Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  He was buried in Smithfield, in the Sunset Memorial Park cemetery at the edge of town. Family comforted the mother and daughter, urged them to stay on awhile, but Molly told them that the house on West Avenue had to be managed; Ava had to get back to school. Molly forced herself to be strong. You could not fall apart—you had to hold on, keep going, and survive. Molly went back to her cooking and her chores and taking care of her boarders. She tried to go on. But nothing could be the way it used to be. She had always treated the scruffy, lonely men who lived there just as she had the bright young lady teachers at Brogden, with kindness and concern, whether they deserved it or not. But try as she did, her enthusiasm for her work had drained away. She felt useless, vulnerable. Jonas was no longer in the house, but she still felt his suffering every day. “My mother never got over his death,” Ava would say years later. “She was never the same person again.”

  Molly and Ava would sit together in the evenings, and Molly would ask her if she was happy, and Ava would not know what to say, afraid to make her mother feel worse. But Molly did not want to stay where they were anymore, and Ava agreed with her that North Carolina was their real home and that maybe the time had come for them to go back.

  That summer of 1938 Molly heard of a job opening down in Rock Ridge, a small town with surrounding rural community in Wilson County, thirty miles or so to the northeast of Smithfield. The situation was just about identical to the one she’d had at Brogden; she applied and was hired, and late in the summer Molly and Ava moved into the Teacherage adjacent to the fifty-year-old brickwork Rock Ridge School.

  The school opened in the fall, eleventh grade for Ava, graduation year back then. She went not knowing what to expect; it was North Carolina and it was Rock Ridge, only a short ride from where she was born, but she was a stranger again, everything new. That first day, though, a teacher she knew from the boardinghouse made her welcome at once, and best of all she had her meet one of the other girls in that graduating class, a genial and beautiful girl named Alberta Cooney. “The teacher, who was a favorite of mine, introduced us,” Alberta Cooney would say, sixty-four years later, “and asked me to show her around and introduce her to some of the classmates. First thing I saw was how pretty she was. Then she spoke, and she had a very husky voice, and I thought she had a cold. And I didn’t realize that was her natural voice. And a lot of people who met her would say, ‘Oh, do you have a cold?’ But that was how she spoke. We talked some and I showed her around, and we found that we got along and had things in common and just became the very best of friends.”

  The two girls had a special bond right off: Alberta had lost her father, too. “You had to take it one day at a time,” Alberta would remember telling Ava. “That was all you could do. She was handling it well, but she spoke of him often. She said she loved her dad very much, and she missed him a lot.”

  Ava invited Alberta over to the Teacherage for lunch. “Ava’s mother gave me a piece of cake she had baked, and she served whipped cream on it and I had never had that before! She was the best cook. But Ava thought my mother was the best cook, too.…We used to spend the weekends with each other. I would go to her house, and she would come to my house. The Teacherage was right on the same street as the school, and they had an apartment, a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms that I can recall, and we would sleep in one and her mom in the other bedroom. Her mother was such a loving person. When I stayed the night there she’d always come and tuck us in and kiss us good night. And I was not used to that. My mother loved me, I know that, but it just didn’t happen in my house. I had never been kissed good night by my mom.”

  Alberta Cooney lived out in the countryside at Spring Hill. She felt abashed the first time she brought Ava out to visit, what was she going to think—it was real simple living then, no inside plumbing, and not even an outhouse. But Alberta relaxed soon enough—Ava was more country than she was. “Ava had to go to the bathroom, and my stepfather drove up while Ava was outside doing her business, and she just popped right up when she saw him and shouted ‘Hey!’ and then popped back down. We all laughed. She was just a plain old country gal. Soon as she came to our house she was always barefoot. In the summertime as soon as she got off the bus at my house she’d take off her shoes and put them in the mailbox. Not me; I never went barefoot, but she did. Our street was not paved at that time and she just loved it, the dirt and the grass in her feet. We would walk down to my uncle’s house; they had babies, and she loved to play with the babies. And every time she took her shoes and stuck them in the mailbox till she had to go home.”

  Ava and Alberta went on double dates together. Ava enjoyed going out, but she never ended up with a steady boyfriend in high school. Alberta believed that many boys were standoffish around Ava because she was so good-looking. And if Ava didn’t intimidate them, then her mother did. On New Year’s Eve, when she saw Ava and her date come home from a school dance and the boy gave Ava a hug and a brief kiss, Molly came charging out, chased the boy back to his car, and then followed a mortified Ava into the house, shouting imprecations in her ear. It was Molly’s blind spot, the one subject that made her lose her temper and her common sense. With Jonas gone, she felt an even stronger compulsion to guard her daughter from temptation. “If you know a man before you’re married,” she told her more than once, “I’ll see you in your grave.”

