Wearing a sweater atop something that can only be described as an industrial sized firework? Check. Seducing you while drinking a really thick vanilla milkshake? Check. Weirdly crouched on a fake beach with high-waist shorts? Check. These pin-ups required Gardner to pose in all sorts of weird and faux sexy ways:
pin-ups, which the studio would print en masse and use in generalized publicity campaigns. She also posed for a shit-ton of “leg art,” a.k.a. When not playing a pretty face in the background, the publicity office made ample use of her looks, putting her in the publicity materials for films in which she may or may not have appeared. Gardner was somewhere between blow-jobber and JV, given walk-on roles in B pictures but rarely allowed to speak, even as she slaved to rid herself of her Southern twang. MGM signed hundreds of beautiful girls every year to similar contracts: Some would go on to make varsity, some would languish on JV, and some were just there to give blow jobs to the coaches, as it were. Gardner was signed to a standard seven-year contract at $50 a week, but that didn’t mean she was a star. She looked to the left, she looked the right, then she walked around just enough to show off a spectacular pair of legs, purportedly prompting the MGM bosses in Hollywood to exclaim “She’s can’t act she didn’t talk she’s sensational! Get her out here!” Realizing that Gardner couldn’t act and couldn’t speak in a way that people North of the Mason-Dixon line could understand, the New York office arranged for her to shoot a silent screen test. He tried the same on Gardner, but all she and her family heard was “she should call MGM.” The tool didn’t get Gardner’s number, but her photo, now in the hands of the New York MGM office, was raising eyebrows.
EN MASSE AVA MOVIE
Some tool who worked for the local movie theater had made a practice of posing as an MGM talent scout in order to procure phone numbers from pretty girls. (Do you think Ava was posed with her pick-up truck and rifle the way people did for senior pictures in my town? HOTTT). He was so pleased with the results that he put it in the front window of his shop, all senior-picture like.
While visiting New York, Gardner’s brother-in-law, an established photographer, had her sit for a session. She was beautiful but without talent, always “picked last” for the school plays the same way that I was “picked last” for every team that didn’t have the word “math” in its title. Gardner was the youngest of eight children, raised in near-poverty in North Carolina, where she acquired a “Pure Tobacco Road South” accent and a predilection for drama. And for most of the ’40s and ’50s, she was Hollywood’s most alluring femme fatale, an image solidified both on and off the screen. She’d slit her eyes, throw her head at an angle, and the photographer would somehow catch something about her - not elegance or grace, exactly, but something that was strong, sexual, and almost animal, as if she were zeroing in on you, weighing your merits, and readying to pounce.
EN MASSE AVA HOW TO
Ava Gardner knew how to pose for the camera.
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