Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Book review: "Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing", by Lee Server

Book review
Ava Gardner bio well-researched, well-written
BILL LINDAU
Special to The Raeford News-Journal
AVA GARDNER: LOVE IS NOTHING, by Lee Server (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006). Biography. 551 pages. $29.95.
Ava Gardner (1922-1990) is undoubtedly the most famous of North Carolina’s native daughters, next to if not including Virginia Dare. This Smithfield native got rid of her Southern accent in a hurry, but she never forget where she came from. This 2006 biography shows that, and this endearing but fair-sounding portrait of one of Hollywood’s most beautiful – and highly interesting – sex goddesses is in my opinion one of the best books to come out the year 2006.
Lee Server, the author of an award-winning bio of Robert Mitchum, has read countless magazine articles and spoken to quite a few people who worked with her. Many of them were still alive after 2000, about the time Server set out on this highly ambitious project. The last 51 pages consists of lists of all his sources, including interviews with people such as the late bandleader Artie Shaw, Gardner’s second husband, Gardner’s housekeeper Carmen Vargas; fellow actresses Janet Leigh, Virginia Mayo and Joanna Lumley and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Server also talked to former paparazzi in many of the countries where she made films – and treated them with open hostility.
Patriotic North Carolinians will especially enjoy the early part of the book, which describes her early years living around Smithfield and in Virginia, just before World War II. It’s a part of the state – and of the mid-South – that is slowly vanishing – the small towns, the farms, the tobacco industry.
It will also make you mad when you read about how non-Southerners made fun of her accent. When she first arrives in Hollywood, “it didn’t help matters that she was shy of speaking at will, aware that her Carolina accent struck some people with horror,” Server writes.
In the second chapter, Server describes tells of the following account by a talent specialist who met her earlier in New York: “Jacobson (Ben, the agent) would one day recall that the beautiful teenager had sounded pretty incomprehensible to his New York ears, everything drawled vowels that seemed to last forever and ‘gs’ that dropped ‘like shattered magnolia blossoms.’ It didn’t matter. She could have been speaking Chinese – he couldn’t take his eyes off her.”
Server devotes the greater part of the book to Gardner’s stormy, love-hate relationship with third husband Frank Sinatra. You wonder how much of it you can believe about Sinatra, but it makes him look pretty bad. He tells how one night Sinatra is so jealous of unsuccessful suitor Howard Hughes that he goes out looking for Hughes with a loaded gun one night. These are the parts, however, that make the book most entertaining.
Some parts of the book will make you laugh out loud, while others make you want to cry or curse the people that treated her rotten, such as George C. Scott and second husband Artie Shaw. On the other hand, the book does nothing to make Gardner a candidate for sainthood, as you see in account of the years she spent in Spain during the 1930s, the way she let herself go in the wake of her failing marriage to Sinatra, the unsavory company she kept, the hotels that barred her because of her wild behavior. We also don’t like to hear the way she treated people close to her, how she could treat one of her friends like royalty one day and shut the same person out of her life the next.
Server strikes a happy medium in his account of his iconic subject. This book is neither a total puff piece nor a total hatchet job. He shows plenty of good things to like about her, such as her devotion to her dogs, and to relationships with longtime friends such as Gregory Peck and the two housekeepers in her life. She also raised some hackles with her friendships with African-Americans, a scandalous idea among white Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
In his fair treatment of his long-deceased subject, this is where Server succeeds. Celebrity bio lovers who don’t like the way many biographers treat long-deceased subjects will be pleased at this account of one of the most beautiful, troubled and at the same time highly popular women of this century.
In my years critiquing books and movies, I know works of art are just as imperfect as their creators. You can find fault even in Shakespeare’s major plays. This is a different story. I can’t think of a thing I didn’t like about this riveting account of the Tar Heel States’ famous native daughter.
Contact writer Bill Lindau at blindau52@earthlink.net

posted by Bill Lindau @ 5:41 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 01, 2007

'Smile (though your heart is breaking)'


One of these shelter dogs gives me a beseeching look at the 2005 AutumnFest, held every first Saturday in October in Southern Pines, N.C. He looks like a Basenji mix that my sister Sara once owned. Below is a poinsettia given to me by Frances "Bunny" Wilson on December 2006. I named it Bunny Junior. Below is a weird-looking but very pretty species of wildflower that somebody called cowlilies. I never found out the proper name, but every May or June these plants sprout up all over Richmond County, and die out just as quickly in September. I've never seen them anyplace else. (All photos by the blogger, Bill Lindau)




"May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's Resolutions." -- Attributed to Joey Adams, Borscht Belt comedian



I think the world would be such a nicer place to live if everybody followed the advice of the title of that old tune from one of Charlie Chaplin's movies (Tony Bennett and Barbra Streisand covered it on Bennett's "Duets" album, which came out last summer and, I'm happy to say, has been nominated for a Grammy Award).



