Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

This biography, begun in the late 1980s and abandoned after Frank Sinatra found out about it, was finally published in 2013. The reader doesn't get much from Ava Gardner's Sinatra years, but there is plenty (perhaps too much) on her first marriage, to Mickey Rooney. The account of Gardner's rural upbringing is excellently done. Her stories of old Hollywood, even half-true, reveal both her power as a sex object and her lifelong insecurity. She called herself a simple farm girl, but the transcript reveals a Bertrand Russell compared to dull-witted actors in the spotlight today.