Ava Gardner by Peter Evans

Author:Peter Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

15

How much longer is this fucking book going to take, baby?” Ava demanded as soon as I entered the apartment. It was 12:30 P.M., too early in the day to expect her to be at her most winning, but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so disagreeable either.

“The delay doesn’t seem to concern you anywhere near as much as it concerns me. For you, there will always be another book. For me, this is it. This is my one shot, baby. I’m not asking for a literary masterpiece, fahcrissake. If I’d wanted a literary fucking masterpiece, I could have asked Robert Graves to write it for me,” she said, referring to the late English poet and novelist, a devoted admirer whom she equally adored. “I just want a book that’ll pay the fucking mortgage now, baby, not next year. Time’s not on my side, you know that, fahcrissake. You’re causing me a lot of fucking grief. You and I have a problem, baby.”

I knew that she was becoming anxious about the time I was taking to finish the chapters to submit to Dick Snyder, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by the frustration and anger in her voice, but I was. I hadn’t regarded the pages I left with her the previous evening as in any way final but I thought at least they would have reassured her.

Her anger was paralyzing. And when she’s in that kind of mood, Dirk Bogarde had warned me, and so had Peter Viertel, you just had to duck and weave and keep your distance. “Jesus, she can be tough on her friends,” Viertel had said with feeling, concluding a story about her displeasure at a scene he had written for her in The Sun Also Rises. “Just remember, she believes that writers only respond to pressure,” he’d said wryly.

Forewarned, I didn’t argue with her. When she was in that frame of mind, there was nothing I could say that would not be wrong. I didn’t even remind her that I had written several chapters she had loved, drafted a few more, which I was sure she was going to like, and was continuing to interview her two or three times a week. I’d also been moonlighting on my novel Theodora but, heeding Ed Victor’s advice, I hadn’t told her about that at all.

Fortunately, I hadn’t planned to do any work with Ava that day. I had simply dropped by to hear what she thought of the new draft pages, and to give her a copy of the final volume of historian Martin Gilbert’s official biography of Sir Winston Churchill. She had met the English statesman aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in the south of France in the 1950s; along with FDR, he was a hero of hers. Gilbert had footnoted Ari, my biography of the Greek tycoon, and I’d hoped that this tenuous link might elicit some odd detail that would unlock a memory Ava could be unconsciously holding back. It was a ploy

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.