The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

What's inside (10 sections)

1. Why Monique, why now
2. Seven sections, eight names
3. Hell's Kitchen exit
4. Celia, and the beard
5. The children
6. Max, Harry, the roadside
7. Monique's connection
8. What does not hold
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo the way I suspect almost everyone does, which is to say someone pushed it into my hands and I started it on a Friday night expecting a glamorous gossip sheet. I finished it on Sunday morning with the cold coffee still on the table. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included. After that, an argument about what the book is really doing when it pretends to be only a Hollywood scandal.

Why Monique, why now

The frame comes first. Monique Grant is thirty-five, a writer at the magazine Vivant, hungry for the assignment that will make her name, and separated from her husband David, who has gone back to San Francisco. Her boss Frankie tells her that Evelyn Hugo has requested an interview with Monique by name, which makes no sense. Evelyn Hugo is seventy-nine, has not given an interview in decades, lives behind the doorman of an Upper East Side building, and has just announced that she will auction her gowns to fund breast cancer research in memory of her daughter.

Monique goes expecting to write about dresses. Evelyn tells her that the auction is beside the point: she wants Monique to write her biography, to be published only after Evelyn dies, with all the money going to Monique. Asked why a nobody, Evelyn says she read Monique's piece on assisted suicide and liked how it handled a subject people lie about. She also makes a promise with teeth in it: by the end of the story Monique will not like her very much.

So Monique sits down, and Evelyn starts at the beginning. The book is built in seven parts, each one named for a husband and prefaced with an adjective that tells you how Evelyn feels about him before you meet him: Poor Ernie Diaz, Goddamn Don Adler, Gullible Mick Riva, Clever Rex North, Brilliant, Kindhearted, Tortured Harry Cameron, Disappointing Max Girard, Agreeable Robert Jamison. Between the parts we are back in the apartment, watching Monique ask questions she is not ready to hear the answers to.

Seven sections, eight names

Count the husbands and you get seven names in order: Ernie Diaz, Don Adler, Mick Riva, Rex North, Harry Cameron, Max Girard, Robert Jamison. Seven sections, seven weddings, seven divorces or deaths, and a title that promises exactly that number.

But count the spouses Evelyn actually had and you get eight, because the book has one marriage the title refuses to admit. Reid has said that Evelyn is built partly out of Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times to seven men, and there is a sly joke in that. The eighth name in Evelyn's life is Celia St. James, the actress she loved for fifty years, the woman she married in a Spanish bedroom with a hair tie for a ring and no witnesses but the two of them. Seven husbands get section titles. The one marriage that lasted gets counted in neither the title nor the tally.

Hell's Kitchen exit

Evelyn Herrera was born in 1938 and grew up poor in Hell's Kitchen, the daughter of Cuban immigrants. Her mother died when she was young, which left her alone with a father she describes without ever quite naming what he was: a man who intended to marry her off, and worse. She develops early, learns that her looks move people, and decides that beauty is not decoration but machinery.

At fourteen she lies about her age, tells a young electrician named Ernie Diaz that she is sixteen, and marries him because he is leaving for Los Angeles to work on film sets. I think of that wedding as her green card marriage, a license doing the work of a ticket: not a romance, a document that moves a person from one life into another. They arrive in Hollywood, and Evelyn does what the poor do when they get to the edge of the dream. She hangs around the Formosa Cafe until a bartender gives her work, she catches the eye of a young producer named Harry Cameron, and she sleeps with a Sunset Studios executive to get a foot in the door.

What follows is a masterclass in the studio system. Sunset Studios invents her. She dyes her hair blonde, scrubs the New York accent out of her mouth, stops speaking Spanish in public and gives the press a past that is not hers. The studio also tells her the marriage has to end so she can be photographed with their male stars, and Ernie cries for hours when she leaves him. Evelyn is honest with Monique about it: she used him, and she would do it again.

Celia, and the beard

The second husband, Don Adler, is the one Evelyn thinks she loves. Son of actors, desperate for his own reviews, he marries her and then begins beating her, which she hides because leaving him would mean admitting the marriage was a mistake. Then the studio casts her as Jo in Little Women opposite Celia St. James, a serious actress with an Oscar and a talent that makes Evelyn furious. They become friends. At a party another actress, Ruby Reilly, tells Evelyn that Celia is a lesbian, and Evelyn soon finds that Don is cheating on her too. She confronts Celia, and the two of them kiss.

Evelyn leaves Don, who divorces her and has her blacklisted. Her career collapses exactly as Celia's rises. To get work again she goes to Paris and makes a racy film for the director Max Girard, and to bury the rumors that follow her and Celia she goes to Las Vegas and marries the rock star Mick Riva, an annulment the next day and a pregnancy that sends her to Tijuana. Celia, betrayed by the sex and the abortion, does not speak to her for five years.

The next two husbands are pure paperwork. Rex North, her co-star in Anna Karenina, marries her for the publicity and they invent a cheating scandal when his girlfriend Joy falls pregnant. Then comes the arrangement that makes the book: Evelyn and Celia reunite, and Celia is already married to John Braverman, a football player who is Harry Cameron's lover. Harry and Evelyn marry each other. Four queer people, two straight-looking couples, one apartment block in Manhattan, and a shared understanding that they are each other's cover. During the Stonewall years the four of them quietly fund the people marching, since they cannot march themselves.

Call it the bearding arrangement, because that is what it is: everyone in the house is a beard for someone else, and the arrangement is the only domestic happiness any of them gets. It is also where Reid puts her best writing, in the ordinary business of four people cooking dinner and lying to the world at the same time.

