![The night before Ed Victor was due to have dinner with Ava Gardner for the first time, he told his father — who was in hospital awaiting an operation for colon cancer — about the meeting, thinking it might cheer him up. “Be careful,” warned the old man. “She might try to seduce you.” Those were the last words Victor heard him say. “It’s a very tender memory for me,” smiles the 73-year-old Bronx-born literary agent. “There was my father warning his 46-year-old son that one of the most iconic actresses of both our lifetimes might ‘try to seduce me.’” Seduce him, Gardner did — though, at 64, it was with her story and wit, not that once sinfully beautiful face and body. The year was 1987 and Gardner was semi-paralyzed by a stroke and living alone in Kensington. Victor, arguably the most famous literary agent in the world, had been called on to broker a deal for the Hollywood star’s memoirs, co-authored by the celebrated British journalist Peter Evans. (“I either write the book or sell the jewels,” Gardner had told Evans when she first contacted him about the project, “and I’m kind of sentimental about the jewels.”) As a man with a client list that includes Nigella Lawson — one of his closest friends and about whom he is tight-lipped amid her marital trauma — Frederick Forsyth, Keith Richards and U2, Victor, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, has never been easily star-struck. “But Ava was different,” he says. And on her behalf he embarked on a labour of love that will finally be published next week after nearly a quarter of a century despite the deaths of both subject and author, and Victor having to finish writing the memoirs himself. Certain words invariably crop up when describing Victor. Bullish is one; flamboyant another. His charmed life is divided between his Regent’s Park home and a 17th- century oak-beamed Long Island “barn” where he and his wife Carol spend four months of the year, kicking off the summer season with their famous July 4 party. But spend time with the man they call the “Mr. Big” of publishing — he is both my friend and agent — and you learn he is not above passion projects. He may sell Eric Clapton’s memoirs for millions of dollars one day and have his client John Banville win the Booker Prize the next, but he also likes quirky endeavours such as the The Obvious Diet, which he wrote in 2001 after shedding 40 lb from his 6ft 4in frame. In Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, Victor managed to combine the literary gold he has always been able to spot, with a nostalgic journey back into his own childhood and his student days at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. “As a young man, I always found her the sexiest of all the movie stars, even sexier than Marilyn,” he says. “And the lascivious nature of her life contributed to that sex goddess perception.” Yet on the night of their first meeting 26 years ago, instead of the Barefoot Contessa, in walked “a prematurely old woman”, the left side of her face “frozen in a rictus of sadness”. It would have been hard for any woman to bear, he says, but for one called “the world’s most beautiful animal”, it was unbearably sad.”The stroke had really taken it out of her,” Victor sighs. “But there was a tension in the situation because she still behaved like a sex goddess. She was debauched, though, a big boozer who smoked three packs a day. And on every occasion that we met — except when I arranged for her to meet [Simon & Schuster executive] Dick Snyder — she wore velour tracksuits. “But she could turn it on. The meeting with Snyder was a very big deal and she transformed herself into a movie star in this wonderful black dress and high heels, showing off the legs she was still proud of. “Not only that but she was backlit,” he laughs. “She had hired a lighting man to make sure she looked her best and a butler to serve Cristal Champagne. ‘I have to get a little pie-eyed to talk about myself, honey,’ she said. Ava knew that she had to perform and perform she did.” Although Gardner’s default setting was flirtatious (“she really couldn’t help herself”), she could also be belligerent, foul-mouthed and pathologically late. “The lateness was a form of power play. Celebrities feel that they can be late with impunity because people will always be happy to see them.” Victor, who once came second on Tatler’s list of London’s most frequently invited guests, behind Sir Elton John, loathes being late himself, “but I’ve dealt with stars for so long that I know how to suck it up when they are”. Gardner once turned up at 5 p.m. for a lunch date, declared “I need a nap” and disappeared for the next five days. As for the book, Evans was having a tough time with the aging star, and the project was abandoned after she died, and for much of the 1990s, during which time Victor suffered leukemia. But his resolve to have Gardner’s memoirs published never wavered. