The legendary love story of Gardner and her inamorato Frank Sinatra began with a bang. “Don’t let the little guy fool you,” Gardner later told movie star Ann Miller, per Server. “Everything in me stopped,” he would write in his memoir I.E.

Weiss had to whisper to a dumbstruck Gardner that this performer was none other than superstar Mickey Rooney, at 20 years old already a hard-living, wised-up “wolf, junior grade.” Even in the midst of performing, Rooney noticed the befuddled beauty and made a beeline for her in his clomping high heels. “A famously short young man, he stood now on high platform heels favored by Miss Miranda.” “He was wearing at this time a spangled bra and skirt, a fruited turban, had rouged cheeks, and his lips bore a thick coating of red lipstick,” Server writes. Weiss took her to the set of the musical Babes on Broadway, where an exuberant man performed “Mama, Yo Quiero” dressed as Brazilian star Carmen Miranda.

On her first day at MGM as a tongue-tied 18-year-old, Gardner was given a tour of the sprawling Culver City lot by studio PR man Milton Weiss. When asked why she stayed with the 119-pound Sinatra, Gardner once replied “Well, I’ll tell you-nineteen pounds is cock.” Their fights were legendary (Sinatra once threw a douche bag filled with water at her and pal Lana Turner), and their make-ups loud. Scott, and an unsuccessful attempt to lure Robert Stack into a foursome (he suddenly got a stomachache).Īnd then there was her beloved Francis-Gardner’s third husband, Frank Sinatra. Kennedy, Steve McQueen, an abusive George C. There was her long entanglement with a snooping Howard Hughes, as well as flings with bullfighters, Robert Taylor, Mel Tormé, David Niven, John F.

In the engrossing Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing, biographer Lee Server documents a life filled with lust, love, and late-night shenanigans. Born in North Carolina, the often barefoot and always brash movie star Ava Gardner was, in the words of second husband Artie Shaw, “the most beautiful creature you ever saw.” She was also, according to costar Deborah Kerr, “funny and rich and warm and human.” But Gardner also had a wandering spirit, with a reckless streak and an insatiable appetite for booze and boys that would often lead to the most glamorous sort of disaster.

Deborah's Story by Ann Burton