Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations
by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover, 304 pages
July 2013
ISBN 9781451627695


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In 1986, actress Ava Gardner suffered a stroke. Two years later she found herself in some financial difficulty and decided to write a memoir so she wouldn't have to "sell the jewels". Biographer Peter Evans was hired to help Gardner write the book after being personally recommended by Gardner's friends including fellow actor Dirk Bogarde. Evans knew that this project would be difficult but couldn't imagine what was in store for him. After months of late night phone calls, bizarre meetings and endless massaging of a fading beauty's ego, the book was called off. A more sanitized autobiography was published much later with the help of someone else. But Peter Evans never let go of the idea of publishing a book about Ava Gardner in her voice and with the permission of her estate put together Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.

Me reading this book is me keeping a very open mind. As some of you know, I do not like Ava Gardner. But many people do like her and are fooled dazzled by her manipulation charm. I set my differences aside because I thought this book sounded really interesting and I wanted to learn more about her.

The end result was that I quite enjoyed my experience reading this book and learning more about Ava Gardner as an actress and as a woman. This book defies any categorization. It's a sort of biography (Peter Evans' voice), autobiography (Ava Gardner's voice), transcript of conversations and a biography about a biography that never happened. The book is also a tribute to Peter Evans who passed away before he could finish it. Both voices are gone but we have this treasure to remember them by.

Because the initial project was cut short, we don't really have the full story of Ava Gardner's life but we do get quite a bit. Most of Gardner's conversations with Evans are about the romantic relationships she's had. We learn a lot about her first marriage to Mickey Rooney and to some extent her marriages to Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. All those marriages ended badly. She also had a long romance with Howard Hughes, but refused to marry him, affairs with Robert Mitchum and a bull fighter in Spain and was in an abusive relationship with actor George C. Scott. In her conversations with Evans, Gardner is very restrained but with Evans patience and a couple of drinks, she does open up to reveal some very personal information. She would often times panic later about what she had revealed and plead Evans not to include it. Evans was essentially in the middle of a tug-of-war. He had a publisher to answer to but he also needed to keep Gardner happy and on board with continuing the book. Evans struggle was a significant one and you get really get a sense of his dilemma.

Ava Gardner can come off very vain in this book. She was highly focused on her appearance and how people perceive her. But in many ways this is understandable. Here is an aging beauty who once had
an incredible power over men, driving many of them wild with desire, and doesn't want to let that power go. Who would?

My favorite part of the book was when Peter Evans recalls the time when he arranged a meeting with Ava Gardner and the publishers. The event was to take place at Gardner's home and she was very worried about her appearance. She was much older now and her stroke had left part of her face paralyzed. Gardner told Evans she would only do the meeting if cinematographer Jack Cardiff arranged the lighting so she could look her best. Cardiff came over, staged the lighting around the chair she would sit in and made everything work for her. Evans talked to Cardiff and this is what 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 camera man who grows old, never the star. - Jack Cardiff (page 83)

This book is amazing and I highly suggest you read it. Did it change my opinion of Ava Gardner? No. But it did give me some insight into this iconic actress and made me understand her allure. I loved reading about her relationships with her mom and her sister Bappy. Evans included parts of the draft that he was working on before he had to cancel the project. Those were really interesting to read. I loved the story of how Mickey Rooney traveled with Gardner to see her mom and made a big fuss over her and made her mom so happy. I really enjoyed how Gardner was open about her mistakes and frank about her career. While she was concerned about what would go into her book, I felt that at heart she was a very honest and open person.

If there is an actress or actor you don't like, I suggest taking some time out to read a bit more about them. It might not change your opinion but it will definitely open your eyes.

This is my fifth review for my 2013 Summer Reading Classic Film Book Challenge. Just one more to go!

 
 

Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker

Young Man With a Horn
by Dorothy Baker
New York Review of Books
Paperback, 192 pages
Originally Published 1938
ISBN 9781590175774

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Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker is considered to be the first ever Jazz novel. It was published in 1938 and was a critical and commercial success. The novel was adapted into a movie which was released in 1950 and starred Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Doris Day (read my review of the movie here). Baker turned down the opportunity to adapt her own novel into a screenplay and because of that the book and movie are very different.

