Posted on by rjonakait

Ava the Magnificent

Elizabeth McGovern, whose career spans a teen-age role in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People to Cora Crawley, the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey to the recordings of Sadie and the Hotheads, is on the New York stage in Ava: The Secret Conversations. The play, written by McGovern, is about the interplay between Ava Gardner and her would-be biographer Peter Evans, who was eventually dismissed by Gardner. After Evans’s death, his notes and tapes of his interviews with Gardner were published, and this book form the basis for Ava: The Secret Conversations. The play interests me because for a long time I had a fascination with Ava Gardner, or really with the Ava Gardner Museum.

The spouse and I have driven south from Brooklyn on I-95 many times heading to South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida. We always wanted to get at least five hundred miles in before stopping for the night. Smithfield, North Carolina, is the first town after that mark, and over the years we often found a nearby hotel for the night.

The first time, the spouse and I drove into town and found a surprisingly good restaurant. At other stops in or near Smithfield, I sought out that eating place again. The restaurant was memorable not only because the food was much better than I had expected in this town of ten thousand or so, but also because one time after we had left, we went to our car and found a host of barbecue rigs set up in an adjacent park. These were not your backyard Weber grills, but the kind that attached to the back of a truck. I had only before seen such monstrous grills and smokers on television.

I quickly learned that the next day was the annual Johnston County barbecue competition and that I was witnessing competitive pit masters. (I later saw a taste test of spiral hams on a cooking show. Johnston County Spiral Ham was considered by far the best.) The fifteen or twenty participants would smoke meat during the night, and their results would be judged the next morning. Many of them displayed trophies from previous competitions. I learned about a circuit that many of them traveled. The pit masters and tenders were friendly and talkative except for one man. He had nothing to say and bullied me away from what he was doing. He somehow thought I was going to steal his secrets. He eyed me as if I, the Brooklyn boy, was a spy for another participant.

I went to bed thinking that we might come the next day and taste the wares even though I am not much of a central North Carolina barbecue fan; I don’t like that vinegar base. It started pouring after midnight and was still coming down the next morning. I thought about how miserable the night must have been for all those nice but competitive people, and I decided to continue down the interstate without another visit to all those smokers.

Smithfield, however, always stuck in my mind primarily because going to and coming from the restaurant, I would see on a side road—I believe it was Third Street–the Ava Gardner Museum. The thought of a museum dedicated to the glamorous Ava Gardner in this dinky town amused me. I would joke about going there, but we only passed it in the evening when the museum was closed.

One trip south, however, had a different timing, and the spouse and I were going to pass Smithfield at noon. We decided to make the detour. The Ava Gardner Museum was now in a different location. It was on the main drag in a modern facility unlike its previous home in a slightly seedy building that had once been a house.

The museum itself was carefully and tastefully laid out with well-written, informative placards accompanying the displays of letters, posters, photographs, and costumes. I was never an Ava Gardner fan and knew little about her other than she had a striking face, a beautiful body, and had been married to both Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, who remained a devoted friend even after their divorce. I learned that she had also been married to Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader. I only knew of Shaw because he was an amusing guest on late night talk shows, often talking about his many wives, and, at least according to him, his many more girlfriends. It was only because of these TV appearances that I recognized Shaw as I entered a New York Appellate Division courtroom one day to argue a case. I was given to understand that he was there to hear an argument about litigation stemming from one of his divorces. True to his image, Shaw was surrounded by stunning women. (I have no memory of what case I was arguing, but I’m pretty sure that it did not involve any beauties.)

From what I learned at the Ava Gardner Museum, Shaw tried to improve twenty-five-year-old Gardner’s education in their year-long marriage, and as a result she took English courses at a Los Angeles college. This made me think about the trajectory of her life as I learned it at the museum.

She was born near Smithfield in 1922 to farmers who lost their property when Ava was young. Her mother then ran boarding houses. Her father died when Ava was fifteen. This was a poor family in depressed times. I wondered how many outdoor toilets she had used, and whether she had been behind a horse in a cart more often than in a car. I would not have been surprised that when she graduated from high school she had never been in an elevator or through a revolving door.

Gardner attended a local college for a year studying to be a secretary. During that summer, she visited her sister, who somehow had made it to New York. The story then goes that she had her picture taken there, which was displayed in the window of a photographic studio. People noticed. Soon she had a screen test in New York. MGM signed her to a contract, and at the age of nineteen, she moved from little Smithfield to glamorous Hollywood.

