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Burt, who had something to say on most things, had something to say on this as well. ‘These old dames, they go on. They’re 50, they’re fading. They can’t cope. They sit in make-up chairs for five hours, with straps holding their faces up.’ After which there is just the withdrawal from public life, the darkened rooms, the small dogs walked at midnight, the booze, and the silence. Which, more or less, is the story of Ava Gardner.
It starts when, a farmer’s daughter from the mid-West, she was discovered at 17 by a talent scout who saw her picture in the window of a small-town photographer’s shop. It ends with booze and small dogs in the exile of a South Kensington flat, all directors and publicists and lovers fallen away, especially the lovers. Lee Server’s main concern is with her sex life.
Until I read his book all I knew about this was the story told by her second husband, the clarinetist Artie Shaw, in the course of a newspaper interview. Newly married, Shaw found himself impotent and went to see a doctor. The man, who seems to have known nothing about his private life, advised him to imagine he was making love to someone else, to Ava Gardner say. Shaw said he did not have the nerve to tell him that it was Ava Gardner. It is such a touching little story, and so human, but Lee Server does not mention it. His concern is with the love goddess.
First there was Mickey Rooney. Ava was 19 and a virgin, but immediately ‘her body gave proof of what for months her words and the prohibitive snap of her thighs had declared’. How does he know? More to the point, how does he know the rest of it?
She would signal her need with a smouldering look or a provocatively raised eyebrow or come to greet him in a pair of panties and nothing else. Or dispense with subtleties altogether, growling at him, ‘Let’s fuck.’ By Rooney’s reckoning she was custom designed for intercourse.
It is that kind of book, with that kind of language. The two were, of course, divorced within a year.
And then there was Artie Shaw. And Howard Hughes, whom she didn’t go to bed with because he stank and had VD; it is a very subtle book, this. And Frank Sinatra, who weighed 119 pounds, 19 pounds of which, Ava told a girl friend, was his penis, though she told Shaw, her ex-husband, that going to bed with Sinatra was like going to bed with a woman. And then, as her own film parts got bigger, her co-stars.
There was David Niven, who mourning the death of his first wife, suffered from ‘a near-perpetual erection, relief from which he found in the procreative recesses of all the alluring Hollywood females who would have him’. There’s words, as the barmaid told Dylan Thomas.
And there was Kirk Douglas, one of nature’s gentlemen, who later recalled their love for each other. ‘Being a Jew I always fasted on Yom Kippur. And let me tell you, it’s not easy to make love to Ava Gardner on an empty stomach.’
After that there were bullfighters and beachboys, and moments of advice to young actresses from a long life. One was: ‘You need to get the fuck out of Spain, because the guys all have little dicks and they’ll fuck you in the ass before you can get your panties off.’ How much of this I can believe, I’m not sure.
But something I do, and treasure, is Donald Sinden’s recollection of how she once took a bath in front of him. Nothing happened, said Sinden, because she was in the habit of stealing food from his plate, which irritated him intensely. In such moments it is the doors which bang in Asgard.
Somewhere, in between all this, films got made, most of which I have seen and cannot remember.
The NFT’s season of Ava Gardner films runs in London until 30 April.
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