Ava Gardner, the stage actress. Who would have thought it?
     Only someone who knew her as a woman of intelligence and humor, a killer chess player, a raconteur and a delicious wit ("Deep down, I'm pretty superficial"). Someone like Gregory Peck, who became her lifelong friend after they starred in "The Great Sinner" in 1949.
     It was Peck who invited the Tar Heel actress to join him at the La Jolla Playhouse, which he had founded two years earlier. The thought frightened and intrigued Gardner, as she noted in her autobiography, "Ava: My Story" (1990, Bantam Books).
     "OK," she told him, "if I can start with something very small."
     As a contract player, Gardner had to have permission from the front office. And movie mogul Louis B. Mayer was not about to let a star of his play a maid at the La Jolla Playhouse.
     "You either play the lead or nothing," he ordered.
     "But I can't possibly play the lead," Gardner snapped.
     And that, she said, was the last time she ever thought about the theater. Instead of honing her craft on a stage, she learned about acting in front of the camera that recorded every tentative step of her career.
     "You have to have a place to be bad, to feel your way and to fail," Peck says. "And I had that opportunity. ... Ava, though, was propelled straight onto the screen out of nowhere and expected to perform like an accomplished actress.
     "I used to say, 'Ava, try to speak out and don't be afraid to be heard.' But she was actually a little bit afraid to be heard because she was so unsure of her abilities. I think her abilities were really unlimited [if only] she had had the proper training and the privilege of coming along slowly before she was given the big roles."
     In a chapter he penned for Gardner's autobiography, he admitted coaching her and urging her to reach out for more.
     "I must have told her hundreds of times that she had it in her to be a great actress," he wrote, "that all she needed was a little more courage to attack, to go at a scene with the intention of selling it, of grasping the audience's attention and holding it."
     She was clearly on her way when they made "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in 1952 and magical when they filmed "On the Beach" in '59. "I felt that Ava came into her own in a very relaxed and kind of fulsome way in 'On the Beach,' " Peck said. "She was good in a lot of things, but I thought she was wonderful in 'On the Beach.' "
     Stanley Kramer's doomsday saga cast Gardner as an Aussie who falls in love with Peck, an American nuclear submarine commander who decides to take his men home so that they might die near their families. It ends with a kiss, the lovers in profile against a setting sun.
     She and Peck never lost touch. And when she died, he fulfilled a promise to care for Morgan, her Welsh Corgi, and her housekeeper and friend Carmen Vargas, who shared her London idyll.
     "Morgan died about a year ago," Peck said. "I'm looking out the window now at a beautiful weeping elm. Morgan lies beneath the tree, and there's a little plaque that says 'Morgan Gardner-Vargas, 1980-1995.'
     "Carmen's been with us about seven years now. She's part of the family; we love Carmen. And we talk about Ava. We haven't forgotten. Those friendships go on after death."
    

Bill Morrison
April 26,1998