MGM’s roster of female stars constituted the greatest collection of beautiful and talented women the world has ever known.

One of the greatest was Ava Gardner.

Ava Gardner in “The Killers,” her breakthrough role, 1946.

As an emerging starlet in the early 1940’s, before she made a single movie the breathtaking Southern beauty was the talk of the town.

Mickey Rooney was MGM’s golden boy, a versatile star equally adept at musicals, comedy and drama. His signature role as the small-town youngster Andy Hardy made him something of a cash cow for the studio. The Hardy movies were cheap to produce and earned enormous profits.

In his compulsively readable autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claims that his mother worked as a prostitute in order to put food on the table during the depths of the Depression. Thus, it’s not surprising that Rooney pursued women with an obsessive compulsion, seeking affection and love in all the wrong places: call girls, ambitious actresses and mature women—including Irving Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer—smitten by Rooney’s brash boyish charm.

The first time Rooney laid eyes on Ava Gardner was when she visited the set of “Babes on Broadway,” in 1941. She was wearing a wispy summer dress and high heels. Rooney was also wearing a dress and high heels—a Carmen Miranda costume.

Rooney recalls the gauzy moment:

“Hello,” said Ava. That’s all. Just hello. And without a smile. But she said it in the soft drawl of her native rural North Carolina, and I was a goner. I had known many beautiful women in my lifetime, but this little lady topped them all. She was five feet one, but she invariably wore high heels, so she was about my height when I was wearing five-inch wedgies.

Ava was eighteen years old, Rooney, twenty-one, and his technique with women, he admits, was a combination of early Neanderthal and late Freud. He pursued the gorgeous young starlet with ferocious determination. After turning down five dates Ava finally succumbed, no doubt out of sheer exhaustion and because as one of MGM’s most powerful and bankable stars Rooney could, Ava understood, help advance her career.

After a night of drinking, dancing and table-hopping at Chasen’s, Rooney was smitten. Ava was exhausted by Rooney’s non-stop patter. He was, she realized, always performing. When Rooney saw Ava to her door at two in the morning he impulsively proposed marriage.

Ava, playing a cool customer but in truth a tongue-tied country girl, gave a little hoot, smiled enigmatically, and ducked into her apartment.

For the next few weeks Rooney kept asking and Ava kept evading. Ava was told by everyone in the Hollywood colony that Rooney never took no for an answer.

Soon after December 7, 1941, Rooney presented Ava with a huge diamond ring and once again popped the question.

There is nothing like war to concentrate the mind on love and romance.

Ava finally surrendered.

They kissed and Rooney started to grope the inexperienced young woman from Grabtown, North Carolina.

But Ava Gardner would not sleep with Rooney before accepting the sacraments of marriage. She was a virgin, and she insisted, that was the way she was going to keep it until the wedding night.

Rooney was out of his mind with desire.

Ava Gardner before her MGM glamour make-over.

Informed of the engagement, L.B. Mayer hit the ceiling. He accused Rooney of trying to destroy MGM. There was an image to preserve and marriage to an unknown hillbilly starlet did not fit the carefully crafted studio profile of Andy Hardy, the clean-cut all-American boy.

Terrified of Mayer’s incandescent temper Ava was ready to postpone the marriage. But Rooney stood up to the most powerful studio chief in Hollywood and threatened to break his contract if Mayer did not give his blessing to the union.

L.B. Mayer realized he was no match for Ava Gardner’s smoldering sensuality and wisely backed down. The wily mogul even hosted a bachelor party for Rooney. The guest list included: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor, Lewis Stone, Bill Holden, Robert Montgomery, Lionel Barrymore, William Powell, and Frederic March.

Ava and Mickey were married on January 10, 1942.

The wedding night should have been an MGM soft-focus dream of deep kisses, moonlight and unquenchable passion.

Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney on their wedding day.

