Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  Page 132 Kitty dialogue beginning “Aren’t I, Swede?” and ending “Break every bone in my body” and succeeding dissolve too pointedly suggestive of sex.

  Page 131 Riordan in Ladies Lounge looking for Kitty permissible only if there are no women present and of course no implication whatever of toilet activities, only powder room. Omit any indication of a toilet room beyond.

  Breen—knowing that clever filmmakers sometimes tried to slip their transgressive material between the lines of a script and think they could get away with it—reminded Hellinger that approval was not given until the viewing of the completed film.

  Hellinger read the letter, then carefully placed it in a file labeled “Fuck You,” and went back to work.

  With shooting to begin at the end of April, Hellinger had much to do.

  The choice of director seemed almost inevitable:*Universal had under contract Robert Siodmak, the man who was then deemed the most talented specialist in suspense films since Alfred Hitchcock. The German Siodmak had entered the Berlin film industry in the mid-1920s as a title writer for silent pictures, then a cutter, and in 1929 he made his first film as a director, Menschen am Sonntag (.People on Sunday), a film whose adventurous, improvisatory spirit resembled in advance the New Wave efforts of Godard and Truffaut. In the thirties Siodmak, a Jew, had been forced to leave Germany—Joseph Goebbels railed against him by name as a decadent influence—and worked for some years in France. Robert’s younger brother, the novelist and screenwriter Curt Siodmak, had immigrated to the United States and to Hollywood in the late thirties, and eventually Robert followed. A specialist in horror pictures at Universal, Curt got his older brother hired to direct his screenplay for Son of Dracula (and Robert immediately replaced his brother with another writer, “a sibling rivalry,” said Curt philosophically). Thrilled with Siodmak’s handling of the material, Universal put him under long-term contract, and he was soon turning out a series of thrillers and murder stories with a psychological element, some of the best in the new style of dark suspense the French were to dub film noir: Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Suspect, Uncle Harry, and The Spiral Staircase. Siodmak’s cinematic characteristics included mordant humor, vivid delineations of the perverse and the pathological, and a highly wrought visual sense in the symbolist, nightmare style of golden-age German expressionism (critic Andrew Sarris wrote that Siodmak’s American films were far more German than his German ones). Hellinger screened some of Siodmak’s recent pictures (including, perhaps, Christmas Holiday, with its own flashback structure). He felt that the style he wanted for The Killers was reflected in particular in Phantom Lady, with its lush nocturnal atmosphere and dazzling set pieces (a pursuit through empty Manhattan streets, an orgasmic midnight jam session, and so on). In addition, though this was probably unknown to Hellinger, one of Siodmak’s acclaimed German films, the 1932 Stürme der

  Leidenschaft (Storms of Passion), had explored material quite similar to The Killers in a tale of criminals, obsessive love, and a treacherous femme fatale. Hellinger hired both Siodmak and—to ensure he wasn’t backing the wrong horse—Phantom Ladys skilled and fast-moving cinematogra- pher, Elwood “Woody” Bredell.

  Once Siodmak was signed on, Hellinger “kicked the story around” with him. The director suggested ways of streamlining scenes and a few places that could be adjusted to increase the potential for visual excitement. He also weighed in on the characters and dialogue. Siodmak felt that Hellinger-Huston-Veiller overexplained some things that were better left unexplained and particularly sought to eliminate some of Hellinger’s interjections in the dialogue, which he saw as too sentimental: a few wisecracking lines by the Swede that tried to make him a more likable and humorous character, to temper his obsessive passion and anger; and some dialogue for Kitty that similarly sought to give her a more sympathetic backstory, a nice girl who had just fallen in with the wrong people. Siodmak preferred a pitiless view of both characters.

