Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra were married in a quiet living room in Westchester, Pennsylvania, on the seventh of November 1951. The bride wore a dress by Howard Greer. The groom was thin and grinning. They cut the cake and laughed for the photographers, and the picture that went out to the world showed a beautiful actress and a famous singer who looked like two people who had finally won.

Nobody in that room knew that the fight had started the night before, and it would not truly end for decades. Late the previous night, the telephone had rung in Ava’s hotel room. Frank was on the line, in another room, drinking, and the two of them had been fighting again the way they seemed to fight almost every time they were apart. There had been accusations and jealousy, a torrent of words neither of them would remember clearly by morning.

And then, according to accounts told by people close to both of them, he said something she would never forget. He told her, in effect, that he could not go on like this and that he was going to end it. Then she heard a gunshot. She dropped everything and ran to him.

The people with her rushed to help. When they got there, they found him alive, unharmed. The bullet had gone into a pillow or a mattress. Whether it had been a terrible accident, a moment of drunken despair, or a desperate act meant to frighten her into coming back, nobody has ever been able to say with certainty.

Friends quietly cleaned up the scene. Money reportedly changed hands to keep the story out of the newspapers. It worked. The story stayed hidden for years.

But everyone who witnessed the relationship at close range described the same pattern: intense love, explosive jealousy, terrible fights, tearful reconciliations, and moments that went far beyond an ordinary lover’s quarrel. This was not a relationship that rose and fell gently. It swung between extremes, and at times it came frighteningly close to the edge. To the public, they were the most glamorous couple in the world.

In private, their love affair was so all-consuming that it came close to wrecking both of them. For him, it was the moment his career was falling apart. For her, it was the moment hers was taking off. And in the middle of it, she would lose far more than anyone outside realized.

It had all begun with a shy farm girl from the tobacco country of North Carolina. Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on the twenty-fourth of December 1922 in a small farming community called Grab Town, near Smithfield, North Carolina. It was not much of a town—fields, dirt roads, and a handful of houses in the middle of the American South. Her parents, Jonas and Mary Elizabeth, whom everyone called Molly, were poor tenant farmers.

Ava was the youngest of seven children. When the tobacco crops failed and the Depression hit, they lost what little they had. Her mother ran a boarding house for teachers to keep the family going. Ava grew up running barefoot, climbing trees, playing with her brothers, and spending time in the fields.

She was a tomboy, independent and stubborn, with a quick temper and a loud laugh. She later said she had been happier as a barefoot country girl than at any other time in her life. Her father died in 1938, when she was fifteen. It was a heavy blow.

Money was tighter than ever. In 1941, at eighteen, she went to New York to visit her older sister Beatrice, known as Bappy, who was married to a photographer named Larry Tarr. Tarr took portraits of his young sister-in-law, and he was so pleased with one that he put it in the window of his studio on Fifth Avenue. A young man who worked in the legal department of Loew’s, the company that owned MGM, happened to walk past and see the picture.

He was so struck by the girl in the photograph that he made inquiries. Word reached MGM, and before long, the farm girl from Grab Town was on a train to Hollywood for a screen test. The test was almost a disaster. Her Southern accent was so thick that the studio people could barely understand her, so they filmed her silently—walking, turning, smiling.

When the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, watched the footage, the story goes that he said something to the effect that she couldn’t sing, act, or talk, but she was terrific. She was signed to a seven-year contract at fifty dollars a week. She would keep a trace of that North Carolina drawl, softened but never lost, for the rest of her life.

The studio gave her lessons in speech and acting and put her in small roles. Within months, the young woman who had grown up without running water was being courted by one of the biggest stars at MGM: Mickey Rooney, the studio’s most popular young actor. He was loud, energetic, and relentless, and he asked her to marry him again and again until she said yes. They married in January 1942.

She was nineteen. It lasted a little over a year. He was unfaithful, he was always out, and she was lonely. They divorced in 1943.

