There was one other boy like that, whom I took my shirt off for because I thought I had to, before I started realizing that I could be the one doing the choosing.
I didn’t want anyone; that was the problem. To be perfectly blunt, I’d started to figure my body out quickly. I didn’t need boys in order to feel good. And that realization gave me great power. So I wasn’t interested in anyone sexually. But I did want something.
I wanted to get far away from Hell’s Kitchen.
I wanted out of my apartment, away from my father’s stale tequila breath and heavy hand. I wanted someone to take care of me. I wanted a nice house and money. I wanted to run, far away from my life. I wanted to go where my mom had promised me we’d end up someday.
Here’s the thing about Hollywood. It’s both a place and a feeling. If you run there, you can run toward Southern California, where the sun always shines and the grimy buildings and dirty sidewalks are replaced by palm trees and orange groves. But you also run toward the way life is portrayed in the movies.
You run toward a world that is moral and just, where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, where the pain you face is only in an effort to make you stronger, so that you can win that much bigger in the end.
It would take me years to figure out that life doesn’t get easier simply because it gets more glamorous. But you couldn’t have told me that when I was fourteen.
So I put on my favorite green dress, the one I had just about grown out of. And I knocked on the door of the guy I heard was headed to Hollywood.
I could tell just by the look on his face that Ernie Diaz was glad to see me.
And that’s what I traded my virginity for. A ride to Hollywood.
Ernie and I got married on February 14, 1953. I became Evelyn Diaz. I was just fifteen by that point, but my father signed the papers. I have to think Ernie suspected I wasn’t of age. But I lied right to his face about it, and that seemed good enough for him. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he also wasn’t particularly book-smart or charming. He wasn’t going to get many chances to marry a beautiful girl. I think he knew that. I think he knew enough to grab the chance when it swung his way.
A few months later, Ernie and I got into his ’49 Plymouth and drove west. We stayed with some friends of his as he started his job as a grip. Pretty soon we had saved enough to get our own apartment. We were on Detroit Street and De Longpre. I had some new clothes and enough money to make us a roast on the weekends.
I was supposed to be finishing high school. But Ernie certainly wasn’t going to be checking my report cards, and I knew school was a waste of time. I had come to Hollywood to do one thing, and I was going to do it.
Instead of going to class, I would walk down to the Formosa Cafe for lunch every day and stayed through happy hour. I had recognized the place from the gossip rags. I knew famous people hung out there. It was right next to a movie studio.
The red building with cursive writing and a black awning became my daily spot. I knew it was a lame move, but it was the only one I had. If I wanted to be an actress, I would have to be discovered. And I wasn’t sure how you went about that, except by hanging around the spots where movie people might be.
So I went there every day and nursed a glass of Coke.
I did it so often and for so long that eventually the bartender got sick of pretending he didn’t know what gamble I was running.
“Look,” he said to me about three weeks in, “if you want to sit around here hoping Humphrey Bogart shows up, that’s fine. But you need to make yourself useful. I’m not giving up a paying seat for you to sip a soda.”
He was older, maybe fifty, but his hair was thick and dark. The lines on his forehead reminded me of my father’s.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.
I was slightly worried that he’d want something from me that I had already given to Ernie, but he threw a waiter’s pad at me and told me to try my hand at taking orders.
I had no clue how to be a waitress, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. “All right,” I said. “Where should I start?”
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.