young couple wed in 1942. Soon divorced, Ava was pursued by millionaire Howard Hughes but she dumped him and married bandleader Artie Shaw in 1945. An educated sophisticate, Shaw belittled Ava who began to take refuge in drink. Her most famous romance was a scandal when Frank Sinatra left his wife in 1951 to marry Ava who was reviled by the press and the Catholic Legion of Decency. She and Sinatra had a passionate, sometimes violent marriage that ended in divorce in 1957. Never married again, Ava had high profile relationships with Ernest Hemingway and legendary bullfighter Manolete.