In January 1952, Frank Sinatra’s career was in ruins. Columbia Records had dropped him. His television show had been canceled. His film contract [music] at MGM was gone. The voice that had made teenage girls faint in the aisles at the Paramount Theater in 1943 was hemorrhaging, a submucosal hemorrhage of the vocal cords, the kind of injury that ends singers permanently.
>> [music] >> The press had written him off. The industry had moved on. He was 36 years old and he was [music] finished. He had also, in the preceding 2 years, destroyed his marriage, alienated his children, humiliated his wife in front of the entire country, and nearly killed himself twice, once with pills, [music] once with intention.
Every single one of those catastrophes had the same cause. Her name was Ava Gardner. She was from a tobacco farm [music] in North Carolina. She was the most beautiful woman Frank Sinatra had ever seen. She never forgave him for loving her that much. He never forgave her for being worth it. Grabtown, North Carolina, does not appear on most maps.
It was never large enough to justify cartographic attention. A cluster of tenant farms in Johnston County, approximately 40 mi southeast of Raleigh, populated by families who worked land they didn’t own for shares of crops that fluctuated with weather and market prices >> [music] >> in ways entirely beyond their control. Jonas Bailey Gardner was a tobacco sharecropper.
[music] He worked the land with the specific ground-down endurance of men who understand that the alternative to endurance is destitution [music] and who have arranged their expectations accordingly. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Baker, whom everyone called Molly, was a woman of stronger constitution [music] than her circumstances suggested, practical, religious, possessed of the particular toughness [music] that rural southern poverty installs in women who cannot afford the luxury of fragility.
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, [music] the seventh and last child of Jonas and Molly. She grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, in a county where the soil dictated the rhythm of every family’s year, in a world bounded by the church, the school, and the fields. It was not a world [music] that suggested Hollywood.
It was not a world that suggested anything beyond more of itself. What it gave her was harder to categorize, that the women of Johnston County, poverty and geography, and the social architecture of the rural South provided, like possessed a quality that Ava would carry [music] into every subsequent context of her life.
Except it all another complete refusal to be [music] person’s interior diminished life. But it was not his people who considered themselves her superiors. It was not aggression. It was not not her defiance was in the obvious still sensor. It was simply the bone-deep certainty installed by a childhood in which survival required [music] it, that no room she walked into was too good for her, and no person in it was beyond her assessment.
Jonas Gardner died in 1938 when Ava was 15. The death reorganized the family’s already precarious circumstances and sent >> [music] >> Ava to live with her older sister Bappie in New York. Bappie’s husband, Larry Tarr, was a photographer who operated a portrait studio in Manhattan. He took photographs of Ava and placed [music] one in his studio window.
A clerk from the MGM legal department saw the photograph while walking past the studio. He called the studio. He asked who the girl was. Bappie told him. He made a call to MGM’s New York office. The photograph showed a girl [music] of 17 with cheekbones that the camera appeared to worship and eyes that communicated, even in a static image, a quality of self-possession unusual in someone of her age and circumstances.
[music] She had never acted. She had never performed. She had grown up on a tobacco [music] farm in a county that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. None of that mattered. The photograph had already [music] made a decision that would determine the rest of her life. She just didn’t know it yet. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941 [music] was the most powerful film studio in the world, and it operated on a philosophy of human raw material [music] that its executives would never have described in those terms, but that its practices
[music] made unmistakable. The studio system at its peak was a manufacturing operation. Stars were products, developed, packaged, marketed, [music] and distributed according to specifications determined by the studio’s assessment of what audiences wanted to purchase. Ava Gardner arrived at MGM in August 1941 [music] on a standard 7-year contract at $1.
50 a week. She was 18 years old, possessed of an accent so thick with Johnston [music] County, North Carolina, that the studio’s first action was to assign her to a drama coach with instructions [music] to remove it. The accent, the coach determined, was not compatible with the image the studio intended to develop.
It was replaced over months of intensive work with a neutralized American diction that could pass for educated without committing to any particular geography. This was [music] the first erasure. There would be others. The MGM grooming process for female contract players in the 1940 [music] was comprehensive in the way that manufacturing processes are comprehensive.
It addressed every variable that affected the final product. Ava’s teeth were assessed and improved. Her hair was styled, re-styled, and eventually settled into the dark [music] waves that would become one of her defining visual signatures. Her wardrobe was managed. Her social appearances were choreographed. Her romantic life, or rather its public [music] presentation, was subject to studio approval because the romantic lives of female contract players were commercial assets that [music] required protection from narrative complications.
She studied acting with the studio’s coaches and learned what they taught her with the same application she brought [music] to the accent removal. Competently, thoroughly, without the spark of genuine creative investment [music] that distinguished the students who would eventually transcend the system from those who [music] would be consumed by it.
The coaches noted her discipline and her beauty and her quality of physical [music] presence. The way the camera responded to her face with a devotion that could not be taught and could not be fully explained. Without being entirely certain what to do with her. The films she made in her first years at MGM [music] were small, uncredited appearances, bit parts, the minor roles that the studio assigned to developing contract [music] players to give them camera time while the larger machinery of star building ground forward.
She appeared in films without distinguishing herself in them. >> [music] >> Which was the correct behavior for a contract player in development. Not invisible, [music] but not yet visible. Building the technical foundation on which the studio would eventually construct the image [music] it had decided to sell.
What the studio had not fully accounted for, and what became apparent with increasing clarity [music] as Ava’s development proceeded, was the distance between the image it was building [music] and the person it was building it around. The MGM female star of the 1940s >> [music] >> was expected to be in her public presentation a specific combination [music] of glamour and accessibility.
Beautiful enough to inspire aspiration, warm enough to inspire identification, and managed enough that neither quality threatened the studio’s narrative control. The successful female stars of the era, Lana Turner, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, >> [music] >> inhabited this combination with varying degrees of genuine fit.
Some of them were genuinely what the studio presented. Some of them were performing it. Most were some combination of both. Ava Gardner was none of it. The warmth was [music] real, but it was not the managed warmth of a studio-approved personality. It was the directness [music] of a woman who had grown up in circumstances where social pretension was a luxury no one could afford, and who had never developed the instinct to perform deference to people whose claim to superiority she found unpersuasive.
[music] The glamour was real, but it was not comfortable. She wore it the way a person wears [music] clothing that has been chosen for them rather than by them. Correctly, but without conviction. The studio, working with [music] what it had, cast her in progressively larger roles through the mid-1940’s.
[music] The Killers in 1946, a film noir adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short story, gave her the first role large [music] enough to reveal what the camera had always known about her, and what the studio was only beginning to understand. [music] That Ava Gardner on screen was not a manufactured product [music] delivering a manufactured performance.
She was something the manufacturing process had produced by accident. Something it didn’t entirely have a category for. She was a woman who appeared on screen to be completely [music] herself. In a studio system built on the systematic replacement of selves with more commercially viable alternatives.
This quality was not an asset [music] the studio knew how to manage. It was also, for the audiences who saw The Killers and then went [music] back to see it again, entirely irresistible. MGM had built a star. It just hadn’t [music] built the star it thought it was building. The first marriage lasted a year. The second lasted 1 year and the psychic equivalent of a century.
The third lasted 6 years, cost both parties more than any accounting could capture, and produced consequences that neither of them recovered from fully in the decades that followed. Mickey Rooney was, in 1942, the biggest box office star [music] in the world. A designation he had held for four consecutive years, from 1939 to 1942, which remains one of the most sustained periods of commercial dominance in Hollywood history.
He was 21 years old, 5 ft 2 in tall, possessed of an energy that his colleagues described [music] as exhausting to be near, and that translated on screen into a quality of pure vitality that audiences found irresistible. He saw Ava Gardner at a MGM function in late 1941 and pursued her with the same total commitment he brought to everything, relentlessly, loudly, without apparent awareness that his interest might not be the most important factor in her decision.
