The Farmer's Daughter

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The men in her life are mostly tight-lipped about their memories. Back home in North Carolina, a boy who used to squire her will only say that she was a nice little country girl with a better-than-average figure. Husband No. 1, brash little Mickey Rooney, declares stiffly: "I have a code of ethics, and it doesn't include talking about my ex-wives." Husband No. 2, Bandleader Artie Shaw, says: "She is a nice girl. I feel complete detachment." Potential Husband No. 3, Crooner Frank Sinatra (now on the hunt for a divorce), is on record as saying only that she is "terrific." Only one of the men who have pursued her does not share this impassioned discretion. Spanish Bullfighter Mario Cabre freely expressed his feelings at her departure from Madrid last spring in a book of poems. Excerpt:

In my breast you will still remain

With a throbbing that recalls you.

London will see you arriving,

With your waist slim like the palm tree.

In my troubled silence

Cries will pierce deeper within me . . .

The palm-slim waist as well as the effusive adulation belong to a green-eyed, reddish-haired young woman in the bare shade of 30 named Ava Lavinia Gardner. Movie bigwigs, whose vocabularies are more limited, put their praises in calmer terms than Serior Cabre. But from the Olympian executives in the Bel Air hills to the plebeian pressagents down on Wilshire Boulevard, the consensus is that Ava Gardner may well turn out to be the best thing for Hollywood since the late Jean Harlow.

The Ancient Question. Ava's open affair with a married man--following Ingrid Bergman's escapade with Roberto Rossellini and Rita Hayworth's fling with Aly Khan--has inevitably reawakened in some quarters the ancient question about Hollywood morals. It has brought her some censure (one letter writer habitually addresses her as "Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner"). Yet it actually seems to be helping, rather than hurting, her earning power. Reports Columnist Sidney Skolsky solemnly: "Ava worried. She lost weight. But now she has found that scandal can't hurt her." Her current picture, Show Boat, is breaking box-office records across the country. In Lone Star, Metro cast her opposite Clark Gable, still one of the greatest favors in its power to bestow, and it has two more important pictures lined up for her. Other studios are clamoring to borrow her services.

The swirling eddy of interest around Ava Gardner is no fluke. Though Hollywood's rulers, whose egos are as tender as a redhead's complexion, are understandably reluctant to admit it, the movies have had to take up arms against a sea of troubles. Recovered from the first shock but still haunted by the specter of TV, beset by mounting production costs, harried by a falling box office, Hollywood is also facing an unexpected shortage in its most vital commodity of all--the mysterious attraction that everybody recognizes but no one has ever .been able to label more accurately than glamor, or oomph, or It.

The Search. Hollywood's busy talent scouts, like eunuchs seeking recruits for a vast harem, are still searching high & low--at drug counters and in dramatic schools, at debutantes' parties and in back alleys--for the girl with that irresistible appeal. The girls in the Hollywood harem today are, inch for inch, at least as voluptuous as their predecessors. But that jaded sultan--the U.S. public--has lately been turning his head away with a yawn.

In the massive array of promising eyes, perfect legs and pneumatic bosoms, he finds nothing that can quite match his favorites of yesteryear--Theda Bara, the archetype of the Vamp; Gloria Swanson, with her passion for spangles and feathers; Clara Bow, the original "It" girl; Greta Garbo, the incomparable Swede, still a legend after a decade off the screen; Jean Harlow, whose platinum-blonde petulance and provocative lisp still agitate nostalgic memories in thousands of aging males.

From Tallahassee to Timbuktu, they set the fashion in clothes, kisses, hairdos and seduction. For years, they were adored more fervently than Cleopatra or Jenny Lind. For years, they ruled the dreams of the world.

What happened to glamor, to oomph, to It?

Buiclcs & Fluff. Some cinemoguls and movie fans claim that there is such a thing as too much glamor: the public may have become bored with the endless succession of hopeful newcomers, as shiny, as well-curved, and as indistinguishable from their rivals as a fleet of new Buicks just off the assembly line. Says a Chicago movie executive : "TV, magazines and billboards give us so many big busts and split skirts that we feel at home with this kind of glamor. We like it, but nobody gets very excited about it." Moviemaster Cecil B. DeMille has a different answer: "Stars today are little fluffs of femininity put together by make-up men."

There is another reason, and perhaps the biggest of all: the life of the movie star, the nation's uncrowned royalty, has undergone some drastic changes.

