The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A chorus girl off Broadway. She’d emigrated from Cuba with my father when she was seventeen. When I got older, I found out that chorus girl was also a euphemism for a prostitute. I don’t know if she was or not. I’d like to think she wasn’t—not because there’s any shame in it but because I know a little bit about what it is to give your body to someone when you don’t want to, and I hope she didn’t have to do that.

I was eleven when she died of pneumonia. Obviously, I don’t have a lot of memories of her, but I do remember that she smelled like cheap vanilla, and she made the most amazing caldo gallego. She never called me Evelyn, only mija, which made me feel really special, like I was hers and she was mine. Above all else, my mother wanted to be a movie star. She really thought she could get us out of there and away from my father by getting into the movies.

I wanted to be just like her.

I’ve often wished that on her deathbed she’d said something moving, something I could take with me always. But we didn’t know how sick she was until it was over. The last thing she said to me was Dile a tu padre que estaré en la cama. “Tell your father I’ll be in bed.”

After she died, I would cry only in the shower, where no one could see me or hear me, where I couldn’t tell what were my tears and what was the water. I don’t know why I did that. I just know that after a few months, I was able to take a shower without crying.

And then, the summer after she died, I began to develop.

My chest started growing, and it wouldn’t stop. I had to rifle through my mom’s old things when I was twelve years old, looking to see if there was a bra that would fit. The only one I found was too small, but I put it on anyway.

By the time I was thirteen, I was five foot eight, with dark, shiny brown hair, long legs, light bronze skin, and a chest that pulled at the buttons of my dresses. Grown men were watching me walk down the street, and some of the girls in my building didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. It was a lonely business. Motherless, with an abusive father, no friends, and a sexuality in my body that my mind wasn’t ready for.

The cashier at the five-and-dime on the corner was this boy named Billy. He was the sixteen-year-old brother of the girl who sat next to me in school. One October day, I went down to the five-and-dime to buy a piece of candy, and he kissed me.

I didn’t want him to kiss me. I pushed him away. But he held on to my arm.

“Oh, come on,” he said.

The store was empty. His arms were strong. He grasped me tighter. And in that moment, I knew he was going to get what he wanted from me whether I let him or not.

So I had two choices. I could do it for free. Or I could do it for free candy.

For the next three months, I took anything I wanted from that five-and-dime. And in exchange, I saw him every Saturday night and let him take my shirt off. I never felt I had much choice in the matter. Being wanted meant having to satisfy. At least, that was my view of it back then.

I remember him saying, in the dark, cramped stockroom with my back against a wooden crate, “You have this power over me.”

He’d convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault.

And I believed him.

Look what I do to these poor boys, I thought. And yet also, Here is my value, my power.

So when he dumped me—because he was bored with me, because he’d found someone else more exciting—I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.

There was one other boy like that, whom I took my shirt off for because I thought I had to, before I started realizing that I could be the one doing the choosing.

I didn’t want anyone; that was the problem. To be perfectly blunt, I’d started to figure my body out quickly. I didn’t need boys in order to feel good. And that realization gave me great power. So I wasn’t interested in anyone sexually. But I did want something.

I wanted to get far away from Hell’s Kitchen.

I wanted out of my apartment, away from my father’s stale tequila breath and heavy hand. I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted a nice house and money. I wanted to run, far away from my life. I wanted to go where my mom had promised me we’d end up someday.

Here’s the thing about Hollywood. It’s both a place and a feeling. If you run there, you can run toward Southern California, where the sun always shines and the grimy buildings and dirty sidewalks are replaced by palm trees and orange groves. But you also run toward the way life is portrayed in the movies.

You run toward a world that is moral and just, where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, where the pain you face is only in an effort to make you stronger, so that you can win that much bigger in the end.

It would take me years to figure out that life doesn’t get easier simply because it gets more glamorous. But you couldn’t have told me that when I was fourteen.

So I put on my favorite green dress, the one I had just about grown out of. And I knocked on the door of the guy I heard was headed to Hollywood.

I could tell just by the look on his face that Ernie Diaz was glad to see me.

And that’s what I traded my virginity for. A ride to Hollywood.

Ernie and I got married on February 14, 1953. I became Evelyn Diaz. I was just fifteen by that point, but my father signed the papers. I have to think Ernie suspected I wasn’t of age. But I lied right to his face about it, and that seemed good enough for him. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he also wasn’t particularly book-smart or charming. He wasn’t going to get many chances to marry a beautiful girl. I think he knew that. I think he knew enough to grab the chance when it swung his way.

