by Lee Server
With Hellinger, Ava had found the sort of patron she had never had in five years at MGM. He was confident in her ability and determined to make her a star. There was not a day that went by from her signing through the film’s wide release that he did not try to promote her somewhere: publicity photos to specific editors and news desks, on-set interviews with journalists, plants with columnists, guest appearances on radio shows, and any other possible interaction that promised at least to spell her name right. Hellinger’s efforts included an “Ava Gardner Celebration Week” in Wilson, North Carolina, timed to the local release of the film in the fall, and the naming of Ava—or part of her, anyway—as “The Most Beautiful and Healthy Legs in America,” the climax of the National Association of Chiropodists’ Foot Health Week.
The Killers was marvelous entertainment, a summit of Hollywood art and craft, a film of narrative intricacy and aesthetic splendor. The script by Huston and Veiller marshaled a sprawling series of events and changing relationships, unfolding them as an interlocking series of dramatic high points. The characterizations and dialogue had a vivid and yet matter-of- fact toughness that at the least matched Hemingway for authenticity and hard-boiled poetry. The photography by Woody Bredell was equally tough yet poetic, the harsh, single-source lighting that somehow became beautiful, full of inky blacks and flaring white whites that challenged the “invisible” imagery (that is to say, undistracting for the audience) commercial Hollywood cameramen were generally ordered to create; Bre- dell’s powerful chiaroscuro effects bore comparison with the legendarily elaborate work of Citizen Kane s Gregg Toland. Siodmak made these elements congruent with inspired direction, from the first glimpse of the killers posed on the shadowed roadside like emissaries from hell, to the vividly inhabited milieus of boxing arena, flashy hotel suites, creaking rooming houses, and small-town diner, and the awesome set piece of the payroll robbery, filmed in one traveling crane shot following the action from the entrance of the crooks through the company gate (actually a Universal studio side entrance), the robbery itself, and the chaotic getaway (the sweeping, floating camera somehow another proclaimed attempt at “realism,” with the voice-over narration supposedly meant to sound like that of a documentary). Throughout, Siodmak constructed thrilling moments from the choreographed interaction of camera and performers, cinematic frissons, as in the bookend appearances of murderous Max and Al—the contrapuntal movement in the lingering opening shot of the two men as they approach the diner, and the breathtaking seconds before the shoot-out in the Green Cat Club with the relentless boogie-woogie piano background suddenly joined in neurotic dissonance with Rosza’s memorable four-note motif (the “dum-dah-dum-dum” theme later used on Dragnet). The influence of The Killers—the script, the style, the music and more—would be seen in countless films to come, from Out of the Past to Once Upon a Time in the West.
Ava Gardner’s work in the film might as well have been, like Lancaster’s, her debut in motion pictures. She seemed born again for the film. What Whistle Stop had crudely hinted at The Killers revealed in full. She shone in a sophisticated and attention-getting production. Her actual screen time was brief and contained relatively little activity but she haunts the entire film with her compelling presence and in the end, the last man standing so to speak, she is revealed as the film’s black heart. Truly alluring, she draws attention even when placed in the background of a shot and with her back to the camera as in the first glimpse of her, in the party scene, the light glowing on her broad, bare shoulders. It is not the consummate performance of a great actress but neither is she a mannequin: In the way of pure film actors, she had used a minimalist technique that yet enlarged her screen space and left a lingering impact; the viewer stays riveted, watchful of a revealing gesture: Her every smile seems to convey a variety of corruptions. It is a controlled, teasing performance, never giving up Kitty’s secrets. She floats through the film as a kind of dream image, fever inducing, as much talked about—thought about—as seen.