  “She would say to me that her mother tried to make her terrified of boys,” Ava’s friend Spoli Mills recalled. “She was very strict about that one thing. It was something a lot of mothers of that generation did. You know, keep close watch, make sure they don’t get into trouble.”

  On that New Year’s Eve, Ava said, she ran into the bathroom, scrubbing her face with soap, trying to “wash off the dirt I was sure I had contracted from that kiss.”

  As a student, Alberta Cooney would recall, “Ava was about mediocre. Like me.” In class the two girls were easy to distract from their lessons, preferring to exchange whispered funny remarks or work on each other’s nails. Ava enjoyed singing, dancing, and music but at school showed no interest in the performing-arts programs—though once in English Lit. she did stand before the class with a few others and act a part in an old play. According to Alberta, “She just wasn’t so good. We all laughed at her, you know how kids will do.”

  Neither girl had much of a plan for the future. One time they were double-dating and had the boys take them to a fortune-teller who operated on the outskirts of Wilson. The fortune-teller looked at her crystal ball and told Ava she was destined to go far away across the water. “We giggled about it,” said Alberta, “but I don’t think Ava gave it much thought.…We figured we might get jobs as secretaries. That was about all we could imagine.”

  Graduation time was nearly upon them when the school burned down.

  No one was hurt, but it caused no end of confusion, finding temporary accommodations for the classes and then revising the graduation ceremonies. In the end they were held outdoors on the ball field on a hot humid day. The graduates sweated in their robes, and when they got up to get their diplomas the robes stuck to the chairs. Then came the time to hand out the annual “Superlative” awards that every senior class voted itself. It was widely understood that the “Most Beautiful” award was a two- girl contest, that it would have to go to either Ava or Alberta. It was hard for the two good friends, waiting to hear the announcement. In the end an extra award was created and Ava won Most Beautiful and Alberta Most Attractive. Ava said it was really a tie, but Alberta had always known she had never seen anyone prettier than her friend.

  “The first time I ever met her I thought that. She would stay overnight with me, and this sounds sick, but she would stay overnight with me and I would wake up in the morning and I’d look over at her in the bed and I just never saw anyone so perfectly made as she was, just a beautiful young woman.”

  One night in Rock Ridge there appeared a visitor from faraway New York City. She appeared out of the night like a glamorous phantasm, standing i
n the doorway of the Teacherage in a Broadway hairdo and neon red lips and wide-shouldered fox-collared coat and high heels and a fog of attar from the perfume counter at Macy’s. Considering the incongruity and extravagance of such a presence in the doorway of a boardinghouse in Wilson County, North Carolina, she might just as well have come from Oz, Glinda the Good Witch with a permanent wave.

  Beatrice Gardner was the eldest of the five daughters, born late in 1903, the year in which Jonas and Molly were wed. Growing up, she had been known as a lively, smart, and sharp-tongued child. She was pretty like all the Gardner girls, although as a young woman Beatrice tended to give what she had an extra spin—the word to describe her would not have been openly applied in those days, but Beatrice was sexy. The girl had an independent streak, and at an early age she had eagerly gotten out of the house in Grabtown and put the tobacco fields behind her, moving to Smithfield and finding herself a job. In town she would meet a handsome law student named Bill Godwin and at the age of nineteen she married him, the same year that Ava was born. When Beatrice would come to visit her family the baby sister could never seem to get her name right. Ava called her “Bappie” and it stuck. It was Ava’s name for her forever after.

  The marriage to Bill Godwin was not to last. There were accusations of infidelities. Divorce was not at all common in that time and place, and Godwin tried to patch things up, but Beatrice became determined to be free of him. The bonds were sundered and Bea, wanting to be away from the furtive looks of Smithfield gossips, left to seek her fortune elsewhere.* One day Beatrice would arrive in New York City, finding work as a department store salesclerk. Though her Carolina drawl drew a few cracks from her Brooklyn-accented coworkers in the handbags and gloves department (they nicknamed her “Dixie”), everyone soon warmed up to the ebullient Southerner. She came to feel right at home in the bustling metropolis, and in due time she shed her Piedmont style for the manners and dress of a sophisticated 1930s Manhattanite—or at least a drawling handbag shopgirl’s version of one. She met lots of men and fell in love with some of them, broke some hearts and had hers broken. One day at lunchtime she stepped into a portrait photo studio on Fifth Avenue, hoping to get a picture taken to give to a boyfriend who was going out of town. The photographer and manager of the place (one of several his family owned in the city) was a short, brash, fasttalking New Yorker named Larry Tarr. He took one look at Bea, and before she knew what was happening they were drinking cocktails across the street, and before she knew what was happening after that they were living together.