Ava was 19, new to Los Angeles, still finding the edges of the world she had entered. Rooney was the most famous person she had met. He was funny. He was persistent. He wore her resistance down over months of telephone calls and appearances, and the specific pressure of a man who was accustomed to getting what he wants and cannot [music] conceive of a framework in which this applies to everything except the woman he has decided he wants.
They married on January 10, 1942. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, was opposed, not on moral grounds, but on commercial ones. Rooney’s box office value was partly predicated on his availability, and a married Rooney complicated the romantic narrative that [music] his fan base had constructed around him. Mayer communicated his opposition clearly, and was overruled by the fact that both parties were adults who had made a decision.
The marriage lasted 13 months. What ended it was not a single event, but an accumulation of incompatibilities so fundamental that the marvel was not that it failed, but that it had been [music] attempted. Rooney was a performer in the total sense, always on, always performing, constitutionally [music] unable to be in a room without being the event in it.
Ava was a woman who required in her private life the absence of performance, who had spent her professional [music] hours being looked at, and wanted in what remained of her days to be somewhere the looking stopped. She filed for divorce in [music] May 1943. The settlement was minimal. She received $25,000, and the end of a situation that had been a mistake from its first morning.
Artie Shaw was a different kind of mistake, more sophisticated, more damaging, and more instructive [music] about the specific vulnerabilities that Ava Gardner carried beneath the self-possession that her public image projected. Shaw was one of the most celebrated [music] jazz clarinetists of the swing era, a man of genuine musical intelligence, whose intellectual pretensions ran considerably ahead of his emotional ones.
He collected wives. Ava was his fifth of eight, with a frequency that suggested either extraordinary romantic optimism [music] or an approach to marriage as a renewable resource. He was also, by the accounts of most people who worked closely [music] with him, a man whose appreciation for the women in his life was inseparable from his assessment of what they reflected about him.
He told Ava, shortly after they began seeing each other in 1945, [music] that she was uneducated and provincial, and that he would improve her. He assigned her reading lists. He corrected her opinions in company. He communicated with the consistency of a man who had decided [music] this was love, that the person she currently was represented a problem he was generously willing to address.
She married him in October 1945. She was 23 years old. What Shaw gave her, >> [music] >> in the wreckage of what he took, was a permanent and entirely legitimate suspicion of men who offered improvement as a form of affection. The reading lists he assigned, [music] Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the modernist canon that Shaw considered evidence of [music] seriousness.
She read, not for him, eventually, but for herself, discovering in the process that [music] the provincial girl from Johnston County had a genuine literary appetite that no one had previously provided [music] the material to feed. She also discovered, in the Shaw marriage, what she was not willing to accept [music] from a man.
The list was longer than she had known before the marriage, and considerably more important than anything she learned from his reading [music] lists. She was not willing to be improved. She was not willing to be corrected in company. She was not willing to be the evidence of a man’s taste and discernment, rather than the subject of his actual attention.
The divorce was final in 1946. Shaw moved on to his sixth wife. Ava moved on to the killers, and the career that the film announced, and >> [music] >> two years later, to a man whose need for her was so total and so desperate [music] that it made Artie Shaw’s intellectual condescension look, in retrospect, [music] like a minor inconvenience.
The third marriage did not begin with a wedding. It began with a look across a room at a party in 1949, and with a specific, mutual, immediately understood recognition of two people who are going to destroy each other and cannot stop themselves [music] from moving forward anyway. Frank Sinatra was standing on one side of the room.
Ava Gardner was standing on the other. His marriage to Nancy Barbato, his high school sweetheart, the mother [music] of his three children, the woman who had stood beside him through the ascent and was now standing beside him through the first signs of the descent, was still legally intact.
None of that was relevant. The look had already decided everything. She knew it. He knew it. The only question from that [music] moment forward was how much it was going to cost. The relationship between Frank [music] Sinatra and Ava Gardner has been analyzed, romanticized, pathologized, and narrativized so many times and in so many formats that the mythology [music] has achieved a kind of independent existence.
A love story that the culture [music] has decided it needs, regardless of what the actual two people were or what the actual relationship cost [music] them. What the mythology gets right is the intensity. What it consistently misrepresents is the direction of the damage. The standard version of the [music] story positions Ava as the destructive force, the beautiful, wild, uncontrollable woman who broke a great man’s concentration, derailed a great career, and left [music] wreckage where there had been achievement. This version
is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete [music] in ways that matter because it requires ignoring what Sinatra brought to the relationship. The obsession, [music] the violence, the emotional volatility, the possessiveness that expressed itself in ways that, assessed by any framework [music] other than romantic legend, looked less like passion and more like the behavior of a man who had never accepted [music] that another person’s interior life was not his property.
They began seeing each other in 1949 while Sinatra was still married to Nancy. The affair was not discreet. Sinatra, whose relationship with discretion in his personal life was always subordinate to his relationship with his own desires, made no serious effort to conceal [music] it. The press, which in that era maintained a largely voluntary relationship with the private lives of entertainers, covering what the studios and publicists permitted and ignoring [music] what they asked to be ignored, broke from this convention
within months. The affair was on front pages. By late 1949, Nancy Sinatra refused to grant a divorce for over a year. She was a Catholic woman with three children and a marriage she had built her life around. And she was not going to dissolve it on a schedule determined by her husband’s affair. The public response to the [music] situation, to Sinatra specifically, was immediate and harsh.
>> [music] >> The bobby soxers who had worshipped him as a romantic ideal found the gap [music] between the ideal and the reality insupportable. The fan mail that had once [music] arrived in volumes requiring dedicated staff to manage became, overnight, a different kind of correspondence. Women who had considered [music] Frank Sinatra the embodiment of romantic devotion now considered him something else entirely.
Ava received her own share of the public’s anger in the specific way that public anger about affairs is distributed. The man receives criticism. The woman receives [music] contempt. She was called a home wrecker in terms that left no ambiguity about the gendered architecture [music] of the assessment. She absorbed this with the Johnston County toughness >> [music] >> that had always been her primary defense against the world’s opinions of her, and she did not modify her behavior in response to it. What she could not
absorb, what no amount of toughness fully managed, [music] was Sinatra himself. He loved her in the way of men for whom love and possession [music] are not entirely distinguishable. He needed to know where she was at every hour. He called repeatedly when she was working on location, long, expensive transatlantic calls in the era before [music] such calls were routine, calls that her directors and co-stars learned to work around because Sinatra’s calls, when not [music] answered, produced consequences.
He appeared unannounced on film sets. He summoned her from locations when his own emotional state required her presence, [music] regardless of her professional obligations, and she refused him. Not always, not [music] consistently, but with enough regularity that the refusals became the defining rhythm of the relationship.
[music] His need pressing forward, her self-preservation pulling back, the space between these two forces generating an energy that both of them appeared, in different [music] ways, to require. She was filming Pandora and The Flying Dutchman in Spain in 1950 when Sinatra’s career began its visible collapse.
[music] The hemorrhage of the vocal cords, which silenced him for weeks at a time during the production of engagements he couldn’t cancel, was partly physical and partly psychosomatic [music] in ways that his doctors noted carefully. Sinatra’s voice had always been the instrument [music] through which his emotional states expressed themselves most completely.
A man in the kind of emotional extremity that characterized his relationship with Ava in 1950 and 1951 [music] was a man whose instrument was subject to forces beyond technical management. He flew to Spain during the production. He arrived unannounced. The reunion was, by accounts of those present, simultaneously passionate and catastrophic.
The pattern of every significant episode in their relationship, in which the coming together produced as much destruction as the separation. They married on November 7, 1951 >> [music] >> in Philadelphia, 3 months after his divorce from Nancy was finalized. The ceremony was small. The press [music] had been stationed outside for days.
When they emerged, Sinatra looked like a man who had won something he had been fighting [music] for so long that the winning had not yet registered as anything other than the continuation of the fight. Ava looked like a woman who understood exactly [music] what she had agreed to and was not entirely certain it had been the right decision.