A few months later, Ernie and I got into his ’49 Plymouth and drove west. We stayed with some friends of his as he started his job as a grip. Pretty soon we had saved enough to get our own apartment. We were on Detroit Street and De Longpre. I had some new clothes and enough money to make us a roast on the weekends.

I was supposed to be finishing high school. But Ernie certainly wasn’t going to be checking my report cards, and I knew school was a waste of time. I had come to Hollywood to do one thing, and I was going to do it.

Instead of going to class, I would walk down to the Formosa Cafe for lunch every day and stayed through happy hour. I had recognized the place from the gossip rags. I knew famous people hung out there. It was right next to a movie studio.

The red building with cursive writing and a black awning became my daily spot. I knew it was a lame move, but it was the only one I had. If I wanted to be an actress, I would have to be discovered. And I wasn’t sure how you went about that, except by hanging around the spots where movie people might be.

So I went there every day and nursed a glass of Coke.

I did it so often and for so long that eventually the bartender got sick of pretending he didn’t know what gamble I was running.

“Look,” he said to me about three weeks in, “if you want to sit around here hoping Humphrey Bogart shows up, that’s fine. But you need to make yourself useful. I’m not giving up a paying seat for you to sip a soda.”

He was older, maybe fifty, but his hair was thick and dark. The lines on his forehead reminded me of my father’s.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

I was slightly worried that he’d want something from me that I had already given to Ernie, but he threw a waiter’s pad at me and told me to try my hand at taking orders.

I had no clue how to be a waitress, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. “All right,” I said. “Where should I start?”

He pointed at the tables in the place, the booths in a tight row. “That’s table one. You can figure out the rest of the numbers by counting.”

“OK,” I said. “I got it.”

I stood up off the bar stool and started walking over to table two, where three men in suits were seated, talking, their menus closed.

“Hey, kid?” the bartender said.

“Yes?”

“You’re a knockout. Five bucks says it happens for you.”

I took ten orders, mixed up three people’s sandwiches, and made four dollars.

Four months later, Harry Cameron, then a young producer at Sunset Studios, came in to meet with an exec from the lot next door. They each ordered a steak. When I brought the check, Harry looked up at me and said, “Jesus.”

Two weeks later, I had a deal at Sunset Studios.

* * *

I WENT HOME and told Ernie that I was shocked that anyone at Sunset Studios would be interested in little old me. I said that being an actress would just be a fun lark, a thing to do to pass the time until my real job of being a mother began. Grade-A bullshit.

I was almost seventeen by that point, although Ernie still thought I was older. It was late 1954. And I would get up every morning and head to Sunset Studios.

I didn’t know how to act my way out of a paper bag, but I was learning. I was an extra in a couple of romantic comedies. I had one line in a war picture.

“And why shouldn’t he?” That was the line.

I played a nurse taking care of a wounded soldier. The doctor in the scene playfully accused the soldier of flirting with me, and I said, “And why shouldn’t he?” I said it like a child in a fifth-grade play, with a slight New York accent. Back then, so many of my words were accented. English spoken like a New Yorker. Spanish spoken like an American.

When the movie came out, Ernie and I went to see it. Ernie thought it was funny, his little wife with a little line in a movie.

I had never made much money before, and now I was making as much as Ernie after he was promoted to key grip. So I asked him if I could pay for acting classes. I’d made him arroz con pollo that night, and I specifically didn’t take my apron off when I brought it up. I wanted him to see me as harmless and domestic. I thought I’d get further if I didn’t threaten him. It grated on my nerves to have to ask him how I could spend my own money. But I didn’t see another choice.

“Sure,” he said. “I think it’s a smart thing to do. You’ll get better, and who knows, you might even star in a picture one day.”

I would star.

I wanted to punch his lights out.

But I’ve since come to understand that it wasn’t Ernie’s fault. None of it was Ernie’s fault. I’d told him I was someone else. And then I started getting angry that he couldn’t see who I really was.

Six months later, I could deliver a line with sincerity. I wasn’t great by any means, but I was good enough.

I’d been in three more movies, all day-player roles. I’d heard there was a part open to play Stu Cooper’s teenage daughter in a romantic comedy. And I decided I wanted it.

So I did something that not many other actresses at my level would have had the guts to do. I knocked on Harry Cameron’s door.

“Evelyn,” he said, surprised to see me. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I want the Caroline part,” I said. “In Love Isn’t All.”

Harry motioned for me to sit down. He was handsome, for an executive. Most producers around the lot were rotund, a lot of them losing their hair. But Harry was tall and slim. He was young. I suspected he didn’t even have a decade on me. He wore suits that fit him nicely and always complemented his ice-blue eyes. There was something vaguely midwestern about him, not so much in how he looked but in the way he approached people, with kindness first, then strength.

