The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

HARRY WASN’T ON BOARD.

He was the one piece of the plan that wasn’t up to me, the one person I wasn’t willing to manipulate into doing what I wanted him to do. And he didn’t want to leave everything behind and fly off to Europe.

“You’re suggesting I retire,” Harry said. “And I’m not even sixty yet. My God, Evelyn. What on earth am I going to do all day? Play cards on the beach?”

“That doesn’t sound nice?”

“It sounds nice for about an hour and a half,” he said. He was drinking what looked like orange juice but I suspected was a screwdriver. “And then I’d be stuck trying to occupy myself for the rest of my life.”

We were sitting in my dressing room on the set of Theresa’s Wisdom. Harry had found the script and sold it to Fox with me attached to play Theresa, a woman who is leaving her husband while desperately trying to keep her children together.

It was the third day of shooting, and I was in costume, a white Chanel pantsuit and pearls, about to go on set to shoot the scene where Theresa and her husband announce that they are divorcing over Christmas dinner. Harry looked as handsome as ever in khaki slacks and an oxford shirt. He had gone almost entirely gray by then, and I actively resented him for growing more attractive as he aged, while I had to watch my value disappear by the day like a molding lemon.

“Harry, don’t you want to stop living this lie?”

“What lie?” he asked. “I understand it’s a lie for you. Because you want to make it work with Celia. And you know that I support that, I do. But this life isn’t a lie for me.”

“There are men,” I said, my voice losing patience, as if Harry was trying to pull one over on me. “Don’t pretend there aren’t men.”

“Sure, but there is not a single man anyone could draw any sort of meaningful connection to,” Harry said. “Because I have only loved John. And he’s gone. I’m only famous because you’re famous, Ev. They don’t care about me or what I’m doing unless it somehow relates to you. Any men in my life, I see them for a few weeks, and then they are gone. I’m not living a lie. I’m just living my life.”

I took a deep breath, trying not to get too worked up before having to go on set and pretend to be a repressed WASP. “Don’t you care that I have to hide?”

“I do,” he said. “You know I do.”

“Well, then—”

“But why does your relationship with Celia mean that we should uproot Connor’s life? And mine?”

“She’s the love of my life,” I said. “You know that. I want to be with her. It’s time for us all to be together again.”

“We can’t be together again,” he said, putting his hand down on the table. “Not all of us.” And he walked away.

* * *

HARRY AND I were flying home every weekend to be with Connor, and during the weeks we shot, I was with Celia, and he was . . . well, I didn’t know where he was. But he seemed happy, so I didn’t question it. I suspected in the back of my mind that he might have met someone who was capable of keeping his interest for more than a few days.

So when Theresa’s Wisdom went three weeks over our shooting schedule because my costar Ben Madley was hospitalized for exhaustion, I was torn.

On the one hand, I wanted to go back to being with my daughter every night.

On the other hand, Connor was growing more and more annoyed by me every day. She found her mother to be the very epitome of embarrassment. The fact that I was a world-renowned film star seemed to have absolutely no effect on just how big of an idiot Connor saw me to be. So I was often happier in L.A., with Celia, than I was in New York, constantly rejected by my own flesh and blood. But I would have dropped it all in a heartbeat if I thought Connor might want even an evening of my time.

The day after filming wrapped, I was packing up some of my things and talking to Connor on the phone, making plans for the next day.

“Your father and I are getting on the red-eye tonight, so I’ll be there when you wake up in the morning,” I told her.

“OK,” she said. “Cool.”

“I thought we could go to breakfast at Channing’s.”

“Mom, no one goes to Channing’s anymore.”

“I hate to break it to you, but if I go to Channing’s, Channing’s will still be considered cool.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say you’re impossible.”

“All I’m trying to do is take you to eat French toast, Connie. There are worse things.”

There was a knock on the door of the Hollywood Hills bungalow I’d rented. I opened it to see Harry.

