Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans

  “Shortly after that, she was offered a job back in North Carolina—running another Teacherage in Rock Ridge, Wilson County. It was practically next door to Brogden. I remember Mama saying, ‘We’re going home, baby, where we belong.’ I don’t think I had ever felt happier in my life. It was sad Daddy didn’t live to see that day. I remember Mama grabbing hold of me and both of us crying, the tears streaming down our faces.”

  “What year was this, Ava?” Pinning her down on dates was never easy.

  “Well, Daddy died in ’38. It was shortly after that. Mama was never the same woman after Daddy passed. That miserable, fucking boardinghouse was killing her. She looked worn. She looked the way I sometimes feel now.”

  She lit a cigarette while she thought about it.

  “I think she might already have had cancer at that stage. It was a sneaky one, one of those insidious bastards that kill you slowly. Cancer of the uterus. Mama never talked about it. At the end she did, when she couldn’t hide it any longer. I was so upset.

  “I told Howard Hughes about it. He’d started calling on me while I was still married to Mickey. He had a great sense of entitlement, Mr. Hughes. He sent one of America’s top cancer specialists to see her. But it was too late. She died on May 21, 1943—the day I got my divorce from Mickey. Mama was fifty-nine, the same age Daddy was when he died. Who was it who said that a mother’s death is a girl’s first tragedy without her sympathy? Baby, they sure had that right.

  “I’m jumping, I’m skipping,” she said irritably to herself. She stubbed out her cigarette without finishing it, as she often did. “Concentrate, Ava. Concentrate,” she said.

  She nodded slowly for a moment without speaking.

  “Okay,” she began again. “Mama and I were back in North Carolina, right next door to the place where I was born. I was eighteen. Just. Taking life as it comes, the wind as it blows. My brother Jack came back into my life. He was a real go-getter. He was the one who accidentally burnt down Daddy’s barn. I watched it go up in flames when I was a baby. Another time, when he was thirteen, a year after I was born, he set up a stall selling shots of corn whiskey he had bartered for fish. North Carolina was a dry state in those days, and Jacko was doing a roaring trade—until Daddy found out, and put a stop to that! Jack must have been a handful, but he obviously had great entrepreneurial skills. Anyway, he was sufficiently well-heeled by the time we returned to Rock Ridge to be able to afford to treat me to a year’s tuition at the Atlantic Christian College in Wilson. I had started a secretarial course at Newport News. I got my shorthand up to 120 words a minute, and my typing to sixty. I was all set for an office career, and started searching for some kind of shorthand-typing job in Wilson. I was willing to settle for that.”

  But what happened next sounds like a script for a bad Hollywood B movie—“a very bad Hollywood B movie,” Ava conceded. Her sister Bappie was on to her second husband, a photographer named Larry Tarr, a brash, dapper son of the owner of a chain of photographic studios dotted over New York in the 1930s and ’40s. Impressed by Ava’s looks, Tarr told her that she “oughta be in pictures.”

  In the spring of 1941, he displayed her portrait in the window of his Fifth Avenue store. The enlarged black-and-white print of Ava, wearing a floral-patterned dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat tied beneath her chin with a ribbon—“Larry must have been trying to copy that early Mary Pickford look,” Ava later mused—caught the eye of Barney Duhan, an office boy at Loew’s Inc., the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood. Hoping to finagle a date with the shop-window beauty, Duhan called the store and, posing as an MGM talent scout, asked for Ava’s telephone number. The manager refused to give it to him but agreed to pass on his query to Larry Tarr, who, believing it to be a genuine inquiry, promptly sent Ava’s pictures to MGM’s New York office on Broadway.

  Since the studio hadn’t requested any pictures, and nobody there had heard of Ava Gardner, there was some confusion and delay at the MGM offices. “Larry Tarr chased them up, he was a real little hustler, but he was getting the run-around. I had never figured on being a movie star anyway. I dreamed of being a singer with a big band one time, that would have been nifty, but I never saw myself as a movie star. Even so, I was disappointed when the interest appeared to disappear in a hurry. You know, I was a kid and it was MGM! Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The most famous movie studio in the world! Where Clark Gable worked! I must have voted for him twenty times to play Rhett Butler.” She laughed. “He fucking well owed me, honey!”

