1
She Can’t Act, She Can’t Talk, She’s Terrific
When Ava Gardner arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1941, all she knew about Hollywood was what she had read in the fan magazines back home in Smithfield, North Carolina, where her mother had taken her to the Howell Theatre, at age nine, to see reigning heartthrob Clark Gable and “blonde bombshell” Jean Harlow inRed Dust. After three scorching days of travel, Ava stepped off the Super Chief in a cheap summer dress and white wedge sandals, carrying a cardboard suitcase with most of her possessions. The eighteen-year-old beauty did not smoke, did not drink, and was a virgin. She was a stranger in a strange land.
Earlier that summer, in the Manhattan offices of the MGM publicity department, Ava laughed about her chances of fame and fortune before the train started its trip across the continent to Hollywood. “Well, if I make it big there,” she told the staff, “I’ll marry the biggest movie star in the world.”
“Would you like to see the biggest movie star in the world?” a publicist asked. He had a photo behind his back, and it wasn’t of Clark Gable, as Ava had anticipated. It was of Mickey Rooney.
Six months after this playful exchange, Ava Gardner would indeed marry MGM’s biggest moneymaker, Mickey Rooney. When the marriage failed, Ava would marry (and divorce) bandleader Artie Shaw, and have numerous affairs on and off the set, and star in movies with Burt Lancaster, Robert Taylor, and, yes, Clark Gable, inMogambo, a remake of Red Dust, the movie she had seen with Mama.
In the midst of it all came Frank Sinatra, the most popular singer on the planet, the entertainer of the century, the womanizer of the ages—in full pursuit of Ava, a brunette bombshell, the Jean Harlow of her time.
How quickly and easily everything had unfolded. Before the age of thirty, Ava had three brief, wild marriages, and had become a major film star as well as an international sex symbol. It was like one of those breathless stories you might read in a fan magazine.
* * *
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born a farmer’s daughter on Christmas Eve, 1922, in a house without water or plumbing in a tiny crossroads hamlet called Grabtown, not even on the map, seven miles east of Smithfield, North Carolina, population 5,574. Because of the proximity of her birthday and Christmas, two cakes were baked to celebrate that day—one chocolate, for the family, and a white coconut cake, for baby Ava, both according to mother Mollie’s recipe. It became a custom that would continue through the years.
Ava was the youngest of five daughters and two sons of Jonas and Mollie Gardner, tobacco sharecroppers who also operated a boardinghouse for teachers. The family was poor. At school, Ava rotated two sweaters, one to wear and the other in the wash.
Jonas Gardner, a lean man of Scots-Irish ancestry, died when Ava was fifteen. “He did everything slowly, so deliberately and so well,” Ava later remarked. He was her idol. “There wasn’t an impulsive bone in his body,” she said. “He used to make us lemonade and I can see him now, sitting at the kitchen table, rubbing the lemons hour after hour so they’d be soft and the juice would literally pour out of them when he finally got around to that part of the operation. I’ve never tasted anything like it. No booze was ever so good.” Ava grew up playing in the tobacco fields, and assisting her father when the tobacco was aging in barns, where the furnaces had to be stoked to maintain a steady temperature for six or seven days until the leaves were cured. “I used to love it,” she said. “I would stay the night with Daddy, sleeping with him.”
At home, she remained the family baby. As her older sisters were married or nudged out of the house to get jobs after high school, Ava was cuddled and coddled. Her sisters bought her special bras to save her breasts from the fate of theirs—strapped against their chests in the Jazz Age style of the day. “I’d get out of doing the dishes,” Ava said years later. “I can see Mama now, cleaning every room every day as though she were expecting Sunday visitors. But I never offered to help her. I should have, I suppose, and now I wish I had.”
Mother Mollie was a woman of strict Baptist principles, who did not, or could not, bring herself to explain the facts of life to her daughters. When Ava had her first period and thought she was bleeding to death, it was not to her mama she rushed, but to the warmhearted black lady who worked in the Gardner household, who comforted her and explained what was happening. Mama had instilled in Ava a fear of the consequences of sex. On Ava’s first date, a school prom, the lad tried to kiss her at the doorstep, and Mama came out of the house, scaring him away.
