HERE is one extra tidbit gleaned from the brand new book about the late MGM star Ava Gardner. Writer Peter Evans talked, in London, with the movie star who has been named “the most beautiful woman ever.” These talks and Evans’ ideas have now come out in “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.”
Toward the end of this book, Ava became quite exercised over the easily believed idea that “The Mob” ever gave her beloved Frank Sinatra anything, especially during the singer-actor’s fallow period in the early Fifties. This was a time when Ava’s own career was booming but Sinatra couldn’t get himself arrested. The Ava-Frank romance was anything but calm. They loved one another but could not get along.
![]() | ![]() | | Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra — probably only seconds away from quarreling. | ![]() |
Ava was adamant and furious in defending Frank, during the period that his career was in ruins. She insisted no criminal elements ever helped him back to success.
“I did!” declared Ava. She says she paid bills, paid airfare back to Hollywood so he could test for the movie “From Here to Eternity.” (He won the Oscar and began a spectacular comeback.) Ava, telling all this, remembering, began to weep.
It is possible, author Evans ponders, that Sinatra later gave Ava money NOT to let the “conversations” be published while he was alive. But the star, suffering the after effects of several strokes, drinking and smoking too much, couldn’t work. She and Sinatra did stay in touch, but by then he was wed to Barbara Marx and Ava said she never called him. Still, he called her off and on, never forgetting her birthday.
Frank Sinatra was finally richer and more successful than anybody had ever imagined. I know he was generous, so why didn’t he set up some kind of comfortable annuity for Ava?
This is a truly diverting book, full of details about Ava’s growing up, her “discovery” from a photo in New York, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hughes, Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Artie Shaw, Lana Turner, etc.
Ava’s profanity, like something from a David Mamet play, is astounding. And she herself when seeing and reading it, objects to it. |