She was right to be uncertain. The marriage was, from its first [music] weeks, a war conducted between two people who loved each other with a totality that precluded [music] the ordinary negotiations that marriages require. Sinatra needed her completely. Ava needed, with equal totality, to not be needed that way.
The need itself, its weight, its constancy, its refusal to be satisfied by any amount of presence or reassurance, was the thing she could not live with because it asked her to be for him. The thing she had refused to be for every other man who had tried to make her into something she wasn’t. A solution to a problem [music] that existed entirely inside someone else.
She was not a solution. She was a person. The distinction, to Sinatra in the extremity of his feeling for her, was not always apparent. [music] The career collapse that coincided with the marriage’s early years was not caused by Ava. >> [music] >> This point requires emphasis because the causal narrative “Ava destroyed Sinatra’s career” has been [music] repeated so often that it has acquired the status of established fact.
What actually happened is more complicated and more interesting. Sinatra’s [music] career was in trouble before Ava. The Bobby socks phenomenon had run its natural course. His musical style was being challenged by the emergence of a new [music] generation of singers and a new popular taste.
And his political associations with the Roosevelt left [music] had made him a target in the emerging McCarthy climate. These were real problems [music] that existed independently of his personal life. What the relationship with Ava did was consume the psychological resources that might otherwise have been available for managing those problems.
A man in the grip of an obsessive love that was being only partially and intermittently reciprocated is a man whose concentration is not fully available for career management. The career problems and the personal crisis ran simultaneously [music] and fed each other. The professional failures intensifying the emotional desperation and the emotional desperation undermining the professional recovery.
[music] He got the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity in 1953, a casting that is [music] rightly described as career saving. The performance won him an Academy Award and reestablished him as a serious dramatic actor [music] rather than a faded teen idol. The conventional account credits Ava with lobbying the film’s producer Harry Cohn to give Sinatra the role.
What the conventional account does not fully address is why Sinatra needed saving. The answer is not simply bad luck or changing tastes. It is a man who had spent three years pouring everything he had into a relationship that could not hold it, and who had arrived at the casting [music] of From Here to Eternity with almost nothing left.
Ava gave him back his career [music] in the version of the story that Hollywood prefers. What she could not give back was his peace. He had given that to her the night he looked [music] across that room in 1949, and she had never found a way to return it. She never would. The film that defined Ava Gardner’s [music] career was not made in Hollywood.
It was made in Africa, in the equatorial heat of Kenya and the Congo, in conditions [music] that the MGM production apparatus had never designed for, and that revealed, in the process of nearly defeating everyone involved, something about Ava Gardner that the studio system had spent a decade trying to manage away.
Mogambo was filmed on location in East Africa in 1952, directed by John Ford, a man whose relationship with the actors he directed alternated between genuine artistic partnership and calculated psychological cruelty, depending on his assessment of what a particular actor needed to produce a particular performance. Ford’s assessment of Ava Gardner was specific.
She was a natural, which meant she was also undisciplined, which meant she needed to be pushed past the comfort of her naturalness into something more demanding. He pushed her. She pushed back. The dynamic between them, mutual respect expressed [music] through mutual refusal to give ground, produced a performance that was the best work of her career to that point, and that established her definitively as something more than a beautiful face that the camera loved.
She could act, not in the technically accomplished way of actresses who had trained for years, in the more fundamental way of a person [music] who understood, from the inside, what the scene required emotionally, and delivered it without the visible mechanics of technique getting in the way. The film also produced a circumstance that became one of the most repeated anecdotes in Hollywood history.
Clark Gable, [music] her co-star, observed Ava on the first day of location shooting walking barefoot across the African soil. The shoes that wardrobe [music] had provided were, in her assessment, incompatible with the terrain and the character, and she had removed them without consultation. Gable watched her for a moment and said, to no one in particular, that he now understood what all the fuss was about.
The barefoot quality, the willingness to discard the approved costume when it conflicted with her own assessment of what was correct, was not limited to the literal. It was the organizing principle of her professional life in the years when she was at her peak. The period between Mogambo in 1952 and The Barefoot Contessa in 1954, in which she made the films that [music] constitute her genuine artistic legacy, and did so on terms that the studio found consistently difficult, and that she found consistently non-negotiable.
The Barefoot Contessa, [music] directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was so obviously constructed [music] around Ava Gardner’s life, a beautiful woman of humble origins [music] raised to Hollywood stardom, unable to find happiness in the world her beauty admitted her to, that the autobiographical dimension was noted by every reviewer, >> [music] >> and confirmed by neither Mankiewicz nor Gardner.
The film’s Maria Vargas is a Spanish dancer discovered by a Hollywood director, >> [music] >> elevated to stardom, married to an impotent Italian count, >> [music] >> and shot by him when she becomes pregnant by another man. It is not a happy story. It is told with the [music] specific, clear-eyed sadness of a narrative that knows its ending before it begins.
Ava played [music] Maria Vargas as if she had been waiting for the role her entire career, which in a sense she had, not because her life matched the plot, [music] but because the character’s fundamental situation matched her experience precisely. A woman whose extraordinary appearance admitted her to a world that was not built for what she actually was, and who could not find within that [music] world anything that satisfied the person the appearance contained.
She received an Academy Award nomination. She did not win. She had not [music] expected to win, and her response to not winning was characteristic. She said little about it publicly, and changed nothing [music] about her approach to her work. The films of this period were made in Europe, Mogambo [music] in Africa, The Barefoot Contessa in Italy and Spain, and the geographical distance from Hollywood [music] was not incidental.
Ava Gardner functioned better in Europe. The specific quality of freedom that European film production offered, >> [music] >> less studio supervision, less manufactured publicity, less of the systematic [music] replacement of self that the Hollywood system required, suited a woman who had never comfortably inhabited the self the system had designed [music] for her.
Spain, specifically, was becoming the location she returned to most consistently, and the country was [music] beginning to feel like something she had not expected to find in the geography of her adult life, a place that fit. The bullfights were [music] part of it. Ava had been introduced to bullfighting during the filming of Pandora in 1950, and had responded to it with an intensity that surprised [music] even her.
The combination of beauty and violence, the formal ritual of danger, the specific quality of courage required of a man who enters an arena with an animal that may kill him and performs within those conditions, something that can only be described as art. She attended corridas [music] whenever she was in Spain.
She befriended toros. She brought to the bullring the same quality of unguarded attention [music] she brought to everything that genuinely moved her, complete, unconcealed, indifferent to what it communicated about her to observers. Hemingway, whom she had met through Artie Shaw’s reading list and then met in person during her Spanish years, recognized in her response to the bullfights the quality he had spent his career [music] trying to write.
Authentic engagement with mortal stakes without performance, without irony. He told her she was the only woman he had ever met who understood [music] what the corrida was actually about. She told him she didn’t know if that was a compliment. He said it was the only compliment [music] he knew how to give. Her relationship with Spain, with the country’s specific combination of beauty and melancholy, its willingness to hold both qualities simultaneously without requiring resolution, was deepening in the same years that her marriage to
Sinatra was collapsing. The two developments were not unrelated. [music] Spain offered Ava something that Sinatra’s love, for all its totality, could not, a context in which she was not required to be anyone’s answer to anything. She was simply a woman who loved bullfights and spoke improving Spanish and drank well and laughed with genuine pleasure and went home when she wanted to rather [music] than when someone else’s need required it.
She was, in Spain, as close to herself as she had been since Grabtown. The tobacco farm and the bullring had more in common than geography would suggest. Both were places where the distance between life and death was not metaphorical and where the people who lived closest to that distance [music] had developed a directness and a lack of pretension that Ava Gardner recognized as the native language of her own interior. Sinatra hated Spain.
He hated it with the specific passion of a man who hates the thing that has taken something from him. Not the country itself, exactly, but what the country represented. The part of Ava that he could not reach, could not [music] possess, could not transform through the sheer force of his need into something that fit the space he had prepared for her in his life.