After a year at secretarial school, Ava came under the influence of her eldest sister, Beatrice, the family rebel, who lived in New York City with her second husband, a professional photographer. Beatrice was called “Bappie,” a name Ava bestowed on her when the youngster could not pronounce her given name. Bappie, nineteen years older than Ava, had movie stars in her eyes. When she won a pair of green shoes—once worn by movie star Irene Dunne!—in a charity auction, she gave them to Ava, who kept them on a shelf in her bedroom to look at, but never to wear.
Ava talked Mollie into letting her visit Bappie in New York during the summer of 1939. Bappie’s husband, Larry Tarr, took photos of the sixteen-year-old beauty and displayed one in his Fifth Avenue studio window as a sample portrait. A young clerk in MGM’s New York office saw the photo and—hoping for a date—pretended to be a talent scout for the studio. He inquired about the model’s name, and Larry Tarr used the occasion to send an array of photos to the MGM office. Ava soon found herself doing a screen test for the studio, including an audio sample, for Ava sang in the church choir and knew all of the old spirituals. She had a sweet singing voice, but her southern drawl was so heavy that few could understand her, so the technician sent the screen test to Hollywood—without audio. “She can’t act, she can’t talk,” said studio chief Louis B. Mayer after viewing it. “She’s terrific.” He rose to leave the screening. “Give her to Gertrude and Lillian and let her have a year’s training,” he said. “Then test her again.” A contract was issued. Beauty carried the day.
Milt Weiss, a young MGM publicist, and sister Bappie accompanied Ava on the train to Los Angeles, because that was how ladies traveled in those days, and that was what Mama wanted for her baby. When Bappie learned that Hedy Lamarr, MGM’s reigning goddess, would arrive on the same train, she proclaimed, “That makes two movie queens on board!”
* * *
The drinks were strong and the conversations lively at Ruth Waterbury’s home when Ava walked in on the arm of Milt Weiss. The publicist had called ahead and asked Ruth—the editor of Photoplay magazine—if he could stop by and show the new starlet off. “Naturally, the moment Ava walked in, the party was ruined,” Waterbury wryly recalled. “The men were knocked speechless. They had never seen so much young beauty before, and I doubt if they ever will again. The women were kayoed, too, not only by Ava but also by the men’s reaction to her.” Ava was shy, but knew how to be slightly flirtatious in her charming southern way. This was her first night in Hollywood, and she was learning to operate on a mixture of instinct, charm, and looks. Tomorrow would be busy, said Milt, and they made a quick exit. “We were all relieved when Ava and the agent left,” said Waterbury. But the conversations suddenly died. “Everybody else left right after them. There was no putting that party together again.”
* * *
No other lot in Hollywood knew a more spectacular and storied history than MGM, the celebrated real estate where The Wizard of Oz and most of the outdoor scenes in Gone With the Wind were filmed. It was where Myrna Loy and William Powell sipped martinis and walked their dog, Asta, where Katharine Hepburn met Spencer Tracy, where Judy Garland sang and danced down the yellow brick road. It was where Mickey Rooney said, repeatedly, “Let’s put on a show!” Here Mama’s favorite, Clark Gable, reigned as King of Hollywood for twenty-seven years.
The studio was a loose collection of buildings and soundstages, a self-contained entertainment factory that measured some five square miles in Culver City, south of Los Angeles, with its own police and fire departments, bank, post office, hospital with a physician and nurses on call, a swimming pool, commissary, a blacksmith’s shop, city streets, western scenes, several lakes, and a fifteen-acre jungle. There were dozens of lavish dressing rooms, bungalows for the big stars, and a little red schoolhouse for child actors. One longtime publicist who was a former circus barker kept four elephants—from his circus days—as pets.
MGM produced the biggest films, paid the biggest salaries, and grossed the largest revenues. Walking through the commissary in that vintage year of 1941, you could have seen, picking at their salads, Jimmy Stewart, Hedy Lamarr, Greer Garson, Lionel Barrymore, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Red Skelton, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Van Johnson, Marsha Hunt, Robert Benchley, Spring Byington, Gladys Cooper, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, and many others—including Louis B. Mayer, the founding father, who was in his fifties now, but still very much in power.
“L.B.” was a short, barrel-chested man with thin white hair, round glasses, and an owlish, gruff expression that someone said made him look like a small-town high school principal. At fifty-six, he still worked until 8:30 P.M., minimum, with three secretaries. His birthday, celebrated on the Fourth of July, was a real holiday on the lot, with a huge party and entertainment by some of the top actors in the commissary, an event that everyone was commanded to attend.
