Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  It was a deliberate betrayal of our deal but I wasn’t surprised, and it didn’t disturb me. She was broke, she sorely needed the money, and I was convinced that I would get to the truth when I started asking the hard questions once we got into the stuff that sold books.

  What concerned me right now was that she still expected the book to be wrapped up in a couple of months. “Pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby,” she had warned me, but she had no idea, and I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, how long a good book—the book she deserved, paying the kind of money she needed, the book I knew it could be—was going to take to write. I’d leave it to Ed Victor to break that news to her when he’d worked out a deal with the publishers. He was good at that sort of thing.

  Ava shook a cigarette out of the pack and sighed as she began to search for her lighter among the cushions on the sofa. There was a small silence. Now that I was beginning to know her better, I knew that this wasn’t an invitation to interrupt.

  “Okay, concentrate, Ava. Concentrate,” she said to herself sternly.

  She turned to me: “You’ve got to help me, baby. I’m struggling here. Tell me exactly what you want to know.”

  “I’d like to know more about your childhood,” I said. “Can we go back to that?”

  “Jesus, that Holden Caulfield crap again, Peter,” she said. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “People are fascinated with the childhoods of famous people,” I told her.

  “You really think so?” She didn’t seem convinced. “Why don’t we start with my first husband, Mickey Rooney?” she said. “Why don’t we start there? I was still practically a child anyway.”

  “You were nineteen,” I said.

  “Only just,” she said defensively. “I was still a virgin. That would be a good place to start, when I was still chaste?”

  “Fine. Let’s start there,” I said. I made no attempt to argue with her. I just wanted to get on with it. There would be plenty of time for arguments when we stopped being polite to each other, which would happen when I started asking about the intimate stuff that publishers would want to know when a sizable advance was being asked.

  “Well, I laughed a lot with Mickey Rooney,” she said slowly, as if searching for a tone of complete candor. “I laughed with Artie Shaw, too—but not so much, and sometimes when I shouldn’t have, I guess. It needled him when he couldn’t figure out why he made me laugh. He was smart as a whip, about politics, about communism, about jazz, about all sorts of things, but he wasn’t smart about women at all—although he’s had other wives since then, including John Huston’s old ex, Evelyn Keyes, so maybe he’s learned a thing or two about ladies since my day in the hay with him.”

  I was amused at how quickly she had lost the Mickey Rooney thread. “But I have to say, what education I got, I got from Artie—the schoolroom kind of education that is,” she said. “He was always trying to improve me and I always wanted to learn stuff. He definitely got me into reading books, which I’m grateful for.”

  Did she still read a lot? I asked.

  “Not so much since my stroke,” she said. “I haven’t done a lot of things since the stroke.”

  It was a stupid question.

  “Where were we?” she said.

  “Mickey Rooney?” I told her.

  “Mickey. Well, I got another kind of education with Mickey. Going to the fights every Friday night in L.A., that was an education. We’d go along with George Raft and Betty Grable. Betty loved the fights as much as Mickey did, but I dreaded those Friday nights. Mickey always insisted on sitting ringside; he could never get close enough. I used to cover us with newspapers, to keep us from being smothered in blood. Those little bantamweights were the worst; they’d cut each other to pieces—they’d nearly kill each other to entertain us. That fact bothered me more than any of the rest of it—the things people would do to please you if you were famous enough, and there was nobody more famous than George Raft, Betty G, and Mickey in those days. They were legends.

  “ ‘You’re walking in the shadow of giants,’ Mickey used to tell me. He was an egotistical sonofabitch, but he was right about how famous they all were. Not me so much, Jesus, not me at all, I was just starting out—I was just famous for being the first Mrs. Mickey Rooney—‘Arm candy’ they’d call me today. You have to remember Mickey was bigger than Gable in those days. At least, his pictures took in more money than Gable’s, although they each earned the same five grand a week when five thousand dollars was real money,” she said. “Movie stars were gods and goddesses in those days.”

  She stopped looking for her lighter and slipped the cigarette back into the pack. “Filthy habit anyway,” she said, shaking her head. “I can go on all day long about the mistakes I’ve made in my life. I’m a real expert on the saddles I’ve put on the wrong gee-gees. That the kind of stuff you want, honey?”

  “All I have to do is listen,” I said.

  “Good. I hate smart-ass questions,” she said.

  I was still keen to get her to tell her story in some kind of chronological order, if only to make it easier for me when I came to put the jigsaw together. I again suggested that when we completed the Mickey Rooney section, I’d like to go back to her childhood.

  “Why?” she said, with fresh irritation in her voice.

  “Among other things, you said it would help you to make sense of your life,” I said.

  “To make sense of my fucked-up life,” she recalled her exact words with glee.

  “Well, to begin with, I was a way afterthought,” she said slowly. “Mama, you know, poor baby, she’d had her family all finished: four daughters and a couple of sons, and suddenly I arrived in her midlife on Christmas Eve 1922. Mama and Daddy must have thought they were all through with babies! What a Christmas present I must have been! That little bundle of joy must have fucked up everything. I’ve been fucking up other people’s lives ever since. Mama and Daddy needed me like a hole in the head.”

