The first full-length biography of the farm girl from North Carolina who became a Hollywood goddess. It recreates a life of glamour, hedonism, and self-destruction, painted in bold colors on the canvas of big-studio Hollywood in the forties and fifties, exotic locations, the Rome of La Dolce Vita, and the Spain of bullfighters and dictators. Her stunning beauty and lack of inhibition led to a tumultuous private life and a long search for love, including marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, and relationships with Hemingway, Howard Hughes, George C. Scott, and famous matador Mario Cabre.--From publisher description.