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He pointed at the tables in the place, the booths in a tight row. “That’s table one. You can figure out the rest of the numbers by counting.”
“OK,” I said. “I got it.”
I stood up off the bar stool and started walking over to table two, where three men in suits were seated, talking, their menus closed.
“Hey, kid?” the bartender said.
“Yes?”
“You’re a knockout. Five bucks says it happens for you.”
I took ten orders, mixed up three people’s sandwiches, and made four dollars.
Four months later, Harry Cameron, then a young producer at Sunset Studios, came in to meet with an exec from the lot next door. They each ordered a steak. When I brought the check, Harry looked up at me and said, “Jesus.”
Two weeks later, I had a deal at Sunset Studios.
* * *
I WENT HOME and told Ernie that I was shocked that anyone at Sunset Studios would be interested in little old me. I said that being an actress would just be a fun lark, a thing to do to pass the time until my real job of being a mother began. Grade-A bullshit.
I was almost seventeen by that point, although Ernie still thought I was older. It was late 1954. And I would get up every morning and head to Sunset Studios.
I didn’t know how to act my way out of a paper bag, but I was learning. I was an extra in a couple of romantic comedies. I had one line in a war picture.
“And why shouldn’t he?” That was the line.
I played a nurse taking care of a wounded soldier. The doctor in the scene playfully accused the soldier of flirting with me, and I said, “And why shouldn’t he?” I said it like a child in a fifth-grade play, with a slight New York accent. Back then, so many of my words were accented. English spoken like a New Yorker. Spanish spoken like an American.
When the movie came out, Ernie and I went to see it. Ernie thought it was funny, his little wife with a little line in a movie.
I had never made much money before, and now I was making as much as Ernie after he was promoted to key grip. So I asked him if I could pay for acting classes. I’d made him arroz con pollo that night, and I specifically didn’t take my apron off when I brought it up. I wanted him to see me as harmless and domestic. I thought I’d get further if I didn’t threaten him. It grated on my nerves to have to ask him how I could spend my own money. But I didn’t see another choice.
“Sure,” he said. “I think it’s a smart thing to do. You’ll get better, and who knows, you might even star in a picture one day.”
I would star.
I wanted to punch his lights out.
But I’ve since come to understand that it wasn’t Ernie’s fault. None of it was Ernie’s fault. I’d told him I was someone else. And then I started getting angry that he couldn’t see who I really was.
Six months later, I could deliver a line with sincerity. I wasn’t great by any means, but I was good enough.
I’d been in three more movies, all day-player roles. I’d heard there was a part open to play Stu Cooper’s teenage daughter in a romantic comedy. And I decided I wanted it.
So I did something that not many other actresses at my level would have had the guts to do. I knocked on Harry Cameron’s door.
“Evelyn,” he said, surprised to see me. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I want the Caroline part,” I said. “In Love Isn’t All.”
Harry motioned for me to sit down. He was handsome, for an executive. Most producers around the lot were rotund, a lot of them losing their hair. But Harry was tall and slim. He was young. I suspected he didn’t even have a decade on me. He wore suits that fit him nicely and always complemented his ice-blue eyes. There was something vaguely midwestern about him, not so much in how he looked but in the way he approached people, with kindness first, then strength.
Harry was one of the only men on the lot who didn’t stare directly at my chest. It actually bothered me, as if I’d been doing something wrong to not get his attention. It just goes to show that if you tell a woman her only skill is to be desirable, she will believe you. I was believing it before I was even eighteen.
“I’m not going to bullshit you, Evelyn. Ari Sullivan is never going to approve you for that part.”
“Why not?”
