Ava Gardner (Bloomsbury Lives of Women) - Softcover

Men literally had to support themselves against buildings when she walked by—she was that beautiful. Ava Gardner was the greatest sex symbol of her time, and also a bad girl who became the obsession of many of the biggest names of her day—including Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, and Howard Hughes. She drank, fought, and slept around with the best of them. She married some, too. Mickey Rooney, the biggest star on the MGM lot, was her first husband; he’d chased her from the moment he saw her, fresh off the train from North Carolina by way of Manhattan, with her sister as her chaperone. Second husband Artie Shaw, the charismatic, cold-blooded bandleader, played Pygmalion to Ava, but also never let her forget that he considered her his inferior. Then there was Sinatra, whose jealousy she battled—often physically—from the Cocoanut Grove to Palm Springs, but whose dreams she haunted for the rest of his life.

Ava Gardner: “Love Is Nothing” paints a fresh, stylish portrait of an actress who starred in The Killers, The Sun Also Rises, and The Night of the Iguana and who was the original Barefoot Contessa. It also repositions the talented star as more than just tabloid fodder. The most alluring woman of the 1950’s, a famously conservative time, lived life like a man—drinking, brawling, moving around the world to pursue her passions for lovers and other cultures. Her love of bullfighting—and bullfighters—led to a dramatic stint in Spain, which culminated in being thrown out of the Ritz in Madrid and a fall from a bull that permanently scarred that famous face. Gardner’s last years were spent in London; Server’s chapters about that solitary time in her life, when disease sprang up and attention died down, are raw and moving.

A rich biography of a woman at the peak of her powers, Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing” is prodigiously researched and laced with fascinating details of a life, as well as of a time and a universe that encompasses Hollywood in its heyday, North Carolina’s tobacco country, New York, London, Madrid, Africa and Mexico.