by Lee Server
Back in North Carolina, brother Jack, who was doing well as a businessman in Smithfield, decided to do his bit to help his little sister find a career. Jack said if she enrolled herself in the secretarial course at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson, he was willing to bankroll her tuition. So she went back to school, in the autumn of 1940, learning to speed-type and take shorthand.
Atlantic Christian was a small but well-appointed college with an assortment of campus activities and social events. Ava’s physical appearance again did not go unnoticed. She was voted Campus Beauty and found many male admirers (and among the coeds pockets of simmering enmity). For a brief while she dated the son of Atlantic Christian’s president, Steve Hilliard. Nan McGlohon, for many years the wife of Loonis McGlohon, the North Carolina musician and composer, would recall double-dating with Loonis, Hilliard, and Ava; she remembered a quiet, very beautiful girl with a gorgeous face, and quite oblivious to that beauty and the strong effect it had on people. You found her pretty or you didn’t, but it wasn’t something in which the girl herself seemed to show much interest. One night they were out together and Ava was encouraged to enter a Cotton Queen beauty pageant being held in Tarboro. “Loonis played for the pageant,” Nan McGlohon recalled. “And Ava didn’t even get an honorable mention. And the little girl that won that night…it was just pitiful. She must have known one of the judges. But Ava didn’t give losing the contest a thought because Glenn Miller and his band were playing over in Wilson that night at the Center Brick Warehouse, the tobacco warehouse, and she didn’t care about the contest—she just wanted to go and hear Glenn Miller and dance.”
Another night, another boy, another dance hall, this one over in Rocky Mount. An imported swing band played loud up on the stand, and the hall was filled with frenetic young people. Ava’s arrival had its usual palpable effect on the stag line. A date, if he had any sense, took her to the dance floor fast and got in a few spins before the competition moved up. One of those who wanted a dance with Ava that night was a tall, self-assured man in his midtwenties, a wealthy man-about-town from Goldsboro named J. M. “Ace” Fordham.
“I thought she was pretty, and any girl who was pretty was all right with me,” Ace Fordham recalled, sixty-three years later. “She had a fellow took her there, a large fellow, larger than I was, and I’m six foot. I don’t know if he didn’t like me or he did; I wasn’t worried. Down here if somebody breaks on you you don’t say a word you just give up the girl and go on and break on somebody else. You don’t do that in New York, do you? Well, it used to be that way here. I haven’t been to a dance in a long time.”
Ava was a good dancer, Ace Fordham remembered, knew all the tunes. “She was a real jitterbug. She told me she was going to college at ACC— A Country College, we used to call that. And I said I’d like to see her again, and I told her more or less I’d be calling her. She was living with her mother then, in a house close to Wilson, where they took care of the teachers. They had a two-room apartment, and the teachers lived upstairs. It was not a first-class house by any means. Her mother was a very nice woman. Ava and her mother got along beautifully. On our first date we went to the Paramount Theater in Goldsboro. To the movies. We saw a Mickey Rooney picture.”
When they got back to the Teacherage that night, Fordham walked up on the porch with her to say good night. “She was about to go inside, and then she said, ‘I bet you can’t do this!’ And she bent over backwards on the porch and put the palms of her hands on the floor behind her. Stretched all the way back and put her hands on the floor. I call that double-jointed. Not many people can do that.”
Ava and Ace saw each other again and then began going together all the time. Fordham could offer her many new experiences, took her horseback riding at his ranch on the lower Neuse River, took her flying. “I’d been a pilot since 1935. We rented a plane out at the Rocky Mount airport, a five- seater, and I flew her around for about an hour. I think it was her first time in the air. Was she excited? She didn’t get excited about anything. I remember she asked me to buzz over the college.”