  And now, after many years in New York, in a swirl of glamour, Bea- trice/Bappie descended on the house in Rock Ridge, bearing presents and fabulous tales of life in the big city. She found her little sister even more beautiful than the last time she had seen her. Although Bappie was old enough to be Ava’s mother and they had never even lived under the same roof, the two had through the years formed a special bond that did not exist with their other siblings. Perhaps Beatrice, the daring divorcee who had gone off to live in exotic New York, sensed some common affinity for adventure or unconventionality in her youngest sister. Or perhaps, near- ing forty and—unlike Inez, Elsie Mae, or Myra—childless, she simply saw in the girl the closest thing to a daughter of her own. She had often behaved as a self-appointed liaison between Ava and Molly, a generational intercept saving the pubescent girl from her mother’s decidedly antique country ways—as when Ava had first developed a need for a brassiere, and Bea swooped in with a new store-bought model before Molly could employ the rural method of binding the young ‘un’s breasts with a diaper closed in the back with a safety pin.

  Now, in Rock Ridge, Bappie came bearing presents from the Big Apple, and like Glinda awarding Dorothy the ruby slippers, she gave Ava a very special pair of shoes—made of lustrous green satin, they had been handcrafted for movie actress Irene Dunne (who had recently starred in the screen version of Show Boat) and had ended up being sold at a charity auction where Bappie had made the highest bid.

  “Put those on, sugar,” Bappie said, “and maybe they’ll walk you right to Hollywood.”

  Ava would take them from their box and unwrap them and gaze at the fabulous movie-star footwear; later she would carefully rewrap them and close the box and then place them out of harm’s way on the top of the tall dresser in her bedroom. Despite what Bappie said, Ava thought they were far too special for her ever to put them on her feet. There was also the fact that she hated wearing shoes.

  If Ava had felt any sense of achievement on her graduation from high school it faded fast, soon replaced by feelings of aimlessness and boredom. She looked for a job without success. The Great Depression still hung over the region, and there had never been many opportunities for women in the best of times. Alberta and another classmate had gone off to Washington, D.C., to find work as secretaries. Another friend—who had wanted to go on to college and learn a profession but had no money for it and was discouraged by her parents—found a job at the local five-and- dime. For most of the girls Ava’s age in that time, in that part of the world, the course of your life, even if you pretended for a little while to have some control over it, was preordained—a man to be found, marriage, home, kids, grandkids, death, all of it in the same county.

  She had little else to do that summer but help her mother at the Teacherage, something she never did with great enthusiasm. She hated the domestic chores that were her mother’s life (with the exception of ironing clothes, which she found satisfying, therapeutic, a task she continued to enjoy even years later when there were maids and personal assistants at hand). She learned how to cook some of her mother’s dishes almost as well as her mother did—her fried chicken with all the trimmings best of all—but Ava had none of Molly’s devotion or discipline in the kitchen. She would cook up some food, leave a great mess everywhere, then slip away when it came time to clean or do the dishes.

  Her social life was active, if demure. Molly had reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter was reaching marrying age and had to be available to meet the right fellow when he came along. Which didn’t mean, though, that she couldn’t continue to instill the fear of God in Ava about sex. She remained a vigilant presence even when her child was alone with a guy in the front seat of his car. Ava saw other girls kissing up a storm with their dates—right in front of her for everyone to see, but she held back, terrified of getting a reputation, of Molly finding out.

  To this becalmed setting one day came a letter from New York City. Bap- pie wrote that she was lonely and invited Ava to come visit. To tempt her—as if she needed tempting—Bappie told her she might find a job in the city as there were hundreds of them advertised in the papers. With Molly’s permission reluctantly given, Ava packed a bag and took the bus to New York. As it turned out, there were not so many jobs available after all, but for a couple of days she made the rounds of employment agencies. “I didn’t land anything except aching feet,” Ava said.

  Larry Tarr made much of Bea’s nearly seventeen-year-old sister. “She was such a beauty,” he would recall years later. “Skin like peaches and cream, those green eyes and that little cleft chin. And I never saw a happier kid.” He had his camera out during much of her stay, eagerly trying to capture her glowing looks on film. She would be plopped in a chair at the end of the day, exhausted, she remembered, and Larry would be buzzing around her with his big Speed Graphic saying, “I want to take your picture just that way, with your eyes half shut,” and the pop of the flashbulb nearly scaring her to death every time. He took some formal portrait shots, too. They decided a pretty studio portrait of Ava would make a nice gift to bring back to her mother. She wore a sleeveless print dress she borrowed from Bappie and a straw bonnet with a ribbon tied under her chin. She smiled at the camera with a sweet yet guarded smile. It was the photo that would change everything.