by Peter Evans
“I was sixteen years old. At that age, when you’re poor, it’s easy to believe that nothing’s ever going to change; life is just going to keep heading the same way till it’s your time to go and push the clouds around. That was just the way it was. I watched my Daddy dying, not complaining, just accepting, that was the way it was always going to end up for people like us. People like us, my Daddy and Mama, Bappie, my whole family, we sweated and slaved and made ends meet our whole goddamn lives, and for what? Nothing! Fuck-all, honey. Just sweet fuck-all.”
She spoke with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. In our previous interviews, she had shown little instinct for what mattered in her life; she always struggled to find threads and meanings to her stories. But her story about reading to her father in his dying days in a public ward of a Newport News hospital in Virginia was deeply moving.
“I remember Newport News for three things: it was where my Daddy died, where I had my first period, and where my family went bust.” It was a Sunday afternoon and we’d been for a walk in Kensington Gardens, her favorite London park, exchanging childhood memories and recalling things our parents had said. It was a game I had devised to get her talking about her past. “Nothing good ever happened to us in that goddamn town, except that Mama and I survived,” she said.
“To this day, when people talk about the Depression, that’s what I think of: Newport News, my Daddy dying, having no money,” she said, and started to smile, “—and my first goddamn period!”
Whether the stock market crash of 1929 brought on the Depression or the Depression brought on the crash is a question that economists and historians still argue over today, but either way her family’s move to Newport News had been tragically predictable as the American economy ran downhill at a disastrous pace. Steel companies, small businesses, big corporations toppled like dominoes. Thousands of cotton and tobacco farmers were forced off the land either by foreclosure or sheer destitution. By the winter of 1932–33, Jonas Gardner, increasingly beset by ill health and bouts of depression, joined the army of unemployed.
And there was worse to come. The following year, the Brogden school authorities decided that they could no longer afford to provide housing for the teachers. The Teacherage, the home where Ava had lived since she was three years old, was closed down. There was no other work for her mother in Brogden. “I knew how serious things were. I knew from Mama’s whispered conversations with Daddy, and their awkward silences whenever I walked into the room, that something bad had happened. I always pretended I hadn’t noticed. I hoped the problem, whatever it was, would go away,” said Ava.
She was devastated when her mother finally explained what had happened and that they were moving to Newport News, Virginia, where she had found another job. “I knew that it was supposed to be wonderful news, and of course it was, Mama had found work, but I wept when she told me. It meant saying goodbye to my friends in Brogden. It probably meant never seeing them again. It seemed like the end of the world to me,” she said.
Seeing how upset she was, her mother told her that if she didn’t like it there, in a year or so, they could return to Brogden. The promise comforted Ava. But that night after she had gone to bed, Ava heard her mother’s racking sobs and Daddy’s voice trying to comfort her.
“I was twelve when we left Johnston County. Me, Mama, Daddy, and our Negro maid Virginia. She was two or three years older than me. I still didn’t want to go to Newport News; even so, it was a big adventure for me. I could handle the move, and Mama could, too. But poor Daddy was a country boy clean through and he didn’t like the city life one bit. But, as he said, you go where the work is—but the only available work was Mama’s work, running another boardinghouse. That was tough, but she had done it all her life.”
The house at Newport News was nothing like the Brogden Teacherage, where the boarders had all been women. Polite, respectable, elementary school teachers, they loved Molly Gardner, the small, plump, bubbly, energetic woman who treated them like her own family. In Newport News the lodgers were all men: shipyard workers, longshoremen, merchant seamen, crane drivers. They were a rough-and-ready lot but Molly treated them the same way she had cared for her ladies back in Brogden.
“ ‘They put the food on our table, baby, never forget that,’ Mama would remind me whenever I complained about them. What can I say, the woman was a fucking saint? I remember one evening, when I was pinning up her hair in paper curlers—she loved me doing that; she had never been a beauty but she loved me curling her hair, she loved to be fussed over a little bit, especially when she was tired—I said something about the way some of the longshoremen smelled. They smelled just godawful, especially when they’d just come back from their night shifts.
“Mama said: ‘That’s what money smells like, honey. You still wanna be rich?’ ”
“That was an interesting question, Ava,” I said. “What did you say?”
“I don’t remember what I said. I knew I was never meant to be rich anyway. I don’t know why she asked the question, but I’ve never forgotten it.”
She remained quiet for a while. “At least, none of those lecherous bastards ever touched me,” she said. “They got a mouthful if they tried. Sure, a few tried, when Daddy wasn’t around, but I could turn the air blue when I needed to. None of them tried a second time.”
Newport News was a big upheaval in all their lives. Unable to find regular work, her father went to stay with Bappie and her second husband, Larry Tarr, a photographer, in New York, and try his luck up there.
