One day Ava Gardner dropped by the studio publicity department at MGM. She wanted to take a look at all those cheesecake photos they were always taking of her: throwing a beach-ball; licking an ice-cream cone. A drawer full of images was spread out before her. After a little while, according to Lee Server's new biography, she 'kind of shrugged, and she said: "Jeez . . . From the way people went on so, I thought I was better-looking than that."' There's an essay to be written on the disadvantages of physical superiority, and Ava Gardner would make its perfect test case. Her beauty distracted others; it was an invitation, a property that never seemed her own possession. It might be lost through an accident. It made men act crazily. It made people forgive her. It was something that age would take and that she could ruin, with all those late nights, with all that drink. Above all, it made her lonely. She was not so much herself as the sum total of other people's reactions to her. She was reduced to an object, a thing of pure physicality.

LRB 7 September 2006 | PDF Download