His pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty have been there to see it, as well as the younger generation: Matt Dillon and directors Wes Anderson and David O. Russell. Woody Allen, he says, is peeved that Evans hasn’t given him a screening yet. “Mark Wahlberg called 20 times for an invite.” The movie, which is built around the abridged audiotape Evans recorded of his 1994 autobiography of the same name–an audio that became a cult item in Hollywood–has made him hot and hip again.
And he’s relishing every moment, from the standing ovation he got at Sundance, where the movie was first shown (it opens July 26), to the screening at the Cannes Film Festival–where Evans was surrounded by flocks of beautiful women wherever he went–to the ceremony in May enshrining his name on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s all gravy to The Kid, who’s just happy to be alive. With good reason: on May 6, 1998, as he was proposing a toast in this very screening room to filmmaker Wes Craven, Evans suffered a massive stroke. “I thought I had died. I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing ‘It’s a Wonderful World.’
Two other strokes followed. His recovery was long and arduous. “I couldn’t move. They had to feed me intravenously. It took six months to learn how to speak. I wish my c–k were as stiff as my tongue.”
But here he is, still standing and, amazingly, given that he is forbidden to take sun, still tan. He has to walk carefully now, reminding himself how to do it. His face has lost its lean, pretty-boy eagerness, but the house, the room, are remarkably unchanged from my last visit there–22 years ago. The same huge Toulouse-Lautrec poster dominates the wall and–talk about retro–bouquets of cigarettes are still set out for guests.
The first time I met Evans was on a blazing hot day in May of 1980. At the time, he was producing “Urban Cowboy.” He was at the height of both his fame and the cocaine infatuation that would soon lead to his misdemeanor conviction for drug possession–the first of two scandals that would ultimately devastate his career. Despite the heat, every fireplace in the house was roaring. A butler handed me an iced tea in a goblet large enough for a giant while Evans excused himself. Emerging re-energized from the bathroom, he led me across the pool area to the screening room, where he showed me a 30-minute “gag reel” that Dustin Hoffman had made on the set of “Marathon Man.” It was hilarious, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Hoffman, dressed as a hospital patient, was doing a nearly libelous impersonation of Evans about to give birth, having been knocked up by the agent Sue Mengers, and babbling unprintably. (You’ll see outtakes of this skit under the documentary’s closing credits; Hoffman would later refine his Evans impersonation in the satire “Wag the Dog.”) Why was he showing me this?
As you watch “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” it becomes clear that in the hyperbolic world of Bob Evans the line between self-denigration and self-glorification is virtually nonexistent. Like a Margarita, Evans’s tales of his adventures are intoxicating–and best taken with many grains of salt. It was amusing to read in a W magazine profile that he recently showed the Hoffman footage to a select gathering, telling them “No one has seen this. I mean no one.” Faced with the potential unreliability of their narrator, directors Morgen and Bernstein open their stylish, high-octane movie with an Evans quote: “There are three sides to every story: my side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying.” Playful, preposterous and poignant, “The Kid” is a hard movie to categorize. In fact, it’s not quite accurate even to call it a documentary–no attempt is made at “objectivity,” no point of view other than Evans’s is heard. Nor should it be dismissed as a vanity production (the producer, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, is a friend of Evans’s). A mischievous thread of irony underlies its Bobocentric view of reality.
But what a story it tells. The 26-year-old former child actor was a partner with his brother in the women’s sportswear company Evan-Picone when he was discovered poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Norma Shearer, who picked him to play her late husband, the movie mogul Irving Thalberg, in “Man of a Thousand Faces.” He was discovered again in a New York nightclub by Darryl Zanuck, who cast him as the matador in the 1957 “The Sun Also Rises,” over the objections of Ernest Hemingway and just about everybody else involved.
Evans had no illusions about his talent as an actor. (Glimpses of his starring role in the 1958 “The Fiend Who Walked the West” confirm his assessment.) He didn’t want to play Thalberg, he wanted to be Thalberg. He started his producing career at Twentieth Century Fox. A laudatory New York Times article on the young go-getter came to the attention of Charles Bludhorn–the boss of Gulf+Western, which had bought Paramount Pictures–and in 1966, to the astonishment of the Hollywood establishment, the untested, 35-year-old failed matinee idol was anointed the studio’s chief of production. No one thought he had a chance. Paramount was on the ropes, and this was a guy whose main claim to fame was that he’d dated Grace Kelly, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner and hung out with the legendary playboy Porfirio Rubirosa. Yet in the late ’60s and early ’70s he oversaw a string of hits that lifted Paramount to the top of the Hollywood heap: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Harold and Maude,” “Serpico,” “The Godfather,” “The Odd Couple” and “Chinatown.”