Ava had joined what in the brief history of film noir was already a sizable sisterhood of memorable femmes fatales, duplicitous dames, and lethal spider women. Some have seen in the wartime/postwar onslaught of these fatal females a psychosocial metaphor: Were they a lurid embodiment of the wives and girlfriends on the home front whose increased independence, presence in the workforce, and sexual liberation during the war left their returning men in states of anxiety and suspicion? Pointedly, Kitty betrays both Colfax and the Swede when they are away—not in uniform overseas but in prison (like Ava Gardner’s words to GI Mickey Rooney, Kitty’s promise to wait for her man’s return is not kept). Whatever the metaphoric meaning, among the ranks of the film noir femme fatale, few had captured anything like the almost supernatural quality in the deadly allure of Ava’s killer creation. Villainesses Mary Astor (The Maltese Falcon), Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity), and Joan Bennett (Scarlet Street) were matronly by comparison, and the lovely-in- Technicolor Gene Tierney (in Leave Her to Heaven) could barely keep her dithering screen husband interested. Even Rita Hayworth, Ava’s most ravishing noir rival, could not compare as an evil beauty: Rita’s Gilda was essentially a good girl waiting to be redeemed by love, not Kitty’s calmly treacherous temptress. If there was a possible filmic comparison to Ava’s amoral, enigmatic, and super-erotic young bad girl it might be the Lulu of Louise Brooks in Pandora ‘s Box, another nonblond with a fateful allure and perverse sexuality. (There was more to this: The Killers script had contained hints—ultimately censored—of a strongly sadomasochistic element in the lovemaking of Kitty and the Swede.)
The Killers had its New York opening on August 28, exactly two months after the production had wrapped in June. Through the summer, a giant Manhattan billboard heralded the film’s coming, as did nearly every columnist and radio host, Hellinger calling in favors from his friends cultivated over the past twenty years. Preview screenings were met with great enthusiasm, and when the response cards showed particular interest in Ava Gardner, Hellinger increased the focus of his advertising campaign on his female star, though the new ads threatened to spoil the film’s denouement (“Some guys never find out…WOMEN can be KILLERS too”). Reviews were almost unanimous in their praise. Life magazine claimed, “there is not a dull moment,” and the critic for the New York Post called it “the best picture of its kind ever made.” Ava Gardner was frequently singled out for approval, hailed for her extreme beauty and for her effective embodiment of the femme fatale. Only Bosley Crowther of the New York Times voiced disdain for the film as “depressing rough stuff.” In a Sunday Theater Section feature he decried both The Killers and The Big Sleep, the new Bogart private-eye thriller, as “perverse,” “unprogressive,” “reflective of impoverished thought in Hollywood and a distorted taste of the public,” and reminiscent, he grimly recalled, of German films in the period leading up to Nazism (Crowther’s antiviolence screeds were eternal: Twenty-some years later Bonnie and Clyde would give him another case of the vapors). Hellinger probably uncorked more bottles of champagne, as it was almost a given that a piece attacking a film for its sensationalism increased audience attendance.
Word of mouth was tremendous, and by the middle of opening day there were lines down the block waiting to see Hellinger’s production. Walter Winchell, tossing a bouquet to his old tabloid pal, told a national radio audience in his signature teletype style: “Dateline New York…probably the heaviest one day’s box office receipts were recorded this week by The Killers…. This is the new Mark Hellinger moving picture hit sensation.…$10,000 the opening day at the Winter Garden.”
In the first week The Killers broke every box-office record at the thirteen-hundred-seat theater. Universal had put up signage eight stories high on two sides of a corner Broadway building—“TENSE! TAUT! TERRIFIC! Told the untamed Hemingway way!”—with three stories’ worth of Ava as the center image, and across the entrance of the Winter Garden was an elaborate three-dimensional poster and cutout display. Hellinger had photographers docu
ment the crowd: There they are, a sea of mid-1940s New Yorkers, many of them looking not unlike some of the tough mugs in the movie, the line snaking along in front of the Singapore Restaurant (“Chinese and Island Eats…Ladies Served”), past Pennyland, past the Original Glori-Fried Ham ‘n’ Eggs, and the triangular marquee for the Havana Madrid nightclub, where Carlos Várele and his Orchestra played rhumbas each night, and up to the Winter Garden’s brass box office (ALL SEATS $.70), where a sumptuous, larger-than-life, painted Ava Gardner in her black satin dress lured the customers to the ticket vendor just as irresistibly as she did Burt Lancaster to his doom.
