I was lying outright to hide a lie of omission. I was crafting a new narrative, in which Celia would believe that I had asked for her blessing before doing what I had already done.
“Her need to be pleasured?”
“We need to see what Patricia gets out of her relationship with Mark. It’s not just love. It has to be more than that.”
“That makes sense,” Celia said. “You’re saying it answers the question Why does she stay with him?”
“Yeah,” I said, excited that maybe she would understand, maybe I could fix this retroactively. “Exactly. So we are going to shoot an explicit scene between Don and me. I’ll be mostly nude. For the heart of the movie to really sink in, we need to see the two main characters truly vulnerable together, connecting . . . sexually.”
Celia listened as I spoke, letting the words sink in. I could see her grappling with what I was saying, trying to make it fit for her. “I want you to do the movie as you want to do it,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I just . . .” She looked down and started shaking her head. “I’m feeling very . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure I can do this. Knowing you’re with Don all day, with these long nights, and I never see you, and . . . sex. Sex is sacred between us. I’m not sure I can stand to watch that.”
“You won’t need to watch it.”
“But I’ll know it happened. I’ll know it’s out there. And everyone will see it. I want to be OK with this. I really do.”
“So be OK with it.”
“I’m going to try.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m really going to try.”
“Great.”
“But Evelyn, I don’t think I can. Just knowing that you were . . . when you slept with Mick, I was sick for years afterward, thinking about the two of you together.”
“I know.”
“And you slept with Harry, God knows how many times,” she said.
“I know, honey. I know. But I’m not sleeping with Don.”
“But you have slept with him. You have. When people watch the two of you on-screen, they will be watching something the two of you have already done.”
“It’s not real,” I said.
“I know, but what you’re saying to me is that you are prepared to make it look real. You’re saying you’re going to make it look more real than anything else any of us have done so far.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I am saying that.”
She started crying. She put her head in her hands. “I feel like I’m failing you,” she said. “But I can’t do it. I can’t. I know myself, and I know this is too much for me. I’ll be too sick over it. I’ll make myself ill thinking of you with him.” She shook her head, resolved. “I’m sorry. I don’t have it in me. I can’t handle it. I want to be stronger for you, I do. I know that if the tables were turned, you could handle it. I feel like I’m disappointing you. And I’m so sorry, Evelyn. I will work forever to make it up to you. I’ll help you get any part you want. For the rest of our lives. And I’ll work on getting there so that the next time this happens, I can be stronger. But . . . please, Evelyn, I can’t live through you sleeping with another man. Even if this time it only looks real. I can’t do it. Please,” she said. “Please don’t do this.”
My heart sank. I nearly vomited.
I looked down at the floor. I studied the way two planks of wood met just under my feet, how the nailheads were just the littlest bit sunken in.
And then I looked up at her and said, “I already did it.”
I sobbed.
And I pleaded.
And I groveled, desperately, on my knees, having long ago learned the lesson that you have to throw yourself at the mercy of the things you truly want.
But before I was done, Celia said, “All I’ve ever wanted was for you to be truly mine. But you’ve never been mine. Not really. I’ve always had to settle for one piece of you. While the world gets the other half. I don’t blame you. It doesn’t make me stop loving you. But I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Evelyn. I can’t live with my heart half-broken all the time.”
And she walked out the door and left me.
Within a week, Celia had packed up all her things, at my apartment and hers, and moved back to L.A.
She would not answer the phone when I called. I couldn’t get hold of her.
Then, weeks after she left, she filed for divorce from John. When he got the papers, I swear, it was as if she had served them to me directly. It was clear, in no uncertain terms, that by divorcing him, she was divorcing me.
I got John to make some calls to her agent, her manager. He tracked her down at the Beverly Wilshire. I flew to Los Angeles, and I pounded on her door.
I was wearing my favorite Diane von Furstenberg, because Celia had once said I was irresistible in it. There were a man and a woman coming out of their hotel room, and as they walked down the hall, they couldn’t stop looking at me. They knew who I was. But I refused to hide. I just kept knocking on the door.