“Poor Daddy, poor darlin’, by this time he was in his late fifties. I’d say his chances of landing a job in New York, even if he’d been fit and well, were zilch. He’d been a cougher all his life, certainly all my life. Whenever I woke in the night, I’d hear him coughing somewhere in the house. He said it was a smoker’s cough, it was nothing to worry about, he always said that. But it grew worse in New York, and he had to come back to Newport News, where Mama could look after him. I told you, he wasn’t much of a talker. His silence was okay when I was a kid, but it makes me sad now, the conversations we never had. He liked to listen and nod, so I never even knew what he was thinking. But he was thin as a stick, and even I could see that his health was crashing downhill fast.
“It was a bad time for all of us. I hated school. Newport News was my first high school. The girls were smart and into nice clothes. Some of them seemed to have new outfits practically every week. I wore the same skirt for a whole goddamn year. Bappie gave me a couple of her old dresses to take in. They were nice dresses—when it came to fashion, Bappie was a pistol; she’d been given her own handbag and accessory section to run at I. Miller—but I was a lousy seamstress. Believe me, nothing is more humiliating than wearing your big sister’s cast-offs when you’re a kid.
“My teacher at Newport News was a patronizing bitch,” she said. “My first morning, she made me stand up in front of the class and answer her questions: Ava, that’s an unusual name, where are you from Ava, what does your Daddy do for a living, Ava? She should have done that quietly, not in front of the whole damn class. She made me feel like the entertainment. ‘My Daddy’s a farmer.’ Well, that brought the house down. The minute I opened my mouth it was obvious that I was from tobacco country. Flat-ass country, they called it in those days. And nobody was a farmer in Newport News. Nobody there spoke the way I did. I dropped my g’s like magnolia blossom. I must have sounded like a cotton picker in Gone With the Wind. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. There are so many reasons for my shyness I can trace back to that time.”
She looked angry, but then slowly she began to smile. “Oh my God, the embarrassment of being young!” she said. “Mama had all those kids and didn’t say a word to me about where babies came from. Isn’t that the strangest thing? She didn’t say a word about puberty, about menstruation. She said nothing at all about those things. Not a word. Can you believe that?”
“It’s unusual,” I said.
“The subjec
t must have embarrassed her, I guess.” She smiled forgivingly.
But physiologically, a girl of thirteen or fourteen must have had some awareness of the changes happening in her body? I said.
“I knew my body was changing, honey. I knew about periods. Of course, I did. Some of the girls in my class had started theirs. They talked about it all the time. That’s how I learned about sex, and ‘doing it.’ Not that I ever did anything until I did it with Mickey. I had a few boyfriends at Newport News High, and I was interested—and damn pretty, too—so there was plenty of interest, believe me.
“There was one boy I particularly liked. He was a senior, a football player. He came from a good family, his people were terribly conservative, it was such a cliché, but I knew it mattered—I was the girl from across the tracks! I was very conscious of that, although it didn’t stop me having lewd thoughts about him.
“But I was shy and Mama was strict . . . so, anyway, that probably explains, in case you’re wondering, how I was still a virgin when I married Mickey Rooney! Then I did it all the time! I’d been holding back a lot of emotions, honey. We screwed each other silly for the whole year we were married. We did it for a bit longer than that, actually. I was making up for lost time. We screwed on and off, right up to the time he went into the army in 1944. Shit, we made love the night he enlisted. We had dinner at the Palladium for old times’ sake and then we . . .”
She hesitated, and I sensed what was coming.
“I’m not sure that we should say that in the book, honey,” she said.
“Say what?” I said innocently.
“That Mick and I screwed all the time.”
“You were married, for God’s sake.”
“We were separated, we were getting a divorce. It didn’t stop us doing it. It makes me sound like a nympho, doesn’t it, doing it when we were in the middle of a divorce?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t think it makes me sound like a goddamn nympho?” she persisted.
“It’s the kind of thing readers want to know, Ava.”
“Is it?” she said.
“It’s a great insight,” I said.
“Into what, honey?” she said.
“Into you—the person you were before you became a movie star,” I said.
“How do you know that?” she said.
“I just do,” I said. I didn’t want to argue with her—at least not at that moment. One always had to choose one’s moment with Ava.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. I knew she wouldn’t want to leave it alone. She would go back to a subject again and again until she got what she wanted. She couldn’t help herself—that was the movie star in her. But she needed different things from the book than I did. “My truth isn’t necessarily your truth, honey, but let’s forget this is my book and compromise—we’ll make it my truth,” she told me once. By this time, we both knew of the struggle we were in, yet still believed that we could get our way.
It was now past eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, and we had been talking since 4 P.M. when we returned from the park. I was ready to call it a day, but we had opened the second bottle of wine.
“Anyway, going back,” she said, showing no signs of wilting. “When I had my first period, I was afraid to tell my mother. It was something I didn’t want to talk about with her, and she most definitely didn’t want to discuss those things with me. My first period started in the morning, before I left for school.
