From Rags to RICHES

THIS NORTH CAROLINA FARM GIRL NEVER DREAMED SHE’D BECOME AN ICON

- Katie Bruno

In 1985, Ava Gardner and two of her sisters attempted to visit the Ava Gardner Museum, near the farm where she was born in Smithfield, N.C. Unfortunately, it was closed. “Ava responded with, ‘I know what’s in there. I lived it,’” Angelica Henry, the museum’s current manager, tells Closer. “She never stepped foot inside.”

The youngest of seven children, Ava spent her earliest years on a tobacco and cotton farm in what was then known as Grabtown. “If you’re going to be poor, be poor on a farm,” said Ava in her 2013 memoir The Secret Conversations, noting that even though their home lacked indoor plumbing, there was always food on the table. “It was a struggle for them,” she said of her parents, Mary Elizabeth, known as Molly, and Jonas Gardner, “but they got by and I always felt loved.”