Celebrity Gossip / By Liz Smith
No one like Ava Gardner
"Whether you are born with it or catch it from a drinking fountain, she had it!”
That was a line from the 1954 movie “The Barefoot Contessa” starring Ava Gardner.
The talky-but-brilliant Joe Mankiewicz script of “Contessa” sure did capture the nature of that elusive quality, the “little something extra” that makes a star. (As well as the sweaty PR machinations that manufacture a star.)
Of course, Ava Gardner had considerably more than “a little something extra.” She was the total deluxe package; so beautiful in the flesh it seemed inconceivable that she was for real. And she was the real deal as an earthy dame, too.
I was reminded of the above quote when I opened up the big new photo book, “But That’s Another Story: A Photographic Retrospective of Milton Greene.”
There’s an incredible early ’50s shot of Ava right up front, full page. She is wearing a huge picture hat and a red silk blouse tied up around that fabulous midsection. The photo is so glorious it made me stop and remember Ava, the North Carolina bombshell, on-screen and off. Onscreen, she was so much better an actress than critics or she herself ever acknowledged. Watch “Mogambo,” “Show Boat,” “Bhowani Junction,” “On the Beach,” “The Night of the Iguana,” and tell me this is not a powerful and moving performer. But she would always say, “I’m a lousy actress, I do it for the money, honey.”
My offscreen encounters with Ava came late in her career, during the 1974 filming of George Cukor’s ill-fated musical, “The Blue Bird.” This curiosity also starred Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda and Cicely Tyson. I was already an old acquaintance of Elizabeth, having practically lived with the Burtons during some of their world travels. She was no problem. Once you got to know her.
Ava, however, couldn’t be cornered. She hated the press. If you wrote, you were the enemy. (This animus toward reporters is something she shared with her great love, Frank Sinatra.) So she just wouldn’t sit still for any kind of interview during the long, long production, during which the fragile Elizabeth — naturally — came down with a near-fatal case of dysentery! (The food was pretty bad.)
I got a lot of Ava info from the gossip grapevine — she was picking up Russian taxi drivers, she was causing a commotion here or there. At that point in her life, Ava had moved to London; she’d had enough of being an American expatriate in Spain. I don’t know how many of these “Blue Bird” tales were true or just based on her exotic playgirl image.
So, Miss Gardner and I passed like ships in the night at the hotel where cast and crew (and pesky reporters) were lodged. Ava once stopped me on the back stairs, wearing her Southern Comfort sweat shirt and said, “Liz we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” She was polite, because we shared a common friend, St. Clair Pugh, who grew up with Ava in North Carolina. He was always trying to convince Ava that I was not the devil, despite my occupation.
But having a conversation with Ava was not to be. Still, she was something. Something else! There will never be another like her.
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