Frank & Ava
In Love and War
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3.7 • 19 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"If I had to go back in Hollywood history and name two people who were most desperately and passionately in love with each other, I would say Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were It" —Liz Smith
It began in Hollywood's golden age when Ava was emerging as a movie star. But she fell in (and out of) love too easily. Mickey Rooney married her because he wanted another conquest. Artie Shaw treated her like a dumb brunette, giving her a reading list on their honeymoon. Neither marriage lasted a year. Then, after being courted by Howard Hughes and numerous others, along came Frank Sinatra.
His passion for Ava destroyed his marriage and brought him close to ruin. Their wild affair broke all the rules of the prudish era as Frank left his wife and children and pursued Ava on an international stage. They became romantic renegades, with the press following them from location to location.
"Oh, God, Frank Sinatra could be the sweetest, most charming man in the world when he was in the mood," said Ava. They married, but then came the quarrels, separations, infidelities, and reconciliations. Eventually, there was a divorce, and they thought it was over. It wasn't.
Through all of the tortured years of separation and splintered affairs with others, they maintained a secretive relationship known only to those who recognized that this was the love of a lifetime. Over the years they attempted to reconcile, romanced and nurtured each other, right to the end.
The love story of Frank and Ava has never been fully explored or explained - until now. John Brady's Frank & Ava delves deeply into the lives of these two iconic stars and their turbulent lifelong relationship. More than anything else, this is the story of a romance lived out under battlefield conditions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran editor and author Brady (Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater) approaches the love-hate history of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner with reliable thoroughness. He reveals his sources for each chapter, promising that "no scenes or conversations are fabricated," and an impressive bibliography shows the depth of his research. These resources build an unusually blunt, absorbing portrait of "the Voice," whose disdain for others was often jaw-dropping. Sinatra gave Buddy Rich $25,000 to fund his own band so he'd be free to dally with the drummer's wife, and had an affair with Lauren Bacall while Humphrey Bogart, her husband and Sinatra's friend, was dying. Brady refrains from coming to his own conclusions about Sinatra, letting other voices speak. Wilfried Sheed is quoted as saying Sinatra was "doing what practically every man in America at least wanted to do cheating on his wife and chasing after Ava Gardner." The repeated ups and downs of the Sinatra-Gardner relationship and careers become tiresome, but Brady knows how to keep readers turning pages all the way to the end of Sinatra's career, when everything that he had collected was sold at auction. Anyone remotely curious about either of these larger-than-life characters will want to read Brady's book.
