“So you think The Barefoot Contessa was shit,” she said. There was accusation as well as amusement in her voice.
“I didn’t say that, Ava. I don’t think that at all. It’s flawed but it’s still an interesting picture. I’d like to see it again before we deal with it in the book.”
“I thought it was a piece of crap,” she said.
“You just don’t like Mankiewicz,” I said, and we both laughed.
She said, “Okay, Barefoot Contessa, The Killers—which do you prefer?”
I preferred The Killers, I said.
“The Killers was a better movie, you’re right. Making it was more fun, that’s for sure. We must say that in the book somewhere. Make a note to say what a good script it was and what fun I had making it.” After a long pause she said, “What did you think of the way Mankiewicz started Barefoot Contessa?”
I knew what she was getting at. I said that the opening scene of her funeral in a rain-drenched Rome graveyard was beautifully shot, but it was a cliché. Anyway, didn’t she think it would be a bit surreal to begin her autobiography with the narrator’s death?
She said, “We don’t start with my death, honey—we start with my stroke, and the death of my career. We both know I’m never going to work again. Not in movies. Not in television. You could make that work in a book, couldn’t you?”
It wasn’t the first time Ava had acknowledged her professional decline, nor was it the first time she had suggested starting the book with her near-fatal stroke—although this time her proposal was more sensible than the Lucille Ball episode she had come up with earlier.
“We can think about it, Ava,” I said. I was tired, too, and as irritable with her as I knew she was with me.
“What the fuck is there to think about, honey. My career’s finished. It’s over, baby. Now I’m exhausted and I want to try to catch some shut-eye. Good night, baby,” she said and replaced the receiver.
7
I would sit by his bed and read the newspapers to him but poor Daddy was so weak from coughing, he couldn’t stay awake. But the moment I stopped reading he’d say, ‘Go on, Daughter, don’t stop, I’m listening. My eyes are closed that’s all.’ He’d squeeze my hand and I’d continue reading, and I’d read till my eyes burned a hole in my head. He loved to hear stories about President [Franklin] Roosevelt. Roosevelt was his hero. How I wish Daddy could have lived to see the day the president invited me and Mickey to the White House on our honeymoon. Everybody wanted to know Mickey in those days. I was a nobody, an MGM starlet, not even a nobody. He was such a star. Mickey Rooney was the biggest star on the MGM lot—and about five inches shorter than me! That never stopped him. Mickey was always on, and loving every minute of it. Everybody wanted to know Mickey. But nobody wanted to know Daddy when he was dying. He was so alone. He was scared. I could see the fear in his eyes even when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to… I don’t know… they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer. Not like I meant it anyway.
“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.