Ava

Ava is an illustrated biography of Ava Gardner by Kendra Bean, published in 2017. The Open Library record gives it 264 pages, and the description in that record names Anthony Uzarowski as her co-author. Google Books lists the same work as Ava Gardner: A Life in Movies, credits both Bean and Uzarowski, and gives July 11, 2017 as the publication date and Hachette+ORM as the publisher. Its record puts the length at 709 pages, which does not match the Open Library count. The dust jacket, as Open Library quotes it, calls the book a “lavishly illustrated tribute.” The publisher’s description on Google Books says the story is told in text and in hundreds of photos.

According to the jacket, the book looks at Gardner’s best-known screen roles and at how her glamorous image was built and kept up. It also covers her marriages and her friendships with Ernest Hemingway, John Huston and Tennessee Williams. The jacket follows the life from Grabtown, North Carolina, to the Spanish bullrings, by way of the MGM backlot and the Rome of La Dolce Vita. Gardner was born in Grabtown on December 24, 1922, and she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941. The jacket describes her as an Academy Award nominee, and that nomination was for Mogambo. Open Library files the book under biography, motion picture actors and actresses, and motion pictures.

For fans

Where it sits among the Gardner books

Of the books about Ava Gardner listed here, this is the most recent. It came out two years after John Joseph Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) and four years after Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner (2013). Lee Server’s Ava Gardner came out 11 years earlier, in 2006. The oldest book on the list is Charles Higham’s Ava: a life story (1974), followed by Judith M. Kass’s Ava Gardner (1977) and John Daniell’s Ava Gardner (1982). Bean’s book shares its short title with Roland Flamini’s 1983 biography and with Gardner’s own memoir, published in 1990. Karin J. Fowler’s bio-bibliography and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men came out that same year. The catalog also lists two novels about her, by Alton Rivers (2007) and Edward Ifkovic (2012).

Gardner and Sinatra

The jacket names Gardner’s lifelong love affair with Frank Sinatra as one of the things she is known for. Gardner and Sinatra were married from 1951 to 1957. The article How Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra met: a nightclub in 1943, then MGM in 1949 relies chiefly on this book, under its Ava, a Life in Movies title. From the book it takes two meetings: one at a club in 1943, while Gardner was with Mickey Rooney, and another at MGM in 1949. The article also draws on the book for Sinatra telling her she had become prettier, a joyride at 3 a.m. with two pistols, and a phone call to his wife Nancy that Gardner made Sinatra place. The available records say nothing more about the book’s sources or how it was received.