Mayer had come out of a Russian ghetto, and he felt a great debt to the America that had permitted him to grow so powerful. He fancied himself a guardian of American family values. His favorite product was the Andy Hardy movie series, idealized sagas of small-town life, with Mickey Rooney as the devilish but good-hearted kid, learning life’s lessons with his mom and pop and his wise old grandpa. L.B. truly believed the myth—and he loved the money it made for the studio, and for himself. At one million dollars a year, Louis B. Mayer was regularly named the country’s highest-paid executive.
His office was cavernous, “about half as large as the lounge of the Radio City Music Hall,” reported New Yorkerjournalist Lillian Ross. Mayer presided behind a huge creamy white desk covered with four creamy white telephones, overlooking a vast expanse of creamy white carpet. The walls were paneled in creamy white leather, and there was a bar, a fireplace, leather chairs, couches, and a grand piano, all creamy white. His desk, on a raised dais, was positioned so that the visitor, always looking upward, was made to feel like a recalcitrant child in the principal’s office. L.B. got the idea from Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia Pictures (the salt mine of studios), who got the idea from Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. “It made L.B. the prophet and all those sitting before him the disciples,” said Jerry Lewis. “A great device for his need to dominate.”
Mayer insisted on absolute punctuality on the part of visitors, who had to be impeccably dressed. Men were required to wear a jacket and tie. Joan Crawford came from a set in a swimsuit and bathrobe, and was sent home to change. Most of Mayer’s top executives—Eddie Mannix, Benny Thau, and Sidney Franklin—were also short. Esther Williams, the gorgeous five-foot-eight swimming star, said that she felt like Snow White with the Dwarfs whenever she was in Mayer’s office for a meeting. A story, probably apocryphal, was told of a somewhat proper actress entering the office one day and asking, “Don’t you usually stand when a lady enters the room?” “Madam,” replied the diminutive L.B., “I am standing.”
Mayer was like a Jewish father (or mother, perhaps) who kept a vigilant eye on his film family. When Lana Turner’s nights on the town elicited the wrong kind of publicity, he summoned her to his office—and demanded that she bring her mother. In an emotional, disappointed tone, he told the young star that keeping late hours and making the papers endangered her wonderful future. “He actually had tears in his eyes at one point, so I started crying, too,” recalled Lana. Then L.B. jumped up and shouted, “The only thing you’re interested in is…” and he pointed crudely to his crotch.
“How dare you, Mr. Mayer!” said Lana’s mother righteously as they marched out. “In front of my daughter!”
Mayer was a micromanager, a stickler for details. One had to be a demagogue on little things if you wanted to have your way on the big things. He was also the best actor on the lot. He asked director John Huston to come to his house one Sunday for breakfast. A script in progress wasn’t what L.B. wanted. He told Huston about Jeanette MacDonald and how he had instructed her to sing “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” by singing the Jewish “Eli, Eli” for her. “She was so moved,” recalled Huston, “that Mayer said she wept. Yes, wept! She who had the reputation of pissing ice water!”
By way of demonstration, Mayer sang the song for Huston. Mayer said that if Huston could make the script into that kind of picture, he would crawl to the director on his knees and kiss his hand, which he then proceeded to do. “I sat there and thought, this is not happening to me,” said Huston, who left in a cold sweat, with Mayer’s words echoing in his ears: “You can only try! Try, John! Try!”
Nepotism ruled. Mayer’s relatives and friends of relatives were everywhere. George Sidney, who directed Ava’s screen test, was the son of Louis K. Sidney, pioneer producer and vice president of MGM. His wife was Lillian Burns, who worked in the drama department. Actress Norma Shearer’s husband, legendary producer Irving Thalberg, had died in 1936, but he was still an influence at the studio. Her brother Douglas was head of the sound department. “We are a business concern and not patrons of the arts,” said obsessive memo dictator David O. Selznick, who earned L.B.’s esteem (and his daughter Irene in marriage) by making two Westerns concurrently, with two scripts and two leading ladies, shooting all action material at the same time, “making two of them for the price of about one and one-eighth,” memo’d Selznick. Such stratagems advanced Selznick’s standing among producers, but it didn’t hurt that there was reportedly an inscription in the commissary men’s room: “The son in law also rises.” The studio was like a Jewish resort in the Catskills.
