Ava

Ava: A Life Story is Charles Higham’s biography of Ava Gardner, published by W. H. Allen. The catalog dates it to 1974. The Open Library record gives 1975 as the year of first publication and lists a 1975 edition of 180 pages, with W. H. Allen and Ebury Publishing as publishers. The Google Books record also dates it to 1975 under W H Allen, but it gives the length as 222 pages. The sources do not explain the difference. Of all the books about Gardner in the catalog, this is the oldest.

The other books in the catalog came later. Judith M. Kass’s Ava Gardner appeared in 1977 from Pyramid Publications. John Daniell’s Ava Gardner followed in 1982, also from W. H. Allen. Roland Flamini’s Ava came out in 1983 from Berkley. Gardner’s own memoir, Ava, was published in 1990, about 16 years after the date the catalog gives for Higham’s book. Wikipedia gives the memoir’s full title as Ava: My Story and says it appeared eight months after her death.

For fans

If you read the Gardner books in the order they were published, this is the first one. The catalog dates three books to 1990: Gardner’s memoir from Bantam, Karin J. Fowler’s Ava Gardner, a bio-bibliography from Greenwood Press, and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men from Random House Value Publishing. The later biographies in the catalog include Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (2006), Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner (2013), John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and Kendra Bean’s Ava (2017). The same list also includes two novels, Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava (2007) and Edward Ifkovic’s Make Believe (2012).

What the records show of the text

Open Library files Higham’s book under one subject, Gardner herself. The only words of the text in the excerpts come from a search snippet in the Google Books record. In that passage an unnamed man puts up with the situation patiently and in good humor until early February. By then he sees that whatever romantic feeling Ava had for him has run out. The snippet does not say who the man is. The further-reading list in Wikipedia’s article on Gardner names Fowler, Rivers, Server and Wayne, among others, but not Higham. Little is recorded about how the book was researched or how it was received.