In 1988, the Hollywood star Ava Gardner asked a writer named Peter Evans to ghostwrite her memoirs. The two had never met, but before long, Gardner was calling Evans in the middle of the night, spilling her soul.
She spoke of her three famous husbands: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. Of her film work in movies like “Mogambo” and “The Night of the Iguana.” Of missed opportunities, such as turning down the role of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate.” And, as Evans wrote in his book “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations,” the candor was typically accompanied by the unmistakable clink of bottle meeting glass. “I’m not afraid of dying, baby,” she told Evans one night, saying she was sick of being Ava Gardner. “I just want you to hold my hand.”
Evans was not holding Gardner’s hand when she died at age 67 in 1990 in London. By then, the two had fallen out. But Evans had his notebook filled with Gardner’s words and, in 2013, he published his conversations, which now have become a theater show, coming to Chicago’s Studebaker Theater this fall, created by and starring Elizabeth McGovern, best known for playing Lady Grantham on the long-running period television series “Downton Abbey.”
“I thought this dialogue was so lively, it was crying out to be on a stage,” McGovern said one afternoon in the lobby of the New York theater where she was performing in a previous production of “Ava: The Secret Conversations.” “They spent a year or more in each other’s company in quite a tense way, hammering out this supposed autobiography. He published almost direct transcripts of their conversations, and they suggested so many interesting subjects to me. Two people were wrangling to have control of the life story of a movie star. Ava, trying to process her past and the impact of her past and everything that had happened to her. And him being part of that journey — a journey toward intimacy for both of them.”
McGovern approached a producer and got the rights to the book.
Why was this fairly routine process of a Hollywood star so fraught?
“I think that she had very ambivalent feelings about writing an autobiography,” McGoverns says. “It was a painful thing for her to go back and look at her past. And rather than being of service to her, he’d dig in his heels and want to do things his way. She partly loved the challenge of that, but, inevitably, it was never going to work.”
In the end, Gardner went to another, more servile, writer and there was an autobiography. But her estate, whatever their misgivings, also gave Evans permission to publish his book in 2013. And the estate approved McGovern’s show.
Both Gardner and Evans appear as characters on stage. “My idea was because Ava is so ambivalent and afraid of going back and Peter has such an agenda in her company that they happen to come together when their mutual agendas coincide, and it pulls them both back and he becomes the people in her past, playing out their parts. That way it becomes alive on the stage and things are happening between them, rather than just one person telling anecdotal stories and the other being the recipient.”
McGovern doesn’t see Ava as a victim of the studio system or fame itself.
“I think that took a toll,” McGovern says, “but there is a feeling at the end of this play that she lived life always entirely on her own terms, having done things her own way. She emerges scarred but triumphant, owning her decisions and her own life story.”
Gardener was, of course, married to three famous men, not to mention having several other complex relationships.
“I wanted to reinforce the arc of a love affair,” McGovern says. “The sexual frisson of the beginning, the middle where you work out the power dynamic and then, in the end, when two equally powerful people just can’t co-exist. That’s the arc of the story between her and Peter and also the stories she tells. The Mickey Rooney marriage is full of the spark of primal sexuality. Artie Shaw was working out an uneven power dynamic where he was very much dominant over her. And the Frank Sinatra marriage was of an equally matched pair but it just became unsustainable.”
“The Secret Conversations” arrives in Chicago just as the “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” movie has its U.S. release.
“It’s the final, final,” the Evanston-born McGovern says. “I can state that pretty confidently. And I am happy to say that I think we are ending on a high. It think it’s the best of the movies. It’s the same old thing, I suppose, but somehow all the years we have put in have rendered it deeper than it was when we started. Everyone has invested so much in these characters. … It’s comforting to think that there is a microcosm of people all working together to make a system work. It’s what we are singularly lacking today.”
“Ava: The Secret Conversations” runs Sept. 24 to Oct. 12 in the Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; www.fineartsbuilding.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com