Ava Gardner by Lee Server

Ava Gardner by Lee Server

"The most complete and engrossing biography yet of this exotic Southern girl...Excellent."--Liz Smith

She was the sex symbol who dazzled all the other sex symbols. She was the temptress who drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide and haunted him to the end of his life. Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento, and Howard Hughes begged her to marry him--but she knocked out his front teeth instead.

She was one of the great icons in Hollywood history--star of The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa, and The Night of the Iguana--and one of the few whose actual life was grander and more colorful than any movie. Her jaw-dropping beauty, charismatic presence, and fabulous, scandalous adventures fueled the legend of Ava Gardner--Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star.

"A seductive book."--The New York Times

"Deliciously entertaining."--Publishers Weekly

"Irresistible and finally heartbreaking."--The Newark Star-Ledger

"Super."--USA Today

In this acclaimed first full biography of Gardner, Lee Server recreates--with great style and vivid detail--the actress's life, from her beginnings as a barefoot North Carolina farm girl to her heady days as a Hollywood goddess. He paints the full spectacle of her tumultuous private life--including her string of failed marriages to Mickey Rooney, Sinatra and Artie Shaw--and Gardner's lifelong search for adventure and love.

Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing" is both an exceptional work of biography and a richly entertaining read.

LEE SERVER is the best-selling and critically acclaimed biographer of Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner, Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care and Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing, respectively. The Los Angeles Times awarded Robert Mitchum's book a Best Book of the Year, the Sunday Times' film biography of the year, and one of the 60 Greatest Cinema Books. The novel Ava Gardner was a New York Times Notable Book as well as a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today bestseller. He resides in the city of Palm Springs, California.