Incomplete memoir of a delightfully unfinished woman

Ava Gardner

The Secret Conversations

By Peter Evans and Ava Gardner

Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $26

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Reviewed by Carrie Rickey

After a glass or three of claret, Ava Gardner told the ghostwriter of her memoirs that Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw were "starter husbands."

Husband #3, Frank Sinatra, was "a cocky god, who reeked of sex" and "was good in the feathers."

When she read the quotes, Gardner took them back. The ghostwriter? Peter Evans, another in a long line of men bewitched by the mercurial beauty.

At last count, the Hollywood siren with the crème de menthe eyes and the cherries jubilee lips had inflamed three husbands, 58 films, and countless lovers and admirers including Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, John Huston, Robert Mitchum, and matadors Mario Cabre and Luis Dominguin. Bull-slingers and bullfighters were her thing. Like her fans, they were drawn to her jaw-dropping beauty and to her language, redolent of the sack and the sauce.

Even after a stroke paralyzed the left side of the heart-shaped face and emphysema coarsened her tobacco-cured drawl, she was still irresistible. In 1988, she persuaded British author Peter Evans to ghost her memoirs. The stroke made it impossible to work, she told him. She needed the money.

The project was aborted when Gardner told ex #3 she was working with Evans. Ol' Blue Eyes reminded her he had sued Evans after a BBC interview in which the scribe said rumor had it Sinatra's Mafia pals got him the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. In 1989, Evans and his publisher surmised that Sinatra asked Gardner how much she expected to make from the book and gave her that amount not to go forward.

In 2009, nearly two decades after Gardner's death in 1990, her estate gave its blessing for Evans to complete what he and Gardner started. The author was working on it when he died in August.

Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, the unfinished memoir of an unfinished woman, is a complete delight. Evans invisibly weaves the loose threads of Gardner's patter into a silky monologue that might be the basis of a play, My Afternoons With Ava.

Though The Secret Conversations recounts the power struggles between memoirist and ghostwriter, mostly it reveals its subject as a colorful raconteur who needed scriptwriters and ghostwriters only to organize the stream-of-conscious observations. Her quotes exude the musk of a woman supremely indifferent to the social proprieties and expectations of her era. "You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey," Gardner cooed to Evans in one of many 4 a.m. phone calls. "She made movies, she made out, and she made a . . . mess of her life. But she never made jam."

Gardner was an unplanned child, the fourth born to sharecroppers. "We were broke, really and truly broke, not just poor, out-on-the-sidewalk broke, honey." She alludes to the depression and alcoholism rampant in her family. She talks about the antidepressants she takes to clear the "black clouds." It's hard for her to look back. "A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework," she jokes.

She loved the movies but had no ambition to be an actress. She was born in tobacco country but never smoked until she saw Lana Turner brandish a gold cigarette case and lighter. Gardner bought her own and went from zero to 60 a day.

An MGM executive noticed her portrait in the New York studio of her photographer brother-in-law. She was 18, socially and sexually inexperienced, when she went West. Mickey Rooney, the studio's biggest star in box office if not in stature, had to have her. She said she'd marry him when she was 19. She was a virgin on her wedding night, "But I caught on very quickly." The sexual electricity fizzled when she learned he was cheating on her. "It's a lonely business [making love to] someone you no longer love. Especially a husband."

She wanted fidelity in a spouse - and in Howard Hughes, whom she never wed. Yet they cheated on her as she would on Sinatra (whom she wed in Philadelphia in 1951). She was "stuck on" Shaw, "smart as an apple," who made her "feel stupid." He enrolled her in classes at UCLA and encouraged her to read serious books. While they were married, she began to drink "because I was so insecure." When Shaw caught Gardner reading the popular novel Forever Amber, he "snatched it out of my hands and tore it to shreds." Then he left her for Amber author Kathleen Winsor. The end of her second marriage marked the real beginning of her film career.

Though she had girlfriends like Turner and "Gracie Grimaldi" (Grace Kelly), her costar in Mogambo, Gardner frames herself as a man's woman. "All those guys - [Tennessee] Williams, Hemingway, [Joe] Mankiewicz . . . they all wanted me to play their women." Of Maxine Faulk, whom she played in Williams' Night of the Iguana, she says, "I really brought that broad to life."

Gardner is very candid - and gallant - about her men in the feathers. Yet her most surprising revelation is that when Sinatra got angry, his eyes "become as black as the ace of spades."

Hers is the heartbreaking memoir of the ultimate heartbreaker, a memoir that had me laughing and crying audibly.