“I don’t need to think,” she said. “I’m ready. I know.”
“OK,” I said, surprised to find that my heart was beating quickly, eager to hear her words. “Go.”
“Evelyn, I have been in love with you since 1959. I may not have always shown it, I may have let other things get in the way, but know that I have loved you that long. That I have never stopped. And that I never will.”
I closed my eyes briefly, letting her words sink in.
And then I gave her mine. “I have been married seven times, and never once has it felt half as right as this. I think that loving you has been the truest thing about me.”
She smiled so hard I thought she might cry. But she didn’t.
I said, “By the power vested in me by . . . us, I now declare us married.”
Celia laughed.
“I may now kiss the bride,” I said, and I let go of her hands, grabbed her face, and kissed her. My wife.
SIX YEARS LATER, AFTER CELIA and I had spent more than a decade together on the beaches of Spain, after Connor had graduated from college and taken a job on Wall Street, after the world had all but forgotten about Little Women and Boute-en-Train and Celia’s three Oscars, Cecelia Jamison died of respiratory failure.
She was in my arms. In our bed.
It was summer. The windows were open to let in the breeze. The room smelled of sickness, but if you focused hard enough, you could still smell the salt from the ocean. Her eyes went still. I called out for the nurse, who had been downstairs in the kitchen. I think I stopped making memories again, in those moments when Celia was being taken from me.
I only remember clinging to her, holding her as best I could. I only remember saying, “We didn’t have enough time.”
It felt as if by taking her body, the paramedics were ripping out my soul. And then, when the door shut, when everyone had left, when Celia was nowhere to be seen, I looked over at Robert. I fell to the floor.
The tiles felt cold on my flushed skin. The hardness of the stone ached in my bones. Underneath me, puddles of tears were forming, and yet I could not lift my head off the ground.
Robert did not help me up.
He got down on the floor next to me. And wept.
I had lost her. My love. My Celia. My soul mate. The woman whose love I’d spent my life earning.
Simply gone.
Irrevocably and forever.
And the devastating luxury of panic overtook me again.
Now This
July 5, 2000
SCREEN QUEEN CELIA ST. JAMES HAS DIED
Three-time Oscar-winning actress Celia St. James died last week of complications related to emphysema. She was 61 years old.
From a well-to-do family in a small town in Georgia, the red-haired St. James was often referred to as the Georgia Peach early in her career. But it was her role as Beth in the 1959 adaptation of Little Women that brought her her first Academy Award and turned her into a bona fide star.
St. James would go on to be nominated four other times and take home the trophy twice more over the next 30 years, for Best Actress in 1970 for Our Men and for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lady Macbeth in the 1988 adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy.
In addition to her remarkable talent, St. James was known for her girl-next-door allure and her fifteen-year marriage to football hero John Braverman. The two divorced in the late 1970s but remained friendly until Braverman’s passing in 1980. She never remarried.
St. James’s estate is to be managed by her brother, Robert Jamison, husband of actress—and St. James’s former costar—Evelyn Hugo.
CELIA, LIKE HARRY, WAS BURIED in Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. Robert and I held her funeral on a Thursday morning. It was kept private. But people knew we were there. They knew she was being laid to rest.