Hollywood has seen its fair share of scandalous affairs that have rocked the industry.

Ava
Gardner was legendary for her beauty, her classic Hollywood films — and her tumultuous love
life. She won the hearts of movie audiences and some of Hollywood’s most famous leading
men. Ava was a ‘knockout’, possibly the sexiest woman ever to grace a movie screen.

Why was Ava Gardner Hollywood’s Most Alluring Femme Fatale?

Ava Gardner: The Firecracker Femme Fatale

“The Most Irresistible Woman in Hollywood”

Ava Gardner knew how to pose for the camera. She’d slit her eyes, throw her head at an angle,
and the photographer would somehow catch something about her — not elegance or grace,
exactly, but something that was strong, sexual, and almost animal, as if she were zeroing in
on you, weighing your merits, and readying to pounce. And for most of the ’40s and ’50s, she
was Hollywood’s most alluring femme fatale, an image solidified both on and off the screen.

Those eyes, those exotic, made-for-stardom eyes — the way they slit lustily for the lens, the
way they’re crowned by devilishly perfect brows — can do strange things to a mere mortal
man. They’re mesmerizing, penetrating, wounding. They could well be sizing you up and
saying, “Go ahead, big guy, I dare you to make a move.”

The word “beautiful” isn’t bold enough to encompass Ava Gardner. To say Ava Gardner was
beautiful is to say Frank Sinatra had a nice voice or Picasso did a pretty good job with oils. No,
Ava Gardner went beyond beautiful into the realm of grandeur, or, as People magazine
proclaimed after her death in 1990, she was the “last goddess.” And to think those exotic,
made-for-stardom eyes were made down-home, in Grabtown, where tobacco grows and the
horizon is no higher than the tallest loblolly pine.

Ava Gardner was, in the words of second husband Artie Shaw, “the most beautiful creature
you ever saw.” She was also, according to costar Deborah Kerr, “funny and rich and warm and
human.” But Gardner also had a wandering spirit, with a reckless streak and an insatiable
appetite for booze and boys that would often lead to the most glamorous sort of disaster.

Her life was filled with lust, love, and late-night shenanigans.

There was her long entanglement with a snooping Howard Hughes, as well as flings with
bullfighters, Robert Taylor, Mel Tormé, David Niven, John F. Kennedy, Steve McQueen, an
abusive George C. Scott, and an unsuccessful attempt to lure Robert Stack into a foursome (he
suddenly got a stomachache).

And then there was her beloved Francis—Gardner’s third husband, Frank Sinatra. Their fights
were legendary, and their make-ups loud.
This straightforward, sassy broad would challenge and terrify both men and women her entire
life—including supposed tough guy Robert Mitchum, her former flame and costar. Years after
their on-set affair, a friend would tell Mitchum that Gardner was arriving shortly. “Ava
Gardner! No, no—don’t tell her I’m here!” Mitchum apparently replied. “If I get together with
Ava, I’m done for.”

The shining star the world knows as Ava Lavinia Gardner had a holiday beginning, born
Christmas Eve 1922, the youngest of seven children. As sparkly as her life would become, it
had a most spartan start.

Her father, Jonas Gardner, was a hard-up tenant farmer. Ava’s girlhood home is about eight
miles southeast of Smithfield; the two-story farmhouse where she was born and spent the
first two years of her life still stands, and is still lived in, at the corner of Grabtown and Avenue
roads. The view from the porch is much the same, too: farm fields flecked with flue-cured
tobacco barns and edged by piney woods. When fire destroyed the family’s barn and cotton
gin, the Gardners moved to the nearby “teacherage,” a boarding home for women teachers
at the local Brogden School, where Ava’s mom worked as a cook and housekeeper. Her father,
stripped of his farm property, later died of bronchitis when Ava was 15 years old.

She was beautiful but without talent, always “picked last” for the school plays the same way
that I was “picked last” for every team that didn’t have the word “math” in its title.

As a teenager, Ava was quite the head-turner, especially on those summer days at Holts Lake
when swim attire accentuated her physique.

At 17, Ava took the train to New York City to visit her older sister, Beatrice, who was 19 years
her senior and married to a professional photographer named Larry Tarr. Tarr clicked off
glamour shots of his sister-in-law and displayed them in his studio window. A moon-eyed
passerby, who wanted a date with that teen angel in the window, suggested sending the shots
to the MGM film studios. Tarr figured, why not? Ava might have been content to carry on with
secretarial classes back home in North Carolina, get married, raise a family, and cook great
fried chicken like her mother did, but MGM saw an exquisiteness that begged to be in pictures.
The talent scouts called her back up to the big city for an interview and screen test.

