Cinema: The Farmer's Daughter

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Later the Gardners moved to Newport News, Va., where her father went to work in a sawmill and her mother ran a boarding house. In school the kids made fun of her. She was shy with boys. "Here I was," she says, "this strange little hillbilly ..." She went to secretarial school, and, for one year, to Atlantic Christian College. Her girlhood, she says, was full of insecurities. "What a generation. No wonder we are all neurotic and crazy."

The Face in the Window. Her oldest sister, Beatrice, was married to a New York photographer named Larry Tarr, and when17-year-old Ava came visiting in 1940, he was fascinated by his sister-in-law, shot dozens of pictures of her. Enter the agent of fate, one Barney Duhan, then a clerk in Loew's New York legal department. One day Duhan's eyes were arrested by the picture of a girl in Photographer Tarr's show window. "It was the face of the kind of girl you want to marry," recalls Duhan. "It was vibrant. I mean vibrant."

He called the Tarr studios, introducing himself as a "Metro talent scout," and asked for the girl's name & address. Her name, he heard, was Ava Gardner, and she lived down in North Carolina. Disappointed that he could not meet her, Duhan told Tarr to send some pictures over. Tarr sent 60. Metro bigwigs saw them,

Ava got a screen test, and within a few months she was on her way to Hollywood as a "starlet" at $50 a week. "It never dawned on me," she says, "that I wasn't going to be a smash right away." Apparently it never dawned on anyone to reward her discoverer: Talent Scout Duhan is now a New York City cop.

Love Comes to Andy Hardy. Starlets are among the lowest—if among the most attractive—forms of Hollywood life. They are the dress extras of paradise. Their main job is to pose for cheesecake pictures and to be ever ready to be named by the United Elevator Operators of America as the Girl They Would Most Like to Be Stuck With at the Top of the Empire State Building. That was Ava's life in Hollywood until one fateful day when someone on the M-G-M lot suggested that she might like to meet Mickey Rooney. "Why?" she asked naively.

A few days later, Rooney called her for a date. "I played it like a little lady,"

Ava recalls wickedly. "A little Southern lady. 'I'm. busy,' I told him. Busy! I didn't know a soul."

Six months later, Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner were married (over Metro Mogul Louis B. Mayer's massive opposition). The studio sent a pressagent along on the honeymoon. "When you came down to breakfast, he was there," Ava recalls bitterly. "When you had your dinner, he was there. When you went to bed, he was damn near there." It was enough to make any husband jumpy. "On our wedding night," says Ava, "Mickey was so nervous. He kept writing letters to people and walking up and down."

Sixteen months later, they were divorced. "We were babies, just children," says Ava. "Our lives were run by a lot of other people. We didn't have a chance." A veteran Hollywood gossipist sees it differently: "Ava simply outgrew Mickey."

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