“I gotta go, Mom,” Connor said. “Karen is coming over. Luisa’s making us barbecue meat loaf,” she said.

“Wait one second,” I said. “Your father is here. He wants to say hi to you. Good-bye, honey. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I handed Harry the phone. “Hi, little bug . . . Well, she has a point. If your mother shows up somewhere, that does sort of mean that, by definition, it will be considered a hot spot . . . That’s fine . . . That’s fine. Tomorrow morning, the three of us will go out for breakfast, and we can go to whatever the cool new place is . . . It’s called what? Wiffles? What kind of a name is that? . . . OK, OK. We’ll go to Wiffles. All right, honey, good night. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Harry sat down on my bed and looked at me. “Apparently, we are going to Wiffles.”

“You’re like putty in her hands, Harry,” I said.

He shrugged. “I feel no shame in it.” He stood up and poured himself a glass of water while I continued packing. “Listen, I have an idea,” he said. As he moved closer to me, I realized he smelled vaguely of liquor.

“About what?”

“About Europe.”

“OK . . .” I said. I had resigned to letting it go until Harry and I were settled back in New York. I assumed that then he and I would have the time, and the patience, to discuss it in more depth.

I thought the idea was good for Connor. New York, as much as I loved it, had become a somewhat dangerous place to live. Crime rates were skyrocketing, and drugs were everywhere. We were fairly protected from it on the Upper East Side, but I was still uncomfortable with the idea that Connor was growing up so close to so much chaos. And even more to the point, I was no longer sure that a life where her parents were practically bicoastal and she was being cared for by Luisa when we were gone was the best thing for her.

Yes, we’d be uprooting her. And I knew she’d hate me for making her say good-bye to her friends. But I also knew she would benefit from living in a small town. She’d be better off with a mother who could be around more. And to be frank, she was getting old enough to read gossip columns and watch entertainment news. Was turning on the television and seeing her mother’s sixth divorce really the best thing for a child?

“I think I know what to do,” Harry said. I sat down on the bed, and he sat next to me. “We move here. We move back to Los Angeles.”

“Harry . . .” I said.

“And Celia marries a friend of mine.”

“A friend of yours?”

Harry shifts toward me. “I’ve met someone.”

“What?”

“We met on the lot. He’s working on another production. I thought it was just a casual thing. I think he did, too. But I think I’m . . . This is a man I could see myself with.”

I was so happy for him in that moment. “I thought you couldn’t see yourself with anyone,” I said, surprised but pleased.

“I couldn’t,” he said.

“And what happened?”

“Now I can.”

“I’m thrilled to hear that, Harry. You have no idea. I’m just not sure this is a good idea,” I said. “I don’t even know this guy.”

“You don’t need to,” Harry said. “I mean, it’s not like I chose Celia. You did. And I’m . . . I think I’d like to choose him.”

“I don’t want to act anymore, Harry,” I said.

All through shooting this last movie, I found myself burning out. I wanted to roll my eyes when asked to do a scene more than once. Hitting my marks felt like running a marathon I’d already run a thousand times before. So easy, so unchallenging, so uninspiring, that you resent even being asked to lace up your shoes.

Maybe if I was getting roles that excited me, maybe if I still felt I had something to prove, I don’t know, maybe I would have reacted differently.

There are so many women who continue to do incredible work well into their eighties or nineties. Celia was like that. She could have turned in riveting performance after riveting performance forever, because she was always consumed by the work.

But my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was never in the craft of acting, only in the proving. Proving my power, proving my worth, proving my talent.

I’d proved it all.

“That’s fine,” Harry said. “You don’t have to act anymore.”

“But if I’m not acting, why would I live in Los Angeles? I want to live somewhere I can be free, where no one will pay attention to me. Do you remember when you were little, and whether it was on your block or a few blocks down, there was inevitably a pair of older ladies who lived together as roommates, and no one asked any questions because nobody cared? I want to be one of those ladies. I can’t do that here.”

