“I now pronounce you man and wife. . . .”
Our chapel was an ancient oak tree on the grounds of a romantic carriage house on La Colina in Beverly Hills. All my family were there, along with a host of friends—Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Natalie and R. J., Felicia and Jack Lemmon, Anne and Kirk Douglas, and more—gathered to witness the breaking of my marital virginity.
None of them, I doubt, had ever seen a bride more beautiful than Sharon. I remember Rossano Brazzi telling Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in his most charming Italian manner, that my raven-haired bride was the brush of Michelangelo.
I had met Sharon Hugueny on a dare. At the time she was Warner Brothers’ entry as the next Elizabeth Taylor playing a starring role in Parrish. It was her first picture and for some strange reason she was being protected as if she were the Hope diamond. No one could get near her. No one knew why.
One day, Ray Danton, while shooting a film at Warners, dared, “Even you, Evans, won’t be able to get to her.”
That’s all I needed. The next afternoon, she was shooting a scene with, that’s right, Troy Donahue. After each take, she would disappear into her trailer, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of her.
The following day I came back with Ray. “What are the odds?” I asked.
Ray said, “Name it.”
While the hairdresser was putting her hair in a bun, I went up and introduced myself.
“This is my second day on the set,” I said. “I just wanted to watch you.”
She smiled sweetly. “You’re the bullfighter, aren’t you? Are you really a bullfighter?”
“No, just a lousy actor.”
She laughed.
“When do you finish shooting?”
“I have one more shot. Then I’m off for the day.”
“Let’s take a drive to the sea.”
“Really?”
We eluded the bodyguards and spent the afternoon on the beach, just talking. For me, Sharon was from a different planet. She had been raised by loving, affluent parents in the San Fernando Valley, educated by private tutors, never allowed to touch money. (Her allowance was twenty-five cents a week.) She was so pure I felt guilty kissing her.
Sharon fell madly in love with me, yes, but it could have been anyone who was the first to touch her. That’s how protected she had been every day of her life until that moment.
Nine months earlier my own family had been hit with the horrible news—our mother had cancer. It was lodged in her jawbone. So devastating was its tentacles that it traumatized our family’s every waking moment.
No one deserves the indignities my poor mother had to suffer. Being among the first to serve as a guinea pig to chemotherapy (better described as mustard gas), she was the victim of excruciating pain, losing her hair, her beauty, but not her dignity. It angers me that more than thirty years have passed, yet we haven’t found anything resembling a cure for the most dreaded disease of all. It’s still death the hard way.
Was I in love with Sharon? I didn’t know. What I did know was my mother’s one desperate wish. To have her overly adventurous son, me, settle down to a life of normalcy. Just as my father before me gave his mother something prior to her passing, so did I want to give something to my mother. What better gift could there be than mother of the groom.
Literally, I swept Sharon off her feet, proposing to her and setting a date. Her parents were vehemently against it—and rightfully so—but I wasn’t thinking of their daughter. I was thinking of my mother. My mother, who barely had the strength at the time to make the trip, traveled west for her shining moment.
The night before the I dos, my mother wanted to meet her new daughter-in-law, and meet her alone. After she saw Sharon, my mother asked to see me alone too.
In a voice hardly above a whisper, she said, “You can’t marry her, Bob. She’s a baby; she’s untouched. It’s unfair to her.”
I lay down beside my mom and cradled her. “I love her, Mom. I’m a changed man. It’s going to be wonderful. A year from now you’ll see a little Bobby running around.”
We both knew that would never be. What she didn’t know—and what I couldn’t tell her—was that I was only marrying Sharon for her.
From Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons to Photoplay, Sharon and I were the couple of the moment. Together, we were a fan magazine’s dream. Being with me was far more important to Sharon than being in front of the cameras. This beautiful, genteel innocent not only was a virgin when I married her, but had never been on a date. Her family’s strict rules were not without reason.
Still under contract to Darryl Zanuck, who had now become more active and was showing renewed interest in my career, I was signed to two of his most ambitious projects: The Longest Day and The Chapman Report.
At the same time, I was feeling guilty living in Los Angeles while my mother withered away back east. Then came the ultimatum. Evan-Picone, unlike my career, was making huge strides. Though I owned a decent chunk, my brother, Charles, and Joe Picone were the major partners. Justifiably, they both confronted me. “Either come back or sell out.”
Looking at yourself in the mirror, calling a spade a spade ain’t easy—Evans, you’re not good enough to make it all the way. The parts you’re offered you don’t want, and the parts you want you’re not offered. Paul Newman? No shot. Tab Hunter? More like it. Not for me. I wanted to be the next Darryl Zanuck, and I paid the price, making the most difficult decision of my life. I gave up the glamour of Hollywood, two firm pictures with Zanuck, a storybook existence, and returned to New York City with my child bride, back to Evan-Picone’s showroom on Broadway.
New York was a disaster. Every morning I would get out of the cab at 1407 Broadway, wishing I were going through the gate at Twentieth Century–Fox. Every evening, sitting in a restaurant entertaining an executive from Saks, Bloomingdale’s or Bullock’s, I was thinking how much I missed my actor, director, and writer pals. I hated the Hamptons. I loved Malibu.
For my child bride, it was worse. One afternoon, my secretary buzzed me. Sharon was on the line, urgent.
“Darling, what’s the problem?” All I could hear was weeping. “What is it, baby, what is it?”
Childlike, “I don’t know where I am.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“I don’t know. I’m so scared!”
“Sharon, darling, are you in a phone booth?”
“Yes . . .”
“Inside or outside?”
“Inside . . .”
“What street are you on?”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“Listen carefully, darling. Open the door and look at the street sign.”
“I can’t. I’m too scared!”
My heart dropped. What had I been thinking, bringing this child to New York? It was like setting a Persian cat loose in the Amazon.
“Please, darling. Just read the street sign. Tell me what it says and I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up!”
I heard her open the phone booth door and say to a passerby, “Please, mister, where am I?” Apparently he thought she was crazy and kept walking.
“Ask a lady.”
I heard a woman answer, “You’re on Fifty-fourth and Lexington, dearie.”
“You’re only four blocks from home, darling. Walk down to First Avenue, turn left, go one block, and you’re there.”
“I can’t! I can’t! I’m too scared!”
“Stay where you are—I’ll be there in ten.”
My mother was right. How could I have been so insensitive to think this fragile flower could survive, no less me, but New York as well? I told Sharon I couldn’t stand by and watch her be hurt anymore. It was unfair to her. Listening like a child, she understood.
Together we went to Mexico for a quickie divorce. Almost six months to the day of our wedding, we kissed good-bye. It was like the first day we met.