Within a decade she was one of the screen’s major stars. Besides her husbands, she had a long-time relationship with Howard Hughes and was a close friend with Gregory Peck. Later in her life, she moved to Madrid where she knew Ernest Hemingway and had Juan Peron as a neighbor. At least according to the museum, however, she never forgot Smithfield and came back even after she had achieved international fame. She is buried in Johnston County.

Yours truly cannot think about Ava Gardner without thinking about her body. The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, displayed costumes from several of her movies, and the placard near one said that she was 5’6’’ tall and wore size six shoes. The dress indicated nothing more than an average bust size, but the waist of one gown was remarkably small. It seemed to define the term “wasp-waisted.” The card said that the dress measured eighteen inches at the waist. That might certainly explain why her breasts appeared bigger on the screen than the dresses indicated.

She did have an hourglass figure, but I still could not imagine a grown woman with that small a waist. That led me later to Google and found websites listing measurements of Hollywood stars. (How they know these things I do not know.) One site says she wore a size eight shoe and a size six dress and had measurements of 36-24-37 inches. Another site takes an inch off her waist and says she was 36-23-37, but that her bra size was 34B. (I don’t really understand these things, but doesn’t that contradict that 36-inch measurement?) Looking at her photographs and the clips of her in movies, however, I realized it did not matter what her sizes were. She was a completely beautiful woman. (I clicked on a recent popup on my computer for the 15 most gorgeous women, and there she was.)

I am not sure that I could have named a single movie Ava Gardner was in before going into the Museum. She appeared in none of the movies I would have listed as my favorites, and I have little concept of her acting ability. I now seem to have some memory of her from the iconic film noir, The Killers, which made her a star and launched Burt Lancaster’s career. I may watch that again, and I might see The Night of the Iguana, which also starred Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr. I have heard that it is good. The posters in the museum indicated, however, that she was in many movies with some of the most famous actors and actresses.

The visit to the Ava Gardner Museum made me think not only about her but about the museum itself. It made sense that it was near her birthplace in Smithfield, but I found it unlikely that the town or county had spent the money to collect all those memorabilia or to produce the film about her that was being shown in the museum. I thought that the origins of the museum must be due to someone’s obsession. The strange novel, The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize, came to mind. In that novel, the protagonist Kemal starts collecting objects that relate to his obsessive love of an unattainable woman. He eventually creates the Museum of Innocence from this compulsive collection. And to my surprise, I found that the novel had a reference to the Ava Gardner Museum.

I did not have to wonder long about the obsession that was the origin of the museum. The Ava Gardner Museum itself told me that the museum originated in the collection of one Tom Banks, who had met Gardner when he was twelve and she was eighteen and in her only year of college. The adolescent boys teased the college girls, and one day Ava chased Tom and gave him a kiss. (If I had met Ava Gardner when I was twelve and she was eighteen, there is a good chance I, too, would have been obsessed with her for the rest of my life. And perhaps I still would not have washed the kissed cheek.) He, not surprisingly, noticed when she did not return for her second year and then saw a newspaper article about her Hollywood contract. He immediately started collecting all the memorabilia he could find about her, and later, after he was a psychologist, he even bought Gardner’s childhood home, the site of the first museum. He started a part-time Ava Gardner Museum, and after he died his wife, who apparently joined her husband in collecting anything related to Ava Gardner, donated the collection to Smithfield.

Whatever obsession I had with Ava Gardner was sated by my visit to the Ava Gardner Museum. Even so, I would like to see Elizabeth McGovern in Ava: The Secret Conversations, but it has a limited New York run, and I will be out of the City until after the production has departed for other cities. If any of you have seen it, however, let me know what you think.

Posted on by rjonakait

Lew’s Judah

Does a century end with a 99 or with a double zero? How you answer that question determines the answer to my trivia question: What was the bestselling American novel of the nineteenth century? Many sources say it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (published in 1852), but others say that in 1900 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ had passed Uncle Tom’s Cabin in sales. Ben-Hur, published twenty-eight years after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, was a phenomenon. It remained the largest selling American novel until it was surpassed by 1936’s Gone with the Wind, when the literate American population was much larger than it was a half-century before. My guess, however, is that while many readers of this blog not only know the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they have read the book, and that many also have read Gone with the Wind and know that Margaret Mitchell wrote it. How many, however, have read Ben-Hur or even know the name of the author?