“You can’t do that anywhere,” Harry said. “That’s the price you pay for who you are.”

“I don’t accept that. I think it’s very possible for me to do that.”

“Well, I don’t want to do that. So what I’m proposing is that you and I remarry. And Celia marries my friend.”

“We can talk about it later,” I said, standing up and taking my toiletry bag to the bathroom.

“Evelyn, you don’t get to decide what this family does unilaterally.”

“Who said anything about unilaterally? All I’m saying is that I want to talk about it later. There are a number of options here. We can go to Europe, we can move here, we can stay in New York.”

Harry shook his head. “He can’t move to New York.”

I sighed, losing my patience. “All the more reason for us to discuss this later.”

Harry stood up, as if he was about to give me a piece of his mind. But then he calmed down. “You’re right,” he said. “We can discuss it later.”

He came over to me as I was packing my soap and makeup. He took my arm and kissed my temple.

“You’ll pick me up tonight?” he said. “At my place? We’ll have the whole trip to the airport and the flight to discuss it more. We can throw back a couple of Bloody Marys on the plane.”

“We will figure this out,” I told him. “You know that, right? I’m never going to do anything without you. You’re my best friend. My family.”

“I know,” he said. “And you’re mine. I never thought I could love someone after John. But this guy . . . Evelyn, I’m falling in love with him. And to know that I could love, that I can . . .”

“I know,” I said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. “I know. I promise I’ll do whatever I can. I promise you we will figure this out.”

“OK,” Harry said, and then he squeezed my hand back and walked out the door. “We will figure this out.”

* * *

MY DRIVER, WHO introduced himself as Nick as I got into the back of the car, picked me up at around nine in the evening.

“To the airport?” Nick said.

“Actually, we’re going to make a stop on the Westside first,” I said, giving him the address of the home where Harry was staying.

As we made our way across town, through the seedy parts of Hollywood, over the Sunset Strip, I found myself depressed about how unseemly Los Angeles had gotten since I’d left. It was similar to Manhattan in that regard. The decades had not been good to it. Harry was talking about raising Connor here, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we needed to leave both big cities for good.

As we were stopped at a red light close to Harry’s rented home, Nick turned around briefly and smiled at me. He had a square jaw and a crew cut. I could tell he had probably bedded a number of women based on his smile alone.

“I’m an actor,” he said. “Just like you.”

I smiled politely. “Nice work if you can get it.”

He nodded. “Got an agent this week,” he said as we started moving again. “I feel like I’m really on my way. But, you know, if we get to the airport with time to spare, I’d be interested in any tips you have for somebody starting out.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, looking out the window. I decided, as we drove up the dark, winding streets of Harry’s neighborhood, that if Nick asked me again, after we got to the airport, I was going to tell him that it’s mostly luck.

And that you have to be willing to deny your heritage, to commodify your body, to lie to good people, to sacrifice who you love in the name of what people will think, and to choose the false version of yourself time and time again, until you forget who you started out as or why you started doing it to begin with.

But just as we pulled around the corner onto Harry’s narrow private road, every thought I’d ever had before that moment was erased from my mind.

Instead, I was leaning forward, shocked still.

In front of us was a car. Bent around a fallen tree.

The sedan looked as if it had run head-on into the trunk, knocking the tree down on top of it.

“Uh, Ms. Hugo . . .” Nick said.

“I see it,” I told him, not wanting him to confirm that it was really in front of us, that it wasn’t merely an optical illusion.

He pulled over to the side of the road. I heard the scrape of branches on the driver’s side of the car as we parked. I froze with my hand on the door handle. Nick jumped out and ran over.

I opened my door and put my feet on the ground. Nick stood to the side, trying to see if he could get one of the doors of the crashed car open. But I walked right to the front, by the tree. I looked in through the windshield.

And I saw what I had both feared and yet not truly believed possible.

Harry was slumped over the steering wheel.

I looked over and saw a younger man in the passenger’s seat.

