Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner, the sharecropper's daughter whose specialty in films was the sloe-eyed sensuous beauty and whose husbands ranged from Mickey Rooney to Frank Sinatra, died Thursday at her home in London. She was 67 and died of pneumonia, a recurring illness she had been battling for several years. She also suffered a stroke in 1986. Famed for her green eyes, reddish-brown hair, remarkably photogenic features and understated acting style, she became equally known for the men she attracted.

Classic Locations The Mocambo nightclub may have lasted only 18 years on the Sunset Strip, but the West Hollywood joint, which opened in 1941, attracted some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Howard Hughes, Tyrone Power, Bob Hope, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. The Latin American-themed nightclub designed by Tony Duquette featured glass cages filled with exotic birds. After leaving the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Frank Sinatra made his L.A. debut as a solo act in 1943.

Film star Ava Gardner is "recovering very nicely" at the Hancock Park home of her attorney from a bout with pneumonia, he said today. "She is ambulatory, takes physical therapy daily and speaks without slurring," said attorney Paul Caruso. Gardner, 64, checked into St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica for a routine checkup Oct. 9, and doctors discovered she was suffering from pneumonia. She was released from the hospital late last month.

This used to be tobacco country. Still is, but the demand for tobacco is down, the demand for soybeans and sweet potatoes is up, and the farmers have adjusted accordingly. This is not a land of pretense. On the highway leading into town, a small green sign celebrates a hometown star. The star is not Ava Gardner — the Hollywood glamour girl who was born nearby and was buried here, the legendary actress and onetime wife of Frank Sinatra. The star is a guy who made it to the major leagues and hit .230.

Actress Ava Gardner has been hospitalized for nearly a week for treatment of a recurring respiratory problem in Santa Monica, a St. John's Hospital spokesman said today. Gardner, 66, who lives in London, flew here last week and was admitted to the hospital about 3 a.m. on Jan. 6. "According to her physician, Dr. William Weber Smith, Miss Gardner is in good condition, is resting comfortably and should be discharged in about a week," hospital spokesman Armen Markarian added.

Mario Cabre, 75, a bullfighter and actor who in 1950 was romantically linked to the late actress Ava Gardner. Cabre became widely known outside Spain for his romance with Miss Gardner during the filming of "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman," which they made together with James Mason in the Spanish Costa Brava. During that same period Cabre and Frank Sinatra were vying for Miss Gardner's affections.

Ava Gardner, who had turned 67 a month before she died Thursday in London, was as perfect a symbol as film history has to offer of the Hollywood dream factory at work. In Gardner, the daughter of a North Carolina tenant farmer, the star-making studio system--still operating at peak power before the erosions of television--created a rags-to-riches story as appealing to its audiences as any it filmed.

Ava Gardner, the barefoot beauty who walked out of the North Carolina tobacco fields to become a Hollywood love goddess, was buried today in a pink gown beneath the stately magnolias of a wind-swept family graveyard. More than 2,000 fans converged on tiny Sunset Memorial Park to mourn the passing of the legendary beauty, who left the farm at 19 and never returned. She was 67 when she died in London last Thursday of pneumonia.

More than 1,000 friends and admirers on Sunday filed past the closed coffin of actress Ava Gardner, the daughter of a Smithfield tobacco farmer who will be remembered for her movies and romantic encounters. She died of pneumonia last week at her home in London.

Ava Gardner, the sharecropper's daughter whose specialty in films was the sloe-eyed sensuous beauty and whose husbands ranged from Mickey Rooney to Frank Sinatra, died today at her home in London. She was 67 and died of pneumonia, a recurring illness she had been battling for several years. Famed for her natural beauty and understated acting style, she became equally known for the men she attracted.

James Bacon, the longtime syndicated Hollywood columnist and reporter whose career covering the film capital began in the late 1940s with the Associated Press, has died. He was 96. Bacon, whose long career also included small roles in movies such as "Planet of the Apes" and TV shows, died in his sleep Saturday of congestive heart failure at his Northridge home, said family friend Stan Rosenfield. Bacon was an AP reporter from Chicago when he arrived in Hollywood in 1948, a time when Los Angeles had six daily newspapers and rival Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons reigned supreme.

