Scandals and rivalries

How Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra met: a nightclub in 1943, then MGM in 1949

Gardner and Sinatra first met in 1943, when she was out at a club with Mickey Rooney. Their affair only started six years later, after a second meeting at MGM, and it ended Sinatra's first marriage.

Photo: DoctorMacro.com

Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra first met in 1943. She was at a club with Mickey Rooney, and Sinatra was struck by her immediately, according to Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski’s 2017 biography Ava, a Life in Movies. Nothing came of it then. Sinatra was married to his longtime sweetheart, Nancy, and for several years the two saw each other only occasionally and kept their distance. The meeting that started the affair came in 1949 at MGM. They married on November 7, 1951.

Who Gardner was by 1943

Gardner was born on Christmas Eve 1922 in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children of a struggling tenant farmer. At 17 she took the train to New York to visit her sister Beatrice, who was 19 years older and married to a professional photographer named Larry Tarr. Tarr photographed her and put the portraits in his studio window. A man who saw them and wanted a date with the girl in the pictures suggested sending them to MGM.

Wikipedia names that man as Barnard Duhan, a legal clerk at Loews who sometimes pretended to be an MGM talent scout to meet women. The studio tested her in New York. Her Southern accent was so thick that the testers had trouble understanding her. Her biographer Lee Server described her eyes on camera as a “flash of hypnotic fire.” MGM gave her a contract, and in 1941, aged 18, she went to California. Her mother insisted that her oldest sister go along as chaperone.

The Rooney marriage

At the time Rooney was 21 and the biggest box-office star in the country. In the Our State magazine version he asked her out again and again until she agreed. MGM did not want them dating because it was protecting Rooney’s image. Wikipedia says they married on January 10, 1942, in the small town of Ballard, California. Louis B. Mayer was afraid fans would abandon the Andy Hardy series if they learned its star had a wife.

Bean and Uzarowski say Rooney would not give up his bachelor habits, and Gardner came to see she did not really love him. The sources disagree on how long the marriage lasted. People, summarizing Bean and Uzarowski, says they divorced nine months after the wedding. Bryan Mims, writing in Our State in 2014, gives 17 months. People says Gardner cited mental cruelty as the reason for the split. Wikipedia gives the same grounds, dates the divorce to 1943, and adds that Gardner privately blamed his gambling and womanizing.

A club, 1943

The 1943 meeting comes from a single source, the Bean and Uzarowski biography as People reported it. In that account Gardner was at a club with Rooney, and Sinatra was captivated by her from the start. The available accounts do not name the club, give a month, or say what was said that night.

Sinatra’s own career was taking off that year. Wikipedia says the frenzy known as Sinatramania began after he opened at the Paramount Theatre in New York on December 30, 1942. He signed with Columbia Records as a solo singer on June 1, 1943. By the end of that year he was ahead of Bing Crosby in a DownBeat poll.

The years apart

According to Bean and Uzarowski, Gardner and Sinatra ran into each other now and then over the next few years. Sinatra was happily married, and neither of them pushed further. Gardner married again in 1945, this time to the bandleader Artie Shaw, and they divorced the following year. She was the fifth of Shaw’s eight wives. People reports that Shaw pushed her to educate herself and was said to have been cruel to her. Wikipedia notes that Gardner, like Lana Turner before her, later called him extremely emotionally abusive.

Her career moved in the same years. Her breakthrough was The Killers in 1946, and after it she became a dependable box-office draw. People also says that before she reconnected with Sinatra she had a string of affairs with costars.

MGM, 1949

They met again in 1949, at MGM, and this time it went differently. Bean and Uzarowski quote Sinatra describing the moment:

“I looked at her and said, ‘Jesus, you got prettier since last time I saw ya.’ This was not the young girl from Carolina at the studio. This was a woman who was glorious.”

In Sinatra’s telling, he had stopped seeing her as a studio newcomer from the South. He was still married to Nancy, and the affair began anyway.

Two pistols at 3 a.m.

The affair was not discreet. Bean and Uzarowski describe a drunken drive at 3 a.m. during which the couple’s two pistols blew out several shop windows. Sinatra’s publicist had to get them out of jail. In February 1950, Wikipedia says, newspapers reported the affair and the collapse of Sinatra’s marriage, and his reputation sank further. Sinatra insisted his marriage had been over long before he met Gardner.

The criticism was broad. Wikipedia lists the gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the Hollywood establishment, the Catholic Church, and his own fans. His career was already falling. In April 1950 he had to cancel five days of a booking at the Copa in New York because of a hemorrhage in his throat. His late publicist George Evans had once said that Sinatra’s voice problems always came from emotional strain. Short of money after the divorce and the slump, Sinatra borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay back taxes.

The phone call to Nancy

Gardner did not want to be kept on the side. Bean and Uzarowski recount a night when she made Sinatra drive her to his house. From there he phoned Nancy and asked her to tell Gardner that he had already asked for a divorce. At first Nancy would not give him one. She eventually agreed, and Sinatra married Gardner on November 7, 1951, as the Associated Press records the date.

What the marriage became

The wedding did not settle things. While Gardner was in Nairobi making Mogambo, she became pregnant by Sinatra. Bean and Uzarowski write that she ended the pregnancy in late 1952, after he had left, without telling him. They say she wanted children but not without the stability she had known as a child. Sinatra was reportedly crushed when he learned of it. She became pregnant again and ended that pregnancy too, and this time Sinatra was there when she woke, crying. In her autobiography, Gardner said MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about its stars having babies.

Wikipedia says Gardner used her influence, especially with Harry Cohn, to get Sinatra cast in From Here to Eternity. That 1953 role won him an Oscar and brought back both his acting and singing careers. Gardner filed for divorce in 1954, and it became final in 1957. People reports that both had affairs with other people before the end. Why she left just as his comeback began is the subject of a separate story.

What she said about him later

Gardner called Sinatra the love of her life. She said so in her autobiography, and Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations repeats it. That book, a collection of her word-for-word recollections to Evans, was published in 2013 after his death. It describes the marriage as one of cheating, fighting and a great deal of martini drinking. Evans left the project after Gardner learned that Sinatra had once sued him.

They stayed close after the divorce. After Gardner’s stroke in 1986, Sinatra wanted to pay for her to see a specialist in the United States. She let him arrange a private plane with medical staff, although she could afford the bills herself. The Ava Gardner Museum is at 325 East Market Street in Smithfield, North Carolina, and draws about 12,000 visitors a year. Among its exhibits is a watch she gave Sinatra.