From the Vaults - Ava, Miss Gardner

This was originally posted on the Obsolete Blog That Is Obsolete on 12 July 2004...

I'd put money on nobody else giving a flying fuck about this, but it needs to be said

OK, so I'm off to see Grandad tomorrow to fit a new belt on his record player - it's so old the rubber perished and got loose so I bought him another one. I thought to myself that I should go to sleep nice and early. However, there was a Paul Newman film on TV: The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean which I decided to tape. Set up the video and all... waited until it started just to be sure... and then found out that Ava Gardner was in it as Lily Langtry.

So I kept watching to see what it was about - I knew it was a sort of comedy western, and you know, John Huston is one of the best directors to ever pick up a viewfinder....


It turns out that a great theme of the film is the Judge's great, undying nay tooby, love for Miss Lily. And he puts posters of Ava-as-Lily up all over his courthouse/saloon (best you don't ask). Even the beer drinking bear didn't top that.

Right at the end, the divine Miss Ava turned up. And she was marvellous. This was not the greatest film I've ever seen. Nor is it the greatest western I've ever seen. It's not the greatest Newman film I've seen. It's one of those films that gets put randomly on BBC2 at ten past eleven on a Sunday night. It wastes the talents of Newman and practically the whole cast. It hides the star's incredibly beauty behind a beard, although nothing can hide those blue eyes of his.

This isn't why I cared to stay up. The reason I kept watching was that this film called Ava Gardner the most beautiful woman ever. In 1972, Ava Gardner was fifty years old... and she was still the most beautiful woman in the world. I actually started writing a post about her the other day after watching The Barefoot Contessa, but I stopped and for whatever reason did not continue.

I've looked long and hard for beauty in this tarnished, ugly world. I've seen it in all sorts of places, but I'm telling you this: Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman who ever walked the face of this earth. Helen of Troy has nothing on her. Especially if your image of the Queen of Sparta is Diane Kruger. There are beautiful women all around us, but none of them can touch the greatness of Miss Gardner, who once, incidentally, played Venus herself.

It's not just about her face. There are physically beautiful people everywhere, but that's not what makes them beautiful. The things that make people beautiful genuinely are from the inside: Marilyn Monroe's steely fragility, Errol Flynn's charm, or that look in Orlando Bloom's eyes. It is the kindness of my friend Louise's smile that makes her one of the most beautiful people I know personally. It's the tragedy written into Jim Morrison's face and it's the serenity in my grandmother's.

With Ava, it's fire and spirit. It's somehow knowing that this is the sort of woman unafraid of swearing like a trooper (she's famous for that) or loving Sinatra as she did. It's the spirit of a woman who wanted to be a good little housewife but was always much more than that. It's that thing inside her that comes from growing up poor in N. Carolina and not entirely buying into the glamour she's been swathed in. It's everything, from the kindness she showed the Sinatra children at what I imagine was a pretty awful time in their lives, to dancing all night long, to saying "Deep down, I'm pretty superficial."

Beauty does not consist only of skin and bones. MGM discovered this when they finally realised that there is no one perfect face, despite the legions of pretty starlets they signed. It is not just skin and bones, but everything about you. It's not one thing or another and it varies from person to person. It is confidence and personality.

There's no woman past, present or future, who will ever compare to the most beautiful Miss Gardner, just as no man past, present or future, will ever be as beautiful (and terrible) as Errol Flynn. There's a film that even has the two of them together: The Sun Also Rises from 1957, and based on a Hemingway story. I've never seen it anywhere on tv or video. Perhaps the two of them on screen together causes the television to explode. I certainly wouldn't be surprised.

Ava, I salute you.