Everyone sort of assumes that when faced with life-and-death situations, you will panic. But almost everyone who’s actually experienced something like that will tell you that panic is a luxury you cannot afford.

In the moment, you act without thinking, doing all you can with the information you have.

It’s when it’s over that you scream. And cry. And wonder how you got through it. Because most likely, in the case of real trauma, your brain isn’t great at making memories. It’s almost as if the camera is on but no one’s recording. So afterward, you go to review the tape, and it’s all but blank.

Here is what I remember.

I remember Nick breaking open Harry’s car door.

I remember helping to pull Harry out.

I remember thinking that we shouldn’t move Harry because we could paralyze him.

But I also remember thinking that I couldn’t possibly stand by and allow Harry to stay there, slumped on the wheel like that.

I remember holding Harry in my arms as he bled.

I remember the deep gash in his eyebrow, the way the blood coated half his face in thick rust red.

I remember seeing the cut from where the seat belt had sliced the lower side of his neck.

I remember two of his teeth being in his lap.

I remember rocking him back and forth.

I remember saying, “Stay with me, Harry. Stay with me. Stay true blue.”

I remember the other man on the road next to me. I remember Nick telling me he was dead. I remember thinking that no one who looked like that could be alive.

I remember Harry’s right eye opening. I remember the way it inflated me with hope, the way the white of his eye looked so bright against the deep red of the blood. I remember how his breath and even his skin smelled like bourbon.

I remember how startling the realization was—once I knew Harry might live, I knew what had to be done.

It wasn’t his car.

No one knew he was here.

I had to get him to the hospital, and I had to make sure no one found out he’d been driving. I couldn’t let him go to jail. What if they tried him for vehicular manslaughter?

I couldn’t let my daughter find out her father had been driving drunk and killed someone. Had killed his lover. Had killed the man who he said was showing him he could love again.

I enlisted Nick to help me get Harry into our car. I made him help me put the other man back into the totaled sedan, this time in the driver’s seat.

And then I quickly grabbed a scarf from my bag and wiped the steering wheel clean, wiped the blood, wiped the seat belt. I erased all traces of Harry.

And then we took Harry to the hospital.

There, bloodstained and crying, I called the police from a pay phone and reported the accident.

When I hung up the phone, I turned and saw Nick, sitting in the waiting room, blood on his chest, his arms, even some on his neck.

I walked over to him. He stood up.

“You should go home,” I said.

He nodded, still in shock.

“Can you get yourself home? Do you want me to call you a ride?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I’ll call you a cab, then.” I grabbed my purse. I pulled out two twenties from my wallet. “This should be enough to get you there.”

“OK,” he said.

“You’re going to go home, and you’re going to forget everything that happened. Everything you saw.”

“What did we do?” he said. “How did we . . . How could we . . .”

“You’re going to call me,” I said. “I’ll get a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Call me there tomorrow. First thing in the morning. You’re not going to talk to anyone else between now and then. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Not your mother or your friends or even the cabdriver. Do you have a girlfriend?”

He shook his head.

“A roommate?”

He nodded.

“You tell them that you found a man on the street and you brought him to the hospital, OK? That’s all you tell them, and you only tell them if they ask.”

“OK.”

He nodded. I called him a cab and waited with him until it arrived. I put him in the backseat.

“What are you going to do first thing tomorrow?” I asked him through the rolled-down window.

“I’m going to call you.”

“Good,” I said. “If you can’t sleep, think. Think about what you need. What you need from me as a thank-you for what you did.”

He nodded, and the cab zoomed off.

People were staring at me. Evelyn Hugo in a pantsuit covered in blood. I was afraid paparazzi would be there any minute.

I went inside. I talked my way into borrowing some scrubs and being given a private room to wait in. I threw my clothes away.

When a man from the hospital staff asked me for a statement about what happened to Harry, I said, “How much will it take for you to leave me alone?” I was relieved when the dollar figure he came up with was less than what I had in my purse.