  Casting was next: three leads, several strong supporting roles, and bits to be filled in a matter of weeks. Bucking the conventional wisdom, Hellinger had no interest in big names. He figured that the star of his picture was Ernest Hemingway, and if there was another star it was going to be himself. The film would feature fresh faces like Charles McGraw, William Conrad (Al and Max, the drily ferocious hit men), Jack Lambert (previously mostly employed as an ax- and gun-wielding cover model for true-crime magazines) and Burt Lancaster as the Swede, making his motion picture debut (for a time Hellinger had been set on giving the part to Wayne Morris, the athletic, inconsequential leading man of numerous Warner Β movies, but Jack Warner vindictively nixed it). Other parts would be taken by the more familiar mugs of iconic character players, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett, and as villain Colfax the veteran tough-yet- urbane bad guy Albert Dekker (just then concluding a term as state assemblyman from Hollywood’s Fifty-seventh District and considering a run for mayor of Los Angeles). As with the writers Hellinger hired, the producer looked favorably upon actors who had been in the war, feeling they would carry with them a certain quality of hard experience, a grim authenticity that would work well for his tale of tough guys, bloodshed, and double cross. Lancaster had been a part of the Army Service Forces entertaining troops at the battle lines through the North African and Italian campaigns. Edmond O’Brien, cast as Riordan the insurance man, had been three years in uniform. Jeff Corey, cast as Blinkie, was a navy combat photographer on the carrier Yorktown and a few months before returning to Hollywood had filmed a Japanese kamikaze plane as it crashed practically at his feet.

  For the role of Kitty Collins, Hellinger fielded suggestions from every agent, talent department, and casting director in town. Two who came under close consideration were Audrey Totter and Leslie Brooks, both blonds with a hard edge. Hellinger thought the “blond bombshell” type was a cliché, and Siodmak agreed. But time was running out. Hellinger had shared the casting dilemma with fellow producer Walter Wanger, who operated out of the next-door bungalow on the Universal lot. One morning Wanger called him. He had just been to a screening of Whistle Stop.

  Wanger said, “You better go see this girl.”

  Hellinger went to see Whistle Stop. The next morning he called MGM to arrange an interview with Ava Gardner.

  Hellinger later as much as said that she had nabbed the part the moment he saw her in person. “It was sex-two-and-even,” he joked to the press. But her erotic impact was serious business. Hellinger was no slouch as a judge of female attractiveness: he had married his ex-showgirl spouse when she was known as “the most beautiful woman on Broadway.” He believed at once that Ava Gardner could convince audiences a man would steal, go to prison, die for her.

  In the meeting with Hellinger, Ava behaved the way she always did when directors or producers talked to her about a part: She acted as if they must have the wrong person. But she listened to Hellinger explain about the character of Kitty Collins—he gave her his vision of Kitty, with some of that sentimental Scheisse that Siodmak complained about—and there were things about the girl that could not but draw her interest. Kitty was a nice girl, Hellinger figured, but she’d allowed herself to accept the easy way of life. She came from a good family “but linked up with the wrong type of people who supply her with the wrong cues in life.” The romance between Kitty and the Swede, Hellinger posited, “is one of frustration.

  They both know it is too bad they hadn’t met before both of them were tangled up in their present situation. They might have married and had a full and happy life. As is, they are both destined for a short and unhappy one.”

  Ava thought, yes, there were maybe some things she could respond to in the character of Kitty Collins.

  On April 26, a few days before filming of The Killers was to begin, an agreement was signed between Mark Hellinger Productions and Loew’s Incorporated. The agreement called for “use of the Artist to begin not later than May 8 and continue for the period necessary to complete the portrayal of her role but not beyond June 24.�
� Ava’s on-screen and advertisement billing were specified in convoluted legalese. Since it had not been decided if Edmond O’Brien or Burt Lancaster or both would be given star billing, Ava’s credit was specified under a series of contingencies, guaranteeing her either first featured credit below one of them as star or third starring credit below both. In the end the release-print credits gave her more than the contract called for, an indication of Hellinger’s satisfaction: O’Brien was reduced to first featured and Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in that order were billed on screen as the twin stars of Ernest Hemingway ‘s The Killers.

  In compensation for her services the payment was to be $1,000 per week for a minimum of seven weeks, money to be delivered each week to Loew’s at Culver City. Ava herself would, of course, get only her regular MGM payment, netting Metro a 700 percent return on the deal. It was standard studio practice, but when she realized the extent of the inequity on this and the Whistle Stop deal, she was furious. Artie told her, “Screw ‘em. Go on strike.” Eventually, Shaw claimed, he went in to sort things out with Metro, an assignment he must have relished; he hadn’t seen his friend Louis B. Mayer since the Lana marriage, when Mayer gave him instructions on how not to knock up his wife. Shaw said he gave them a take-it-or-leave-it offer, and Metro, sensing by then that Ava was at last a probable hot property, agreed to raise her salary to $1,250 a week with a $10,000 bonus at the end of the third year.