She filmed The Barefoot Contessa in [music] Italy in 1954. She received the Academy Award nomination. She continued to be, by every commercial and critical measure, one of the most significant actresses in [music] Hollywood. She also filed for separation from Frank Sinatra in October 1953. [music] The divorce was not final until 1957, because neither of them [music] was capable of the clean administrative act of ending.
The legal dissolution required 4 years. The emotional one took considerably [music] longer. Some biographers argue it never fully completed. That Sinatra carried the specific wound of Ava Gardner [music] for the rest of his life. That every subsequent relationship was conducted in its shadow. [music] That the peace she destroyed was never fully rebuilt.
There is evidence for this [music] argument. There is also evidence that what Sinatra experienced as destruction was, from another angle, the only period of his life in which he [music] was fully, completely, uncomfortably alive. The distinction may not have mattered to him. It mattered to her. By 1955, Ava Gardner [music] was 32 years old and operating at the precise intersection of peak professional achievement and peak personal chaos.
A combination that Hollywood has always been comfortable with in its male stars, and has always found complicated in its female ones. The double standard was not subtle. Male stars of equivalent commercial power who conducted equivalent personal lives, multiple marriages, public [music] affairs, notorious drinking, professional instability driven by emotional turbulence, were described in the press as complicated, passionate, larger than life.
Ava was described as difficult. [music] The word carried specific freight in the Hollywood context of the 1950. It meant a woman who did not make the professional [music] and personal accommodations that the system required, who prioritized her own assessment of a situation over [music] the studios, who was not sufficiently grateful for what the machine had provided to behave as the machine required. She was difficult.
She was also, in the years that the label was being most actively applied, [music] making the best films of her career. Bhawani Junction in 1956, directed by George Cukor, gave her a role of genuine complexity. An Anglo-Indian woman navigating the political upheaval of Indian independence [music] in 1947, caught between racial identities and political loyalties in ways that the film treated with more sophistication [music] than most Hollywood productions of the era brought to colonial history.
Cukor, who had a reputation for drawing performances from actresses that other directors couldn’t access, [music] found in Ava a subject whose emotional availability, when the material earned it, was total. The film required her to inhabit a character whose experience of not belonging to any single world was, for Ava, not a dramatic challenge but a lived condition [music] given new context.
She had never fully belonged to Hollywood. She had never fully belonged to Grabtown, [music] either. Once the photograph and the MGM contract had made her something Grabtown could not [music] contain. She had been for her entire adult life a woman between worlds. Too much herself [music] for the system that had created her public image and too much the image for the private self to fully reclaim.
Victoria Jones in Bhowani Junction was the first character she had played who understood this condition from the inside. The performance showed it. MGM, which had held her contract for 14 years, allowed it to lapse in 1958. The decision was mutual in the way that endings are mutual when one party has been withdrawing for years and the other has been pretending [music] not to notice.
The studio system was collapsing under the combined pressure of television, the antitrust consent decrees [music] that had broken the studios control of the exhibition market, and the emergence of independent [music] production as a viable alternative to factory filmmaking. The seven-year contract, the instrument [music] through which MGM had owned Ava Gardner since 1941, was becoming an anachronism.
She was free. Free in a way she had not been since before the photograph in the studio window. Free to choose her projects and her locations [music] and her working conditions without the oversight of a studio apparatus that had been managing her image for [music] 17 years. She was also, for the first time in her adult life, genuinely alone.
Not temporarily alone, between marriages, between engagements, between the phases of the Sinatra relationship. Alone in the structural sense, without the institutional framework of a studio contract >> [music] >> or the personal framework of a marriage to organize her days around. The drinking that had always been a feature of her social life, she drank with the directness she brought to everything, without apology and without the theatrical quality that characterized Sinatra’s or Martin’s relationship with alcohol,
became in the late 1950s [music] more consistent and more load-bearing. It was not, at this stage, a crisis. It was a direction. And the direction was familiar [music] to everyone who had watched the specific way that extraordinary people managed the gap between their public achievement and their private desolation.
She was not desolate in the obvious sense. She had money. >> [music] >> She had the Madrid apartment she had acquired during the filming of The Sun Also Rises in 1957. She had friends, genuine ones, the kind accumulated over years of working relationships and [music] shared experience, rather than the industry friendships of mutual professional [music] benefit. She had the bullfights.
She had Spain. What she did not have was what she had never had >> [music] >> and had spent her life alternately pursuing and fleeing, a relationship with a man that did not require her to be less than herself [music] in order to survive. The affairs of this period, and there were several, [music] conducted with the directness that characterized everything she did and covered by a press that had learned to report on Ava Gardner’s romantic life with the specific combination of admiration [music] and disapproval that her choices
reliably generated, were not substitutes for the marriage she hadn’t found. They were something else, proof of continued vitality, evidence that she remained, at 35 [music] and 37 and 40, the woman that men wanted with an urgency that time and the industry’s preference for younger [music] models had not diminished.
She knew the urgency was partly about the face. She had always known this, had known it since the [music] photograph in the studio window, had known it through every camera that had turned [music] her with a devotion of something that couldn’t help itself. The face was not her.
It was the thing that had happened to her, the condition [music] she had been born into, the instrument through which the world had decided to interact with Dino Paul Crosetti. [music] She caught herself thinking of Ava Gardner in the third person sometimes, the character distinct from the person, the way Dean Martin thought of himself. She did not find this parallel [music] amusing when she eventually heard it articulated.
She found it accurate, [music] which was worse. The films continued. On the Beach in 1959, Stanley Kramer’s [music] adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel about the survivors of nuclear war waiting for the radiation cloud that [music] will kill them gave her a role that required something different from her. Not the physical presence that the camera had always worshipped, but a quality [music] of ordinary human grief.
The specific sadness of a woman who has survived something [music] that has made survival feel like the lesser outcome. She delivered it with a restraint [music] that surprised critics who had categorized her as a natural rather than a technical actress. The surprise was itself a kind of insult, though she chose not to receive it as one.
The assumption that beauty and genuine acting ability were mutually exclusive, that a woman who looked the way Ava Gardner looked could not also feel the way a real actress felt, was one of the organizing prejudices of the Hollywood system she had navigated for 18 years. She had been disproving it intermittently for most of that time.
By 1960, she was living primarily in Madrid. The Hollywood career continued on a project-by-project basis. She was not retired, not withdrawing, simply no longer organized around the industry’s calendar and the industry’s requirements. She chose [music] roles that interested her, declined roles that didn’t, and conducted the practical business of her professional life from an apartment in the Spanish capital that her friends described [music] as comfortable, and that her detractors described as exile. She described it as
home. She was the only one whose description mattered. The apartment on La Brea Street in Madrid was on the third floor of a building that looked, from the outside, like every other residential building on the block. Unremarkable, slightly worn, the kind of architecture that accumulates rather than announces itself.
Inside, it was the distillation of everything Ava Gardner had learned in 20 years of living in other people’s visions of what her surroundings should be, about what she [music] actually wanted. It was not decorated the way a Hollywood actress’s home was expected [music] to be decorated. There was no professional interior designer’s hand in it.
No studied elegance, no display of the kind of expensive taste that money and cultural [music] ambition produce in combination. There were books, the Hemingway and Fitzgerald that Shaw had assigned, and that she had continued beyond his assignment, plus the Spanish literature she had been reading since her first extended time in the country, plus the crime fiction she consumed with the unselfconscious pleasure of a reader who reads for enjoyment rather than cultivation.
>> [music] >> There were photographs of friends, of toros, of the landscapes of Johnston County that she had carried with her in some [music] form through every subsequent geography of her life, the flat tobacco fields and the red clay roads [music] that Grabtown had imprinted on her visual memory before she knew what a camera was.
There was a record [music] player, flamenco primarily, the music of Andalusia that she had encountered through her bullfighting connections, [music] and that had affected her in the specific physical way that music affects people who have no defensive relationship with being moved. She played it loudly.
