I can't remember exactly when I saw first saw The Night of the Iguana, but it made a BIG impression on this pre-teen. It's still my favorite film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, although when I rewatched it as a gay man, promiscuous Ava Gardner replaced prim Deborah Kerr as my favorite character, reflecting my own sexual journey. Had I sublimated Ava's uninhibited midnight ocean revels with her bare-chested, Mexican servants as a kid?
So when Peter Evans published Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations in 2013, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Few Tinsel Town memoirs have ever been as juicy, that's for sure. Apparently, a little too juicy for Frank Sinatra, one of Gardner's three husbands. Although Gardner had hired Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography for financial reasons, she fired him after Ol' Blue Eyes got wind of it two years into the project; the singer, and likely love of Gardner's life (she previously had married "Andy Hardy"--Hollywood's biggest star when she got off the bus from North Carolina at 18--and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, an abusive smarty pants) had successfully sued Evans for libel. Evans managed to secure the rights to release the book only after the death of all the principals, including Howard Hughes (Gardner was his off-and-on mistress for decades).
Is it any wonder a contemporary actress would want to play the larger-than-life Gardner on the stage? Elizabeth McGovern, who bears some physical resemblance to her and is almost exactly the right age, took the idea a step further and wrote a two-hander based on Evans's book. Her engaging, heartfelt play imagines the complicated dynamic between the author and the actress and gives actor Aaron Costa Ganis his own star turn as he more than credibly evokes Rooney, Shaw and Sinatra. McGovern wisely uses Gardner's alcoholism and physical debilitation (she had suffered a stroke, thus ending her "bankability" prior to her collaboration with Evans) to weave the star's bawdy memories and shrewd judgements about her lovers into a kind of gossipy Hollywood recitative.
Less successful is McGovern's own performance due in part to the role for which she is best known: Lady Cora in Downton Abbey, still chugging along after the end of the beloved PBS series with the imminent release of a third feature film, The Grand Finale, directed by McGovern's British husband, Simon Curtis. It's peculiar and a little off putting to hear Lady Cora swear like a sailor; where Gardner was voluptuous and often drunk, McGovern is brittle and clearly in command which sometimes makes the transitions between the past and present less clear, as is the question of who is seducing whom.
But McGovern is more than good enough, and the modest production is superb with a perfect set in Gardner's cozy London apartment and multi-media celebrity reminders of a mostly forgotten age although the audience the night I attended clearly didn't need them. Most people were older than I, which is a shame, because McGovern has resurrected a gorgeous star who enjoyed sex as much as men did.
"I love to laugh in bed," Gardner declares to Evans when they first meet. Is there a better prescription for happiness in life?
