Ava Gardner: the Secret Conversations, by Peter Evans, review
In a new book, the ghost of Hollywood’s most beautiful woman speaks. But, asks Gaby Wood, is it really her voice we are hearing?
Ava Gardner: 'I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip. Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember?' Photo: Rex
Late one night in January 1988, Ava Gardner rang Peter Evans – a veteran journalist she had never met – and asked him to ghostwrite her memoirs. “Dirk Bogarde says you’re OK,” she explained, “and you’re not a faggot.” So that was that.
The work, as Evans renders it, was difficult – mutual friends tell him at the outset that she’ll eat him alive, fight him all the way, and enact a string of other clichés. Gardner herself has misgivings: she suffers from depression and memory loss, she dislikes her own foul language when it’s on the page and, eventually, spurred by a comment made by her ex-husband Frank Sinatra, she fears a betrayal and pulls the plug.
Nine months after her death in 1990, a different memoir was published – Ava: My Story – which was rather straightforward. Clearly, she had found a tamer collaborator. But Evans still had the tapes. Why he waited to use them is unclear, and the question unanswerable: Evans himself died before he finished writing the last chapter of Ava Gardner: the Secret Conversations.
In some editions, the book is subtitled An Indiscreet Memoir by Peter Evans. In this one, Evans and Gardner are listed as co-authors. The former seems more honest. In any case, there are few revelations: she misses John Huston, Mickey Rooney was a “midget”, she graduated from the University of Sinatra.
'Ghosting” in this case is a very flexible verb. It’s not just that author and subject are shades by the time the book reaches us; and not even that you can’t tell if Evans is really writing it as if on Gardner’s behalf.
It’s also that Gardner, by the time she contacts Evans, has had two strokes and is a sexagenarian shadow of her famous self. Half her face, Evans writes, is frozen “in a rictus of sadness”; “as if getting old wasn’t tough enough”, Gardner says, apparently reading his thoughts. And more generally, there is a large-scale resurrection implicit. Ava Gardner is, Dirk Bogarde warns Evans, “essential to the Hollywood myth about itself. You tamper with that at your peril.”
One puzzling thing about Hollywood histories is that its subjects tend to speak like the characters they feel they’re expected to play. Gardner comes across here as a hard-boiled dame – “pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby”. It’s difficult to tell whether this is the talk of the period or a put-on. Were the pulp fiction writers taking down what they heard, or were the stars impersonating what they’d read?
But “authenticity” is something of a red herring in the context of Hollywood. It’s a world built on stories – whether scripted or gossiped about, covered up or reconstituted. “I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip,” Gardner tells Evans. But then she asks him to perpetuate it: “Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember? You can make it up, can’t you? The publicity guys at Metro did it all the time.” The MGM stars were all “made-up”: both painted and a fiction. In Evans’s account, Bogarde suggests that Gardner is “pathologically conflicted about herself, especially about her fame”.
This is the most interesting aspect of any of those women’s lives. Not who they “really” were (what would that mean when they spent their waking hours acting?), but who they thought they were, and how that played out in a world where millions of others thought they knew them, too. “I’m so ----ing tired of being Ava Gardner,” Evans says she told him. Such figures were designed, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it, “to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded”. But that is its own kind of reality – can anyone in that complicated public-private dynamic be said to be actively wrong? The point about a star is that she enters your life: who Ava Gardner is to you or me is no less real than the person she was in the flesh. To us, she is merely less mortal.
One puzzling thing about Hollywood histories is that its subjects tend to speak like the characters they feel they’re expected to play. Gardner comes across here as a hard-boiled dame – “pretty damn soon there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby”. It’s difficult to tell whether this is the talk of the period or a put-on. Were the pulp fiction writers taking down what they heard, or were the stars impersonating what they’d read?
But “authenticity” is something of a red herring in the context of Hollywood. It’s a world built on stories – whether scripted or gossiped about, covered up or reconstituted. “I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip,” Gardner tells Evans. But then she asks him to perpetuate it: “Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember? You can make it up, can’t you? The publicity guys at Metro did it all the time.” The MGM stars were all “made-up”: both painted and a fiction. In Evans’s account, Bogarde suggests that Gardner is “pathologically conflicted about herself, especially about her fame”.
This is the most interesting aspect of any of those women’s lives. Not who they “really” were (what would that mean when they spent their waking hours acting?), but who they thought they were, and how that played out in a world where millions of others thought they knew them, too. “I’m so ----ing tired of being Ava Gardner,” Evans says she told him. Such figures were designed, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it, “to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded”. But that is its own kind of reality – can anyone in that complicated public-private dynamic be said to be actively wrong? The point about a star is that she enters your life: who Ava Gardner is to you or me is no less real than the person she was in the flesh. To us, she is merely less mortal.
