The Daily Record

AVA'S GOT IT - SHE'S MAGNIFICENT - Bio-beauty, so to speak," said Rudyard Kipling, "nor biologists, philosophers, poets and Hollywood casting directors for years have sought a good tight definition of sex appeal. About the closest they have come is that this agreeable human characteristic is both psychological and physical. 'Tisn't good talk necessarily. It's just IT." And everybody agrees Ava has IT. From any angle, any view and any perspective, Ava has an over-abundance. These four pictures in varying poses speak for themselves.

AVA LOYAL TO THE HOMEFOLKS
The Truth About Ava Gardner
This is the ninth in a series of articles on Ava Gardner, the Goddess of Love from Johnston County.
Copyright 1955 by the New York Daily News.

By JESS STEARN
Ava Gardner talks rather disparagingly about her acting ability and indicates that she preferred motherhood to the movies.

Ava's getting into movies was a fluke. "I was much better equipped for having babies," she says philosophized.
She had managed a year at Atlantic Christian College, near home, studying as a secretary. At 18, she came to New York, looking for a secretarial job, and stayed with her sister Beatrice, and Beatrice's then husband, photographer Larry Tarr.

BROTHER-IN-LAW
SENT PICTURES OUT
Tarr through his young sister-in-law was the best-looking thing he had seen. He enthusiastically took pictures of her and sent several to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer representatives here. They rhapsodized over her face and figure, but groaned when she opened her pretty mouth.
The North Carolina drawl was so thick they couldn't make out who she was when she said, "Ahm A-a-a-Vuh Gahd-nuh." She dropped Gs like magnolia blossoms in an April storm, there were no Rs in her vocabulary.
However, the impact of her lush beauty was so great, scouts made a silent test and sent it out to the Coast anyway.
The story goes that an accompanying message read:
(Continued on Page Two)
THE DAILY RECORD, DUNN, N. C.

AVA WITH NO. 1 AND NO. 2 - The Goddess of Love is pictured at left with Mickey Rooney, No. 1, and at the right with Artie Shaw, husband No. 2. She's now separated from No. 3, and rumor has it that Howard Hughes, the multi-millionaire, is No. 4.

The Truth About Ava
She's sensational."

Sister Beatrice, who later divorced Tarr, went with Ava to Hollywood, where she signed a $50-a-week stock contract one week and met Mickey Rooney the next.

After 13 years of seeing the world, the 31-year-old actress looks back on the Rooney marriage as ridiculous, saying they were both "babies." However she still sees the pint-sized actor whenever they are in the same town. "He likes to come and tell me about his work," she says. "He has such great talent. He is just finding himself after MGM practically ruined him. They milked him dry. Now he has a chance to replenish himself and, you'll see, he'll be greater than ever."

Ava suspects that she married Mickey because he made her feel wanted. At 21, he was also Hollywood's No. 1 boxoffice star, and the luster of his position probably did nothing to hurt his cause.

Mickey Didn't Laugh At Her

"I remember wondering what he could have seen in me," Ava recalls. "He was the first guy I'd met that I didn't figure was laughing at me."

They were married in January 1942, after a six-month courtship, and were divorced the following year. "In the year or so they were together," a friend reports, "they must have had at least two weeks of happiness. Mickey was fiercely assertive, making up in aggressiveness what he lacked in height."

The undersized Rooney actually came up to Ava's chin. However Hollywood wiseacres described him as being "knee-high" to his willowy wife, and the bad gag had movieland busting its sides.

Two years after the Rooney split, Ava, still an unknown, was discovered by moody bandleader Artie Shaw. Ava had never known anybody like Shaw before.

"He was always quoting from Shakespeare, Proust, Plato, Plutarch—and Shaw (Artie)," a mutual friend reports, and Ava thought him fascinatingly wise. She wasn't sophisticated enough at the time to realize that poor Artie was only trying desperately to build up his own ego as an intellectual, which, of course, he wasn't."

Whatever assurance Ava was beginning to develop was flattened with Artie. He kept telling her how stupid she was," a friend recalls, "and kept bringing home books for her to read."

On their honeymoon, for Ava's edification, the bandleader brought along a stack of books, including Tolstoy's "War and Peace," "Das Kapital" by Marx, and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain."

She Feared She Was A Moron

"I thought I'd never finish that damn book," Ava can now say with a grin.

During the Shaw ordeal, Ava dropped 20 pounds, from 126 to 106, and couldn't retain her food.

"She was also convinced by now that she was a moron, pure and simple," an intimate relates. "However, friends suggested an IQ test to determine whether she really was as moronic as Artie kept insisting—even if the timing was a little extraordinary."

Writing the best piece on Rubinstein we've read yet, Columnist Earl Wilson quotes from The Good Book, which says, "Judge not that ye be not judged."... As we see it, aside from the tremendous human interest angles, a story like that serves a purpose in that it focuses attention away from the more boring economic and defense problems... We never met Rubinstein, for which we have absolutely no regrets, but somebody pointed him out to us once in a New York night club he had three girls at his table that night... And they were all young beautiful babes... It was at Ruban Bleu's swank joint... There's a new recording out on "The Tennessee Waltz."
Intimate. The result showed her considerably above average, but she refused to believe it. Artie had been so positive."

Ava's productive phase in pictures didn't begin until after her divorce from Shaw in 1946, exactly one year after the marriage. She started getting psychoanalysis, which partially restored her deflated ego. And, as she points out, "I had to work to pay the psychiatrist." Through psychiatry, she hoped to build up a set of standards by which she could better judge people in the future, particularly prospective husbands. Considering the Sinatra fiasco, it hasn't worked out that way.