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Ava Gardner: "Love Is Nothing" | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $7.96 (44%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 19900
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 560
Dewey Decimal Number: 790
ASIN: B001C4PH9C
Publication Date: April 3, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
It is said men literally had to support themselves against buildings when she walked by. She was that beautiful. She was the great 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; Artie Shaw, the charismatic, cold-blooded bandleader; Sinatra, whose jealousy she battled like a wildcat and whose dreams she haunted for the rest of his life.This biography is rich with style, detail, and a sense of place. Prodigiously researched and laced with fascinating fresh interviews with many who worked with, knew-or loved-Gardner, many speaking on the record for the first time, Ava Gardner: -Love is Nothing+ repositions the talented star as a woman who lived large, long, and precisely as she wanted to.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Beautiful and self destructive woman September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Really enjoyed this book, found it well written and well researched. She was lovely woman to look at, but she destroyed herself with her excesses and probably destroyed others in the process.
The book should have been called 'Destroying Beauty'. I don't think she really thought love was nothing, I think she must have thought it was everything and aside from her time with Sinatra, she never quite found it. She turned to booze for solace like so many others have, before and since.
 Superbly Entertaining and Informative! May 12, 2008
This is a wonderfully entertaining and superbly researched biography of a true Hollywood screen legend. Lee Server did a magnificent job and is just fun to read. If you enjoy reading the larger-than-life stories of Hollywood's most notable characters, then this book is for you. Once you read about Ava, you'll be clamoring for Server's book on Robert Mitchum, "Baby, I Don't Care".
 Well-written but ultimately ridiculous May 2, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Lee Server is a cut above the usual "star" biographer in many ways - he can really write, he makes the most vapid subject interesting, and he can hold the reader's interest throughout. But...does he wear blinders? He reiterates over and over and over and over again how Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world and how EVERYONE loved her. The book is so one-sided as to be a love-letter to Ava herself. I find it difficult to believe with her behavior and lifestyle that there wasn't ONE single person who spoke negatively about her and who intensely disliked her...but you won't find it in this book. It seems the one man who turned her down was Paul Newman and even that episode is wrapped up in one quick sentence and made to seem like something was wrong with him. C'mon Lee...get real and write some of the negative comments about her predatory lifestyle - from the wives/girlfriends/children of marriages/relationships she interferred with. And why didn't Ava, or someone who loved her (Bappie) seek help for her nympho ways because this woman truly had a problem. This wasn't someone just "enjoying" sex...she was disturbed, and Lee Server really doesn't seem to recognize it.
On the plus side - lots of juicy old Hollywood gossip.
Portrait of a Siren January 29, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
First of all, let me say this is an excellent biography, a superb, superb read--magnificently done. What one comes to doubt is the worthiness of his subject. His subject is Ava Gardner. The first most obvious thing about her was her beauty--and it is a fact--she was one of the most beautiful women to ever star in a Hollywood movie. That much should be given to her, and testaments to her spectacular, disarming beauty are replete throughout the book.
Server excellently sketches us the portrait of this woman, whose persona was quite layered, and rife with contradictions. Ava--what could you say about her? First of all one starts with the physical aspect of her, which made her a veritable screen goddess and international star--and that singular beauty was a significant force in her life for several reasons. It firstly compelled nearly every man she ever knew to want her; and this dazzling beauty seemed to give her a seemingly endless line of credit with men. That is to say she was so beautiful that it allowed her to exhibit darker shades of her personality with impunity, and largely without consequence. She was a woman of extremes, of light and darkness. She was said to be initially shy with people, in that it was difficult for her to wade at first into social interaction--yet when she did gain that initial familiarity, she displayed an easiness of manner, an honesty, a genuineness, a down-to-earth charm that won her the fondness of a great many people. And yet, oftentimes the charm was simply a mood, only skin deep--when the mood would turn, and it inevitably did, she could be cold, callous, rude, brutal and direct if it sought her fancy. She could be tremendously ingratiating, and did not put on airs,--a trait which won her many a friend while filming this movie and that--and yet she was incredibly difficult to work with on the set, hypersensitive to the slightest disturbance, demanding outrageous perks which one would only expect of the most pompous star. Her beauty enabled her to treat men exactly as she pleased, with callousness, neglect, or outright abuse and yet they nearly almost always came back obediently for more, until she tired of them, or more rarely, they would at some point finally reach their threshold for the invective she dealt out.