Two decades ago Hollywood was Babylon cum Samarkand cum Coney Island. The mind swayed like a prop palm before a wind machine; reason lay limp on the cutting-room floor. Pola Negri walked her leashed leopard cub. through the streets; Bessie Love drove a lavender-colored limousine ; Marion Davies* brought a marble bridge from Italy to span her 80-ft., saltwater swimming pool; and Dolores Del Rio let it be known that she drank only from a golden chalice. Even discounting the pressagents' fevered imaginations, it was a wondrously gaudy existence.

Sunset & Main. Hollywood still strains the outsider's credulity and the insider's nerves. It still has more feuds than Tennessee, more phonies than Times Square, queerer logic than Wonderland, and stranger mores than almost any place in or out of this world. But, fearful of its reputation--which at times has been several degrees below zero--it knocks itself out trying to convince the world that Sunset Boulevard is just an extension of Main Street. For the past decade, the U.S. has been flooded with pictures of stars scrubbing their floors, baking cakes, sewing clothes and doing everything but breastfeeding their own babies. At a recent meeting of Hollywood pressagents, Producer William (Forever Amber) Perlberg scolded: "You have taken the glamor out of the business . . . Would you want to go to the theater and pay money to see the girl next door?"

Some Hollywood bigwigs, notably MGM's Dore Schary, welcome the glamor recession: they feel that the public has matured intellectually as well as morally, that today not the star but the screenplay's the thing. But the majority of producers insist that what Hollywood needs is a return to the oldest lure of all. They are taking hasty steps to reglamorize their "properties." Typical recent case: Darryl F. Zanuck ordered Jeanne Grain out of her demure aprons and put her into bathing suits, which she fills more than adequately. And they are searching feverishly for the girl who can put glamor back in business.

Between such fixed but aging stars as Irene Dunne, 43, Joan Crawford, 43, Loretta Young, 38, and the swarming clouds of hopeful young starlets, a constellation of new stars is emerging. Among them:

Esther Williams, 29, who has risen from the watery mediocrity of a dozen swimming pictures to become the nation's No. 2 female box-office star (No. 1: Betty Grable, 34). From Chillicothe, Ohio to South America to Hong Kong, moviegoers have enthusiastically succumbed to her smiling, wholesome, dismayingly athletic but very American brand of sex.

Betty Mutton, 30, who sang, shouted and bounced her way to the top in the musicomedy field.

Elizabeth Taylor, 19, an authentic beauty with eyes like melting diamonds who can, given the right direction, almost act. Her latest and best part: the rich girl in A Place in the Sun, movie version of Dreiser's American Tragedy.

Shelley Winters, 28, a slangy Brooklyn blonde who is the freshest and most promising of Hollywood newcomers. After two years of hip-swinging parts, she finally got a serious role in A Place in the Sun, in which, with stationary hips and considerable skill, she plays a drab little factory girl.

Jennifer Jones, 31, carefully groomed by Husband David Selznick ever since The Song of Bernadette for top dramatic roles, has serious ambitions as an actress. Her next part: Sister Carrie, opposite Sir Laurence Olivier. Notable offscreen achievement: her recent tour of Korea, visiting over 4,000 wounded soldiers, -with none of the publicity ballyhoo that usually attends Hollywood's overseas missions of mercy.

Susan Hayward, 32, a pert-nosed, durable redhead who after 29 routine pictures is being molded to super siren parts. Her current picture: David and Bathsheba.

Linda Darnell, 29, who started in pictures at 16 as "the most physically perfect girl in Hollywood" (her pressagent's tribute), rose through the obvious, slinky assignments to sex-with-humor (A Letter to Three Wives) and creditable straight acting (No Way Out). Her next: Saturday Island.

Virginia Mayo, 28, in the classic tradition of Hollywood cheesecake, whose body has been referred to by the Sultan of Morocco as "the most striking proof of God's existence." From bathing beauty parts she has recently been switched to juicier--and more heavily clothed--adventure roles. Her current: virtuous Lady Barbara in Captain Horatio Hornblower.

Most of the stars in this constellation rose, if not from rags to riches, at least from muskrat to mink. They are good-looking, by & large intelligent, hard-working and talented. Yet, in the telescopes of the stargazers, none of them shows up with that special and undefinable brightness that was the glamor of Hollywood's great stars.

Does Ava Gardner?

She is far from being the most beautiful babe in the Hollywoods (her mouth is a little too large). Her figure is not the best (she is a trifle skinny and by Hollywood standards her legs are only average). Certainly few people--least of all herself--claim that she is a good actress (though she likes to think of herself as a singer).** By Hollywood standards she lives modestly (salary: $2,000 a week), enjoys few luxuries except a maid and a Cadillac (a gift from Frankie).