They had been going together awhile, and Ava wanted to visit her sister in New York, so Fordham agreed to take her in his car and spend a few days. They took turns driving, a twelve-hour ride in those times before the Interstate. In Manhattan, Fordham got a hotel room and took Ava to stay with her sister. Fordham found Larry Tarr to be all he had ever heard about “nervy” New Yorkers. “The first thing, he made some remark about my coat being too short. He told me I was out of fashion. My coat was from Edwards Young Men’s Shop back home.”
They went out every night, to restaurants and nightclubs, stayed out late, the later the better Ava liked it—New York was an all-night town, just the idea of which thrilled her. They went to the racetrack. She was so pretty she caught attention wherever they went, sometimes unwanted attention: At the track she was felt up by a pair of turf bums; her violent response sent them running in fear. At a restaurant she went to with Ace and her sister, she saw Henry Fonda sitting five tables away; he was the first movie star she had ever seen. “I’ve got to get his autograph,” she said, and when she went to his table Fonda’s glamorous female companion reacted to Ava as if she were the star. “Sweetie, you’re so pretty you should go to Hollywood,” the woman told her. Bappie and Larry Tarr thought the same thing. They watched in amusement and amazement the impact the girl had—she created more stir than two Henry Fondas. Years later Tarr told a reporter, “We kept saying to each other, ‘We gotta do something about the kid.’ “ But what to do? Ace Fordham said he had a friend who had backed a movie one time (“and lost his shirt”) and now worked in the theater, and he gave him a call and told him about the real pretty girl he knew who ought to be in the movies. The friend said, “Forget it. Pretty girls are a dime a dozen.”
The last night before they were to drive back to North Carolina, they were at a club to hear some music. Fordham and Ava were at the bar, and the bartender, taking a fancy to the good-looking girl, got schmoozing with the two out-of-towners. Ava told him, yes, she liked to sing, loved music, all the bands, and so on. As the talking went on the bartender told them that he knew a bandleader who was looking for a girl singer and that—well, if she had a voice half as good as she looked and if she was interested in something like that, being the girl singer in a hot swing band, how did that sound to her?
Ava, in her posthumously constructed memoir Ava: My Story— recalling slightly different circumstances, eliminating her wealthy boyfriend from the scene, and remembering the bartender in the conversation as the bandleader himself—reckoned that “the hope of my life was to stand in front of a big-band orchestra and have a crack at the microphone.”
Next day they waited in Bappie’s apartment for the guy to call, delaying their departure for home. “We waited,” said Fordham, “and he didn’t call and we were fixing to leave and get on the road when at the last minute he finally called and he gave her the appointment.” They went to an address, an office suite in a building in midtown, Ava, Ace, and her sister. Ace and Bappie sat outside while Ava was taken into the next room. In her memoir Ava wrote that she made a demonstration record, singing “Amapola” (a hit that year for Jimmy Dorsey) with a piano accompanist, and sending the record on to the bandleader, but Ace Fordham recollected it as more of a live audition, Ava singing for a few minutes while a couple of guys listened. “They had her sing a song. We sat outside, and we could just hear her through the walls a little bit. Then she came out, and we left there. She was very calm about it. She was always cool about everything she did unless you got her mad. She just said, ‘I think they’ll sign me up.’ But then on the drive back she said something like, ‘I hope I get it.’ So she wasn’t so sure.”
Back in Rock Ridge she waited for word from the bandleader telling her she was his new songbird and she was going on tour. She checked the mail each day. Nothing ever came.
But back in New York someone else had taken an interest in her.
Like the s
peck of grit, insignificant and unwitting, which in a chance encounter with the oyster makes possible the rarest pearl, so is the brief, random, and yet decisive appearance of Barney Duhan in the story of Ava Gardner. Although he would never know her, never even see her in the flesh but for a momentary introduction some decades later, his significance to the course of her life was such that without him little else in her future would have happened as it did, and the words on these pages, in the nature of commercial endeavor, would likely be about somebody else.