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy. Evans describes how Gardner swung between bouts of introspectiveness and self-doubt to bursts of jaw-dropping candour over the years they worked on the book together. She described how, as a 19-year-old on her first day on the MGM lot, she met first love Mickey Rooney, who told her, “I wanted to bed you the moment I saw you” — then cheated on her in the first week of their marriage. She told Evans how Howard Hughes taught her to be a better lover, adding that she nearly killed him with a marble ashtray in a fit of rage once, but MGM hushed it up. She and third husband Frank Sinatra fought all the time (“It was madness, but he was good in the feathers”) before saying with a shrug: “But I fought with all my men. It was my way of life, my way of loving.” After some of the more salacious reminiscences, Gardner would get worried that she had said too much. “Ava wasn’t ashamed of the life she had lived, but back in her day — and even in Hollywood today — you couldn’t be honest about who you were,” says Victor. “Ava was always carefully planning how she would come across, which is ultimately why she fired Peter. She wasn’t sure she wanted all this stuff coming out while she was still alive. But when Frank Sinatra, who probably remained the love of her life, condemned Peter to her, that spelled the end of their relationship.” Evans always believed that Sinatra had paid Gardner to suppress the book, but in the late 1990s he resurrected the memoirs. He never got to write The End, however. As he sat down to finish the book on August 31, 2012, he had a fatal heart attack, leaving Victor to finish the book himself. “When she had fired Peter, Ava came out with this wonderful phrase: ‘Maybe one day when I’m pushing clouds around.’ Well, now they’re both pushing clouds around.” Although the book and Gardner’s own admissions strip her down to a less mythical creature, Victor rejects notions that she was miserable during those final years. “Aging is not an easy process, especially when you’re sick. I know that there is a bullet with my name on it, but on the other side of illness there can be a better life, one you appreciate more. I think Ava chose to end up the way she was. She never seemed lonely to me. Alone, maybe, but not lonely. And right up until the end, even in those velour tracksuits, she comported herself like a movie star.” Perhaps all the effort that went into keeping other people’s fantasies alive eventually became too much for her. “I’m tired of being Ava Gardner,” she announced to Evans one day. “And she was,” Victor maintains, “but I’ve learned a lot about celebrity in my life and it’s a complicated thing.” He then tells me about the day his wife and Candice Bergen, a family friend, sat outside a café in Paris, at the height of the actress’s fame. “People were coming up to Candy every five minutes and my wife asked her how on earth she dealt with it. ‘With a mixture of irritation and entitlement,’ came Candy’s reply. “Ava dealt with it exactly the same way.” © Copyright (c) The Daily Telegraph E-mail this Article Print this Article Share this Article STORY TOOLS E-mail this Article Print this Article Font: Sponsored by Shaw GMC SPOTLIGHTS Sign up for breaking news alerts Visit our Content Marketplace for Herald stories and pictures Join the conversation on the Herald's Facebook page Download the Herald's iPhone app Download the Herald's Android app Download the Herald's iPad app WE RECOMMEND William and Kate’s christening guest list raises eyebrows Flames goalie MacDonald turns old friends into foes Alberta couples combine some of their personal finances Sandra Oh: ‘I want to live!’ What is love, actually? Not monogamy, says Emma Thompson FROM AROUND THE WEB Robert De Niro's a Heavy Hitter in Last Vegas (YouTube) Two Female Cops Beat Each Other Black & Blue Over a Guy (CafeMom) The Halloween Accessory That Could Send You to the Hospital (Global Intellectual Property Center) Popular infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau jailed (USA TODAY) Mark Cuban: Dwight Howard made a ‘mistake’ signing with Rockets (Sports Illustrated) What's this? LOCAL FLYER DEALS Great Deals on Granite Counter tops! Rona Great Deals On Kitchen Sets At Home Furniture Home Furniture 30% Off Hudson's Bay Fall Collections Hudson's Bay Save On Target Gifts for the Whole Family Target Canada We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information. CALGARY HERALD HEADLINE NEWS Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Calgary Herald. Our Privacy Statement The night before Ed Victor was due to have dinner with Ava Gardner for the first time, he told his father — who was in hospital awaiting an operation for colon cancer — about the meeting, thinking it might cheer him up. “Be careful,” warned the old man. “She might try to seduce you.” Those were the last words Victor heard him say. “It’s a very tender memory for me,” smiles the 73-year-old Bronx-born literary agent. “There was my father warning his 46-year-old son that one of the most iconic actresses of both our lifetimes might ‘try to seduce me.’” Seduce him, Gardner did — though, at 64, it was with her story and wit, not that once sinfully beautiful face and body. The year was 1987 and Gardner was semi-paralyzed by a stroke and living alone in Kensington. Victor, arguably