Ava et Elizabeth

"Sometimes she would do a scene particularly well. I would thank her and she would fall in my arms and say, 'Christ, you know I can't act.' And I'd say, 'What is it then? It's just as good as acting.' But she never believed me... Ava is like Marilyn. She's really frightened. She would cry a lot, she had no confidence in herself, she felt she couldn't act, she had no home, no base, no family, she missed them terribly, she felt she'd missed out in life. It was hard to believe her unhappiness. When you looked at her, even then, she was...the most beautiful human being in the world." — Nunnally Johnson, who directed Ava in "The Angel Wore Red" (1960). Photo of Ava is a still from the film.

“Elizabeth didn’t know the meaning of fear.” – Kathy Ireland Photo by Roddy McDowall c. 1964.

'In London she was setting out to make a new life. To make a new Ava Gardner. In departing from Spain she had wanted to leave behind the furies that had directed her behavior for so long. "By that time in her life she was really very tired of stardom," said Spoli Mills, Ava's close friend for the last 30 years of her life. "It had overwhelmed her. She started out a very shy person and a lot of what had happened to her she found very embarrassing. When she came to London she really just wanted to become a normal person again. An anonymous person. She wanted to walk down the street and not be bothered. She wanted peace. She didn't want to think about being beautiful, about having to live up to that legend. She wanted to walk her dog in the park and not give a damn about how she looked." — Love Is Nothing by Lee Server.

Ava Gardner walking her dog in London, 1959. She loved London and remained there for the rest of her life. Ofthe city, she said: “Since that first visit on my way to Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, I’ve always loved London. So it rains sometimes. It rains everywhere sometimes. And I happen to like the rain. More important, the British leave you alone. They take three or four photographs when you arrive and then they forget you exist. It’s a very civilized town. If I choose to walk down the street or go across the park with my dog, nobody bothers me. When people do recognize me, they smile and nod their heads, which is a hell of a lot different from the treatment I’ve been used to….I do…have a lot of friends in London…really good friends, so I’m far from lonely. We have dinner at our homes or, if we go out, it’s to places where we won’t be disturbed….Actually, my apartment in Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge suits me so well I hate to leave it, even for a park bench.”

'[Kenneth] Tynan would recall with a mixture of enthusiasm and horror a night spent out and about with the movie star, “six enthusiastic flamenco singers and several bottles of vodka.” Miss Gardner, he wrote to critic Cyril Connolly (by way of apology for broken engagement due to night with Gardner, hangover, and so on), “is… not easily discouraged when she gets the smell of riot in her nostrils, and I allowed myself to be swept in an open car across London with her entourage, which was joined at odd times by a policeman and a rich swimmer named Esther Williams, on whose presence Miss Gardner insisted, saying that a party wasn’t a party without a drunken bitch lying in a pool of tears.”' — 'Love is Nothing' by Lee Server.

— ‘Love Is Nothing’ by Lee Server. Photo by Sam Levin.

“She was the most charming person in the world. Until she had too much to drink, and then she could be your worst nightmare. We had a fight right at the start. We were in a taxi. She was drunk, and she wanted to go to another club. It was already late. I told her we had to get back and get our car before the garage closed. We had to go home. ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ ‘Ava, I’m not telling you what to do, I’m telling you we have to go home.’ She was furious with me. Nobody told her she couldn’t do something she wanted to do. ‘Take me back to the St. Regis. I’m going to take my dogs for a walk.’ I said, ‘Ava, I hope you take off that emerald necklace first, you won’t last twenty seconds in Central Park.’ We get up to her suite, and she goes stumbling into her bedroom and slams  the door. Her sister is stretched out, passed out cold, and there was dog doo all over the floor. I called down to the front desk to have them take the dogs out.

She came storming out finally in her slacks and loafers. ‘Where are my dogs? What have you done with my dogs?’ I said, ‘I’ve had someone from the hotel come walk them. You’re in no condition’ This was too much. This was High Noon time. She was like a tiger coming at me. My husband’s fallen asleep, and she’s coming at me. I thought, if she hits me I’m going to hit her back! I was terrified, actually. She looked ready to kill me. But when she got within a foot the whole rage melted away. She said, ‘Oh, hon, I just love you.’ And she collapsed against me. And I said, ‘Well, Ava, I love you too.’

