Biography: I saw her once. She was having lunch at the table next to mine in the commissary of Pinewood studios. he looked unwell and not in the least like a goddess, a word that her latest biographer, Lee Server, uses on virtually every page.
I remember thinking, foolishly, that goddesses should not eat alone.
Her life story was a piece of dross out of Photoplay or Modern Screen. The year was 1941, and it was still a time when teenagers dreamed of fame in Hollywood. They lived in a gingham Valhalla. Aspiring stars, craving the limelight, were to be found at the ice-cream counters of drug stores; at home, as was later said of Debbie Reynolds, if you opened the fridge door and they stood in the light, they were good for 20 minutes. Gardner was an exception who took her dreams calmly, as they came.
She was brought up in North Dakota in a near-slum that was mocked as Tobacco Road; it was even the subject of Broadway's longest-running play - 3,122 performances - and, later, a John Ford film of that name. Gardner went to visit her sister, who lived in New York, and while there she had a portrait of herself made as a gift for her mother back home. It appeared in the window of a Fifth Avenue photo shop; there were tests, and the final fateful instruction went out that would send one of these from Tobacco Road to MGM's Culver City in Hollywood.
It was according to legend.
The MGM starlets went to school on the studio lot, where Ava learned deportment and speech, an alma mater trivialised with the itsy-bitsy name of the Little Red Schoolhouse. She was given walk-on parts in short films, such as Crime Does Not Pay, where her inexperience could sneak by, unnoticed. Ava was wooed by Mickey Rooney, then at the height of his fame as Andy Hardy, the all-American kid, who, on-screen at any rate, was as wholesome as Mom's apple pie. He wooed Ava and, reader, she married him.
There had been an earlier, juvenile marriage back home in North Dakota. It was a kind of trial run, and did not last. Neither, thanks to an enraged Louis B Mayer, did the Rooney marriage. Gardner put it down to experience; she liked men - or at least she liked sex, which was not the same thing - and she developed a taste for drugs and hard liquor which, in the end, probably killed her.
If there was a point where the on-screen and off-screen Gardner over-lapped, it came late in her career, with Pandora and the Flying Dutchman when, at her whim, a besotted lover (Marius Goring) drives his prized sports car off a cliff edge. Gardner would have asked for no less and derived the same amusement.
Her lovers made up in quantity what they lacked in quality. Among them were the gangster, Johnny Stompanato, whom one day Lana Turner's daughter would stab to death, and there were Mel Torme, the ubiquitous Howard Hughes, Howard Duff and Artie Shaw. Somehow, and in spite of their being teamed on three occasions, her teenage idol, Clark Gable, was spared, perhaps because it was said that if one bade him good morning he would be flummoxed for an answer. Though bereft of small talk, he alone of the bunch was streetwise.
Later, she fell in love with Spain and became infatuated - although not simultaneously - with two bullfighters. As if she were a Pandora come to life, her need for men who would destroy themselves for her sake seemed incurable.
However, the kingpin among her lovers was Frank Sinatra, and he and Gardner were two of a kind. They fought, reconciled, separated, were unfaithful. On film, both the heroine in Pandora and her successor in The Barefoot Contessa - the daft story had more than a passing resemblance to that of Rita Hayworth - came to grief for love. When Sinatra married Mia Farrow, Gardner's feline comment was "I always knew that Frank would end up marrying a boy".
One could say she was a star and all that word implies, but hardly ever an actress; which makes Server's labours seem all the more unnecessary.
In spite of Robert Siodmak's sometimes brilliant but flawed version of Hemingway's The Killers, she was never the sensation that Server implies. Amicably, she traded insults with John Ford - a case of Greek meets Greek - when in Africa for Mogambo. She was cast as a succession of shopworn angels, and in the Hollywood of the Production Code era loose women were doomed to end up on the topmost shelf, among the trash.
It is said that she could carry a song, but her vocals in Show Boat were taken from her and given to Annette Warren (Gardner, it was felt, lacked the necessary passion). Nonetheless, it was the best performance of her career.
She provided her own epitaph: "Although no one believes me, I have always been a country girl and still have a country girl's values." It is a pity that, in reality, her values were always those of Hollywood.
• Hugh Leonard is a playwright and novelist
• Ava Gardner By Lee Server Bloomsbury, 544pp. £20