When a smitten great-grandson of Charles Darwin pronounced Ava Gardner "the highest specimen of the human species," he summed up the consensus about this voluptuous movie queen. With remarkable unanimity, those who met Gardner were apt m second that emotion.
"She was a sexy gal," said George Sidney, who filmed her for an MGM screen test in 1941. "Man. she was a hot number," Miles Davis said many years later.{{U}} (41) {{/U}}. As for the much-vaunted party stamina of a woman who never met a drink or a bullfighter she didn't like: "She could go all night, y'know. She was a wild country girl and liked to let her hair down and fling off her shoes and have a good time." Her latest biographer. Lee Server, is no slouch when it comes to admiring Gardner. His book's introduction calls her "a carnal, dangerous angel in the chiaroscuro dreamscape of film noir."
{{U}} (42) {{/U}}. He is well suited 1o writing about iconic movie mavericks like these two. He's not a bore. And as the author of a book about film noir, he understands cinematic idiom. Mr. Serverrefers to amnesia as "noir's Version of the common cold."
"Ava Gardner. 'Love Is Nothing'" is a seductive book that avoids the pitfalls that come with its territory. First of all, there is the problem of the star's memoir. Ms. Gardner's autobiography was published posthumously and worked on by several writers, sometimes sounding that way. Mr. Server makes use of this account without particularly trusting it, and with a nod to the apocryphal nature of so many Gardner stories.{{U}} (43) {{/U}}
He also enlivens his book's bibiliography with a long string of newspaper and magazine headlines that capture the tenor of Gardner's paper trail.{{U}} (44) {{/U}}. Gardner lived so much of her life in this kind of spotlight that the tabloid coverage became part of her story.
"There is one extant press photo of the couple on their honeymoon that does not show them muning0 snarling, cringing, cowering," Mr. Server writes about Gardner's gale-force stormy marriage (her third) to Frank Sinatra. "Of course, it was taken from a distance, and from the mar."{{U}} (45) {{/U}}. She called love "nothing but a pain" and specified where the pain was.
Her story begins in Grabtown, the rural North Carolina burg that became famous as her birthplace. But it doesn't take long for Mr. Server to take Gardner to Hollywood, into an MGM contract and a marriage to Mickey Rooney. Rooney, who called his honeymoon with Gardner "a sexual symphony," was one of many men whose memoirs bragged of bedroom exploits with tiffs gorgeous creature. She liked to kiss and tell, too. "We never fought in bed." she supposedly said about Sinatra. "The fight would start on the way to the bidet"
[A] And when the facts are unobtainable, he's willing reprint the legend; or so it seems—stories like "Later on she took the entire band with her when the club closed."
[B] Others thought of her as "a goddess," "an enigma," "a very, very wild spirit" and "one of those people who broke the rules all the time."
[C] Among them: "Ava, 'Nervous,' Tossed Out of Brazil Hotel"; "Nothing Between Us, Says Ava": "Sinatra Departs, Ava Blows Kisses to Bullfighter."
[D] Speaking of the rear, this book's subtitle, "Love Is Nothing," is only a partial, sanitized quotation from Gardner.
[E] For Gardner, love and pain became a swirling, kamikaze-like froth of high-speed existence before decades of overload finally broke her down.
[F] Server fondly brings Gardner to life as a warm,- refreshingly unpretentious star whose appetites eventually overwhelmed her spirit.
[G] But Mr. Server. whose last book was a Robert Mitchum biography that lived up to its terrific title ("Robert Mitchum: 'Baby, I Don't Care'"), can also keep his cool.