About Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra
Frank & Ava is a biography by John Joseph Brady, published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2015. Its subject is the love story of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Open Library files it under both of their names and under singers and motion picture actors. The Google Books record gives the full title as Frank & Ava: In Love and War. It names Macmillan as the publisher and dates publication to October 13, 2015.
The two records give different lengths. Open Library counts 292 pages and Google Books lists 377. The library cataloging data quoted in the Google Books record gives Brady’s birth year as 1942 and lists separate ISBNs for a hardcover and an e-book edition.
The publisher’s description says the story had only been told in fragments before, from his side or from hers. It calls the book thoroughly researched. It also says the book is not the storybook version of a Hollywood romance. Instead it presents the relationship as a drama of “love and emotional war” that left both people wounded for life. All of these are the publisher’s claims.
The longer description in the Google Books record sets out the ground the book covers. It starts before Sinatra, with Gardner’s marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw (by its account, neither lasted a year) and with Howard Hughes among the men who courted her. It then follows Sinatra as he leaves his wife and children for Gardner, with the press trailing the couple from location to location. After that come their marriage, the quarrels and separations, and finally the divorce. The description says the two kept up a private relationship afterward, tried to reconcile and looked after each other to the end. It sums the book up as the story of a romance carried on under battlefield conditions.
The same description opens with a line credited to USA Today. That paper said the book tells of the couple’s stormy romance while also giving “a broader portrait of Hollywood’s Golden Age.” No other review appears in the record.
According to Wikipedia, Gardner was married to Sinatra from 1951 to 1957. She filed for divorce in 1954, and the divorce became final in 1957. The two stayed good friends for the rest of her life. Wikipedia also notes that in her autobiography she called Sinatra the love of her life.
Frank & Ava came out in 2015, two years after Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner (2013) and two years before Kendra Bean’s Ava (2017). The catalog lists most of the other Gardner books as biographies. Two are novels: Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava (2007) and Edward Ifkovic’s Make Believe (2012). Readers who want Gardner’s own account can turn to her memoir, Ava (1990). Lee Server’s Ava Gardner (2006) and Charles Higham’s Ava (1974) are biographies of Gardner herself, not of the couple.
On the Sinatra side, the catalog lists three other books from 2015: Charles Pignone’s Frank Sinatra 100, John Seven’s Frankie Liked to Sing and David Lehman’s Sinatra’s Century. According to the catalog, Thomas Dunne Books also published Tom Santopietro’s Sinatra in Hollywood (2008). Wikipedia lists a 2018 film also called Frank & Ava, with Emily Elicia Low as Gardner. None of the sources say whether that film has any connection to Brady’s book. Apart from the publisher’s descriptions and the single USA Today line, the record says nothing about how Brady researched the book or how it was received.
John Brady’s book tells the Sinatra and Gardner story as a lifelong relationship. The publisher says Sinatra’s passion for Gardner ended his first marriage and nearly ruined him, and that the two kept trying to reconcile until the end. USA Today said it also gives a broader picture of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Article What happened to Frank Sinatra after his career collapsed in 1952
John Brady’s 2015 book is described by its publisher as tracing a secret relationship that Sinatra and Gardner kept up after their divorce, with attempts to reconcile right to the end.
Article How Frank Sinatra died in 1998
In the title Frank & Ava, the two names belong to Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, not to one person called Ava Frank. John Joseph Brady’s 2015 biography tells their love story, and Open Library files it under both of their names.
The sources here do not cover Abbott Elementary. In the Frank and Ava story they do record, Frank is Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner’s husband from 1951 to 1957 according to Wikipedia. The two stayed good friends after the divorce.
The sources here have no record of Frank Avalon. The Frank in Brady’s Frank & Ava is Frank Sinatra, who was born on December 12, 1915, and died on May 14, 1998, according to Wikipedia.
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Star profile / Frank Sinatra
By 1952 Frank Sinatra had lost his record label, MCA and most of his audience. A film role and a new arranger in 1953 began a second career that ran until his death in 1998.
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CNN reported in May 1998 that Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack at 82, and his family said his last words were “I’m losing.” This is the dated record of the vigil, the funeral Mass and the private burial.
Continue readingStar profile / Frank Sinatra
By 1952 Frank Sinatra had lost his record label, MCA and most of his audience. A film role and a new arranger in 1953 began a second career that ran until his death in 1998.
Continue reading
Kendra Bean · 2017
Peter Evans · 2013
Edward Ifkovic · 2012
Alton Rivers · 2007
Lee Server · 2006
Ava Gardner · 1990
Karin J. Fowler · 1990
Jane Ellen Wayne · 1990
Roland Flamini · 1983
John Daniell · 1982
Judith M. Kass · 1977
Charles Higham · 1974
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