Michael Newton writes:

She was the most beautiful girl at Rock Ridge High, and it was her looks that took her to Hollywood. She was famous as a beauty before she was famous as an actress. Her best films both celebrate her appearance and respond to it as a problem, almost a fate. Her habits were all bad ones – getting drunk, smashing crockery, picking up handsome but ultimately unappealing men. She pursued her pleasures, and broke a few hearts, but most of the men she had sex with are still boasting about it half a century later. Sexually, there seems to have been little that she did not try. She also travelled; she drank; she hung out in brothels, danced with gypsies, took part in bull-fights, skinny-dipped, and got herself barred from most of the best hotels in Europe. Ava Gardner had a lot of fun.

(LRB 7 September 2006

Bloomsbury | hardback 551 |ISBN: 9780747565475