Her second husband was the bandleader Artie Shaw, one of the most famous clarinetists of the swing era and one of the most difficult men in the music business. They married in 1945. Shaw was brilliant and cutting, and he made her feel ignorant. He pushed books at her, mocked her lack of education, and treated her as a project to improve.

That marriage lasted about a year. By her mid-twenties, she had been married and divorced twice, but her career was finally taking off. In 1946, she played the seductive Kitty Collins in The Killers alongside Burt Lancaster. Suddenly, Hollywood saw what the studio had been sitting on.

She was not just beautiful; she had something smoldering and real on screen, and audiences could not look away. She had become one of the most desirable women in the world. One of the men pursuing her in those years was the billionaire aviator and film producer Howard Hughes. He showered her with attention, flew her around in his planes, and asked her to marry him more than once.

She refused. He was possessive to the point of obsession and reportedly had her followed and watched. By her own later account, one of their arguments turned physical, and she struck him with a heavy object to defend herself. It was an early sign of the kind of dangerous passion that seemed to follow her wherever she went.

But the man who would turn her life upside down was at that moment watching his own world begin to fall apart. Francis Albert Sinatra was born on the twelfth of December 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Italian immigrant parents. He grew up tough and ambitious. His mother Dolly was a forceful, well-connected woman in the local community; his father Marty was a boxer turned fireman.

Young Frank dropped out of school, sang wherever he could, and eventually got his big break with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. By the early 1940s, he had become something the world had never quite seen before. When he performed at the Paramount Theater in New York, thousands of teenage girls in bobby socks screamed, fainted, and rioted in the streets. He was skinny with big ears and an easy grin, and he sang ballads in a way that made every girl in the audience feel he was singing only to her.

They called him the Voice. In October 1944, when he returned to the Paramount for another run of shows, an enormous crowd packed the streets around Times Square. Police struggled to hold them back, windows were broken, and the chaos became known as the Columbus Day riot. No singer had ever caused anything quite like it.

At that moment, he seemed untouchable. In 1939, he had married his hometown sweetheart, Nancy Barbato. They had three children: Nancy, born in 1940; Frank Junior, born in 1944; and Tina, born in 1948. To the public, the Sinatras were a devoted Catholic family.

In private, he was already unfaithful, with a long list of affairs with actresses and showgirls. Nancy knew about many of them, but she stayed, and he always came home. By the late 1940s, the magic was fading. The screaming teenagers of 1944 were growing up and getting married.

Musical fashions were changing. His record sales were falling. His films with MGM were doing less and less business. The newspapers had turned on him, running stories about his temper, his friendships with men connected to organized crime, and his clashes with reporters.

He first met Ava Gardner briefly in the 1940s, when she was still married to Mickey Rooney. He flirted with her. She was not interested. She thought he was arrogant, and she did not like married men chasing her.

But when they met again in 1949, something clicked. She was in her late twenties; he was in his early thirties. Both were restless, fiery, stubborn, and used to getting what they wanted. Both loved late nights, drinking, jazz, and trouble.

One of the first stories people told about them captures the mood perfectly. According to accounts that came out later, one night in the California desert, the two of them drove through a small town with a pair of pistols, laughing and firing shots at street lamps and shop windows. They were arrested, and Sinatra’s people reportedly had to spend a considerable sum of money to make the whole thing go away quietly. They were not in love like teenagers.

They were in love like two people setting fire to something. In early 1950, the affair became public. On Valentine’s Day 1950, Nancy Sinatra announced that she and Frank had separated. Reporters gathered outside the family home, and the three Sinatra children, the youngest still a toddler, found their father’s private life splashed across the newspapers.

Only weeks later, he was performing at a hotel in Houston, and Ava flew in to be with him. They were photographed together at an Italian restaurant, and he reportedly lost his temper with the photographer. The pictures went out across the country. The reaction was ferocious.

It is hard to imagine now just how scandalous this was in 1950. Divorce was still frowned upon, especially among Catholics. Sinatra was a married father of three, and the public saw Ava as the glamorous temptress who had lured him away from his faithful wife. Letters poured into MGM calling her a home-wrecker and far worse.