the most famous literary agent in the world, had been called on to broker a deal for the Hollywood star’s memoirs, co-authored by the celebrated British journalist Peter Evans. (“I either write the book or sell the jewels,” Gardner had told Evans when she first contacted him about the project, “and I’m kind of sentimental about the jewels.”) As a man with a client list that includes Nigella Lawson — one of his closest friends and about whom he is tight-lipped amid her marital trauma — Frederick Forsyth, Keith Richards and U2, Victor, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, has never been easily star-struck. “But Ava was different,” he says. And on her behalf he embarked on a labour of love that will finally be published next week after nearly a quarter of a century despite the deaths of both subject and author, and Victor having to finish writing the memoirs himself. Certain words invariably crop up when describing Victor. Bullish is one; flamboyant another. His charmed life is divided between his Regent’s Park home and a 17th- century oak-beamed Long Island “barn” where he and his wife Carol spend four months of the year, kicking off the summer season with their famous July 4 party. But spend time with the man they call the “Mr. Big” of publishing — he is both my friend and agent — and you learn he is not above passion projects. He may sell Eric Clapton’s memoirs for millions of dollars one day and have his client John Banville win the Booker Prize the next, but he also likes quirky endeavours such as the The Obvious Diet, which he wrote in 2001 after shedding 40 lb from his 6ft 4in frame. In Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, Victor managed to combine the literary gold he has always been able to spot, with a nostalgic journey back into his own childhood and his student days at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. “As a young man, I always found her the sexiest of all the movie stars, even sexier than Marilyn,” he says. “And the lascivious nature of her life contributed to that sex goddess perception.” Yet on the night of their first meeting 26 years ago, instead of the Barefoot Contessa, in walked “a prematurely old woman”, the left side of her face “frozen in a rictus of sadness”. It would have been hard for any woman to bear, he says, but for one called “the world’s most beautiful animal”, it was unbearably sad.”The stroke had really taken it out of her,” Victor sighs. “But there was a tension in the situation because she still behaved like a sex goddess. She was debauched, though, a big boozer who smoked three packs a day. And on every occasion that we met — except when I arranged for her to meet [Simon & Schuster executive] Dick Snyder — she wore velour tracksuits. “But she could turn it on. The meeting with Snyder was a very big deal and she transformed herself into a movie star in this wonderful black dress and high heels, showing off the legs she was still proud of. “Not only that but she was backlit,” he laughs. “She had hired a lighting man to make sure she looked her best and a butler to serve Cristal Champagne. ‘I have to get a little pie-eyed to talk about myself, honey,’ she said. Ava knew that she had to perform and perform she did.” Although Gardner’s default setting was flirtatious (“she really couldn’t help herself”), she could also be belligerent, foul-mouthed and pathologically late. “The lateness was a form of power play. Celebrities feel that they can be late with impunity because people will always be happy to see them.” Victor, who once came second on Tatler’s list of London’s most frequently invited guests, behind Sir Elton John, loathes being late himself, “but I’ve dealt with stars for so long that I know how to suck it up when they are”. Gardner once turned up at 5 p.m. for a lunch date, declared “I need a nap” and disappeared for the next five days. As for the book, Evans was having a tough time with the aging star, and the project was abandoned after she died, and for much of the 1990s, during which time Victor suffered leukemia. But his resolve to have Gardner’s memoirs published never wavered. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy. Evans describes how Gardner swung between bouts of introspectiveness and self-doubt to bursts of jaw-dropping candour over the years they worked on the book together. She described how, as a 19-year-old on her first day on the MGM lot, she met first love Mickey Rooney, who told her, “I wanted to bed you the moment I saw you” — then cheated on her in the first week of their marriage. She told Evans how Howard Hughes taught her to be a better lover, adding that she nearly killed him with a marble ashtray in a fit of rage once, but MGM hushed it up. She and third husband Frank Sinatra fought all the time (“It was madness, but he was good in the feathers”) before saying with a shrug: “But I fought with all my men. It was my way of life, my way of loving.” After some of the more salacious reminiscences, Gardner would get worried that she had said too much. “Ava wasn’t ashamed of the life she had lived, but back in her day — and even