Mickey Rooney confesses the awful truth:

After the ceremony, we kissed our families good-bye and headed for our honeymoon in Carmel, at the Del Monte Inn…

We didn’t have a normal, sexy wedding night. I was a nervous wreck. Getting there had been more than half the fun. Now I didn’t quite know how to savor my victory. To quiet my nerves I drank too much champagne at dinner and barely made it back to our room before I took off my pants and sank into the bed. By the time Ava emerged from the bathroom, all dressed in white satin and lace, I was snoring heavily—dreaming, no doubt about how nice it was, being married to the most beautiful woman in the world.

The marriage was a predictable disaster. Rooney was interested in booze, betting, and babes—not necessarily in that order. Ava reports in her autobiography, Ava: My Story, that she spent her days posing for MGM publicity photos—her career had yet to ignite—then cooked, cleaned, and decorated the house. She was trying to be a good wife.

But Rooney was a serial adulterer who spent all his time at the studio, the track, and a brothel stocked with prostitutes who were dead-ringers for Hollywood movie stars.

Go figure.

Finally Ava walked out on him. One year and five days after he slipped a ring on her finger bearing the engraving: “Love Forever,” they were divorced.

Years later, Ava somewhat wickedly characterized their union as Love Finds Andy Hardy.

Ava’s career soared after appearing as the femme fatale opposite Burt Lancaster in “The Killers,” 1946. But her love life was tumultuous, a blizzard of booze, wrenching love affairs and failed marriages to Frank Sinatra and Artie Shaw, volcanic and abusive men.

Rooney racked up an astonishing seven additional marriages after Ava.

Neither ever found true contentment in love or marriage.

Hollywood was and still is a dream factory that all too frequently weaves nightmares.

Flags and bunting graced every building and sound stage. There was band music and rows of picnic tables groaning under the weight of food.

L.B. Mayer, a man without a birth date

Every MGM star was expected to attend and pay homage to America-and to L.B. Mayer. For in Mayer’s mind, the two were inseparable. All complied, except Greta Garbo, a woman far too narcissistic to lavish attention on any country or person other than her own mirrored island.

Though Yiddish was his first language, L.B. Mayer delivered a rousing Fourth of July speech. Mayer could be a forceful English speaker, mixing deeply personal anecdotes—usually about his beloved mother—and soaring rhetoric about his adopted home, America.

To date, every Mayer biographer and film writer with whom I’m familiar repeats the familiar anecdote in which Mayer “claimed to have lost his birth certificate” when crossing from Europe to America. The quotation marks tell us—with a condescending wink and nudge—that Mayer fibbed in order to adopt July Fourth as his birthday, thereby conflating his identity with America’s.

However, the truth of Mayer’s birth date can best be appreciated and understood within the context of the Eastern European Jewish culture from which the junk man turned film pioneer emerged.

L.B. Mayer, real name Lazar Meir, was born in Minsk, today the capital of Belarus, but at the time part of the Russian Empire known as The Pale of Settlement where Jews were forced to reside by the viciously anti-Semitic Tzar.

For the most part, Jews of the Pale lived in grinding poverty and the constant threat of pogroms—state sanctioned murder, pillage and rape by the Cossacks. But in spite of their oppression and status as second class citizens, these Jews were overwhelmingly pious and ritually observant, preserving Judaism thorough faith in the G-d of Israel, adherence to the Torah and the study of Talmud.

This was a culture steeped in preserving Jewish traditions, traditions where Biblical and Rabbinic literature is marked by an absence of birth dates.

In the Bible we are informed that men and women lived for a specific number of years—and there is considerable Rabbinic debate at to what constitutes a year in the Biblical age. In addition, the great Rabbinic sages are, at best, recorded as living during the reign of whichever King was, at the time, ruling.

Crucial to understanding life in The Pale, is an awareness that birth certificates were avoided by Jewish families because the Tzar used this information to draft Jewish children—as young as 12-years old—into the Russian army for a period of twenty-five years. The goal being to rid the child of his religious identity and convert him to Christianity.