Religious groups threatened boycotts. Some cinemas talked about refusing to show her films. Her studio was furious. MGM had spent years building her up, and now the woman it had signed at fifty dollars a week was being denounced from pulpits.

Sinatra’s troubles were getting worse by the week. In April 1950, while performing at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, he opened his mouth to sing and nothing came out. He had suffered a hemorrhage of his vocal cords. For a singer, it was a nightmare.

He was ordered to stay completely silent for weeks. That same spring, MGM released him from his film contract. While he was recovering, Ava was in Spain filming Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in the seaside town of Tossa de Mar. There, the Spanish press began to link her romantically with her co-star, the bullfighter Mario Cabré, who made no secret of his feelings for her.

When Sinatra read about it, he could not bear it. He flew to Spain to see her, reportedly carrying an emerald necklace as a gift. Photographers followed. The whole thing turned into a public circus, and the tabloids had a field day with the jealous crooner who had flown across an ocean to confront his rival.

For the rest of that year and into the next, the relationship lurched from one crisis to the next. He was losing his audience, his film career, his voice, and his confidence. She was becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The more successful she became, the more insecure he grew.

He was also still legally married. Nancy was in no hurry to give him a divorce, and the delays tormented both of them. In March 1951, Sinatra went into a recording studio and sang a song called “I’m a Fool to Want You,” which he had helped write. People who were there described how raw he sounded, and how after the take he walked out of the studio.

Many who knew him believed he was singing about Ava. That summer, the strain nearly turned into tragedy. In August 1951, while staying at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe, and after another painful telephone call with her, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. He was treated in time and survived.

In public, it was explained away as an accident. People around him were far less certain. Finally, in the autumn of 1951, Nancy agreed to the divorce. It came through at the end of October.

Within a week, Frank and Ava were married. The wedding took place on the seventh of November 1951 at the home of a friend’s brother in Westchester, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia. It was meant to be quiet and private, away from the reporters who had been hounding them for nearly two years. It very nearly did not happen at all.

According to people close to them, the night before the wedding, Ava received a letter from a woman who claimed to have been involved with Frank. There was a furious row. She threatened to call the whole thing off. There were tears, shouting, and hours of arguing before they were reconciled.

The next day, she walked into the living room in her Howard Greer dress, and they were married. The honeymoon took them to Miami and then to Havana, which in the early 1950s was a playground of casinos, nightclubs, and Caribbean glamour. Reporters followed them everywhere. And almost from the start, there was an uncomfortable truth hanging over the marriage: she was now the one with the money and the career.

He was still struggling. His recording contract was about to end, his agency would soon drop him, his film career was stalled, and his nightclub bookings had dried up. The man who had once earned a fortune now found himself short of money, and at times his new wife paid for things, including, according to several accounts, some of the costs of their life together. For a man as proud as Frank Sinatra, it was humiliating.

He was also jealous to a degree that frightened people. He hated the idea of other men looking at her, hated the leading men she worked with, hated her going out without him. And she, in turn, knew exactly how many women he had been with before her, and she did not trust him an inch. She once put it in a way that has stayed with people ever since: when they were apart, they longed for each other, and when they were together, they fought.

The fights were not quiet. They shouted, threw things, stormed out, and slammed doors. Then they made up with the same intensity. Friends who stayed with them described nights when the arguments went on for hours, followed by mornings when the two of them behaved as though nothing had happened.

And the jealousy was about to boil over into incidents so dramatic that the police would have to be called. One of the stories friends told for years involved their house in Palm Springs. Ava was spending time there with her close friend, the actress Lana Turner, and a man who was helping them. When Frank arrived unexpectedly, he flew into a rage at the scene he found.

Convinced that the women had been talking about him and gossiping about his past relationships, there was a terrible scene. He ordered them out of the house. The local police were reportedly called, and the chief of police had to help calm the situation. Ava left humiliated and furious.

