Ava

Ava is the autobiography of Ava Gardner. Among the books about her listed here, it is the only memoir. Wikipedia gives its full title as Ava: My Story. It came out in 1990, eight months after Gardner died in London on January 25 of that year, at 67. She had suffered a stroke in 1986.

The sources disagree on the publisher. The catalog record lists Bantam Bks. for 1990. Wikipedia’s main text credits Random House Publishing Group with the 1990 edition and calls the 1992 Bantam printing an illustrated reprint, though its reading list cites Bantam for 1990. The Open Library edition is dated 1992 and runs to 359 pages. Its subjects include large type books.

Wikipedia cites the book on several points. In it Gardner names Frank Sinatra, her third husband, as the love of her life. She says she was never in love with Howard Hughes, though he kept drifting into and out of her life over roughly 20 years. She writes about the penalty clauses MGM imposed when its stars had babies, which Wikipedia cites when it reports that she ended two pregnancies during the Sinatra marriage. Wikipedia also cites the book, along with her biographers, for the view that Christianity never played a positive part in her life.

For fans

How the book came to be

The book was not Gardner’s first attempt at an autobiography. In her last years she asked Peter Evans to ghostwrite it. Wikipedia quotes her as framing the choice as writing a book or selling “the jewels.” She met Evans often and approved most of what he wrote. Then she learned that Sinatra had once sued Evans and the BBC. The friendship cooled and Evans left the project. His notes and parts of his draft, based on their taped conversations, were published after his death in 2012 as Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. The catalog also lists a 2013 book by Peter Evans called Ava Gardner.

Next to the other books

All the other books on the list were written by someone else. Four biographies came before it: Charles Higham’s Ava: a life story (1974), Judith M. Kass’s Ava Gardner (1977), John Daniell’s Ava Gardner (1982) and Roland Flamini’s Ava (1983). Two more appeared in 1990, the same year as the memoir: Karin J. Fowler’s bio-bibliography from Greenwood Press and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men. The later books are biographies by Lee Server (2006), John Joseph Brady (2015) and Kendra Bean (2017), and novels by Alton Rivers (2007) and Edward Ifkovic (2012).

What the articles here draw from it

How Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra met: a nightclub in 1943, then MGM in 1949 turns to the memoir for Gardner’s statement that Sinatra was the love of her life, and for her account of the MGM pregnancy clauses, which she ties to her own pregnancies during the marriage. How Ava Gardner’s character dies in The Barefoot Contessa, and how Gardner herself died in 1990 follows Wikipedia in dating the book to 1990 under the Random House name, notes her stated reason for writing it, and repeats what she says about Sinatra and Hughes. Why Ava Gardner left Frank Sinatra in 1953, just as his comeback began uses the memoir for the phone call in which, by her account, Sinatra said he was in bed with another woman, the call she names as the point she chose divorce. That article also takes from the book her reasons for ending both pregnancies and her memory of a concert in Naples where the audience rose and chanted her name.