Her neighbors had adapted. There was a bar, well-stocked, used daily. Madrid years, roughly 1955 through the late [music] 1960, with periodic departures for film locations and the occasional necessary visit to Los Angeles for business, were the most stable period of Ava Gardner’s adult [music] life, in the sense that stability is measured not by the absence of difficulty, but by the presence [music] of a continuous self.
She was the same person in Madrid as she was on a film set in London or a cocktail [music] party in Rome. The performance had not disappeared. She remained in social contexts, the Ava Gardner [music] that the world had constructed expectations around. The woman who entered rooms with the authority of someone who has never had to negotiate a right to be there.
But the performance had become in Madrid a thinner layer over the actual [music] person, more permeable, less load-bearing, less necessary. The bullfighting remained central. [music] She had moved past the position of interested observer into something closer to genuine connoisseur. She understood [music] the technical vocabulary of the corrida, could assess a toro’s faena with the specific knowledge of someone who has watched hundreds of fights and paid attention to all of them, and was known in the world of the bulls
as a serious presence rather than a celebrity [music] spectator. The toros she knew, Luis Miguel Dominguín, the most celebrated matador of the era, had been her lover in the early 1950s before, during, [music] and after the Sinatra marriage, a chronological complication that all three parties managed with varying degrees of grace, treated her as a person of genuine understanding, which was, in her experience, rarer than it should have been.
Dominguín himself was, in the specific typology of men that Ava Gardner had always been drawn [music] to, a recognizable type. Physically beautiful, genuinely courageous in a context [music] that made courage non-metaphorical, and possessed of the specific relationship with mortality that comes from a profession in which death is not a statistical abstraction, [music] but a practical possibility every working afternoon.
She had always preferred men who understood from the inside that the world was not [music] safe. Men whose courage was not the performed courage of the Hollywood action hero, but the actual courage of someone who had decided [music] that the thing they loved was worth the risk it carried. Sinatra, in the extremity of his love for her, had possessed [music] this quality.
He had risked everything, his marriage, his career, his public standing for her, and the risk had been real, [music] the losses actual. This was part of what had made him impossible to dismiss, even when dismissal would have been the healthier choice. A man who risks nothing for you is easy to leave. A man who has lost everything for you is a different problem.
Dominguín risked his life every Sunday. The comparison was imprecise, but not irrelevant. She wrote letters from Madrid to friends, to family, occasionally to people she had worked with who had remained in her orbit as genuine, rather than professional [music] relationships. The letters, several of which have been published in biographical accounts of her life, show a voice that is recognizably the voice of the woman who appears in every account of her.
Direct, funny, self-aware without being self-absorbed, possessed [music] of the specific quality of clear-eyed honesty about her own situation that people who have nothing to prove tend to develop. She wrote about the bullfights and the weather and the wine and the loneliness and the book she was reading. She did not write [music] about regret because regret requires a belief in the availability of alternative paths [music] and Ava Gardner had never been entirely convinced that her path had been chosen rather than found.
The film career in this period was less central than it had been but not absent. [music] She made 55 days at peak king in 1963, a large-scale historical epic that she accepted primarily because it was filming [music] in Spain. A professional decision that her agents found difficult to explain [music] to producers who were accustomed to stars organizing their locations around the project rather than the project around their locations.
She made The Night of the Iguana in 1964. John Huston’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play filming in the jungles of Puerto [music] Vallarta, Mexico in a production that became legendary for the combination of talent, dysfunction, and physical difficulty that Huston appeared to deliberately [music] cultivate as a directorial method.
The cast of The Night of the Iguana was a concentration of difficulty [music] that would have defeated a less skilled director. Richard Burton, who was in the process of his own career and [music] marriage destroying love affair with Elizabeth Taylor, played the defrocked minister at the center of the story.
Deborah Kerr played the itinerant artist. >> [music] >> Sue Lyon, fresh from Lolita, played the teenage temptress. Ava played Maxine Faulk, the owner of the Mexican hotel where the story takes [music] place. A woman of middle age, earthy, sexual, comfortable with the body and the appetites in a [music] way that Williams wrote with his characteristic combination of sympathy and sadness.
Huston had cast [music] her with specific intention. He wanted for Maxine an actress who had actually inhabited the territory the character occupied, who understood from the inside rather than from craft alone, what it meant to be a woman of extraordinary [music] beauty moving through middle age in a world that had always defined her in terms of that beauty and was now beginning to revise its assessment.
There were not many actresses who [music] could bring that understanding to the role. There was one obvious choice. The filming in Puerto Vallarta was miserable in the practical [music] sense and productive in the artistic one. The heat was extreme. The logistics of filming in the Mexican jungle in 1963 were challenges [music] that the production solved imperfectly and expensively. The cast drank heavily.
This was, Huston Productions being what they were, less a problem than a feature. And the interpersonal dynamics among four strong-willed people in close proximity [music] in difficult conditions generated the specific kind of creative friction that occasionally produces extraordinary work. Ava’s performance in The Night of the [music] Iguana is, by most assessments, the finest of her career.
It is the performance [music] of a woman who has stopped acting and started inhabiting, who has brought to a Tennessee Williams character in a Mexican jungle the full weight of everything she actually was. Maxine Faulk’s combination [music] of sexual confidence, genuine loneliness, and absolute refusal to apologize for either.
These were not qualities Ava Gardner constructed [music] for the role. They were qualities she contributed from inventory. She did not receive an Academy Award nomination for the performance. This was noted [music] by critics who had expected one. And by Ava, who had not expected one, and whose relationship with Academy recognition had always been characterized by the philosophical detachment of someone who has learned not to invest in [music] outcomes she cannot control.
The Madrid years also produced, in their quiet stretches between films and bullfights and dinners with friends, something that the public narrative of Ava Gardner consistently underweights. A genuine interior life that had nothing to do with the face or the career or the men or the mythology. She read seriously and widely.
She thought about things. She had opinions about literature, politics, the specific social [music] architecture of Spain under Franco, the economics of the bullfighting world, the question of what constituted a life [music] worth having, opinions formed through observation and reflection rather than adopted [music] from the people around her.
This interior life was rarely made visible. She did not write publicly [music] about it. The interviews she gave fewer as the years passed, and conducted with increasing impatience with the questions that journalists considered relevant to Ava Gardner, [music] touched it occasionally and then deflected because the interior was not for the public and she had always known the difference [music] between what was hers and what was theirs.
The face was theirs. The voice was theirs. The mythology was theirs. Everything else was hers. She kept it accordingly. The 1970s arrived in Madrid with a specific quality of change that decades carry when the world they represent is genuinely different from the one that preceded them. The cultural landscape of the 1970s, its music, its [music] films, its social architecture, bore little resemblance to the world in which Ava Gardner had become Ava Gardner, >> [music] >> and the distance was not simply generational.
It was categorical. The studio [music] system that had manufactured her, the specific version of Hollywood glamour that she had inhabited and resisted [music] in equal measure. The cultural moment that the Rat Pack and the Corita and the smoky nightclub represented. [music] All of it had been replaced by something she recognized as the world her successor generation [music] had made without feeling any particular connection to it.
She was 47 years old in 1969. She was by the assessment of everyone who encountered her in person during [music] this period still extraordinarily beautiful. The specific quality of her face, >> [music] >> its architecture, had not softened with age so much as it had deepened. The bone structure that had always been the foundation of the beauty becoming more visible as the softer elements of youth receded.
Photographers who worked with her in the 1970 >> [music] >> described the experience as different from working with younger women. More efficient, more controlled on her part. The relationship between her face and the camera less one of discovery than of long [music] acquaintance. The films came less frequently. She accepted [music] them on the basis of practical considerations.
The money remained necessary. The studio system’s collapse having produced a financial landscape for aging stars [music] that was considerably less comfortable than the contract era had been. And on the basis of occasional genuine interest in a role [music] or a director. Earthquake in 1974 was the former.
