Peter Evans - Ava Gardner - The Secret Conversations

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?”