Ava Gardner

"AVA: MY STORY" Bantam. $19.95. 286 pages. Hard cover. Howard Hughes got rough so she applied a heavy bronze bell to his temple; twice she aborted a baby conceived with Frank Sinatra - their marriage ended when he called from the bed of another woman; George C. Scott reiterated his spurned marriage proposal with a fist to her eye and broken glass at her face. Ava Gardner, who high-stepped her way out of a childhood spent in close company with poverty to seize the screen, left a little something extra when she died of pneumonia earlier this year.

This could be a day to write about such boring ephemera as George Bush's China policy, the Drug War budget, or the Social Security debate. Forget it. If Ava Gardner is dead at 67, then we must all be mortal. We'd better pay attention to things that count, namely beauty, real life and the time's fast passage. Put it simply: Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman who ever walked across the screen. Go ahead, take Monroe, Taylor, Lamar, Hayworth, and whoever's on this week's cover of People.

Phillippe Sinatra Ryan Phillippe also has a fascination - formerly an obsession - with Frank Sinatra. "I didn't date much in high school," he said, "and when I was 16 I used to drive around in my dad's pickup on Friday night and listen to Sid Mark. " A particular fan of Ol' Blue Eyes' 1950s period, "when his voice and swagger peaked," Phillippe named his daughter Ava (after Sinatra love Ava Gardner) and his bulldog, who passed away last year, Frank. He became this macho icon, Phillippe said of his idol, and he started as "a little runt of a guy from Hoboken.

Just before joining the Daily News, photographer Sam Psoras got his first Sinatra assignment: the singer's 1951 marriage to Ava Gardner in Philadelphia. On the day of the wedding, Nov. 7, we end up at Manie Sach's house to try to get photos of Frank and Ava. (Sachs was an ex-Philadelphia stockbroker- turned-record-exec who played an instrumental role in Sinatra's career). We are told we can't stay, but then Sachs says, "All right, we'll get Mr. Sinatra and Ava to come out and you'll get one picture on the front porch, but then you have to leave.

My Life With Frank By Barbara Sinatra Crown Archetype. 400 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by Susan Whitall For fans, there can be no more intimate insider than Frank Sinatra's longest-running (and last) wife, Barbara, and indeed she details his neat streak (at least three showers a day), the gift of his voice, unstinting appetite for a party, and the intense romanticism that lured so many women to his bed. One night, when Barbara retired early and locked her door to get away from her husband and his heavy-drinking friends, he ended up banging on her door at 5 a.m. "Who is it?"

If there were any justice in screenland, Wendy Hughes would be the Ava Gardner of the '80s instead of an underknown stunner who specializes in playing neurotic aunts and brooding beauties from Down Under. She was the rich aunt in My Brilliant Career, a richer aunt in Careful, He Might Hear You, a poor secretary in Lonely Hearts and a newsreel producer in Newsfront, roles that established her as Australia's premier actress. Her presence in a movie justifies seeing it. Few actresses are as glamorous and as gifted.

Jane Siberry came to the Theater of Living Arts Friday night to forge an identity. On a surface level, Siberry's voice bears an uncanny resemblance to Joni Mitchell's. She's been branded a Kate Bush wannabe, a second-string Laurie Anderson. In photographs and videos she resembles an odd cross between Ellen Barkin and Ava Gardner. So Siberry had a lot riding on the "It Ain't a Concert Concert," which she performed Saturday as well, to answer the question: Is there enough of Jane Siberry to emerge from the forest of names she's often compared to?

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) is a hothouse orchid of a film, a behind-the- screen melodrama of a Spanish dancer (Ava Gardner) who becomes an instant Hollywood legend by not giving a damn about appearances. She exhibits most unstarletlike behavior by preferring musicians to princes or movie moguls, and the various chapters of her florid career are narrated by her director/ discoverer, Humphrey Bogart, and by her publicist, Edmond O'Brien, who won a supporting-actor Oscar. Joseph Mankiewicz's film might be slow-moving, but it's all the better to appreciate his brilliant writing and the luminous Gardner.

It's just not right. Fran Casella and her crew of former bobby-soxers have come to celebrate the life of Francis Albert Sinatra, and what are they forced to stare at over their eggs with broccoli rabe? A mug shot of Ol' Blue Eyes from his 1938 arrest in Bergen County, N.J., on charges of seduction - having sexual intercourse with a single woman in return for a promise of marriage. "Of all the pictures in the world, they have to put that up there," Casella said yesterday as she looked at the photo hanging on the wall of the Fitzwater Cafe in South Philadelphia.

It was where The Voice said, "I do," to The Movie Queen. Inside the modest house at 506 W. Springer St., in West Mount Airy, 35-year-old Frank Sinatra and 28-year-old Ava Gardner exchanged vows, capping a tumultuous love affair that mesmerized the world. The neighbors still talk about it. On Nov. 7, 1951, behind tightly drawn venetian blinds, the superstars were married by Common Pleas Court Judge Joseph Sloane. They wed in front of about 60 guests, mostly family and close friends.