Studying Jewish tombstones that were documented before the onslaught of the Communist bulldozers in Eastern Europe, there is a marked absence of birth dates. Most often the name of the deceased—for instance, Jacob son of Aaron, no family names—is inscribed, accompanied with a biblical inscription, usually from King David’s Psalms, and finally, the yahrtzeit, the date of death. It is rare to see a birth date chiseled into the stone.

Most Jews confined to The Pale marked their birthday through an association with a specific Jewish holiday.

As an example, my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Avrech, also from The Pale, told me that he was born “… sometime around Chanukah.”

In contrast, I tell people that I was born in the year of All About Eve.

L.B. Mayer, like every pioneering Jewish mogul, was anxious to shed his Jewish identity. These rags to riches studio chiefs were unable to reconcile Judaism with their aspirations to be real Americans.

And so, it seems more than likely that rather than admit to a vague birth date—associated with an ancient Jewish festival—Mayer crafted the lost birth certificate story, thereby avoiding what he viewed as his embarrassing Jewish heritage.

In any case, L.B. Mayer, the man who invented the star system and who headed the most powerful studio in Hollywood, was intensely patriotic—he emigrated to America from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada—and insisted that MGM films reflect his deeply held values.

Every Hollywood studio produced thousands upon thousands of still photos as a means of promoting their stars. There were basic, canned poses used over and over again: Starlets in swimsuits, swashbuckling actors with swords, a male and female star locked in a passionate embrace. There were also photo sets celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

And there were Independence Day stills.

To jaded eyes, these photos appear artless and heavy-handed. To be sure, the great glamor photographers George Hurrell and C.S. Bull did not snap the shutter for these novelty poses.

But to me, studio produced July Fourth pictures represent a genuine love of America and the values of democracy, liberty and freedom. These are refreshing images, free of tedious, post-modern irony, images that speak deeply of Hollywood’s Golden Age and it’s place in the American grain.

Always an explosive performer, Joan Crawford celebrates liberty.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

It’s in the walk.

Think of Mae West, hands caressing her Rubenesque hips, head tilted, not just sauntering, but oozing forward, the exaggerated female.

Elbows cocked and angled at his hips, moving with concentrated energy, Jimmy Cagney looks like a coiled spring about to explode.

Joan Crawford, leading with her linebacker shoulders, like a tank on the battlefield, determined, dangerous, unstoppable.

Spine rigid, arms glued to his side, plum straight steps—no motion in the hips or shoulders—eyes nailed to the distant horizon, Henry Fonda’s walk is a combination of cool reserve and righteous indignation.

Bette Davis, nervously wringing her hands—William Wyler once threatened to chain them down—as she paces back and forth in her pathologically unstable world.

Rapid fire mincing steps, hips and shoulders swaying, Marilyn Monroe is the archetype of the sexually charged woman, and yet simultaneously a little girl who is innocent of her immense power.

And then there is John Wayne.

His walk is odd.

Distinctive, but odd.

It’s a complex, disorienting, and ultimately elegant forward propulsion: long manly strides, elbows bent and poised—like a boxer locked into position—a distinctly feminine swooshing of the hips, and a pronounced case of pigeon toe.

Was Duke’s walk natural?

Or was it part of the John Wayne image, a carefully constructed bit of acting business?

Harry Carey, Jr., in his fascinating memoir, Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company, provides invaluable and deeply private insights into the famous John Wayne walk.

First, Harry Carey, Jr. sketches in some background on John Wayne’s intimate relationship with the great character actor Paul Fix (1901–1983) Carey’s father-in-law:

…Paul Fix had almost as much to do with Duke’s success as a screen actor as did John Ford. Paul Fix literally taught John Wayne what John Wayne knew about acting. He was the man who gave Duke his first insight into forming the mold which was to be his persona. Most people give Uncle Jack [John Ford] the credit for this, but the first man to put the John Wayne image into John Wayne’s head was Paul Fix.