  Whether it was Larry Tarr’s persistence that finally paid off or whether Ava’s photographs alone were enough to persuade an executive called Marvin Schenck, a relative of Nicholas M. Schenck, the president of Loew’s, to invite her in for an interview, isn’t clear.

  She said, “I was eighteen. The summer of 1941. I was eighteen, I knew I was pretty, nobody had to tell me that, and I loved visiting New York. I used to go up and see my sister Bappie every opportunity I got. I’d call in to see her at I. Miller and the other salesgirls would say, ‘God sake, Dixie, put your sister in the back. She’ll scare off all our customers.’ I was a bit behind the parade for New York tastes.

  “Mama came with me to New York for the interview with Mr. Schenck. We had to make our own way to New York City; nobody offered to pay our expenses or train fare. But Mama was all for it. She was a great movie fan. The idea of me being interviewed by MGM was the greatest thrill of her life. I have no idea how she got hold of the piece of change that trip must have cost her. But since the Depression and Daddy’s illness, Mama was used to being the breadwinner. She was the one who always made the pot boil.

  “Fortunately, in New York, we could bed down at Bappie and Larry Tarr’s place. Even so, we still had to travel steerage to and from North Carolina. In the summertime that was something, believe me, especially for Mama. I still didn’t know how ill she was, I don’t think any of us knew, and the trip was too much for her. On the day, she was too exhausted to come with me to meet Mr. Schenck. Bappie came with me. But can you imagine how disappointed Mama must have been? She made me promise to remember everything, what he said, what his office was like. ‘Darling, baby, he is going to love you,’ she said when she kissed me goodbye. ‘You are going to be a movie star.’ From that moment on, that became her mantra. She had such confidence in me, it was embarrassing.

  “Anyway, Mr. Schenck was very sweet. He said he liked my shoes. I was wearing my favorite oxford saddle shoes with white leather straps across the front, which your friends used to autograph. He couldn’t help but notice them; I always wore my shoes too big—that’s why I’ve got big feet now. But I was flattered when he admired them. I told him about each of the girls who had signed their names on the straps. I told him their whole goddamn histories. He seemed very interested, although I don’t think he understood a damn word I was saying. My accent was as Tarheel as it gets. That’s incomprehensible to anyone who lives more than two whoops and a holler outside the state of North Carolina. For years I woke up in cold sweats about that interview!”

  Eventually, Marvin Schenck gave up trying to work out what she was talking about. He rose from his desk, and held out his hand. “I think we should test you, Miss Gardner. At least let’s see what you look like on the screen,” he said. Ava didn’t miss the irony. “To be willing to tune out that goddamn accent, shit, I owe that guy plenty,” she told me nearly fifty years later. “He really stuck his neck out for me.”

  Ava was tested at a small studio on Ninth Avenue the same day they tested Vaughn Monroe, a big band singer, and Hazel Scott, a singer and pianist. Again Bappie accompanied her because their mother was too unwell to make it in the sweltering New York City heat. This time Ava borrowed a pair of Bappie’s high-heeled shoes and wore a pretty print dress with a long flared skirt that her mother had bought her in Wilson for sixteen dollars. “It was not a color most women would wear but I loved it. I felt like a real fashion flash,” Ava said.

  The test was basic: stand up, s
it down, look this way, look that way, smile, be sad, look happy. She was asked to walk back and forward a couple of times, then they did a voice test: what’s your name, when’s your birthday, where do you live? It seemed like a waste of time to Ava. “I wasn’t dumb. I knew that my looks might get me through the studio gates but the moment I opened my mouth that accent was going to do me every time.”