* * *
Shortly after Ava’s arrival, Milt Weiss took her for a tour, including a visit to the set of Babes on Broadway,where Mickey Rooney was dressed for his Carmen Miranda number, bedecked in a skirt, a fruit hat larger than his head, and platform-soled shoes, which added some height to his diminutive stature. When he espied Ava behind the cameras, it was lust at first sight.
“She had narrow ankles, perfect calves, full thighs, a tiny waist, a bosom that rose like two snowy mountain peaks, an alabaster throat, a dimpled chin, full red lips, a pert nose, wide green eyes beneath dark, arched brows, a wide, intelligent forehead and chestnut-colored hair that looked as if it had been stroked a thousand times a night ever since she was old enough to handle a brush,” he recalled approvingly in his memoir, Life Is Too Short. At lunchtime that day, as Ava walked into the studio commissary, Rooney told his cronies that he was going to marry that girl.
Rooney, two years older (and four inches shorter) than Ava, was the biggest box-office attraction in the world, and—at twenty—still a convincing teenager in the studio’s Andy Hardy movies. He was also a relentless womanizer—Lana Turner called him “Andy Hard-on”—and a regular at a brothel called T&M Studios, off Santa Monica Boulevard, where young women were made up to look like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, and other stars of the era.
When Mickey asked Ava for a date, though, she said no. He continued to pester, and she continued to turn down his requests. “That only made me want her more,” he said, “not just so I could go to bed with her. I wanted to make her the mother of my children.”
* * *
Ava drew a low salary, even by entry-level standards: At fifty dollars a week, plus acting, speech, and grooming lessons, she was a steal. Her salary was actually thirty-five dollars, because a clause in the contract gave MGM the right to stop payment for a twelve-week layoff period. “If Bappie hadn’t come to Hollywood with me … and she hadn’t gone downtown and got a job at I. Magnin’s, we’d have starved to death,” Ava later recalled. “As it was, we lived in one crummy room with a pull-down bed, and a kitchenette as big as a closet. Film star! More like slave laborer.”
There was no equity among the starlets in residence. Esther Williams—who had an agent—signed on, shortly after Ava’s arrival, for $350 a week. Of course, both lasses’ salaries paled beside the one thousand dollars a week that Lassie earned as top dog around the studio, where he was known as “Greer Garson with fur.”
Beyond salary inequities, contracts gave the studio the right to rule on all professional decisions in an actor’s life. The studio decided which film she or he would make, who else would be in it, who would produce and direct it. The studio had the right to “loan” an actor out to another studio for any film that the other studio wanted to make. The loan-out fee went entirely to MGM, which paid the actor his regular salary out of its profits on the loan.
The studios used promotional films and stories in cooperative magazines and newspapers to create an image of themselves as exciting workplaces, with wardrobe and makeup departments for pampering the stars in their dressing rooms or at tables in the commissary. It was like a big game of pretend. Except for the small handful of top stars, working at MGM was like being part of an assembly line in a robber baron factory where the product was “pictures,” as they were then called. Movie theaters in those days offered a double bill from Thursday to Saturday and another from Sunday to Wednesday. MGM supplied their chain of movie houses with four B movies—or “program pictures”—every week, along with the occasional big-budget picture. “I don’t think you sat around just looking pretty at MGM,” said Ava ruefully. “They worked you hard eight until five.”
Director Elia Kazan termed the men who created Hollywood “marvelous monsters.” He knew them all—Mayer and his enforcer, Eddie Mannix; B. P. Schulberg; the Warner brothers; Darryl Zanuck; Spyros Skouras; Harry Cohn; David Selznick; and Samuel Goldwyn. The front office and the producers had the power; the rest of the lot—writers, actors, directors, composers—were mere employees. The execs were responsible for artistic decisions, not the artists. “They were industrialists,” said Kazan.
Recruited from Broadway in 1946, Kazan arrived in Hollywood with high hopes. “I’d be working at the greatest film studio in the world,” he wrote, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the home ground of ‘more stars than there are in the heavens.’ I’d be a director among many famous directors whom I admired. I’d made it.” Instead, he found himself “dumped into a perfectly structured organization … an industrial compound” where a “relentless conveyor-belt style of productivity depended on a constant ingestion of new creative talent, but the artists counted for little or nothing apart from their ability to deliver the goods.”
