The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “Celia, stop it. I’m sick of this conversation. You’re being a brat.”

  She laughed coldly. “Exactly the same Evelyn I’ve been dealing with for years. Nothing’s changed. You’re afraid of who you are, and you still don’t have an Oscar. You are what you have always been: a nice pair of tits.”

  I let the silence hang in the air for a moment. The buzz of the phone was the only sound either of us could hear.

  And then Celia started crying. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should never have said that. I don’t even mean it. I’m so sorry. I’ve had too much to drink, and I miss you, and I’m sorry that I said something so terrible.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I should be going. It’s late here, you understand. Congratulations again, sweetheart.”

  I hung up before she could reply.

  That was how it was with Celia. When you denied her what she wanted, when you hurt her, she made sure you hurt, too.

  DID YOU EVER CALL HER on it?” I ask Evelyn.

  I hear the muffled sound of my phone ringing in my bag, and I know from the ringtone that it’s David. I did not return his text over the weekend because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. And then, once I got here again this morning, I put it out of my mind.

  I reach over and turn the ringer off.

  “There was no point in fighting with Celia once she got mean,” Evelyn says. “If things got too tense, I tended to back off before they came to a head. I would tell her I loved her and I couldn’t live without her, and then I’d take my top off, and that usually ended the conversation. For all her posturing, Celia had one thing in common with almost every straight man in America: she wanted nothing more than to get her hands on my chest.”

  “Did it stick with you, though?” I ask. “Those words?”

  “Of course it did. Look, I’d be the first person to say back when I was young that all I was was a nice pair of tits. The only currency I had was my sexuality, and I used it like money. I wasn’t well educated when I got to Hollywood, I wasn’t book-smart, I wasn’t powerful, I wasn’t a trained actress. What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.”

  She goes on. “When Celia said that to me, I had crossed into my thirties. I wasn’t sure I had many more good years left, to be honest. I thought, you know, sure, Celia would keep getting work because people were hiring her for her talent. I wasn’t so sure they would continue hiring me once the wrinkles set in, once my metabolism slowed down. So yeah, it hurt, a lot.”

  “But you had to know you were talented,” I tell her. “You had been nominated for an Academy Award three times by that point.”

  “You’re using reason,” Evelyn says, smiling at me. “It doesn’t always work.”

  IN 1974, ON MY THIRTY-SIXTH birthday, Harry, Celia, John, and I all went out to the Palace. It was supposedly the most expensive restaurant in the world during that time. And I was the sort of person who liked being extravagant and absurd.

  I look back on it now, and I wonder where I got off, throwing money around so casually, as if the fact that it came easily to me meant I had no responsibility to value it. I find it mildly mortifying now. The caviar, the private planes, the staff big enough to populate a baseball team.

  But the Palace it was.

  We posed for pictures, knowing they would end up in some tabloid or another. Celia bought us a bottle of Dom Perignon. Harry put back four manhattans himself. And when the dessert came with a lit candle in the middle, the three of them sang for me as people looked on.

  Harry was the only one who had a piece of the cake. Celia and I were watching our figures, and John was on a strict regimen that had him mostly eating protein.

  “At least have a bite, Ev,” John said good-naturedly as he took the plate away from Harry and pushed it toward me. “It’s your birthday, for crying out loud.”

  I raised an eyebrow and grabbed a fork, using it to scrape a forkful of the chocolate fudge icing. “When you’re right, you’re right,” I said to him.

  “He just doesn’t think I should have it,” Harry said.

  John laughed. “Two birds with one stone.”

  Celia lightly tapped her fork against her glass. “OK, OK,” she said. “Small speech time.”

  She was due to shoot a film in Montana the following week. She’d postponed the start date so she could be with me that night.

  “To Evelyn,” she said, lifting her glass in the air. “Who has lit up every goddamn room she ever walked into. And who, day after day, makes us feel like we’re living in a dream.”

  * * *

  LATER THAT NIGHT, as Celia and John went out to hail a cab, Harry gently helped me put my jacket on. “Do you realize that I’m the longest marriage you’ve had?” he asked.

  By that point, Harry and I had been married for almost seven years. “And also the best,” I said. “Bar none.”

  “I was thinking . . .”

  I already knew what he was thinking. Or at least, I suspected what he was thinking. Because I’d been thinking it, too.

  I was thirty-six. If we were going to have a baby, I’d put it off for as long as I could.

  Sure, there were women having babies later than that, but it wasn’t very common, and I had spent the last few years staring at babies in strollers, unable to focus my eyes on anything else when they were around.

  I would pick up friends’ babies and hold them tightly until the very moment their mothers demanded them back. I thought of what my own child might be like. I thought of how it would feel to bring a life into the world, to give the four of us another being to focus on.

  But if I was going to do it, I had to get moving.

  And our decision to have a baby wasn’t really just a two-person conversation. It was a four-person conversation.

  “Go on,” I said as we made our way to the front of the restaurant. “Say it.”

  “A baby,” Harry said. “You and me.”

