Famous Women Quartet: the story so far

Evelyn Hugo was seventy-nine, long retired and famously silent when she asked for a magazine journalist nobody had heard of. Monique Grant arrived expecting a piece about a gown auction and was told to write the whole biography instead, and that she could ask anything she liked.

The seven husbands were mostly career. Ernie Diaz got her out of Hell's Kitchen at fourteen. Don Adler made her a star, beat her, and blacklisted her when he found out about Celia. Mick Riva was one night in Las Vegas, annulled by morning. Rex North was a publicity arrangement. Harry Cameron was her closest friend and the father of her daughter Connor, and the two of them raised the child alongside Celia and Celia's own arranged husband. Max Girard wanted the sex symbol rather than the woman. Robert Jamison was Celia's brother, married so that Evelyn would have a legal claim to Celia's life.

Celia St James was the point of all of it. They met making Little Women, fought, fell in love, and spent forty years being pulled apart by studios, by Evelyn's ambition and by what a photograph could cost. Celia died of emphysema in Spain at sixty-one.

Then Evelyn explained why she had chosen Monique. Harry Cameron had been driving drunk when he crashed, and the man who died beside him was James Grant, Monique's father, who had loved Harry and would not leave his family. Evelyn moved the bodies so Harry would not be blamed, and let Monique grow up believing her father had been the drunk one.

Monique took the book anyway. Evelyn had breast cancer, and died of an overdose within days that Monique understood was not an accident.

The book is an oral history, assembled twenty years after the band walked off a Chicago stage and never played again, and every account is somebody's version of it.

Daisy Jones grew up rich and unattended in Los Angeles and turned into a singer nobody could look away from. The Six were Billy Dunne's band out of Pittsburgh, and Billy wrote everything and controlled everything. Their producer Teddy Price put Daisy onto one of Billy's songs as a duet, and it went off like a bomb.

Billy had gone to rehab while his wife Camila was pregnant with their first daughter, and came out with rules he did not break. Daisy had no rules. Writing the Aurora album together they made something neither could have made alone and fell for each other doing it, and Billy would not touch it, because of Camila.

Everything around them came apart. Daisy married a man in Greece almost at random. Karen and Graham were together in secret, and when Karen fell pregnant she ended it and told him she did not want the life he wanted. Daisy overdosed in a hotel suite on tour and Billy was the one who found her.

In Chicago, Eddie quit and told Billy he had slept with Camila. Billy hit him and went on stage drunk for the first time in years. Daisy told him to go home and fix his marriage. They played the encore and that was the end of the band.

The interviewer turned out to be Julia, Billy and Camila's daughter. Camila had died not long before, and had left instructions that Billy and Daisy should finally speak. The last thing in the book is Daisy opening her door to him.

The Riva children were famous in Malibu for being Mick Riva's, which was the one thing none of them wanted. Mick was a singer who married their mother June, kept leaving, fathered Hud with another woman, and came back whenever it suited him. June drank herself to death waiting, and Nina, barely grown, raised the other three.

By August 1983 Nina was a surf model on a magazine cover she hated, and her tennis player husband Brandon had just left her for somebody else in public. She threw her annual end of summer party anyway, because she always did.

The party ate the house. Jay told Lara he loved her and got the answer he did not want. Hud admitted he was with Ashley and about to be a father, which was the secret he had been keeping from his brother. Kit kissed a boy for the first time and understood from it that she did not want to. Brandon turned up wanting Nina back and she refused him. A young woman named Casey arrived and turned out to be another of Mick's daughters, and by morning the others had decided she was one of them.

Nina finally said out loud that she was leaving, and that the other three could look after themselves, which had been true for years.

Then Mick, on his way out, flicked a cigarette into dry grass, and the house he had never lived in burned to the ground behind him.

Carrie Soto retired holding twenty Grand Slam singles titles and a reputation for being unpleasant about every one of them. Six years later Nicki Chan was one title away from the record, and Carrie announced at thirty-seven that she was coming back to defend it.

Her father Javier had coached her since she was a child and agreed to do it again. He was not well. Chemotherapy years earlier had damaged his heart, and he needed a pacemaker during Wimbledon.

Bowe Huntley, a men's player near the end of his own career, trained with her and became something more, and the two of them spent the season arguing about how much she was prepared to hurt herself for this.

The comeback did not go cleanly. Ingrid Cortez knocked her out of the Australian Open. She went out early in Paris and watched Nicki Chan take the French. She won Wimbledon, beating Cortez in the final, which kept the record out of reach for another few months.

Then Javier had a heart attack during the US Open and died. He left her a notebook of notes on her game that he had been keeping the whole time.

Carrie reached the final and played Nicki Chan through a long match and a rain delay, and she did not win it, and found that she could live with not winning it. Bowe told her he loved her.

A year later she was back at the US Open with Bowe beside her, watching Nicki Chan play, as Nicki's coach.