Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

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 called 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.”

“You remember your father weeping? You were only three.”

She said, “I remember the flames. I remember Daddy crying. You don’t forget things like that. They stay in your mind, honey. Maybe I didn’t understand the significance of his tears that night until I was older—the fact that he had nothing socked away. No insurance. We were broke, really and truly broke, not just poor, out on the sidewalk broke, honey.”

Jonas Gardner was used to tragedy in his life. His first son, Raymond, was killed when he was two years old, twelve years before Ava was born. Jonas had been using dynamite to clear a parcel of land of rocks and tree roots; the explosive caps he used to ignite the sticks of dynamite were kept in a kitchen cabinet. One dropped onto the floor one morning when Jonas was handing them out to the blasters; unnoticed, it was swept up and thrown into the fire with the rubbish. The explosion caught baby Raymond full in the face. He died on the way to the doctor in Smithfield.

Ava lifted the hand of her paralyzed arm onto her lap. “Anyway, somebody up there must have taken pity on us. After the barn burnt down—God bless the kindness of strangers, honey—Mama was offered a job, and a place for us to live, running the Teacherage, the boardinghouse for women teachers at the school down the road in Brogden. Whoever had the idea of getting Ma to run that place was wise as a hoot owl. It definitely saved our skins.”

Mama’s full name was Mary Elizabeth but everybody called her Molly. “She was always up and doing, she never stopped: she took to that job like a duck to a water pond—she washed sheets, cleaned toilets, scrubbed the floors, and cooked three meals a day for about twenty boarders. We took in field workers as well as the teachers. She was always ironing; the guests paid extra for that, and eventually I got to help. I picked up some pocket money ironing the shirts; I’m still one hell of an ironer. Frank used to say I pressed his collars better than any laundry service. I damn well did, too.”

I asked about her sisters.

“Mama was thirty-nine when she had me—that was seven years after Myra was born. Growing up, I was closest of all to Myra. All the others, Bappie—she was pregnant the same time Mama was pregnant with me, only she jumped out of a peach tree and lost the baby—Elsie Mae and Inez were all married and away by this time. I remember Daddy holding me and waving goodbye to Inez and her husband, Johnny, as they drove away in a Model T Ford after their wedding.”

She stopped and gave me a look. “Is this really interesting, honey?” she asked me again. “I’m skipping. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Is this really the sort of stuff people want to read about?” she asked again.

I told her that it was exactly what they wanted to read about. There was nothing wrong with her memory, I told her.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, honey.”

“How old were you when you started school, can you remember that?”

“I was three—not to study, to visit. I would just sit there until I fell asleep, and a teacher would take me back to the Teacherage, and put me to bed. The teachers always made a fuss of me. I was a pretty little thing; I had platinum blond curls. I started school proper when I was five, which was a year before most kids in Brogden, probably because I was a familiar figure around the place. But I was never a great learner. When I was eight, there were other distractions—I started to hang out with boys. It wasn’t a sexual thing; at least I don’t think it was. I was a regular tomboy. I could climb any tree a boy could climb, and higher, too—I’ve still got the scars to prove it. I could run as fast as any of them, and cuss even better. The one thing I didn’t catch on to was smoking. It made me sick as a dog. I didn’t start smoking until I was eighteen, when I got to Hollywood. I saw Lana Turner sitting on the set holding a beautiful gold cigarette case and lighter. She looked so glamorous. I went straight out and bought myself an identical cigarette case and lighter, just to carry around.”

She shook another cigarette from the packet.

“From there to sixty a day!” she said ruefully.

She played with the cigarette between her fingers but didn’t attempt to light it this time. “We had two Negro maids living with us at the Teacherage,” she continued after a while. ”One was my best friend, Virginia. I slept with her more than I slept with Mama and Daddy, or my sister Myra; blacks were like family in our house. Sometimes when Mama went in to Smithfield to do the big grocery shop on a Saturday, Virginia and I would go to the movies. She wasn’t allowed to sit downstairs, that was whites only, so I was the only little white thing, a white blond child, up in the balcony with the blacks. I remember seeing one movie with Bing Crosby and Marion Davies. You’ll have to check what it was called and what year that was. [ Going Hollywood , 1933.] I must have been ten or eleven years old. Virginia and I came home and acted out the whole thing; one time I’d be Davies and she would be Crosby, then we’d switch around.