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She got a series of routine movie roles, worked hard to lose her Southern accent, finally got a solid part in Whistle Stop with George Raft. Then little Ava ran smack into a hazard relatively rare in Hollywood—an Intellect.
When she saw Bandleader Artie Shaw in a Hollywood nightclub, she was smitten at once. At that time, the only book she had ever read was Gone With the Wind. Clarinetist Shaw (an alumnus of the New Haven High School and Manhattan's lower East Side) was not satisfied with being just a bandleader ("jitterbugs are morons"), but fancied himself as a serious musician and all-round intellectual. After he married Ava, in 1945, he set out to educate her.
He took a stack of books along on their honeymoon, made her read Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Dostoevski. She took a U.C.L.A. correspondence course in economics and English literature, tackled War and Peace, The Magic Mountain ("I thought I'd never finish that damn book") and Das Kapital ("Ever since then," says a friend, "she has been spelling capital with a K").
Pygmalion-Shaw continued to hack away at his Galatea until Ava had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, went to a psychoanalyst. When Shaw finally decided that Ava was not a promising pupil, Ava acknowledged the breakup with the classically laconic comment: "He told me to leave, so I left."
Venus Observed. No one could survive two Hollywood marriages unchanged. When she married Rooney, Ava was still a slightly chunky, giggling kid who would playfully scuffle with Mickey on the living-room floor; by the time of her divorce from Shaw, she had grown sleeker, more self-possessed. She had also become tougher, more aggressive. She began to get better parts (The Killers, The Hucksters'). To go out with Ava began to be considered a distinction. She began figuring as the heroine of many a Hollywood anecdote.
When Ava was assigned to play the goddess of love in One Touch of Venus, Sculptor Joseph Nicolosi was commissioned to do a statue of her. She began posing for him in a two-piece bathing suit, but he found that this interfered with his artist's conception of the foam-born one, so Ava obligingly removed the bathing-suit top. This, said Nicolosi, after working for a while, was better, but still not satisfactory. So Ava rolled the bottom of the suit down to G-string size, and Nicolosi turned out a magnificent, realistic statue. When a studio bigwig saw it, he was horrified. "This thing has got to come to life in the picture," he cried. "For God's sake put some clothes on her." Reluctantly, Sculptor Nicolosi put his Venus in a cloak.
Her reputation as Hollywood's most irresistible female grew apace. When Robert Mitchum was assigned to a picture with her, he cautiously called the studio's head, who had once gone around with Ava, and asked if it would be all right to start dating her. The boss pondered the matter for a moment and replied that, on the contrary, it was probably a good idea: "If you don't take her out, Robbie, people will just start saying you're a little queer."