Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo an Almost Master Work

 

 

THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO (2018-19)

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Simon and Shuster, 400 pages.

★★★★

 

The Seven Wives of Evelyn Hugo is a satisfying, dishy book that blows the lid off of celebrity culture. It does so by showing how fame is both manufactured and fragile. Like several other novels I’ve spotlighted on this blog, it would have been even better–perhaps the master work by Taylor Jenkins Reid–had the author stuck to one narrative instead of interjecting a second.

 

The novel’s protagonist is the eponymous Evelyn Hugo, and what a brassy and determined woman she is. We meet the seven-husbanded but reclusive Hugo at age 79. She is about to authorize a spill-all biography with a handpicked writer, the biracial Monique Grant, who first assumes she’s only doing her first feature for Vivant Magazine. Hugo shocks Monique by telling her she won’t do an article; she wants her to write an unvarnished biography that will make Monique millions in royalties.

 

That’s the setup for a trip back in time and across the post-World War II decades. Hugo is Cuban American, though not many know that as she is a bottle blond sexpot who is so gorgeous that men and women alike freeze when they see her. Think of Hugo as a composite of numerous Golden Age Hollywood stars, including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolores del Rio, Jayne Mansfield, and others that movie studio celebrity machines “invented”.” (Taylor actually had seven husbands, eight if you count Richard Burton whom she married and divorced twice!) Reid presents Hugo as a girl from a poor background, a dead mother, an abusive father, and a spectacular bust that allowed her to pass for 16 when she was just 14. She married Ernie Diaz to get away from her father and because, as Evelyn puts it, “I traded my virginity … for a ride to Hollywood.”

 

That’s not all she traded! Hugo sleeps her way to the top, meets high-powered men who transform her from bumpkin to bombshell, pair her with stars, and arrange dates, divorces, and marriages for her. She loved only one of her seven husbands: producer Harry Cameron, who is her best friend and a closeted gay man. Each marriage is introduced with a chapter title that signposts where things are headed, though the way things unfold are unique each time: “Goddamn Don Adler,” “Naïve Mick Riva,” “Brilliant, Kindhearted, Tortured Harry Cameron,” etc. There is no shortage of suitors; thanks to the luck of the genetic draw, Hugo is so breathtaking that she inspires lustful fantasies into her late 70s. As we discover, Evelyn has lots of closet skeletons to reveal.

 

Evelyn’s transformation involves leaving her Hell’s Kitchen roots behind, inventing new ones, learning to become a good actress, wallowing in egoism, engaging in catfights with other actresses, experiencing motherhood, and becoming a rich and powerful figure of sufficient sway to command rather than ask. In many ways, her story is (metaphorically) one of selling and reselling her soul. Along the way, Evelyn becomes jaded and stops caring, because the one person she can’t have fully is the one she wants the most. As she informs Monique, she wants to make sure two things are clear in her biography: that sex and sexuality are two different things, and that she’s not a nice person. No fear on the second score; to call Evelyn Hugo a difficult woman doesn’t even begin to get it.  

 

The backstories of each phase of Evelyn’s life are told in rich detail. In addition to the interpersonal relationships, Reid takes us into worlds of tyrannical studio heads, racism, rampant sex, herculean partying, homophobia, changes in American society, and more mind games than a convention of mentalists. At a key juncture of the book our anti-heroine insists that Evelyn Hugo never existed in the way her fans imagined: “[S]he was a person I made up for them.” We know exactly what she means.

 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo would have been a near-perfect novel had Reid let Evelyn tell her tale to a non-descript scribbler who nods and types. Instead, she tries to flesh out Monique Grant, but it would take many more pages to do so thoroughly. Reid’s aim is to draw parallels between two generationally separated biracial women with partner problems, pose Evelyn as a cranky mentor, and highlight changing social mores. The obvious question is why bother?  The intercalary chapters are interruptions. Monique’s biracialism aside, she’s a conflicted young adult looking for a break, a page out of any magazine confessional. To put it as Evelyn might have at the height of her fame, who wants to gaze upon space dust when there’s a star in front of your face?

 

Rob Weir