It was typical of the pattern: a small spark would set one of them off, and within minutes it had become a war. In 1952, she was cast in Mogambo, to be directed by John Ford and shot on location in Africa alongside Clark Gable and a young newcomer named Grace Kelly. It meant months away in Kenya and other parts of East Africa. For a jealous husband with a collapsing career, it was torture.

He went out to visit her in Africa late in 1952, and for a while things seemed better. They celebrated his birthday there in December. The crew watched the two of them laughing together one day and fighting the next. Conditions on location were tough.

The company lived in a huge camp of tents surrounded by wild animals, heat, dust, and insects. John Ford had a reputation as one of the hardest directors in Hollywood, and at first he and Ava clashed, but she won him over with her toughness and her sense of humor. She swore like a sailor, drank with the crew, and never complained about the hardships. By the end of filming, Ford had become one of her admirers, and her performance would earn her the only Academy Award nomination of her career.

It was around this time that Ava made one of the most painful decisions of her life. During the marriage, she became pregnant, and later pregnant again, and on both occasions she chose not to continue the pregnancy. She traveled to London for private medical procedures. For years, she kept this almost completely to herself.

Later, she explained that she did not believe it was right to bring a child into a relationship as unstable as theirs, when they could not even be sure from one week to the next whether they would still be together. The studio’s strict rules about its stars and pregnancy may also have weighed on her. Many who knew her believed the decision haunted her for the rest of her life. She loved children, had always imagined having a family, and in later years she spoke with regret about never having become a mother.

Her husband, according to many accounts, was deeply upset when he found out. It became one more wound in a marriage that already had too many. But at that very moment, halfway across the world, the man whose career seemed finished was about to be handed a chance that would change everything. And the person who helped him get it was Ava herself.

In 1952, Columbia Pictures was preparing to film From Here to Eternity, based on the best-selling novel by James Jones about soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. One of the parts was a skinny, stubborn Italian-American soldier named Angelo Maggio. Sinatra read the novel and was convinced the role was his. He felt he knew Maggio—the scrappy underdog who refused to give in.

He wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted in his career. The problem was that nobody else wanted him. The head of Columbia, the notoriously tough Harry Cohn, was not interested. Sinatra’s name was box-office poison.

Other actors were being considered. Ava went to work quietly. According to several accounts, she spoke to Harry Cohn’s wife, Joan, and asked her to help persuade her husband to at least give Frank a screen test. Sinatra also pushed through every channel he had.

While Ava was filming in Africa, Frank got word that Columbia was willing to let him test. He flew all the way back to Hollywood to do it. He did the scene with an intensity that shocked the people watching. Columbia gave him the part, and he took a fraction of the fee he would once have earned—by most accounts, around eight thousand dollars.

Filming took place in the spring of 1953, largely in Hawaii. When From Here to Eternity came out that summer, it was a sensation. Audiences lined up around the block, and the famous scene of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr embracing in the surf became one of the most celebrated images in movie history. The film went on to win eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Sinatra’s performance as Maggio—cocky, funny, and heartbreaking—was the talk of the country.

At almost the same time, his music career came back to life. In the spring of 1953, he signed with Capitol Records and began working with the arranger Nelson Riddle. The records they made together had a new, darker, more grown-up sound. His voice had changed.

It was deeper, rougher, full of the pain he had been through. People who had written him off started listening again. In just a few months, the washed-up crooner had become the comeback of the decade. And yet, just as his life was being rebuilt, the marriage was falling apart.

He was working all the time, surrounded again by admirers, women, and old friends, and she was increasingly far away. Their reunions were shorter and more combative. The jealousy had never gone away. Neither had the drinking.

Ava was growing tired. She had spent two years fighting the press, the studio, and the public for this man, and two years fighting him in private. By the autumn of 1953, she had reached the end of her patience. On the twenty-ninth of October 1953, MGM issued a brief statement announcing that Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra had separated.

