Ava Gardner
φωτοδημοσίευμα 1950
Photoplay
magazine March 1950
Gallery
of Stars
Καλλονές
Θεάματα
Κινηματογραφικά
Ava Gardner
Happiness is no pose with Ava Gardner of “East Side,
West Side’’ (1949, directed by Mervyn LeRoy)
( η λεζάντα της φωτο )
Ava Gardner
Ava, you
will remember, was the kid who had everything — and nothing. Before she was
twenty, she had all the things most young girls think they want — the kind of
beauty that drives cosmeticians crazy because it cannot be improved by anything
in a jar, a starring contract at M-G-M, with the fame and fortune that go with
it, and, on a platter, the hearts of every eligible male in town. And she was
so miserable she cried herself to sleep night after night.
Three years
later she was scarred in spirit by two unsuccessful marriages, to Mickey Rooney
and Artie Shaw. Whereupon, lonely and terribly unsure of herself, Ava was ready
to look for help in any quarter where a friendly hand was extended.
Today the
frightened, lonely little girl Ava used to be is no more. Today Ava is suddenly
a woman, mature and more beautiful than ever. And she is radiantly happy.
How?
“It’s simple,”
she says, “I just found out that it’s too hard to be unhappy.”
It wasn’t
simple, of course — except in looking backward.
Ava was sick,
physically and emotionally exhausted, when she reached the turning point in her
life.
She changed,
because she couldn’t go in the old way. She had to take a good long look inside
herself, and then she had to change, deeply, adopt a whole mew attitude to
life, and a whole new set of motivations.
“You must
change to be well,” her doctors told her.
And her
doctors helped her to change. Essentially, what Ava found out about herrself —
the discovery she made which paved the road to her new happiness — was tbat it
wasn’t necessary for her to go on trying to be a dozen different people running
off in a dozen different directions.
“I was trying
with all my strength to anything and everything I thought I had to be — to make
good as Ava Gardner,” she says. “But what I had to face was that none of the
people I was trying to be was the real Ava Gardner.”
It wasn’t
necessary to go on running, and it was much too hard.
“I had, I
realized, worked like a dog at being unhappy; never relaxed. So I’d never had a
chance to find out what I really was like, what I really wanted.”
This is a
pitfall always handy for girls like Ava. And it’s disastrous.
When Ava
arrived in Hollywood, contact in pocket, she was just eighteen, and a very
young eighteen, for she was fresh off the South Carolina farm where she had
grown up in a big, poor family. “I didn’t know anything,” she recalls, I had
barely finished high school — at a rural school three miles’ walk from my home.
Except for a few months with my sister in New York, I had never been off the
farm. And here I was, plumped down in Hollywood, required — or so I thought —
to be a glamour girl.”
So Ava became
a glamour girl. Or tried to.
“I spent
hours in beauty shops having my hair glued into fancy hair-do’s — I didn’t have
enough sense to know I looked terrible with fancy hair-do’s. I piled on make-up
and hid what was really a very nice young girl’s skin. And I bought slinky
clothes and fancy hats, and made like a sex boat.”
IT WAS a
terrible effort, but worth it, Ava says, so long as she managed to convince
herself that she was getting away with it. And then one night at a party, when
Ava arrived done up in black satin and ropes of pearls, a woman guest laughed.
The woman was Ruth Rosenthal, the wife of a young attorney, and now one of
Ava’s best friends.
Ruth laughed,
but not unkindly, when Ava came in, and said, “You poor child. You look like a
little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes.”
“I felt
sick,” Ava recalls. “I wasn’t getting away with it.”
But she had
no time to weep for the ghost of her glamour-girl self. By now, she was
obsessed with a new dream — and Ava thinks this kind of dream, too, is a stock
dream for most American girls — the dream of young love.
“I bought
it,” she says. “I bought all the formula illusions.
“I
was dream-driven when I was a kid. ΤFirst
I wanted to be a boy, to run as fast, and throw as straight as my brothers — I
almost made it, and I have the scars to prove it. It’s only in the past few
months that I’ve realized how really wonderful it is to be a woman.
“Then I
wanted to be a school teacher, and I followed the country school marm who
roomed at our house all over the county, picking up the pearls of wisdom as
they fell. But did it make me a teacher?
“You know
what happened to the glamour girl try. But I couldn’t catch on. Now I had to
fall for that old bromide about the beauty and innocence of young love.”
Ava Gardner married
Mickey
Rooney before she was nineteen, knowing even less about the realities
and responsibilities of marriage than she had known about the glamour of
Hollywood.
Young love is
innocent, all right, Ava found out. But it isn’t very intelligent. She was
married to the boy, and she didn’t even know him. “I had been acting a part,”
she said, “I suppose he had been, too. But when you’re married to a man, you
have to live with him, you have to take off the false face you’ve been wearing
around and be yourself. You can’t act all the time. You have to relax sometime.
