‘My Lunches With Orson’ and ‘Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations’
If you are fan of watching old movies at TCM ( Turner Classic Movie Channel), you will enjoy reading about two Hollywood giants of their time, Orson and Ava Garner. (F. Sheikh)
Ava Gardner was “essential to the Hollywood myth about itself,” as her friend Dirk Bogarde observed, and so was Orson Welles. Orson was “his own greatest production,” as the Hollywood chronicler Peter Biskind writes, and so was Ava.
Two new books — “My Lunches With Orson” and “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” — unearth vintage conversations with the stars in their final years, when they were broke, in bad health, unable to get work and mourning their lost grandeur. But oh, what gorgeous wrecks they were, and what mesmerizing stories they told, these Sunset Boulevard Scheherazades.
Even washed up and so heavy and arthritic he had to use a wheelchair, the 68-year-old Welles knew he was more interesting than anyone else in Hollywood. So he asked his pal Henry Jaglom, an indie filmmaker, to tape their lunch conversations at Ma Maison — with his ill-tempered toy poodle Kiki at the table — discussions that indolently roamed from chicken salad capers to chic romantic capers. The tapes span 1983 to 1985, when Welles died of a heart attack with a typewriter in his lap writing a script; they languished in a shoe box for years until Biskind learned about them in the 1990s and started bugging Jaglom to transcribe and publish them.
In 1988, living on her own in London, recovering from a couple of strokes and fearing she had pulmonary emphysema, Gardner asked the British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her memoir. She had no money and didn’t want to sell the jewels that Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes and other famous men had lavished on her. “Pretty damn soon,” she frets to Evans, “there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby.”
Both books make you feel as if you’re eavesdropping, the one about Ava in a more invasive way. Unlike the chummy rambling chats between Welles and Jaglom, Gardner was in a constant tug of war with Evans, agonizing in vinous 3 a.m. phone calls, as he surreptitiously took notes, about whether she really wanted “strangers digging around in my panties drawer.”
Watching this Venus ply her mind games, sensuality and stubborn will on Evans, it’s easy to imagine what it was like to be a love object jerked on her marionette strings in her prime. You wouldn’t have a chance.
“You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey,” she tells Evans in her throaty voice. “She made movies, she made out and she made a [expletive] mess of her life. But she never made jam.”
Some of the colorful stories Welles tells have appeared elsewhere, with sharper aperçus. But what makes “Lunches With Orson” appealing is the piquancy of the much younger, skinnier actor and director taking on the Sisyphean job of reviving the Falstaffian outcast — a mitzvah another Welles interviewer and acolyte, Peter Bogdanovich, didn’t bother with, Welles thought, when Bogdanovich was on top.
Even maudlin, Welles and Gardner are magnificent. “A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework,” Ava says.
Both hit the big time as teenagers, Boy Genius and Girl Vamp, landing Time covers in their 20s. They had in common a bawdy honesty, a desire to shock and a lust for living extravagantly.
The lion and lioness in winter are poignant. The cosmopolitan man who made “Citizen Kane” could not get financing to make a movie. The green-eyed woman who dazzled in Technicolor in “The Barefoot Contessa” was drinking, smoking, coughing and listening to old Sinatra-Tommy Dorsey recordings that Sinatra sent her after her strokes.
“Who’d have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog,” dryly notes Gardner, who once danced all night and then began drinking Dom Pérignon in the studio makeup room at 5 a.m. “I miss Frank,” she says, even the fights. She knows he will outlive her: “Bastards are always the best survivors.” Click link for full article;