Yet she seems to exude the kind of allure that sets the mysterious Geiger counters which measure glamor clicking like subway turnstiles. Says Starmaker David Selznick: "She is going to be a big star. She supplies the need and hunger of a kind of glamor girl. She has a genuine glamor atmosphere." Says an Italian movie fan: "I call her the aperitif. She stimulates me."

Three Lives. A Hollywood star lives at least three different lives. One is the life on the screen. There, Ava has consistently been the coldhearted, hot-blooded enchantress, low-voiced, slow-moving, a little sleepy, every man's dish and every woman's poison.

The second is life as chronicled in the gossip columns, which pretend to take the reader into the star's boudoir and living room. In this world, Ava emerges as a femme only slightly less fatale.

And then there is the real-life Ava.

Her face looks both inviting and expectant, as if she were forever waiting for something exciting to happen. She can curse like a truck driver. She makes no secret of the fact that she likes men. She proclaims her feeling for Frank Sinatra by wearing on a chain around her neck a miniature Oscar he gave her. She claims that women are not jealous of her, pays no attention to the fact that her women friends regard her as a bit on the calculating side. She is a farmer's daughter from Smithfield, N.C. (pop. 3,678). When Ava was two, her father lost his farm and became a tenant farmer. Ava loved to run about barefoot, and is still apt to appear at parties carrying her shoes. She climbed trees and smoked cigarettes behind the barn with the boys.

Later the Gardners moved to Newport News, Va., where her father went to work in a sawmill and her mother ran a boarding house. In school the kids made fun of her. She was shy with boys. "Here I was," she says, "this strange little hillbilly ..." She went to secretarial school, and, for one year, to Atlantic Christian College. Her girlhood, she says, was full of insecurities. "What a generation. No wonder we are all neurotic and crazy."

The Face in the Window. Her oldest sister, Beatrice, was married to a New York photographer named Larry Tarr, and when17-year-old Ava came visiting in 1940, he was fascinated by his sister-in-law, shot dozens of pictures of her. Enter the agent of fate, one Barney Duhan, then a clerk in Loew's New York legal department. One day Duhan's eyes were arrested by the picture of a girl in Photographer Tarr's show window. "It was the face of the kind of girl you want to marry," recalls Duhan. "It was vibrant. I mean vibrant."

He called the Tarr studios, introducing himself as a "Metro talent scout," and asked for the girl's name & address. Her name, he heard, was Ava Gardner, and she lived down in North Carolina. Disappointed that he could not meet her, Duhan told Tarr to send some pictures over. Tarr sent 60. Metro bigwigs saw them,

Ava got a screen test, and within a few months she was on her way to Hollywood as a "starlet" at $50 a week. "It never dawned on me," she says, "that I wasn't going to be a smash right away." Apparently it never dawned on anyone to reward her discoverer: Talent Scout Duhan is now a New York City cop.

Love Comes to Andy Hardy. Starlets are among the lowest--if among the most attractive--forms of Hollywood life. They are the dress extras of paradise. Their main job is to pose for cheesecake pictures and to be ever ready to be named by the United Elevator Operators of America as the Girl They Would Most Like to Be Stuck With at the Top of the Empire State Building. That was Ava's life in Hollywood until one fateful day when someone on the M-G-M lot suggested that she might like to meet Mickey Rooney. "Why?" she asked naively.

A few days later, Rooney called her for a date. "I played it like a little lady,"

Ava recalls wickedly. "A little Southern lady. 'I'm. busy,' I told him. Busy! I didn't know a soul."

Six months later, Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner were married (over Metro Mogul Louis B. Mayer's massive opposition). The studio sent a pressagent along on the honeymoon. "When you came down to breakfast, he was there," Ava recalls bitterly. "When you had your dinner, he was there. When you went to bed, he was damn near there." It was enough to make any husband jumpy. "On our wedding night," says Ava, "Mickey was so nervous. He kept writing letters to people and walking up and down."

Sixteen months later, they were divorced. "We were babies, just children," says Ava. "Our lives were run by a lot of other people. We didn't have a chance." A veteran Hollywood gossipist sees it differently: "Ava simply outgrew Mickey."

She got a series of routine movie roles, worked hard to lose her Southern accent, finally got a solid part in Whistle Stop with George Raft. Then little Ava ran smack into a hazard relatively rare in Hollywood--an Intellect.

When she saw Bandleader Artie Shaw in a Hollywood nightclub, she was smitten at once. At that time, the only book she had ever read was Gone With the Wind. Clarinetist Shaw (an alumnus of the New Haven High School and Manhattan's lower East Side) was not satisfied with being just a bandleader ("jitterbugs are morons"), but fancied himself as a serious musician and all-round intellectual. After he married Ava, in 1945, he set out to educate her.

