You watch Mick step into the bathroom. You hear him turn on the shower.
When he comes out, he sits down next to you on the bed.
He is clean. You have not bathed.
He smells like soap. You smell like booze.
He is sitting up. You are lying down.
This, too, is a calculation.
He has to feel like the power is all his.
“Honey, I had a great time,” he says.
You nod.
“But we were so drunk.” He speaks as if he’s talking to a child. “Both of us. We had no idea what we were doing.”
“I know,” you say. “It was a crazy thing to do.”
“I’m not a good guy, baby,” he says. “You don’t deserve a guy like me. I don’t deserve a girl like you.”
It’s just so unoriginal and laughably transparent, feeding you the same line he fed the papers about his last wife.
“What are you saying?” you ask. You put a little spin into it. You make it sound like you might start crying. You have to do this because it is what most women would do. And you have to appear to him the way he sees most women. You have to appear to have been outsmarted.
“I think we should call our people, baby. I think we should get an annulment.”
“But, Mick—”
He cuts you off, and it makes you mad, because you really did have more to say. “It’s better this way, honey. I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer.”
You wonder what it must be like to be a man, to be so confident that the final say is yours.
When he gets up off the bed and grabs his jacket, you realize there’s an element of this that you hadn’t accounted for. He likes to reject. He likes to condescend. When he was calculating his moves last night, he was thinking of this moment, too. This moment where he gets to leave you.
So you do something you hadn’t rehearsed in your mind.
When he gets to the door and turns to you and says, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us, baby. But I wish you all the best,” you pick up the phone on the side of the bed and throw it at him.
You do it because you know he’ll like it. Because he’s given you everything you came for. You should give him everything he came for.
He ducks and frowns at you, as if you’re a small deer he has to leave in the forest.
You start crying.
And then he’s gone.
And you stop.
And you think, If only they gave out Oscars for this shit.
PhotoMoment
December 4, 1961
RIVA AND HUGO LOSE THEIR MINDS
Heard of a quickie wedding? How about a quickie marriage? Well, this one takes the cake!
Bombshell Evelyn Hugo was spotted in the lap of none other than her biggest fan Mick Riva last Friday night in the heart of Las Vegas. Card players and dice guys alike were treated to quite a show by the two of them. Canoodling, necking, and drinking up a storm, from the craps table right out the door and down the street to a . . . CHAPEL!!!!
That’s right! Evelyn Hugo and Mick Riva got married!
And to make matters even crazier, they promptly filed for an annulment.
The booze seemed to have gotten to their heads—and in the morning, clearer heads prevailed.
With a string of failed marriages between the two of them, what’s one more?
Sub Rosa
December 12, 1961
EVELYN HUGO’S HEARTBREAK
Don’t believe what you hear about Evelyn and Mick’s drunken escapades. Mick may get a little too eager with the drink, but those in the know say Evelyn was in full control that night. And desperately wanted to get married.
Poor Evelyn’s had such a hard time finding love after Don left her—it’s no wonder she would throw herself into the arms of the first handsome man to come along.
And we’re hearing she’s inconsolable since he left her.
It seems like Evelyn was no more than a night of fun to Mick, but she really thought they had a future together.
We just hope Evelyn can get it right one of these days.
FOR TWO MONTHS, I WAS living in near bliss. Celia and I never talked about Mick, because we didn’t have to. Instead, we could go wherever we wanted, do whatever we wanted.
Celia bought a second car, a boring brown sedan, and left it parked in my driveway every night without anyone asking questions. We would sleep cradling each other, turning off the light an hour before we wanted to fall asleep so that we could talk in the darkness. I would trace the lines of her palm with my fingertips in the mornings to wake her up. On my birthday, she took me out to the Polo Lounge. We were hiding in plain sight.
Fortunately, painting me as some woman who couldn’t keep a husband sold more papers—for a longer period of time—than outing me. I’m not saying the gossip columnists printed what they knew to be a lie. I’m simply saying they were all too happy to believe the lie I was selling them. And of course, that’s the easiest lie to tell, one you know the other person desperately wants to be true.
All I had to do was make sure that my romantic scandals felt like a story that would keep making headlines. And as long as I did that, I knew the gossip rags would never look too closely at Celia.
And it was all working so goddamn beautifully.
Until I found out I was pregnant.
“YOU ARE NOT,” Celia said to me. She was standing in my pool in a lavender polka-dot bikini and sunglasses.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
I had just brought her out a glass of iced tea from the kitchen. I was standing right in front of her, looming over her, in a blue cover-up and sandals. I’d suspected I was pregnant for two weeks. I’d known for sure since the day before, when I went to Burbank and saw a discreet doctor Harry had recommended.
I told her then, when she was in the pool and I was holding a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon in it, because I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
I am and have always been a great liar. But Celia was sacred to me. And I never wanted to lie to her.
I was under no illusions about how much it had cost Celia and me to be together and that it was going to continue to cost us more. It was like a tax on being happy. The world was going to take fifty percent of my happiness. But I could keep the other fifty percent.
And that was her. And this life we had.
But keeping something like this from her felt wrong. And I couldn’t do it.
I put my feet into the pool next to her and tried to touch her, tried to comfort her. I expected that the news would upset her, but I did not expect her to hurl the iced tea to the other side of the pool, breaking the glass on the edge, scattering shards in the water.
I also did not expect her to plunge herself under the surface and scream. Actresses are very dramatic.
When she popped back up, she was wet and disheveled, her hair in her face, her mascara running. And she did not want to talk to me.
I grabbed her arm, and she pulled away. When I caught a glimpse of her face and saw the hurt in her eyes, I realized that Celia and I had never really been on the same page about what I was going to do with Mick Riva.
“You slept with him?” she said.
“I thought that was implied,” I said.
“Well, it wasn’t.”
Celia raised herself up out of the pool and didn’t even bother to dry off. I watched as her wet footprints changed the color of the cement around the pool, as they created puddles on the hardwood and then started dampening the carpet on the stairs.
When I looked up at the back bedroom window, I saw that she was walking back and forth. It looked like she was packing.
“Celia! Stop it,” I said, running up the stairs. “This doesn’t change anything.”
By the time I got to my own bedroom door, it was locked.
I pounded on it. “Honey, please.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Please,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”
“No.”
“You can’t do this, Celia. Let’s talk this out.” I leaned against the door, pushing my face into the slim gap of the doorframe, hoping it would make my voice travel farther, make Celia understand faster.
“This is not a life, Evelyn,” she said.
She opened the door and walked past me. I almost fell, so much of my weight had been resting on the very door she had just flung open. But I caught myself and followed her down the stairs.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “This is our life. And we’ve sacrificed so much for it, and you can’t give up on it now.”
“Yes, I can,” she said. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to live this way. I don’t want to drive an awful brown car to your home so no one knows I’m here. I don’t want to pretend I live by myself in Hollywood when I truly live here with you in this house. And I certainly don’t want to love a woman who would screw some singer just so the world doesn’t suspect she loves me.”
“You are twisting the truth.”
“You are a coward, and I can’t believe I ever thought any differently.”
“I did this for you!” I yelled.
We were at the foot of the stairs now. Celia had one hand on the door, the other on her suitcase. She was still in her bathing suit. Her hair was dripping.
“You didn’t do a goddamn thing for me,” she said, her chest turning red in splotches, her cheeks burning. “You did it for you. You did it because you can’t stand the idea of not being the most famous woman on the planet. You did it to protect yourself and your precious fans, who go to the theater over and over just to see if this time they’ll catch a half frame of your tits. That’s who you did it for.”