“I told Virginia what had happened. Well, bless her heart, she did the best thing in the whole world. She said, ‘Lordie, you is a little woman now.’ I thought, Well, that’s rather nice. I’m a woman! Virginia fixed me up with a Kotex. I asked her to tell Mama. I was too shy to tell her myself. Whether she did or not, I have no idea because Mama never said a word to me about it. But neither did she say a word when my white cotton shift became transparent when I was soaked with holy water at my baptism. I was thirteen. I was just beginning to grow pubic hair, you can imagine! I was mortified. My hair, which had always been blond, was beginning to darken. Especially down there,” she said. “The whole congregation could see everything!
“This was about the time I started wearing a bra—and noticing boys. I remember I hung a picture of Clark Gable from one of the movie magazines on the inside of my wardrobe door. I was a sassy little bitch. One day I was in the kitchen, sassing Mama about something. She started to slap me when she noticed that my little breasts were just beginning to sprout out. She said, ‘Yeah, and I’m going to put a bra on you!’ I guess she thought it was time she stopped slapping this young lady because she never slapped me again.
“Bappie wrote Mama from New York and said don’t buy her a bra in Brogden. I’ll get her a good one from here, which is what she did. I’ve worn good bras ever since. But I’ve never had large breasts. My sister Myra and I were normal but my other sisters were enormous. Mama, too. In the twenties, when flat chests were the thing, they used to tie diapers around each other and pull as tight as they could to flatten themselves out. I’m sure they must have torn every muscle in their breasts.”
The conversation had run its course, and it was time to go.
At the door, she said: “I hope you can make sense of this, honey. I know it’s muddly. And, oh, make a note of this when you get home: in the years we lived in Newport News, I never once asked a girlfriend back to the house, and no boys ever came there, not inside anyway. The boy I was sweet on, the boy in his senior year, he lived in a nifty-looking house. He had a little car and sometimes he’d pick me up at the house but I was out of the door like a shot before he’d even pulled to a stop. Shit, he must have thought I was keen! It was just that I didn’t want anyone to know that I lived in a goddamn boardinghouse! I didn’t want my friends to see any of those people who put the bread on our table. I was such a fucking snob—even if I was a girl from across the tracks.”
8
I don’t want Ava to get hurt, Peter,” Spoli Mills said.
We were having dinner at my London home a month after I had embarked on Ava’s book. A year younger than Ava, although she looked older, Spoli was her closest woman friend I knew. A former German actress—Irmgard Spoliansky—the wife of Paul Mills, a movie producer and onetime publicity director at MGM’s Elstree Studios in London, she had known Ava since they met in India during the production of George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction, more than thirty years before.
Her comment puzzled me. “You think I might hurt her?”
“There’s always a line in things,” she said. “Sometimes people cross that line without even knowing it’s there.”
I assured her that Ava and I understood the terms of our deal. There would be no reason for me to cross any lines, I said.
“We both know movie stars are endlessly lied to,” she said.
“Don’t you think they know that?” I said.
“Not after a while,” she said.
I was fond of Spoli, I liked her cynical wisdom and dark humor. I had known her for twenty years, and I was used to her frankness, which would have been brutal were it not for our friendship. “I won’t let her down, Spoli,” I said.
“I just want you to know how I feel about it,” she said.
“We both have Ava’s interests at heart,” I told her.
“Let me ask you a question, Peter,” Paul Mills said. “Why do you want to tell Ava’s story?”
“If I don’t write it, others will go on trying,” I said. “Somebody will write it eventually.”
“The grave robbers, you mean?” he said.
“Look what they’ve done to Marilyn,” I said.
“Maybe nobody else will be as clever at sniffing out things as you are,” Paul said.
“All it takes is time,” I said.
“I know the book is Ava’s idea. I know she needs the money, but her stories can be bloody alarming sometimes. I think the book is a terrible idea,” Spoli said
. “You can probably do it as well as anyone. But I want you to know that I’ve tried to talk her out if it.” It wasn’t news to me—Ava had told me, several times, as she continued to vacillate over whether to take her advice—but I was pleased at Spoli’s honesty. “Her heart is my heart, Peter. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect her happiness,” she said.
“If you don’t talk her out of it, will you help me get it right?” I said. I knew how useful she could be to me, how important it would be to have her on my side.
“Will I be a good loser, is that what you’re asking me?”
“I’m not going to fight you, Spoli. We’re on the same side. We both want what’s best for Ava,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said.
I’D SPENT THE MORNING working on various transcripts, going backward and forward in time, piecing together Ava’s reminiscences—of her childhood, of Hollywood, of her husbands and lovers—trying to make sense of her life. I was grateful for the interruption when the phone rang.
“Are you ready for some good news?” Ed Victor asked when I picked up.