Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations Author: Peter Evans | Language: English | ISBN:
B00A27X5SU | Format: PDF
Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations Description
“I EITHER WRITE THE BOOK OR SELL THE JEWELS,” Ava Gardner told her coauthor, Peter Evans, “and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” So began the collaboration that led to this remarkably candid, wickedly sardonic memoir.
Ava Gardner was one of Hollywood’s great stars during the 1940s and 1950s, an Oscar-nominated leading lady who co-starred with Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, and Humphrey Bogart, among others. Her films included Show Boat, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Barefoot Contessa, and On the Beach. But her life off the screen was every bit as fabulous as her film roles.
Born poor in rural North Carolina, Gardner was given a Hollywood tryout thanks to a stunning photo of her displayed in a shop window. Not long after arriving in Hollywood, she caught the eye of Mickey Rooney, then America’s #1 box-office draw. Rooney was a womanizer so notorious that even his mother warned Gardner about him. They married, but the marriage lasted only a year (“my shortest husband and my biggest mistake”). Ava then married band leader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, who would eventually marry eight times, but that marriage, too, lasted only about a year (“he was a dominating son of a bitch . . . always putting me down”). She carried on a passionate affair with Howard Hughes but didn’t love him, she said. Her third marriage was a tempestuous one to Frank Sinatra (“We were fighting all the time. Fighting and boozing. It was madness. . . . But he was good in the feathers”).
Faithfully recording Ava’s reminiscences in this book, Peter Evans describes their late-night conversations when Ava, having had something to drink and unable to sleep, was at her most candid. So candid, in fact, that when she read her own words, she backed out and halted the book. Only now, years after her death, could this frank and revealing memoir be published.
“If I get into this stuff, oh, honey, have you got something coming,” Ava told Evans. Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations is the stunning story of a legendary star’s public and private lives.
- File Size: 15240 KB
- Print Length: 305 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1451627696
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 2, 2013)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00A27X5SU
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,681 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Theater > Acting & Auditioning - #34
in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Theater > Acting & Auditioning
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Theater > Acting & Auditioning - #34
in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Theater > Acting & Auditioning
I found the book thoroughly enjoyable, with the only fault being that the author didn't get to complete it, as the actress stopped cooperating, but I will leave that for the end. Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Christmas Eve of 1922 in Smithfield, NC and ended being buried there 67 years later in Sunset Memorial Park next to her brothers, her father, Jonas, 1878-1938, and her mother, Mary Elizabeth, "Mollie", 1883-1943. Her actual date of death was January 25,1990. She swore voraciously and smoked 3 packs a day for many years suffering from emphysema, pneumonia, and had several strokes. But her adult life was dominated by her looks and extreme fondness for unadulterated sex.
Ava claims she had a happy childhood, the youngest child born into a working class farm family. She claims to have been a tomboy and loved her "Daddy" best of all, he always just called her "daughter" which she loved, as it made her feel as though she belonged to someone. In Ava's own words, "You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey: she made movies, she made out, and she made a f****** mess of her life." [p2] "Her affairs had brought her final husband, Frank Sinatra, to the brink of suicide, taken her lover Howard Hughes beyond the edge of madness, and provoked George C. Scott to bouts of homicidal rage." [p7]
Ava was a 19yo virgin when she married Mickey Rooney on 1/10/1942 and a very experienced lover by the time she divorced him over his supposed numerous affairs on 5/23/1943; a date she says was easy to remember as it was the same day her mother died. She was tired of Mickey's antics from early on in their marriage, but stayed as long as she did, since the sex was very good. "[H]e was athletic in the sack and I was pretty verbal, and we were both very, very loud!
This is a gathering of fragments for a book that was never written. Ava Gardner worked on it for a while, lost interest, then died.
More than two decades passed before her collaborator, Peter Evans, finally assembled his notes on interviews, phone conversations, recorded talks and meetings, thus preserving a few strobe light flashes of Ava Gardner. The result is part biography and part book about writing a book. It is a winning hybrid. Ms. Gardner could be a steely challenge. Mr. Evans had to be a persistent yet diplomatic extractor of stories. It became something of a take-and-take contest, fascinating even apart from Ms. Gardner's vignettes.
By the time the Gardner/Evans work was in progress, Ms. Gardner was already on the way to frail. She had had a damaging stroke, had once been a heavy smoker and an accomplished drinker. The rent on her body had been raised and the landlord was knocking. Consequently, Ms. Gardner comes through in these partly sewn notes as a bit of dowager, once famous, once wealthy, and grace-of-God gorgeous. All of that by this time had fallen away.
She had a fairy tale start, rising from Tar Heel hayseed at 18 to spouse of Hollywood's most notable box office draw, Mickey Rooney, at 19. The marriage failed a year later, to be followed by one to Artie Shaw, then another to Frank Sinatra.
As Ms. Gardner speaks of these things she is bawdy, moody and profane in the war zone/middle school/Glenngary Glenn Ross way ... which is to say a mightily profane lady. Never a very good actress she understood her hypnotic looks made her a star and highly desirable as a sex partner which she seems to have enjoyed.
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