When Celia finally opened it, I looked her in the eye and didn’t say a word. She stared back at me, silent. And then, with tears in my eyes, I said, simply, “Please.”
She turned away from me.
“I made a mistake,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”
The last time we had fought like this, I had refused to apologize. And I really thought that this time, if I just admitted how wrong I was, if I gave in, sincerely and with all my heart, she would forgive me.
But she didn’t. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said as she shook her head. She was wearing high-waisted jeans and a Coca-Cola T-shirt. Her hair was long, past her shoulders. She was thirty-seven but still looked like she was in her twenties. She always had a youthfulness to her that I never really had. I was thirty-eight then, and I was starting to look it.
When she said that, I got down on my knees, in the hallway of the hotel, and bawled my eyes out.
She pulled me inside.
“Take me back, Celia,” I begged her. “Take me back, and I’ll give the rest of it up. I’ll give up everything but Connor. I won’t ever act again. I’ll let the world know about us. I’m ready to give you all of me. Please.”
Celia listened. But then she very calmly sat down in the chair by the bed and said, “Evelyn, you are not capable of giving it up. And you never will be. And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine. That you cannot be loved enough to be anyone’s.”
I stood there for a moment longer, waiting for her to say something else. But she didn’t. She had nothing else to say. And there was nothing I could say that would change her mind.
Facing reality, I got hold of myself, held in my tears, kissed her on her temple, and walked away.
I got back on the plane to New York, hiding my pain. And it wasn’t until I was back in my apartment that I lost it. Sobbing as if she’d died.
That’s how final it felt.
I had pushed her too far. And it was over.
*
THAT WAS TRULY IT?” I say.
“She was done with me,” Evelyn says.
“What about the movie?”
“Are you asking if it was worth it?”
“I guess so.”
“The movie was a huge hit. Didn’t make it worth it.”
“Don Adler won an Oscar for it, didn’t he?”
Evelyn rolls her eyes. “That bastard won an Oscar, and I wasn’t even nominated.”
“Why not? I’ve seen it,” I say. “Parts of it, at least. You’re great. Really exceptional.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Well, then, why weren’t you nominated?”
“Because!” Evelyn says, frustrated. “Because I wasn’t allowed to be applauded for it. It had an X rating. It was responsible for letters to the editor at nearly every paper in the country. It was too scandalous, too explicit. It got people excited, and when they felt that way, they had to blame someone, and they blamed me. What else were they going to do? Blame the French director? The French are like that. And they weren’t going to blame the newly redeemed Don Adler. They blamed the sexpot they’d created whom they could now call a tramp. They weren’t going to give me an Oscar for that. They were going to watch it alone in a dark theater and then chastise me in public.”
“But it didn’t hurt your career,” I say. “You did two more movies the next year.”
“I made people money. No one turns away money. They were all too happy to get me in their movies and then talk about me behind my back.”
“Within a few years, you delivered what is considered one of the most noble performances of the decade.”
“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have had to turn it around. I did nothing wrong.”
“Well, we know that now. People were praising you, and the film, as early as the mid-’80s.”
“It’s all fine in hindsight,” Evelyn says. “Except that I spent years with a scarlet A on my chest, while women and men across the country screwed each other’s brains out thinking about what the movie meant. People were shocked by the representation of a woman wanting to get fucked. And while I’m aware of the crassness of my language, it’s really the only way to describe it. Patricia was not a woman who wanted to make love. She wanted to get fucked. And we showed that. And people hated how much they loved it.”
She’s still angry. I can see it in the way her jaw tightens.
“You won an Oscar shortly after that.”
“I lost Celia for that movie,” she says. “My life, which I loved so much, was turned upside down over that movie. Of course, I understand it was my own fault. I’m the one who filmed an explicit sex scene with my ex-husband without talking to her about it first. I’m not trying to blame other people for the mistakes I made in my own relationship. But still.” Evelyn is quiet, lost in her thoughts for a moment.
“I want to ask you something, because I think it’s important for you to speak directly about it,” I say.
“OK . . .”
“Did being bisexual put a strain on your relationship?” I want to make sure to portray her sexuality with all of its nuance, in all its complexity.