  Among the aesthetic decisions made by Hellinger, Siodmak, and Bredell in the weeks leading up to the first day of shooting was a determination to avoid anything resembling what they saw as typical Hollywood glamor- ization and overlit “unreality.” Hellinger told Bredell he wanted all scenes to be lit “exactly as they would be seen in real life.” Enthusing to American Cinematograp her magazine, Bredell said, “The Hemingway story was a perfect chance for me because I had always wanted to take a crack at a show where nothing had to be beautiful.” In scenes like the opening arrival of the killers that would have ordinarily been flooded with fifty arc lights, Bredell would use four. The scene of the robbers gathered around a poker table was illuminated with a single dangling overhead light as it would have been in life, with no correcting fill light when the actors’ eyes became shadowed. (It is remarkable how many of the creators of classic film noir images now perceived as highly stylized and phantasmagoric, believed they were working in the name of “realism.”) As for Ava, however alluring and irresistible The Killers man-killer star was meant to appear, she was not exempt from the filmmakers’ pursuit of reality. Coming to the set at Universal for the first day of test shooting, Ava had gotten made up in the heavy MGM style that was considered mandatory for working under her home studio’s standard blast of heavy arc lighting.

  “Ava, darling, what iss wiz all zis face?” said the bald, pop-eyed director. “Please, you are going and washing off and bringing back face alone!”

  Ava shrugged, went back to the makeup room and returned unadorned. Siodmak and Bredell enthused. Bredell would long after speak of Ava Gardner as the first adult actress who had ever agreed to be filmed without makeup: “All we did was rub a little Vaseline into her skin for a sheen effect.”

  The look of Ava’s flesh on test footage, lit only with Bredell’s simple setups, would influence the visual style of the entire film. The smooth ivory tone of her skin produced such a pure white image that Bredell based his whole lighting treatment around it. His “out of balance lighting,” created in many scenes an extreme form of contrast, the whitest whites, deepest blacks and eliminating as much as possible all gray halftones.

  To see how the movie’s chosen lovers looked together Ava was also tested in a love scene with her fledgling costar. The intensely masculine ex—circus acrobat Burt Lancaster was still new to that sort of intimacy on a soundstage and gave a less than professional response to the demands of the scene. Some years later, asked by a French filmmaker what it was like the first time he kissed Ava Gardner for the camera, Lancaster said proudly, “I got an erection.” Apparently such a rampant hard-on that the entire crew broke up over it. Ava good-naturedly accepted it as a compliment.

  She liked Lancaster. He had a great, charismatic enthusiasm for life. At the age of thirty, after many years of struggling on the obscure fringes of show business, he now seemed to be inescapably bound for sudden success—in the first week of his first acting job onstage he had received seven offers to work in movies. He was amusing company, still carefree, not the sometimes-pompous know-it-all to come. She learned that his “discovery” was as much a fluke as her own, a story he told her with hilarious insouciance. Going up in an elevator to see a friend about some crummy job, he said, another fellow in the elevator kept staring at him. “We got out on the same floor, and the guy is still eyeing me up and down like he can’t get enough. I walk away but he comes up behind me so I grab him by the necktie and tell him, ‘Listen you pansy keep it up and I’ll beat the shit out of you!’ I go to my job interview and the phone rings and it’s this guy from the elevator, and my friend tells me the guy is casting a play and all he wanted was to ask me to audition. That play got me to Hollywood. And I almost blew my chance ‘cause I thought the guy was queer for me!”

  Hellinger had Ava and Burt taken off to Malibu to pose for some innocuous promotional photographs, filler for the newspapers to start the drum beating about the leads in his coming release. While the photographer snapped away the pair frolicked across the beach, he in swim trunks, she in summery white shorts and T-shirt. Lancaster showed off some of the skill that had kept him employed by various circuses a few years before, tossing and spinning her in the air. Ava got into the spirit of it, doing a remarkable full handstand balanced only by Lancaster’s grip on her shoulders, and then carrying the brawny six-foot-two actor down to the waves on her back. They looked like the healthiest, sexiest circus act there ever was.