He took a stack of books along on their honeymoon, made her read Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Dostoevski. She took a U.C.L.A. correspondence course in economics and English literature, tackled War and Peace, The Magic Mountain ("I thought I'd never finish that damn book") and Das Kapital ("Ever since then," says a friend, "she has been spelling capital with a K").

Pygmalion-Shaw continued to hack away at his Galatea until Ava had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, went to a psychoanalyst. When Shaw finally decided that Ava was not a promising pupil, Ava acknowledged the breakup with the classically laconic comment: "He told me to leave, so I left."

Venus Observed. No one could survive two Hollywood marriages unchanged. When she married Rooney, Ava was still a slightly chunky, giggling kid who would playfully scuffle with Mickey on the living-room floor; by the time of her divorce from Shaw, she had grown sleeker, more self-possessed. She had also become tougher, more aggressive. She began to get better parts (The Killers, The Hucksters'). To go out with Ava began to be considered a distinction. She began figuring as the heroine of many a Hollywood anecdote.

When Ava was assigned to play the goddess of love in One Touch of Venus, Sculptor Joseph Nicolosi was commissioned to do a statue of her. She began posing for him in a two-piece bathing suit, but he found that this interfered with his artist's conception of the foam-born one, so Ava obligingly removed the bathing-suit top. This, said Nicolosi, after working for a while, was better, but still not satisfactory. So Ava rolled the bottom of the suit down to G-string size, and Nicolosi turned out a magnificent, realistic statue. When a studio bigwig saw it, he was horrified. "This thing has got to come to life in the picture," he cried. "For God's sake put some clothes on her." Reluctantly, Sculptor Nicolosi put his Venus in a cloak.

Her reputation as Hollywood's most irresistible female grew apace. When Robert Mitchum was assigned to a picture with her, he cautiously called the studio's head, who had once gone around with Ava, and asked if it would be all right to start dating her. The boss pondered the matter for a moment and replied that, on the contrary, it was probably a good idea: "If you don't take her out, Robbie, people will just start saying you're a little queer."

Enter Frankie. The Gardner legend flourished--and so did her box-office value. Just 19 months ago Ava ran into Frank Sinatra at a party in Palm Springs (they had met for the first time years before). Ava and Frankie left the party together and, in high good humor, rode along the main street of nearby Indio, firing a revolver out of the automobile window.

Their friendship continued to be percussive. When she was making Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in Spain, and seemed to be taken with versifying Bullfighter Cabre, Sinatra went charging to Spain and figuratively tossed the matador out of the ring (Cabre claims he failed to keep Ava because he did not speak her language, and is now fiercely learning English).

Last month, after Frankie and Ava (and a dozen reporters) finished a cozy Mexican holiday (TIME, Aug. 13), Sinatra went to work in a Reno nightclub to make some money toward his forthcoming divorce (Cracked one Hollywood wit:"He's earning while he's yearning"). Ava stayed at nearby Lake Tahoe and came to hear him sing. Sinatra meekly told the press: "I think you can safely say that Miss Gardner and I will be married."

Asked by a newsman last week to confirm a reported statement that she was through with romance, Ava replied calmly: "Why no, that must have been somebody else."

Damned Good Secretary? Ava bridles at any criticism of her conduct: "Nobody is going to run my life. Neither the studio or the press." She is indifferent to prospects of fame & big money: "Acting bores me. I have no need for money. Anyway I could always be a damn good secretary. This movie thing is not the end. This isn't what I really want. I like the simple life."

That indifference is part of her charm. Marlene Dietrich, who, at 48, is still one of the greatest glamor girls of them all, has set down three prerequisites for glamor. The first is that a star must not try too hard to woo the public, for the public reacts in the same way as a man who is chased too hard; indifferent Ava fulfills that condition. Prerequisite No. 2: a glamor girl must enjoy sex, rather than just pretend to enjoy it on the screen; Hollywood's enthusiastic consensus is that Ava Gardner fulfills that condition, too. Prerequisite No. 3: the glamor girl must have an inner authority and economy (i.e., poise). This quality Ava Gardner still lacks, but she may some day acquire it.

If she does, Ava Gardner may yet, in spite of herself, wind up bringing glamor back to Hollywood.

-*For other news of Marion Davies, see PRESS. **For her part of Julie in Show Boat, Metro dubbed in the voice of a trained contralto, used her own expressive but small voice for the M-G-M record album.

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