A disaster film of the 1970s [music] blockbuster variety that paid well and required little. The Cassandra Crossing in 1976 [music] was similar. She made them with professionalism and without self-deception [music] about what they were. What occupied the center of her Madrid life was not the film career.
It was the daily life, the apartment, [music] the books, the friends, the bull fights when the season was running, the dinners that went late in the Spanish manner, the specific social world she had [music] built over two decades of the city’s rhythms becoming her own. The friendships of this period were real in the way that friendships are real when they have been tested by time and by the specific pressure of proximity to someone whose public image generates its own gravitational field.
The people who remained in Ava [music] Gardner’s orbit in Madrid in the 1970 were people who had learned to navigate that field, to see [music] consistently and without effort the woman rather than the icon. This was easier in Madrid than it had been in Los Angeles [music] because Madrid in the 1970 was not organized around the maintenance of American entertainment mythology.
Sinatra was in her life peripherally and permanently. The divorce had been legal since 1957, >> [music] >> the emotional separation considerably less clean. He called. She answered sometimes. [music] They spoke in the specific register of people who have been through something together that permanently altered both of them and who have not found a language for what that alteration cost that doesn’t, in the using of it, reopen the wound.
He had remarried Mia Farrow in 1966, a marriage that lasted two years and produced public commentary of a kind that Sinatra, at 50, found more degrading than the press had managed in any previous [music] phase of his personal life. Yep. Then Barbara Marx in 1976, a marriage that lasted until his death and provided him with the stability that his nature had always worked against and that age had finally made possible.
He was not, in any of these subsequent arrangements, at peace in the way that peace [music] had been available to him before 1949. This is not Ava Gardner’s fault in any simple causal sense, but it is a fact about Sinatra that every person who knew him well confirmed in various ways across the decades of his later life.
That the specific quality of contentment, the sense of existing in correct relationship with the world, had been available to him before Ava and was not in the same form available afterward. He had said as much in his way in the recordings. The Sinatra of the Capitol Records years, the albums of the late 1950 and early 1960 that constitute his greatest artistic achievement.
The Only the Lonely and In the Wee [music] Small Hours albums that define the concept of the saloon singer with a broken heart was a man singing from the specific emotional location that his relationship with Ava had opened up and left open. The pain in those recordings was not performed. It was the real pain of a real man alchemized through a voice of extraordinary technical and emotional range into something that millions of people recognized as [music] the sound of their own interior.
He made those records because she broke him. And in the breaking, she gave him the emotional access that [music] produced the best music of his career. This is not an argument that the breaking was worth it. It is an observation about [music] the relationship between damage and art that Ava Gardner herself, when the subject arose in later interviews, found both [music] accurate and uncomfortable.
She had not intended to be his muse. She had not intended anything [music] in particular. She had simply been herself, wholly, consistently, without the modifications that his love required and that she was constitutionally incapable of making. And the collision between her wholeness and his need had produced the wreckage that the [music] records documented.
She was not sorry about being herself. She was not sorry about the records. She was sorry about the children she had never had. >> [music] >> The marriages that had failed. The specific loneliness of a woman in her 50s who had been wanted by more men than she could accurately remember. And who had found in none of them the specific quality of being seen that she had been looking for since Grabtown.
[music] The abortions were a part of the story that she spoke about rarely and that her biographers have handled with varying degrees of care. She had at least two documented abortions during the [music] Sinatra marriage. Both times at his insistence. Or what she described as his insistence.
Though Sinatra contested this characterization in subsequent interviews. The truth of the specific conversations is irrecoverable. What is recoverable is that she had wanted children and had not had them. And that the wanting had not diminished [music] with time in the way that some unfulfilled desires diminish. She had seven godchildren by the [music] 1970.
The children of friends, actors, and directors, and people she had accumulated over decades of professional and personal life. And her relationship with them was, by all accounts, [music] the warm, direct, practically engaged relationship of a woman who understood children as people rather than ornaments. She showed up.
She remembered things. She was, to the children of her friends, >> [music] >> the glamorous godmother who called from Madrid and sent things from Spain. And arrived periodically with the authority of someone whose visits were events. It was not the same as having her own. She knew it was not the same. The health problems [music] of the 1970s and early 1980 arrived with the consistency that decades of hard living [music] deliver, eventually regardless of constitutional robustness.
The drinking had taken its physical toll in the incremental way that chronic alcohol consumption takes its toll. Not a crisis, not a collapse, but a progressive taxation [music] of organs and systems that had been servicing the consumption for 30 years. She had been a smoker since her MGM years, and the smoking had created the respiratory vulnerabilities that would eventually define her final years.
She was not, in her mid-50s, an ill woman. She was a woman whose body was beginning to present the bill for everything she had asked of it. She paid the bill with the same directness [music] she brought to everything. She reduced the smoking. She was told to reduce the [music] drinking and reduced it less than recommended and more than she might have otherwise.
She submitted to the medical oversight that she had always found tedious with the pragmatic [music] cooperation of someone who has enough interest in the continuation of her life to do what is necessary, if not enough to do what is optimal. The [music] apartment in Madrid remained the center. The friends remained. The bullfights continued, [music] though the physical difficulty of attending them, the heat, the standing, the logistics of the experience, required more management than it had in her 40s. She managed it.
Spain in the late 1970 was changing. Franco died in 1975, and the country’s emergence from 40 years of dictatorship into a constitutional monarchy produced a social transformation that Ava Gardner observed with the specific interest of someone who had lived inside a country’s culture long enough to understand what the transformation cost as well [music] as what it gained.
The Madrid she had arrived in in the mid-1950 and the Madrid of 1980 were not the same city. She was not the same woman. Both had survived their respective formations and were trying with varying success to determine what came next. What came next for Ava Gardner was London. She moved in 1968 for reasons that combined the practical tax considerations, proximity to the London film industry that was producing the work she was most likely to be offered with a personal which she did not discuss publicly, and which her biographers have reconstructed
imperfectly. The most persuasive reconstruction is simply that Madrid had become by the late 1960, a place she had been long enough to have used up whatever she had come there to find. The city had given her a decade of genuine life, genuine selfhood, genuine daily existence organized around her own preferences >> [music] >> rather than an institution’s requirements.
She had taken what it had to give. She moved on in the pattern that had characterized every previous geography of her life. Not fleeing, not failing, simply completing one chapter and beginning another with the same directness she had brought to every transition since the girl from Grabtown got on a train to New York with a photograph in a studio window making decisions on her behalf.
London was gray and cold and entirely unlike Madrid, which was partly [music] the point. Big pops expanding chapter nine. Last mirror from tilde three [music] 500 to tilde five 000 words now. Every addition is substance, [music] new scenes, deeper emotional excavation, more voices, nothing padded.
The flat in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge was on the ground floor of a cream-colored Victorian terrace that faced a private garden square the residents shared and rarely used. It was quiet in the way that expensive London neighborhoods are quiet, not empty, but insulated. The noise of the city present, but managed. The specific piece of money deployed in the service of distance from everything money is supposed to be pursued in order to obtain.
Ava Gardner moved there in 1968 and remained for the rest of her life. 22 years in the same flat. Longer than she had lived anywhere except Johnston County. Longer than any of her marriages. Longer than her MGM contract. The longevity was not planned. It was the result of the flat being, without her having searched for it, the place that finally fit in the way that she had been looking for a place to fit since she left North Carolina.
It was, by the accounts of everyone who visited, completely itself. No professional decoration. No studied elegance. No performance of the taste of a woman of her stature. Books everywhere. Organized by some system that was apparent to her and opaque to visitors. Photographs of [music] friends and family, of Spain, of the bullfights that she no longer attended with the frequency of her Madrid years, but that remained in image form, a permanent presence on her walls.
A dog, she had always had dogs. The attachment was genuine and long-standing. Named Morgan, >> [music] >> a corgi, who occupied the flat with the territorial confidence of an animal that has correctly assessed the power dynamic. What visitors noticed, and [music] what most of them mentioned in later accounts, was the absence of mirrors.