Barney Duhan worked as a runner in the New York legal department of Loew’s Inc., the worldwide theatrical organization and corporate parent of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture studio. Duhan had little interest in the picture business himself—he saw his future in the law—but he was not unaware of the allure of the movies to other people, especially females, and he was not above using his tangential connection to the fabled MGM to impress attractive young women. “I’m Duhan from MGM/Loew’s,” he might say to some lovely he would encounter. “Baby, have you given any thought to being in the movies?” It was a bit as old as Edison’s Black Mariah, but still very effective.
One day in late spring 1941, Barney Duhan was making his way down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when his glance caught on an image he found arresting. It lay behind the display window of Larry Tarr’s photo shop, exhibited to the passing parade—artfully framed and matted, a blown-up print of the portrait photograph Tarr had taken of Ava as a gift for her mother, the black-and-white head-and-shoulders shot of the teenage girl in her print dress and bonnet.
Barney Duhan stood still amid the hustle and noise of the busy avenue, and for a moment or two he studied the girl in the photograph: the wide- eyed gaze, the lush dark curls, the full lips, the tentative Mona Lisa smile. He decided that this was a young woman he would like to meet. Exactly what happened after this, who did or said what, varies according to the teller of the tale. In Duhan’s version: “I was running late for a party, and thought what lousy luck it was with my looks and my income that I didn’t have a date for the party. I saw the picture and said out loud, ‘Maybe I can get her telephone number!’ “
He called the shop from a corner phone booth.
“I’m Duhan from MGM/Loew’s,” he said, and I’m interested in that girl in the picture in your window. What’s her name and where can I find her?”
The person on the phone informed him that the girl had gone home to North Carolina.
Duhan’s ardor cooled. It might have ended right there. But Bappie and Larry Tarr, excited by a movie company’s supposed interest, pursued the connection. Tarr printed up his best pictures of the girl in his window. He packaged them nicely and he delivered them personally to Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer’s office in Times Square.
After the excitement of her New York sojourn and the dashed dream of a job with a big band, Ava resumed an ordinary life in Rock Ridge—now more ordinary-seeming than ever. She would help her mother during the day—perfunctorily—and sit with her listening to the radio in the evening or sometimes go with her to the movies (singing cowboy Gene Autry was Molly’s new favorite).
She began now to contemplate the real, modest possibilities for her future. When she completed her courses at Atlantic Christian she could more than likely look forward to finding a job as a secretary. She could be a good one maybe. Her shorthand was 130 words a minute, her typing 60 to 65 per minute for accuracy. That was what it looked like she might do, she thought then, eight, nine hours a day of typing and dictation, five and a half days a week. What else was there? Marriage at last came up for consideration. Her high school best friend, Alberta, who had not seen much of her since graduation, remembered her coming by one night and telling her of a local boy she intended to wed. Was it a passing whim or something more serious—and who was her intended? Sixty-some years later Alberta could not recall. If it was Fordham, then the notion remained secret and one-sided. A friend of Ava’s spoke to him, slyly perhaps. “So when are you two going to get married?” Fordham replied, “We’ll see about that.” He never found out if it was something Ava had put her up to asking. “But back then I was young and I wouldn’t have married the Queen of Sheba. I was looking to know pretty girls but not to marry them.”
In that summer of 1941, as Ava pondered her future prospects, her mother began to show signs of chronic health problems. She suffered recurrent stomach pains, sudden vaginal bleeding. Stubbornly indomitable, she refused to seek outside attention for her ailments—she had never seen a doctor in her life for anything but to aid her in childbirth and once or twice when the kids themselves had been ill—she went on working without complaint, masking her pain as best she could with increasing doses of aspirin. Ava would later write that Molly and Ava’s older sisters shielded her from any details of Mama’s “women’s complaints.” It seems a curiously protective attitude toward a young adult, perhaps a convenient rationale for what might have been inattention to Molly’s growing ill health. Ava loved her mother with all her heart, but like many spoiled children she had always enjoyed receiving more attention than she gave, with little reflection or guilt.
