“Anyway, Mr. Schenck was very sweet. He said he liked my shoes. I was wearing my favorite oxford saddle shoes with white leather straps across the front, which your friends used to autograph. He couldn’t help but notice them; I always wore my shoes too big—that’s why I’ve got big feet now. But I was flattered when he admired them. I told him about each of the girls who had signed their names on the straps. I told him their whole goddamn histories. He seemed very interested, although I don’t think he understood a damn word I was saying. My accent was as Tarheel as it gets. That’s incomprehensible to anyone who lives more than two whoops and a holler outside the state of North Carolina. For years I woke up in cold sweats about that interview!”
Eventually, Marvin Schenck gave up trying to work out what she was talking about. He rose from his desk, and held out his hand. “I think we should test you, Miss Gardner. At least let’s see what you look like on the screen,” he said. Ava didn’t miss the irony. “To be willing to tune out that goddamn accent, shit, I owe that guy plenty,” she told me nearly fifty years later. “He really stuck his neck out for me.”
Ava was tested at a small studio on Ninth Avenue the same day they tested Vaughn Monroe, a big band singer, and Hazel Scott, a singer and pianist. Again Bappie accompanied her because their mother was too unwell to make it in the sweltering New York City heat. This time Ava borrowed a pair of Bappie’s high-heeled shoes and wore a pretty print dress with a long flared skirt that her mother had bought her in Wilson for sixteen dollars. “It was not a color most women would wear but I loved it. I felt like a real fashion flash,” Ava said.
The test was basic: stand up, sit down, look this way, look that way, smile, be sad, look happy. She was asked to walk back and forward a couple of times, then they did a voice test: what’s your name, when’s your birthday, where do you live? It seemed like a waste of time to Ava. “I wasn’t dumb. I knew that my looks might get me through the studio gates but the moment I opened my mouth that accent was going to do me every time.”
Nevertheless, Marvin Schenck saw something in her. He shrewdly sent the test to Hollywood—minus the soundtrack. Meanwhile, Ava returned to Wilson, North Carolina, with her mother, convinced that her Hollywood adventure was over.
On that journey home Ava learned how sick her mother was. “She was eating aspirin by the fistful. She could barely walk. It was only when my sister Inez persuaded her to see a doctor in Raleigh that she learned the truth. She was riddled with cancer, although I didn’t know that until later.”
A few weeks later, to her astonishment, MGM offered Ava a seven-year contract. “Thinking back, it’s hard for me to remember exactly how I felt. I was very confused. I had convinced myself that I wouldn’t hear another word from them. I was sure the dream was over. But I do remember that my heart was thumping when I read the letter asking me to come to Hollywood. The idea had been, if they offered me a contract, Mama would come with me to California. She had been strict with me all my life, her word was law, and even then, when I was eighteen, she still saw me as a child. But by this time we all knew that she was in no fit state to come with me to the end of the road, let alone to the West Coast.”
But the evening Ava got the MGM offer, Mama announced that of course she must accept it. “She said it was too good to turn down just because she was under the weather—I loved that ‘under the weather.’ She had cancer for fuck sake! Mama declared that Bappie would go with me instead, and she would stay with Inez and her husband in Raleigh.”
The morning Ava left for New York to pick up Bappie and take the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago and the Super Chief to Los Angeles to seek her fortune, her mother took her in her arms. “Enjoy yourself, my darling baby. You are going to be a movie star.”
10
When I arrived the following evening, Ava kissed me—a little reward kind of peck on my lips. “Thank you for yesterday, honey,” she said.
“What did I do yesterday?”
“You were nice, that’s all. Talking about Daddy’s death and Mama’s cancer was hard for me. You understood. It’s tough having to talk about how your parents died. Neither death was easy for them. I didn’t know so much of it had stayed with me.”
“Moments like that never go away,” I said.
“Like guilt, honey,” she said. “Like goddamn fucking guilt.”
She had gone to Hollywood when she knew that her mother was dying. Her sister Inez had taken on the burden of caring for their mother in her last months. And although Molly had encouraged her to accept the MGM deal, and encouraged Bappie to accompany her to Hollywood, I knew that Ava’s sense of guilt about that time still ran deep. She had married and, after only a year, was in the middle of divorcing Mickey Rooney and already dating Howard Hughes when her mother died.
“What a fly-by-night lady I must have seemed to poor Mama,” she said, pouring the first drink of the evening before we began our session. “A season in Hollywood does so change a girl!” she mimicked Elizabeth Taylor, whose refined, rinky-dink delivery was one of Ava’s favorite party pieces. I’d heard it before, and acknowledged it with a polite grin. Ed Victor and Dick Snyder were talking serious money now, and I wanted to get on with it. The previous evening, as we always did, we had discussed the areas we wanted to cover—her arrival in California, her early days at MGM, her first meeting with Mickey Rooney. It was rich and promising stuff, and she seemed okay with it.
A few days earlier I had written to Greg Morrison, an old friend of mine—and Ava’s—telling him that I was working with her on her autobiography and asked whether he had any “laundered reminiscences” about her that he would like to share. Although I had never inquired, I suspected that they had once been lovers. I never expected him to break the publicists’ omerta code of silence but anything he cared to say would be useful, I told him. An insider’s insider, he knew where more bodies were buried than Ted Bundy. But that morning, I had received a scrawled note from Morrison in California:
She’s 17 or 18 with one pair of shoes, cardboard suitcase, leaving everybody in her life to enter the MGM University. They teach her to walk, talk, sit, sleep, shave her legs, shake hands, kiss, smile, eat, pray. Her ass is great, fine tits, short but good legs, great shoulders, thin hips, fix the toes, do the hair—clean it, but don’t touch the face. Everybody and every camera is drawn to that face. That town is jammed with pretty, but not like that—the eyes, the mouth, are from another world. She becomes the “armpiece du jour,” learns what they want. Learns how to do it without giving her soul away, and learns everything but how to Act. In her whole shitkicking, barefoot life she never really learned to pretend, nor did poverty give her much humor, certainly none about herself, so she went to work on the Men—Lancaster, Gable, Huston, Douglas, Hughes, and the “suits” that needed her. And so she went to her last and most important school, the U. of Sinatra. In essence, by fucking, fighting, and forgetting with him she inhaled the gangster outlook of the world. Take what you want. Don’t let them use you. They only understand tough. And all of her days became nights.
Written in obvious haste, with affection and understanding, its prose simple and uncorrected, it had a frankness, a darkness, and a beauty that said more about her than anything I had ever read before—her shyness, the careless one-night stands, her love affairs, and disloyal passion for Sinatra—it was all there.
It was a priceless briefing note. I thought it insightful and sympathetic, but I wasn’t sure how Ava would take it and decided not to show it to her straightaway.