  “Have you discussed it with John?” I asked.

  “Not specifically,” he said. “Have you discussed it with Celia?”

  “No.”

  “But are you ready?” he said.

  My career was going to take a hit. There was no avoiding it. I’d go from being a woman to being a mother—and somehow those things appeared mutually exclusive in Hollywood. My body would change. I’d have months where I couldn’t work. It made absolutely no sense to say yes. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

  Harry nodded. “Me too.”

  “OK,” I said, considering the next steps. “So we’ll talk to John and Celia.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said. “I suppose we will.”

  “And if everyone is on board?” I asked, stopping before we got out to the sidewalk.

  “We’ll get started,” Harry said, stopping with me.

  “I know the most obvious solution is adoption,” I said. “But . . .”

  “You think we should have a biological child.”

  “I do,” I said. “I don’t want anyone trying to claim we adopted because we had something to hide.”

  Harry nodded. “I get it,” he said. “I want a biological child, too. Someone half you, half me. I’m with you on this.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “You do realize how babies are made?” I asked him.

  He smiled and then leaned in and whispered, “There is a very small part of me that has wanted to bed you since I met you, Evelyn Hugo.”

  I laughed and hit him on the arm. “No, there is not.”

  “A small part,” Harry said, defending himself. “It goes against all my greater instincts. But it is there nonetheless.”

  I smiled. “Well,” I said, “we will keep that part to ourselves.”

  Harry laughed and put out his hand. I shook it. “Once again, Evelyn, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  WOULD THE BABY BE RA
ISED by the both of you?” Celia asked. We were lying in bed, naked. My back was lined with sweat, my hairline damp. I rolled over onto my stomach and put my hand on Celia’s chest.

  The movie she was doing next was making her a brunette. I found myself transfixed by the golden red of her hair, desperate to know that they would dye it back properly, that she would return to me looking exactly like herself.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. It would be ours. We’d raise it together.”

  “And where would I fit into all of this? Where would John?”

  “Wherever you want to.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means that we would figure it out as we go.”

  Celia considered my words and stared at the ceiling. “This is something you want?” Celia asked finally.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Very badly.”

  “Is it a problem for you that I have never . . . wanted that?” she asked.

  “That you don’t want children?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Is it a problem for you that I cannot . . . that I cannot give you that?” Her voice was starting to crack, and her lips were starting to quiver. When Celia was on-screen and needed to cry, she would squint her eyes and cover her face. But they were fake tears, generated out of nothing, for nothing. When she really cried, her face remained painfully still except for the corners of her lips and the water brimming in her eyes that stuck to her lashes.

  “Honey,” I said, pulling her toward me. “Of course not.”

  “I just . . . I want to give you everything you’ve ever wanted, and you want that, and I can’t give it to you.”

  “Celia, no,” I said. “It’s not like that at all.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You have given me more than I ever thought I could have in one life.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’m positive.”

  She smiled. “You love me?” she said.

  “Oh, my God, what an understatement,” I told her.

  “You love me so much you can’t see straight?”

  “I love you so much that when I sometimes get a look at all the crazy fan mail you get, I think, Well, sure, that makes sense. I want to collect her eyelashes, too.”

  Celia laughed and ran her hand across my upper arm as she stared at the ceiling. “I want you to be happy,” she said when she finally looked at me.

  “You should know that Harry and I will have to . . .”

  “There’s no other way?” she asked. “I thought women were getting pregnant by men just using their sperm now.”

  I nodded. “I think there are other ways,” I said. “But I’m not confident in the security of the situation. Or, rather, I don’t know how to ensure that no one finds out that’s how we did it.”

  “You’re saying you’re going to have to make love to Harry,” Celia said.

  “You are the person I’m in love with. You are the person I make love to. Harry and I are merely making a baby.”

  Celia looked at me, reading my face. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Absolutely positive.”

  She looked back up at the ceiling. She didn’t talk for a while. I watched her eyes as they moved back and forth. I watched her breathing as it slowed. And then she turned to face me. “If it’s what you want . . . if you want a baby, then . . . have a baby. I will . . . we will figure it out. I will make it work. I can be an aunt. Aunt Celia. And I’ll find a way to be OK with it all.”

  “And I’ll help you,” I said.

  She laughed. “How do you suppose you’ll do that?”

  “I can think of one way to make it all a bit more palatable for you,” I said, kissing her neck. She liked to be kissed right below and just behind her ear, where her earlobe hit her neck.

  “Oh, you are too much,” she said. But she didn’t say anything else. She did not stop me as I moved my hand across her breasts, down her stomach, between her legs. She moaned and pulled me closer to her, and she ran her own hand down my body. She touched me while I touched her, soft at first and then harder, faster. “I love you,” she said, breathless.

  “I love you,” I said back to her.

  She looked into my eyes and made me feel rapture, and that night, in giving of herself, she gave me a baby.

  PhotoMoment

  May 23, 1975

  EVELYN HUGO AND HARRY CAMERON HAVE A BABY GIRL!