  “Money was tight?” I said.

  “You could say that. Daddy was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer. There aren’t many more precarious ways of making a living than that, honey. There was never enough money. Daddy’s ass was always in some kind of sling or another. It was a struggle for them but they got by and I always felt loved. There was always milk on our doorstep. If you’re going to be poor, be poor on a farm, that’s what I say. I remember when I started out in movies, in the forties, one of the Hollywood papers said we had been dirt poor. It was a story some MGM press agent must have put out to make my life sound more interesting than it was. That pissed me. Dirt poor! It made it sound as if we were white trash. I didn’t even mind being called a hillbilly but dirt poor crossed a line. There were plenty of hard times, no question. We were often broke, but never in our lives were we dirt poor. I resented it when reporters put it in their stories. It made me mad.”

  It was the first time since I’d known Ava that we’d talked about her family to any degree, and I was surprised at how strongly she cared about her past.

  “I want to get this right in the book,” she said deliberately.

  I said I did, too.

  “I might have worn hand-me-down frocks, and had dirty knees, maybe I didn’t always scrub them as often as polite little girls should—but we were never dirt poor. I was the goddamnedest tomboy you ever met. In the summertime, I went barefoot, that was what farm kids did. Of course, we were poor. It was the Great Depression, everybody was poor. It cost you just to breathe. But being hard-up didn’t make us dirt poor, fahcrissake.”

  I could see that the subject was upsetting her. “Tell me about your dad, Ava,” I said, moving off the subject just enough. “Were you close to him?”

  She said, “I was probably closer to Daddy. Little girls usually are. I have his green eyes and the same cleft in my chin. I also inherited his shyness, particularly when I’m sober. When I was married to Artie Shaw, Artie complained that I was drinking too much, and made me go
to a shrink. He was right, of course. I was drinking too much, but I didn’t need a shrink to tell me why—Artie was the reason why! After six months of seeing me every day the shrink said I had an Oedipal complex. Artie had to tell me what the hell an Oedipal complex was! So, yeah, I guess I was Daddy’s girl more than Mama’s.”

  She had always spoken of her father with great affection, and I knew that he was some kind of icon for her. I was still trying to figure out how to phrase my next question diplomatically when she said: “Did I get my weakness for booze from Daddy? Is that what you want to know?”

  The thought had occurred to me, I said.

  “Daddy’s drinking is hard for me to picture. I don’t think I ever saw him drunk, which would have registered, I imagine. Bappie [her sister Beatrice] says he drank quite a bit though; she says he sometimes went off on benders. If he did, he kept it from me. He did disappear from time to time, I remember that. Once he was gone for weeks and I got upset; Mama said that he was looking for work in New York. I just don’t know, honey. I’m a drinker and my grandpa enjoyed a glass or two so they say, and drink is supposed to run in families.”

  Did she know her paternal grandfather? I asked.

  She shook her head. “His name was James Bailey Gardner. A good old Irish name. He was an ornery sonofabitch by all accounts, but hardly up there with the Kennedys’ old man, old Joe Kennedy. Grandpa Gardner died before I came along. I didn’t know any of Daddy’s side, except for Aunt Ava, but I must have inherited some of their Irish temper. Frank reckons I did. He was probably right.”

  I asked about her mother’s family.

  “Mama’s daddy was David Baker, David Forbes Baker.”

  Did the middle name suggest a touch of class somewhere down the Baker line?

  “I doubt it, honey. Grandpa Baker was a Scot—a hardworking cotton hoer,” she said. “He never amounted to much more than that.”

  Her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, died when Ava’s mother was a young girl. “Mama took over the running of the house for Grandpa while he went marching on, doing what he did,” Ava said. “The old boy ended up with eighteen or nineteen kids between Grandma and his second wife. He was a randy old boy. He obviously enjoyed peddling his wares.”

  “You never met any of your grandparents?”

  “They had all passed before I was born,” she said. “Mama talked about her family, but Daddy never did. But he was never much of a talkin’ man. I do know that Grandma Gardner and my Aunt Ava, the one I was named for, lived with Mama and Daddy when they moved from Wilson County to Johnston County, where I was born.”

  She became thoughtful.

  “Grandpa Gardner was a drinker, which is probably why he and Grandma Gardner were not together,” she said. “That was not the usual scene in the South. In those days people didn’t get divorced, they didn’t split. No matter how bad things were between you, you just stuck it out, lived out your miserable existence together until the day one of you kicked the bucket.”

  The pause was a little longer this time. There seemed to be sadness in there somewhere.

  “But Grandma and Grandpa Gardner split,” she said eventually. “That tells us something, huh?”

  “What does it tell us, Ava?” I was deliberately obtuse. I didn’t want to have to guess, I wanted Ava to tell me what she made of it. It was her story I was going to tell.

  “It tells me that Grandpa was a lush,” she said.

  “Would you like to deal with that in the book?”

  She shrugged. “If you think it’s interesting.”

  “I think it would interest readers,” I said. I also thought it might throw a light on Ava’s drinking problems, although I decided not to mention that just yet.