MGM movies originated on the lot—rarely on location—where the studio had a special large stage and staff for rear projection. The powerful art department designed, built, painted, and put up backgrounds for scenes that were staged, just barely directed. Other scenes were shot with a process screen behind the actors, showing moving traffic on a street so that it looked, unconvincingly, like they were traveling down it. This was the cost-efficient way that Metro made movies, with control of lighting and other conditions, no matter what time of year.
The cost-accounting cynicism at MGM was so thorough that the studio brandished it on the lion’s head logo, where the motto was Ars Gratia Artis, art for art’s sake, very loosely speaking. Spencer Tracy recalled producer/director Mervyn LeRoy, at lunch in the commissary, raving about a book he’d bought. “It’s got everything,” he said. “Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But,” he added, “I think I can lick it.”
* * *
The popular press exploited the Hollywood glamour game, and collected fat revenues for movie ads in their pages. Ava was part of the annual crop of what Life magazine, in a 1940 cover story, called “the world’s most envied of girls.” Starlets, usually discovered by roving talent scouts, had little or no acting experience. “At all times they are told what to do, what to say, how to dress, where to go, whom to go with,” reported the weekly. “Only if they obey implicitly and only if, in addition, by some magic of beauty, personality or talent, they touch off an active response in millions of movie fans, will a few of them know the full flower of stardom, with its fabulous rewards of fame and wealth.”
Of course, stardom could happen. Lana Turner was discovered, according to studio lore, as she sipped a soda in a Hollywood ice-cream parlor while cutting a secretarial class at her high school. This led to an interview with MGM director and producer Mervyn LeRoy, who began guiding her career. In her first movie, They Won’t Forget,Lana spoke not one line, and was murdered in the first reel. She removed her blouse beneath a skintight sweater, however, and jiggled along a street, thus becoming the original “sweater girl.” Stardom followed.
“It was all beauty and it was all power,” Lana explained. “Once you had it made, they protected you; they gave you stardom. The ones who kept forging ahead became higher and higher and brighter and brighter and they were stars. And they were treated like stars.” The star system was big business. When the actor or actress didn’t personally own the appropriate clothes, the studio stepped in and provided what was needed to maintain the glamour and glitz—and protect its considerable investment.
Stars had drivers, bodyguards, and were accustomed to having assistants, valets, cooks, maids, servants, houseboys, secretaries, lackeys, toadies, hangers-on, all ready to run for cigarettes, speak only when spoken to, mind the pets, run for popcorn at previews, take notes, sign autographs (when no one was looking), bring the car around, do their hair, and answer their phones.
For every Lana success story, hundreds of starlets struggled for supporting roles; countless others never appeared in front of a camera. “The studio was full of them, sexy young women who wanted to make it in Hollywood,” said Mickey Rooney. “Most often,” he recalled, “Hollywood ended up making them because some of the women were there, first and foremost, as potential pussy for the executives at MGM.”
The casting couch? It was real. Thanks to studio publicity, unknown starlets often became celebrities in their hometowns and would do almost anything rather than return home. L.B.’s office featured a private elevator for transporting secret visitors to the Mayer of Hollywood, who fell in love often. Benny Thau, the top casting producer at MGM, made directors cast the women he was sleeping with in their films. “He couldn’t fire us if we said no because we had long-term contracts,” said producer Gottfried Reinhardt, “but we never wanted to alienate him. He was too powerful.”
Elia Kazan said that the studio heads “thought of every film they made, no matter how serious the theme, as a love story.” Consequently, they cast by an elemental rule: Does the actress arouse me? “I believe this rule of casting is not only inevitable but correct, and quite the best method for the kind of films they made,” said the director. “The audience must be interested in a film’s people in this elemental way. If not, something essential is missing. If the producer wasn’t interested in an actress this way, he was convinced an audience wouldn’t be and that this actress wouldn’t ‘draw flies.’” Thus, when it came to actresses, said Kazan, “They went by a simple rule and a useful one: Do I want to fuck her?” They often put actresses to such a test.
The story circulated of a onetime New York glove salesman named Sam Goldfish, who was now a big-shot studio mogul named Samuel Goldwyn, attempting to mount Madeleine Carroll on the office sofa one day, and the actress—very poised, very British—twisted her body and threw Sam on the floor. As he adjusted his clothing, Goldwyn drew himself up to his most dignified posture, absorbed the novelty, and proclaimed, “I have never been so insulted in my life!”