The children

Children enter the picture in two ways, and both cost something. Evelyn is pregnant after Mick Riva and terminates the pregnancy in Tijuana, which ends her relationship with Celia for half a decade. Later, with Celia's blessing, Evelyn and Harry have a daughter, Connor, and Evelyn is thirty-six and in love with being a mother.

Connor grows up inside the lie, which is easier when she is small and impossible when she is fourteen and the tabloids are calling her a wild child. She recovers enough to go to Stanford, then is diagnosed with breast cancer in her late thirties and dies eighteen months later. The charity auction that starts the book exists because of her. The book is, underneath the husbands, a story about a woman who traded a public life for a private one and then lost the private one anyway.

Max, Harry, the roadside

In her late thirties Evelyn films another Max Girard picture, this one with an explicit love scene opposite Don Adler, and she does not ask Celia first. Celia leaves her again. John Braverman dies of a heart attack, Harry drinks himself through the grief, and Max proposes. Evelyn divorces Harry and marries Max, and discovers on the honeymoon that Max is in love with the idea of her: he wants to relaunch her as an action star and cannot hear that she wants to stop.

Then the book's machinery turns. Evelyn and Celia write letters, reconcile, and plan for the future: Celia has emphysema and less than a decade to live, she wants to spend it in Spain, and the plan is that Evelyn will marry Celia's older brother Robert so that she can inherit and manage Celia's affairs. Harry, left behind, announces he has fallen in love with a man and wants to bring him to Spain as well.

Before any of that can happen, Evelyn comes upon a wrecked car outside Harry's house. Harry is bleeding and alive. The passenger is dead. She can smell the alcohol on Harry, who was driving. She pulls him out, and then she makes the decision the whole novel has been walking toward: she moves the dead man into the driver's seat so the record will say he was drunk at the wheel. Harry dies at the hospital. She tells no one, and the secret sits inside her for the rest of her life.

This is the roadside secret, the piece of Evelyn that no amount of charm excuses, and Reid makes sure you understand that Evelyn knows it. Later she tells Monique she would make the same choice again to protect her family. It is the sentence the whole book is engineered to make you argue with.

Monique's connection

After the crash come the quiet deaths. Evelyn, Celia and Connor move to Spain with Robert, whom Evelyn marries as the seventh husband. Celia dies in Evelyn's arms in 2000, Robert dies a few years later, and Connor dies of cancer. Evelyn is left with an assistant, a doorman and a story nobody alive knows.

Then she tells Monique the ending. The dead passenger in Harry's car was James Grant. He was Harry's lover, and he was Monique's father. Because of what Evelyn staged that night, Monique and her mother Angela have spent their lives believing James died driving drunk, and Monique has spent her marriage to David quietly repeating her mother's story about men who cannot be trusted.

Evelyn hands her a letter James wrote to Harry, in which he says he loves him and cannot leave, that Angela and Monique are his family. Monique is furious, first at the lie and then at the fact that she understands it. Her father was a gay man in love with her best friend's husband, and the only way he could be remembered was as a drunk.

Evelyn, it turns out, has breast cancer too, and has no intention of being treated. Monique realizes what the interview has been: a woman clearing the table before she goes. She considers calling someone and decides it is not her decision to make. The next day the papers report that Evelyn Hugo died of an accidental overdose.

Monique goes back to work and publishes the introduction of the biography in Vivant. She tells the world that Evelyn was bisexual, that the love of her life was none of her seven husbands, and that it was Celia. She also tells David, finally, that she is done repeating her mother's story, and lets him go. The last thing the book gives you is the letter, and the question of what a life looks like when you stop protecting it.

What does not hold

The interview frame does an enormous amount of lifting. Evelyn agrees to tell everything on the first day, keeps the biggest secret for the last day, and never once needs a reason to keep talking other than that the plot needs her to. A real seventy-nine-year-old with this much to lose would have lawyers, hesitations and lies. The apartment scenes are connective tissue, not scenes.

The coincidence density is the harder problem. That Evelyn's covered-up crash happened to involve Monique's father is a coincidence of a size that would sink a mystery novel, and Reid does not build toward it so much as drop it in a suitcase at the end. There are smaller ones stacked on top: Monique's piece on assisted suicide being the exact thing Evelyn read, every husband dying before the interview begins, David leaving town the same month the story starts.

Some husbands are thin. Rex North and Robert Jamison are function and a name, Mick Riva is a Vegas joke, and only Don Adler and Harry Cameron get enough pages to become people. Seven sections is a clean structure, but it means the book is only as deep as its two best husbands, and the other five are arrangements.

And Evelyn herself is slippery in a way that can read as authorial convenience. She is ruthless in the past and wise in the present, always right about what she did and always able to explain it. The book wants you to love her and judge her at once, which is a hard note to hold, and it holds it about eight times out of ten. The ninth time, when she tells Monique she would do it all again, the book flinches and lets her off.

FAQ

Why does Evelyn Hugo choose Monique Grant to write her biography?

Evelyn read Monique's article on assisted suicide and liked how she handled a subject people lie about. Monique is also thirty-five, separated from her husband and hungry for a real assignment, which Evelyn calculates will make her useful rather than sentimental. The arrangement pays Monique all the money and publishes only after Evelyn is dead.

Who is the love of Evelyn Hugo's life?

Celia St. James, the Oscar-winning actress Evelyn meets on the set of Little Women. They are together off and on for fifty years, marry privately in Spain with a hair tie for a ring, and Celia dies in 2000. Evelyn's official record keeps seven husbands, but the eighth spouse the title never counts is Celia.

How does The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo end?

Evelyn reveals that the dead passenger in the wreck outside Harry's house was James Grant, Monique's father, and that Evelyn staged the scene to protect Harry. Evelyn then dies of an accidental overdose, and Monique publishes the introduction in Vivant, telling the public that Evelyn was bisexual and that Celia was the great love of her life.