“‘They put the food on our table, baby, never forget that,’ Mama would remind me whenever I complained about them. What can I say, the woman was a fucking saint? I remember one evening, when I was pinning up her hair in paper curlers—she loved me doing that; she had never been a beauty but she loved me curling her hair, she loved to be fussed over a little bit, especially when she was tired—I said something about the way some of the longshoremen smelled. They smelled just godawful, especially when they’d just come back from their night shifts.
“Mama said: ‘That’s what money smells like, honey. You still wanna be rich?’”
“That was an interesting question, Ava,” I said. “What did you say?”
“I don’t remember what I said. I knew I was never meant to be rich anyway. I don’t know why she asked the question, but I’ve never forgotten it.”
She remained quiet for a while. “At least, none of those lecherous bastards ever touched me,” she said. “They got a mouthful if they tried. Sure, a few tried, when Daddy wasn’t around, but I could turn the air blue when I needed to. None of them tried a second time.”
Newport News was a big upheaval in all their lives. Unable to find regular work, her father went to stay with Bappie and her second husband, Larry Tarr, a photographer, in New York, and try his luck up there.
“Poor Daddy, poor darlin’, by this time he was in his late fifties. I’d say his chances of landing a job in New York, even if he’d been fit and well, were zilch. He’d been a cougher all his life, certainly all my life. Whenever I woke in the night, I’d hear him coughing somewhere in the house. He said it was a smoker’s cough, it was nothing to worry about, he always said that. But it grew worse in New York, and he had to come back to Newport News, where Mama could look after him. I told you, he wasn’t much of a talker. His silence was okay when I was a kid, but it makes me sad now, the conversations we never had. He liked to listen and nod, so I never even knew what he was thinking. But he was thin as a stick, and even I could see that his health was crashing downhill fast.
“It was a bad time for all of us. I hated school. Newport News was my first high school. The girls were smart and into nice clothes. Some of them seemed to have new outfits practically every week. I wore the same skirt for a whole goddamn year. Bappie gave me a couple of her old dresses to take in. They were nice dresses—when it came to fashion, Bappie was a pistol; she’d been given her own handbag and accessory section to run at I. Miller—but I was a lousy seamstress. Believe me, nothing is more humiliating than wearing your big sister’s cast-offs when you’re a kid.
“My teacher at Newport News was a patronizing bitch,” she said. “My first morning, she made me stand up in front of the class and answer her questions: Ava, that’s an unusual name, where are you from Ava, what does your Daddy do for a living, Ava? She should have done that quietly, not in front of the whole damn class. She made me feel like the entertainment. ‘My Daddy’s a farmer.’ Well, that brought the house down. The minute I opened my mouth it was obvious that I was from tobacco country. Flat-ass country, they called it in those days. And nobody was a farmer in Newport News. Nobody there spoke the way I did. I dropped my g’s like magnolia blossom. I must have sounded like a cotton picker in Gone With the Wind. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. There are so many reasons for my shyness I can trace back to that time.”
She looked angry, but then slowly she began to smile. “Oh my God, the embarrassment of being young!” she said. “Mama had all those kids and didn’t say a word to me about where babies came from. Isn’t that the strangest thing? She didn’t say a word about puberty, about menstruation. She said nothing at all about those things. Not a word. Can you believe that?”
“It’s unusual,” I said.
“The subject must have embarrassed her, I guess.” She smiled forgivingly.
But physiologically, a girl of thirteen or fourteen must have had some awareness of the changes happening in her body? I said.
“I knew my body was changing, honey. I knew about periods. Of course, I did. Some of the girls in my class had started theirs. They talked about it all the time. That’s how I learned about sex, and ‘doing it.’ Not that I ever did anything until I did it with Mickey. I had a few boyfriends at Newport News High, and I was interested—and damn pretty, too—so there was plenty of interest, believe me.
“There was one boy I particularly liked. He was a senior, a football player. He came from a good family, his people were terribly conservative, it was such a cliché, but I knew it mattered—I was the girl from across the tracks! I was very conscious of that, although it didn’t stop me having lewd thoughts about him.
“But I was shy and Mama was strict… so, anyway, that probably explains, in case you’re wondering, how I was still a virgin when I married Mickey Rooney! Then I did it all the time! I’d been holding back a lot of emotions, honey. We screwed each other silly for the whole year we were married. We did it for a bit longer than that, actually. I was making up for lost time. We screwed on and off, right up to the time he went into the army in 1944. Shit, we made love the night he enlisted. We had dinner at the Palladium for old times’ sake and then we…”
She hesitated, and I sensed what was coming.
“I’m not sure that we should say that in the book, honey,” she said.
“Say what?” I said innocently.
“That Mick and I screwed all the time.”
“You were married, for God’s sake.”
“We were separated, we were getting a divorce. It didn’t stop us doing it. It makes me sound like a nympho, doesn’t it, doing it when we were in the middle of a divorce?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t think it makes me sound like a goddamn nympho?” she persisted.
“It’s the kind of thing readers want to know, Ava.”
“Is it?” she said.
“It’s a great insight,” I said.
“Into what, honey?” she said.
“Into you—the person you were before you became a movie star,” I said.
“How do you know that?” she said.
“I just do,” I said. I didn’t want to argue with her—at least not at that moment. One always had to choose one’s moment with Ava.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. I knew she wouldn’t want to leave it alone. She would go back to a subject again and again until she got what she wanted. She couldn’t help herself—that was the movie star in her. But she needed different things from the book than I did. “My truth isn’t necessarily your truth, honey, but let’s forget this is my book and compromise—we’ll make it my truth,” she told me once. By this time, we both knew of the struggle we were in, yet still believed that we could get our way.
It was now past eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, and we had been talking since 4 P.M. when we returned from the park. I was ready to call it a day, but we had opened the second bottle of wine.
“Anyway, going back,” she said, showing no signs of wilting. “When I had my first period, I was afraid to tell my mother. It was something I didn’t want to talk about with her, and she most definitely didn’t want to discuss those things with me. My first period started in the morning, before I left for school.
“I told Virginia what had happened. Well, bless her heart, she did the best thing in the whole world. She said, ‘Lordie, you is a little woman now.’ I thought, Well, that’s rather nice. I’m a woman! Virginia fixed me up with a Kotex. I asked her to tell Mama. I was too shy to tell her myself. Whether she did or not, I have no idea because Mama never said a word to me about it. But neither did she say a word when my white cotton shift became transparent when I was soaked with holy water at my baptism. I was thirteen. I was just beginning to grow pubic hair, you can imagine! I was mortified. My hair, which had always been blond, was beginning to darken. Especially down there,” she said. “The whole congregation could see everything!