Ava’s mother had her misgivings, as any mother would, but the baby of the family went out
for her big audition. Her Southern drawl was thicker than Clark Gable’s hair tonic. Nobody
could much understand her, and, bless her heart, she was just plain awkward on screen.
Acting? Well … it needed work. And those eyes, those mesmerizing, penetrating, wounding
eyes, they laser-beamed through every soul in the room — a “flash of hypnotic fire.”

Realizing that Gardner couldn’t act and couldn’t speak in a way that people North of the
Mason-Dixon line could understand, the New York office arranged for her to shoot a silent
screen test. She looked to the left, she looked the right, then she walked around just enough
to show off a spectacular pair of legs, purportedly prompting the MGM bosses in Hollywood
to exclaim “She’s can’t act; she didn’t talk; she’s sensational! Get her out here!”
Gardner was signed to a standard seven-year contract at $50 a week, but that didn’t mean
she was a star. MGM signed hundreds of beautiful girls every year to similar contracts: Some
would go on to make varsity, and some were just there to share private moments to the
coaches, as it were. Gardner was somewhere between these two, given walk-on roles in B
pictures but rarely allowed to speak, even as she slaved to rid herself of her Southern twang.

When not playing a pretty face in the background, the publicity office made ample use of her
looks, putting her in the publicity materials for films in which she may or may not have
appeared. She also posed for a ton of “leg art,” a.k.a. pin-ups, which the studio would print en
masse and use in generalized publicity campaigns. These pin-ups required Gardner to pose in
all sorts of weird and faux sexy ways.

What’s even more fascinating then air-humping, however, is that Gardner was stuck as a B-
girl despite the fact that she was married to the biggest star at MGM — bigger than Clark
Gable, bigger than Joan Crawford. For when Gardner arrived on the studio lot in 1941, she had
become the immediate target of one Mickey Rooney, who, at all of 21, had been Hollywood’s
biggest box office draw for three years running.

Even in the midst of performing, Rooney noticed the befuddled beauty and made a beeline
for her in his clomping high heels. “Everything in me stopped,” he would write in his memoir
“My heart. My breathing. My thinking.”

He may have been far from a hottie, but he had quite the reputation for his sexual exploits,
and he honed in on Ava Gardner with an animalistic fervor. He asked her out on a date. He
was so not her type. He asked again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Finally, likely
out of pure exhaustion, she said, well, all right. Then came the huge diamond ring. Then came
the Hollywood marriage. Then, 17 maddening months later, came the Hollywood divorce.

Then came two more Hollywood marriages — to band leader Artie Shaw (she was wife No. 5
out of 8), and to crooner Frank Sinatra — only to end in two more Hollywood divorces. She
called Sinatra the love of her life, despite their unholy matrimony of cheating, fighting, and
much martini drinking.

The legendary love story of Gardner and her inamorato Frank Sinatra began with a bang. In
the fall of 1949, the very married and very drunk Sinatra convinced an equally inebriated
Gardner to leave a Palm Springs party hosted by studio head Darryl Zanuck with him. They
sped into the night, until they reached the quiet town of Indio. After a sloppy make-out
session, Sinatra brought out two guns and began to shoot out streetlights. A titillated Ava
joined suit and shot out the window of a hardware store. The night ended with the pair
brought into the station by armed cops, who were then paid off by the studio.

She was the very embodiment of femme fatale: mysterious, dangerous, brutally blunt,
irresistible. Men, regardless of their money and might, pursued her at their own peril.
Consider the intense courting from eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. The two never
married, but she ended up smashing a marble ashtray on his head in one famous fight,
knocking him flat out and nearly killing him.
Gardner had always been a fighter — she and Hughes had thrown things at each other all the
time, and she and Shaw routinely got in screaming matches. But she and Sinatra fought on an
entirely different level, in part because Gardner’s career was soaring while Sinatra’s was
hanging around in the toilet.

Obviously this was a recipe for disaster. It’s like Gardner was the gorgeous high-powered CEO
going off to make millions every day, and Sinatra was the mopey yet talented boyfriend who
sat at home in his underwear, eating cereal with whiskey for breakfast.

