She asked me to leave the new pages with her. “I’ll read them again tonight, when I can’t sleep—instead of waking you up at three o’clock in the morning,” she said. She smiled and asked what ground I wanted to cover that evening.
I suggested that we take it from when she returned to Newport News after her father’s funeral.
She thought about that for a moment, and sipped the wine. “Well, Daddy was my favorite, but I loved Mama, too. Daddy’s death brought Mama and me closer,” she said. There was another long pause as she pondered where to start.
“After Daddy died, when he was no longer around to give her a hand, that was the time I realized how tough running the boardinghouse had become for her. We can begin there. When I suggested I quit school and get a job. Well, she just about went through the roof at that. ‘Doing what?’ she said. ‘Bringing in a wage, Mama. Doing my share. I want to pull my weight,’ I said. ‘You finish your schooling first. I want you to make something of yourself, something your Daddy would be proud of.’ I loved her dearly but she could still be fucking annoying at times. She still wanted to control my life. I was fifteen, for God’s sake!
“Shortly after that, she was offered a job back in North Carolina—running another Teacherage in Rock Ridge, Wilson County. It was practically next door to Brogden. I remember Mama saying, ‘We’re going home, baby, where we belong.’ I don’t think I had ever felt happier in my life. It was sad Daddy didn’t live to see that day. I remember Mama grabbing hold of me and both of us crying, the tears streaming down our faces.”
“What year was this, Ava?” Pinning her down on dates was never easy.
“Well, Daddy died in ’38. It was shortly after that. Mama was never the same woman after Daddy passed. That miserable, fucking boardinghouse was killing her. She looked worn. She looked the way I sometimes feel now.”
She lit a cigarette while she thought about it.
“I think she might already have had cancer at that stage. It was a sneaky one, one of those insidious bastards that kill you slowly. Cancer of the uterus. Mama never talked about it. At the end she did, when she couldn’t hide it any longer. I was so upset.
“I told Howard Hughes about it. He’d started calling on me while I was still married to Mickey. He had a great sense of entitlement, Mr. Hughes. He sent one of America’s top cancer specialists to see her. But it was too late. She died on May 21, 1943—the day I got my divorce from Mickey. Mama was fifty-nine, the same age Daddy was when he died. Who was it who said that a mother’s death is a girl’s first tragedy without her sympathy? Baby, they sure had that right.
“I’m jumping, I’m skipping,” she said irritably to herself. She stubbed out her cigarette without finishing it, as she often did. “Concentrate, Ava. Concentrate,” she said.
She nodded slowly for a moment without speaking.
“Okay,” she began again. “Mama and I were back in North Carolina, right next door to the place where I was born. I was eighteen. Just. Taking life as it comes, the wind as it blows. My brother Jack came back into my life. He was a real go-getter. He was the one who accidentally burnt down Daddy’s barn. I watched it go up in flames when I was a baby. Another time, when he was thirteen, a year after I was born, he set up a stall selling shots of corn whiskey he had bartered for fish. North Carolina was a dry state in those days, and Jacko was doing a roaring trade—until Daddy found out, and put a stop to that! Jack must have been a handful, but he obviously had great entrepreneurial skills. Anyway, he was sufficiently well-heeled by the time we returned to Rock Ridge to be able to afford to treat me to a year’s tuition at the Atlantic Christian College in Wilson. I had started a secretarial course at Newport News. I got my shorthand up to 120 words a minute, and my typing to sixty. I was all set for an office career, and started searching for some kind of shorthand-typing job in Wilson. I was willing to settle for that.”
But what happened next sounds like a script for a bad Hollywood B movie—“a very bad Hollywood B movie,” Ava conceded. Her sister Bappie was on to her second husband, a photographer named Larry Tarr, a brash, dapper son of the owner of a chain of photographic studios dotted over New York in the 1930s and ’40s. Impressed by Ava’s looks, Tarr told her that she “oughta be in pictures.”
In the spring of 1941, he displayed her portrait in the window of his Fifth Avenue store. The enlarged black-and-white print of Ava, wearing a floral-patterned dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat tied beneath her chin with a ribbon—“Larry must have been trying to copy that early Mary Pickford look,” Ava later mused—caught the eye of Barney Duhan, an office boy at Loew’s Inc., the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood. Hoping to finagle a date with the shop-window beauty, Duhan called the store and, posing as an MGM talent scout, asked for Ava’s telephone number. The manager refused to give it to him but agreed to pass on his query to Larry Tarr, who, believing it to be a genuine inquiry, promptly sent Ava’s pictures to MGM’s New York office on Broadway.
Since the studio hadn’t requested any pictures, and nobody there had heard of Ava Gardner, there was some confusion and delay at the MGM offices. “Larry Tarr chased them up, he was a real little hustler, but he was getting the run-around. I had never figured on being a movie star anyway. I dreamed of being a singer with a big band one time, that would have been nifty, but I never saw myself as a movie star. Even so, I was disappointed when the interest appeared to disappear in a hurry. You know, I was a kid and it was MGM! Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The most famous movie studio in the world! Where Clark Gable worked! I must have voted for him twenty times to play Rhett Butler.” She laughed. “He fucking well owed me, honey!”
Whether it was Larry Tarr’s persistence that finally paid off or whether Ava’s photographs alone were enough to persuade an executive called Marvin Schenck, a relative of Nicholas M. Schenck, the president of Loew’s, to invite her in for an interview, isn’t clear.
She said, “I was eighteen. The summer of 1941. I was eighteen, I knew I was pretty, nobody had to tell me that, and I loved visiting New York. I used to go up and see my sister Bappie every opportunity I got. I’d call in to see her at I. Miller and the other salesgirls would say, ‘God sake, Dixie, put your sister in the back. She’ll scare off all our customers.’ I was a bit behind the parade for New York tastes.
“Mama came with me to New York for the interview with Mr. Schenck. We had to make our own way to New York City; nobody offered to pay our expenses or train fare. But Mama was all for it. She was a great movie fan. The idea of me being interviewed by MGM was the greatest thrill of her life. I have no idea how she got hold of the piece of change that trip must have cost her. But since the Depression and Daddy’s illness, Mama was used to being the breadwinner. She was the one who always made the pot boil.
“Fortunately, in New York, we could bed down at Bappie and Larry Tarr’s place. Even so, we still had to travel steerage to and from North Carolina. In the summertime that was something, believe me, especially for Mama. I still didn’t know how ill she was, I don’t think any of us knew, and the trip was too much for her. On the day, she was too exhausted to come with me to meet Mr. Schenck. Bappie came with me. But can you imagine how disappointed Mama must have been? She made me promise to remember everything, what he said, what his office was like. ‘Darling, baby, he is going to love you,’ she said when she kissed me goodbye. ‘You are going to be a movie star.’ From that moment on, that became her mantra. She had such confidence in me, it was embarrassing.