  “Here’s something else that might be interesting for the book,” she said. “My sister Elsie Mae told me that as a small child she remembered going with Daddy to Wilson County to visit an old man. She said she remembered the building because it was so gloomy and unfriendly. She said it wasn’t a prison, but she remembered going through passageways of locked doors, and she heard screams, and people crying.

  “The story used to scare the pants off me. Elsie Mae said she used to visit an old man there, an old man with white hair. I don’t know how old I was when Elsie Mae first told me that story, maybe seven or eight, but I remember thinking to myself, Yeah, Wilson County, the old guy must have been Grandpa Gardner. The more I think about it now, the more it makes sense to me. The old guy had been committed.”

  “Your grandpa was insane?”

  “It was a bat house, honey.”

  She saw my puzzled look.

  “That’s what we called insane asylums as kids.” She made a dismissive motion with her hand. “I’m sure plenty of serious drinkers in those days were put away as crazies. Some of them might have lost their marbles, but plenty were probably suffering from depression, or just couldn’t cope. People didn’t understand depression back then. If they didn’t know so much about it today, a lot of people around here would be locked away. Me included. Grandpa Gardner had black Irish moods. He’d split from my grandmother, and his family—that was enough to depress anyone.”

  “And you think that he was the old man Elsie Mae used to visit in that place in Wilson County?”

  “It figures, wouldn’t you say? Madness is the last stage of human degradation. Who said that?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Neither do I,” she said. “But I think that madness runs in my family, honey. Booze and depression definitely do. That’s close enough.”

  Madness in the family! It was the kind of story that can send a celebrity memoir flying off the shelves. But I didn’t attempt to pursue it right then. She had a habit of retracting some of the most intimate things she told me if she thought I showed too much interest. I would have to think about how I would handle this one. I said casually: “You said your grandfather was a drinker, but you didn’t think your father was.”

  “No, I said it was hard for me to picture.”

  “But he might have been?”

  “Bappie reckons he was. I know he had deep depressions, and got terrible headaches. ‘Sick headaches,’ he called them. Whether they were suicidal hangovers or genuine depressions, I was too young to know, and he was too proud to talk about anything personal.

  “According to Bappie, he started getting the headaches really bad when he was around forty-five, a year or so after I was born, which is interesting because my depressions started at the same age. I was lying in bed at my sister’s house in California, recovering from my hysterectomy, which does jumble up a woman’s mind, and I saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy on television. That night I had a terrible sort of vertigo, and by morning I was in a black depression. The deepest, blackest cloud descended on me; it completely engulfed me. The gynecologist didn’t know what the hell was wrong. I was finally hospitalized.”

  She was put on a drug called Elavil, called Tryptizol in England. “I’ve been on the same drug for over twenty years. It brings temporary comfort but no cure.” She looked at me solemnly. “My life’s a fucking train wreck,” she said. She found her lighter among the cushions, shook a cigarette from the pack. “Who the hell is going to be interested in this stuff anyway?”

  It was a familiar question when she was getting tired. I asked whether she’d like to call it a night.

  “When I was making The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway asked me my Daddy’s name,” she said, ignoring my offer. She lit the cigarette, and exhaled smoke through her nose. “I told him Jonas Gardner. Hemingway said he sounded like a character in a John Steinbeck novel. I loved that. What was the name of that Steinbeck book, the movie James Dean was in?”

  East of Eden, I said.

  “There was something about Daddy that I never understood as a child, but I think it was the same sense of loneliness Jimmy Dean had in that movie. It makes me sad when I think of how hard Daddy’s life must have been, the disappointments he’d suffered. He always c
alled me Daughter. It was to distinguish me from his sister Ava. I loved being called Daughter. It sounded so possessive, and to be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved. But later if anyone tried to possess me—oh boy, I was outta there. That was something Frank never understood. He just couldn’t deal with it, and I couldn’t explain it to him. Probably because I couldn’t understand it myself,” she said.

  “But it was a happy childhood?” I said.

  “I was spoiled. I was the baby of the family. Mama and Daddy kept the tougher side of being tenant farmers from me. But it was plain to me early on that sharecropping was never going to be any way to make a fortune. Daddy built the wood-frame house I was born in with his own hands; he cut and hauled the timber, dug the well, built the outhouse.”

  “Were you aware of how hard your life was when you were growing up?”

  “No running water, no electricity, the privy at the bottom of the backyard—yeah, I probably had a suspicion of how horse-and-buggy life was for us.” Her smile took the edge off the sarcasm.

  “But you don’t care about those things when you are a small child and your Daddy’s the best lemonade maker in the whole world. And Daddy had plans. He always had plans. He built a tobacco barn, and he opened a little country store across the way—Grabtown was just a crossroad in the middle of nowhere, really; God knows where the customers came from, there can’t have been too many of them; I hope to God they were loyal—but the buildings caught fire and burned to the ground one night and that was the end of that little enterprise. Rumor had it that my brother Melvin Jonas, everybody called him Jack, started the blaze when he slipped into the barn to roll a ciggy and dropped the match.

  “I remember that night—I must have been about three—somebody holding me at the window to see the flames from Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, where my sister Myra and I also slept together; Daddy wept that night.”