Ava Gardner

Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner, published in 2013, is built from late-night conversations Evans had with Ava Gardner. The Open Library description says the talks took place when she had been drinking and could not sleep, and that Evans set down what she remembered faithfully. According to the same description, she spoke so freely that she pulled out and stopped the book after reading her own words. It could be published only years after her death in 1990. The Google Books record gives the full title as Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, lists Simon and Schuster as publisher with a date of 2 Jul 2013, and credits Gardner and Evans together as its authors. The two records disagree on length: Open Library lists 366 pages, with subjects including biography, motion picture actors and actresses, and large type books, while Google Books lists 328.

In the catalog it arrives late. It came out 23 years after Gardner’s own Ava (1990) and seven years after Lee Server’s biography Ava Gardner (2006). Between Server’s book and this one, the catalog lists only two novels, Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava (2007) and Edward Ifkovic’s Make believe (2012). Two later books follow it: John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and Kendra Bean’s Ava (2017). The catalog lists it as a biography, but the Open Library description calls it a memoir, and the publisher’s description on Google Books calls it the autobiography Gardner began with Evans in 1988. That puts it closer in kind to Gardner’s own Ava, the only book on the list catalogued as a memoir, than to the biographies by Charles Higham (1974), Judith M. Kass (1977), John Daniell (1982) and Roland Flamini (1983).

For fans

What the publisher says

The publisher’s description on Google Books sets the scene of the collaboration. When the two worked together, Gardner had lived in London for decades and was smoking and drinking heavily. A stroke had damaged her left arm and the left side of her face, she slept badly, and she was often depressed. The description says she has much to say in the book about her three husbands (Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra), about lovers including Howard Hughes and George C. Scott, and about some of her co-stars. It says she never finished the book and chose not to publish it because it was so frank, and that she later worked on a tamer autobiography. After her death, according to the same description, her estate authorized publication in roughly the form she and Evans had planned.

Kirkus Reviews, 2 Jul 2013

The Kirkus review that ran the week of publication identifies Evans as a British journalist, the author of Nemesis (2004), a book about Aristotle Onassis and Jackie O. The reviewer reports that Evans steered Gardner toward her private life, so The Barefoot Contessa, Mogambo and The Sun Also Rises get little space. Among the stories the review cites are her claim that she and Rooney kept sleeping together after their divorce and her account of Scott as violent when drunk, often beating her. Kirkus says she was broke and recovering from a stroke when she asked Evans to ghostwrite in 1988, and that she was often shocked by his transcripts of her profane talk. Because most of the material came from telephone calls she placed at night, sleepless and drinking, the reviewer wrote that the project “smacks of exploitation.” The review credits the pages Evans finished before his death with conveying her “salty, no-BS personality,” but likens reading them to searching “a person’s bureau drawers” while she is out.

Wikipedia’s account of the break

Wikipedia’s article on Gardner gives the history behind Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. In the last years of her life, Gardner asked Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography. She put it to him as a choice between writing the book and selling her jewels. The two met often, and she approved most of what he wrote. Then Gardner found out that her ex-husband Frank Sinatra had once sued Evans, along with the BBC. Their friendship cooled and Evans left the project. Wikipedia says his notes and parts of his draft, based on their taped conversations, were published after Evans died in 2012.

Where the sources differ

The sources explain the break differently. Open Library says Gardner stopped the book once she read how frank she had been, and Kirkus says she never liked the idea. Wikipedia connects the cooling to the Sinatra lawsuit. None of the excerpts says whether one reason came first or all of them played a part. The jewels remark also comes down in different words: the publisher’s description has her “kinda fond of the jewels,” while Kirkus prints “kinda sentimental about the jewels.” The sources also differ on the other autobiography. Wikipedia records that Ava: My Story came out from Random House in 1990, eight months after her death, while the publisher’s description says the tamer book appeared at her death.

On this site

How Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra met: a nightclub in 1943, then MGM in 1949 draws on the book’s word-for-word recollections, in which Gardner calls Sinatra the love of her life and describes a marriage of cheating, fighting and martinis. How Ava Gardner’s character dies in The Barefoot Contessa, and how Gardner herself died in 1990 describes Evans as the first ghostwriter on her memoir and covers his exit after she learned of the Sinatra suit. Why Ava Gardner left Frank Sinatra in 1953, just as his comeback began uses the 1988 tapes for her bluntest account of the marriage: that she paid the rent while Sinatra was broke, that she alone stayed by him, and that he still called every Christmas.