In the late 1980s, a larger-than-life movie star from Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age began making late-night phone calls to a British journalist she’d never met. Ava Gardner, one of the Silver Screen era’s original sex symbols, was hoping Peter Evans — a onetime columnist at London’s Daily Express — would ghostwrite her memoir and make her some money.

But the relationship crumbled, and Gardner died in 1990, well before Evans’ book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations,” was published.

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