Not a deliberate removal. Nothing so theatrical as that. Simply an indifference to their placement. A domestic arrangement that had evolved without vanity as its organizing principle. A woman who had been looked at more than almost any human being of her generation had arranged the space in which she actually [music] lived so that looking at herself was not a requirement of moving through it.
The face that had been the instrument of everything, the MGM contract, the marriages, the mythology, [music] the specific wound it had opened in Frank Sinatra, was not the face she needed to see every morning in her own home. She knew what she looked like. She had known since the photograph in the studio window.
She did not need to be reminded. Frank Sinatra called from America. The calls were periodic, [music] unscheduled, arriving when he felt the need to make them, rather than by any arrangement. She answered when she wanted to. The conversations were, by the accounts of people she described them to afterward, shorter than they had been in the years of the marriage and the immediate aftermath.
Less charged, less painful, more like the conversations of two old soldiers who had fought on opposite sides of a war that had ended long ago, and who had arrived, through the specific mercy of time, at the ability to speak to each other as people rather than as the roles they had occupied in [music] each other’s destruction.
He told her in one of these calls, she recounted this to her friend and biographer Lee Server in the 1980, that she was the only woman he had ever loved without reservation. [music] She told him that was probably true and that it had been the problem. He laughed. She laughed. They did not discuss it further.
What neither of them said, in that conversation or in any of the subsequent ones, was the thing that both of them understood and that the laughter [music] was designed to hold at the precise distance that made continued conversation possible. That the love had been real, that the damage had been real, and that the two facts were [music] not in contradiction.
The love had produced the damage the way weather produces erosion, not through malice, not through failure, but through the simple, relentless application of a force too large for the landscape it was applied [music] to. She had been that landscape. The erosion was what her friends saw when they looked at her carefully in the London years.
Not on the surface, not in the face, which remained extraordinary [music] into her 60s with a specific quality of faces built on exceptional bone structure, but in the deeper territory. In the way she moved through the world. In the specific caution that surrounded any [music] conversation that moved toward the interior.
In the quality of her attention to other people’s love affairs. The genuine interest, [music] the specific sadness that accompanied the interest. The expression of a woman watching something she recognized and mourning quietly her own version of it. The film work in London was steady without being central. She made The Blue Bird in 1976.
[music] A Soviet-American co-production filmed in Leningrad that was, by the accounts of everyone involved, a production of remarkable organizational dysfunction [music] that produced a film of limited quality. She made City on Fire in 1979. She made The Kidnapping of the President [music] in 1980. The films were work, professional, competent, conducted by a woman who understood what she was being hired for and delivered it without complaint [music] and without the pretense that the material was other than what it was.
What she was being hired for, increasingly, was the name and the face. The specific authority that decades of presence in the cultural imagination conferred on a person. >> [music] >> The quality of gravity that audiences projected onto performers who had been famous for long enough that the fame itself had become a kind of [music] credential.
She was, in her 60s, a monument, and the films that hired her were interested primarily in what monuments [music] communicate. Weight, permanence, the suggestion of a history that extends beyond the frame. [music] She understood this. She did not find it degrading. She found it accurate. She was a monument in the sense that her face and her name [music] represented something in the culture that had outgrown the original person who had given [music] them their charge.
The original person was still present, still living in the Knightsbridge flat with Morgan the corgi and the books and the photographs of Spain, but the monument was separate, and the monument had its own relationship with the world that the original person could observe without being consumed by. The younger actors she worked with in these London years frequently arrived on set having prepared for the encounter with Ava Gardner the monument rather than Ava Gardner the working [music] actress. They expected, by the various
accounts collected after her death, one of two things: either the grand dame, cold and regal and operating from a position of practiced inaccessibility, or the legend, warm and generous and performing her own mythology for the benefit of those lucky enough to share a set with her. What they got was neither.
What they got was a woman who showed up on time, knew her lines, had opinions about the scene that she expressed directly [music] and without political navigation, laughed at things she found funny, declined to laugh at things she didn’t, [music] and went home when the day’s work was done without the lingering performance of availability that less secure performers used to manage their relationships with directors and co-stars.
She was, on a film set in her 60s, [music] exactly who she had always been. The Johnston County directness, the complete immunity to hierarchy, the refusal to [music] perform deference to people whose authority she found unearned. These qualities had not softened with age or status. If anything, they had become more concentrated, the unnecessary elements having been [music] stripped away by decades, leaving something close to pure.
The younger actresses found her terrifying [music] in the specific way that absolute self-possession terrifies people who are still negotiating their own. The younger actors found her fascinating for the same reason. Both groups, in interviews given after her death, said variations of the same thing. That being in a scene with Ava Gardner required you to be real, [music] because anything less was visible to her immediately, and she had no patience for it.
The stroke [music] came in 1986. It was a significant event, a cerebrovascular episode that affected [music] the left side of her body, leaving her with a weakness in her left arm and leg that never fully resolved. And that required, for the first time in her adult life, the sustained engagement of a medical [music] support structure that she found genuinely alien to her nature.
She had always been physically robust in the specific [music] way of people who have never had to think about their bodies. Not athletic, not disciplined, but constitutionally [music] sound. The underlying machinery of her physical existence reliable enough that she had not [music] been required to manage it consciously. The stroke changed that.
The body was now a subject that required attention, [music] rather than a vehicle she occupied without maintenance. She submitted to the rehabilitation with the specific combination of compliance [music] and resistance that characterized her relationship with all institutional requirements. Doing what was necessary, [music] doing less than was optimal, maintaining the minimum engagement with the medical system that her condition required, while preserving the maximum autonomy in the daily life the system surrounded.
The left side [music] weakness improved partially. The energy that the recovery required left her more limited in her daily radius than she had been, the flat, the garden square, the nearby shops and restaurants [music] within walking distance of Ennismore Gardens. The specific small geography of a life that had been, since the Rat Pack years, progressively contracting toward [music] its essential elements.
The essential elements were, in the end, exactly what they had always been. The books, the music, [music] the dogs. Morgan died and was replaced by a succession of corgis who occupied the flat with the same [music] territorial authority as their predecessor. And the friends who continued to visit, to call, to maintain the specific [music] web of human connection that she had built over six decades of moving through the world.
Bappie, her older sister who had taken her in when she arrived in New York from Grabtown in the late 1930s, [music] who had been present in some form at every subsequent stage [music] of her life, died in 1981. The loss was profound in the way that the loss of the person [music] who knew you before you became anything is profound.
It removed from the world the last witness to the original, the girl from Johnston County before the photograph made her into Ava Gardner. She grieved [music] privately, as she had always done everything significant. The public face remained the public face. The private work of loss happened in the flat, in the hours that the public [music] did not see, in the way that everything that actually mattered had always happened for her, behind the image, in the space that the image existed [music] to protect.
The memoir was Bappie’s idea in the specific sense that Bappie had always been the person who understood the practical dimensions of Ava’s life most clearly, who saw without sentiment what the life had cost and what it had produced [music] and what the accounting required. She had suggested, years before her death, that Ava [music] write something.
Not for the public, exactly, not as a performance of confession or a commercial exercise in mythology, but as an act of record, as the establishment [music] of what had actually happened from the inside, before the outside version became the only version available. Bappie died before the [music] memoir was written. The book that eventually resulted, Ava, My Story, published in 1990, was shaped in Bappie’s absence, which may explain its specific quality of incompleteness.
The person who would have pushed Ava past the surface, who had the standing and the love and the history to insist on the deeper excavation, was gone. What remained was the collaborator, the publishers’ requirements, and Ava Gardner’s 60 years of practiced privacy, [music] all of which conspired to produce a book that is honest about the facts >> [music] >> and guarded about the feelings, which is the exact inverse of what a memoir is supposed to be and the exact shape of what Ava Gardner had always offered the
world. The question of what Ava Gardner thought about Frank Sinatra [music] in the years of his final decline, as the Alzheimer’s that took him in stages through the early 1990, became publicly known, as the man who had been the defining force of her [music] adult life was reduced by degrees to something that could no longer call from America without assistance, is one that she did not answer directly and that her biographers have handled with appropriate uncertainty.