As the moment was coming to unveil her as one of the great screen temptresses of the age, Ava Gardner was struggling with the breakdown of her marriage to Artie Shaw, seemingly unable to tempt the one person in the world she wanted. She continued to lose weight—down to 108 pounds that summer—and wrestle with the stomach pains that still plagued her in times of stress. Who can say but that these domestic circumstances contributed to her playing of Kitty Collins, giving her a vivid sense of the potentially poisonous nature of love, only at home she was playing the Burt Lancaster role. For a woman who caused people to stumble over themselves when they saw her, now the lead in a major production, she was full of self-disparagement. On the set of The Killers she mentioned that Artie had a film project he was considering producing. Someone asked if she would be the star. “No,” Ava said. “I’d probably just louse it up.” She had stopped going out. After work, she said, she went home and read. On the set she talked in earnest of her UCLA courses, of the education she so desired. She talked so much of her woeful ignorance that others picked up on the theme, joked about her. Siodmak said she called champagne shampoo.
The arguments and the icy standoffs back home got so that Ava had begun sleeping on the couch. After one quarrel she ran off and stayed several days with her attorney’s family. The press started sniffing around. Late in June a reporter caught up with Shaw, asked if he and his wife were having problems. The clarinetist was evasive.
“We’re living together in this house. And it’s a small house.”
The reporter raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean you’re living together but not living together as man and wife?”
“I don’t see how you could do that,” said Shaw, shifting to the pedantic. “Not in a house this size.”
Artie reckoned that he and Ava had their difficulties and blamed them, for the record, on their different working hours. He was up all night, and she went to the studio at 6:00 A.M. “Makes for domestic friction,” he said.
A few days later, the friction having apparently increased, Ava left home again. She took up an open invitation to stay at the house of agent Minna Wallis, who had cultivated Ava’s friendship (she was not Ava’s agent, Charles Feldman having taken up that position) since not long after her arrival in California. Minna, the middle-aged sister of producer Hal Wallis, and bearing an unfortunate resemblance to him (neither sibling was easy on the eyes), doted on the beautiful young actress. Through the years Ava had occasionally turned to her as a maternal figure for advice and comfort, but some said that the lesbian Minna’s interest was less wholesome than that. When Ava first came to work at MGM, recalled people who knew her then, she had been ignorant even of the concept of homosexuality. There had been a curious incident with one of the girls from the costuming department, a flirtation or a come-on of some sort, and when Ava spoke of it to some friends at lunch she was apprised for apparently the first time that there existed girls who were attracted to other girls and that as a result the two girls did certain things with each other that did not involve men. Ava cackled in disbelief. Five years later she was much more knowing about the varieties of human nature and routinely tippled cocktails and had friendships with homosexual men working at Metro, some of those whom historian William Mann called the studio’s “behind the scenes queens,” the more ebullient of them giving her detailed accounts of their latest sexual escapades, stories that would have made the eighteen-year-old Ava Gardner pass out cold. As for Minna Wallis, there is no evidence that she offered more than Platonic affection to her houseguest, but still there were gossips who voiced bitchy speculation, as well as witnesses to the relationship who believed Minna was romantically smitten with the young actress, and lavished her with unusual concern and affection.
Ava’s departure from the house she shared with Artie had been impulsive, never intended to be permanent. But that was how it turned out.
“I must be very difficult to live with,” Shaw would reflect many years later. “I have to assume that. Although, of course, none of the women I’ve known ever proved they were any easier.”