The fact that she had already gone not just one husband only helped to amplify the image, as
did the string of similarly femme fatale-ish roles that followed. This girl had a devilish look in
her eye, was clearly bad news, could drink you under the table, and could steal every man in
sight. But oh my actual god was she beautiful.

Despite her love-hate relationships with some of the most famous men of the 20th century,
Hollywood would have a long, prosperous marriage to Ava Gardner. The camera loved her
unconditionally, and by extension, America loved her. After her breakthrough 1946 movie,
The Killers, she became a box office go-to girl. She was in pin-ups. She was on the cover of
Time. She was in movies with the biggest hunks in Hollywood. Clark Gable. Gregory Peck. Burt
Lancaster. Cary Grant. Humphrey Bogart. Not bad for a girl who grew up eating her mother’s
fried chicken and saying “y’all” down on Grabtown Road.

Her picture was all over the fan magazines, while her personal life and stream of boyfriends
provided ample dish for the gossip columns.

Whichever was the case, MGM realized it had a huge star on its hands, immediately casting
her in a string of pictures and donning her “the second-look girl.”

Ava never made a big fuss about her life in the limelight. Why, she never even wanted to put
on lipstick when she was home, and she certainly didn’t want to dress up. “She was never in
front of the mirror primping. To sum her up, when she was around family, she was family.”

Gardner first met patrician Grace Kelly, the future Princess of Monaco, on the sultry, sexually-
charged Kenyan set of Mogambo, in 1952. The outwardly uptight Kelly was initially appalled
by Gardner and tag-along Sinatra’s antics in the tent that cast and crew shared, telling one
friend, “Ava is such a mess it’s unbelievable.”

But Gardner’s free-spirited sense of fun soon won over Kelly, who also began a passionate
affair with hard-drinking leading man Clark Gable. Soon, Kelly was trying to keep up with her
costars— “after a few drinks she usually ended up turning pink and running into the bushes to
vomit.”

The two beauties took a madcap trip to Rome, Kelly now suffering a severe case of hero
worship. Gardner apparently insisted they visit a brothel, and an intrigued Kelly went along.
“By the end of the tour, the demure Grace Kelly had even found a boyfriend at one place and
had dragged him into the backseat of the taxi for some heavy necking.”
Gardner and Kelly would remain friends for the rest of their lives. The princess would even
attempt to set up her friend with Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who she claimed was a very
“forceful lover.” Gardner was decidedly grossed out by Onassis, though; she “whispered to
Grace that not even a good whipping could make her change her mind, and slipped away.”

And here’s where Gardner’s life takes a sweet turn. She divorces Sinatra and moves
permanently to Spain, which she had fallen in love with during the filming of Contessa. Having
at this point appeared in no less than three Hemingway adaptations (Kilimanjaro, and as Lady
Brett in The Sun Also Rises) she becomes BFF with Papa himself. Hemingway introduces her
to all sorts of bullfighters, the hottest of whom she seduces full-on Lady Brett-style. She
accompanied Hemingway to his villa in Cuba, and after skinny-dipping in the pool, Hemingway
ordered his staff “The water is never to be emptied.”

Gardner continued to appear in films through the ’60s, most notably The Night of the Iguana,
where she hung out with Dick and Liz and 5,000 paparazzi, and The Bible, where she drove
George C. Scott so mad with desire that he had to be locked inside his trailer.

Like the other sirens of the classic era, she slowly faded into obscurity, eventually resorting to
appearances on Knot’s Landing and obscure low-budget films in order to pay the bills.

It was in London where the shining star the world knew as Ava Lavinia Gardner withered up
and flickered out. After a lifetime of smoking and hard living, she suffered from emphysema
and, in 1986, suffered two strokes that left her paralyzed and bedridden. On January 25, 1990,
terribly weakened by pneumonia, she died at the age of 67.

Ava Gardner lit the world on fire with her breathtaking beauty and fiery spirit. She was raised
as a farmer’s daughter near Smithfield. She transformed herself into a Hollywood starlet, a
crooner’s wife, and a legacy. The world will never forget her. And we will never stop
remembering — she was ours.

Color Codes:
-Title
-A general introduction. The most striking sentences related to the theme of the text.
-A thought-provoking conclusion, a philosophical reflection on the character in question.
Farewell.
-Introduction. A summary introduction of the person. What they were famous for, what they
thought of them, what they stood for. About 500-600 words.
-Biography: Life story with spicy stories and background information.
-Basically, the main story line. Continuous development of the same theme as the title. The
climax of the story itself.