Summary  

Evelyn Hugo Marries for the Seventh Time  

This 1990 article in Now This announces Evelyn’s marriage to Celia’s brother Robert. It notes that Connor was the maid of honor and wonders if the couple is off to visit Celia, who just bought a property in southern Spain. 

Chapter 59 

Connor recovers some from her grief in Spain and grows attached to Robert. When she goes to Stanford for college, Celia and Evelyn get to spend more time with each other than they ever have before. Evelyn starts speaking Spanish again and feels as though she’s recovering parts of herself that she lost long ago. 

Celia is sick. She talks about how she regrets the years they lost when they were not speaking to each other. In bed, the two hold their own wedding ceremony. Evelyn officiates, and they use a hair tie for a wedding ring. They say their vows. Celia says she’ll never stop loving Evelyn, and Evelyn says none of her other marriages can compare. Evelyn feels immensely moved by the private informal ceremony.  

Chapter 60 

After Celia and Evelyn have been together for a decade in Spain, Celia dies in Evelyn’s arms in their bed. Evelyn is devastated. 

Screen Queen Celia St. James Has Died 

This 2000 article in Now This is an obituary for Celia. It gives an overview of her early life and career and notes that her estate is to be managed by Robert and Evelyn. 

Chapter 61 

At Celia’s funeral, Evelyn goes to visit Harry’s grave and breaks down sobbing. The paparazzi take a picture of her and print a story about how heartbroken she is about the death of her ex-husband. Evelyn notes that the press always gets it wrong, and the media will always tell the story they want to tell, not the truth. She says they can’t see that she is heartbroken over the loss of Celia. 

Chapter 62 

Robert dies and Connor gives the eulogy. Evelyn notes that it’s sometimes difficult living alone. This is part of the reason she hired Grace, whom she enjoys spoiling. She was happy on her own until Connor died of breast cancer last year. Since then, she says, the panic has never left her. 

Chapter 63 

This chapter is still in the first person as Evelyn speaks directly to Monique. She tells Monique to tell her whole story. Though she prized fame her whole life, what she was really looking for was family. She says that the Evelyn Hugo that the world knew was someone she made up for them. She says she just wants to go home to her daughter, her lover, her best friend, and her mother.   

Chapter 64 

Evelyn emphasizes to Monique that she would make the same choices to protect her family again and again. Then she reveals to Monique that the man who died in the car crash with Harry was Monique’s father, James Grant. 

Analysis

Evelyn gets the life she has always wanted by giving up the pursuit of fame and fortune. At the end of Celia’s life, Evelyn has given up notoriety and achieved true love and affection from her wife and daughter. Without the distorting pressure of public scrutiny, Evelyn is able to pick up many of the identities that she has discarded and repressed. She inhabits her bisexual identity and lives more openly with Celia. The two also set aside the things they’ve battled about for decades, both forgiving each other and relaxing, finally, into their love. Picking up Spanish again and speaking it so often suggests that Evelyn also returns to her Cuban roots. She notices that she still remembers the language after all these years. The parts of her that Evelyn put aside to make it as an actress still live within her. Away from Hollywood and the pressures of the persona she created to be accepted and well-loved, Evelyn is finally able to truly be herself.  

The wedding between Evelyn and Celia illustrates the power of reclaiming and redefining traditions. Evelyn has married for love three times, and each wedding was more unconventional than the last. Her wedding with Don was a traditional wedding, and the familial and public expectations that saddled the couple at their wedding freighted their marriage, too. Her wedding with Max is a somewhat conventional wedding with family and friends in attendance, but they switch stereotypical roles. Max is the one who wears white. Though the press tries to position Max as Evelyn’s “white knight,” the white more closely mirrors the way Evelyn is more experienced than Max and savvier in marriage and love. Finally, Evelyn’s wedding with Celia is the least traditional and is guided only by the couple’s hearts. In their bed, dressed casually with a makeshift ring and extemporaneous vows, their wedding is stripped of all the trappings of a public performance. Evelyn and Celia’s private wedding illustrates the purity of their love. They have struggled to define their relationship on their own terms for decades, and this wedding illustrates that, in the end, all they need is each other. 

The press acts as a mouthpiece for tradition and enforces conventional ideas about sexuality and gender. Celia’s obituary presents a bland picture of a likable actress and focuses on her Oscars and her marriage to John. It doesn’t give any sense of who Celia truly was. The obituary describes Celia using the phrase “girl-next-door,” and this is the same language the press used to describe Celia in her press clipping from 1961. This media’s story about Celia hasn’t evolved in nearly forty years, and the press is still peddling stereotypical ideas of pleasant, non-threatening femininity. Similarly, when the media covers Evelyn's heartbreak at Celia’s funeral, they assume she’s mourning Harry. The media can’t see past the image of Evelyn they’ve created. When Evelyn reflects that the media has always and will always tell whatever story they want to tell, it becomes clear that the media is unyielding and stubbornly blind to the truth. Though Evelyn has fed the media false stories about herself throughout her life, she finally understands that the press was never in the business of telling the truth. This realization pushes Evelyn to take back control of both her story and her biography. The book itself serves as a corrective to years of media misrepresentation.