payment page
Summary
Chapter 65
Monique is furious. All her life she believed that her father was responsible for his own death and that he had driven drunk and lost control of the car. Monique is irate that Evelyn framed him for his own death and ruined his legacy. She pins Evelyn to the couch and tells her that she’s glad she’s alone and that everyone she loved has died. Monique accuses Evelyn of using her. Evelyn gives Monique a letter that’s stained with blood. Monique asks Evelyn to leave so she can read it.
The letter is from Monique’s father to Harry. It says that he loves Harry more than he ever thought possible but that he can’t go with him to Europe. He says he loves his wife and daughter too much to leave them or to cause them any pain. Monique confronts the fact that her father was in love with a man.
Chapter 66
Still furious, Monique tells Evelyn that giving her the biography doesn’t make up for what she did to her father. She calls Evelyn self-involved and only interested in assuaging her guilt. Evelyn points out how much Monique stands to gain from the biography and says if she doesn’t want it, they can burn the notes and interview recordings together. Monique won’t and says she hates Evelyn. Evelyn tells her hate is an uncomplicated feeling. She says she gave Monique the letter so that she would understand how much her father loved her.
Monique demands to know when the book can be released. Evelyn tells her she has breast cancer and that it won’t be long before she’s gone.
Chapter 67
Monique gets home and sees that David has returned the coffee table and a note admitting it was petty for him to take it. She realizes she wouldn’t have ended her marriage, gotten her promotion, or gotten the opportunity to write a bestseller without Evelyn.
Chapter 68
Monique goes to the Vivant photoshoot at Evelyn’s. She can see how at home Evelyn looks in the spotlight. Evelyn insists she and Monique take a few photos together. Evelyn wears an emerald green gown while Monique wears jeans and a blazer. Evelyn smiles at her, and Monique realizes she is still captivated by Evelyn. As Monique leaves, Evelyn tells her she thinks she has a bright future. Monique realizes that Evelyn is saying goodbye for good and that Evelyn is going to kill herself.
Chapter 69
As Monique goes to meet her mother at the airport, she debates whether to go and stop Evelyn from killing herself. But she knows that this is what Evelyn wants, and that part of the reason Evelyn picked Monique for her biography was the piece she wrote on doctor-assisted suicide. She had counted on Monique to understand how important it is for Evelyn to die with dignity.
Monique goes to the airport and when she sees her mother, she breaks down and cries. She tells her mother that she’s getting a divorce and asks about her mother’s marriage to her father. Her mother says that they had a great companionship even though their marriage wasn’t passionate and that they loved each other’s company. Monique realizes she’s not sure whether or not she’ll include her father’s story within Evelyn’s biography or if she’ll protect her mother. When they get back to Monique’s apartment, they watch Evelyn’s film All for Us. Monique realizes she’ll forgive Evelyn someday.
Evelyn Hugo, Legendary Film Siren, Has Died
This 2017 article in the New York Tribune is an obituary for Evelyn. It says she died of an accidental overdose and that she was in the early stages of breast cancer when she passed. The article discusses her career, her marriages, and her charity work. It ends with a quote from Evelyn about her desire to leave the world a bit better for those who come after her.
Evelyn and Me
In Monique’s 2017 Vivant piece, she discusses her complex feelings for Evelyn. She reveals the truest thing about Evelyn, which is that Celia was the love of her life. Monique says the biography will be called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Monique reveals that Evelyn told her that when people hear her true story, what they will be most interested in is not her husbands but her wife.
Analysis
These chapters suggest that no single person is totally bad or good, and that morality is incredibly complex. In reckoning with Evelyn’s life, Monique cannot dismiss Evelyn as a bad person despite the pain she’s caused Monique’s family directly. Monique notes that Evelyn also did good in the world and that she genuinely cares about Monique and her well-being. By acknowledging the gray areas in her judgment of Evelyn, Monique opens herself up to more uncertainty. This allows her to get closer to the truth. For example, though she wants to hate Evelyn, she sees Evelyn’s complexity and also feels compassion for her along with admiration and awe. In telling Evelyn’s story and the story of their time together, Monique articulates this complexity and says she both admires and dislikes Evelyn. In doing, Monique creates the first honest depiction of Evelyn in the media, and she honors her wishes in telling both of their truths.
The gowns represent Evelyn’s public persona, and the fact that they are at auction is highly symbolic; she is now selling them, as she once sold herself. Before she ends her life, Evelyn wants to accomplish two goals: auctioning off the gowns and telling her life story to Monique. The gowns have served as Evelyn’s armor for major public events in her life, and they allowed her to present herself to the public as a glamorous, beautiful starlet who fit Hollywood's mold of the ideal woman. They also masked who she truly was, and by wearing them, Evelyn protected herself from unwelcome scrutiny and the anticipated backlash and judgment of having a relationship with a woman. By donating the gowns to charity, Evelyn relieves herself of the burden of public perception, sheds her false selves, and creates a positive impact with her notoriety. Telling her story to Monique compounds this act: before her death, she gets to both reclaim and surrender the past.
Evelyn’s decision to die with dignity parallels the beginning of her story and illustrates how much she’s grown. At the beginning of her story, Evelyn was both subject to forces beyond her control and intent on seizing every opportunity to get what she needed. She wasn’t able to protect herself entirely from the advances of men, but she used their inevitably bad behavior to her advantage. She lied and seduced to get to Hollywood and to get her first roles, knowing full well that as a poor Cuban woman in a white- and male-dominated society the deck was always stacked against her. In the same way, though Evelyn can’t escape death, she is able to choose how she dies in order to avoid suffering. In the beginning, she didn’t have much concern for how her actions affected other people. In her end, Evelyn goes out of her way to make sure some of the people she affected are well taken care of. This sets both Monique and Grace up with financial prospects before she goes. Though Evelyn hasn’t lost her drive for self-protection in the end, she has developed a deep love for other people.
