I just finished reading Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, a memoir that the late Hollywood star aborted in the 1980s; her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, died as he was completing it last year. The result is part Ava's memoir about herself, and part Peter's memoir about attempting to work with Gardner. I enjoyed it almost as much as the Orson Welles book, and I had already read Lee Server's biography of the star, Love Is Nothing. (This is all sort of inexplicable as I have yet to see an Ava Gardner film.) She was a pistol, no two ways about it, but what I loved most were her turning of phrases. I imagine many were slang back in the day, but I hadn't heard them. Take this anecdote about Howard Hughes:
I hit him with an ashtray. I think it was onyx. Anyway, it was heavy. I practically had him laid out on a slab. We fought all the time but I nearly put a lily in his hand that night.
It's as if she ate Raymond Chandler.
It's funny now but Louis Mayer nearly had kittens when he heard about it. He was convinced I'd killed the guy.
There's pathos, too:
But I must say, it's a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love. Especially a husband.
And yet, the part that hit me like an onyx ashtray wasn't by Gardner or Evans. It was by MGM publicist Greg Morrison, whom Evans had asked for reminiscences. Here it is in its entirety, in italics as it is in the book:
She's 17 or 18 with one pair of shoes, cardboard suitcase, leaving everybody in her life to enter the MGM University. They teach her to walk, talk, sit, sleep, shave her legs, shake hands, kiss, smile, eat, pray. Her ass is great, fine tits, short but good legs, great shoulders, thin hips, fix the toes, do the hair—clean it, but don't touch the face. That town is jammed with pretty, but not like that—the eyes, the mouth, are from another world. She becomes the "armpiece du jour," learns what they want. Learns how to do it without giving her soul away, and learns everything but how to Act. In her whole shitkicking, barefoot life she never really learned to pretend, nor did poverty give her much humor, certainly none about herself, so she went to work on the Men—Lancaster, Gable, Huston, Douglas, Hughes, and the "suits" that needed her. And so she went to her last and most important school, the U. of Sinatra. In essence, by fucking, fighting, and forgetting with him she inhaled the gangster outlook of the world. Take what you want. Don't let them use you. They only understand tough. And all of her days became nights.
And that, my friends, is writing.
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