A romantic adventure set in Las Vegas, the Southwest and rural Mexico, "Kites" has been given the no-holds Bollywood treatment by producer Rakesh Roshan and director Anurag Basu. In its telling, the love story draws from westerns, musicals, film noir, chase thrillers with stunts so preposterous they verge on parody — and it gets away with everything because of Basu's visual bravura and unstinting passion and energy. The film is free of both subtlety and irony, and it demands of its charismatic stars, Hrithik Roshan and Bárbara Mori, that they act their hearts out with the utmost sincerity.

THE World's Most Beautiful Animal. That line of advertising copy, promoting "The Barefoot Contessa," was marginally more truthful, and a lot more memorable, than the movie itself, which mainly demonstrated how full of himself Joe Mankiewicz had become after winning unprecedented back-to-back Oscars for writing and directing "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve" in 1949 and 1950, respectively.

Henri Paris, 90, hairdresser to stars who were traveling through the Midwest from the 1930s to the 1950s, died April 30 in Chicago of heart failure. Before airlines replaced trains as the most popular mode of travel from coast to coast, Chicago served as the mid-continental pit stop for entertainers traveling from New York to Los Angeles.

Re the review of "The Women of Tin Pan Alley" (Aug. 20): The caption referred to the unidentified women in the photo with Ann Ronnell as "two singers." In fact, they are actresses Ava Gardner and Olga San Juan and this photo was probably taken on the set of the film "One Touch of Venus," which starred Gardner, San Juan, Robert Walker and Dick Haymes. SANDRA STOKLEY Riverside

A funny thing happens to Nancy Sinatra during her 336-page chronological journey through her father's stunning musical and humanitarian accomplishments: She runs out of pictures. Oh, yes, there are many wonderfully personal, never-before-seen photos of this truly amazing American icon. But most of them, be they of him at work or with his family, very definitely depict the early Frank Sinatra. I imagine a now-middle-aged Nancy in her basement, if she has one, unpacking cartons, sifting through photo albums and then ring-a-ding-dinging up her brother, Frank, sister, Tina, and mother, Nancy, and asking whether it'd be all right if she rummaged through their personal files too. It's around her father's Ava Gardner period that readers will begin to notice a subtle thinning out of Nancy's exclusive and often candid photographic collection and how it is suddenly overtaken by a graphic look that relies far more heavily on stock shots, black-and-white press photos and album artwork.

THE World's Most Beautiful Animal. That line of advertising copy, promoting "The Barefoot Contessa," was marginally more truthful, and a lot more memorable, than the movie itself, which mainly demonstrated how full of himself Joe Mankiewicz had become after winning unprecedented back-to-back Oscars for writing and directing "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve" in 1949 and 1950, respectively.

Ava Gardner bears "the distinction"--the reader is told on the last page of this biography--"of being MGM's final mold of a screen legend." True to its title, however, "Ava's Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner" places its emphasis on the late actress' love life, where conceivably she herself might have placed it.

In your "Letters on Kurt Cobain" (Calendar, April 16), you printed comments from several readers who didn't see Kurt Cobain for who he was--someone with a lack of desire to be anything other than just a musician to his listeners. Letter writer B. Dirk Yarborough denigrates Cobain as an ineffectual songwriter who wrote "cool songs" but who was not worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Both Dylan and Lennon would have disagreed with Yarborough, who doesn't understand that Cobain never thought of himself as a rock hero or an icon, but he obviously very reluctantly did affect a generation and would have continued to do so had he been able to handle his success.

AVA: My Story By Ava Gardner (Bantam: $19.95; 315 pp.). The nicest thing ever said about her, writes Ava Gardner, was George Cukor's calling her "a gentleman." It's easy to see why she liked the term; though Ava often drank into the wee hours, and addresses her readers as "honey," she never traded in her North Carolina farm-girl soul for the Hollywood model. Stardom, she writes, "gave me everything I never wanted," and she admits she wasn't a great actress despite good notices for films such as "The Sun Also Rises" and "The Night of the Iguana."