Spoiler alert! In comparing the book with the movie I reveal some important plot points. 

Young Man With a Horn follows the story of Rick Martin from when he was a young boy in the poor part of Los Angeles to when he becomes a professional jazz trumpeter to his downward spiral to his inevitable death. In the movie, Rick comes out of his sickness alive with the help of friends. In the book, it's only Smoke who is by his side and the story ends with his demise.

Race is a big issue in the novel and much time is spent on exploring the class and social difference between whites and blacks. It's unclear whether Dorothy Baker was prejudiced herself but much of the language is very demeaning towards African-Americans and this is dialed down quite a lot in the film. The language in the book might come as a bit of a shock to contemporary readers so its important to note the time frame this book was written in. I thought it interesting that Rick's friendship and collaboration with black musicians isn't questioned much in the film except for when Rick is doing double-duty playing at a fancy nightclub during the evening and a dive with his friend Art later in the night.

Let's talk about the two important men in Rick's life: Art Hazzard and Smoke Jordan. The film has an African-American (well really an Afro-Latino) playing Art Hazzard and a Caucasian man playing Smoke Jordan. In the novel, they are both African-American and it's really Smoke who is Rick's lifelong pal and not Art. Art Hazzard is a musician who helps Rick get ahead but not much more. The whole sop story of Art getting older and sickly and dying because of Rick neglect's is purely an invention of the movie and does not happen in the book. Baker's character Smoke is split into two characters in the movie with some story lines are given to Art and the rest to Smoke. Perhaps it was too much for the time the movie came out for Rick to have one African-American friend and no Caucasian buddy.

I was surprised how little the two main female characters play in the novel versus the film. In the movie adaptation, Jo Jordan is played by Doris Day, a blonde Caucasian actress known for her singing and for playing good girls on screen. Amy North is played by Lauren Bacall, with cat-like features she's excellent playing a seductress and femme fatale. Jo's part in the movie is much bigger than it is in the book. In the novel, Jo is a singer who only briefly comes into Rick's life enough to introduce him to Amy North and to interact with him one other time. She's described as dark-skinned and doesn't have a romance or even a flirtation with Rick in the novel. Both Jo Jordan and Amy North don't come into the story until about 127 pages into the 172 page novel where as Jo appears 21 minutes in and Amy 50 minutes into the 112 minute movie and take up much more time after their initial appearance than they do in the book. The portrayal of Amy is pretty accurate in the movie and although she becomes Rick's wife, she seems to be more of a disastrous mistake in the book than a big cataclysm like the movie portrays her.

The two portrayals of Rick Martin are not that different from each other. However, the book spends a lot more time exploring Rick's childhood and how he develops his skills over the years playing the trumpet. We see Rick, desperately poor and parentless trying to find something in the world worth living for. The novel explores his struggles in school, his fascination with reading library books, his piano playing and his switch to the trumpet, his African-American pals and their adventures together. Some of this is explored in the movie but a lot is cut out to focus more on Rick's adult life.

The movie is much more entertaining than the book possibly because of the love triangle of Jo, Amy and Rick which adds much romantic drama. The book's focus is more on Rick as a jazz musician and less as an object of romantic desire. One thing I thought was really intriguing is that the author Dorothy Baker was fascinated with homosexual relationships and as she wrote more books she became more open in exploring them. Amy North as a lesbian or a bisexual woman is hinted at much more in the movie than in the book. The movie focuses a lot more on sex and I wonder if Dorothy Baker had tackled the screenplay (she refused to do it) whether she would have gone that route or maybe found some other drama to play up.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I read the novel Young Man With a Horn but to me it read almost like a completely different story than the film. The novel has a lot less drama and is an introspective look at the life of a jazz artist. Both the film and the novel have their good qualities, so while I compare them both together in this review they should in fact be seen as two different stories.

I bought the book from New York Review of Books which put Young Man With a Horn after it had been out of print for many years! This is my fourth entry into my 2013 Summer Reading Classic Film Book Challenge.

Cagney by Cagney

Cagney by Cagney
Doubleday
Paperback, 202 pages
Originally published 1976
ISBN 9780385520263

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"Acting is work, nothing more or less than work, and it comes into existence only with work." - James Cagney

By 1976, at least three biographies had been written about the already legendary actor James Cagney. Frustrated by what he thought was the proliferation of misinformation, Cagney set out to write his on autobiography and gave it, what he refers to as, a "fatheaded title": Cagney by Cagney.

