His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [85]
Jacobson was so taken with what he saw that he requested that the eighteen-year-old beauty be delivered to MGM’s New York office the next day for a screen test. Ava arrived with a southern accent so thick it sounded as if she were speaking in a foreign language.
“Ahuhm Ahvuh Gahdnah,” she said, drawing out her vowels until each one seemed to consist of several syllables.
The New York producer filming her turned off the audio and sent a silent print to California so they could at least see what she looked like before they heard her speak. Louis B. Mayer was bewitched and sent for her at once.
On August 23, 1941, Ava arrived in Hollywood. She was tested again, this time with sound.
“What do you do down there in Smithfield, North Carolina?” she was asked.
“Ahuh jes’ wen’ rown peekin’ bogs oaf tabaccah plains,” she said.
It took the producer several minutes to realize that she had said, “I just went around picking bugs off tobacco plants.”
“She can’t act, she can’t talk, but she’s a terrific piece of merchandise,” said George Sidney, the MGM producer in charge of selecting new talent for the studio.
Metro signed Ava to a seven-year contract and turned her over to the studio voice coach, Lillian Burns, whose elocution lessons over the next few years purged the broad southern drawl. Still, Ava appeared only as an extra in walk-ons and supporting roles until 1945, when the studio began grooming her to be a movie queen.
By the time she came into Frank Sinatra’s life, she was no longer a gawky innocent from the South. She had been seasoned by marriages to Mickey Rooney (1942) and bandleader Artie Shaw (1945), each of which lasted less than a year. She said the only tangible asset she received from either divorce was two years of analysis financed by Artie Shaw, which left her more confused than ever. “I don’t want to read any more books on neurosis,” she said. “Artie fed me that crap, and I’m so damned mixed up as a result, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Artie was a monster with great intellectual pretensions,” said Jo-Carroll Silvers. “He just destroyed her, as he did many other beautiful women. As a result, I think Ava, who was Artie’s fourth wife, spent the rest of her life trying to get back at men. She was sexually uninhibited, wild, all kinds of goodies and quick. You couldn’t get ahold of her. She was gone and off with somebody else before you knew where you were. She was cruel that way, but so was Frank.”
With her full lips and alluring eyes, Ava Gardner radiated accessibility, sending off signals of sweet and succulent sex, a rare commodity in a repressed era. She seemed to offer the promise of erotic nights and untrammeled sex. Hers was not the soft, round cornucopia of sex of Marilyn Monroe. This lithe beauty had no little-girl overtones, no extravagant padding. Although lean and spare, she was all woman—sensuous, ripe, seasoned. Ava was the mystery woman from out of town who would be loved for a night and whose name would never be learned. And Frank had been mesmerized from the first time he ever saw her.
“I still remember when she made the cover of some magazine,” recalled Nick Sevano. “Frank looked at it and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’ It was during the Dorsey days, and I wasn’t about to remind him that he was already married.”
Frank took an apartment in the Sunset Towers, where Axel Stordahl and Sammy Cahn also lived. “We’d yell back and forth to one another,” said Sammy, “and guess who was living down below? If you looked down from Frank’s terrace, you’d see, across the street, a series of little houses, one of them owned by Tom Kelly, a noted interior decorator; the occupant of that house was Ava Gardner. Just for mischief, Frank and I would stick our heads out the window and yell her name.”
Ava never answered. She had met Frank at MGM and was not impressed. According to her friend, Ruth Rosenthal (Mrs. Milton Berle): “Ava disliked Frank intensely. She kept saying that