“What do you mean?” she asks. There is a slight edge to her voice.
“You lost the woman you loved because of your sexual relationships with men. I think that’s relevant to your larger identity.”
Evelyn listens to me and considers my words. Then she shakes her head. “No, I lost the woman I loved because I cared about being famous as much as I cared about her. It had nothing to do with my sexuality.”
“But you were using your sexuality to get things from men that Celia couldn’t give you.”
Evelyn shakes her head even more emphatically. “There’s a difference between sexuality and sex. I used sex to get what I wanted. Sex is just an act. Sexuality is a sincere expression of desire and pleasure. That I always kept for Celia.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that before,” I say.
“Being bisexual didn’t make me disloyal,” Evelyn says. “One has nothing to do with the other. Nor did it mean that Celia could only fulfill half my needs.”
I find myself interrupting her. “I didn’t—”
“I know you’re not saying that,” Evelyn says. “But I want you to have it in my words. When Celia said she couldn’t have all of me, it was because I was selfish and because I was scared of losing everything I had. Not because I had two sides of me that one person could never fulfill. I broke Celia’s heart because I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her. Never once did I cheat on Celia. If we’re defining cheating by desiring another person and then making love to that person. I never once did that. When I was with Celia, I was with Celia. The same way any woman married to a man is with that man. Did I look at other people? Sure. Just like anyone in a relationship does. But I loved Celia, and I shared my true self only with Celia.
“The problem was, I used my body to get other things I wanted. And I didn’t stop doing that, even for her. That’s my tragedy. That I used my body when it was all I had, and then I kept using it even when I had other options. I kept using it even when I knew it would hurt the woman I loved. And what’s more, I made her complicit in it. I put her in a position to continually have to approve of my choices at her own expense. Celia may have left me in a huff, but it was a death by a thousand cuts. I hurt her with these tiny scratches, day after day. And then I got surprised when it left a wound too big to heal.
“I slept with Mick because I wanted to protect our careers, mine and hers. And that was more important to me than the sanctity of our relationship. And I slept with Harry because I wanted a baby, and I thought people would get suspicious if we adopted. Because I was afraid to draw attention to the sexlessness of our marriage. And I chose that over the sanctity of our relationship. And when Max Girard had a good idea about a creative choice in a movie, I wanted to do it. And I was willing to do it at the expense of the sanctity of our relationship.”
“You’re hard on yourself, I think,” I say. “Celia wasn’t perfect. She could be cruel.”
Evelyn shrugs slightly. “She always made sure the bad was outweighed by so much good. I . . . well, I didn’t do that for her. I made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad. Of course, I realized all this when she left me. And I tried to fix it. But it was too late. As she said, she simply couldn’t do it anymore. Because it took me too long to figure out what I cared about. Not because of my sexuality. I feel confident you’re going to get that right.”
“I promise,” I say. “I will.”
“I know you will. And while we’re on the subject of how I’d like to be portrayed, there’s something else you need to get exactly right. I won’t be able to clear things up after I’m gone. I want to know now, I want to be absolutely sure, that you’ll represent what I’m telling you accurately.”
“OK,” I say. “What is it?”
Evelyn’s mood turns a bit darker. “I’m not a good person, Monique. Make sure, in the book, that that’s clear. That I’m not claiming to be good. That I did a lot of things that hurt a lot of people, and I would do them over again if I had to.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You don’t seem so bad, Evelyn.”
“You, of all people, are going to change your mind about that,” she says. “Very soon.”
And all I can think is, What the fuck did she do?
*
JOHN DIED OF A HEART attack in 1980. He was just shy of fifty. It didn’t make any sense. The most athletic and fit of us, the one who didn’t smoke, the one who exercised every day, he shouldn’t have been the one whose heart stopped. But things don’t make sense. And when he left us, he left a giant-sized hole in our lives.
Connor was five. It was hard to explain to her where Uncle John went. It was even harder to explain to her why her father was so heartbroken. For weeks, Harry could barely get out of bed. When he did, it was to drink bourbon. He was rarely sober, always somber, and often unkind.