  Nevertheless, Marvin Schenck saw something in her. He shrewdly sent the test to Hollywood—minus the soundtrack. Meanwhile, Ava returned to Wilson, North Carolina, with her mother, convinced that her Hollywood adventure was over.

  On that journey home Ava learned how sick her mother was. “She was eating aspirin by the fistful. She could barely walk. It was only when my sister Inez persuaded her to see a doctor in Raleigh that she learned the truth. She was riddled with cancer, although I didn’t know that until later.”

  A few weeks later, to her astonishment, MGM offered Ava a seven-year contract. “Thinking back, it’s hard for me to remember exactly how I felt. I was very confused. I had convinced myself that I wouldn’t hear another word from them. I was sure the dream was over. But I do remember that my heart was thumping when I read the letter asking me to come to Hollywood. The idea had been, if they offered me a contract, Mama would come with me to California. She had been strict with me all my life, her word was law, and even then, when I was eighteen, she still saw me as a child. But by this time we all knew that she was in no fit state to come with me to the end of the road, let alone to the West Coast.”

  But the evening Ava got the MGM offer, Mama announced that of course she must accept it. “She said it was too good to turn down just because she was under the weather—I loved that ‘under the weather.’ She had cancer for fuck sake! Mama declared that Bappie would go with me instead, and she would stay with Inez and her husband in Raleigh.”

  The morning Ava left for New York to pick up Bappie and take the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago and the Super Chief to Los Angeles to seek her fortune, her mother took her in her arms. “Enjoy yourself, my darling baby. You are going to be a movie star.”

  10

  When I arrived the following evening, Ava kissed me—a little reward kind of peck on my lips. “Thank you for yesterday, honey,” she said.

  “What did I do yesterday?”

  “You were nice, that’s all. Talking about Daddy’s death and Mama’s cancer was hard for me. You understood. It’s tough having to talk about how your parents died. Neither death was easy for them. I didn’t know so much of it had stayed with me.”

  “Moments like that never go away,” I said.

  “Like guilt, honey,” she said. “Like goddamn fucking guilt.”

  She had gone to Hollywood when she knew that her mother was dying. Her sister Inez had taken on the burden of caring for their mother in her last months. And although Molly had encouraged her to accept the MGM deal, and encouraged Bappie to accompany her to Hollywood, I knew that Ava’s sense of guilt about that time still ran deep. She had married and, after only a year, was in the middle of divorcing Mickey Rooney and already dating Howard Hughes when her mother died.

  “What a fly-by-night lady I must have seemed to poor Mama,” she said, pouring the first drink of the evening before we began our session. “A season in Hollywood does so change a girl!” she mimicked Elizabeth Taylor, whose refined, rinky-dink delivery was one of Ava’s favorite party pieces. I’d heard it before, and acknowledged it with a polite grin. Ed Victor and Dick Snyder were talking serious money now, and I wanted to get on with it. The previous evening, as we always did, we had discussed the areas we wanted to cover—her arrival in California, her early days at MGM, her first meeting with Mickey Rooney. It was rich and promising stuff, and she seemed okay with it.

  A few days earlier I had written to Greg Morrison, an old friend of mine—and Ava’s—telling him that I was working with her on her autobiography and asked whether he had any “laundered reminiscences” about her that he would like to share. Although I had never inquired, I suspected that they had once been lovers. I never expected him to break the publicists’ omerta code of silence but anything he cared to say would be useful, I told him. An insider’s insider, he knew where more bodies were buried than Ted Bundy. But that morning, I had received a scrawled note from Morrison in California:

  She’s 17 or 18 with one pair of shoes, cardboard suitcase, leaving everybody in her life to enter the MGM University. They teach her to walk, talk, sit, sleep, shave her legs, shake hands, kiss, smile, eat, pray. Her ass is great, fine tits, short but good legs, great shoulders, thin hips, fix the toes, do the hair—clean it, but don’t touch the face. Everybody and every camera is drawn to that face. That town is jammed with pretty, but not like that—the eyes, the mouth, are from another world. She becomes the “armpiece du jour,” learns what they want. Learns how to do it without giving her soul away, and learns everything but how to Act. In her whole shitkicking, barefoot life she never really learned to pretend, nor did poverty give her much humor, certainly none about herself, so she went to work on the Men—Lancaster, Gable, Huston, Douglas, Hughes, and the “suits” that needed her. And so she went to her last and most important school, the U. of Sinatra. In essence, by fucking, fighting, and forgetting with him she inhaled the gangster outlook of the world. Take what you want. Don’t let them use you. They only understand tough. And all of her days became nights.

