A BOOK A WEEK: Week 3
Rating: Fuck yeah!/10
Book link: https://www.amazon.com/Ava-Gardner-Conversations-Peter-Evans/dp/145162770X
This was not what I was expecting, but BOOM… I do love surprises. I’ve had a fascination with Ava Gardner ever since I discovered that she left Hollywood to live in Madrid for several years, embarking on love affairs with bullfighters and flamenco bars. It seems like such an odd turn for a massive movie star to make and I was curious to find out more about the silver-screen legend.
This is not your stock standard bio as Ava and her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, had a falling out and the notes of his time with Gardner weren’t published until they were both very dead, or «pushing clouds around» as Ava would say.
The fact that I feel like I’m on first name terms with a dead, Hollywood goddess just shows how good the writing is. Evans did a marvelous job of making the reader a fly on the wall throughout his odd interviews with Ava, who would confidently reveal fascinating fragmented memories but an hour later want to retract them, worried she would sound mean, slutty, sweary, whiny, or worst of all… boring. The lack of flow this created gets a little frustrating, you desperately want to know more about her life just as she grows insecure revealing it. However, all this is a window into who she was at 65 after two strokes, three husbands and god knows how many cases of Dom Perignon. Frustrating moments aside, the book is worth the read for Gardner’s genius one-liners alone, «I like to fuck, but it was an education, too» and «Mickey Rooney, my smallest husband and the biggest mistake of my life».
Many women will relate to moments in the story of the gal once referred to as «The most beautiful animal in the world» who (drunkenly)navigated her way through a male-dominated time and heartless industry An industry that sucked her in at 18 and said, “She can’t act, she can’t walk, she can’t sing, she can’t talk…she’s terrific”, leaving her in an overwhelming state of imposter syndrome that could only be medicated with the copious amounts of wine.
The book details how she grew up dirt poor, lost both her beloved parents before the age of 20 and how everyone in her family was shocked that she became famous. No one saw it coming and no one, not even Ava, really knew what to do with it.
She tells of the difficult relationships she had with her three ex-husbands. Mickey Rooney was incredible in the feathers, apparently, and every woman that came within a 5-meter radius of the man was quickly made aware of the fact. Not long after tearing her hair out over randy Rooney, her second husband, Artie Shaw, emotionally bullied her for not being intelligent enough, taunting her to the point that she got an IQ test just to make sure she wasn’t a complete moron. Turns out she was pretty sharp. She didn’t speak so much about Sinatra, almost as though she was still not sure what the hell had happened there, and they did keep a close long-distance relationship up until the day she died. On some of the late night calls that Ava would make to Evans, he could hear Sinatra faintly playing in the background.
I didn’t learn much about her escape to Spain, nothing solid, the partnership between Gardner and Evans broke down before she went into it. But it was clear that she loathed the superficiality of Tinseltown, and you can’t get much deeper than flamenco. Or maybe she was looking for some kind of tax break, who knows!
This was a gorgeous, easy read, and I fucking love her even more now I’ve finished it. I only wish she was remembered as the hilarious, straight-talking, perceptive soul that she seemed to be… instead of being immortalized in motion pictures as a dazzling doll.
If you like gossip, the romance of the golden age of cinema, and stories about women who could take you down in a fight if they had to, then this book is for you.
«You can sum my life up in one sentence…She made movies, she made out, she made a mess of her life, but she never made jam».
Ava Gardner worked hard on her singing, but the studio would always dub over it. Here is a clip of a beautiful performance with her own voice.
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