“I’m sorry, what has brought this up?”
“I told him you were writing my book. He wasn’t happy about that. What did you say, fahcrissake?”
“Not much, I was on the TV program 24 Hours. I said it was rumored that the Mafia helped get him the Maggio role in From Here to Eternity. I never said there was any truth in it. I simply didn’t know. Although it was widely acknowledged that Mario Puzo used Frank Sinatra as the model for singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. But the BBC program suggested that he was in London ducking a subpoena to appear before the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Organized Crime. Kitty Kelley said as much in her book. Frank didn’t sue her.”
That conversation was the beginning of the end of Peter’s relationship with Ava and her book. He called me right afterward and told me he saw, all too clearly, the writing on the wall. Ava had always had her doubts about the book, constantly complaining to him that she was revealing far too much about her life for comfort. Frank Sinatra’s condemnation of Peter was the final straw for her. We concluded that Sinatra had probably asked her how much money she expected to make from the book and offered to pay her that amount not to write it. Whatever the case, Peter’s work with Ava ceased shortly thereafter. She eventually went ahead with another writer and produced a bland, sanitized version of her story, which was published after her death.
Many years later, in May 2009, Peter asked me to lunch with him, saying he had an interesting proposition to put to me. Over that lunch, he proposed writing a book about his adventures with Ava, incorporating into it the approximately forty thousand words of Ava’s that he had on tape. I agreed this was a marvelous idea, because I knew just how revelatory and fascinating those words were. I told Peter that we had to get permission from the estate of Ava Gardner to print the transcripts of those tapes verbatim—which we duly did. Ava’s manager, the venerable Jess Morgan, enthusiastically gave the estate’s blessing to the project, and Peter began to write the book.
Peter’s widow, Pamela Evans, remembers that sometime after the collaboration ended, Peter called Ava and said that he hadn’t heard from her for a while and jokingly said he didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. Ava promised him that she would send a sign when she died. On the afternoon Ava died, the promised sign was delivered. It was the day of the European Great Storm of January 25, 1990. A two-hundred-year-old oak tree crashed through the roof of Peter’s writing room. Fortunately Peter was at the gym at the time.
Ava always said to Peter that maybe one day, when she was “pushing clouds around,” the book she was working on with him could be published. Now they are both pushing clouds around and her amazing life story can finally be told properly.
(1) This portrait of Ava taken by her brother-in-law Larry Tarr led to a screen test with MGM. When Ava left for Los Angeles, her mother told her, “Enjoy yourself, my darling baby. You are going to be a movie star.”
(2) Ava with her beloved older sister Beatrice, known as “Bappie.” Bappie accompanied Ava to Hollywood and chaperoned her on her first date with future husband Mickey Rooney.
(3) Nineteen-year-old Ava with her new husband, Mickey Rooney. “He went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge,” said Ava. Lana Turner nicknamed him “Andy Hard-on.”
(4) The newlyweds with Ava’s mother, Mary Elizabeth “Molly” Gardner, in the Gardner home in North Carolina. Ava’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had been too ill to attend their wedding. On that visit Rooney put on a terrific show for Ava’s mother. “Nothing had ever touched me as deeply as Mickey’s performance for Mama that day.”
(5) Lana Turner was Ava’s idol. Lana had had an affair with Mickey Rooney and had married Artie Shaw. “First Mick, then Artie… she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too,” Ava said. “Even so, I liked her.”
(6) Howard Hughes “was in my life, on and off, for more than twenty years, but I never loved him,” said Ava. “Till death us do part would have been a whole lot sooner than later if we had tied the knot.”
(7) Ava married star bandleader Artie Shaw in 1945. She admired his intellect, but he bullied her emotionally: “He was always putting me down. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating sonofabitch.”
(8) John Huston working with Ava on The Bible. Huston once said that it was seeing Ava’s open-mouth kiss with George Raft in Whistle Stop that persuaded him to cast her in The Killers. Although she resisted his advances, she remained close to him throughout his life: “He knew me better than anyone alive, better than I knew myself.”
(9) Ava and Clark Gable in Mogambo. “He was my hero when I was a kid. He was still my hero when we made our first movie together and until the day he died.”
(10) John Ford directed Ava in Mogambo—he was crusty and a hard-drinker, but he and Ava had a strictly professional, if feisty, relationship.
(11) Ava with Frank Sinatra, husband number three. The first time they met, Ava claims Sinatra said, “If I had seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.”
(12) “The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. Bappie said I was Frank in drag…. [But] you don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers.”
(13) Humphrey Bogart, Ava’s costar in The Barefoot Contessa. Their working relationship was not a happy one. “Bogie hated learning lines,” Ava said. “He knew every trick in the book to fuck up a scene and get a retake if he felt a scene wasn’t going his way…. I just didn’t like him very much as a man—and he had no respect for me at all.”
(14) Ava became involved with George C. Scott in 1964, when she played Sarah to his Abraham in John Huston’s The Bible. “When GCS was loaded, he was terrifying,” Ava said. “He’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea next morning what he’d done.”
(15) Ava in her apartment in London. Though debilitated by a stroke and having replaced her glamorous outfits with a track suit that became her uniform, she never lost her wicked wit. “You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey,” she told Peter Evans. “She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life. But she never made jam.”
Peter always enjoyed writing acknowledgments thanking all those who’d helped him. Sadly, with The Secret Conversations this undertaking has been left to me.
I probably don’t know all of the people who helped Peter, so if I haven’t mentioned you below, please forgive me, but on Peter’s behalf you have his heartfelt thanks.