It said, in essence, that after trying their best to make the marriage work, the couple had decided that they could not. It was calm and formal. The reality behind it was anything but. Only weeks later, in November 1953, Sinatra was rushed to hospital in New York after hurting himself at the apartment of his close friend, the music executive Manny Sachs.

The incident was explained at the time in vague terms, but people close to him understood that he had been in a very dark place. He recovered, but those who loved him were badly shaken. Ava, meanwhile, flew to Europe. She went to Spain and began a relationship with one of the most famous bullfighters of the day, Luis Miguel Dominguín, a charismatic, dashing figure who moved in the same circles as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso.

The newspapers followed every move. Photographers waited outside her hotels and trailed her through the streets of Madrid and Rome, and every rumor about the bullfighter was sent straight back to America, where her estranged husband read it all. She went on to make The Barefoot Contessa in Italy in 1954, playing a Spanish dancer who becomes a film star—a role that seemed to many people to echo her own life. In March 1954, Frank Sinatra won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity.

He accepted it in front of the entire film industry, and it was one of the greatest comebacks in Hollywood history. Fans who had written him off a few years earlier were lining up outside his concerts again. Ava was nominated for Best Actress for Mogambo that same year, but she did not attend the ceremony. She was in Spain.

The man who had once been so broke that his wife paid the bills was back on top, and the woman who had stood beside him through the worst of it was not there to see him win. Friends said later that the Oscar did not make him happy in the way people expected. He had got his career back, but he had lost her. Over the next few years, there were many attempts at reconciliation.

He called her, he flew to see her, and she flew to see him. They would spend a few days together, sometimes weeks, and for a while it would seem as though they might try again. Then something would go wrong, and it would end in anger and tears once more. And through it all, he did the one thing he knew how to do better than anyone alive: he poured every feeling he had about her into his music.

In 1955, Frank Sinatra released an album called In the Wee Small Hours. It was one of the first long-playing albums built around a single mood, and the mood was heartbreak. It was a collection of slow, lonely ballads about lost love, sleepless nights, and the ache of missing someone. On the cover, he stood alone under a street lamp at night, cigarette in hand.

For generations of listeners, it has remained one of the loneliest, most beautiful records ever made. Almost everyone who knew him believed it was about Ava. The stories of that period became part of the Sinatra legend. His arranger and friends described him in the studio singing late at night, completely lost in the lyrics, sometimes having to stop because he was too emotional to go on.

Nelson Riddle reportedly said that it was Ava who had taught him how to sing a torch song, because she had broken his heart. Over the next few years, album after album carried the same shadow: songs of longing and loss, songs of drinking alone at closing time, songs about a woman who got away. She, meanwhile, was living her own restless life. She moved to Spain in 1955, drawn by the sunshine, the flamenco, the late nights, and the bullfights.

She loved the country, and the Spanish people loved her. She spent nights in the bars and clubs of Madrid, dancing until dawn with gypsy guitarists and bullfighters. Later, she lived in a flat in Madrid where one of her neighbors was the exiled former president of Argentina, Juan Perón, who reportedly found her late-night parties quite a trial. Her drinking, which had always been heavy, became heavier.

Her beauty, which had once seemed untouchable, was beginning to show the strain of the life she was leading. In the summer of 1957, the divorce from Frank was finally made official in Mexico. By then, they had been separated for almost four years. They had been married on paper for nearly six.

She never married again. She had been married three times to three famous men, and she later suggested that she had had enough of it. Frank would marry twice more—first to the young actress Mia Farrow in 1966, a marriage that lasted only a couple of years, and then to Barbara Marx in 1976, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. But the two of them never really let go of each other.

And in the last years of her life, when she needed help most, it was Frank who would come to her rescue. In 1968, Ava left Spain and moved to London. She settled into a flat in Ennismore Gardens in the elegant district of Knightsbridge, near Hyde Park. It was a quieter life.

