BillLindau

Book review: "Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing", by Lee Server

Book review
Ava Gardner bio well-researched, well-written
BILL LINDAU
Special to The Raeford News-Journal
AVA GARDNER: LOVE IS NOTHING, by Lee Server (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006). Biography. 551 pages. $29.95.
Ava Gardner (1922-1990) is undoubtedly the most famous of North Carolina’s native daughters, next to if not including Virginia Dare. This Smithfield native got rid of her Southern accent in a hurry, but she never forget where she came from. This 2006 biography shows that, and this endearing but fair-sounding portrait of one of Hollywood’s most beautiful – and highly interesting – sex goddesses is in my opinion one of the best books to come out the year 2006.
Lee Server, the author of an award-winning bio of Robert Mitchum, has read countless magazine articles and spoken to quite a few people who worked with her. Many of them were still alive after 2000, about the time Server set out on this highly ambitious project. The last 51 pages consists of lists of all his sources, including interviews with people such as the late bandleader Artie Shaw, Gardner’s second husband, Gardner’s housekeeper Carmen Vargas; fellow actresses Janet Leigh, Virginia Mayo and Joanna Lumley and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Server also talked to former paparazzi in many of the countries where she made films – and treated them with open hostility.
Patriotic North Carolinians will especially enjoy the early part of the book, which describes her early years living around Smithfield and in Virginia, just before World War II. It’s a part of the state – and of the mid-South – that is slowly vanishing – the small towns, the farms, the tobacco industry.
It will also make you mad when you read about how non-Southerners made fun of her accent. When she first arrives in Hollywood, “it didn’t help matters that she was shy of speaking at will, aware that her Carolina accent struck some people with horror,” Server writes.
In the second chapter, Server describes tells of the following account by a talent specialist who met her earlier in New York: “Jacobson (Ben, the agent) would one day recall that the beautiful teenager had sounded pretty incomprehensible to his New York ears, everything drawled vowels that seemed to last forever and ‘gs’ that dropped ‘like shattered magnolia blossoms.’ It didn’t matter. She could have been speaking Chinese – he couldn’t take his eyes off her.”
Server devotes the greater part of the book to Gardner’s stormy, love-hate relationship with third husband Frank Sinatra. You wonder how much of it you can believe about Sinatra, but it makes him look pretty bad. He tells how one night Sinatra is so jealous of unsuccessful suitor Howard Hughes that he goes out looking for Hughes with a loaded gun one night. These are the parts, however, that make the book most entertaining.
Some parts of the book will make you laugh out loud, while others make you want to cry or curse the people that treated her rotten, such as George C. Scott and second husband Artie Shaw. On the other hand, the book does nothing to make Gardner a candidate for sainthood, as you see in account of the years she spent in Spain during the 1930s, the way she let herself go in the wake of her failing marriage to Sinatra, the unsavory company she kept, the hotels that barred her because of her wild behavior. We also don’t like to hear the way she treated people close to her, how she could treat one of her friends like royalty one day and shut the same person out of her life the next.
Server strikes a happy medium in his account of his iconic subject. This book is neither a total puff piece nor a total hatchet job. He shows plenty of good things to like about her, such as her devotion to her dogs, and to relationships with longtime friends such as Gregory Peck and the two housekeepers in her life. She also raised some hackles with her friendships with African-Americans, a scandalous idea among white Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
In his fair treatment of his long-deceased subject, this is where Server succeeds. Celebrity bio lovers who don’t like the way many biographers treat long-deceased subjects will be pleased at this account of one of the most beautiful, troubled and at the same time highly popular women of this century.
In my years critiquing books and movies, I know works of art are just as imperfect as their creators. You can find fault even in Shakespeare’s major plays. This is a different story. I can’t think of a thing I didn’t like about this riveting account of the Tar Heel States’ famous native daughter.
Contact writer Bill Lindau at blindau52@earthlink.net

posted by Bill Lindau @ 5:41 PM