Her 10 Best Quotes – The Hollywood Reporter
Ava Gardner on Hollywood
“I thought I was making fifty dollars a week [at MGM], but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white slavery, and it lasted for seventeen years.”
On Artie Shaw
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Eric Carpenter/Hulton Archive/Getty Images “We hadn’t been married five minutes when he decided I should go to an analyst. Artie was a pseudo-intellectual. He had a great oral diarrhea. I was constantly being put down. I was madly in love with him, but I wasn’t treated as an equal, as a wife; I was treated as sort of his little pet.”
On Fighting Off Men
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images “I dealt with men who had tempers, and who could get violent—Lord knows how I had to defend myself against Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra, and from Artie Shaw’s verbal abuse. But George [C. Scott] was a different category of animal when he got drunk. He’d break into my hotel room, which he did in Italy, London and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, attack me to where I was frightened for my life, and scream, ‘Why won’t you marry me?’ Well, I would never marry a man who couldn’t control his liquor. Me, I’m a happy drunk. I laugh, I dance. I certainly don’t break bottles and threaten to kill.”
On Acting
“I was lazy. I would have been a hell of a lot better actress had I taken it more seriously. I never had the proper respect for acting. Quite often, I learned my lines on the way to the studio.”
Pictured: On the Beach
On Frank Sinatra
Image Credit: Photo Credit: AFP/AFP/Getty Images “The poor guy was literally without a job. He said all he could do was play saloons and crappy night clubs. His ego and self-esteem was at its lowest ever. And mine was practically at its peak. So it was hell for him. He was such a proud man — to have a woman pay all his bills was a bitch.”
On Howard Hughes
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images “I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know about his reputation or his great wealth or his thing about airplanes and jetting around the world. I just knew that as soon as I got divorced from Mickey, Howard entered my life and I couldn’t get rid of him for the next fifteen years, no matter who I was with or who I married.”
On ‘The Killers’
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection “Oh, what the hell did I know? I went to the set the first day in full makeup and the director told me to take it off. So I did the film without makeup. I had nothing to do with anything I did. I never understood why I was so famous.”
On Marlon Brando
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Keystone/Getty Images “We went back to his hotel and had some drinks. I wasn’t wearing a bra and he reached over and grabbed my breasts and said, ‘Are those real?’ I said, ‘I believe they are.’”
On Mickey Rooney
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images “He came to visit me at the hospital and I heard the Jesus Christ routine. He’s a reborn Christian. He kept on about being made in the image of God. What a load of crap!”
On Drinking
Image Credit: Photo Credit: Getty Images “Some of the things that I regret most in my life happened when I was drinking. I’m just not good with alcohol. And I don’t give a damn what time of the day it is, I just drink too much.”
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