Eva Almighty
This is the story of a girl from Corpus Christi who was determined to have it all, and got it: the hit TV show, the hunky husband, the nonstop press. Still, Eva Longoria wants more. Don’t even think of standing in her way.
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I was thinking about all this on the day last spring that I interviewed Eva on the show’s Burbank set. As myriad headlines have clarioned since Housewives debuted in 2004, she is no longer desperate—assuming she ever was. It has been on the air for so long now (three years, an eternity in TV land) and has so many viewers (at last count, 22.5 million each week) that people forget what a novelty it was in the beginning: a witty, cynical, and—despite all those murders—oddly accurate take on the schizophrenic lives of women today. Eva, in lots of lingerie and décolletage, is the bona fide breakout star of the show; Huffman may have the Emmy and the Oscar nomination, but only Eva has managed to parlay her part into a one-woman conglomerate, the kind that assures if not eternal staying power (no one gets that in Hollywood) then a decidedly comfortable income for life. Simultaneously, Eva has become a stereotype buster and a folk heroine. “There wouldn’t be an Ugly Betty without Desperate Housewives,” asserts David Damian Figueroa, her longtime friend.
Eva had spent the morning filming two scenes. One was on a soundstage with John Slattery, who was playing her new love interest, mayoral candidate Victor Lang. Eva was Bacall to his Bogie. Promising to take Gabrielle to a classy new restaurant, he said, “There’s no place harder to get into.” “That’s what you think,” she retorted, to approving chuckles from the crew. An hour or so later, we rode in an SUV up a steep hill to the Wisteria Lane set—once Beaver Cleaver’s street—where Eva/Gabrielle spent the next hour or so slamming the front door of the rambling Solis home in the face of her ex-husband, Carlos, played by San Antonio hunk Ricardo Antonio Chavira.
There were a lot of Evas in attendance that day. On the soundstage, she was ebullient, like the cheerleader she was at rough-and-tumble Roy Miller High School in the early nineties. She hopped into a director’s chair, scarfed down egg whites and spinach and bacon and cereal, and showed off her retina-scarring diamond engagement ring. “It looks like a Chiclet,” one of the crew members cracked. She insisted that someone demonstrate the small battery-powered Chihuahua she’d bought the director, Larry Shaw; when activated, it humped whatever or whoever was near. There were jokes about a recent injury. Eva: “I fell down the stairs of a private jet.” Crew member: “Or did you slip on Cristal on the yacht?” There was also, as there often is with Eva, some discussion about swag, which she clearly adores. Eva: “I get free Budweiser for a year.” Me: “Really? Why?” Eva: “I don’t know. It was in my trailer. It’s like Christmas every day.” And she displayed an impeccable grasp of the rules of celebrity journalism. “Don’t you want to tell her how great I am?” she prompted crew members several times.
Longoria is five feet two and skinny—Marc Cherry joked at the wedding that she had a boy’s body under all her padding—but she is a girlish dervish of energy, with a loud, easy laugh that belies her size but not her roots. Her eyes glitter in an almost preternatural way. Remember the smart, quick-witted Hispanic girl in your advanced classes in high school, the one with the flashing ponytail who already had a zillion scholarships? That’s her.
You get the feeling there isn’t a self-destructive bone in her body and that she isn’t about to bite the hand that feeds her. Eva was perfectly content to let Chavira throw her about like a sack of potatoes—hoisting her on his shoulders, turning her upside down, gathering her around his waist—but once I started asking about the role of Mexican Americans in the movie business, she stepped back and grew silent, letting her co-star do the talking about how “there’s opportunity, but we’re still in the same f—ing rut” and how racism is now enacted “with a handshake and a smile.” Yet this is the woman who cracked up the Latino Leaders Luncheon in Washington, D.C., last November by announcing, “Don’t think of me as today’s featured speaker. Think of me as your temporary guest worker.” But here, all she’ll say is “We still have a long way to go.”
It’s Eva’s self-possession that separates her not just from the Britneys and Lindsays of the world but from many of the troubled Texas beauties who have come before her, like Farrah Fawcett and Anna Nicole Smith. “I don’t think that’s saying much” was her comment, with obvious displeasure, when I brought up the subject. My visit happened to be on the day that Anna Nicole was found dead, alone, in a hotel room, a fact that was broadcast on all the TVs in the makeup trailer and on the set. Eva watched the news pensively. “She was always a mess,” she said, shaking her head.
I tried to engage her in conversation about the vicissitudes of celebrity, but she wouldn’t budge. “I think everybody is programmed to do what they’re gonna do. Six thousand people come here every day, and six thousand people leave who failed. Some people aren’t focused,” she said instructively before jumping off a table, leaping to the front of Gabrielle’s McMansion, opening the door wide, and then slamming it shut with all her might on Chavira. Then she marched back to continue the conversation.
“And you’re focused?” I asked.
She snorted. “Yaaah,” she said, as if the answer were beyond obvious.
What about the lack of privacy that comes with celebrity—the fact that millions know about her purported love of yoga, sex toys, caramel-colored lipstick, Angel Sanchez gowns, and Tony’s, um, member, barely hidden by his swim trunks, as displayed on various Web sites? What about the fact that everyone knows just about everything there is to know about her?
She sized me up the way a fifth-grade teacher assesses a slow student. “You think you know me,” she said, and then jumped up to slam the door in Chavira’s face again. Expertly.
There are some things I do know, however, having grown up in the same place, South Texas, albeit a generation earlier. I know, for instance, that Eva came of age during an era when the world was opening up to Hispanics, when the discrimination of the fifties and sixties had not disappeared but was dissipating. Eva’s parents were living proof that times had changed. Her father was a tool engineer at an Army base, and her mother was a special-ed teacher. While there wasn’t much money to go around, there was enough to instill in their children not just a strong work ethic but the possibility of great reward. Eva has long given credit for her ambition to her mother. “I grew up in a household of women—aunts, sisters, a house full of strong female role models,” she told me. She was the youngest of four girls, and she watched her mother working a full-time job, shuttling her and her sisters from one activity to another, and especially tending to her oldest sister, Lisa, who was born developmentally disabled. “For me there is nothing I can do that compares to what my mom did,” she said. “I’m a great multitasker because of her.”
There really isn’t a time these days when Eva isn’t multitasking. Last winter, for instance, I went with her to the Mujer Awards in San Antonio, where she was being honored as a woman of the year—“Film and television actor, producer and activist . . . A Mexican American Latina who is living the American Dream”—by the National Hispana Leadership Institute, of Arlington, Virginia. It was a black-tie affair; the light from so many sequined gowns and flash cameras was almost blinding. There was an all-female mariachi band, and the sponsors’ names on the tables (Continental, Wal-Mart, Chase, Coors, McDonald’s, GM) were evidence that Latino culture was no longer emerging but had arrived. On the dais was a large cutout of the Alamo, the significance of which now seemed debatable.
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