She had a housekeeper, a small circle of friends, and a much-loved Welsh corgi named Morgan. She went for walks in the park, read, listened to music, and stayed up late talking on the telephone. Neighbors often saw her out in the streets of Knightsbridge in a headscarf and dark glasses, walking the dog, and many passersby had no idea that the woman beside them had once been promoted by a Hollywood studio as the most beautiful animal in the world. She still worked from time to time.

She had given strong performances in On the Beach in 1959 and in The Night of the Iguana in 1964, directed by John Huston. In the 1970s and 1980s, the parts were smaller and the films were often forgettable, but she took the work partly for the money and partly perhaps because she did not know what else to do. She had also developed a self-deprecating honesty about her own career. She often said that she had never really considered herself a good actress, and that the studio had made her a star for her looks rather than her talent.

People who worked with her disagreed. At her best, she was a wonderfully natural, instinctive performer. Frank called her. He kept calling her for the rest of her life.

Friends in London described how the telephone would ring late at night, and Ava would take the call, and they would know who it was just from the tone of her voice. The two of them talked about old times, about music, about the people they had known. They were still friends, still fond of each other, still connected by something neither of them could quite explain. In 1986, she suffered two strokes.

They left her partly paralyzed down one side of her body and struggling to speak. It was a devastating blow for a woman who had always been fiercely independent. According to many accounts, it was Frank who quietly paid for her medical care, including arranging treatment in the United States, reportedly at considerable expense. He did not talk about it publicly.

He simply made sure she was looked after. In the last years of her life, she spent much of her time in her flat, frail and increasingly housebound. She began working on her memoirs, recording long conversations about her life, her marriages, and the men she had loved. By the accounts of those who helped her, when she talked about Frank, her voice still changed.

And then, in the first weeks of 1990, the telephone calls stopped. Ava Gardner died on the twenty-fifth of January 1990 at her home in London. She had pneumonia. She was sixty-seven years old.

Her body was flown back to the tobacco country of North Carolina, where she had grown up. She was buried in Smithfield, near her parents and her brothers, not far from the fields where she had run barefoot as a child. Thousands of people lined the streets of the little town for her funeral. In London, her old friend Gregory Peck, her co-star from years earlier, took in her corgi Morgan, so that the little dog she had loved so much would have a home.

Frank Sinatra did not attend. By the accounts of people close to him, he was devastated when he heard the news. He reportedly shut himself away for a time and was deeply shaken. He sent a large floral arrangement to her funeral—a quiet gesture from the man who had once flown across an ocean to be near her.

Her memoir, drawn from those long conversations in her final years, was published after her death. In its pages, she wrote about Frank with a mixture of love, exasperation, humor, and sadness. She did not pretend the marriage had been happy. She described the fights, the jealousy, and the pain.

But she also made it clear that of all the men in her life, he was the one she had loved the most. Frank Sinatra lived for another eight years. He died on the fourteenth of May 1998 in Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-two. For decades, whenever he sang one of those old torch songs from the 1950s, audiences who knew the story would wonder if he was thinking of her.

He never really said so outright. He did not need to. Looking back now, it is easy to see how fragile it all was from the very beginning. They were two people who were too alike.

Both were proud, jealous, restless, stubborn, and quick to anger. Both loved to drink and hated to back down. Both had grown up with very little and had fought their way to the top. Neither of them knew how to be calm, and neither of them knew how to let go.

They met at the worst possible moment for him and the best possible moment for her. He was losing his voice, his career, and his confidence just as she was becoming one of the biggest stars in the world. The imbalance poisoned everything. His jealousy fed on his insecurity, and her patience wore thin under the weight of his moods and his reputation.

The scandal cost her dearly in public. The marriage cost her far more in private. And yet they never really stopped loving each other. He carried her in his music for the rest of his life.

She carried him in her memories, and in those late-night telephone calls from across the Atlantic. The marriage lasted less than six years on paper. The feelings lasted until the very end. Today, that photograph from November 1951 still exists.

A young couple in a living room outside Philadelphia, laughing as they cut their wedding cake, surrounded by friends. He is thin and grinning. She is radiant. They look like two people who have finally got what they wanted.

In a way, they had.