South Camden Theatre Company concludes its season — dedicated entirely to Tennessee Williams' centenary — with his 1961 play The Night of the Iguana. It's a fine capper; what's a better send-off than a sultry south-of-the-border evening filled with sex, liquor, and a nervous breakdown or two? When John Huston filmed the drama in 1964, the offscreen shenanigans of its stars — Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr among them — earned Puerto Vallarta a reputation as el centro de amor long before the Love Boat ever docked there.

IN "The Mighty Macs," Carla Gugino plays Cathy Rush, the Hall of Fame basketball coach who in 1972 led tiny Immaculata College to the national women's basketball championship, the first of three titles. Q: When you're playing a real person, do you like to get close to your subject? A: I haven't done a lot of that before, so I don't know if you feel differently in different situations, but in this case, because Cathy was available, it was easy to make her part of the process.

My Life With Frank By Barbara Sinatra Crown Archetype. 400 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by Susan Whitall For fans, there can be no more intimate insider than Frank Sinatra's longest-running (and last) wife, Barbara, and indeed she details his neat streak (at least three showers a day), the gift of his voice, unstinting appetite for a party, and the intense romanticism that lured so many women to his bed. One night, when Barbara retired early and locked her door to get away from her husband and his heavy-drinking friends, he ended up banging on her door at 5 a.m. "Who is it?"

Phillippe Sinatra Ryan Phillippe also has a fascination - formerly an obsession - with Frank Sinatra. "I didn't date much in high school," he said, "and when I was 16 I used to drive around in my dad's pickup on Friday night and listen to Sid Mark. " A particular fan of Ol' Blue Eyes' 1950s period, "when his voice and swagger peaked," Phillippe named his daughter Ava (after Sinatra love Ava Gardner) and his bulldog, who passed away last year, Frank. He became this macho icon, Phillippe said of his idol, and he started as "a little runt of a guy from Hoboken.

In a police lineup of the most breathtaking, heart-stopping, Lord-have-mercy specimens of movie manhood, you would not look twice at Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, John Travolta or Denzel Washington because Farley Granger would hold you in the flutter of his double-dip lashes. When the public saw Granger as the clean-cut tennis star capable of murder in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), everyone wanted a ride on the dreamboat. Ava Gardner succeeded. So did Leonard Bernstein.

For years now, Marvel has beaten DC by having interesting minority characters, more minorities in headline titles and more minorities playing a significant role in their comic universe. The one thing they haven't been able to do is come up with a female character to rival DC's iconic Wonder Woman in either power or stature. Until now. "Ms. Marvel" is back and not only is she headlining her own title again, she is determined to be the "best of the best. " It is a goal that both she - and Marvel - are taking seriously.

I don't normally spotlight miniseries (or books that are two months late), but I have to bring your attention to the just-issued "Battlestar Galactica: Zarek" from Dynamite. The four-issue limited series focuses on Tom Zarek - the fan-favorite revolutionary played by original series actor Richard Hatch - and tells how he grew up with loving parents in the slave state that is his own Sagittaron colony and in the shadow of the First Cylon War. As we see in the first issue, everything from the government's repressive policies to devastating personal tragedies helped slowly meld this innocent child into a ruthless rebel.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics By Marisha Pessl Viking. 514 pp. $26 Grant Marisha Pessl this: She is audacious. Her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, is as big, bold and, at times, unwieldy as its title. Pessl, 28, is not a miniaturist tethered to restraint but a writer who rolls around in language like a pig in slop. This Bildungsroman is a library of literary references - each chapter named for a title in the educational canon - although many of the cited works are cons, total fabrications of her vivid imagination.

It's just not right. Fran Casella and her crew of former bobby-soxers have come to celebrate the life of Francis Albert Sinatra, and what are they forced to stare at over their eggs with broccoli rabe? A mug shot of Ol' Blue Eyes from his 1938 arrest in Bergen County, N.J., on charges of seduction - having sexual intercourse with a single woman in return for a promise of marriage. "Of all the pictures in the world, they have to put that up there," Casella said yesterday as she looked at the photo hanging on the wall of the Fitzwater Cafe in South Philadelphia.

STEVEN SEAGAL. On screen. Tough. In a New York courtroom. Not so tough. Ask him to play a witness against a reputed mob boss and . . . well, he may just forget his lines. But Seagal is expected to eventually take the stand, against his own wishes, in the prosecution of Peter Gotti, brother of the late mob boss John Gotti, and other alleged members of the Gambino crime family. Prosecutors say Seagal's ex-business partner was a Gambino crony who tried to extort money from the action figure for every film he made.