From infamy to a stable life

Most people, asked to come up with three facts about the American actress Bo Derek, would probably say that she made a notorious movie, 10, with Dudley Moore, for which she had a notorious hairstyle, plaited into cornrows and beaded, and that she made, while still in her teens, a notorious marriage to the actor and director John Derek, who was 30 years her senior and had previously been married to the actresses Ursula Andress and Linda Evans.

After that, everything starts to go a bit blurry - were there some truly dire films after 10, the titles of which one can't quite recall? Did she campaign for the Republicans this time around? Or was that some other beautiful, blonde movie star not quite at the peak of her career?

Perhaps it was the apprehension of a certain haziness as to her public image that prompted Mrs Derek, now widowed, 44 and, you get the impression, not exactly rolling in cash - at least in Hollywood terms - to come up with the idea for Riding Lessons, a memoir of her life so far.

The book is subtitled "Everything that matters in life I learned from horses", which seems calculated pretty unequivocally to dispose of her husband's reputation as a Svengali.

In fact, the portrait of their marriage that emerges from these pages is strange and distinctly rueful. He does not sound an easy man to be married to. Every chapter seems to contain a description of him flying into a terrible, vein-swelling, Rumpelstiltskin rage for some reason or another.

"At 71," writes Bo, describing his deathbed scene (all his "coronary arteries had ruptured ... like a run in a stocking"), "his ... mind was still as sharp as ever, especially when he was angry".

What is more, he seems to have been endowed with what you might call the anti-Midas touch. In his wife's artless account of their joint projects, everything he touched turned instantly to lead. Even a sure thing, a porn movie called Love You!, went wrong: "You made a Clairol commercial," complained the boyfriend of one of the sex goddesses involved. His legacy to his young widow appears to have consisted largely of debts. In the circumstances, you can see how a girl could get quite keen on horses.

The counterpoint, in Riding Lessons, to the terrible evasions and lack of candour of human relationships is the sweet steadiness of the bond between Bo and her stable. To the inexpert eye, Mrs Derek might seem as wilful a picker of horseflesh as she was of men. Her book's jacket blurb describes her as an "able horsewoman", but the illustrations include some sweetly self-conscious, and occasionally rather horrible, pictures of her riding, long hair and stirrups flying in all directions, including one where she is plunging a gaily decorated barb into a small Spanish bovine whose horns appear to have been safely wrapped in brown paper for the occasion.

Sweetly self-conscious and occasionally rather horrible pretty much sum up the accompanying text, too, which is credited as being written "with Mark Seal". There is enough about it of candour, if not precisely of self-knowledge, to make one wonder whether the result might have been more engaging if Mark Seal's contribution had been dispensed with.