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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Her recent deal with Bebe Sport goes back to the days when the company dressed her for special events; when she later appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan in a low-cut Bebe blouse, the company was inundated with requests, and the issue was one of the biggest sellers in the magazine’s history. (When Eva first moved to Hollywood, she used to dream that she’d one day have the money to shop at Bebe.) The CEO of L’Oréal, Carol Hamilton, told me that the combination of Eva Longoria and the company’s motto—“Because I’m worth it”—has been a boon for all concerned. (Certainly this is true for Eva, who was paid $2 million for her trouble.)
In this way, even Tony Parker becomes a form of brand extension. Eva met him in the locker room after—in typical fashion—asking a reporter from San Antonio’s WOAI to introduce her. “It was goo-goo-ga-ga,” says Garcia, who was present in the early days of their courtship. No one is saying that Eva attached herself to Parker for the advertising possibilities, but the mutual benefits are obvious: The two were profiled last March in Sports Illustrated, Parker’s nickname is now Hollywood, and people who have never watched Desperate Housewives know that she was one of the first people on the floor after the Spurs won the NBA championship last June. In the ever-converging market of celebs and sports, they offer a twofer—maybe not quite Posh and Becks but getting close. (Eva was recently spotted making time with those two at David Beckham’s first soccer game in Los Angeles.) The wedding too was a synergist’s dream, providing plugs for everyone and everything from OK! and the NBA to Chanel and even A.B.S. designs, which has already knocked off the pink minidress Eva wore to the civil ceremony. (I had asked Anderson if I could attend the wedding as part of my reporting. Oh, no, she told me—it was just for friends and family. “I couldn’t even ask,” she said. This was her polite way of saying TEXAS MONTHLY wasn’t in the running for any multimillion-dollar wedding exclusive.) “You want to capitalize on it, profit from it, elevate your status in Hollywood,” a publicist for another major female celebrity told me. “Whenever you see something of this stature, you know people are trying to make a greater point.”
Only occasionally has Eva’s popularity backfired, as it did two Christmas Eves ago in San Antonio, when a bicycle cop tried to persuade Parker to move his SUV, which was blocking traffic in front of a local nightclub that had just refused the couple admission (Parker wasn’t dressed up enough). According to a police report, Eva became furious and cursed the officer with a popular epithet having to do with performing a sexual act. When the officer ticketed Parker for impeding traffic and for not producing his U.S. driver’s license, Eva allegedly shouted, “He’s just a Mexican bike cop. He only wants your autograph.” After landing on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News, the story subsequently went worldwide, thanks to the AP and Reuters, and prompted Anderson to issue a statement from Eva that said—“as a Mexican myself”—she never made any racial slurs about the bicycle cop’s ethnicity. Speaking for Eva, Anderson threatened legal action against him and told the press that the couple was “intent on setting the record straight” and that both Tony and Eva were “law-abiding and respectful citizens of the community.” So far, no suits have been filed.
The question now being asked about Eva is, What’s next? Seeking clues, I went to the Eva’s Heroes fundraiser and fashion show with her last winter at the Club at Sonterra, one of the newer San Antonio developments that have become home to an ever-growing cadre of spectacularly rich Mexicans and Mexican Americans. San Antonio has warmed to Eva in a way it never could to its other, more irascible, local celebrity, Tommy Lee Jones; there are unauthorized endorsements for a hotel in South Texas that is supposedly her favorite and a peanut butter cake in town she supposedly can’t get enough of. “Ew, I hate peanut butter,” she told me.