[music] What she said in the last interviews she gave, and she gave very few, the tolerance for the public’s questions having diminished to near nothing [music] in her final years, was that she had never stopped caring about him. That caring and loving were not the same thing, and that she had loved him in the specific, destructive, [music] total way only once and had survived it, and had no desire to repeat it.
But that caring was different, [music] quieter, less consuming. The feeling of a woman who has looked at a man’s life and recognized, [music] across all the years and all the wreckage, that he had been real to her in a way that the others had not. She said this not as a romantic statement, but as a factual [music] one.
He had been real. The reality had cost them both everything it had. She had paid the bill, and so had he, and neither of them had gotten [music] from the transaction what they had needed. But the transaction had been real, and in a life that contained a great deal of performance, >> [music] >> the real things were the things that mattered.
The last years in the flat had a quality that her friends described, [music] in their various ways, as peaceful, though the word requires qualification. It was not the peace of contentment, not the peace of a woman who had arrived at the end of her [music] life feeling that the ledger balanced.
It was the peace of a woman who had stopped fighting the things that could not be changed, who had arrived, through the specific exhaustion of 67 years of being Ava Gardner, at a relationship with her own existence that required [music] nothing from it except its continuation on the terms she had established. She read every day.
The books of her final years, cataloged by her housekeeper [music] Carmen Vargas in the weeks following her death, showed the same range that had always characterized her reading. Hemingway, alongside Spanish [music] poetry, alongside contemporary crime fiction, alongside biographies of people she had known or wished she had known.
There was no [music] pattern to it except appetite. She read the way she had always done everything that genuinely interested her, >> [music] >> without system, without hierarchy, following the thread of her own curiosity wherever it led. She listened to music every evening. Flamenco remained, 20 years after Madrid, the music that reached her most [music] directly, the specific quality of duende that the best flamenco carries, the sense of a form engaging honestly with darkness rather than managing it, spoke to something [music]
in her that had never been fully articulated in any other language. She watched television. This detail appears in multiple accounts of her final years and has been noted by her biographers with varying degrees of condescension that [music] she would have found unwarranted. Television was entertainment.
She had spent 40 years providing [music] it. She had no quarrel with consuming it. The writing of her memoir, Ava, My Story, [music] published in 1990, was conducted with the assistance of a collaborator and with the specific ambivalence of a woman who [music] had spent 60 years protecting her interior and was now, under the pressure of age and diminished health and the practical financial considerations that the memoir advance [music] addressed, being asked to make portions of it available to the public.
The [music] book that resulted is, by the standards of Hollywood memoir, unusually direct and unusually incomplete [music] in equal measure. Direct about her marriages, her drinking, her assessments of the industry and the people in it. Incomplete about the interior, the actual emotional experience of the life, the specific quality of what it had cost and what it had given, the answer to the question that all of her biography attempts and none of it quite reaches.
What was it like to be Ava Gardner? The answer she gave to this question in the book, in her way was hard. Harder than it looked. Harder than it was supposed [music] to be given everything the face had promised. She had been given at 17 the most commercially valuable physical attribute in the most commercially powerful entertainment industry in the world.
And she had spent 50 years managing the distance between what [music] that attribute promised and what it could actually deliver. What it could not deliver [music] was the thing she had been looking for since the tobacco farms in Johnston County. The experience of being known completely without the face, without the name, without the mythology that the photograph in the studio window had set in motion.
She had been seen her entire life by people who saw Ava Gardner. She had been loved her entire life by men who loved Ava Gardner. Frank Sinatra had loved Ava Gardner more completely than any person had ever been loved in the history of Hollywood. He had also in the extremity of that love confirmed what she had always suspected that even the most total love directed at [music] the image rather than the person inside it could not reach her where she actually was.
She died on January 25, 1990 >> [music] >> in the Knightsbridge flat. She was 67 years old. The cause of death was pneumonia, a consequence of the respiratory [music] vulnerability that the years of smoking had created and that the stroke had worsened. Her housekeeper found her. >> [music] >> She had died by the medical assessment in her sleep.
Carmen Vargas, who had worked [music] for her for years and who had been in the daily intimacy of the flat among the most consistent human presences of Ava’s London life described [music] finding her with the specific careful language of a woman who loved the person she was describing and was trying to honor that love with accuracy.
She said she looked in death >> [music] >> like herself. not like Ava Gardner the monument, not like the face that 50 [music] years of photography had made into something the world considered its property, like herself, like the woman who lived in the flat with the books and the [music] corgis and the photographs of Spain and the record player that played flamenco every evening.
Carmen said she looked peaceful. She said this not as comfort, not as the conventional language of bereavement, but as an observation. It was the most she had ever seen Ava Gardner look like she had nothing left [music] to manage. She was buried in Smithfield, North Carolina, Johnston County, the ground where it had all started, the tobacco fields and the red clay roads and the girl who had grown up in the specific, [music] undecorated poverty of a sharecropper’s family and who had been taken out of it by a photograph [music] and a studio
contract and turned into something that the world decided it could not stop [music] looking at. She came home to Grabtown, 67 years after she had been born there and 50 years after [music] she had left. She came back to the ground that had made her before Hollywood remade her and she was placed in it and the tobacco fields were still there and the distance between that ground and the Knightsbridge flat and the Sands Hotel and the corrida >> [music] >> and the MGM lot and the apartment in Madrid was, from where she lay, exactly
nothing. She had always been the girl [music] from Johnston County. Every version of her, the MGM contract player, the Rat Pack consort, the barefoot queen of the corrida, the woman in the Knightsbridge [music] flat with the corgi and the books, had been built on top of that original, had never replaced [music] it, had carried it forward through every geography and every transformation as the thing beneath all the other things.
Frank Sinatra outlived her by eight years. He died in May 1998 at 82, the Alzheimer’s having completed, [music] by degrees, the work of erasure. Whether he knew in his final years that she was gone, whether the information was available to the diminished mind that the disease had left him, is unclear from the accounts of those who were with him.
What is clear is that the recordings remained. The voice that her destruction [music] had made into the instrument of his greatest art, singing from the specific wound she had opened. Those recordings [music] were permanent, available, still capable of communicating to anyone who listened without distraction [music] what it sounds like when a man loves something he cannot keep and knows it and keeps loving it anyway.
She had given him that. >> [music] >> It had cost her everything the giving costs when you are the involuntary source of someone else’s transcendence. When your wholeness becomes their wound and their wound becomes their art and the art outlasts both of you by generations. Consider what that means in full. Not as romance, not as tragedy, but as a plain statement of what happened [music] between two specific people in the middle of the 20th century.
A woman who refused at every point in her life to be reduced [music] to what the world wanted her to be. Who had resisted the MGM machine and the studio system and Artie Shaw’s reading lists and Mickey Rooney’s energy >> [music] >> and the press’s contempt and the public’s worship could not resist being for one man >> [music] >> exactly what he needed her to be.
The irony is not lost. The woman who refused every cage that Hollywood built walked into the one cage she could not refuse. The cage of being loved so completely that the love [music] itself became the walls. She had been real to him. He had been real to her. The reality had cost everything it costs when two real things collide without adequate protection.
[music] And out of the collision, out of the specific wreckage of two people who burned through each other like weather systems >> [music] >> had come the music, the recordings that were going to be playing in bars and bedrooms and late night kitchens long after everyone who knew either of them was gone.
The records [music] play, the voice carries, and somewhere in Johnston County in the red clay ground of Smithfield, North Carolina, the girl who was taken out of a tobacco [music] field by a photograph and turned into a legend and then turned finally and completely back into herself, she is at rest. She always knew how to look, Big Pops.
The world just never knew where to look back.
