On what would have been her 100th birthday, NC movie starlet Ava Gardner gets a present
On Christmas Eve in 1922, an unexpected seventh child arrived in the Gardner household — a spunky tomboy girl who would one day dazzle Hollywood, dance the flamenco barefoot and turn Frank Sinatra’s heart to mush.
The world got its first glimpse of Ava Gardner in the tiny Johnston County crossroad called Grabtown outside Smithfield, where the family sharecropped tobacco until the barn and cotton gin burned down.
So the future starlet moved to Brogden, not far away and equally small, where the young Ava won every game of marbles, climbed the town’s water tower and was known as the kid you shouldn’t cross.
Before she died in 1990, Ava Gardner would get almost literally plucked off the streets for movie stardom, whisked off to Hollywood, drawn into three turbulent marriages and nominated for an Oscar — remembering her Grabtown roots even when she courted bullfighters in Spain.
And for her 100th birthday, her hometown museum in Smithfield got a present to add to the array of gowns, posters and sultry portraits on the wall: a copy of her original birth certificate.
“Although no one believes me,” reads her quote at the museum entrance, “I always was a country girl and still have a country girl’s values.”
A made-up name story
The Johnston County Register of Deeds office retrieved and restored the document, which had grown worn around the edges.
“It was not in a plastic cover,” said Register of Deeds Craig Olive, showing off the new paper with its freshly treated signatures. “Anybody could put their soil-stained hands on it.”
While the original remains a public record, the copy hangs framed alongside the Grabtown mementos, where it corrects a popular Hollywood fable.
As a young MGM actress, who spoke in an accent she worried sounded too Southern, Ava Gardner got handed a fictional backstory that included a more plain-sounding name: Lucy Johnson.
“They felt that ‘Ava Gardner’ was a little too fancy,” said Lynell Seabold, the museum’s executive director. “They made up this story that from these humble beginnings she had this simple name.”
Three celebrity marriages
The story spread so widely that Johnston County school children learned it in class.
“It was on Jeopardy!” Seabold said.
To walk through the museum is to follow a life from tobacco fields to the olive groves outside Rome, where she danced her seductive flamenco in “The Barefoot Contessa.”
The movies took her from the humble teachers’ boarding house where her mother cooked in Brogden to remote corners of Kenya, where she coaxed a baby elephant in “Mogambo.”
It led her into three turbulent marriages — Mickey Rooney, who was unfaithful, Artie Shaw, who belittled her, and most famously Sinatra, whose acting career she revived before jealousy and limelight devoured them.
“Oh God,” she said, in a quotation captured in a museum exhibit, “Frank Sinatra could be the sweetest, most charming man in the world when he was in the mood.”
To this columnist’s mind, it remains a shame that so much attention is paid to her love life rather than her movies, their titles strange to much of this century’s audience.
A cigarette and a glass of whiskey
However explosive the details from those episodes in her life — a drunken George C. Scott simultaneously punching her and demanding marriage, as her memoir reported — they do not define her.
This quote might:
“I wish to live to 150 years old,” she once said, “but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.”
One might also bring up that when Ava Gardner was a child, she defiantly sat with Black children in segregated movie theaters, later joining the NAACP. Or that she gave generously to the Red Cross and the March of Dimes.
An even better illustration of her life:
After a film career spanning 45 years, starting with a bit part in “Hitler’s Madman” and finishing with an episode of “Knots Landing,” jetting around the world and settling in both Madrid and London, she chose to be buried in the family plot in Smithfield, alongside her parents.
You can see their names, Jonas and Mollie, on her birth certificate.
This story was originally published December 26, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "On what would have been her 100th birthday, NC movie starlet Ava Gardner gets a present."