Ava’s Loves, Ava’s Life : AVA’S MEN The Private Life of Ava Gardner <i> by Jane Ellen Wayne (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 260 pp.; 0-312-0394-5) </i>

Ava Gardner bears “the distinction”--the reader is told on the last page of this biography--”of being MGM’s final mold of a screen legend.” True to its title, however, “Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner” places its emphasis on the late actress’ love life, where conceivably she herself might have placed it.

Strikingly beautiful with a langorous manner that was frowned upon as lazy in her native North Carolina but considered classy in Hollywood, Gardner married Mickey Rooney when he was MGM’s reigning box-office king. She had a brief relationship marked by a violent episode with Howard Hughes, who as a matter of course paid for apartments and dancing lessons for women all over the country that he found attractive.

She became the fourth of the eight wives of the intellectual bandleader/clarinetist Artie Shaw, who undertook to have her psychoanalyzed and encouraged her to take literature courses at UCLA so she would feel more fluent with his writer friends.

Frank Sinatra, his career at its lowest ebb, became her third and last husband. Gardner found him wonderful when he was down, but harder to take when he got back on top. The marriage was hectic, stormy, and short-lived, but the two remain devoted to each other. With her marriages behind her, the actress emerged as a celebrated international party animal, settling abroad in Spain and London and taking countless lovers.

Ava Gardner is her real name, beautiful and exotic enough to make a movie executive suggest they pretend the studio had thought it up. She was given a seven-year contract with MGM when her marriage with Rooney ended, but it was a low-paying “starlet’s” contract and she got to do very little. It was her second husband, Artie Shaw, who encouraged her to go on strike one morning when they got her wake-up call after a late night. As a result of this rebellion L. B. Mayer re-did her contract at 10 times her previous salary and lent her to an independent producer for “Whistle Stop,” starring George Raft. Next came “The Killers,” and she was on her way.

The most harshly proprietary toward its stars of all the studios, MGM was known to have its representatives present on honeymoons and, when necessary, to arrange abortions with or without the consent of both marriage partners. The bull-like Mayer was the man in charge. Judy Garland said that at will he could cry “ball-bearing tears,” and in certain quarters, he was regarded as the best actor in Hollywood.

Subject to intrusive scrutiny in their private lives on top of their rigorous workday schedules, the kings and queens of the studio system inhabited a world of grim paradox. Stars on the same movie routinely had affairs with one another, as if to assert some last vestige of personal autonomy in the face of the tyrannical studio hierarchy. Concerned that the stars’ public images remain in character, MGM in turn had an executive whose sole responsibility was trouble-shooting. Gardner was given a contract partly because her association with Rooney--Andy Hardy to an adoring public--made it important that she be perceived in a favorable light even after the relationship was over.

A woman making more than $1,000 a week by the early 1940s, Gardner was an unpretentious, natural beauty who needed little or no makeup and didn’t spend the stars’ usual hours on herself. She confessed to Artie Shaw that she would have been happier if she’d stayed in North Carolina and married a garage mechanic. But he also saw her constantly worried about “the bags” under her eyes. At times, the author of this routine celebrity biography, Jane Ellen Wayne, sees her subject as a beautiful maverick, feisty and independent, and there is surely some truth to that. What is also clear is that Gardner remained ambivalent and even anxious about her position for all her protestations. “Life is what happens to you,” sang John Lennon, “while you’re busy making other plans.”

When the journalist, Joe Hyams, recorded in a profile of Gardner her remark at Grace Kelly’s wedding that she envied Kelly having a father to lean on (her own having died in her childhood), she never spoke to him again. The piece, which appeared in Life, was considered too frank not to detract from her mystique, and her reaction suggests she wasn’t entirely unattached to it. The last of the big MGM stars, she gave strong later performances in “The Sun Also Rises” and “Night of the Iguana” while wrestling flamboyantly with a public glamour whose flip-side seemed to be a private reality in which there was scarcely room for a life.