Regarding Ava Gardner

Smithfield, North Carolina, is a small town off Exit 95 of I-95.   Nearby is even smaller rural Grabtown where the film star Ava Gardner was born in 1922 and is buried since 1990.  But Smithfield is where memorabilia of her life and career are on display in a small, elegant museum.

Folks around Smithfield are quite proud of her.  Proud that she is from an ordinary family in their quiet community, and rode her extra ordinary beauty and talent to popular and critical success.  Proud of her 50 year career and cosmopolitan life.  Proud especially that she asked to be brought home from London, where she lived when she died, to lie in Sunset Memorial Park with her parents and siblings.

Few of even the most famous of film stars of her era and earlier rate a museum just for them.  Especially one that lasts. 

Liberace's flamboyance --costumes, candelabras and cars -- was on view near Las Vegas (where else?) for a few successful years.  Now his museum is closed, "temporarily." 

John Wayne's home town of Winterset, IA, is soliciting building donations on the web, as is Saybrook, CT, on behalf of Kate Hepburn's small museum "under construction." 

Frank Sinatra's Hoboken  memorial never was much and closed in 2006.  He was Ava's last husband, and in her words, "the love of my life." Hr is now better memorialized in Ava's museum than by his home town.  The day we visited Ava"s  place it was Francis' (as she always called him) music that played.

Jimmy Stewart's museum in Indiana, PA, is on hard times.  Audrey Hepburn's family forced a memorial in Switzerland to close. 

No museum honors Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire.  Or Ava's second husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, or her reputed lover, billionaire Howard Hughes.  Orson Welles has a museum "Of The Air," but you don't have to be very famous to rate mention world wide on the web.

In contrast, Judy Garland's museum  in her home in Grand Rapids (Minnesota not Michigan) is thriving.  It helps to be Dorothy of  "The Wizard of OZ,"  and have the world's grand parents eager to take another generation of kids out of Kansas and over the rainbow with that enduring classic film.  The 75th anniversary of "Wizard" is coming up in 2014 and word is they're already getting ready to celebrate in Grand Rapids. 

Another ever youthful icon -- this time to the successive generations of adolescent rebels -- is James Dean, the original 1960's "Rebel Without a Cause."  He has two places keeping his memory alive.  One is his gallery and museum in Fairmount, IN, where he lived when young and is buried.  The other is a modernistic monument in Cholame, CA, a tiny desert community a mile from where he died in a single car crash at the intersection of state roads 41 and 46.

Ava and Judy were born in the same year.  But, like her other contemporaries, Ava lacks that singular image, frozen in time, emblematic of  an identifiable era in the nation's life, that is our gift from Judy and James.  One film, her star turn with Robert Walker in "One Touch of Venus," had that potential, or so it seemed to this writer at 18 when he saw it -- several times on successive days. 

How is the Ava Gardner Museum doing?  The lady there that day acknowledged that the tour buses are less frequent and their passengers older these days.  Only one other person drifted in the afternoon in August, 2012, when we were there.  It may be that when the original fans age and depart the star fades as well.  The easy substitution of a web site for a brick and mortar building no doubt  plays, and will  play, an increasing role.  Meanwhile, the Ava Gardner Museum is one of eight unique small American museums celebrated by the grand daddy of them all, the Smithsonian -- on its web site.

If Ava beats the odds and her memory does endure it will be because of the shear quality of the work done by Smithfield residents and the unusual dedication and talent of several of her most devoted followers, including Tod Johnson, present museum executive director, and his volunteer staff; Dr Tom Banks, founder of the first collection and museum with his wife, Lorraine, and the Dutch painter Bert Pfeiffer.

Pfeiffer's paintings line the wall of the museum's conference room.  He painted one a year for two or more decades, each a uniquely stylized version of Ava's lush and timeless beauty.  The collection rewards close examination not only to appreciate her sensuous glamour but to note the tiny, somewhat surrealistic surprises lurking in most, if not all, of his portraits.

The museum does a fine job of weaving a narrative of her film career and personal life into a seamless chronology using video, pictures and artifacts.  There is the requisite Cinderella story of how a sultry photograph of her at 16 led to an MGM contract.  Reportedly, her southern accent was so thick, that her screen test was silent on purpose. Then came her highly publicised pursuit by the young star, Mickey Rooney, whom she finally married and quickly divorced.

Her breakthrough film was "The Killers," a a critically acclaimed effort based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, which also introduced Burt Lancaster.   My personal favorites:

              1948      One Touch of Venus                         Robert Walker, co-star.

              1949      Pandora and the Flying Dutchman    James Mason

              1951      Show Boat                                         Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson

              1954     The Barefoot Contessa                       Humphrey Bogart

              1964     The Night of the Iguana                      Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr

Worth noting: Ava never acted or sang for her three husbands.  Her declared favorite co-star was Gregory Peck while her girlhood matinee idol was Clark Gable.  She lived for a long period in Spain and made her home in her final years in London.


From the Wikipedia Free encyclopedia:

The Ava Gardner Museum is located at 325 East Market Street in historic downtown Smithfield, North Carolina, and holds an extensive collection of artifacts from Ava Gardner's career and private life.

The original collection was started in 1941 by a fan, Tom Banks, who, at age 12, met Ava on the campus of Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College) where she was studying to become a secretary. When she did not return to school the next year, he saw a photograph of Gardner in a newspaper and learned that she had been signed to a movie contract with MGM.

The Banks devoted most of their lives to collecting memorabilia from every source imagined. In the early 1980s Dr. Banks purchased the Brogden Teacherage, the house where Ava lived from age 2 to 13, and operated his own Ava Gardner Museum during the summers for nine years. Dr. Banks suffered a stroke at the museum in August 1989 and died a few days later. Ava died 5 months later on January 25, 1990. In the summer of 1990, Mrs. Banks donated the collection to the Town of Smithfield, being assured that a permanent museum would be maintained in Johnston County, Ava's birthplace and final resting place.

The Ava Gardner Museum was incorporated in 1996 as a 501(c)3 organization to manage and care for the Museum's collection of personal items and movie memorabilia gifted to the Town of Smithfield by Tom and Lorraine Banks. Since that time the Ava Gardner Museum Foundation has continued to acquire artifacts related to Ava's life and is committed to preserving these items and displaying them in an educational manner.

In August 1999, the Museum’s board made an investment in downtown Smithfield by purchasing and renovating a 6,400-square-foot building that became the permanent home for the Museum’s vast collection. In October 2000, the new Ava Gardner Museum opened its doors and has continued to draw national and even worldwide attention with approximately 12,000 visitors each year.