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Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing
Books: Travel: Africa: Item 1
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Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothingby Lee Server
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful: Love is Nothing, June 8, 2006 Reviewer:Brad Baker (Atherton, Ca United States) - Lee Server's brand new "Ava Gardner, Love is Nothing", is a proud companion to his comprehensive biography of actor Robert Mitchum. Trust me, "Love is Nothing" includes everything. Ravishing and famous in her time, Ava Gardner is, sadly, almost forgotten today. Gardner, a 5'6" barefoot tom-boy from Grabtown, North Carolina, had her photograph reviewed by MGM Studios in the late 1930's. She received a movie contract. MGM paid her $150.00 a week. But Ava languished at the Culver City, Calif. lot for years, taking bit parts and extra work. She was loaned-out to Monogram Pictures in 1943 for a small role in "Ghosts on the Loose", with Bela Lugosi. But then came a saucy portrayal as a mobster vixen in "The Killers(1946)" with Burt Lancaster. Her career took off. With success came money and recognition. And love. Two quick marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw ended badly. Ava became jaded on love. But not on romance. Then she met Frank Sinatra. The young New Jersey crooner fell madly in love with Ava. But Frank and Ava were incendiary. And they liked to drink. Volatile and flighty, they were perhaps, too much alike. They could make love and argue in just a matter of minutes. On their wedding day, Frank and Ava broke-up and reconciled before the ceremony. Twice. Server's book details Ava's starring role in MGM's "Mogambo(1953)", with Clark Gable. Husband Sinatra tagged along with them, on-location, in Africa. Ava had to buy Frank's plane ticket. Sinatra was at the lowest point in his career. The marriage strained under the cross-currents of opposite business directions. Ironically, Ava was on the verge of stardom; Sinatra was just all played-out. Sinatra and Ava parted; the damage done. The scars of their love would haunt them both for the rest of their lives. Mediocre film roles followed. But, in 1957, 20th Century-Fox hired Ava to star in an adaption of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", the story of Jake, an American journalist, and his friends enjoying Paris in the 1920's. The movie co-starred Tyrone Power, Eddie Albert, Henry Daniell, and Errol Flynn as Mike Campbell. Ava was stunning as Lady Brett, but it was Flynn, as the world-weary Campbell, who stole the show. Flynn delivered a textured performance as the dissolute playboy. His portrayal mirrored real-life. He died just two years later. More films followed for Ava, but she never overcame a deep insecurity about acting. And she drank. In 1968, due to tax problems, Ava moved from Spain to London, her final home for the next 22 years. She never forgot Sinatra(and, maybe, never stopped loving him). Frank Sinatra paid all her medical expenses after her 1989 stroke, which left her partially paralyzed and bedridden. This a long(560 pages) and detailed biography, but it's never boring, as Server dishes up every explicit morsel of this woman's amazing life. It may not all be true, but, then again, maybe it is.
From Publishers Weekly
At the ripe old age of 32, having collected three ex-husbands-Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra-Ava Gardner waxed introspective: "I still believe the most important thing in life is to be loved." Server's (Baby, I Don't Care) deliciously entertaining tome bursts with Hollywood dish and Oscar-worthy dialogue and is written in a crackling style that reads like great pulp. "Love became her terrible habit," he writes, "something hopeless to resist, impossible to get right." A Tobacco Road urchin turned "statue of Venus sprung to succulent life," Gardner ditched her secretarial aspirations and started at MGM in the early '40s as a contract actress earning $50 a week. She became an international star, drawing huge crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. But life wasn't always sweet for the gorgeous star of Show Boat and The Barefoot Contessa; her steamy affair and marriage to Sinatra ranks among the most notorious of Hollywood love stories. Gardner's career, hard drinking and screen-worthy love affairs are all chronicled in Server's page-turner prose, doing justice to one of cinema's most beautiful faces.
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Server follows his superb biography of Robert Mitchum (Baby I Don't Care, 2001) with the life of another midcentury movie icon: Ava Gardner. Gardner's rise from North Carolina tobacco country to Hollywood superstardom began when an MGM talent scout spotted her picture in the window of a photographer's studio. It's a Cinderella story, to be sure, but Server gives us the unexpurgated version, complete with Gardner's Mitchum-like credentials for booze consumption, rugged individualism, and sexual appetite (marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra and affairs with pretty much everyone else). And then there was her beauty--in interviews with dozens of stars, the message is the same: no one ever looked better than Ava Gardner. This is also a story of the studio system, and Gardner was one of its most notable victims, ill-used throughout her career, forced to do bad movies and forced to watch her good movies decimated in the cutting room. Server capably assesses the hits and misses, languishing on those electric moments when the camera caught the "feline sprawl of her exquisite body." A no-holds-barred view of a larger-than-life star. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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