In July a call came from Bappie in New York. She recounted for Ava the tale of the desirous messenger boy and the picture in the window and the photos sent to the movie company—it was all very fast and confusing over the crackling long-distance line.
“They want you to come in, hon.”
What for?
“They want to meet you!”
Who does?
“MGM.”
Where?
“Where Clark Gable works, baby!”
Another pipe dream, like the big-band job. Why go all that way for another disappointment? She could be stubborn when her feelings were hurt. But Bappie didn’t let up. Bappie said she had to get her be-hind up there to New York and not even think about letting a chance like this get away.
Molly agreed. Ava went to Ace Fordham and told him what was up. He thought again about what his friend in the theater business had told him about girls like her being a dime a dozen. “So I wasn’t too excited. I didn’t put much stock in her getting into the movies. She asked me did I want to go to New York again, and I said no.”
Ava went to Smithfield to catch the bus, sat by herself at the station with her suitcase. Ace Fordham figured he would be hearing from her in New York one day soon, saying, “Come and get me!” But he never did. “Maybe…I should have had an idea what would happen…as pretty as she was.”
The next time he saw her it was her picture in the newspaper, with the story all about the Tobacco Road girl who had made good.
*In adolescence her hair would darken to a reddish brown.
*Godwin much later became a judge and then the mayor of Selma, North Carolina.
TWO
Zombies at the Beachcomber
To many who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in what they called the home office at 1540 Broadway, New York City, Hollywood was a provincial wasteland and the fabled West Coast studio a mere adjunct to a vast international enterprise. The movies were made “out there” in California, but their fate was largely determined in the Loew’s State Building on Times Square. At 1540 they approved scripts, casting, budgets, and production schedules; designed publicity and advertising campaigns; controlled print orders and worldwide distribution; and signed Clark Gable’s checks. And it was at 1540 Broadway that many of the biggest stars in Hollywood had their first contact with the movie business.
From early on a critical division of the New York office was the talent department, whose assignment was the contractual capture of potential effective film actors and actresses and, most important, potential stars. Originally the department was intended to go after only performers who were already established—on Broadway or the European stage, in vaudeville or nightclubs—luring them to their motion picture debuts. But with the success of Metro’s Joan Crawford, plucked from the back row of a New York chorus line, the studio realized that a discerning talent scout might fi
nd stars—unique and great and profitable stars like Crawford—in people without experience. These persons might even be without discernible talent but with some special quality that could connect with an audience in the dark of a movie theater and in doing so make lots more money for MGM and Loew’s Inc. It was an idea born in the early years of the picture business, when “legitimate” stars had often refused to work in the primitive new medium, but adapted by studio chief Louis B. Mayer to the industrial age of moviemaking: Find him the raw talent and he could process and package it like any other manufactured merchandise.
And so it came to be that the talent department in New York devoted much of its time to scrutinizing unknown, unproved individuals for signs, however embryonic, of that special, profitable star quality, stalking small theater productions, beauty pageants, sporting events, modeling agencies, and billboards and leaving their doors at least partly open to the solicitations of people straight off the Broadway sidewalk.
Early summer, 1941, Ava arrived at the Metro office on Broadway. The activities inside 1540 showed few connections to the glamour and mystery of the movies, and as she sat and waited to be interviewed it might have been for a job as a secretary. Someone led her to the office of a man named Ben Jacobsen, a specialist in talent, who sat and stared at her for some time without saying a word. At last he handed her a few stapled pages, with strangely spaced words on each one. She read to him as he asked her to, and the man folded his hands and smiled and after a minute or two he asked her to stop. Jacobsen would one day recall that the beautiful teenager had sounded nearly incomprehensible to his New York ears, everything drawled vowels that seemed to last forever and “gs” that dropped “like shattered magnolia blossoms.” It didn’t matter. She could have been speaking Chinese—he couldn’t take his eyes off her.