  Evelyn Hugo is finally a mother! At the age of 37, the stunning bombshell is adding “parent” to her résumé. Connor Margot Cameron, 6 pounds, 9 ounces, was born late last Tuesday at Mount Sinai Hospital.

  Dad Harry Cameron is said to be “over the moon” about the little bambina.

  With a string of hits behind them, Evelyn and Harry are sure to consider the littlest Cameron their most exciting coproduction yet.

  I WAS IN LOVE WITH Connor from the moment she looked at me. With her full head of hair and her round blue eyes, I thought, for a moment, she looked just like Celia.

  Connor was always hungry and hated being alone. She wanted nothing more than to lie on me, quietly sleeping. She absolutely adored Harry.

  During those first few months, Celia shot two movies back-to-back, both out of town. One of them, The Buyer, was a movie I knew she was passionate about. But the second, a mob movie, was exactly the sort of work she hated. On top of the violence and darkness, it shot for eight weeks, four in Los Angeles and four in Sicily. When the offer came in, I was expecting her to turn it down. Instead, she took the part, and John decided to go with her.

  During the time they were gone, Harry and I lived almost exactly like a traditional married couple. Harry made me bacon and eggs for breakfast and ran my baths. I fed the baby and changed her nearly hourly.

  We had help, of course. Luisa was taking care of the house. She was changing the sheets, doing the laundry, cleaning up after all of us. On her days off, it was Harry who stepped in.

  It was Harry who told me I looked beautiful, even though we both knew I’d seen better days. It was Harry who read script after script, looking for the perfect project for me to take on once Connor was old enough. It was Harry who slept next to me every night, who held my hand as we fell asleep, who held me when I was convinced I was a terrible mother after I scratched Connor’s cheek giving her a bath.

  Harry and I had always been close, had long been family, but during that time, I truly felt like a wife. I felt like I had a husband. And I grew to love him even more. Connor, and that time with her, bonded Harry and me in ways I could never imagine. He was there to celebrate the good and support me during the bad.

  It was around that time that I started to believe that friendships could be written in the stars. “If there are all different types of soul mates,” I told Harry one afternoon, when the two of us were sitting out on the patio with Connor, “then you are one of mine.”

  Harry was wearing a pair of shorts and no shirt. Connor was lying on his chest. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his stubble was coming in. It had just the slightest gray patch under his chin. Looking at him with her, I realized how much they looked alike. Same long lashes, same pert lips.

  Harry held Connor to his chest with one hand and grabbed my free hand with the other. “I am absolutely positive that I need you more than I’ve ever needed another living soul,” he said. “The only exception being—”

  “Connor,” I said. We both smiled.

  For the rest of our lives, we would say that. The only exception to absolutely everything was Connor.

  * * *

  WHEN CELIA AND John came home, things went back to normal. Celia lived with me. Harry lived with John. Connor stayed at my place, with the assumption that Harry would come by days and nights to be with us, to care for us.

  But that first morning, just around the time Harry was due for breakfast, Celia put on her robe and headed to the kitchen. She started making oatmeal.

  I had just come down,
still in my pajamas. I was sitting at the island nursing Connor when Harry walked in.

  “Oh,” he said, looking at Celia, noticing the pan. Luisa was washing dishes in the sink. “I was coming in to make bacon and eggs.”

  “I’ve got it,” Celia said. “A nice warm bowl of oatmeal for everybody. There’s enough for you, too, if you’re hungry.”

  Harry looked at me, unsure what to do. I looked at him, equally uncertain.

  Celia just kept stirring. And then she grabbed three bowls and set them down. She put the pot in the sink for Luisa to wash.

  It occurred to me then how odd this system was. Harry and I paid Luisa’s salary, but Harry didn’t even live here. Celia and John paid the mortgage on the home Harry lived in.

  Harry sat down and grabbed the spoon in front of him. He and I dug into our oatmeal at the same time. When Celia’s back was to us, we looked at each other and grimaced. Harry mouthed something to me, and even though I could barely read his lips, I knew what he was saying, because it was exactly what I was thinking.

  So bland.

  Celia turned back to us and offered us some raisins. We both took her up on it. And then the three of us sat in the kitchen, eating our oatmeal quietly, all aware that Celia had staked her claim. I was hers. She would make my breakfast. Harry was a visitor.

  Connor started crying, so Harry took her and changed her. Luisa went downstairs to grab the laundry. And when we were alone, Celia said, “Max Girard is doing a movie called Three A.M. for Paramount. It’s supposed to be a real art-house piece, and I think you should do it.”

  I had kept in touch with Max, on and off, since he directed me in Boute-en-Train. I never forgot that it was with him that I was able to catapult my name to the top again. But I knew Celia couldn’t stand him. He was too overt in his interest in me, too salacious about it. Celia used to jokingly call him Pepé Le Pew. “You think I should do a movie with Max?”

  Celia nodded. “They offered it to me, but it makes more sense for you. Regardless of the fact that I think he’s a Neanderthal, I can recognize that the man makes good movies. And this role is exactly your thing.”