Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner is a 1977 biography of Ava Gardner by Judith M. Kass. Pyramid Publications published it, and the Open Library record for that edition gives it 158 pages. The Google Books record has the same page count and a 1977 publication date. Open Library files the book under two subjects: biography, and motion picture actors and actresses. Kass is the only author named on either record.

Neither record has a description of the book’s contents. Beyond the publisher, the date, the length and the subjects, the catalog records say nothing about what Kass covers.

For fans

Where it sits among the Gardner books

Kass’s book is the second-oldest book about Gardner in the catalog. Only Charles Higham’s Ava: a life story, published by W. H. Allen in 1974, came before it. The next one after Kass is John Daniell’s Ava Gardner, also from W.H. Allen, in 1982. Roland Flamini’s Ava followed from Berkley in 1983. Kass’s is the only book on the catalog’s Gardner list that Pyramid Publications put out.

Kass came out 13 years before Gardner’s own memoir, Ava, which Bantam published in 1990. The Wikipedia article on Gardner gives the memoir’s title as Ava: My Story and names Random House as its 1990 publisher, with a Bantam illustrated reprint in 1992. Two more books appeared in 1990: Karin J. Fowler’s bio-bibliography from Greenwood Press and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men. The catalog lists Ava’s Men under Random House Value Publishing, and Wikipedia’s reading list cites a 2004 Robson Books edition.

The later books

Later biographies include Lee Server’s (2006), Peter Evans’s (2013), John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and Kendra Bean’s Ava (2017). Wikipedia gives Server’s full title as Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing. The same article says Gardner once asked Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography, and that his notes and draft came out after his death in 2012 as Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. There are also two novels about her: Love, Ava by Alton Rivers and Make believe by Edward Ifkovic.

Watch the title when you search. Daniell, Server and Evans also called their books Ava Gardner, so it helps to search by Kass’s name or by the 1977 date.