Memoirs of Ava Gardner - man eater

[Wiseguy]

She nearly killed Howard Hughes and sent Sinatra half- mad with desire: The memoirs of man-eater Ava Gardner

After telling all to PETER EVANS for her biography, Ava Gardner got cold feet and swore him to silence. Now he finally reveals the truth...

Flawless beauty: Ava Gardner had toyboys before Cher had toys

This month, Ava Gardner will have been dead 20 years. If you are of a certain age, you will remember her as a movie star of flawless beauty and a love goddess of infinite scandal. Once described as 'the most irresistible woman in Hollywood', she epitomised its golden years.

Although she had seldom been accused of great acting, she had seduced, and been seduced by, married and divorced, lived with and walked out on, some of the most famous names of the 20th century. She had toyboys before Cher had toys.

'My vices and scandals are more interesting than anything anyone can make up,' she told me when, in 1988, we embarked on the autobiography she invited me to ghost for her. I knew that she was essentially a private person and it was a book she never wanted to write.

'I'm broke, honey,' she admitted when I asked her why she was finally prepared to tell her story. 'I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.'

In the end, our book never saw the light of day. But now, for the first time, I can reveal Ava's secrets.

She was 66 years old when we first met at her apartment in London. She wore nothing but an angry scowl and a bath towel. I later learned that she greeted me this way partly because she wanted to see how I would react to her state of dishabille - she never to her dying day lost her pride in her sexuality.

Marlon Brando
'I loathe it when people spread bedtime stories about me,' she said, explaining her foul temper. I was just in the tub when a friend called from LA. She said that Marlon Brando told her he'd once slept with me. That's a god damn lie.'

She went on to explain that she had called Brando about it straightaway. If he really believed they had ever been lovers, she told him angrily, his brain had gone soft.

Brando apologised, and said his brain wasn't the only part of his anatomy that had gone soft lately. 'Isn't that punishment enough, Ava?' he had lisped.

Disarmed, and amused, by his frankness, she had - largely - forgiven him.

'I don't know about Jimmy Dean, Ingrid Bergman, Larry Olivier, Jackie Onassis, and the rest of the names Marlon's supposed to have carved on his bedpost, but my name's definitely not one of them, honey,' she told me.

Mickey Rooney
The first star she met at MGM was Mickey Rooney. In character for a movie and dressed in a Brazilian drag costume, his mouth smeared with lipstick, he looked ludicrous. But it didn't stop him from asking Ava for a date.

He was the biggest star on the MGM lot - more famous than Spencer Tracy, bigger than Clark Gable, and six inches shorter than Ava - and Ava was impressed, and smart enough to turn him down. She called it Rule Number One of the Southern Lady Conventions: a lady must be courted - and a gentleman must be patient.

But Rooney was also persistent, and smitten, and began proposing to her on a regular basis. Eventually, she gave in - with one proviso: 'Not until I'm 19, honey.'
Rooney settled for that. 'Well, I guess he ain't been able to get into your pants yet,' his mother told Ava when they first broke the news to her.

Ma Rooney knew her son well; Ava was still a virgin when they married on January 10, 1942.


First love: Ava with Mickey Rooney on their wedding day in 1942

One year and five days later, amid a debris of public brawls and rumours of Ava's intemperate conjugal demands - 'I owe Mickey something: through him I discovered that I enjoyed sex,' she told me - they were divorced.

Artie Shaw

Although Ava's looks made her a byword for Hollywood glamour, her career was still going nowhere. In 1945, she married the virtuoso clarinettist and male chauvinist Artie Shaw. 'Artie was an intellectual, I was smart but I had no education at all - we were made for each other,' she told me.

Determined to educate her, Shaw ordered her to read more books - 'you can't listen to Frank Sinatra records all the time,' he told her; he hated Sinatra's voice.