in Hollywood today — you couldn’t be honest about who you were,” says Victor. “Ava was always carefully planning how she would come across, which is ultimately why she fired Peter. She wasn’t sure she wanted all this stuff coming out while she was still alive. But when Frank Sinatra, who probably remained the love of her life, condemned Peter to her, that spelled the end of their relationship.” Evans always believed that Sinatra had paid Gardner to suppress the book, but in the late 1990s he resurrected the memoirs. He never got to write The End, however. As he sat down to finish the book on August 31, 2012, he had a fatal heart attack, leaving Victor to finish the book himself. “When she had fired Peter, Ava came out with this wonderful phrase: ‘Maybe one day when I’m pushing clouds around.’ Well, now they’re both pushing clouds around.” Although the book and Gardner’s own admissions strip her down to a less mythical creature, Victor rejects notions that she was miserable during those final years. “Aging is not an easy process, especially when you’re sick. I know that there is a bullet with my name on it, but on the other side of illness there can be a better life, one you appreciate more. I think Ava chose to end up the way she was. She never seemed lonely to me. Alone, maybe, but not lonely. And right up until the end, even in those velour tracksuits, she comported herself like a movie star.” Perhaps all the effort that went into keeping other people’s fantasies alive eventually became too much for her. “I’m tired of being Ava Gardner,” she announced to Evans one day. “And she was,” Victor maintains, “but I’ve learned a lot about celebrity in my life and it’s a complicated thing.” He then tells me about the day his wife and Candice Bergen, a family friend, sat outside a café in Paris, at the height of the actress’s fame. “People were coming up to Candy every five minutes and my wife asked her how on earth she dealt with it. ‘With a mixture of irritation and entitlement,’ came Candy’s reply. “Ava dealt with it exactly the same way.” © Copyright (c) The Daily Telegraph E-mail this Article Print this Article Share this Article STORY TOOLS E-mail this Article Print this Article Font: Sponsored by Shaw GMC SPOTLIGHTS Sign up for breaking news alerts Visit our Content Marketplace for Herald stories and pictures Join the conversation on the Herald's Facebook page Download the Herald's iPhone app Download the Herald's Android app Download the Herald's iPad app WE RECOMMEND William and Kate’s christening guest list raises eyebrows Flames goalie MacDonald turns old friends into foes Alberta couples combine some of their personal finances Sandra Oh: ‘I want to live!’ What is love, actually? Not monogamy, says Emma Thompson FROM AROUND THE WEB Robert De Niro's a Heavy Hitter in Last Vegas (YouTube) Two Female Cops Beat Each Other Black & Blue Over a Guy (CafeMom) The Halloween Accessory That Could Send You to the Hospital (Global Intellectual Property Center) Popular infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau jailed (USA TODAY) Mark Cuban: Dwight Howard made a ‘mistake’ signing with Rockets (Sports Illustrated) What's this? LOCAL FLYER DEALS Great Deals on Granite Counter tops! Rona Great Deals On Kitchen Sets At Home Furniture Home Furniture 30% Off Hudson's Bay Fall Collections Hudson's Bay Save On Target Gifts for the Whole Family Target Canada We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information. CALGARY HERALD HEADLINE NEWS Ava Gardner as femme fatale Kitty Collins, in the film that made her a star, The Kiillers, 1946.](http://www.seraphicpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ava.jpg)
Deadpanned Gardner: “I either write the book or sell the jewels, and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.”
Only now, years after Ava and Evans’ death, has this frank memoir been published. Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations is a sad and intimate book about the fate of a great Hollywood star. Born poor in rural North Carolina, Ava was given a Hollywood screen test thanks to a radiantly innocent photo of 18 year-old Ava displayed in a shop window.
After meeting with Ava in her London flat, Evans realized that the aging star was deeply conflicted about publishing an honest memoir. He also realized that she was a hopeless drunk. But the lure of working with one of Hollywood’s legendary stars trounced the author’s common sense. Already, in the preliminary stages, Gardner, drunk, depressed, and lonely, was calling Evans in the middle of the night, and rambling on, quite candidly, about the glorious, yet often sordid past. Evans, a solid, if sleep-deprived pro, faithfully recorded her reminiscences in a notebook he parked on his night stand.
Said Ava about her great rival, Elizabeth Taylor: “She was pretty. I was beautiful.”
On her youthful marriage to notorious womanizer and gambler Mickey Rooney: “My shortest husband and my biggest mistake.”
Ava then married band leader Artie Shaw, born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky: “He was a dominating son of a bitch… always putting me down.”