* * *
For Ava, MGM comprised a finishing school. She was put through the assembly-line gauntlet, where experts in make-up and hairdressing clinically examined her teeth, studied her figure, and experimented with her hair. They monitored her demeanor. One day, as she sat reading a magazine, a voice startled her. “Stop chewing that gum, will you?” It was Sydney Guilaroff, Metro’s top hairdresser. “Take it out of your mouth this minute.” (He would eventually become her best MGM friend.)
They scrutinized her walk, posture, everything. Ava was a tall, sensuous brunette with chestnut-colored hair that had a reddish glow. Her height (5'6") separated her from the smaller starlets—Lana claimed to be 5'3"—and endeared her to the wardrobe department as she carried stylish outfits with flair. She had a face of classical proportions and balance, a radiant smile, green almond-shaped eyes, a dimpled chin, and a long-legged figure of perfect proportions, 36-20-36, with high, firm breasts, prominent nipples, and skin like white jade.
MGM employed an elaborate makeup system, which included a chart of a generic face that was used by every makeup man, who marked it according to corrections he felt should be made on each actress. “Shading here, shading there, eyes made up this way, throat made up that way, and so on,” recalled Betty Garrett. “Each picture then became completely different depending on the woman’s natural coloring and contours. This line over Lana Turner’s eyes, this direction for Ava Gardner’s eyebrows. Everybody had her own chart so it did not matter which makeup man you got. He just looked at the chart and knew exactly what to do.”
Ava had some social mannerisms that troubled Howard Strickling, the studio’s legendary publicity chief. By her own description, Ava was a barefoot country girl who could be one of the boys—earthy, unpretentious, and capable of cussin’ with the worst of them. “Strick” asked singer/actor Allan Jones and his wife, Irene Hervey, to invite Ava to their home so that she would note how people entertained. During the meal, Ava startled her hosts and guests by picking up her napkin between courses to wipe her knife and fork. There was still a residual amount of hillbilly in the starlet.
Ava cultivated table manners quickly, and her drawl diminished (except when she had a few drinks) in Gertrude Fogler’s elocution class. MGM girls learned dance and movement from instructor Jeanette Bates, who had them walking down stairs, in heels, without ever looking at their feet. “We studied simple movements, such as getting up out of a chair, keeping your knees together, making exits and entrances, and how to tuck your bottom in when you walked,” recalled Esther Williams.
MGM girls were beautiful, serene, poised, and deadly sure of themselves when making an entrance, or an exit. Posture was serious to acting coach Lillian Burns, who taught the dramatic exit—chin up, shoulders up, head thrown back. “Ava Gardner snapped her neck; so did Lana Turner and Janet Leigh,” said Esther. “It’s a wonder we all didn’t end up at the chiropractor’s.”
* * *
And Mickey? Gradually, he began to wear down Ava with his entreaties. The deal maker came out when Ava declined dinner one night because Bappie was with her, you see, and—
“Well, I’m inviting you and Bappie,” said Mickey, making nice with Cinderella’s older sister.
That evening, there was dinner for three at Chasen’s—and the courtship of Ava Gardner began in earnest. Mickey Rooney was everywhere, driving her from her Franklin Avenue apartment to the studio, driving all over the lot, shouting to everybody he knew on the studio streets. “Hey, this is my new girl. She’s going to be a big star. Isn’t she gorgeous?”
They became a couple. They went to baseball games, auto races, and the track. In October, Bappie may have blabbed, for the Smithfield Herald was reporting to the hometown folks in North Carolina, “Pretty Ava Gardner in Limelight as Mickey Rooney’s ‘Latest’ Girl Friend.”
This was a new world for Ava, one she quickly became accustomed to. Movie stars liked to travel in the fast lane. Maître d’s welcomed them with a smile and escorted them to good tables. Moreover, Ava was able to sidestep the perilous route taken by many wannabes in the hands of predatory producers—as Mickey’s date, she was that rarest of starlets: a girl who could say no.
Hardly a day went by that Mickey didn’t propose. Gradually, Ava’s replies drifted from “You’re crazy, Mick, I hardly know you” to “Marriage is a serious thing, Mick.” She asked Bappie for guidance. What would Mama think? Bappie and Mama both approved. Eventually, her reply to Mickey was, “What’ll our life be like?”
