THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Ava Gardner’s earthy charm and magnetic beauty made her one of Hollywood reigning sex symbols through the 1940s and '50s. Much to her chagrin her private life - which included marriages to three legends, Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention stormy escapades with the likes of Howard Hughes and Ernest Hemingway - made her into one of the first global tabloid sensations. She fled it all, first to Spain (to the arms of a famous toreador no less) then to London after finally giving up the ghost on making it work with Sinatra. They were too alike.
Elizabeth McGovern has written this two-hander in which she also stars. It finds Ava in the autumn of her years, living quietly in Knightsbridge, bored, boozing and chain smoking while struggling with infirmities such as a wasted arm, the product of a stroke.
Feisty as ever and with an acute self-awareness Ava is in no way a pitiable figure. Instead, to get some cash, she seizes on the idea of a memoir and the publishers send Peter Evans (Boardwalk Empire's Anatol Yusef) to write it with her. For him, an aspiring novelist with pretensions, this is just another gig and for her she’d happily concoct stuff just to get it over with. Eventually, their relationship evolves beyond the transactional, as they work together on the book.
It’s a useful framing device for such a story but sadly the writing fails to rise to the occasion. Too often it settles for tart phrases like “I made movies, I made out, but I never made jam”. Another problem is that Yusef also gets to play the three (quite different) husbands which is a misstep as it stretches both his range and our buy-in to the story.
The play disdains the tabloid attitudes which drives Foster’s editor to keep phoning him to get the ‘real dirt’ (such as on Sinatra’s legendary appendage) but isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black? Ava resists that focus on the husbands rather than on her work, but as ever it’s what the public appears to want, so she must relent.
McGovern perfectly captures Ava’s particular mix of elegance and earthiness. With her husky North Carolina drawl, she professes to an ordinariness and indeed uses the F word like Joe Pesci but it’s that mix of the goddess and girl-next-door that was her secret. Today with her wit and intelligence she would be producing her own material and making a huge success of it. Like other female stars of the time, she was used and abused by a system which then recoiled at her confident sensuality and took revenge when she stood her ground. She was a fascinating character and deserves a more multi-layered exploration than we get here.
Director Gaby Dellal’s background is in film, and it shows. Serious money has been spent on 59 Productions' set and video designs. Rather distractingly the stage is framed and perched very high, against a steeply raked auditorium, which has a distancing effect. Sliding panels approximate wipes and camera shutters while scrims and backdrops display some well-chosen clips of Ava and her husbands in their prime.
For Ava fans all this is a wonderful wallow, but it needs more time and more emotional heft to really get to the heart of her.