Just after midnight, a doctor came into the room and told me that Harry’s femoral artery had been severed. He had lost too much blood.

For a brief moment, I wondered if I should go get my old clothes, if I could give some of his blood back to him, if it worked like that.

But I was distracted by the next words out of the doctor’s mouth.

“He will not make it.”

I started gasping for air as I realized that Harry, my Harry, was going to die.

“Would you like to say good-bye?”

He was unconscious in the bed when I walked into the room. He looked paler than normal, but they had cleaned him up a bit. There was no longer blood everywhere. I could see his handsome face.

“He doesn’t have long,” the doctor said. “But we can give you a moment.”

I did not have the luxury of panic.

So I got into the bed with him. I held his hand even though it felt limp. Maybe I should have been mad at him for getting behind the wheel of a car when he’d been drinking. But I couldn’t ever get very mad at Harry. I knew he was always doing the very best he could with the pain he felt at any given moment. And this, however tragic, had been the best he could do.

I put my forehead to his and said, “I want you to stay, Harry. We need you. Me and Connor.” I grabbed his hand tighter. “But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it’s time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you, that you will live in everything Connor and I do. Go knowing I love you purely, Harry, that you were an amazing father. Go knowing I told you all my secrets. Because you were my best friend.”

Harry died an hour later.

After he was gone, I had the devastating luxury of panic.

* * *

IN THE MORNING, a few hours after I’d checked into the hotel, I woke up to a phone call.

My eyes were swollen from crying, and my throat hurt. The pillow was still stained with tears. I was pretty sure I’d only slept for an hour, maybe less.

“Hello?” I said.

“It’s Nick.”

“Nick?”

“Your driver.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. Hi.”

“I know what I want,” he said.

His voice was confident. Its strength scared me. I felt so weak right then. But I knew it had been my idea for this call to happen. I had set up the nature of it. Tell me what you want to keep you quiet was what I had said without saying it.

“I want you to make me famous,” he said, and when he did, the very last shred of affection I had for stardom drained out of me.

“Do you realize the full extent of what you’re asking?” I said. “If you’re a celebrity, last night will be dangerous for you, too.”

“That’s not a problem,” he said.

I sighed, disappointed. “OK,” I said, resigned. “I can get you parts. The rest is up to you.”

“That’s fine. That’s all I need.”

I asked him his agent’s name, and I got off the phone. I made two phone calls. One was to my own agent, telling him to poach Nick from his guy. The second was to a man with the highest-grossing action movie in the country. It was about a police chief in his late fifties who defeats Russian spies on the day he’s supposed to retire.

“Don?” I said when he answered the phone.

“Evelyn! What can I do for you?”

“I need you to hire a friend of mine in your next movie. The biggest part you can get him.”

“OK,” he said. “You got it.” He did not ask me why. He did not ask me if I was OK. We had been through enough together for him to know better. I simply gave him Nick’s name, and I got off the phone.

After I set the phone back in the cradle, I bawled and I howled. I gripped the sheets. I missed the only man I’d ever loved with any lasting meaning.

My heart ached in my chest when I thought about telling Connor, when I thought about trying to live a day without him, when I thought of a world without Harry Cameron.

It was Harry who created me, who powered me, who loved me unconditionally, who gave me a family and a daughter.

So I bellowed in my hotel room. I opened the windows, and I screamed out into the open air. I let my tears soak everything in sight.

If I had been in a better frame of mind, I might have marveled at just how opportunistic Nick was, how aggressive.

In my younger years, I might have been impressed. Harry most certainly would have said he had guts. Plenty of people can make something out of being in the right place at the right time. But Nick somehow turned being in the wrong place at the wrong time into a career.

Then again, I might be giving that moment too much credit in Nick’s own story. He changed his name, cut his hair, and went on to do very, very big things. And something tells me that even if he had never run into me, he would have made it happen all on his own. I guess what I’m saying is it’s not all luck.

It’s luck and being a son of a bitch.

Harry taught me that.