When I left, I saw the row of Oscars that Ari had sitting in his office. I told myself that one day I’d get one, too.

Love Isn’t All and the Gary DuPont movie I’d wanted came out within a week of each other. Love Isn’t All tanked. And Penelope Quills, the woman who’d gotten the part I’d wanted opposite Gary, got terrible reviews.

I cut out a review of Penelope and sent it by interoffice mail to Harry and Ari, with a note that said, “I would have knocked it out of the park.”

The next morning, I had a note from Harry in my trailer: “OK, you win.”

Harry called me into his office and told me that he had discussed it with Ari, and they had two potential roles for me.

I could play an Italian heiress as the fourth lead in a war romance. Or I could play Jo in Little Women.

I knew what it would mean, playing Jo. I knew Jo was a white woman. And still, I wanted it. I hadn’t gotten on my back just to take a baby step.

“Jo,” I said. “Give me Jo.”

And in so doing, I set the star machine in motion.

Harry introduced me to studio stylist Gwendolyn Peters. Gwen bleached my hair and cut it into a shoulder-length bob. She shaped my eyebrows. She plucked my widow’s peak. I met with a nutritionist, who made me lose six pounds exactly, mostly by taking up smoking and replacing some meals with cabbage soup. I met with an elocutionist, who got rid of the New York in my English, who banished Spanish entirely.

And then, of course, there was the three-page questionnaire I had to fill out about my life until then. What did my father do for a living? What did I like to do in my spare time? Did I have any pets?

When I turned in my honest answers, the researcher read it in one sitting and said, “Oh, no, no, no. This won’t do at all. From now on, your mother died in an accident, leaving your father to raise you. He worked as a builder in Manhattan, and on weekends during the summer, he’d take you to Coney Island. If anyone asks, you love tennis and swimming, and you have a Saint Bernard named Roger.”

I sat for at least a hundred publicity photos. Me with my new blond hair, my trimmer figure, my whiter teeth. You wouldn’t believe the things they made me model. Smiling at the beach, playing golf, running down the street being tugged by a Saint Bernard that someone borrowed from a set decorator. There were photos of me salting a grapefruit, shooting a bow and arrow, getting on a fake airplane. Don’t even get me started on the holiday photos. It would be a sweltering-hot September day, and I’d be sitting there in a red velvet dress, next to a fully lit Christmas tree, pretending to open a box that contained a brand-new baby kitten.

The wardrobe people were consistent and militant about how I was dressed, per Harry Cameron’s orders, and that look always included a tight sweater, buttoned up just right.

I wasn’t blessed with an hourglass figure. My ass might as well have been a flat wall. You could hang a picture on it. It was my chest that kept men’s interest. And women admired my face.

To be honest, I’m not sure when I figured out the exact angle we were all going for. But it was sometime during those weeks of photo shoots that it hit me.

I was being designed to be two opposing things, a complicated image that was hard to dissect but easy to grab on to. I was supposed to be both naive and erotic. It was as if I was too wholesome to understand the unwholesome thoughts you were having about me.

It was bullshit, of course. But it was an easy act to put on. Sometimes I think the difference between an actress and a star is that the star feels comfortable being the very thing the world wants her to be. And I felt comfortable appearing both innocent and suggestive.

When the pictures got developed, Harry Cameron pulled me into his office. I knew what he wanted to talk about. I knew there was one remaining piece that needed to be put into place.

“What about Amelia Dawn? That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” he said. The two of us were sitting in his office, him at his desk, me in the chair.

I thought about it. “How about something with the initials EH?” I asked. I wanted to get something as close to the name my mother gave me, Evelyn Herrera, as I could.

“Ellen Hennessey?” He shook his head. “No, too stuffy.”

I looked at him and sold him the line I’d come up with the night before, as if I’d just thought of it. “What about Evelyn Hugo?”

Harry smiled. “Sounds French,” he said. “I like it.”

I stood up and shook his hand, my blond hair, which I was still getting used to, framing my sight.

I turned the knob to his door, but Harry stopped me.

“There’s one more thing,” he said.

“OK.”

“I read your answers to the interview questions.” He looked at me directly. “Ari is very happy with the changes you’ve made. He thinks you have a lot of potential. The studio thinks it would be a good idea if you went on a few dates, if you were seen around town with some guys like Pete Greer and Brick Thomas. Maybe even Don Adler.”

Don Adler was the hottest actor at Sunset. His parents, Mary and Roger Adler, were two of the biggest stars of the 1930s. He was Hollywood royalty.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Harry asked.

He wasn’t going to mention Ernie directly, because he knew he didn’t have to.

“Not a problem,” I said. “Not at all.”

Harry nodded. He handed me a business card.

“Call Benny Morris. He’s a lawyer over in the bungalows. Handled Ruby Reilly’s annulment from Mac Riggs. He’ll help you straighten it out.”

I went home and told Ernie I was leaving him.

He cried for six hours straight, and then, in the wee hours of the night, as I lay beside him in our bed, he said, “Bien. If that’s what you want.”

The studio gave him a payout, and I left him a heartfelt letter telling him how much it hurt me to leave him. It wasn’t true, but I felt I owed it to him to finish out the marriage as I’d started it, pretending to love him.

I’m not proud of what I did to him; it didn’t feel casual to me, the way I hurt him. It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now.

But I also know how badly I’d needed to leave Hell’s Kitchen. I know what it feels like to not want your father to look at you too closely, lest he decides he hates you and hits you or decides he loves you a little too much. And I know what it feels like to see your future ahead of you—the husband who’s really just a new version of your father, surrendering to him in bed when it’s the last thing you want to do, making only biscuits and canned corn for dinner because you don’t have money for meat.

So how can I condemn the fourteen-year-old girl who did whatever she could to get herself out of town? And how can I judge the eighteen-year-old who got herself out of that marriage once it was safe to do so?

Ernie ended up remarried to a woman named Betty who gave him eight children. I believe he died in the early ’90s, a grandfather many times over. He used the payout from the studio to put a down payment on a house in Mar Vista, not far from the Fox lot. I never heard from him again.

So if we are going by the metric that all’s well that ends well, then I guess it’s safe to say that I’m not sorry.

EVELYN,” GRACE SAYS AS SHE comes into the room. “You have a dinner with Ronnie Beelman in an hour. I just wanted to remind you.”

“Oh, right,” Evelyn says. “Thank you.” She turns to me once Grace has left. “How about we pick this up tomorrow? Same time?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I say, starting to gather my things. My left leg has fallen asleep, and I tap it against the hardwood to try to wake it up.

“How do you think it’s going so far?” Evelyn asks as she gets up and walks me out. “You can make a story out of it?”

“I can do anything,” I say.

Evelyn laughs and says, “Good girl.”

* * *

“HOW ARE THINGS?” my mom asks the moment I pick up the phone. She says “things,” but I know she means How is your life without David?

“Fine,” I say as I set my bag on the couch and walk toward the refrigerator. My mother cautioned me early on that David might not be the best man for me. He and I had been dating a few months when I brought him home to Encino for Thanksgiving.