  Written in obvious haste, with affection and understanding, its prose simple and uncorrected, it had a frankness, a darkness, and a beauty that said more about her than anything I had ever read before—her shyness, the careless one-night stands, her love affairs, and disloyal passion for Sinatra—it was all there.

  It was a priceless briefing note. I thought it insightful and sympathetic, but I wasn’t sure how Ava would take it and decided not to show it to her straightaway.

  “HONEY, THAT EARLY STUFF in Hollywood we talked about yesterday is so fucking boring. I think we should start the next part of my life with Whistle Stop, the picture I did with George Raft. It was my first leading role. It got me the part in The Killers, with Burt Lancaster. Nobody remembers the shit I did before that. I barely remember it myself, fahcrissake.”

  I was shocked. It was a terrible idea. It would mean eliminating much of her early life in Hollywood, and probably a good deal of her marriage to Mickey Rooney. Why would she want to do that? It didn’t make any sense at all. But I made a show of giving it some thought.

  “What about the stuff we talked about last night? It would be a great shame to lose the story of your start at MGM, and we can hardly ignore your marriage to Mickey Rooney. We already have some wonderful stuff on that,” I reminded her.

  “I don’t mean we cut it out completely, honey,” she said.

  That sounded better, but I was still cautious. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I just don’t want to dwell on it, honey. Mick has already written his book. All the stuff about our marriage and the divorce is in there. I don’t want to go over that ground again. It’s old hat, honey. Ancient history. Nobody cares about that stuff today. We’ve all moved on from there, fahcrissake.”

  “When you say you don’t want to dwell on it—”

  “I mean I don’t want to dwell on it, period,” she said flatly. “We can say what we need to say in a few lines.”

  “A few lines?”

  “It’s worth no more than that, honey, believe me,” she said serenely.

  “But it’s a transitional part of your life—the end of your hillbilly days, the start of your Hollywood career. So much was happening. I don’t think we can skate over it like that, Ava. No one else can talk about that time more knowledgeably, more entertainingly, than you can—especially about your marriage to Mickey Rooney.”

  “This book is about me, Peter. Not about fucking Mickey Rooney.”

  “Dick Snyder will definitely expect us to cover it,” I said.

  “Mr. Snyder can whistle for it,” she said.r />
  I knew that one rule of ghostwriting is that you must never let the star make the rules. But I also knew that now was not the time to argue about it. I suspected that somebody had put ideas in her head since we discussed our schedule the previous evening. “I don’t see how we can avoid it,” I said reasonably.

  “You don’t like my idea?”

  “Not really, Ava. No.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Don’t beat about the bush, Ava. Tell me what you really think,” I said. I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. I just thought it would make her laugh and ease the tension that was growing between us. Instead, it made her very angry. I’d forgotten another rule of ghostwriting: never tease a movie star.

  “I’ll tell you what I really think, baby,” she said. “I think you want me to get into the whole fucking thing about my drinking with Mickey. You want me to say I was a teenage piss artist. If that’s what you want, you can forget it right now. You’re not going to lead me down that path, baby.”

  “Baby” was a dangerous word. “Honey” was fine, but “baby” usually meant trouble.

  “People have warned me about you, baby,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked. I was curious, although I could guess.

  “Lots of people,” she said.

  “Do you want to give me a name?”

  “Friends of mine.”

  “Then why did you hire me, Ava?” I said.