Harry was one of the only men on the lot who didn’t stare directly at my chest. It actually bothered me, as if I’d been doing something wrong to not get his attention. It just goes to show that if you tell a woman her only skill is to be desirable, she will believe you. I was believing it before I was even eighteen.

“I’m not going to bullshit you, Evelyn. Ari Sullivan is never going to approve you for that part.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not the right type.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No one would believe you were Stu Cooper’s daughter.”

“I certainly could be.”

“You could not.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes, I want to know why.”

“Your name is Evelyn Diaz.”

“So?”

“I can’t put you in a movie and try to pretend you’re not Mexican.”

“I’m Cuban.”

“For our purposes, same difference.”

It was not the same difference, but I saw absolutely no merit in trying to explain that to him. “OK,” I said. “Then how about the movie with Gary DuPont?”

“You can’t play a romantic lead with Gary Dupont.”

“Why not?”

Harry looked at me as if to ask if I was really going to make him say it.

“Because I’m Mexican?” I asked.

“Because the movie with Gary DuPont needs a nice blond girl.”

“I could be a nice blond girl.”

Harry looked at me.

I tried harder. “I want it, Harry. And you know I can do it. I’m one of the most interesting girls you guys have right now.”

Harry laughed. “You’re bold. I’ll give you that.”

Harry’s secretary knocked on the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Cameron, you need to be in Burbank at one.”

Harry looked at his watch.

I made one last play. “Think about it, Harry. I’m good, and I can be even better. But you’re wasting me in these small roles.”

“We know what we’re doing,” he said, standing up.

I stood up with him. “Where do you see my career a year from now, Harry? Playing a teacher with three lines?”

Harry walked past me and opened his door, ushering me out. “We’ll see,” he said.

Having lost the battle, I resolved to win the war. So the next time I saw Ari Sullivan at the studio dining hall, I dropped my purse in front of him and “accidentally” gave him an eyeful as I bent down to pick it up. He made eye contact with me, and then I walked away, as if I wanted nothing from him, as if I had no idea who he was.

A week later, I pretended I was lost in the executive offices, and I ran into him in the hallway. He was a portly guy, but it was a weight that suited him. He had eyes that were so dark brown it was hard to make out the irises and the kind of five o’clock shadow that was permanent. But he had a pretty smile. And that was what I focused on.

“Mrs. Diaz,” he said. I was both surprised and not surprised to find that he had learned my name.

“Mr. Sullivan,” I said.

“Please, call me Ari.”

“Well, hello, Ari,” I said, grazing my hand on his arm.

I was seventeen. He was forty-eight.

That night, after his secretary left for the day, I was laid across his desk, with my skirt around my hips and Ari’s face between my legs. It turned out Ari had a fetish for orally pleasing underage girls. After about seven minutes of it, I pretended to erupt in reckless pleasure. I couldn’t tell you whether it was any good. But I was happy to be there, because I knew it was going to get me what I wanted.

If the definition of enjoying sex means that it is pleasurable, then I’ve had a lot of sex that I didn’t enjoy. But if we’re defining it as being happy to have made the trade, then, well, I haven’t had much I hated.

When I left, I saw the row of Oscars that Ari had sitting in his office. I told myself that one day I’d get one, too.

Love Isn’t All and the Gary DuPont movie I’d wanted came out within a week of each other. Love Isn’t All tanked. And Penelope Quills, the woman who’d gotten the part I’d wanted opposite Gary, got terrible reviews.

I cut out a review of Penelope and sent it by interoffice mail to Harry and Ari, with a note that said, “I would have knocked it out of the park.”

The next morning, I had a note from Harry in my trailer: “OK, you win.”

Harry called me into his office and told me that he had discussed it with Ari, and they had two potential roles for me.

I could play an Italian heiress as the fourth lead in a war romance. Or I could play Jo in Little Women.

I knew what it would mean, playing Jo. I knew Jo was a white woman. And still, I wanted it. I hadn’t gotten on my back just to take a baby step.

“Jo,” I said. “Give me Jo.”

And in so doing, I set the star machine in motion.

Harry introduced me to studio stylist Gwendolyn Peters. Gwen bleached my hair and cut it into a shoulder-length bob. She shaped my eyebrows. She plucked my widow’s peak. I met with a nutritionist, who made me lose six pounds exactly, mostly by taking up smoking and replacing some meals with cabbage soup. I met with an elocutionist, who got rid of the New York in my English, who banished Spanish entirely.

And then, of course, there was the three-page questionnaire I had to fill out about my life until then. What did my father do for a living? What did I like to do in my spare time? Did I have any pets?

