On their drive to Florida down Interstate Highway 95, the corridor to the Sun Belt from the northeast, snowbirds pass a roadside sign outside this North Carolina town that says, “Ava Gardner Museum.”
Few know why Smithfield, a town of 11,000, has a museum for the Hollywood goddess who spanned the years between Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.
The reason: Gardner was a “Tar Heel,” a native North Carolinian. She was the youngest of seven children of a tenant farmer who planted cotton and tobacco near here. Gardner, whose first home had no electricity, spent most of her childhood in the area.
Despite her international travels — she maintained residences in Spain and later in Great Britain — Gardner never forgot her roots, humble though they were. Doris Cannon, the museum’s chairman emeritus, said the actress quietly returned all her life. “She liked to kick off her shoes, let down her hair and wander barefoot without makeup among the roses in her brother’s yard.”
Gardner, who died at 67 in January 1990, opted to be buried in her family plot in Smithfield.
In the waning days of the Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned his way through Georgia, camped with his Union troops near the now 233-year-old town, located about 25 miles southeast of the state capital at Raleigh. But the war ended before he could wreak any damage.
The genesis of the museum began when Gardner gave 12-year-old Tom Banks a playful kiss on the cheek when she was a secretarial student. He never forgot her. Some years later, when he spotted her picture in a newspaper, he started a lifetime hobby of collecting memorabilia of her career.
In the early 1980s, Banks, who became a psychologist, bought a boarding house that Gardner’s parents ran near Smithfield. There, Banks and his wife operated his own Ava Gardner Museum during the summers. When he died in 1989, his wife donated the collection to Smithfield.
Today, the expanded collection is said to be one of the most extensive for a single movie star. There are theater posters from her 61 films, costumes from her pictures and clothes from her personal wardrobe. Also displayed are leather-bound scripts, photos, portraits, newspaper clippings about her three marriages (to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra) and personal letters.
Each year, about 5,000 visit the one-story museum. One visitor was the actor Gregory Peck.
Some years ago, museum officials started a drive to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp with her picture on it. Humphrey Bogart, Boris Karloff and other film superstars are already on stamps. Why Gardner? The museum’s Cannon said Gardner’s fame far exceeds that of most movie actresses. “Her name is always on lists of the century’s 10 most interesting women. She is the only female North Carolinian to appear on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines.”
One of Gardner’s letters displayed at the museum indicates that as early as age 13, she dreamed of going to Hollywood. Writing to a friend, she said: “I hate school worse every year and I still have three years to go. . . . I remember we always talked about what we wanted to be. You wanted to be a teacher and me a movie star. But I know I can’t. So I have about given up.”
That changed one day in 1939. Her oldest sister, Beatrice, married a photographer, Larry Tarr. He took a portrait of Gardner at 16 and put it in his studio window in New York City. The photo captured her classic beauty — the arching eyebrows, the high cheekbones, the cleft chin and dark green eyes. A passerby saw it and suggested Tarr send it to Hollywood. He did.
Two years later, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Ava Lavinia Gardner (her real name) to a seven-year contract — even though she had no professional acting experience and had even failed to win a major role in any of her high school plays. Her voice was too soft to carry beyond the front rows, friends said.
For four years, she got only walk-ons and small parts in movies. Meanwhile, she took acting lessons and elocution coaching to neutralize her southern drawl. A turning point came in 1946. Universal borrowed her to play opposite Burt Lancaster in a dramatization of the Hemingway short-story “The Killers.” Critics wrote about Gardner’s sensuous, sloe-eyed beauty, her magnetic screen presence and understated acting style.
Her career took off. She became the reigning glamor queen playing opposite such leading men as Bogart, Clark Gable, James Mason and Richard Burton.
Her pictures included “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1952) and “The Barefoot Contessa” (1964). She was never considered an accomplished actress. In fact, most fans remember her chiefly for her looks. Nevertheless, in 1953 she got an Oscar nomination for her performance in “Mogambo” opposite Gable. And Hemingway said she was the only actor who played his characters the way he envisioned them.
Yet, through her long career, there was an undertone of a life unfulfilled. Soon after she came to MGM, she married Rooney. She was only 19. The marriage lasted only a year and a few days. Shaw, the band leader, was her next husband. Their marriage in 1945 also dissolved in just over a year.
Sinatra, Gardner’s third husband, left his first wife of 12 years for her. They were divorced five years later in 1956, unable to survive the pressures of their high-powered careers. Gardner never married again. Later, she would say Sinatra was the “love of her life.” She had no children.
Gardner never cared for the Hollywood scene. She once said she would have traded her screen career for “one good man I could love and marry and cook for and make a home for, someone who would stick around for the rest of my life. I never found him.”
In 1978, the country girl returned to her hometown for the 50th anniversary of her alma mater, Rock Ridge High. “The show of affection for her by the people was warm enough to melt an iceberg,” said Dewey Sheffield, her escort. “Her remarks touched the hearts…. She recalled with great fondness the people she knew, how proud she was to have come from such a community, and how grateful she was to always be known as a Tar Heel.”
But away from Smithfield, she often lived the life of a reveler, frequenting the nightclub circuit and drinking heavily. In later years, Gardner stayed in her elegant apartment near Hyde Park in London and in her villa in Madrid where she often went to the bull ring and was linked romantically with a succession of toreadors.
However, her last years were lonely. She suffered a stroke in 1986. Pneumonia plagued her thereafter. Four years later, she died from that condition.
Obituary writers called her the last “celluloid goddess.” However, her choice of a burial site was not Hollywood but her tiny Southern hometown, a choice that was not unexpected in Smithfield.
“We have a saying in North Carolina,” said Sheffield, her escort for a day. “`I am a Tar Heel born. I am a Tar Heel bred. And when I die, I will be a Tar Heel dead.'”
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The Ava Gardner Museum is located at 205 S. 3rd St., a mile west of I-95 Exit 95, but it is scheduled to move later this year to a site a block away on Market Street. The museum charges $3 admission ($2 for seniors and $1 for children 11 and under). For hours and other information, call 919-934-5830 or visit the museum’s Web site www.avagardner.org.
