Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations
By Peter Evans and Ava Garder - Simon & Schuster © 2013
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to sit down over a drink with one of the most sought-after women in Hollywood history, this is as close as it gets. “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” is just what it says it is – a collection of intimate stories told to her ghost writer, British journalist and author, Peter Evans, over 30 years ago. It’s also much more.
In 1988, encouraged by mutual friends, Ava asked Evans to help her write her memoirs, kicking off a project that would outlive both of them and only come to print a quarter century later. And not as a memoir. “The Secret Conversations” is instead a recounting of certain memorable periods in Ava’s life as told to Evans during their dozens of, often boozy, conversations. Some of them took place in person, some over the phone – a vast majority during the wee hours of the night, when Ava really came alive.
The result leaves the reader feeling like the fly on the wall or the unwitting neighbor on the party line. And it’s delightful. Evans’s refusal to edit or censor Ava’s candor, colorful language, and frequent moments of vulnerability, exposes the real human being behind the starlet once called “the world’s most beautiful animal.” Ava is equal parts home-spun and sentimental, vindictive and crass, confused and melancholic. Most often she’s hilarious. You can hear the smoke in her laugh.
Since it’s not a memoir, “The Secret Conversations” is also not comprehensive. And it is equally a first-person account of Evans trying to tell her story. Or, more appropriately, trying to get Ava to tell her own story. Sure, all the usual suspects are present: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Howard Hughes, John Ford, Louis B. Mayer, Lana Turner, and at least two bullfighters. (And let's not forget one Francis Albert Sinatra, who, thirty years after their divorce, may have been most to blame for the original book's demise.)
Plenty had already been written about Ava’s life, legendary lovers, films, fights, and flings by the time she sat down with Evans, and her official biography “Ava: My Story” written with a different author, was released in 1990. But even with gaps in the narrative this “unfinished” project will thrill fans and aficionados alike with the soul it brings to Gardner's words and, subsequently, the stories from her life that have now, 32 years after her death, passed into legend.
