But it does not mean I wasn’t conflicted. And of course, a lot of the time, that ambivalence was even more personal than it was political.
I knew it was imperative that I hide, and yet I did not believe I should have to. But accepting that something is true isn’t the same as thinking that it is just.
Celia won her second Oscar in 1970, for her role as a woman who cross-dresses to serve as a World War I soldier in the film Our Men.
I could not be in Los Angeles with her that night, because I was shooting Jade Diamond in Miami. I was playing a prostitute living in the same apartment as a drunk. But Celia and I both knew that even if I had been free as a bird, I could not go to the Academy Awards on her arm.
That evening, Celia called me after she was home from the ceremony and all the parties.
I screamed into the phone. I was so happy for her. “You’ve done it,” I said. “Twice now you’ve done it!”
“Can you believe it?” she said. “Two of them.”
“You deserve them. The whole world should be giving you an Oscar every day, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I wish you were here,” she said petulantly. I could tell she’d been drinking. I would have been drinking, too, if I’d been in her position. But I was irritated that she had to make things so difficult. I wanted to be there. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she know that I couldn’t be there? And that it killed me? Why did it always have to be about what all of this felt like for her?
“I wish I was, too,” I told her. “But it’s better this way. You know that.”
“Ah, yes. So that people won’t know you’re a lesbian.”
I hated being called a lesbian. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with loving a woman, mind you. No, I’d come to terms with that a long time ago. But Celia only saw things in black and white. She liked women and only women. And I liked her. And so she often denied the rest of me.
She liked to ignore the fact that I had truly loved Don Adler once. She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.
People were just starting to talk about the idea of bisexuality, but I’m not sure I even understood that the word referred to me then. I wasn’t interested in finding a label for what I already knew. I loved men. I loved Celia. I was OK with that.
“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.”