In Ava’s view of things she had somewhere in their time together lost Artie’s love, and it was not coming back. Bored, tired of her, he had set about disengaging himself from their life. Shaw didn’t buy that. He believed that their breakup was by no means inevitable. They had started to drift apart, it was true, but it was Ava, he felt, who had chosen Hollywood over him, siding with the Philistines. He had told her that he wanted to move to New York for a while, get away from Hollywood’s half-wit palm- tree-and-nutburger culture; who knew, maybe relocate for good. It was natural that he expected she was coming too, but she had not wanted to go with him, feeling that her big chance had come at last, saying, “They’ll forget me if I leave.”
Shaw thought it sad. He wanted to tell her that they would forget her anyway. In the beauty business the merchandise got shopworn fast; gravity was going to have its way on even the fairest flesh, and one day the next eighteen-year-old would be there to take her place.
She was still crazy about him, for all that she felt she had suffered for it. And hey, he loved her too. But when a thing like a marriage started to crumble, man, there was nothing for it but to get on your way, get moving before something fell on your head. The only thing was to call a cab, Shaw would say. Pack your bag, call a cab, and get in it and go away. That was fundamental.
“Artie Shaw was no good for her at all,” said Ava’s friend Kathryn Grayson. Ann Miller, another of the MGM sorority, said, “It was Artie, and all those head doctors, and becoming a big star, I guess it was too much to handle, it made her a little coo-coo, I guess. She became quite a wild child.”
She made up her mind to be more cautious in the future. If a man knew you loved him, he took advantage, treated you badly. She wouldn’t go through it again.
“I don’t trust love anymore,” Ava Gardner said. “It has led me astray.”
*Ava once met Darwin’s great-grandson Francis at a Greek restaurant in New York and mentioned her honeymoon reading matter; after their encounter, Young Darwin, who had been drinking retsina, said—adjusting his spectacles—that Ava Gardner was “the highest specimen of the human species.”
*I could find no substantiation for the idea that Huston was considered for the directing job or the claim of future action ace Don Siegel that Hellinger wanted him to direct the film; Siegel would direct a quasi-remake of The Killers in the 1960s in an entirely different style from the original.
FOUR
Venus in Furs
When you talk to Ava Gardner you are always infor a double-barreled dent. That true glamour of hers gives you the first wallop…At conversational closeness, her face and figure are genuine dream stuff. Further, Ava is delicious ly neither too old nor too young, and she was born with the rare knack of being fascinatingly feminine. In person, not merely on screen. When Ava goes to a premiere or to Ciro ‘s she lands in all the columns the morning after. Her behavior is invariably genteel but her appearance is completely sock.
Obviously, Ava is developing her acting ability out Culver City way and is now destined to climb to her very own niche in Hollywood’s history. But the generally unappreciated fact I think worth bringing out is this: away from her studio she is already in full bloom—as a human being.
—”Human Side of a Heavenly Body,” Screenland magazine
She prefers in
formal clothes, but since she must as part of the Hollywood game attend diverse formal functions, she owns four evening gowns, the most expensive of which cost $200. Her entire wardrobe is insured for $8,000; $5,000 of it covers a mink coat she bought several years ago.…She wears black, white and blue lingerie—”never pink”—and green is her favorite color for outer garments. She has a simple taste in jewelry. Her ears were pierced last spring for earrings. She is near-sighted and often wears shell- rimmed glasses, which is one reason why few fans recognise her on the street.
—”The Girl Who Learned Too Much Too Late,” Redbook
The thing you ‘ve got to understand about this girl is that she isn ‘t easy to understand. You expect her to be a slinky siren, and she turns up talking badminton. It doesn ‘t prove anything. She can still slink, and if you ‘ve ever seen her in the middle of a rhumb a, you know. She doesn ‘t remind you of your mother.
She went through a time when she was miserable, and she got too thin, and she stayed out too late, with too many people. That’s over now. From the way Ava tells it, she ‘s become a happy-medium addict.
—”Honey Chile,” Modern Screen
Being a star is a responsibility. It means I have to go forward or go back; I can ‘t stand still. Sometimes I shiver and shake at the idea. Me. Who never had a nerve in her body!
