They divorced in 1957, but remained close for the rest of their lives, and when Gardner pulled out of completing her memoirs, Evans suspected that Sinatra gave her the money she would have gotten for the book. Gardner had two abortions during her marriage to Sinatra, and a courtship that began with “fighting all the time, boozing and fighting,” ended the same way. ‘Don’t do it!’ I should have listened to her.” Through with it: “I’ve been there, honey,’ she told me. Their relationship was famously tempestuous, and her best friend Turner - who’d also had affairs with Shaw and Sinatra - begged Gardner not to go In 1951 she married Sinatra, who she later called the love of her life. Scott, who Gardner said would often drunkenly “beat the s–t out of me.” “The bastard broke my heart,” she said, and throughout her life she picked the wrong men. One week after their first anniversary, Shaw dumped her for another woman. “I didn’t have an enormous IQ, but I did have a high one.” “He had me convinced that I was completely stupid,” Gardner said. But now Gardner was smoking three packs of Winstons a day and getting drunk constantly she felt so intellectually insecure around her new husband that she finally took an IQ test. Then, in 1945, she married Shaw - who’d also left his wife for her. “Howard wouldn’t piss on a black man to put him out if he was on fire,” she said. “I never loved him,” she said, adding that despite the generosity he showed her, paying for her dying mother’s medical care, he was also a racist. “I caught on very quickly,” she said.Īfter Rooney came Howard Hughes. He’d screw anything that moved.”Īfter a one-year courtship they wed, and one of Hollywood’s greatest sex symbols was a virgin on her wedding night. “I still didn’t know he was the biggest wolf on the lot. “I wanted to f–k you the moment I saw you,” he told her. On her first day on the lot, she met Rooney, the 5-foot-2 star of the wholesome “Andy Hardy” series. “A lot more should have.”Īfter a screen test, she was signed to a seven-picture deal with MGM, and quickly became sought after by nearly every leading man in Hollywood. She knew she wasn’t a great actress, and didn’t much care: “A lot of my stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor,” she said. “I knew that my looks might get me through the studio gates.” She’d grown up poor and uneducated, yet her mother always knew that Ava had what it took to be a movie star. Gardner was a teenage virgin from Grabtown, NC, when she was discovered by a talent scout in 1941. “He said, ‘Get into a fight with him, and he won’t stop until one of you is dead,’ ” Gardner said. When she told Mitchum that she was also seeing Sinatra, he ended things. While seeing Sinatra, Gardner also had an affair with the married Robert Mitchum. 38s the Chairman kept in his glove compartment. Sinatra knew it was true love on their first date, when they went for a late-night drunken drive from Palm Springs to Indio and “shot out streetlights and store windows” with a pair of. Gardner went on to marry bandleader Artie Shaw - “another kind of bully he was always putting me down” - and then, most famously, Frank Sinatra, who left his wife for her. “He went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge,” she said, adding that her best friend Lana Turner - who’d slept with Rooney first - called him “Andy Hard-On.” What followed were the extended deathbed confessions of a legend, compiled for the first time in Evans’ last book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.”Īmong the shocking revelations: first husband Mickey Rooney was such a womanizer that he cheated on Ava, then considered the most beautiful woman in the world, in their marital bed - while she was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.”Īnd so, in January 1988, Ava Gardner, ravaged by booze and cigarettes and a recent stroke, called British journalist Peter Evans and asked him to ghostwrite her memoirs. She was broke and alone and usually drunk, a one-time Hollywood goddess who had two choices: “I either write the book or sell the jewels,” she said. ‘SHORT’ COURTSHIP: Ava Gardner was a virgin when she wed Mickey Rooney in 1942, but says she “caught on very quickly.” (
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