By Lucy Komisar

“Ava: The Secret Conversations” is the story of Ava Gardner, a Hollywood glamor girl pre-feminism. Elizabeth McGovern, the playwright and actor, is brilliant recreating a woman who somehow knew something was wrong with how the system and men treated her, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Women today would see her dialogue as a feminist cry of pain.

The play is based on the book “The Secret Conversations,” by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner,“ published in 2013 after her death in 1990 at age 67. As the Evans character (Aaron Costa Ganis) says, it is “mostly true.” The direction by Moritz von Stuelpnagel makes the story pulse with reality.

London 1988, by which time, post-new feminism, Ava should have figured everything out. Yes, she understands the men were the predators and she was the victim. She was a  Marilyn Monroe figure except that Ava Gardiner never made into the iconology. Maybe her lovers were not as important as JFK and DiMaggio.

They were both sex goddesses exploited by men. She and Marilyn made themselves, or were made by their male handlers, into the male fantasy of women. And they were destroyed by it. Both lived before feminism. Both didn’t think they could live without men. But Ava admits she loved the attention and loved the sex.

Born in 1922, she was only 18 when she arrived in Hollywood because an MGM talent scout saw a portrait of her in her brother-in-law’s New York City photography studio. The scout, impressed by her beauty, arranged a screen test, and she was subsequently signed to a seven-year contract with MGM in 1941.

There she met Mickey Rooney, who demanded she marry him. He was just 21 and a big star. What could a poor naïve Southern girl do? She discovered that he would sleep with anything that moved. But even during their divorce, she slept with him. She loved sex, she explains. The hormones of people in their early 20s.

What’s fascinating in the play is how she slowly learns how she is used, but also cooperates in her humiliation.

Peter Evans, the celebrity writer who is hired to do the book, is crude. (Note celebrity is steps down from film or entertainment.) I don’t like him from the start. Ava has had a stroke in 1986, is living in London and needs the money from a book. She is not taken with him but explains she needs to write a book or sell her jewels. In fact, she wants to start the book with the stroke. He wants to start with her husbands. After Rooney came Artie Shaw the clarinet player and band leader and then Frank Sinatra.

She says, “To think it all led to this a stone’s throw from Harrods.” She fell in Hyde Park, which she thinks is funny. She said the stroke ended her career. Thinking back to her Southern origins, she lived the Depression in the North Carolina dust bowl. She rejects being called dirt poor. The video shows Mickey Rooney, she repeats the dialogue. He was a big gambler. You see visuals of the divorce. You see her yelling at Brando. She has memory lapses. But she is smarter than Evans the author.

The bad guys arrived so fast. Artie Shaw called her family leeches and divorced her when she was 23. Then Sinatra. But first Evans finally gets to the movies. BTW in the play he is taking notes, no recorder.

In 1954, she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Barefoot Contessa.” She tells Evans that was 30 years ago and cackles. She is a charmer. There are visuals of her in films. She argues at studios that won’t let her sing in roles.

But back to Sinatra. She says, “Frank lost everything because of me.” He comes on to her. She thinks, “You’re married, walk away, What if you ask me out to dinner, what do I say?” After dinner they drive to Indio, Calif. Ganis plays Sinatra.

Frank’s wife attacks, goes to the papers. Ava laughs, “My problem is Nancy with a laughing face. It doesn’t end well.

 Ava to Frank: “Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time boozing with gangsters, you would be back on track.”  

 Frank (Ganis): “Maybe if your legs didn’t open like the pearly gates for every man, woman and animal on god’s green earth, you wouldn’t feel so cheap.” So Frank was different?

There was also billionaire Howard Hughes who assaulted her.

What was it about the Hollywood system that let women such as Ava Gardner become rich and powerful and yet let themselves be abused by the system and their male predators? Or is this just a glittering part of the American system? The women of Hollywood is a feminist book that has yet to be written. Pre-Weinstein. Better than the Gardner and Evans book.

Elizabeth McGovern is superb as writer and actor. Ganis is fine as a series of very unlikeable characters.

“Ava: The Secret Conversations.” Written by Elizabeth McGovern, based on the book “The Secret Conversations” by Peter Evans & Ava Gardner. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Stage I New York City Center. 131 West 55 Street, NYC. Opened July 29, closes Sept 14, 2025. Studebaker Theater, Chicago, Sept 24 to Oct 12, 2025. CAA Theatre, Toronto, Nov 6 to Nov 23, 2025.