Evans has had five marriages, including a brief one with former Miss America Phyllis George, and the latest, a 12-day post-stroke fiasco with actress Catherine Oxenberg. The movie goes into only one: his tabloid-ready, “love of my life” romance with Ali MacGraw, which produced his only child, Josh, and which ended, notoriously, when she took up with Steve McQueen on the set of “The Getaway.” The press has always reveled in Evans’s affairs, and he denies nothing. “Sun, sex and sports–my three favorite things,” he tells me. His stroke has forced him to give up the first and third entirely. “As for sex,” he says, “I ain’t Rubirosa, but I ain’t dead yet.”
But if Evans’s escapades with glamorous women have gotten the most headlines, the true secret of his success may be his talent for seducing some of the most powerful men in America. These are the relationships upon which his career is built: Zanuck, Bludhorn, Henry Kissinger, the late mob lawyer Sidney Korshak and Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, which now owns Paramount, where Evans has his current deal.
Evans managed to get Kissinger to show up at his side for the “Godfather” premiere despite the fact that the high-flying diplomat was heading off the next morning for secret peace talks to end the Vietnam War. “Henry was a most unusual person,” Evans says. “He enjoyed making fun of himself, of his own ego. He was brilliant, but he was naive in so many ways. He’d call me up from the State Department and say, ‘Are Raquel Welch’s tits for real?’ " Notice the past tense: Evans, not wanting to be a political embarrassment, broke off his friendship with Kissinger after the 1980 guilty plea for cocaine possession. They didn’t speak for a decade.
Korshak may be the least well known of these men (which was how he wanted it) and the most powerful. They met at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs in 1955; in 1996, Evans gave the eulogy at his funeral. “From the ’40s through the ’70s, organized crime was controlled by one person, and no one knew it,” Evans says with casual authority. “He was totally legitimate and he was not Mafia. The Mafia went to him. He could press a button and close down Las Vegas. The country was Sidney’s and I was his godson.”
Many times when his back was against the wall, he turned to Korshak. He cites the time Simon & Schuster suddenly announced that it wouldn’t publish his autobiography, or allow him to sell it to anyone else. Simon & Schuster was also owned by Gulf+Western and, as Evans tells it, Marty Davis, who had been Bludhorn’s right-hand man, “didn’t want Paramount’s history told through my mouth.” Evans made a call to Korshak and Korshak made a call to Davis: “Marty, I don’t want you to have a rainy weekend. Let Bobby free.” And Bobby got his book sold to Hyperion. Is it any wonder the movie Evans most wants to make is about Korshak? “It’s the quintessential story of power.”
In what he now says was his stupidest move, Evans didn’t turn to his godfather when the cocaine scandal broke and Bludhorn disowned him. Korshak was angry that Evans didn’t t ask for his help; it made him look ineffectual when Evans took his fall. “We didn’t talk for six years.” And worse was yet to come. Roy Radin, a potential investor in “The Cotton Club,” was found murdered in a drug-related crime, and newspapers linked Evans’s name to the case. Though he was never charged, and was ultimately exonerated, the “Cotton Club Murders” made him a pariah.
“I went from royalty to infamy in one day,” Evans recalls. There was no work, no money, he had to sell his beloved house (which he bought back later only after Jack Nicholson flew to France to plead his case to the new owner) and became suicidally depressed. For a decade he was Hollywood’s invisible man, re-emerging only in 1991 when he acquired the rights to make “The Saint.” “In 1979,” he says, “I was worth $11 million. In 1989 I was worth $37. I feel like I’ve lived to be 300 years old, and I’m not the better for it.” At the Q&A session at Sundance, he was asked the one thing about his life he would change if he had the chance. “The second half,” he said.
But now The Kid is back in business. Producing movies. Holding court. And dictating a sequel to his autobiography, called “The Fat Lady Sings.” The stroke, and his giddy return to the spotlight, have given him a miraculous third act. The new book will contain portraits of the most seductive men he’s ever known. Guys like Kissinger, Korshak, producer Mike Todd and Rubirosa. Evans deserves a place alongside them on anybody’s list. It’s easy to smile at his larger-than-life braggadocio, his penchant for embellishment, but it’s impossible to come away from the movie–or from a long afternoon in his presence–not admiring his will, his smarts, his chutzpah and his generosity. You root for him to beat the odds. Have I been seduced? Shamelessly, transparently, happily. By a real pro.
