Ava

Roland Flamini’s Ava is a biography of Ava Gardner. Berkley first published it in 1983. The Open Library record lists a Berkley edition dated April 15, 1984. It files the book under biography and under motion picture actors and actresses, and American screen actors are among its subjects.

In the catalog’s list of books about Gardner, it is the fourth biography. Three older books come before it: Charles Higham’s Ava: a life story (1974, W. H. Allen), Judith M. Kass’s Ava Gardner (1977, Pyramid Publications) and John Daniell’s Ava Gardner (1982, W.H. Allen). Gardner’s own memoir, Ava, came out in 1990, seven years after Flamini’s book. The catalog also lists Karin J. Fowler’s bio-bibliography (Greenwood Press) and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men for 1990. After those, the next biography in the catalog is Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (St. Martin’s Press), published in 2006.

For fans

Flamini’s book has a one-word title, Ava, and so does Gardner’s own book. The catalog records hers as a 1990 Bantam memoir. Wikipedia gives a different account. It calls the book Ava: My Story, names Random House as the 1990 publisher and dates an illustrated Bantam reprint to 1992, although its own reading list cites a 1990 Bantam edition. Wikipedia also says her autobiography came out eight months after she died. Kendra Bean’s 2017 biography is also titled Ava.

The catalog lists Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner for 2013. Wikipedia says Gardner had asked Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography. It says he left the project after she learned that Sinatra had once sued him. It also says the book, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, drew on his notes and parts of his draft and came out after his death in 2012. The catalog’s other entries are John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and two novels: Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava (2007) and Edward Ifkovic’s Make believe (2012). The record says little about Flamini’s book beyond its publication details and subjects.