She carried on a passionate affair with Howard Hughes, but did not love him.
Her third marriage to Frank Sinatra was, to say the least, tempestuous: “We were fighting all the time. Fighting and boozing. It was madness…. But he was good in the feathers.”
Unfortunately, in the morning, when Ava would read what Evans recorded in the middle of the night, she was horrified and refused to allow Evans to use her most honest memories.
Before backing out of the memoir entirely—there is a rumor that Sinatra paid Ava not to write the book—Evans convinced Ava to meet with Simon & Schuster’s distinguished publishing executive, Dick Snyder, in order to secure a contract—and a hefty advance.
Gripped by anxiety about her fading looks, Ava considered cancelling the meeting.
Evans, by now a diplomat/psychologist/ghostwriter said:
“Have you put your makeup on yet? I’m sure you’ll feel much better once you’ve put your face on.”
“Call Jack Cardiff,” she said after a silence.
“What can Jack do, Ava?”
“Call him now and explain the situation. Tell him I desperately need him,” she said, and put the phone down.
I rang Cardiff and told him exactly what Ava had said. That afternoon, the world’s finest cinematographer rearranged the lamps in her drawing room—and placed a key light above the chair on which she’d sit for her meeting with Snyder.
He called me in that evening. “It’s the best I can do discreetly,” he said. “When she sits in that chair tomorrow, keep telling her how beautiful she looks. Keep on saying that. How beautiful she looks. Lay it on thick. She won’t believe you, she’s too smart to fall for blarney, but it’s what she wants to hear. It’s the tribute you must always pay to great beauties when they grow old. Remember, it’s always the cameraman who grows old, never the star.”
It’s too bad the book Evans envisioned was never written because Ava had a remarkable facility for voicing unvarnished, if bitter, observations.
“You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey,” she tells Evans in her tobacco-stained voice. “She made movies, she made out, and she made a [expletive] mess of her life. But she never made jam.”
Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and inspirational Shabbat.
I read Ava: My Story years ago, and thought she was pretty frank in that. She had a mouth like a truck driver–in one story, she was fighting with a man (Howard Hughes, I think), and said, “Always the lady, I yelled, ‘**** you!'” She seemed to have the ability to be simultaneously witty and profane, and I came away thinking she had her own code that she didn’t veer from, and I didn’t like her very much. It was an interesting book that I was a bit sorry I had read.
I was a kid and maybe that was why I never got her attraction. Her best line was the one about Sinatra when she said, “He only weighs about 100 pounds but 40 pounds of that is c**K !”
Michael – there was a great story (told by Robert I am almost sure) of a drunken Sinatra and Ava driving around in pre-dawn Indian Wells, shooting out store front windows. The police catch them and in the night a studio rep comes with a suitcase full of money – problem solved.
Why is this a great story. If true, they seem like, if not outright imbeciles, spoiled and filthy children. As for the so-called sadness of her demise, she lived in an arrogant and unhealthy style. Opinionated and clever without judgment. Interesting as a case history but not to be emulated.
I have seen it, and Robert I’m sure you’ve really seen it in Hollywood, the throwing away of talent, opportunity, and the future.
Brutal decline. 1980s London is far from 1920s North Carolina.
Once I owned a bootleg CD of a chemically-influenced Judy Garland rant, originally recorded reel-to-reel. After a few listens, embarrassed, I fobbed it off on to someone else.
After reading the post, her turn in Night of the Iguana must have seemed, to her, like reading a Girl Scout part.
Robert – Ava’s life towards the end seems to mirror Marlena Dietrich. (That’s Dee-trich – Larry 😉 ) – Alone, living almost like a Hermit, she agreed to make a movie-documentary about herself but she gave the director a difficult dictate: She must never be filmed at this stage in her life, nor could he film the interior of her apartment. She did not want people to see or remember her as she was in 1984.
The director, Maximilian Schell, came up with a very creative way around this – he built a set of her apartment as he remembered it, and against her voice you saw (if I remember right, her “shadow” in her “bedroom”.
As for Ava – things I will always remember about her – your story of Sinatra- a bit drunk – calling for her down the hill in her bungalow, her tempestuous affair with Howard Hughes, and her sad ending that you have so well described.
Robert:
Is there more to come…? And, if not, why not? Fascinating. I wandered by her London digs and apparently she used to fool around with tennis, weather and health permitting.
That was in the Cadogan Square/Gardens area.