Ava:  My Story by Ava Gardner is a 315-page hardcover published by Bantam Books, 1990.  The dust jacket has some rubbing and shelf wear but is fully intact.  The book has mild bumping to the spine and corners and has an inscription in ink on the front endpaper.  Otherwise, the book is clean, the binding is tight and the pages are unmarked.

Book Summary

"If I don't tell my side of the story," Ava Gardner said, "it'll be too late, and then some self-appointed biographer will step in and add to the inaccuracies, the inventions, and the abysmal lies that already exist. 

I want to tell the truth...about the three men I loved and married:  Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Francis Sinatra.  I want to write about the Hollywood I knew from the early forties when I arrived wide-eyed from the cotton and tobacco fields of North Carolina, about the films I made, many in exotic settings all over the world, often a damn sight more dramatic than the movies themselves. 

I want to remember it all, the good and bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years..."

For more than two years Ava Gardner sifted through her memories, filling ninety tapes with reminiscences of her life as a sharecropper's daughter turned legendary screen star.  She completed the last tape just a few months before her sudden death in January 1990.  And now, here, as only Ava can tell it, is her story--as straightforward, irreverent, and exciting as the woman herself. 

She was the seventh child of a kindly farmer and his gregarious wife; a risk-taking tomboy who was happiest running barefoot through the fields; a pretty girl who knew what it was like to be dirt poor.  She was Ava Gardner, and in 1940, at the age of eighteen, she was about to be transformed overnight from North Carolina hillbilly to MGM starlet.  Within six months she'd be socializing with stars such as Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter Lawford, dancing at Ciro's and the Trocadero--and married to Mickey Rooney, the most popular entertainer in America.  And that was only the beginning...