On Ava’s nineteenth birthday, Christmas Eve 1941, Mickey Rooney asked Ava Gardner to be his wife, this time with a big diamond ring. Ava said yes.
L. B. Mayer summoned the couple. This was Ava’s first encounter with L.B. “It would break my heart to see you unhappy,” he told Mickey. “I’ve always been like a father to you. Believe me, this is not the girl for you. You’re so hot for her you can’t think straight.” Ava squirmed in embarrassment. Later, with Rooney out of earshot, he warned her, “He just wants to get in your pants.”
Mickey faced L.B. down, and when Mayer realized he couldn’t prevent the marriage, he arranged a stag party for Mickey in his private dining room. There, Metro male stars rose to offer ribald advice to the young groom, including how to explain lipstick marks on his fly when he came home from a busy day at the studio. “During the first year, every time you make love, put a pebble in the sink,” intoned Spencer Tracy. “The second year, every time you make love, you take a pebble out of the sink. You know what, Mickey?” he said. “You’ll never empty the sink.”
* * *
On January 10, 1942, Mickey and Ava married, in a small Protestant church in the village of Ballard, in California’s Santa Ynez Mountains. The bride wore a navy blue suit and a corsage of orchids. Bappie, Mickey’s parents, and Les Peterson, the number-two gun in MGM publicity, attended the ceremony.
Hedda Hopper headlined her Sunday column with her exclusive on the wedding of the Mighty Mite to MGM’s sexiest starlet. Mickey, standing on a stool, appeared as tall as Ava in the pictures. The couple took off on a working honeymoon (Mickey was promoting the latest Andy Hardy movie), with Les Peterson tagging along as MGM’s chaperone.
Ava was apprehensive about losing her virginity on her wedding night. “Relax, you’re going to do fine, honey,” said Bappie. “Nature will take its course. Just open wide!”
Mickey, apprehensive in his own way, got so drunk that evening that Ava was still a virgin the morning after. Coitus interruptus number two occurred when Mickey pulled golf clubs out of the trunk of his car the next day. “Golf?” said Ava. “But I don’t play golf.”
Long after that marriage collapsed, long after several other marriages and divorces had transpired, Mickey Rooney, in his memoir, recalled how Ava had watched him play a round of golf that he found quite exciting that first married day—“and she saw me card a confident seventy-nine,” he reported, quite pleased with himself. (Ava took up tennis.)
On evening number two, they had sex. “I was, by turns, alternately tender and tremendous,” said Mickey, who could now return his undivided attention to playing thirty-six holes. “It was an ideal honeymoon: sex and golf and sex and golf,” he said. “It never occurred to me to ask Ava what she wanted.”
What Ava wanted—and she was good at it—was more sex. “Once Ava got into the spirit of things, she wanted to do it all the time,” said Rooney. She quickly learned how to arouse a man with a smoldering look, kicking off her shoes as soon as she entered the house, or coming to breakfast in only a pair of shorts. “In the feathers,” as she phrased it, Ava was exciting and could be starkly demanding. “Let’s fuck, Mickey,” she would say. “Now!”
Rooney—who, in addition to being short, could be small on occasion—reported that “Ava’s breasts were full, with large brown nipples that, when aroused, stood out like enlarged California golden raisins. And at the center of her femininity she had this little rosebud that seemed to have a life of its own. It was almost like a little warm mouth that would reach up and grab me and take me in and make my, uh, my heart swell.”
* * *
One portentous evening, the newlyweds were enjoying drinks at the Mocambo on Sunset Strip when Frank Sinatra approached, all smiles.
“Hey, why didn’t I meet you before Mickey?” asked Frank, clasping the Mick’s hand and giving Ava what came to be known as “the look.” “Then I could have married you myself!”
What a strange thing to say, thought Ava. She smiled but said nothing. She had seen Frank around the MGM lot, and pianist Skitch Henderson even introduced them one day between soundstages. She also told a friend that, as a teen in Newport News, Virginia, she had seen the singer perform with Tommy Dorsey. He was her dream idol, she said.
There were few kept secrets in Hollywood. Everyone knew Frank’s wife, his kids, and his proclivities. Mickey and Frank chatted some—they were pals—and when he returned to the band, Frank Sinatra dedicated his first number to Mrs. Ava Rooney. What would Mama say about that? she wondered.
Copyright © 2015 by John Brady