From then on she was really very very dear to me. Maybe it was the fact that I had stood up to her, I don’t know. I don’t know if a lot of thought went into anything that she did. We became friends. She trusted me, and she didn’t trust a lot of people. I became like the old sorority sister she never had, who didn’t want anything from her, never asked her for anything. And she was very generous. Always trying to give you presents. She’d give me a fistful of jewelry. The good stuff. I’d put it back. She’d say, ‘You never let me give you anything!’ A lot of the time I played the caretaker. There had to be somebody in the group who knew where the care keys were or how to get home or what city you were in. You wouldn’t believe how much these people drank. Drunks and total nuts who survive have a knack for finding people to look after them.”

— Nan Birmingham on Ava Gardner.

“She was a raging beauty. That was first. I never saw anybody so beautiful. Maybe Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe on a very good day Elizabeth Taylor. She was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing. I’ve known a few women like that. It’s like something’s sprayed, like a bitch in heat. You can’t get to the end of the block with women like this where five guys aren’t following, falling over themselves. Guys and girls following, too. And these women know,they understand it about themselves. I’m not one of them, so I don’t know how it works. Ava had it times a hundred. She could seduce anyone in two split seconds.”

--- Nan Birmingham

"She came up to my office one day. She came in very quietly, almost snuck in, because this was when she first started and was afraid of everything. And she says, ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m really curious to see what my pictures look like.’ So I said, ‘Well, c’mon.’ And I went and pulled out the drawer of her stuff they had taken. And I spread the pictures out for her to look at, and she studied them. And you want to know something? Those were stunning photos of her. She was the most beautiful woman on the lot, absolutely, nobody compared to her. But not only that, she couldn’t take a bad picture. And that was rare, y’know; everybody has a bad side. And she looked at the pictures for a little while, and when she was done she straightened up and ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘From the way people went on, I thought I was better-looking that that…’” — Berdie Adams, 'Love Is Nothing' by Lee Server. Photo by Eric Carpenter, 1942.

"I slept in Frank’s pajamas, at least the top half of them, and the next day we walked along the empty beach, me in the bottom half of my travel suit and Frank’s jacket. Naturally a photographer was lying in wait and snapped a shot of us, barefoot, holding hands. I’ve always thought it was a sad little photograph, a sad little commentary on our lives then. We were simply two young people so much in love, and the world wouldn’t leave us alone for a second." — Ava Gardner.

"As movie stars go, Dame Elizabeth was the gold standard. She was always a creature of paradoxes: possessed of exquisite beauty, she loved to curse like a longshoreman. She lived her life out loud and in public, yet she ensured her four children and ten grandchildren a private life, which they enjoy to this day. Raised in relative luxury by an art dealer and an actress, she loved the company of working men and women, made friends with the crews of all her films, and embraced Richard Burton’s Welsh coal mining family. She was comfortable with vulgarity. She ate and drank to her heart’s content. Her lust for life informed everything she did, and everything she did was outsized: her eight marriages (two of them to Burton, the love of her life); her six decades’ worth of films; her two Academy awards; her astonishing jewels, including the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond and the 69.42-carat Taylor-Burton Diamond. The English called her “The Wife of Bath.” She was made a Dame of the Realm in 2003. She knew how to be a movie star and, in truth, her stardom and her fabled personal life eclipsed her real gifts as an actress—gifts that most dazzled in A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Butterfield 8, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Taming of the Shrew. She taught the theatrically trained Burton how to act for the camera: he praised her quality of stillness, and learned from it. But off-stage, and in the third act of her life—when Richard was gone, when her marriages to John Warner and Larry Fortensky were over, when her late-career forays into acting on film, onstage, and in television ended—she was anything but still. Some might say her third act was her greatest, and her most fearless. Like Maggie the Cat, she seemed to have nine lives, as she survived a brain tumor, a broken back, the scoliosis she’d had since birth, hip replacements, and heart surgery. In the early 1990s, she took on the daunting cause of raising awareness of and finding a cure for AIDS, by founding the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Fund—at a time when mainstream America was still recoiling from the disease, and from gay America." — Vanity Fair. Photo of Elizabeth at the premiere of "Moby Dick" in Los Angeles, 1956.

Photos of Ava by Clarence Sinclair Bull in promotion for "Maisie Goes to Reno" (1944).

Photo by Bert Six, 1956.

Ava Gardner at the Hollywood premiere of "The Barefoot Contessa" (1954). The Milwaukee Sentinel wrote of the premiere: "Ava was in a rosy-pink, body-molding sheath designed with a halter neckline, the full-length gown completely embroidered with matching pink sequins. She wore a matching tiara, pink crystal earrings, long pink kid gloves, pink slippers, and carried a long pink fox stole. It was a magnificent costume." Photos by Frank Worth.