Ava-va-voom!
Ava Gardner’s Last Photoshoot
I have two first impressions of Ava Gardner arriving on the set of A.D., a thirty-million-dollar made-for-TV barn-burner with a biblical backstory filmed on location in Tunisia in 1983.
First, despite a film crew already jaded by an all-star cast, I witnessed this woman suck the air out of a soundstage when she walked on. It went from humming with activity to a collective hush in an instant, like everyone stopped breathing. She could stop clocks within the radius of her charisma. Attention spun her way like a compass needle. She still had it: the star quality recognized by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer mavens who groomed her for consecration as a Hollywood deity.
Second, back at Hotel Monastir (modern digs surrounded by date palm trees on a Mediterranean beach but otherwise isolated from the twentieth century), an honest-to-goddess movie star stepped out of her limousine, grabbed the wig off her head and hurled it to the ground, cursing at no one in particular as she stomped into the lobby waving a lit cigarette. She is known to have said, “When I lose my temper, Honey, you can’t find it anyplace.”