In this crowd, on this day, I could almost envision a lower-wattage future for her: as a beautiful mother presiding over a beautiful brood, a little heavier, perhaps, but still determined, using her contacts and force of will to get a son into Harvard and a daughter into Yale. Eva often says that nothing matters more than her family, and at this event she had yet again filled her table with her parents, her aunt and uncle, and her sister Esme Traube, along with Tony Parker and his teammate Robert Horry, who was the guest of honor. (Parker was much more animated with Horry beside him.) Eva seemed genuinely happy to have them there. They weren’t props; she whispered to her parents and caressed them, coming back to them time and again between onstage duties. Their faces were broad and weathered, her mother pretty and warm, her father handsome enough but somehow, too, a reminder of the genetic quirkiness of Eva’s beauty, and all beauty for that matter. These were the ones who used to jokingly refer to Eva as “la prieta fea” (“the ugly dark one”) and now wore the somewhat dazed expressions of people who have raised a child who has gone so far beyond their expectations that she, at times, seems more like an apparition, albeit a bountiful one in a sexy polka-dotted halter dress that nicely highlights her well-toned shoulders.
Eva’s Heroes, Eva said, was dedicated to her sister Lisa, who doctors had said was doomed at birth to never walk or talk or live any semblance of a normal life. The sold-out crowd of mostly Latinos—including General Ricardo Sanchez, the Texan who once commanded U.S. troops in Iraq—listened raptly.
“So cut to—my sister’s forty, she’s graduated high school, she’s highly functional, she has a job,” Eva said from the podium, while Lisa sat beaming with her parents. She then thanked her mother for the determination to help her oldest sister live independently, and she thanked Lisa for being “her hero,” for teaching her that nothing was impossible. Eva also thanked Garcia, who has devoted her life to special education and will run Eva’s Heroes, starting with fund-raising for a building and teaching afternoon classes to the developmentally disabled. Garcia told me she was amazed at how quickly Eva leaped into business mode when they spoke about creating the charity, and, in fact, you could see her influence in everything from Horry’s honor to the swag bags that contained her L’Oréal lipstick. There was an emcee from Extra! and a co-host from CitiBank, a balding, starstruck executive who was practically giddy about donating seed money. H-E-B, Time Warner, and AT&T had bought tables too. “She’s a little rock star,” Figueroa said of Eva’s ability to raise money.
Everyone in the family was crying by the time she finished her speech, as were most of her friends. When Lisa glided down the aisle, proudly modeling clothes for the fashion show, all Longoria eyes were fixed upon her.
The live auction started after lunch. One offering was a day on the set of Desperate Housewives. The emcee bid $1,200. Figueroa bid $1,400. “Time Warner, where are you?” Eva chided. AT&T came in at around $3,000, but the winner, at $3,100, was the owner of a local limousine company. The next auction item was dinner at San Antonio’s Melting Pot with Eva and Tony. “Tony and I are a lot of fun!” Eva chirped. “You have no idea!” A limo ride was thrown in; who wouldn’t want that? After furious bidding, the package went for $3,500, and Eva was ecstatic. (She presented this deal to a much bigger crowd at a Hispanic leadership conference in Phoenix last year and came up with $40,000.) For a moment I imagined that being wanted in any form might satisfy her, but then dismissed the idea just as fast as it had come.
Yes, Eva has seven more years on her Desperate Housewives contract, which pays her $200,000 an episode, and she must know that she is rapidly approaching the shady side of her life as a Hollywood glamour queen—but no one is better than she is at getting while the getting’s good. Yes, she passed on a few movies to concentrate on her wedding last summer, but after the big event she returned lickety-split to the set and refocused on her career. Despite talk of how much she’d like to have a child—not this season, Cherry supposedly told her—Eva spends a lot of time looking for a suitable project for her own production company. “My ambition is to do more—in acting, in philanthropy, in clothing lines, in writing, in business, in producing,” she told me a few weeks ago, when I asked whether she might one day chuck it all and just settle down in Texas. “I’m very driven to work.”
It reminded me of our previous meeting, on the Desperate Housewives set. Eva had finished for the day and retired to her trailer. There she found a gift-wrapped box—still more swag—which she ripped open with gusto. Inside was a studded black leather yoga bag of no small value. Without hesitation, she unzipped the bag and tore through the tissue paper inside, still searching, searching, searching for more.
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