#lee server

“Ava Gardner used to be known as the most beautiful woman in the world (and was once fancifully publicized as the World’s Most Beautiful Animal), but it was not wholly her looks that made her one of the great movie stars. Her image, which she quickly developed, was that of the independent-minded, worldly-wise and sexually knowledgeable good bad woman who fascinates men and worries wives. She was eminently suitable to be a Hemingway heroine, as she proved in The Sun Also Rises and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and her highly publicized off-screen life was built into her screen personality. Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa appears almost autobiographical (sensual, temperamental beauty built to stardom) and certainly he never considered anybody else for the part. Her marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, like her friendships with Howard Hughes and others, are all a part of her cinema legend; she is the epitome of the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has made it big without kowtowing to anybody.”

/ From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979) by Ken Wlaschin /

“I was in Spain doing a film ... had two fabulous lunches with (Ava Gardner). She had saddlebags of vodka on the sides of her eyes. But what a beauty. You’re just in awe; it’s like taking in the Taj Mahal of beauty. But she was a real girl. “Honey, honey” and smoking, smoking and the beauty of this face and drinking and laughing our asses off. She was trying to get me out of Madrid. She said I had to get out of there – get the fuck out of the country. And she leaned over the table, and she said, “You need to get the fuck out of Spain, because the guys all have little dicks, and they’ll fuck you in the ass before you can get your panties off.” I loved her so much. We laughed so hard ... What a genius. She had a lot of vodka in her, boy, that’s for sure.”

While filming in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) in London, one weekend with her sister Bappie she had her first look at Paris, Metro arranging for a suite at the George V and a chauffeured limousine. Wanting to see something of the "real Paris", they ditched their chauffeur outside the Tour d'Argent and wandered off on their own, ending the night drinking champagne in a glitzy lesbian nightclub.  (The visit to the club was a naive accident, Ava would claim, disingenuously, perhaps, as she had a continuing curiosity about the sexual demimonde and through the years paid visits to gay bars, red-light zones, and brothels all over the world.)

Hi! Well, as for Ava she had a terrific metabolism despite the fact that many of her relatives were prone to gaining weight (her mother, her sisters and brother). She was a night owl and she ate and drank a lot but still her waist was incredibly small. Only after 50 she had to control herself a little bit more in this sense. According to her biographer Lee Server, when Ava arrived in London for the filming of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman she had time to explore the city and “the only disappointment came at mealtime, the holdover of wartime rationing and the contrast with California plenty painfully visible in portions that taunted a woman with Ava’s vast appetite. At her first dinner she looked at the size of the steak she had been served and ordered the waiter to bring two more.”

Ava’s diet:

Breakfast: Southern-fried chicken, grits, biscuits, gravy, coffee.

Lunch: A large steak, veggies, potatoes, salad, apple-pie with ice cream, iced-tea.

Snack: A milkshake. Cornbread dipped in cooked vegetable juices.

Dinner : Another steak, with all the trimmings.

Dessert.

Evening snack : An omelette

As you can imagine it’s not very probable for mere mortals to have Ava Gardner’s body on such diet! However she was very active and sporty person, a tomboy since her childhood, climbing the trees, running with boys. She played tennis, golf, she swam, she liked to dance very much, but she did not do any special exercises to lose weight.

I think Grace too had a good metabolism, all her family was very sporty, her mother was a model in her younger years. Recently I read on gracefilm blog that Grace was very good at tennis. There’s footage of her playing baseball. She was a very disciplined person who neither drank nor smoked. And I remember reading in one of her bios that during her model years she did diet herself and the diet was based on prunes. When she was close to 50 she gained some weight and suffered because she couldn’t get rid of it: her body retained water and the metabolism slowed down. At the same time she said how difficult it was to say No to a delicious fried chicken. Of course let’s not forget that she gave birth to three children.

[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 discourage 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."