Although it did not make it to my small Wisconsin town until six months after its premiere, the 1959 movie first introduced me to Judah Ben-Hur. It was one of my first dates. However, any of my hopes for a makeout session before going home were dashed — not, I am sure, because of my lack of charm and appeal –but by both the film’s religious conclusion and its length. The movie is over three-and-a-half hours long and that does not include the overture (remember movie overtures?) and the intermission (remember movie intermissions?). The movie was a huge box-office success and won eleven Oscars, including for best movie and best actor for Charlton Heston, who seemingly did not learn from his role that you can be a hero without holding a gun. (Eleven Oscars have not been surpassed but that total has been matched by Titanic and one of those god-awful Lord of the Rings nerdfests.)Other actors were considered for the lead role including Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman, who apparently turned it down because he was convinced that he did not have the legs for a tunic. (Did Newman ever show his legs in any of his movies?)  

This movie was not the first visual depiction of the book. In 1899, a play of Ben-Hur opened on Broadway. The book’s author only consented to the theatrical production after stipulating that the crucifixion not be staged and that Jesus not be portrayed by an actor. Instead, Christ was suggested by a beam of light. In the 1959 movie version, an actor portrayed Jesus, but his face is not seen and his voice is not heard. In the 2016 remake, an actor for the first time portrayed the voice, face, and figure of Jesus. There was also a 1925 version. It starred the Mexican American heartthrob Ramon Novarro, né José Ramón Gil Samaniego, who became Hollywood’s Latin Lover after the death of Rudy Valentino and whose considerable appeal apparently also included his legs and whose closeted homosexuality helped cause his gruesome murder in 1968.

Of course, Ben-Hur is not complete without the chariot races which, in the 1959 movie comprise a thrilling nine minutes long segment (with a teenage boy yelling out during my initial viewing that the bloody face of a driver looked like a pizza, a food only recently introduced to my town.) In that long-ago live play, it was staged with live horses running on hidden treadmills. The stage production was so successful that it toured for two decades requiring four railroad cars to transport the equipment. Over twenty million people saw it.

Although I have seen televised fragments of the 1959 movie many times since my high school days, I gave Ben-Hur little thought over the next half-century. Covid changed that. At the beginning of the pandemic, the local, friendly library where I spend summers erected a plexiglass shield to separate patrons from staff at the checkout desk. On the patron’s side, two stacks of books held the plastic upright. The blue bindings, all the same, suggested “classics.” I now know that they were part of the International Collectors Library. An insert in each books said they came in “The William Morris Binding, a modern adaptation of a superb Old Victorian bookbinding specimen.” The original covering was designed by William Morris for his book Utopia.

Ben-Hur was on the top of the right-hand side stack of books restraining the plexiglass. After a few visits to the post-Covid checkout facility, I asked if I could take out Ben-Hur. I was told that I could not because it continued to be part of the protective device’s support system. Recently, however, I asked the wonderful librarian again about the novel’s availability. Mary Ann, tall and slender with a charming smile and sparkling eyes, said yes. (I have never had a real conversation with Mary Ann, but I am convinced that she is smart and witty. Alas, I confess to being too old for her.)

Reading the book has made me interested in Lew Wallace, who, of course, is the author of Ben-Hur, but it turns out that he was much more than a writer. I had known that he was a Civil War general but I knew little else about his remarkable life. Lewis Wallace was born in 1827 in Indiana. When the Mexican War started, the nineteen-year-old Wallace volunteered for the army. Serving under Zachary Taylor, he did not see combat but became a regimental adjutant and left this army service as a first lieutenant. He returned to Indiana, married Susan Arnold Elston, had a son, practiced law, and served a term as a Democrat in the state legislature.

Two weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter, Wallace, a firm believer in the Union, became the commander of an Indiana regiment. Five months later, after involvement in some minor battles, he became a brigadier general and was given command of a brigade. Early in 1862, after performing well in more major actions, Wallace was promoted to major general, the youngest (age 34) in the Union army. Within a month, however, Grant and others criticized his decisions at the Battle of Shiloh (Wallace maintained that his orders were unclear), and he was removed from front-line command. Throughout his life, Wallace felt that the blame from Shiloh was unjust, and even near his death fifty years after the battle, he was still defending his actions at the battle.

Wallace, however, continued with his military career with notable successes in Kentucky and in defending Cincinnati. However, what gained him most praise was not a victory. Confederate General Jubal Early, with superior forces, defeated Wallace’s troops at Monocacy Junction, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. With skillful maneuvering, however, Wallace’s army impeded the Confederate drive to Washington for a day, giving Grant time to send reinforcements to the capital. Grant recognized Wallace’s effective tactics and praised him at the time and later in his autobiography.

(continued July 27)