Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations
*Starred Review* In 1988, only two years before her death, legendary actress Ava Gardner, then living in semiseclusion in London and running low on money, asked the late Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography: “I either write the book or sell the jewels, and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” Gardner didn’t want to do a sugarcoated memoir, preferring to tell it straight, the real story of the marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, the multiple affairs (with Howard Hughes, among many others), the hardscrabble childhood in North Carolina tobacco country. But as the two met and Gardner began speaking of her life, it became clear to Evans that the actress was more reticent about telling it straight than she pretended to be. The conversations were uninhibited, to be sure, but Gardner balked at the finished chapters (“I sound too fucking vulgar”), leading ultimately to the project being abandoned. Shortly before his own death in 2012, Evans wrote this memoir of a memoir-in-progress, transcribing Gardner’s recollections and providing connective passages setting the scenes. What emerges doesn’t cover the sweep of the movie icon’s remarkable life as fully as Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (2006), but it does capture Gardner’s indelible voice—vulgar, yes, but humanly so as well as unfailingly witty and movingly melancholic. Finally, 25 years after the fact, we have at least a facsimile of the unbuttoned version Gardner claimed she wanted to tell. Movie buffs will be as transfixed by the actress’ own words as they have always been by her drop-dead beauty on the screen. --Bill Ott