She bought the bestseller of the day, but when he found her reading Forever Amber, Shaw was furious. 'I won't have a wife of mine reading that rubbish,' he said, hurling the bodice-ripping novel right across the room.
One year after they wed, Ava and Artie were divorced. Ironically, Artie's next wife was Kathleen Winsor, who had written Forever Amber; Ava went on to marry her third and last husband, Frank Sinatra.


Volatile relationships: Ava with second husband Artie Shaw, and right, Howard Hughes, who she felled with an ashtray during a fight in Louis B. Mayer's office

Howard Hughes

She talked honestly, and sometimes painfully, about her hard-drinking, her affairs with millionaires and matadors, the guys she met in bars, and the scandals that her old boss, Hollywood's boss of bosses, Louis B. Mayer, had hushed up - including the night Howard Hughes dislocated her jaw and she felled him with a marble ashtray.

She thought she had killed him. 'There was blood on the walls, on the furniture, real blood in the Bloody Marys,' she said.

'Mr Mayer sent in his henchmen to clean up the place and get me out of there fast. He feared it might become a murder scene.

I don't think he cared too much about me, but he didn't want any scandal attached to his studio.'

Hughes recovered and asked Gardner to marry him. But the mix was too volatile.

She said: 'Our chemistry was the stuff that causes hydrogen bombs to explode. Til death do us part would have been a whole lot sooner than later if we'd tied the knot.

'Howard was a control freak, and I was too independent to take his crap. He was out of his mind most of the time, even then, and he got crazier through the years.'

Although she made zero impact in any of the dozen second-feature movies she made at MGM, an outside studio borrowed her to play George Raft's sultry squeeze in a minor noir thriller, Whistle Stop.

'That was my first leading role. George Raft was old enough to be my father [he was 43]. He took some handling, but I adored him.'


Her way: Ava Gardner with third husband Frank Sinatra

Her performance landed her the role of Burt Lancaster's double-crossing girlfriend in The Killers.

'Whatever it is, whether you're born with it, or catch it from a public drinking cup, she has got it,' Humphrey Bogart said when he saw the performance and recognised the quality that makes a star.

Director Joseph Mankiewicz lifted the line straight from Bogart to describe Ava in The Barefoot Contessa, the story of a gipsy dancer discovered by a film director, played by Bogart, and turned into a Hollywood legend.

Frank Sinatra

As for her marriage to Frank Sinatra, well, that lasted less than six years but, in a sadomasochistic way, the romance never ended.

Outspoken, caustic and often wickedly funny, Ava relished talking about the past, her highs and lows, her indiscretions, her mistakes. Nothing was spared - until she saw it on the page.

'Jesus Christ, Peter, we can't publish this,' she would say when I gave her pages to read.

'But Ava, it's your life,' I'd plead. 'Exactly, honey,' she'd say. And eventually that was the end of the book she wanted me to write.

We remained friends until the day she died. 'My body's failing every which way,' she told me after stumbling in her apartment.


Reminder of mortality: Ava Gardner pictured before the devastating stroke she suffered in 1986

She walked with a cane; once a heavy smoker, she had pulmonary emphysema, the lung disease that had recently killed her one-time lover, the director John Huston.

She didn't see many people, but hated to be called a recluse. 'I'm just winding down, honey. It's been a long haul from Grabtown. I'm just taking a little time out. I'm entitled to that,' she told me shortly before she died in January, 1990.

I miss her a lot. Who doesn't?

Full story : Mail Online

[A*O]

She had brains and balls. My kinda gal. RIP.

[HWBL]

She was stunning, but - like on of her male co-stars once said -
she could drink any man under the table!

Evolution: famous faces changing with age

[McJag]

Man! Knocked out Howard Hughes! Good for her.

[HWBL]

and she felled him with a marble ashtray.

Reminds me of a scene in Bugsy, where Virginia (Annette Bening)
throws an ashtray at Bugsy (Warren Beatty). I wonder if the
screenwriter (James Toback) was in the know about the Gardner/
Hughes incident.....

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUURGc4AKjs[/YOUTUBE]

[heart_leigh]

Ava was one of a kind.

[Grimmlok]

Tough broad, nice gams.

