We [Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner] became lovers forever--eternally. Big words, I know. But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love... one or two people tried to warn me about him. Lana Turner was one. She had been one of Artie Shaw's wives, and she'd had a very serious affair with Frank a couple of years before me... Though he was shuttling backward and forward between her bedroom and Nancy's [Frank's wife], trying to equate obedience to Catholic doctrines with indulgence in his natural inclinations, divorce plans were all set up and
[COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]wedding [COLOR=blue !important]plans[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] had been made.
Then Lana woke up one morning, picked up the newspaper, and red that Frank had changed his mind and gone back to Nancy for good. It was the old Catholic arrangement: wife and family come first...
...I told Lana gently that Frank and I were in love, and that this time he really was going to leave Nancy for good. If I'm in love, I want to get married: that's my fundamentalist Protestant background. If he wanted me, there could be no compromise on that issue.
...Now, nearly forty years later, I can be fairly rational about this, even smile ruefully at all the fuss. Then, however, I was deeply hurt and upset. All I had done was fall in love. It was, unfortunately, with a married Catholic man...
[page 127] In the next few weeks [after Nancy Sinatra announced that she and Frank were formally separated, and Ava's affair with Frank Sinatra became more public] I was receiving scores of letters accusing me of being a scarlet woman, a home wrecker, and worse. One correspondent addressed me as "b*tch-Jezebel-Gardner," the Legion of Decency threatened to ban my movies, and Catholic priests found the time to write me accusatory letters. I even read where the Sisters of Mary and Joseph asked their students at St. Paul the Apostle School in Los Angeles to pray for Frank's poor wife. I didn't understand then and, frankly, I still don't understand now why there should be this prurient mass hysteria about a male and female climbing into bed and doing what comes naturally. It's blessed in weddings, celebrated in honeymoons, but out of wedlock it's condemned as the worst of sins.