Frank McLynn
A Wicked, Wicked Life
Ava Gardner
By Lee Server (Bloomsbury 533pp £20)

Ava Gardner, surely one of the best known of all film stars, exemplified the classic rags-to-riches fable. The seventh child of a North Carolina sharecropping tobacco farmer, she was what the unkind describe as poor white trailer trash, with accent and ambitions to match. The height of her aspirations was to be a secretary in New York, but she was 'discovered' from a chance snapshot in a photographer's window and whisked away to Hollywood for the big star build-up, purely on the basis of her looks. And here, straight away, Lee Server's workmanlike biography solves one problem that has always puzzled me. While everyone agrees that Ava Gardner was no great shakes as an actress, she was consistently described as a woman of stunning beauty - yet this did not seem to me to correspond with the image I saw on the screen. According to Server, she was one of those rare movie stars who are far more stunning in the flesh than on celluloid; usually it works the other way round, with fairly ordinary-looking men and women being transformed by the magical alchemy of a camera that likes them.

While most of the films Ava Gardner appeared in were unmemorable to say the least, she soon attracted attention by the turbulence of her private life. At the age of nineteen (in 1942) she married Mickey Rooney, then an MGM superstar. Ava, who had been brought up in an atmosphere of severe sexual repression, with parents who had major hang-ups about carnality, was a virgin when she married but took to sex with gusto; it soon became apparent that she had both a natural talent and a voracious appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. Tiring of Rooney's habitual infidelities, she divorced him and married the clarinettist, bandleader and would-be intellectual Artie Shaw. Her new husband tried the Pygmalion treatment on her, introducing her to books and the world of ideas, but Ava got tired of his remorseless intellectual nagging and eventually found in her third spouse, Frank Sinatra, a partner on her own hedonistic level. By this time Ava was a promiscuous woman, notably unbalanced, with a taste for the bottle and a tendency to fly into rages after the first few drinks. Since Sinatra was one of the most unpleasant individuals ever to haunt even Hollywood - a place not noted for its quota of St Francises - the stage was set for a stormy, on-off, six-year marriage, where it was a toss-up which was the greater prima donna. Yet even after divorce, neither could entirely shake loose of the other; for years afterwards there were partial reconciliations, drink-fuelled one-night stands and rumours of remarriage. Sinatra, the control freak's control freak, was incandescent with rage that a mere 'broad' could treat him with contempt, but no one saw through him more clearly than Ava, and it particularly irked him that she openly despised his Mafia cronies like Sam Giancana. Meanwhile, Ava was working her way through the dozens of lovers she acquired in her heady career: actors, toyboys, barmen, sailors, musicians - they were all grist to her mill. She made no distinction between Howard Hughes, who spent much of his life vainly trying to make her his creature, and the latest fancy she had picked up in a bar during one of her interminable pub crawls. She had a particular penchant for bullfighters, and had a lengthy and torrid affair with Luis Miguel Dominguin, who in the 1950s was Spain's premier matador.

By the age of forty Ava Gardner was a sensational hedonist, a lady guaranteed to raise scandal wherever she went. She was virtually thrown out of Franco's Spain after a long residence when she annoyed the locals by keeping company with felonious gypsies and other lowlifes. For the Argentine dictator Juan Peron and his second wife Isabella, in exile in Madrid, she proved to be the neighbour from hell. She despised acting and the world of the movies and was by no means unintelligent, courting the company of writers, some of whom became close friends: Hemingway, Robert Graves, Henry Miller. But the drunken escapades and the rampant promiscuity became more and more pronounced. Lee Server's description of her fiery affair with the actor George C Scott sounds like hell on earth, with drunken violence the norm and the two of them engaging in a kind of obscene Attic dialogue, the conversation sounding like some mad sound-mixer's amalgam of the saltiest nautical language with a battery of four-letter words. Ava loved to shock people with crude outbursts and crude deeds. Among the latter, her favourite exploit was urinating in public in hotel lobbies (a taste she shared with other female performers, like Edith Piaf and Rachel Roberts). Among the former, her best-known bon mot came when a reporter asked her what she saw in a 119-pound weakling like Sinatra. Referring to the crooner's notorious physical endowment, she coolly replied: 'Well, I'll tell you - nineteen pounds is cock.'

Lee Server's biography is not as good as his previous work (on Robert Mitchum), but this is mainly because Ava Gardner was neither as interesting nor as talented as Mitchum. As a movie actress she was close to negligible. Claims have been made for her roles in Show Boat, Pandora and The Flying Dutchman, and Mogambo, but the only part in which she really impressed was that of Maxine Falk in The Night of the Iguana - where she was required to do little more than play her own outrageous self. Cinephiles may well be disappointed in this book, which is best read as black comedy - the kind of thing someone like Terry Southern might have devised as a fictional satire on Hollywood. But Ava's 'wicked, wicked life' - to borrow the title of Errol Flynn's autobiography - could be read by feminists as the tale of a woman who never truckled to anyone or anything. Despite all her excesses and crudities, I found it difficult to dislike Ava Gardner. As she herself often admitted, she was at root a simple country girl, with a country girl's values and attitudes, pitchforked into a world of unreality simply because of her beauty. She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and after all who could blame her?