James Cagney tells the story of life from his humble beginnings as a poor kid growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to his career as a film actor to his retirement. Told in a conversational style, Cagney offers us lots of stories especially those of the ordinary folks who influenced him in his early years and the fellow actors whom he would befriend along the way. He spends a lot of time talking about his mother, probably one of the biggest influences in his life, his brothers, his sister Jeanne and a bit about his father, a mysterious figure who died when Cagney was coming into his adulthood. What we don't read very much about is his wife, Francis Willard Vernon, whom Cagney refers to as "My Bill", or about his two adopted kids James Cagney Jr. and Casey Cagney. At one point Cagney writes that his wife asked to not be included in the book but Cagney refused to oblige her request. It might be because of that request that he refrains from going into too much detail about their marriage. There is some detail but not a lot, and perhaps she also asked him to also keep the kids out of the book too. I would have liked to have read more about their relationship because it was a fruitful marriage that lasted a lifetime and Cagney was known to remain always faithful to his wife even with the temptations that Hollywood offered.

Instead, Cagney focuses a lot more on the kids he grew up with, his mother and siblings and his many Hollywood friends including his lifelong friend Robert Montgomery and other buds such as Pat O'Brien, Frank McHugh and Ralph Bellamy. He didn't get along with everyone and when he decides to say something negative about those people he usually doesn't mention them by name.

I'm not sure if Cagney had help writing his autobiography but he wasn't a stranger to writing and over the years penned numerous rhymes and limericks for various occasions. He includes many of them, both old and new, in the text. It gives the reader a sense of his personality: humorous with a playfully devilish side. Cagney was not afraid to speak his mind. He devotes a lot of the book to his frustrations with the studio system and with Warner Bros. in particular. He went on to become part of the Screen Actors Guild and also started his own production company (Cagney Productions) with his brother and business manager Bill Cagney. He also discusses the ups and downs of being an actor, the artificialness of Hollywood and even devotes a chapter to his politics (he went from being a Liberal to being a Conservative).

I learned a lot of interesting tidbits about Cagney while reading this book. He was raised Catholic however he ended up learning Yiddish and used his skills many times throughout the years. Cagney was never interested in being on TV but made a few exceptions including one for his friend Robert Montgomery who had a TV show. He had some disdain for his gangster pictures that he made with Warner Bros. and only really liked the song-and-dance pictures. He never watched any of his films except for those musicals and even then he only wanted to see the song-and-dance numbers. He considered his crowning achievement to be Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and it's the only film he spends a considerable time talking about. Cagney liked to think of himself as a song-and-dance man and not as a gangster. He also discusses his somewhat frustrating experience with One Two Three (1961) which was the last film he did before his retirement (he went on to do a couple more but they were after he wrote this biography).

I particularly liked some of the issues that Cagney explores in the book. He was very fond of nature and owned a farm in Massachusetts. He was particularly interested in issues of conservation and the protection of the environment and discusses his concerns with the building of highways in the 1970s. Cagney was also concerned about how the present society was so fixated on building up heroes only to break them down. It's such a part of our culture today that it's difficult to think of a time when this didn't happen. Cagney also gives some really good advice about living a long fruitful life after retirement: get some hobbies! He picked up painting, martial arts and farming after he stopped acting and his new hobbies kept him going for many years.

Even though the book was fun to read, I was a little disappointed with Cagney by Cagney. I really wanted to know more about his gangster movies, his wife, how he and Bill came to adopt their kids, etc. I have read a few memoir type books recently and have grown a bit weary of them. Actors are performers and their books are often another type of performance. They have an agenda and they want to appear a certain way and sometimes that gets in the way of what the reader really wants out of the book. However, I'm very glad I read it and I can set aside my disappointment and treasure this book for what it is. If I want more, I know there are other Cagney biographies out there for me to enjoy.

I bought this book new at Barnes & Noble and while it's still in print it looks like there are limited new copies available out there.

This is my third contribution to my 2013 Summer Reading Classic Film Book Challenge!