Eve­lyn and Me marks the cul­mi­na­tion of a jour­ney I nev­er expect­ed to take. When I first agreed to help the leg­endary Eve­lyn Hugo with her mem­oirs, I couldn’t have known how deeply it would affect me. Her death ear­li­er this year, while we were still in the mid­dle of com­pil­ing her life’s sto­ry, left me with a sense of unfin­ished busi­ness but also a pro­found real­iza­tion. Reflect­ing on the time I spent with her, I can see that it was filled with moments that were as com­plex and mul­ti­fac­eted as Eve­lyn her­self. There were days of laugh­ter, frus­tra­tion, awe, and even admi­ra­tion, but at oth­er times, con­fu­sion and anger would take over as I ques­tioned the per­son she tru­ly was. What began as a sim­ple mem­oir project turned into a pro­found explo­ration of the intri­ca­cies of her life, and more than that, it became a dis­cov­ery of her deep­est, most close­ly guard­ed truth.

I found myself con­stant­ly wrestling with my own per­cep­tion of Eve­lyn. On the one hand, she was a woman who had achieved tremen­dous suc­cess in Hol­ly­wood, over­com­ing numer­ous obsta­cles to carve out a lega­cy that would span gen­er­a­tions. But on the oth­er hand, there was this lay­er of manip­u­la­tion and deceit, a need for con­trol that con­stant­ly worked to obscure the per­son under­neath. It wasn’t just her glam­orous image that had the world cap­ti­vat­ed, but her abil­i­ty to con­ceal parts of her­self that she wasn’t ready to share. She was a para­dox: a bril­liant, strong, and charis­mat­ic woman who knew how to win peo­ple over and achieve her desires, yet one who hid so much of her soul from the world. These con­flict­ing aspects of her iden­ti­ty were some­thing I found myself pon­der­ing often dur­ing our time togeth­er, and even now, I strug­gle to come to terms with them.

As I care­ful­ly read over our tran­scripts, reex­am­in­ing the words that Eve­lyn spoke to me in the final weeks of her life, I began to under­stand the depth of the emo­tion­al and per­son­al bat­tles she had faced. One of the biggest rev­e­la­tions came when I learned about her love for Celia St. James. For years, Eve­lyn had con­cealed the truth about her sex­u­al­i­ty, keep­ing it buried under lay­ers of fame, pub­lic scruti­ny, and the pres­sure to con­form to soci­etal norms. But when Eve­lyn final­ly con­fessed her love for Celia, it was not just a per­son­al revelation—it was a state­ment of free­dom. She had lived most of her life hid­ing that love, yet it had been the truest part of her being. In shar­ing this truth with me, she was reclaim­ing a part of her­self that had been silenced for far too long. This rev­e­la­tion made it clear that Eve­lyn was more than just the pub­lic per­sona she had crafted—she was a woman who had loved deeply and strug­gled with the very same fears, doubts, and soci­etal expec­ta­tions that count­less oth­ers had. But her love for Celia was not just an affair—it was the cor­ner­stone of her exis­tence, one that had shaped every­thing she did, from the choic­es she made in her career to the way she nav­i­gat­ed her rela­tion­ships.

Eve­lyn want­ed the world to under­stand the pow­er of that love and how it had fueled her most sig­nif­i­cant deci­sions. And even though shar­ing this truth came at a high per­son­al cost, she chose to reveal it because, to her, the act of lov­ing Celia was both a per­son­al and polit­i­cal defi­ance of the world’s con­straints. This con­fes­sion was, in many ways, Evelyn’s most impor­tant act of rebel­lion. By shar­ing her truth with the world, Eve­lyn was tak­ing back her nar­ra­tive, rewrit­ing the rules of what it meant to love, to live, and to be free. It wasn’t just about her love for Celia; it was about dis­man­tling the walls of secre­cy that had con­fined her for so long. Evelyn’s deci­sion to share this part of her­self, to open­ly claim her bisex­u­al­i­ty, was a moment of clar­i­ty and courage, one that not only allowed her to embrace her true self but also inspired count­less oth­ers to do the same. It was a pow­er­ful reminder that in the face of soci­etal expec­ta­tions, there is strength in liv­ing your truth, no mat­ter how dif­fi­cult that might be.