Barefoot and poignant

THE World’s Most Beautiful Animal.

That line of advertising copy, promoting “The Barefoot Contessa,” was marginally more truthful, and a lot more memorable, than the movie itself, which mainly demonstrated how full of himself Joe Mankiewicz had become after winning unprecedented back-to-back Oscars for writing and directing “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve” in 1949 and 1950, respectively.

The animal in question, Ava Gardner, was at her peak in 1954, a sui-generis sensualist more authentically sexy than any of her competitors -- most notably Marilyn Monroe -- and trailing into some of her roles the gossip hinted at about her own disorderly, not to say wanton, real-life adventures in bedrooms around the world. The genius that Mankiewicz’s movie displayed was to change Gardner from what she was, a poor tobacco farmer’s daughter from North Carolina, into something more in tune with what we male animals dreamed she might be -- in the case of “The Barefoot Contessa,” a Spanish flamenco-dancer-turned-international-movie-star who preferred the company of gypsies to the jet set.

Accents and costumes aside, we sensed in her portrayal of Maria Vargas something authentic. For Gardner -- with her ebony hair, cleft chin and slender, non-bulbous figure -- was not a conventionally manufactured Hollywood beauty. In those days, we guessed that all she did to be camera-ready was run her fingers through her hair and put on some lipstick. She ate what she felt like eating, drank all she wanted to (which was already a lot) and spoke her mind lustily, in language that still cannot be printed in genteel publications.

And, yes, she preferred to run shoeless through the world, just as Maria did. The film was a kind of emotional autobiography, and, reflecting on it more than half a century later, we can’t help thinking that one reason no one will turn Lee Server’s biography of Gardner into a movie is that the only woman who could possibly play her -- Ava herself -- is unavailable.

Another reason is that the book is about as dreadful as star bios can be: a numbing, almost week-by-week accounting of lovers taken, fought with, spurned and then often enough recycled; of increasingly erratic behavior on movie sets on every continent but Antarctica; of an untended body declining and a mind increasingly addled by booze. The story saddens the author, but he busies himself collecting anecdotes that are largely without insight. His bibliography lists 112 interview sources, mainly people still so seemingly retrospectively besotted by their association with a movie star that they have almost nothing smart or useful to say about her. And the book is too dumb to consider how Gardner’s life and career were a paradigmatic -- or do we want to say parodistic? -- version of a hundred bad novels, avatars of the basic Hollywood meta-fiction about the rise and demise of girls who had nothing to recommend them for the actor’s life except their good looks.

Gardner came out of near-poverty with no ambitions grander than becoming a secretary. But in 1941, at age 18, she made a trip to New York to visit her older sister, who was dating a photographer. He took some pictures of her, put one in the window of his shop, where it was seen by an MGM messenger, who told his bosses about it. This was a variant of the Lana Turner-at-Schwab’s-drugstore story, and a screen test was quickly arranged. The director took a shine to her (he cut out the test’s dubious dialogue passages and just sent silent shots of her on to the studio). The next thing Gardner knew, she was one of the dozens of the studio system’s virgin brides -- making $50 a week on the Culver City lot, posing for publicity pictures, doing a few bits. It was a loan-out to Universal for “The Killers” (1946) that put her over. Having made “Show Boat,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “Mogambo” in the early 1950s, she was a genuine movie star by the time she did “Barefoot” (1954). It was a status to which she clung for only about a decade, though she remained rewardingly bankable for another 10 or 12 years after that before fading into ever more inconsequential projects, the last of which, a TV pilot, was made four years before her death in 1990.

Gardner was only 67 when she died, leaving behind a bit of wealth and a host of questions, all unanswered by Server. As a girl, she had been a good-natured tomboy, funny and smart in her untutored way. As a young actress, armored with a certain amount of indifference to what her studio bosses wanted from her, sexually and otherwise, she handled herself pretty well professionally. She remained insecure and self-deprecating as a performer, never quite aware of how good she could be in the right role, but that’s not the worst place to be if you’re a star. It makes people want to protect and reassure you. Nor was her independence -- she lived much of her adult life in Europe -- much of a problem for the studios. As the old studio system waned, its managers got used to the help living at the more exotic ends of the cable wires.

Her insoluble problem was men. They came in all shapes and spirits: Early on, Gardner married teeny, egomaniacal Mickey Rooney, intellectually pretentious Artie Shaw and that golden-throated Rottweiler, Frank Sinatra, in short order and for short spans, all the while fending off Howard Hughes, whose body odor she could not abide. Later, there were hundreds more -- costars, beach boys, an Italian comedian and the Spanish matador “Dominguin,” who was the best of the bunch, possibly because, next to a charging bull, even Gardner in full screech was a modest challenge to his machismo.

The relationship with Sinatra was the oddest of them, since divorce didn’t stop it. Between marriages, he was always turning up. They would make mad love and then just get mad, only to start cooing at one another on the telephone, starting the whole cycle anew. This went on for most of her life.

Why this endless romantic mess? Her biographer doesn’t know. Or maybe doesn’t care. It is enough for him to report the largely unpleasant particulars of his subject’s love life. We are, of course, allowed our speculations. Alcohol had a lot to do with it, of course, rendering her irrational on an almost daily basis; so did her night-crawling ways. She was forever wandering the midnight streets of the world’s capitals, looking for jazz, food, drink, laughs, some simulacrum of intimacy, which she rarely found.

Maybe her restlessness and flaming jealousy had something to do with her father dying when she was a kid; the number of actors whose fathers died young, sending them on a lifelong search for love in all the wrong places (notably in an audience’s applause), is truly astonishing. Maybe there’s a clue in the fact that she regularly visited brothels during her nightly wandering, perhaps thinking she was whorish for making a living by displaying herself before the world’s avid eyes. Possibly, she remained forever a country girl, believing her career was just a lucky genetic accident, all a matter of looks, unsupported by real talent -- and disciplined effort -- in which she could take pride.

Whatever the case, the last act of Gardner’s life completed its mythic arc. Her country-girl strength, which had kept her gorgeous despite the way she abused herself physically, inevitably failed her, and she became a predictably erratic and imperious diva, no longer directable, no longer worth the trouble she caused. She was heading to her final reclusiveness, to her own version of “Sunset Blvd.”

To read this life, especially as it is presented in Server’s book -- all plodding reportage, without meaningful critical or psychological insight -- is to court ennui and then depression. Affection without irony, a taste for stale gossip unmediated by the way blind fate toys with the lives of certain people unprepared for public lives just won’t do. “The Barefoot Contessa” was a failure, but at least Mankiewicz understood that something significant and instructive was at play in the life of his heroine. It is the final sadness -- not quite a tragedy perhaps -- that the lives of people like Ava Gardner are, to borrow a phrase from Nabokov, “typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities.” *