Ava-va-voom Gardner
By: Tom Zimberoff
Tags: Memoir, Cinema, Photography, Hollywood, Movies

Everyone on the film crew was awed by Ava Gardner. She was a diva, a glamour puss. And she drank. She was also used to getting her way, just because she could. Apparently, just before skulking into that limo, she had told an increasingly impatient director, Stuart Cooper, and Vincenzo Labella, the producer, that she was unwilling to sit for a “gallery,” a photo session in costume. She hadn’t posed for publicity pictures in fifteen years and said she had no intention of doing so, now. It was an “at-my-age,” vanity-versus-the-camera issue. But they needed to promote this very expensive production by trumpeting Ava Gardner‘s participation. They wanted high-resolution photographs with studio lighting. It would be unsatisfactory to grab still photos during rehearsals or to shoot over the cinemaphotographer’s shoulder while filming a scene; far worse (for the sake of image quality) to snip a motion picture frame to be used as a still.

The screenplay was written by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange. It chronicled the internecine political drama that was unraveling the Roman Empire in the years 39 through 69 Anno Domini — hence the “A.D.” title. Ava played Agrippina, the scheming mother of Caligula (played by Anthony Andrews, having just come off his celebrated role as Sebastian Flyte in the PBS drama “Brideshead Revisited”). Many other stars of stage and screen shone in the “A.D.” firmament, hailing from the U.S.A., Great Britain, and Spain, including Susan Sarandon, James Mason, and the “French Connection’s” Fernando Rey. But Ava Gardner was special. Her supernova had once illuminated Hollywood’s most glorious epoch. She had appeared in sixty films, with starring roles in “The Killers,” “The Night of the Iguana,” “Show Boat,” “Mogambo,” “Barefoot Contessa,” “One Touch of Venus,” “The Flying Dutchman,” “On the Beach,” and “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.” She received a 1953 Academy Award nomination for best actress in “Mogambo.” (Audrey Hepburn won the Oscar that year for “Roman Holiday.”)

Gardner with Sinatra, the greatest love and rockiest romance, of her life — his too. Although they divorced, and he remarried twice, he continued to support her until the end. (photographer unknown)

Ava was as glamorous as the company she kept. Although, it may have been the case that it was her glamour that rubbed off on the men who only thought they had kept her. She had been been the paramour of Howard Hughes (yesteryear’s Elon Musk but two orders of magnitude sexier) and the wife of Frank Sinatra (think Justin Timberlake, John Legend, and Johnny Depp rolled into one, and then some), with myriad tabloid-headlining relationships in between. It’s said that Ernest Hemingway admonished the staff of his Havana estate, “The water is not to be emptied!” after Ava swam naked in his pool. She was a leading lady to Bogart and Gable. Add Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck, Charleton Heston, and Burt Lancaster to a long list of illustrious leading men. She was directed by John Ford, John Huston, John Frankenheimer, and Stanley Kramer. I’m sure she gave no quarter to Louis B. Mayer and his MGM minions. It seems to me she had the intellectual chops to hold her own with this crowd, both in business and in fun. But it was, after all, the movie business. Despite her own quips like, “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial,” her reputation as a man-eating femme fatale, along with her wits, made her a force to contend with, when it came to getting her way in Hollywood. So, I don’t know what gave the big guns in Tunisia the idea that I could be more successful than they were, in persuading Ava to step in front of a stills camera. I suppose, having failed all previous importuning, asking me was their version of a Hail Mary pass.