He was only a boy but he never forgot teen-age Ava Gardner

Press, 28 August 1984, Page 24

He was only a boy but he never forgot teen-age Ava Gardner

By

HUNTER JAMES

oi me Cox News Service (through NZPA-AAP Brogden, North Carolina By the time Thomas Banks was 40 he had achieved wealth and distinction as a clinical psychologist, bought expensive pleasure boats, moved into an elegant condominium on Florida’s Pompano Beach, and spent summers travelling around the world. But he had never forgotten the girl with the flashing emerald eyes. The first time he saw Ava Gardner was in 1941. She was 18 and he was only eight. But he was old enough to develop a crush for the girl from Brogden who would one day be voted the world’s most beautiful woman. “I pestered her continuously,” says Mr Banks. “She was a day student at a college in my home town, and she would sit there for an hour or so each afternoon waiting for a ride home. One day she got so fed up she chased and caught me, and since she couldn’t figure out what to do with me she gave me a kiss on the cheek.” . Within a year Mr Banks read that Ava had signed a seven-year contract with M.G.M. and had gone off to Hollywood. “I couldn’t believe it,” Mr Banks says. “That was like going to heaven.” Mr Banks, now 50 went to heaven for awhile himself. Miss Gardner remembered him and started a correspondence that has lasted more than 40 years. Mr Banks, a graduate in English from the College of William and Mary, worked as a publicist on one of her early movies, “My Forbidden Past,” and later moved to New York in a similar capacity for Columbia Pictures. He never forgot those eyes. In New York and later, during his graduate-school days in Florida, he collected everything he could find about Ava Gardner. He went on collecting long after he was out of school. Today his collection includes more than 10,000 photos of her. He has a scrapbook for each year of her career, dozens of promotional posters known as

“one sheets,” audio and video cassettes from all but four of her 55 movies, stacks of Ava Gardner biographies, and probably every magazine article or newspaper story ever written about her. It fills almost every corner of the house that Miss Gardner’s mother operated a a boarding school in the 1920 s and 19305. In a room at the back stand three mannequins dressed in gowns worn by Ava in some of her more memorable performances. In boxes and on crowded shelves are hundreds of other items dating back to her childhood in this crossroads village. There is even a copy of a letter that Ava, then 12, wrote to her best friend. “I remember we talked about what we wanted to be, and you always wanted to be a teacher and me a movie star,” she had written. “I still do, but I know I can’t, so I have about given up hope.” Miss Gardner’s childhood home is still known as the Teacherage because most of the boarders were teachers who taught in a two-room .schoolhouse next door. The school is now only a shell, but the Teacherage is in excellent shape, thanks to Tom Banks and his wife Lorraine. There are no signs advertising the place, but the lack of publicity has not hurt. Some 1000 people find their way to Brogden during the six or seven weeks that the Bankses spend here each summer. Though he does not miss his own hometown of Wilson, must down the road, Banks often feels nostalgic for Smithfield and Brogden — and for the old house where his heroine grew to young womanhood. Mr Banks welcomes visitors warmly and offers a free tour. But sometimes even he seems a little puzzled about his obsession.

“There were two of us who used to keep after her,” he says. “You know how it is with kids that age. They pick out the best-looking girl they can find and pester her to death.”

It was her face — “a certain dreamy look.” Mr

Banks calls it — that landed her in Hollywood before she turned 19. Hollywood took the country out of her voice and put music in her step. Before long, national magazines were writing cover stories with titles like, “The, Girl Who Learned Too Much Too Late.”

The late 1940 s and early 1950 s were her glory years. Her performance in “Mogambo” was acclaimed as her best; she won an Oscar nomination for that one. But others — “The Barefoot Contessa,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Showboat,” “The Night of the Iguana” — may have have been more memorable. Then came her multiple marriages, the troubles with Frank Sinatra, who became her third husband, and rumours of a wild life in the south of Spain: fast cars, parties out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, steamy romances with Madrid’s most popular bullfighters. Then there was the time she showed up in Smithfield for her brother’s wedding, complete with 200 kg of luggage, an Italian boyfriend and a Spanish maid. But Mr Banks never wavered in his esteem, never stopped writing, and in 1978 he and his wife visited the star in London, where she still lives — a recluse, some say. But, at 61, she is still making movies, an average of one a year. None of her recent films has excited much attention. But it is quite' enough for Mr Banks that she is in them. He has gone on collecting memorabilia and restoring the house that was her childhood home. Miss Gardner still comes back to Smithfield on occasion and always travels incognito. The last time, she wore dark glasses and jogging clothes — and nobody gave her a second look. She even came back to Brogden once, to the museum. But she just sat in her car, staring silently up at the old place. As Mr Banks recalls that visit, “Everybody said she really ought to go in and see what was inside. But she said, “I know what’s in there. My whole life is in there.”