gardner's memoir about her relationship with brooke

Two decades later, Evans got permission from Gardner's estate to incorporate material from those interviews into a book about his abortive tenure as her co-writer. 'Secret' because after agreeing to co-write her memoirs with Evans in 1988, and giving him hours of interviews, she got cold feet, stopped collaborating, and - wisely, based on the result - withdrew permission to publish, a deal theoretically sealed by her death in 1990, at the age of 67. All of which qualifies as a mother lode of promising material for the late journalist Peter Evans to mine in his posthumously published and, sadly, dead-on-arrival Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. Then there were the movies: One Touch of Venus, The Night of the Iguana, Show Boat, The Killers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Barefoot Contessa, Mogambo, On the Beach, The Sun Also Rises and a few dozen others in a career that spanned four decades before it was cut short by a debilitating stroke that left part of her face slack. At four years in duration, that one qualified as a virtual marathon. She had a similarly brief union with bandleader Artie Shaw - she called those two her 'starter husbands' - before a tempestuous, headline-making marriage to Frank Sinatra. Her beauty - which reportedly intimidated Elizabeth Taylor - won her not just film roles and studio-paid acting lessons, but the attentions of all-American boy Mickey Rooney, whom she married and divorced before she turned 21. How?Ī country girl from Grabtown, N.C., Ava Gardner arrived in Hollywood in 1941 knowing she couldn't act but, gorgeous as she was, she never had to let that slow her down. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Ava Gardner Author Peter Evans, Ava Gardner

Gardner's memoir about her relationship with brooke