Server points out that Ava was a flawed person whose belief in love was irreparably damaged from a miserable marriage to bandleader Artie Shaw. Shaw, a cold, arrogant, distant man, saw Gardner as a backwoods, ignorant country girl and despised her for her lack of education and sophistication; his contempt and scorn for her wounded her time and time again, until literally he could no longer endure what he considered her lack of intellect and dull, provincial ways and divorced her; and he seemed to be the one man whom Ava had wanted but ultimately whose approval she never won--an exception which would never be repeated again for the rest of her life. She projected a down-to-earth affability which she could alternate with a detached aloofness, which with her appetite for sex fooled many men into thinking she was in love when in reality she was only passing the time and opting against loneliness. Her beauty, spirit, and aloof detachment made her a positive obsession of Frank Sinatra, her husband in the 50s. At the same time Frank and Ava were possibly the very worst couple of that entire decade. Both suffered as it was from wild mood swings and lacked entirely a quality most people practice in major relationships--the ability to regulate or modify one's speech to a situation. Whenever Frank or Ava were upset, or frustrated or angry or even dissatisfied(which was, admittedly, almost perpetually), they would express their feelings, as they did as a rule to everyone else in their lives, without qualification or filter, profanely, with extreme prejudice. Neither Frank nor Ava ever seemed to be able--nor ever really wanted--to mask what they felt to anyone in particular; they were never able to hold back in their dealings with anyone, and this rule held true for their marriage as well. The fact that Ava and Frank were both by this time alcoholics--Ava especially--and inveterate social animals accustomed to going out on the town every night only fueled the instability and the strife, and they broke up.
Ava stopped working regularly after her breakup with Sinatra and her life completely disintegrated into a restless jaunt around the globe of drinking, parties and sex. Server relates that Ava was a person who could act at times with a chilling, ruthless selfishness--she had two abortions in her life, one Sinatra's child and the other possibly Sinatra's but possibly one of the many lovers she took while filming "Mogambo" . This is heartrending in itself, but because of her breakups with Sinatra and Shaw, she came to believe that true love would never happen again to her and that love itself even was not desirable; she had no husband in the second half of her life and virtually no family at all besides her sister, and moreover, no children, since she had aborted all of her pregnancies--and this was an equation for a life essentially of emptiness and loneliness, and though Ava gamely tried to fill it with parties and casual lovers, her life for the most part became as much. Server is outstanding and thorough in his treatment of his subject; the freshness and verve of his writing convey to us the allure and mystique of his charismatic subject; and we are no different than the rest; in reading his work we fall in love with her too, and ultimately we pity her for a life of glamour and fame but also of tragic choices that ultimately did not serve her well in the end.
Hard to Put Down December 30, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Overall this book was revealing, entertaining and hard to put down. There were a few minor points that I thought the book lacked or should have clarified. For example, when Bappie accompanies Ava to Hollywood, Bappie was married to Larry Tarr a New York photographer. However, the book never mentioned what became of Bappie's marriage. Something I thought should have been mentioned since the reader was introduced to Bappie's marriage and then left hanging.
Also, I am not a fan of books that in one Chapter quote people saying, for example, that Ava was still a beautiful woman even in her forties. However, in the next Chapter would be devoted to people quoted as saying Ava was no longer beautiful and that she was old and unappealing. So we have two different versions or opinions concerning Ava at that time and the reader is lost as to which version is real.
Likewise her publicist, David Hanna mused "What friends?" when someone mentioned Ava's friends. However, later there were a number of people referred to as old close friends. Since Hanna was dismissed by Ava, I think this quote of his could be properly cited as a tactless statement made by a bitter man and nothing more.
These are minor points but I think it helps to discuss areas of weakness in a book.
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