When I turned in my honest answers, the researcher read it in one sitting and said, “Oh, no, no, no. This won’t do at all. From now on, your mother died in an accident, leaving your father to raise you. He worked as a builder in Manhattan, and on weekends during the summer, he’d take you to Coney Island. If anyone asks, you love tennis and swimming, and you have a Saint Bernard named Roger.”

I sat for at least a hundred publicity photos. Me with my new blond hair, my trimmer figure, my whiter teeth. You wouldn’t believe the things they made me model. Smiling at the beach, playing golf, running down the street being tugged by a Saint Bernard that someone borrowed from a set decorator. There were photos of me salting a grapefruit, shooting a bow and arrow, getting on a fake airplane. Don’t even get me started on the holiday photos. It would be a sweltering-hot September day, and I’d be sitting there in a red velvet dress, next to a fully lit Christmas tree, pretending to open a box that contained a brand-new baby kitten.

The wardrobe people were consistent and militant about how I was dressed, per Harry Cameron’s orders, and that look always included a tight sweater, buttoned up just right.

I wasn’t blessed with an hourglass figure. My ass might as well have been a flat wall. You could hang a picture on it. It was my chest that kept men’s interest. And women admired my face.

To be honest, I’m not sure when I figured out the exact angle we were all going for. But it was sometime during those weeks of photo shoots that it hit me.

I was being designed to be two opposing things, a complicated image that was hard to dissect but easy to grab on to. I was supposed to be both naive and erotic. It was as if I was too wholesome to understand the unwholesome thoughts you were having about me.

It was bullshit, of course. But it was an easy act to put on. Sometimes I think the difference between an actress and a star is that the star feels comfortable being the very thing the world wants her to be. And I felt comfortable appearing both innocent and suggestive.

When the pictures got developed, Harry Cameron pulled me into his office. I knew what he wanted to talk about. I knew there was one remaining piece that needed to be put into place.

“What about Amelia Dawn? That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” he said. The two of us were sitting in his office, him at his desk, me in the chair.

I thought about it. “How about something with the initials EH?” I asked. I wanted to get something as close to the name my mother gave me, Evelyn Herrera, as I could.

“Ellen Hennessey?” He shook his head. “No, too stuffy.”

I looked at him and sold him the line I’d come up with the night before, as if I’d just thought of it. “What about Evelyn Hugo?”

Harry smiled. “Sounds French,” he said. “I like it.”

I stood up and shook his hand, my blond hair, which I was still getting used to, framing my sight.

I turned the knob to his door, but Harry stopped me.

“There’s one more thing,” he said.

“OK.”

“I read your answers to the interview questions.” He looked at me directly. “Ari is very happy with the changes you’ve made. He thinks you have a lot of potential. The studio thinks it would be a good idea if you went on a few dates, if you were seen around town with some guys like Pete Greer and Brick Thomas. Maybe even Don Adler.”

Don Adler was the hottest actor at Sunset. His parents, Mary and Roger Adler, were two of the biggest stars of the 1930s. He was Hollywood royalty.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Harry asked.

He wasn’t going to mention Ernie directly, because he knew he didn’t have to.

“Not a problem,” I said. “Not at all.”

Harry nodded. He handed me a business card.

“Call Benny Morris. He’s a lawyer over in the bungalows. Handled Ruby Reilly’s annulment from Mac Riggs. He’ll help you straighten it out.”

I went home and told Ernie I was leaving him.

He cried for six hours straight, and then, in the wee hours of the night, as I lay beside him in our bed, he said, “Bien. If that’s what you want.”

The studio gave him a payout, and I left him a heartfelt letter telling him how much it hurt me to leave him. It wasn’t true, but I felt I owed it to him to finish out the marriage as I’d started it, pretending to love him.

I’m not proud of what I did to him; it didn’t feel casual to me, the way I hurt him. It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now.

But I also know how badly I’d needed to leave Hell’s Kitchen. I know what it feels like to not want your father to look at you too closely, lest he decides he hates you and hits you or decides he loves you a little too much. And I know what it feels like to see your future ahead of you—the husband who’s really just a new version of your father, surrendering to him in bed when it’s the last thing you want to do, making only biscuits and canned corn for dinner because you don’t have money for meat.

So how can I condemn the fourteen-year-old girl who did whatever she could to get herself out of town? And how can I judge the eighteen-year-old who got herself out of that marriage once it was safe to do so?

Ernie ended up remarried to a woman named Betty who gave him eight children. I believe he died in the early ’90s, a grandfather many times over. He used the payout from the studio to put a down payment on a house in Mar Vista, not far from the Fox lot. I never heard from him again.

So if we are going by the metric that all’s well that ends well, then I guess it’s safe to say that I’m not sorry.