THE FEMME FATALE: Ava Gardner

Three Men and a Goddess

“Once Hollywood’s most irresistible woman—wed to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra—by 1988 Ava Gardner was nearly broke, ravaged by illness, and intent on selling her memoirs. But the man she chose as her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, had his own problems, not least a legal war with Sinatra. In an exclusive from the book that wasn’t published in either of their lifetimes, Gardner spills the seduction-to-split secrets of her three marriages…” more

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Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Ava Gardner, the Second-Look Girl

“Ava Gardner knew how to pose for the camera. She’d slit her eyes, throw her head at an angle, and the photographer would somehow catch something about her — not elegance or grace, exactly, but something that was strong, sexual, and almost animal, as if she were zeroing in on you, weighing your merits, and readying to pounce. And for most of the ’40s and ’50s, she was Hollywood’s most alluring femme fatale, an image solidified both on and off the screen…” more

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