Celia was photographed in tears, her eyes bloodshot, walking into her trailer on location in Arizona. I wanted to hold her. I wanted us all to see one another through it. But I knew that wasn’t in the cards.
But I could help Harry. So Connor and I stayed with him at his apartment every day. She slept in her room there. I slept on the sofa in his bedroom. I made sure he ate. I made sure he bathed. I made sure he played make-believe with his daughter.
One morning, I woke up to find Harry and Connor both in the kitchen. Connor was pouring herself a bowl of cereal while Harry stood in his pajama bottoms, looking out the window.
He had an empty glass in his hand. When he turned away from the view and back toward Connor, I said, “Good morning.”
And Connor said, “Daddy, why do your eyes look wet?”
I wasn’t sure if he’d been crying or if he was already a few drinks into the day that early in the morning.
At the funeral, I wore a black vintage Halston. Harry wore a black suit with a black shirt, black tie, black belt, and black socks. Grief never left his face.
His profound, guttural pain didn’t follow the story we had sold the press, that Harry and John were friends, that Harry and I were in love. Nor did the fact that John left the house to Harry. But despite my instincts, I did not encourage Harry to hide his feelings or decline the house. I had very little energy left to try to hide who we were. I had learned all too well that pain was sometimes stronger than the need to keep up appearances.
Celia was there, in a long-sleeved black minidress. She did not say hello to me. She barely looked at me. I stared at her, aching to walk over and grab her hand. But I didn’t take a single step in her direction.
I was not going to use this loss of Harry’s to ease my own. I wasn’t going to make her talk to me. Not like that.
Harry held back tears as John’s casket was lowered into the ground. Celia walked away. Connor watched me watch her and said, “Mom, who is that lady? I think I know her.”
“You do, honey,” I said. “You did.”
And then Connor, my adorable baby girl, said, “She’s the one who dies in your movie.”
And I realized she didn’t remember Celia at all. She recognized her from Little Women.
“She’s the nice one. The one who wants everyone to be happy,” Connor said.
That’s when I knew the family I had made had truly disintegrated.
*
Now This
July 3, 1980
CELIA ST. JAMES AND JOAN MARKER, BEST OF FRIENDS
Celia St. James and Hollywood newcomer Joan Marker have become the talk of the town lately! Marker, best known for her star-making turn in last year’s Promise Me, is quickly becoming the It Girl of the season. And who better to show her the ropes than America’s Sweetheart? Seen shopping together in Santa Monica and grabbing lunches in Beverly Hills, the two can’t seem to get enough of each other.
We certainly hope this means the duo are planning a movie together, because that would be a tour de force of performances!
*
IKNEW THE ONLY WAY to get Harry to start living his life again was to surround him with Connor and work. The Connor part was easy. She loved her father. She wanted his attention every second of the day. She was growing up to look even more like him, with his ice-blue eyes and his broad, tall frame. And when he was with her, he would stop drinking. He cared about being a good father, and he knew he had a responsibility to be sober for her.
But when he went back to his own home every night, a fact still secret from the outside world, I knew he was drinking himself to sleep. On the days he was not with us, I knew he wasn’t getting out of bed.
So work was my only option. I had to find something he would love. It had to be a script he would feel passionate about and one with a great role for me. Not just because I wanted a great role but also because Harry wouldn’t do anything for himself. But he would do anything if he believed I needed him to.
So I read scripts. Hundreds of scripts over the months. And then Max Girard sent me one that he was having trouble getting made. It was called All for Us.
It was about a single mother of three who moves to New York City to try to support her children and pursue her dreams. It was about trying to make ends meet in the cold, hard city, but it was also about hope and daring to believe you deserve more. Both of which I knew would appeal to Harry. And the role of Renee, the mother, was honest, righteous, and powerful.
I ran it over to Harry and begged him to read it. When he tried to avoid it, I said, “I think it will finally get me my Oscar.” That’s what made him pick it up.
I loved shooting All for Us. And it wasn’t because I finally got that goddamn statue for it or because I became even closer with Max Girard on the set. I loved shooting All for Us because while it didn’t get Harry to put down the bottle, it did get him out of bed.
* * *