Love, Ava

Love, Ava is a novel by Alton Rivers, and Ava Gardner is one of its characters. St. Martin’s Press published it on February 6, 2007. Its Open Library record gives it 272 pages and files it under fiction, friendship, veterans, the Vietnam War of 1961 to 1975, and London. The catalog lists it under Ava Gardner. The Wikipedia article on Gardner names it under further reading, with the subtitle A Novel.

The publisher’s description on the Google Books record gives the premise. Major Russ Jefferson comes home from a hard tour in Vietnam, burned and grieving. He gives up a promising career in aviation and takes a desk post at the American Embassy in London. There he sees Gardner stumble on a curb as she gets out of a taxi, and he goes to help her. The description says she is far past her peak and is already struggling with symptoms of the illness that would later kill her. It says the two begin a hesitant affair that changes both of their lives, and it calls the book “bittersweet and poignant.”

The novel stands out among the other Gardner books in the catalog because it is fiction. The catalog lists 13 titles about her, and only two are novels. The other is Edward Ifkovic’s Make Believe, which Poisoned Pen Press published in 2012, five years after this one. Of the remaining 11, 10 are biographies and one is Gardner’s own memoir, Ava, which Bantam issued in 1990.

For fans

Among the Gardner books

Rivers’s novel came out a year after Lee Server’s biography Ava Gardner (2006), and St. Martin’s Press published both. The further reading list in Wikipedia’s Gardner article includes both books and gives Server’s the subtitle Love Is Nothing. The catalog offers 10 biographies for readers who want the documented life, from Charles Higham’s in 1974 to Kendra Bean’s in 2017. Wikipedia gives the full title of Gardner’s memoir as Ava: My Story.

The publisher’s account and the editions

The publisher’s description presents Gardner as a screen goddess of the Hollywood Golden Era who earned her name as a “man killer.” It adds that she was still as dangerous as she was beautiful. It ends on a sacrifice it describes as unusual for her: she gives up what may be her last chance at happiness to save Jefferson from himself. The Google Books record lists a later edition, titled Love, Ava: A Novel and dated December 10, 2013, from Macmillan + ORM, at 292 pages. The 2007 St. Martin’s edition in Open Library has 272. The records say nothing about how reviewers received the novel or what sources Rivers used, and no articles here are tagged to it yet.