Carey, Jr. discusses the early days, the B westerns, and journeyman actor John Wayne’s stage appearance that turned disastrous:

Paul first worked as an actor with Duke in those early westerns. In those days, Paul had a sort of slinky, haunted look about him, like a man who might steal or lie, so of course he was usually cast as a heavy; not the head honcho, though, the sly henchman. He played a lot of gangsters, along with Sheldon Leonard or Barton MacLane. Paul was very serious about acting, and he wrote many plays. He was always putting them on in the little theaters around Hollywood. He cast Duke in one of them, but Duke was so frightened of live theater that he overdosed on booze and made a total ass out of himself. His wife, Josephine [Alicia Saenz], was so furious she screamed from the audience, “You’re a bum—a drunken bum!” What a night in the theater! Little did they know that they were looking at the man who was to become the biggest movie star of all time.

Harry Carey, Jr. reveals how Paul Fix worked behind the scenes as an acting coach to John Wayne during the most important film of Duke’s career.

Duke used to tell Paul that he felt awkward in front of the camera. He said he didn’t know what to do with his hands; that he didn’t feel natural. Not too many years later, Duke got his big break when John Ford cast him as “The Ringo Kid” in Stagecoach. Duke was overwhelmed by this good news but paralyzed with fear that he wouldn’t be able to carry it off. He went to Paul for help. Without John Ford’s knowledge. Duke went to Paul’s house every night to go over the next day’s work while they were shooting in town.

Private and not so private acting coaches are not unusual in Hollywood. Montgomery Clift was so dependent on his acting coach Mira Rostova, that he put her on salary while shooting some of his most famous films. And much to the chagrin of his directors and co-stars, Clift, after every take, would anxiously look to Rostova—not the director—for approval or disapproval of his line readings.

“Not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk.”

And now Carey fills us in on the birth of the legendary John Wayne walk:

Because Duke was kind of heavy-footed and used to trudge more than walk, Paul told Duke to point his toes when he walked, and the “John Wayne walk” was born. Try it yourself. Take a step and point your toe, like you’re stabbing it into the ground—left foot, right foot. Your shoulders automatically move back and forth, and the hips follow, not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk. When Duke first did it, it was ballsey as hell. As the Wayne legend began to form, the walk became more pronounced. Rio Bravo or any of the “Rios” are good examples.

Hollywood stardom is a mysterious thing. In the days when the studio system dominated, the moguls consciously searched for the key to a players potential image. And then, once identified, the studio system—at its best, an incredible make-over machine—created, polished and ruthlessly exploited that star’s specific persona.

No wonder L.B. Mayer alternately broke down in rage and tears when he discovered that Andy Hardy/Mickey Rooney ran off in the middle of the night and married the young and sexy Ava Gardner. Mayer was terrified that the public would reject the incredibly profitable Andy Rooney series—innocence and apple pie—when they realized that small town, all American Andy/Mickey was actually something of a dog, hooking up with a hot 17-year old actress—not to mention a host of chorus girls, hookers and vulnerable starlets.

With Clark Gable it gradually became clear to the executives at MGM that he was a man’s man, possessed of a humorous glint in his eye that turned women to jelly. For Jean Arthur it was her sandpaper voice and hesitant delivery that conveyed a woman desperate for control, but on the edge of a melt down. Jean Harlow was perfect as the sexy, vulnerable, wise-cracking tootsie who didn’t take herself too seriously.

But since the demise of the studio system, Hollywood stardom has morphed into an eerie kind of tabloid celebrity. Movie stars no longer have an identifiable movie persona, in fact most work hard at subverting a fixed image. They take pride in grabbing movie roles that go against type. Contemporary actors want to prove that they have range, that they are versatile. Hence, absent a fixed address, the post-modern actor is, with rare exceptions, fated to be excluded from the pantheon of Hollywood immortals.

For John Wayne, after a long Hollywood apprenticeship, his stardom was defined and exquisitely refined as a particular kind of rugged American individual; a man, no matter how conflicted, who recognized the difference between good and evil—and strode across the silver screen like a colossus.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech