The Fat Lady Sang

by Robert Evans

  30

  There have been many novels written about Hollywood, but only one has been hailed as legendary . . . and it wasn’t even complete.

  Of all the personalities who shaped film and the way films get made, of all the promoters and hustlers and part-time geniuses who’ve labored over scripts and schedules, lenses and releases, distribution and publicity—in other words, producers—only one has had the constellation of talents and circumstances to have affected not only his peers but generations of filmmakers to come. He was the subject of that legendary novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon. In the book, the producer was named Monroe Stahr.

  In real life, he was named Irving Thalberg.

  At the age of twenty, Thalberg was head of production at Universal Studios—smart enough to run the studio, too young to sign the checks. It does sound like fiction, doesn’t it? His life does, too—that’s why Fitzgerald wrote it as a novel. The Last Tycoon remains the only incomplete novel that belongs in literature’s hall of fame.

  Despite the many changes in the film industry since Thalberg reigned in the twenties and thirties, he remains the beau ideal of Hollywood producers. No career has ever approached his. He oversaw dozens of productions a year personally, as well as overseeing, okaying, rewriting, reshooting, and reediting dozens more. He was married to Norma Shearer, one of the smartest and most glamorous actresses of her day, who won the second Academy Award ever bestowed.

  Thalberg’s talent was mythical. After his sudden death from a heart attack in 1937, no one ever filled the immense void he left. And so the Irving Thalberg Lifetime Achievement Award became the most coveted and the most prestigious award a producer can receive.

  Imagine, then, how I felt when, in my mid-twenties, I was waved over to the side of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel by none other than Ms. Shearer herself.

  “Are you an actor?”

  “I’m not, but I used to be.”

  “Watching you by the pool, I said to Martin [Arrouge, her husband], ‘That young man reminds me of Irving.’ They’re making Man of a Thousand Faces at Universal. It’s about Lon Chaney. Irving played a very important part in Lon’s life. Jimmy Cagney is playing Lon Chaney. They’ve sent fourteen actors for me to see and you’re the first one who actually reminds me of the real Irving.”

  She sent me to meet the producer and director of the film. Against their professional wishes and to everyone’s shock, I got the part. In December 1956, we started shooting.

  My first day was nearly my last. Before the cameras rolled, Norma told me that Irving would never wear makeup, so she wanted me not to wear makeup. In my naïveté, I agreed. Not my last mistake.

  The first thing they told me on the set? “Makeup!”

  “But Ms. Shearer said I shouldn’t wear makeup,” I protested.

  The director brooked no protests. “Makeup!”

  Humbly, the new guy went along.

  My father and brother flew out to Hollywood to watch me shoot with the great James Cagney, who had greeted me warmly. Lights, camera, roll sound, action . . . and nothing. The first line was mine; I had rehearsed it without incident. Now that the moment had arrived, I couldn’t get a sound out of my mouth. Nothing.

  Take two. Lights, camera, roll sound, action . . . nothing.

  Never mind. Take three. Take four. Lights, camera . . . nothing. Not a syllable.

  By now more people had gathered. An anxious stillness. I could hear muttering from behind the camera. Assistants were sent to fetch things; a cloud of unease fell over the set.

  I could see the producer talking to the director.

  Take five. Lights . . . my throat seized up completely. I couldn’t even squawk, much less deliver a line. I started wondering how fast I could get out of town. Are there flights to New York tonight? By now the makeup team was patting me down.

  One more try.

  Lights, camera, roll sound, action . . . hopeless. I’d become the Sphinx, a tomb, a statue. I’d reverted to infancy. I couldn’t make a sound.

  I saw the great Cagney get up from his seat. This is it, I thought. I had my shot . . . and I blew it.

  Cagney walked over to the director, whispered in his ear.

  “All right, let’s all take five!”

  Cagney walked over to me. I was paralyzed with humiliation. He took me by the arm and guided me off the set. We walked outside, my legs trembling.

  “Kid, on the first day of my first film, I had to do a scene with a guy who was six foot four. I’m five foot five. It was my job to bully the guy. Well, by the time the scene was over, I was six foot four and he was five foot five. Remember one thing, kid, in life and in acting: Don’t be afraid. Not of me, not of anybody.

  “Now, c’mon, let’s go back on the set and show ’em good.”

  Imagine Jimmy Cagney saying that to me! He made me feel ten feet tall. Those words stayed with me for the rest of my life.

  The next take was a print. I never had a problem like that again.

  Of course, that didn’t solve my makeup problem. On the first showing of dailies, Norma Shearer stood up the moment I came on screen, walked over to me, and said, “I told you no makeup!” Then she stomped out of the room. It took the director, the producer, and myself days to convince her that no makeup was just not possible.

  The picture opened in July 1957, to rave reviews. There were Oscar nominations, big box office, lots of publicity. Me? I got mixed reviews, but in Norma Shearer’s eyes I had become her legendary husband.

  “You are Irving. Onscreen as well as in person. I never told you this, but Man of a Thousand Faces was just your audition. Now, for the first time I feel comfortable taking on The Last Tycoon as a film—even without a third act. I have hundreds of pages, and nowhere to go but the big screen. I’m going to call Selznick. He and I have talked about this for years. I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

  How well I remember walking into the great David O. Selznick’s office at Twentieth Century Fox! He was cordial, enthusiastic about my future, and very interested in my thoughts on Thalberg’s idiosyncratic behavior. As I left his office, I said to myself, I’m in!

  Wrong. I was out.

  Selznick called Norma Shearer. “He’s a nice young man, and he was adequate to play Irving opposite Jimmy Cagney. But Irving is the central character in The Last Tycoon, and to have the picture depend on this young man would be imprudent, both professionally and personally. We’ve discussed this project for too long for me not to advise you that this young man is no Irving Thalberg. To put it bluntly, Norma, the kid just doesn’t have the chops. If your heart is set on him being Irving, then I’ll have to bow out as producer.”

  Selznick was right, I didn’t have the chops. But within a decade I was head of worldwide production at Paramount—and The Last Tycoon was on our slate. Instead of playing Irving Thalberg, I cast him in the person of Bobby De Niro, who played the part of Monroe Stahr flawlessly.

  De Niro? He had the chops.

  Despite his rejection, I continued to look up to David O. Selznick. He was, and always will be, the producer’s producer. It was easy to understand why the producer’s award was named after him.

  Rejection breeds obsession. Underneath it all, I suppose I wanted to be David Selznick. When he died in 1965, the first thing I did was try to buy his home from his wife, Jennifer Jones. But it was too late. Ted Ashley, head of Warner Brothers, got there ahead of me. I didn’t get the part and I didn’t get the house.

  Still, the Thalberg Award and the Selznick Award loomed as the Holy Grails of my profession. The two most important awards for a producer/filmmaker are both lifetime achievement awards. There’s a damned good reason for that. To achieve over a long period of time in Hollywood is a matter of brains, balls, resilience, and mucho fuckin’ luck. Many are called, but few are chosen. Very few have ever received the Irving Thalberg or the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Awards. I wanted them both.

  One day in 1980, Howard Koch, my good friend and
the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, burst in unannounced.

  “I’ve got good news. No, great news. No, deserving news.”

  Howard was a horse breeder. “I won the trifecta, huh?”

  “No. I’m going to tell you a secret. Can’t tell anyone. We voted last night. You’ve been selected to receive the Irving Thalberg Award.”

  “Are you putting me on?”

  “No, the Academy is. They’re putting you on a pedestal you deserve. I nominated you for the third time. This time, you got two shy of a unanimous vote. In other words, you beat the odds. I’m very happy for you.”

  He laughed.

  “We’re gonna do a first. We’re going to toast you as a crowning example of life imitates art. You are the only man who played Irving Thalberg on the screen and duplicated his role in life. We’re going to introduce you using the scene with you and Jimmy Cagney, and bringing you onto the stage as today’s Thalberg. It’ll make terrific theater, huh?”

  He must have sensed something was wrong. “Smile, will ya? You’re only going to make history.”

  I couldn’t. I was too stunned. My wildest dream had come true.

  It didn’t last long. Two months later, I was arrested for cocaine possession. Good-bye Irving, hello infamy. Suddenly, I went from lion to lizard. Forget the Irving Thalberg Award, I became all but unemployable.

  The horrific thing about this phase of my life was, I was innocent of the charge. Guilty of usage, yes, but I was three thousand miles away when the arrest went down. The fact that I had nothing whatever to do with the crime in question didn’t matter, as I was to discover. I was on a roller coaster that wouldn’t stop for years.

  For the record, I was totally exonerated. All charges against me were dismissed, my record completely expunged.

  None of that mattered to the powers that be. They couldn’t get away fast enough.

  Royalty fades, infamy stays.

  At the time, Michael Eisner was head of Paramount. In what was described as a “carefully worded statement,” he announced: “Bob is not an employee of Paramount and has not been an employee of Paramount for four years. We have a relationship with him as a producer, and nothing that has happened has changed that relationship. Paramount does not condone what he did, nor does it harshly deal with something that has no bearing on his professional relationships.”

  Mind you, I was innocent. It didn’t matter.

  How did it happen? An ambitious district attorney in Manhattan named John Martin understood that the ink I would generate for him—regardless of the worthiness of his case—could catapult him into higher political office, perhaps all the way to U.S. attorney general. For this reason and this reason alone, my name continued to be leaked to the press as a “person of interest” or a “witness.” That’s all the tabloids needed to generate headlines—which were the only parts of this story most people ever bothered to read.

  For the next ten years, my career express-trained south, trailing headlines all the way. All of them bad. My life was consumed. And consumed is the word.

  The best way to describe my career? The bottom line. In 1979 I was worth $11 million. A decade later? Thirty-seven bucks and falling.

  Despite my exoneration, the scandal made me radioactive in Hollywood. I came to realize that a lot of things were settled in this way. A public figure is brought before the court of public opinion—a court that needs abide by zero rules of any kind before reaching a verdict. A little timely name-dropping here, some quiet “anonymous” innuendo there, and presto, you’ve got one cooked goose. And I had headlines, not innuendoes.

  The MO? Patronizing smiles and sympathy to my face, but no return calls. After making picture after picture, I couldn’t even secure a development deal. To my face? Endless praise. Behind my back? The knives were out. By law I didn’t get arrested, but conversely, in my profession I couldn’t get arrested. It ain’t a good feeling going from fame to failure. And I was wearing failure with a capital F.

  The Thalberg Award? Not to be, at least in this lifetime.

  I have lived a cavalier life since before I was old enough to shave. I’m the first to admit it—I’ve never lived by the rules. The people who make them don’t, so why should I? But when you’re in the public eye, it’s double-jeopardy time. You’re guilty until proven innocent. And once branded, you’re branded for good.

  31

  One way or another, I’ve been involved in the making of three hundred odd films. But none of them did for me what one book did. The reason I wrote The Kid Stays in the Picture was to show my son who his old man really is. He lived through this whole horrible period with me, helping me to face what I had to face. Without him to remind me of the importance of legacy, I could have easily slipped into obscurity, once and for all.

  Whatever happened in my life, I was proud of what I’d accomplished. But never did I expect that an autobiography I’d written for my son would catapult me into new fame. A new generation of young people believed in the irreverent, and they responded to the book beyond anyone’s expectations.

  By 2000, I was more of a celebrity from the book and its audio version than I’d ever been as a filmmaker. I couldn’t go to restaurants without receiving the congratulations and adulation of young filmmakers, audiences, and fans—a group younger than any I had encountered since the sixties. I had touched a new generation. Royalty I wasn’t, but infamy can be more intoxicating than royalty, and certainly more dangerous. One is born into royalty; infamy is self-made.

  Walking through the gates of Paramount in 1950, a young, razorless, pretty-boy actor under contract to the studio, I was one step away from touchin’ Heaven. Everything looked different, smelled different, tasted different. Through the eyes of a wannabe, the City of Angels was just that: Was I dreamin’ it? Yes and no.

  Now, fifty years later, I was walking up to the podium, on the occasion of receiving my star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. My real estate was prime, adjacent to my dear friend, Jack Nicholson, near the entrance to what was then Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Johnny Grant, master of ceremonies and mayor of Hollywood, introduced me to a crowd that flooded out into the streets of Hollywood Boulevard. Them fifty years were part dream, part nightmare. I stood to address my friends and fans, battle-scarred from heartbreaks, yet buoyant from victories. Amid the throng were Sumner Redstone, Sherry Lansing, Billy Friedkin, Slash, Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Val Kilmer, Cheryl Tiegs, Beverly Johnson, Darryl Hannah, Kelly Lynch, and my son, Joshua, and his mother, Ali MacGraw. Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell addressed the crowd. Of the nearly two hundred attendees, most had played a part in my climb up the balsa-wood ladder.

  After the ceremony, David Russell embraced me.

  “Hey, Bob—that guy Wahlberg, on the podium with you just then? In a few years, we’ll both be working for him.” As usual, David was right.

  The whole occasion was nearly hallucinogenic for me. But how perfectly I remember it. With my star in place, I was high on what seemed like my fifth life—and it wasn’t over yet.

  Twenty-some years after producer Howard Koch had walked into my office, dejected at having to break the news that my infamy was preventing me from receiving the Thalberg Award, a moment of déjà vu: His son Hawk, president of the Producers Guild, burst into the very same office—but this time the message was different.

  “Bob, I’ve got news. The Producers Guild voted unanimously last night to give you the David O. Selznick Award.”

  Again, I was stunned. For more than twenty years I had given this up as a fantasy. I had resigned myself to the fact that infamy does not open doors to prestige. Apparently, I was wrong.

  For the second time in my life, I was speechless.

  “We’re going to have Dustin Hoffman present you the award. He can’t wait.”

  I hadn’t spoken to Dustin in years. I was glad I was sitting down; I don’t think my legs could have held me up at that point.

  Could this be possible? Too much had
happened for me to take this on faith. I started to count down the days till the ceremony.

  On the day of the award, I was in knots. What would Hoffman say? How would I be received? I sat in the audience as impassively as I could, terrified that somehow this too would be taken away from me. As Dustin went up to the podium I realized that I was holding my breath.

  Hawk Koch had told me that Dustin wasn’t making a prepared speech, just presenting the award. I was expecting him simply to announce my name, call me to the stage, and that would be that. After years we’d spent at arm’s length from each other, it would have been more than enough to reconcile us—and more than enough to make me feel that everything I’d been through had been more than worth it.

  What happened next was so astonishing that I don’t dare paraphrase it. I reproduce it here in full.

  Dustin goes on stage and opens a sheaf of papers.

  In a way, I probably met Robert Evans before I ever met him. At age eleven, Mr. Evans started his illustrious career on the Let’s Pretend radio show, which I listened to every Saturday morning. We were destined to work together; even then we had the same taste. But it wasn’t until Marathon Man that I met Bob formally, and now I can thank him publicly for lobbying for me; for Sir Laurence Olivier, when no insurance company would insure him because of his illness; and for the creative and courageous choice of Marthe Keller, who could not speak one word of English except for phonetically learned lines when I met her for her screen test; and for bringing John Schlesinger, the irreplaceable Conrad Hall, and William Goldman’s script, as well as Bob Towne, the finest writer of his generation, to write a critical scene, to the mix. Robert Evans produced Marathon Man in the fullest sense of the word.

  (Applause.)

  I never met a producer like Bob before; I never met a producer like Bob, period.

  (Laughter.)

  To know him and to work with him is to understand the engine that put Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather I and II, and other films up there on the screen and beyond, into film history. Relentless, pathologically enthusiastic, not unlike Willy Loman. As Arthur Miller put it, “He’s out there on a smile and a shoeshine. A salesman’s got a dream, it comes with the territory.”