Ava Gardner “Love Is Nothing” by Lee Server

Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing” by Lee Server

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There was a point when I was reading this that I thought about that moment in Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. That’s not to cast any aspersions upon Server’s fact-checking because this is a rigorously put together title with an enormous list of references in the back, but rather to recognise how stories came to Gardner and were wrapped around her and very rarely, it seemed, to touch upon the truth. She was a storymaker herself, a hard-drinker and hard-partyer and often, it seems, incredibly hard company, but also she was possessed of a profound loneliness. It’s Server’s sympathy to this that makes the book work: a gentle, thorough, and often deeply sad examination of a life lived at one hundred miles an hour.

Ava Gardner was discovered by chance, her beauty catching the eye of the man on the street, and through a wild ride of circumstance and telephone calls suddenly found herself in Hollywood, a movie star. She came from straitened circumstances, a barefoot childhood in North Carolina, and went through the fierce and unforgiving MGM studio system (the absolutely abusive edge of this!). It couldn’t have been easy and it didn’t get easier but she persisted and survived in the only way she knew how. She loved, she lived, and she kept going because it seemed that stopping wasn’t an option.

I gasped at stories written about her which wondered if they’d seen the last of her hotness on screen (she. was. thirty. nine. my. god). and I gasped at moments where reporters who did not get the quote that they wanted from her just went and made it up and she had to suffer the consequences. A victim, in many senses, of who she was and what she did, and a complex, challenging soul, who lived, this was never going to be a biography where you could hide your feelings about her and I’m glad Server didn’t. He likes her. And so do I.

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