Hell, I suppose if you stick around long enough they have to say something nice about you.
- Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story
Ava Gardner was a hard-drinking, wisecracking, libidinous vamp, a liberated woman before it was even invented.
It's an extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman. She swore like a drunken sailor, slept with anything that moved, drove Frank Sinatra to such heights of passion and torment that he attempted suicide, and entirely failed to care what anybody thought of her.
Ava Gardner was an actress who starred in some good films and some not very good films; but more than that she was the great iconic beauty of her day. She wafted around the screen and was featured on the front covers of magazines looking untouchable in pearls and mink. And yet she behaved like a man or, at least, like a certain kind of man - one with pots of cash, a taste for hard liquor and a higher-than-average libido.
She was, in essence, a liberated woman, a good two decades before women's liberation was invented. Her success and status made it possible for her to make the kind of choices - and mistakes - that other women couldn't. And, even now, there's really nobody who can match her combination of carnality, glamour and a potty-mouth.
Sixty years on, people claim that Sex and the City's Samantha Jones is the figment of a gay, male scriptwriter's imagination, but compare it to this story from Murray Garrett, a press photographer, recounting a backstage photo-call: 'This one idiot guy ... says to her, "Hey Ava, Sinatra's career is over, he can't sing any more ... what do you see in this guy? He's just a 119-pound has-been." And Ava says, very demurely, no venom, just very cool, in the most perfect ladylike diction, "Well I'll tell you - 19 pounds is cock."'
She married three times - to Mickey Rooney (a serial cheater), the musician Artie Shaw (who belittled her) and finally and most tumultuously to Frank Sinatra. She lured him away from his wife, sinking his career in the process, married him, divorced him, but never got over him. Nor he her. It was a life-long relationship between two people who loved each other but couldn't be together. Their rows, she said, 'started on the way to the bidet'.
Instead, Gardner had affairs. They litter her life. She slept with David Niven, Robert Mitchum, John F Kennedy. She had flings with Spanish bullfighters and Mexican beach boys and rejected Howard Hughes, the multi-millionaire aviator and womaniser.
What made Gardner who she was? It's the great, unanswered question of her life and career. There is nothing in the early years to suggest her character to come. Not the tomboyish childhood spent with her family among the ordinary rural poor of north Carolina; nor the moment when an MGM studio exec spotted her portrait in the window of a photographer's shop; nor even when she married Mickey Rooney, the studio's biggest star.
It is as if her character wasn't so much revealed over time, as forged in the furnaces of Hollywood's industrial complex.There are countless testimonies from other Hollywood stars to Gardner's beauty, but almost no sense of her as a person. She gradually turns from object to subject, her beauty her defining characteristic and the key to her power and freedom but also, as her favourite director, John Huston, says, a curse from the gods. 'Ava,' he said, 'has well and truly paid for her beauty.'
Her high spirits descend into alcoholic abuse; her wanton behaviour into episodes such as the one when she is banned from the Ritz in Madrid for urinating in the lobby; when she moves to live out her days in the relative anonymity of a London flat it is with a sinking heart that you realise that the woman who charmed Ernest Hemingway and Robert Graves should become so isolated.
She made some truly terrible choices, including turning down the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate and ending her days making schlock TV. She was careless of her art, under-confident about her talent and tended to be taken at her own measure. But ultimately, it's besides the point. Gardner's genius was not her work, but, as her own autobiographical book proves, her life.
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#NY THIS Saturday 4/15 at 7:30pm EST
With just added #Brooklyn icon Jenny Gorelick & artist Camille Tagami!
Comedy by
Phoebe Robinson (HBO)
Joe Kwaczala (Comedy Central)
Sonia Denis (Adult Swim)
Jessica Sele (VICELAND)
Jenny Gorelick
Animation by
Christina Ogbotiti
Celina Bertoncini
Emmett Goodman
Jason Chatfield
Camille Tagami
Ray Alma
Hosted by
Samantha Ruddy
TICKETS:
LIVE SHOW: $10 pre-sale, $15 day-of/at the door
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/picture-this-live-animated-comedy-tickets-543343092817?aff=odcleoeventsincollection
at Union Hall (702 Union St, Brooklyn, NY 11215)
Proof of vaccination required to attend live show.
Masking HIGHLY encouraged when not actively eating or drinking.
21+, Street Parking available, ride share encouraged
LIVESTREAM ONLY: $10 online
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/livestream-only-picture-this-415-live-from-new-york-tickets-600950096917
*Not all performers guaranteed to be on the livestream
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