Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations by Peter Evans (2013)

Good morning!

It's a banner day at She Was a Bird, blog followers-- I actually read, cover to cover, a high demand book in our library system within its due date! I feel so sad for all the little forlorn titles that languish the entire three week checkout period on the shelf next to my desk at work...all those missed opportunities. But maybe I'm turning over a new leaf: I checked out Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations last week and read the whole thing in a day and a half...so intimate! So revealing! So other-adjectives-you-usually-use-to-describe-undergarments! 

Writer Peter Evans received the first of many late night phone calls from Ava Gardner in 1988, thereafter being contracted to ghost write her autobiography. The former journalist and biographer of Aristotle Onassis, Evans took copious hand written notes of both formal and informal interviews with the star publicists called at the height of her fame, "the world's most beautiful animal"... and does this kitten have claws, folks! While I was busy looking up literary references and cross-indexing sources-to-check-out-later from Orson Welles's dishy but at times esoteric conversations with Henry Jaglom, this book had me gulping up pages to hear more about the starlet's racy reminisces of husbands Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, and her poignant younger days in the South, her family toeing the line between subsistence and almost-poverty. Born in Grabtown, North Carolina (a seasoned publicity man couldn't make a better name up for the girl's hometown, but it's real!), Ava was discovered when her sister Bappie's first husband displayed a large portrait of the seventeen year old in the front window of his photography business in New York. In spite of a thick Tarheel accent, she was signed to a seven-year starlet's contract (with the cancel-at-any-time option every six months-- the studio system did not mess around with dead weight!) in 1940 and took two cross-continental trains to seek her fortune at the gates of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

What I loved about the book was the sense of self you got from the midnight hour transcript of Evans and Gardner's conversations. Peppered with serious profanity, punctuated with sorghum-sweet "honey" or "baby", interrupted by a call for more wine or whiskey, her conversations and the voice Peter Evans manages to convey has all the magic of table-tapping or a Ouija board-- this is as close as you're going to get to the "real thing" of Ava Gardner off set. Curled up in a grey track suit, her once perfect face paralyzed on one side by a recent stroke, the inner Ava is still intact, still feisty-- what amazes me is that beyond her perfect figure and that luminous beauty, there was a real firecracker of a girl, besides! Cussin' this, decrying that...she must have been a lot of fun when she was flying high.

Gardner got the jitters about being "laid bare" as Peter Evans had her in his initial chapter drafts for the memoir. Frank, funny, and sharp as a tack, she wanted him to "clean up some of the g-ddamn profanity", essential to her speech patterns, and take out some of the indiscreet pillow talk that made Evans's 2013 book so compelling. She ended up firing him and engaging a more pliable writer to produce what would be Ava: My Story, sadly published posthumously, and even more sadly, a bland account of a fascinating life. It was such a sticking point, throughout the Evans conversations, that she was writing the book to help keep her from the poor house. “I either write the book or sell the jewels, and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” he quotes her as saying in the first chapter, and isn't that a line good enough for a movie!

There's been some controversy as to how much of the book is actually Gardner's voice, but the truth of it is, I'm only disappointed that one, there wasn't a companion cd of some of the actual microcassettes Evans's used during their sessions, à la Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy and two, Evans himself passed away, from a heart attack, before finishing the final chapter of the Conversations book. While the first half of the text is as strong and cinematic as the best Hollywood memoirs I've read, the second half seems to trail off a bit, into increasing paranoia and indecision on Gardner's part and more hemming and hawwing . At that point, a lot of the fun of sitting and gossiping with one of the screen's greatest "love goddesses" dissolves into the cat and mouse of "whether or not she'll let me publish the book" ( uh, spoiler alert: she doesn't, that's why we have this book). But all and all, I have to say I had a great time reading and feeling closer to the icon. When this book is good, it is very, very good.

So! Have you read any Hollywood memoirs that knocked your little socks off lately? Are you a fan of Gardner's? I've read the Ava memoir, and seen The Killers, Mogambo, The Barefoot Contessa (NOT the tv show, btw), Night of the Iguana, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, One Touch of Venus, and The Sun Also Rises...but that was way back in the days of Nashville Public Library's VHS collection being just bursting with classic Hollywood titles. Now, if we have a copy on DVD, it seems like it's been checked out since 2005 and never returned! Booo. I'm going to have to see what I can see again between my own DVD collection and what's left of ours. Who's one of your "go-to" Hollywood screen queens? Let's talk!

I gotta get back to work!! Have a great Tuesday, and I'll see you back here tomorrow! Til then.