"Gardner kept the cheap coat she wore when she first arrived to remind herself where she came from."

Beneath the Stars

Jeanine Basinger

Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner

Simon and Schuster, 293 pp., $26.00

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907–1940

by Victoria Wilson

Simon and Schuster, 1,044 pp., $40.00

Both Stanwyck and Gardner knew Hollywood for what it was. Gardner kept the cheap coat she wore when she first arrived to remind herself where she came from. She preferred to hang out with nonprofessionals and lived as simply as she could. (“I’ll go on living according to my own standards,” she said.) Stanwyck, a disciplined professional who was friendly with her film crews, made similar statements: “It would be the same with me if I were a waitress in Peoria or a chambermaid in Oshkosh instead of a film actress in Hollywood.” Both women knew that fame was transient. “Movie stars write their books,” said Gardner, “then they are forgotten, and then they die.” Stanwyck warned Robert Taylor, when he first saw his name in lights, “The trick is to keep it up there.” She was coldly realistic about the world she lived in. “When you are up in Hollywood, you are accepted; when you are down, it is as though you do not exist.”