Ava's Men

Ava’s Men is a biography of Ava Gardner by Jane Ellen Wayne, first published in 1990 by Random House Value Publishing. Open Library’s first subject heading for it is “relations with men.” The other headings cover Gardner herself, listed with the dates 1922 to 1990, plus biography and motion picture actors and actresses, with one heading for actors in the United States and one reading “Canada, biography.”

The book has appeared in more than one edition. Open Library lists an edition dated April 15, 1992. The further reading list in Wikipedia’s entry on Gardner cites a 2004 Robson Books edition, which carries the subtitle The Private Life of Ava Gardner.

Wayne’s is one of three books on Gardner in the catalog dated 1990. The other two are Gardner’s own memoir, Ava (Bantam), and Karin J. Fowler’s Ava Gardner, a bio-bibliography (Greenwood Press). 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). After Wayne’s, the next biography on the list is Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (2006), which Wikipedia’s further reading gives the subtitle Love Is Nothing.

For fans

Where it sits on the shelf

Wayne’s book falls at the midpoint of the catalog’s Gardner shelf, with six of the other books dated before 1991 and six after. The later group includes two novels, Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava (2007) and Edward Ifkovic’s Make believe (2012), and three more biographies: Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner (2013), John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and Kendra Bean’s Ava (2017). Wikipedia’s further reading on Gardner lists Wayne’s book along with others, among them Fowler’s, Server’s, Rivers’s and Gardner’s own.

The men in the record

Open Library does not say which men Wayne writes about. Wikipedia’s entry on Gardner, a separate source, records that she married three times: Mickey Rooney in 1942, Artie Shaw from 1945 to 1946, and Frank Sinatra from 1951 to 1957. The same entry says she became pregnant twice while married to Sinatra and ended both pregnancies, and it quotes her autobiography on MGM’s penalty clauses for stars who had babies.

Gardner’s own account

Readers who want Gardner’s version next to Wayne’s have two places to look. Wikipedia says Gardner wrote Ava: My Story, issued by Random House Publishing Group in 1990, and that Bantam Books reprinted it with illustrations in 1992. The entry reports that the autobiography appeared eight months after her death. It also says Evans had once worked on that autobiography as her ghostwriter and later left the project. Wikipedia quotes Gardner’s reason for doing the book at all: “I either write the book or sell the jewels.” Evans’s notes and draft sections, which he based on taped conversations with her, were published after his death in 2012 as Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.

Little else is recorded about Ava’s Men. The catalog record does not describe its sources or its structure, or say how it was received.