“The trouble
with all of us dreamdriven kids, and this goes for Mickey — who is really a
nice person — as well as for me, is that we expect too much of people. You can
get hurt that way. There isn’t a chance for happiness in marriage or anything
else unless you accept people — and especially yourself — for what they really
are.”
It’s so easy
when you’ve been hurt, Ava says, to blame the other person.
“I wouldn’t
do that, I used to say. Maybe not . . . But I would have done something else. I’m human.”
“Girls
dreaming of Clark Gable marry the boy next door. They wouldn’t believe for a
minute that the Clark Gables are just as difficult to live with — human beings
just like the boys next door.
“They run
away from an imperfect marriage, looking for a perfect one. There isn’t such a
thing as a perfect marriage.”
Ava knows
that now.
“But don’t
think I wouldn’t like to be married. Every normal woman wants a good marriage
more than anything else in the world. But I know now that marriage is the
hardest — if the most challenging and rewarding — job in the world. I’ll be
ready and willing next time to work hard to make my marriage work.
“When I
married Mickey I had bought the lovely dream. ‘You’re in love now, Ava. You’re
married. All your problems are solved.’ ”
MARRIAGE
makes new problems, it doesn’t solve the old ones, Ava had to find out. She
should have known that from her own parents’ good marriage, built in the face
of poverty and struggle. But Ava wasn’t looking homeward for help. She was
afraid to look back.
The new
problems were too much for Ava and Mickey and their marriage crashed. And it
took what was left of Ava’s ego along with it.
Now she had
failed at everything, her sick heart told her. She was more insecure than ever.
And to cover up, she says, she acted harder than ever.
“I was the
gay girl, the good-time kid. I went out on the town night after night when I
would far rather have stayed at home. I would feel, ‘I must talk! I must say
something bright.’ And I’d chatter on endlessly, stupidly.
“That big act
may go over on the first date, it may be a very intriguing act, very appealing
— but remember, you have to relax sometimes! Your self, whatever it is, is
always better than what you’re trying to be!”
But Ava
hadn’t learned that important fact yet.
She met, and
married Artie
Shaw. Artie is a fascinating man, and Ava frankly admits she still finds
him fascinating. And he is an intellectual. With the chameleon-like techniques
she had developed to cover up her deep feelings of inferiority, Ava set out to
make herself over once more — this time into an intellectual, the sort of woman
she thought Artie wanted his wife to be.
Already weary
from her wild flight from herself, taxed to her physical limits by her arduous
motion picture schedule, Ava nevertheless enrolled in correspondence nce
courses at U.C.L.A. and sat up night when she should have been sleeping, trying
to beat English literature and the nineteenth century economists.
This effort
too, was doomed to fail. Ava found herself at twenty-three, two divorced,
exhausted and ill, haunted her “past” and afraid for the future.
Fortunately
for Ava, help was available when she came to the end of the rope, help in the
person of trained at understanding doctors who know that unhappiness — no less
than tuberculosis cancer — is a disease, a disease which can be cured.
The cure for
Ava, and for girls like her everywhere, lies in self recognition; the knowledge
that one’s own real self is better than any of the false faces, this the only self with which one can be happily.
Today, Ava
knows herself for what she is, a young, unsophisticated girl who glamorous only
if the glamour comes from the inside. It cannot be superimposed. She knows that
her background — those years of learning and work and love on the farm with her
solid, industrious family is not something to run away from .
She knows
that love and marriage is more than a game which one can play with a part of
one’s self. The whole woman is involved, must be involved, if love is to live,
and marriage to work.
She knows
what she is, and she knows what she wants, which is to live honest and happily
as — and with — her self. . .
For Ava, it
was the end of the rope, it i says: “I had to get on to myself.”
The process
of “getting on to herself” was long and difficult, and, at times, a cure was as
agonizing as the disease, which Ava has come through it.
“I had to
take a good long look to myself,” she says. “I had to face some important
facts: Who I was, really, what I really wanted. It was too hard to be
unhappy. I had to find an easier way to live. ”
Ava has
stopped wasting her energy in a mad pursuit of things she never wanted in the
first place. And she’s happy for the first time in years.
The End
Ava Gardner
(φωτο από το δημοσίευμα)
( o τίτλος
του δημοσιεύματος )
Don’t
by unhappy
By
Pauline Swanson
Take
a tip from Ava Gardner, who reached the end of her rope before she finally
caught on to herself
Photoplay
magazine, March 1950, pp. 60-61, 97-98.
( η ύλη περιεχομένων του τεύχους )
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 22 Ιουνίου 2024 :
Ava Gardner
φωτοδημοσίευμα 1950
Photoplay magazine March 1950
Gallery
of
Stars
Καλλονές
Θεάματα
Κινηματογραφικά
]
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου