Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DW8GMEK | Format: PDF
Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations Description
This wickedly candid memoir that Ava Gardner dared not publish during her lifetime offers a revealing self-portrait of the film legend's life and loves in Hollywood's golden age.
Ava Gardner was one of Hollywood's great stars during the 1940s and '50s, an Oscar-nominated leading lady who co-starred with Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, and Humphrey Bogart, among others.
But this riveting account of her storied life and career had to wait for publication until after her death, so concerned was Gardner with its frankness. 'I either write the book or sell the jewels,' Gardner told co-author Peter Evans, 'and I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.'
The legendary actress serves up plenty of gems in these pages, reflecting with delicious humour and cutting wit on a life that took her from an impoverished childhood in North Carolina to the heights of stardom.
Get ready for the most revealing Hollywood autobiography in decades.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 12 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: AudioGO Ltd
- Audible.com Release Date: July 10, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DW8GMEK
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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