The quote above was the theme of the Dec. 31, 2006 New York Times Crossword. I thought it was fabulous. The punch line: Nobody keeps New Year's Resolutions. I tried that out on somebody and I don't think they got it, from the looks I receive.



I try to start each new year on an upbeat, but it's doggone hard when you meet other people who don't take that same approach. This includes convenience store clerks and fast-food restaurant workers who only smile at customers when their bosses are watching.



On New Year's Day 2006 I made a resolution to start each day with a funny remark, a compliment or a quote from a Beatles song. I haven't done it every day, but I've made the effort.



Only on this New Year's Day, I ran into at least two people who didn't make the effort to smile at one of my remarks because they were too bogged down with work.



I had stopped into a local fast-food eatery for a snack and a look at the newspaper. At one time the place played a song by Coldplay, from their "X&Y" CD from 2005.



I was so excited I thanked one of the cashiers for having the restaurant play that. The cashier gave me one of those cow-eyed stares, as if she didn't know what I was talking about. I gave her the thumbs-up, shouting "That's my number-one group!"



Same reaction.



I went back and told the shift manager the same thing. She gave me a similar deadpan expression and said, "We don't set that. It's pre-set."



I wish I knew when it became such a faux pas to say something complimentary. Even if it weren't your doing?



That reaction just put me in a bad mood. I filled out one of those cards complaining about that kind of reaction.



I've had a joie de vivre which I wanted to share with the world. That includes a phone greeting in which I say "Good day" in four languages. I put that on a cell phone that I used at work and my supervisor gave me a hard time about it and ordered me to change it. I did, but I wrote letters to several newspapers telling about the incident. I have the same greeting on my own cell phone: "Bonjour! Guten Tag! Buenos dias! Hello!"



Somebody else said it sounded eccentric, but I don't care. That's one of the things that make this world such a drag sometimes: Some people are so buttoned-down they seem to begrudge other people their non-buttoned-down-edness.



I don't understand people like that. What a bunch of sad sacks. Whatever happened to "Service with a Smile"?



We all get up on the wrong side of the proverbial bed sometime, but the people we deal with aren't interested -- anybody listening?! I know I'd have gotten chopped if I ever came to work with a sourpuss attitude. How the people I mentioned ever get away with it I'll never know.



I'm glad that's not a universal trait. Another place I frequent features staff who appreciate my one-liners and attempts at life-brightening a bit more than others. They've also banned smoking, another plus in my book.



While we're on the subject, one of the staff at a local library has worked there for at least four years, and in all the time I've gone there, I've never seen her crack a smile. One day I called her "Stony" and she had a fit. That's not the worst thing I've said to anybody. I was hoping she'd take the hint and act a little bit more pleased about serving the patrons, even the ones they're clearly not fans of. If I'd been the head librarian that young woman would've been history.



I know what I say goes over some people's heads. They see me as some dotty old local, and maybe I could remedy that by explaining my take on things.



I used to be a bit of a crab, but lately I've discovered the joy of doing or saying something nice and watching somebody's eyes light up, watch the bad mood disappear from his/her face.



I want to keep doing that, even if some of the people I say things to are so wrapped up on their own issues (or really have something bad going on) that it doesn't touch them. I just go on doing my thing.



I wake up each morning in the blackest of moods myself, but after my usual shower and a trip to a fast-food joint for a meat-free biscuit, a senior soda and a newspaper I try to keep my chin up and chase the Nazis off with an upbeat appearance. It's too bad not everybody has learned that particular trick. If you encounter them, just keep smilin'. Keep on truckin'.






posted by Bill Lindau @ 7:22 PM 0 comments