Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

Evans, Peter; Gardner, Ava

ISBN 10: 1611739055 ISBN 13: 9781611739053

Publisher: Center Point Pub, 2013

Synopsis

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.Born poor in rural North Carolina, Gardner was given a Hollywood tryout thanks to a stunning photo of her displayed in a shop window.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Evans was a columnist and foreign correspondent with the Daily Express (UK), and wrote for the Los Angeles Times and Vogue, as well as every major newspaper in Britain. His books include Peter Sellers: The Man Behind the Mask and Nemesis. He died in 2012.

Ava Gardner was born in Grabtown, North Carolina, in 1922. Her films include The Killers, Showboat, Mogambo, The Barefoot Contessa, The Sun Also Rises, and On the Beach. She died in London in 1990.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1988, only two years before her death, legendary actress Ava Gardner, then living in semiseclusion in London and running low on money, asked the late Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography: “I either write the book or sell the jewels, and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” Gardner didn’t want to do a sugarcoated memoir, preferring to tell it straight, the real story of the marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, the multiple affairs (with Howard Hughes, among many others), the hardscrabble childhood in North Carolina tobacco country. But as the two met and Gardner began speaking of her life, it became clear to Evans that the actress was more reticent about telling it straight than she pretended to be. The conversations were uninhibited, to be sure, but Gardner balked at the finished chapters (“I sound too fucking vulgar”), leading ultimately to the project being abandoned. Shortly before his own death in 2012, Evans wrote this memoir of a memoir-in-progress, transcribing Gardner’s recollections and providing connective passages setting the scenes. What emerges doesn’t cover the sweep of the movie icon’s remarkable life as fully as Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (2006), but it does capture Gardner’s indelible voice—vulgar, yes, but humanly so as well as unfailingly witty and movingly melancholic. Finally, 25 years after the fact, we have at least a facsimile of the unbuttoned version Gardner claimed she wanted to tell. Movie buffs will be as transfixed by the actress’ own words as they have always been by her drop-dead beauty on the screen. --Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Center Point Pub
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1611739055
• ISBN 13: 9781611739053
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 366