I love old-timey language!

[louiswinthorpe111]

There wasn't enough dish on Sinatra.

[Speranza]

She was wonderful, so witty, sassy, intelligent, she truly had it all. And plus that face and that stunning body. She'll always be one of my favorites. If you've never read it I recommend her auto bio Ava,my story. It's obviously not 100% truthful, but she's pretty honest and it's refreshing. Also 'Love is nothing' by Lee Server is a highly recommended read on Ava, it reads like a novel.

[Wiseguy]

She was wonderful, so witty, sassy, intelligent, she truly had it all. And plus that face and that stunning body. She'll always be one of my favorites. If you've never read it I recommend her auto bio Ava,my story. It's obviously not 100% truthful, but she's pretty honest and it's refreshing. Also 'Love is nothing' by Lee Server is a highly recommended read on Ava, it reads like a novel.

Is that Frank and Ava in your avatar?

I haven't read any books on Ava, but will check out the ones you recommended. Is it true that Frank never really got over Ava?

[msdeb]

i had heard that Howard Hughes wasnt much on bathing. if this is true, why would she be with him?

[Wiseguy]

^^^I've heard that too. I found this from Wikipedia:

In 1947, Hughes descended into one of the most bizarre episodes of his life. In December of that year, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, speak to him, and solely to respond when spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks.

After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He also rented out several other rooms for his aides, his wife, and his numerous girlfriends. His erratic behavior continued, however, as he would sit naked in his bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. In one year, he spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel........

Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so that he could insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of it...........

Eventually, Hughes only had his hair cut and nails trimmed once a year. Several doctors were kept in the house, but Hughes rarely saw them and rarely followed their advice. Toward the end of his life, his inner circle was largely composed of Mormons, as they were the only people he considered trustworthy, even though Hughes himself was not a member of their church....

Death
His reclusive activities and drug use made him practically unrecognizable; his hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were quite long, his tall 6'2" (188 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 lb (41 kg), and the FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify the body...

His Will
Approximately three weeks after Hughes's death, a handwritten will was found on the desk of an official of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The so-called "Mormon Will" gave US$1.56 billion to various charitable organizations (including US$625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute); nearly US$470 million to the upper management in Hughes's companies and to his aides; US$156 million to first cousin William Lummis; US$156 million split equally between his two ex-wives Ella Rice and Jean Peters; and US$156 million to a gas-station owner named Melvin Dummar. Dummar initially denied any knowledge about the will but changed his story when his fingerprints were found on the envelope containing the will.

Dummar claimed to reporters that late one evening in December 1967, he found a disheveled and dirty man lying along U.S. Highway 95, 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas. The man asked for a ride to Las Vegas. Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said the man told him he was Hughes.

Dummar then claimed that days after Hughes's death, a "mysterious man" appeared at his gas station, leaving an envelope containing the will on his desk. Unsure if the will was genuine, and unsure of what to do, Dummar left the will at the LDS Church office. In a trial lasting seven months, the Mormon Will was eventually rejected by the Nevada court in June 1978 as a forgery. The court declared that Hughes had died intestate.

[collateral damage]

I had no idea at all that she married Micky Rooney! Holy smokes!

[crumpet]

She is the epitome of old Hollywood glamour, bar none. I also appreciate the heavy drinking, smoking, and volatile relationships.....these stars today do the same thing but studios don't protect their image like they did back in the day. She lived hard, but so what? She seemed like a very passionate woman.

[Speranza]

Is that Frank and Ava in your avatar?

I haven't read any books on Ava, but will check out the ones you recommended. Is it true that Frank never really got over Ava?

yes it is them. And yes, it is partly true that frank still tought of Ava as the greatest love of his life. Once the shock of the divorce started to fade away, they kept in contact, mostly by telephone and he was always there for her, especially when she needed money/support and such. I remember reading that when she died he went silence and closed himself in a room and wanted to see no one for the rest of the day.
Seems like a love like this won't last in these modern times