Amazon Review, 2006; (Reprinted from published media)
Ava Gardner, under the mistaken belief that she
was having a date with director Howard Hawks, soon
learned that the tall, “rail thin” man with the
“rawboned face of a cowboy” was none other than Texas
entrepreneur Howard Hughes. Modestly amused by the
mixup, Hughes asked Ava out again, and they soon began
seeing each other “several times a week or more.” But
let there be no mixup about Lee Server’s powerfully
compelling portrait of Ava Gardner. The man, along
with his international contacts and sources, has
crafted a a complex portrait of a barefooted country
girl whose photograph in the window of a portrait
studio in New York ultimately captivated the world
with her beauty and the antics of her personal life.
Server’s previous biography, Robert Mitchum, Baby I
Don’t Care, showcased his expertise with all things
film and noire, and AVA GARDNER allows him full venue
to elaborate in this ode to the Barefoot Contessa of
two continents. With a surplus of parentheticals and
bottom-of-the-page addendum, Server leaves tidbits
like Ava changed partners, always something new and
savory demanding a change to the next blank page
where something must be written. From Ava’s best
friend in high school, to her last, closest chums in
London’s high-brow Knightsbridge district, everyone
had something to say about Gardner’s extraordinary
goddess-like beauty and her volatile personal
landscape.
This book reveals Gardner’s inauspicious beginnings
deep in the red-dirt heartland of North Carolina, and
then provides the reader a world tour with the most
enticing brunette of the forties and fifties as she
emotes in private and on film. Hemingway, Sinatra,
Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner, Howard Hughes, Robert
Mitchum, Luis Miguel Dominguin, Esther Williams,
Fidel Castro, Judy Garland, John Huston, and many
others have their moments in the sol and sombra with
Ava. Only MGM central casting would have difficulty
finding all the extras for this moveable feast of a
book. The baked Alaska is Gardner’s jagged frankness
and crisp retorts left unprintable in the 40’s, 50’s,
and 60’s, but poured out on Server’s pages like so
much tequila.
The rise of the paparazzi, the inspiration for La
Dolce Vita and the final cast for The Pink Panther
all had something to do with Ava Gardner. There are
sweet, candid remittances from BBC Television’s Joanna
Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous fame, who was a castmember of
Roddy McDowall’s first directorial effort, Tam Lin, which
starred Gardner in her forty-seventh year. Her utter lack
of prejudice reveals her democratic spirit, and Server’s sources also
illuminate past information from previously published
show business biographies that has been tweaked and
updated with scandal, certainty, and revelations from
Ava’s personal friends (Spoli Mills, Betty Sicre) and
industry insiders like Gene Reynolds, producer of
television’s M*A*S*H*, Hemingway pal A.E. Hotchner,
and Artie Shaw, Ava’s second husband. But it was her
third husband she had the most difficulty releasing.
Server’s depiction of Ava and Frank drops readers in
the minefields and mortar shells of a very personal
war that was unfortunately quite public, and it
leaves no profanity unmuttered. Credits rolled at the
end of their final love scene, and Server fills in
the spaces no one else dared or could.
With a list of 109 personal interviews and 24 pages of
sources, Server ‘s skullduggery into the nine decades
since Ava Gardner arrived in Grabtown, North Carolina,
on December 24, 1922, has revealed the Venus who often
erupted like Mount Vesuvius, leaving heartbreak
and despair in her wake. The only elements missing are
possibly the addition of more photographs and a desire
to see Ava Gardner, the actress and seductress, on
film again. The psychology of her alcoholism and her
regrets at the end of her life reveal the pain. But
her eternal beauty and her gypsy soul dance away the
night in the streets and clubs of Madrid. You can
almost hear the castanets.
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