  On May 8 Ava recorded the song Miklos Rosza and lyricist Jack Brooks had written for the film, “The More I Know of Love.” It would be the song Kitty Collins sings at the piano just after the Swede first sees her and becomes hooked—ensnared—forever. It was typical of the integrity and vision Hellinger showed toward the production: Universal higher-ups thought it ought to be a little irrelevant musical interlude as in every other movie, a pop tune their song-publishing company might subsequently get Bing Crosby or the Andrew Sisters to record. Instead Hellinger stuck with Rosza’s downbeat wisp of a composition and the lyrics that reflected the bitter pleasure and delusions of love. Ava loved to sing, but when Hellinger scheduled the recording session she predictably resisted. The producer enthused and insisted. She credited him with getting her to relax enough finally to do it. She sang in a small but very sultry voice that had the effect of an erotic whisper in the listener’s ear.

  On May 10, Ava went to work on Stage 6 at Universal, shooting the party scene that served as her introduction in the film. Hellinger’s zest and positive reinforcement kept the company in high spirits, and Siodmak and Bredell worked with such speed and creative energy that there was little time to be bored or nervous, Ava’s normal conditions on a film set. Phil Brown, who played Nick Adams, the young man in the diner who runs to warn the Swede of his impending murder, and speaks the first line in the movie (“Ketchup!”), recalled, “Siodmak always knew what he wanted and worked very quickly. There was no rehearsal before the actual shooting began. Siodmak’s interest was in staging and camera placement. He did not discuss motivation with the actors or give line readings. Everything went smoothly. The only difficulty I had was in trying to jump all those fences—it was shot in one take—and not break my neck.”

  It was not that the director was unconcerned with motivation or psychological subtext, but Siodmak was entirely a man of the cinema and he masterfully understood the plastic nature of film to express depth through surface means. In the case of Ava Gardner, Siodmak’s functional directions and concern for the pace, movement, and gesture within each frame rather than a more overarching and motivational ins
truction seemed to be just what she needed to sidestep her often fatal nervousness and consequent woodenness before the camera. In the way of Mamoulian or von Sternberg, who could direct Garbo or Dietrich to stare into space and count to twenty and yet make an audience read profound contemplation on their faces, so Siodmak helped Ava to create a coherent characterization and a haunting erotic presence out of such things as the shift of her eyes, the turn of her lips, and the feline sprawl of her exquisite body. He wanted her to act not more but less: She would say a line or give an expression and Siodmak would tell her to do it again but “half as much.” Other actors re-membered Siodmak’s fascination with the actress, moving her around to try different poses, excited by the heat and mystery she brought to his compositions. For the scene when the gang first meets around the poker table, Edmond O’Brien told writer Charles Higham, “He focused the camera entirely on her boredom and restlessness, which she most subtly conveyed.”

  Ava’s only difficulty was in pulling off the histrionic breakdown at the film’s climax, as Kitty pleads for a way out from the mortally wounded Colfax, a phony alibi to save her from jail (“Don’t ask a dying man to lie his soul into Hell,” Sam Levene memorably tells her). She did not have sufficient technique to reach the emotional pitch called for in the scene, and so Siodmak chose to bully her into approximating in real life Kitty’s distraught state of being. For that day the usually puckish director became the stereotypical sadistic Teutonic auteur, barking that if she did not do the scene right he would hit her, shouting at her for take after take until the acting of the scene became a release for her mass of jangled nerves and anger.

  It was for the rest a pleasant and stimulating experience, for Ava the first time she had felt a real part of a creative enterprise. “It was a very happy set,” recalled Bob Rains, a U-I publicist who became attached to the production. “Of all the movie sets I have been on, it was one of the most friendly. No prima donnas, no problems or arguments. Everyone seemed to be enjoying their work. Burt was very enthusiastic, and Ava was very friendly. The crew loved her. She insisted everybody call her Ava, not ‘Miss Gardner’, just a regular gal. Hellinger made sure everyone was happy. He was that kind of guy. If a studio guard showed him where to park his car, the next day he sent the guard a big basket of liquor.”