What Ava Gardner said about Frank Sinatra: he was the love of her life

“I either write the book,” Ava Gardner told Peter Evans, “or sell the jewels.” It was the last stretch of her life, and she had been living in London since 1966. Her final address was 34 Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, and Our State magazine reports that she personally chose three portraits of herself by the Dutch painter Bert Pfeiffer to hang in her London home. Evans was to ghostwrite her autobiography. The two met often, he worked from tapes of their talks, and she approved most of what he put on the page. Then she found out that Frank Sinatra, her former husband, had once sued Evans and the BBC. The friendship cooled, and Evans left the project.

What Gardner said about Sinatra comes down to two books. In Ava: My Story, published eight months after she died in 1990, she named him the love of her life. Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, which came out in 2013 after Evans’s death, keeps the rest of the account. Bryan Mims, writing in Our State in March 2014, set her verdict beside a marriage of cheating, fighting and much martini drinking, and he pointed to the Evans book, her reminiscences taken down word for word, as the record of it all. He also warned that some readers would find it more than they wanted to know.

The phone call to Nancy

The history she was describing began in 1943, at a club where she had come with Mickey Rooney. People magazine’s July 2017 rundown of Ava: A Life in Movies, by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, says Sinatra was taken with her on the spot. He was married, they saw each other only now and then, and they kept apart until a meeting at MGM in 1949. The biography gives Sinatra’s memory of that day in his own voice. “Jesus, you got prettier,” he recalled telling her, “since last time I saw ya.” She was no longer the girl from Carolina he had known at the studio, he said, but “a woman who was glorious.”

The affair that followed had guns in it, at least in People’s telling. After one drunken 3 a.m. drive, with several store windows shot out by the couple’s two pistols, Sinatra’s publicist had to get them out of jail. Gardner also wanted proof of his intentions. The biography recounts a time she made him drive to his house and phone his wife, so that Nancy herself could confirm that he had asked for a divorce. Nancy would not give way at first, though she eventually agreed.

The accounts of that earlier marriage do not match. People describes Sinatra as happily married to his longtime sweetheart before 1949, while Sinatra himself, once reports of the affair broke in February 1950, insisted that the marriage had been over well before he met Gardner. Gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons went after him for leaving his wife, and so did the Catholic Church and his own fans. The Associated Press’s entertainment calendar gives the wedding date as November 7, 1951.

Nairobi and the penalty clauses

Off camera, Gardner could dispose of a man in a few words. Of John Ford, who directed her in Mogambo, she said: “Thoroughly evil. Adored him!” That film took the couple to Nairobi, and there, according to People’s summary of the biography, she became pregnant with Sinatra’s child and ended the pregnancy after he left, without telling him. People dates an abortion to late 1952 and says he was reportedly crushed when he learned of it. When she became pregnant again and made the same decision, he was there as she woke, with “tears streaming down his face,” in the words People gives.