The Kid Stays in the Picture

by Robert Evans

  I was a throwback, but, unfortunately, not an owner. Lew Wasserman said it all on the phone one evening.

  “Where are you, Bob? You’re late.”

  “Godfather’s in deep shit, Lew. I’m in the editing room.”

  “You’re head of a company, not an editor. Get your priorities straight!”

  Was Wasserman right? Today he’s a millionaire 500 times over, while I’m breaking my ass finishing the book to pay back taxes.

  From 1967 to 1970, my instinct said no but my survival said yes. I star-fucked with the best. At one time, I had seven of the top ten box-office stars making pictures at Paramount. I batted one for seven—Duke Wayne came through with True Grit. Even with a grand slammer, one for seven ain’t a good average.

  How could we miss with Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe? With Gigi, My Fair Lady, and Camelot (all for other studios), they’d batted a thousand on the big screen. We got Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, which cost megabucks, and struck out—Paint Your Wagon painted Paramount’s wagon bright red. After its disastrous premiere, the clouds never opened for On a Clear Day. And neither did they for Darling Lili, The Adventurers, or Catch-22.

  In film as in life, I’ve always believed that, when forced into a crisis, do the unexpected. I went back to basics. Instinct, stories—where the written word was the star, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “Strictly for television,” they said. Thirty years earlier my mentor, Norma Shearer, starred as Juliet opposite Leslie Howard. Both were more than twice the age of the characters they played. But their unrequited love brought unrequited lines to the theater. As a kid, I had seen various versions on the stage of Romeo. Never once, though, were the actors the actual age of the characters they played.

  How brilliant director Franco Zeffirelli was, finally a Romeo and Juliet, played by actual teenagers. Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, who were sixteen and seventeen, respectively, during filming, were certainly not stars, but they were perfect for the roles. The picture went through the roof.

  From British to Yiddish with Goodbye, Columbus was next. This time Juliet was a Jewish American Princess and Romeo, her librarian love; both critically and commercially, it was a four-star hit for Paramount. Downhill Racer was Redford’s labor of love. No studio wanted a ski picture. But Redford did. For $1.4 million, my money was on him. To this day Redford considers it one of his best, which it is.

  A real cuckoo was The Sterile Cuckoo. Alan J. Pakula, a fine producer, now wanted to direct. There was one problem—no one wanted to take a chance with him. Especially when he insisted Liza Minnelli play the misfit college girl. If ever there was a case of two negatives making a positive, it was Cuckoo, which launched Alan as a major maestro and Liza as a major movie star.

  And me, I was still a minor nut. Especially when I announced a film written by a pool attendant and directed by an editor whose first picture had yet to be released. That was bad enough. But try to tell your distribution honchos that you’re making a love story where an eighteen-year-old boy falls for an eighty-year-old woman! When Bart first brought me the script, written by the pool boy of producer Eddie Lewis, a kid named Colin Higgins, I began having second thoughts about Bart.

  “Peter, I ain’t readin’ it. Don’t tell me how brilliant it is. I don’t want to hear. If it was dug out of Shakespeare’s vault and no one had seen it yet, I still wouldn’t read it.”

  “Bob, you’re wrong.”

  “Pull the car over, will you, Peter. I want to walk to the studio. An eighteen-year-old kid making love to an eighty-year-old woman? I can just see me telling Bluhdorn the story. He’ll take his glasses off, squint, and state eloquently: ‘I want to vomit!’ ”

  “Take an hour—read it. Please.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not!”

  “Stanley Jaffe’s brother, Howard, gave it to me.”

  “You sure know how to push my buttons, you prick.”

  Two hours later, I walked into his office. “It’s gonna get me fired, you know—an unknown director, a pool boy writer, two impossible-to-cast parts. It’s gonna give Marty Davis the shot he’s been waiting for—straightjacket time.”

  Bart laughed. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll blame it on Ashby, say he went crazy.”

  I looked at Bart. “Is Ashby crazy? He must be, wanting to take this on. Peter, I gotta ask you something. How come a conservative guy like you has more weird ideas than Timothy Leary?”

  He thought for a moment, took off his glasses, eyed me. “Good cover, huh?”

  Harold and Maude was the pool boy’s script. Hal Ashby was a then untested director. Bud Cort was a teenager, and hardly a recognized actor. To play the eighty-year-old eccentric, who better than Ruth Gordon, who had just won the brass ring, the Academy Award, for Rosemary’s Baby. The connective tissue was Cat Stevens’s extraordinary music from Tea for the Tillerman.

  It was an impossible dream. The dream became the longest-playing cult picture in cinema history. It opened at Christmas time more than twenty-three years ago. Today, in cities all over the world from Minneapolis to Paris, the picture has never been off the screen.

  Two pictures I insisted on making almost got me barred for life from the Gulf + Western building. One was Medium Cool, directed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler, using actual footage of the riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Controversial? The Republicans thought it was democratic demagoguery. The Democrats thought it was radically Republican. Gulf + Western thought it should never have been made. It had a wide release . . . one theater.

  Walking the edge is one thing, but jumping rope on the edge is another. Henry Miller was a personal friend of mine. Someone with whom I’d played Ping-Pong most every weekend. He was in his eighties. Not even twenty years before, his books weren’t allowed in stores because of their lustful subject matter. I would beat him at Ping-Pong nine out of ten games. He was setting me up. One Saturday afternoon, after losing 21-10, 21-12, he threw me a dare.

  “You say you’re a gambler, huh?”

  “No, I’m a handicapper.”

  “Handicap this one, kid. I beat you the next two games and you don’t reach ten either game.”

  “That’s not handicapping, Henry, that’s stealing. Come on.”

  “Bet?”

  “What?”

  “I win—you get Tropic of Cancer onto the screen.”

  “I can’t make the fuckin’ film and you know it, you prick.”

  “I can’t beat you 20 to 9 either, and you’re a prick too.”

  “When I win, what do I get, writer?”

  “Twelve handwritten raunchy letters to twelve pussies, or twelve raunchy letters to one pussy—your choice. Each pussero who gets a letter will yearn for your balls. If a dozen letters go to one, she’ll walk the streets to please you.”

  “You’re a hustler, Henry, but you’re old. You don’t stand a shot. You’re on.”

  He beat me 21-6, 21-7. The old motherfucker should have spent his years in Vegas, not in Paris. He would have come out a helluva lot richer.

  “Okay, junior, start thinking how to get it on the screen. No weather reports, nitty-gritty, hand-picked crabs, right from the lady’s crotch. That’s the book, that better be the film, junior.”

  “Henry, you’re one sick fuck.”

  “Uh-uh, kid, just a fuck.”

  Tropic of Cancer got to the screen. Joe Strick directed and produced it—brilliantly. Raunchy? Ellen Burstyn, who later won an Academy Award, lay in a Paris bed, bare-ass naked, her legs spread, pulling crabs from her crotch. The scene went over very big in the Gulf + Western boardroom.

  “Fire him,” they said. “Burn the negative.”

  They didn’t burn the negative. It played in one theater and disappeared for good. Because of Henry Miller, I traveled a back elevator for the next two months. Henry, you got the last laugh, wherever you are, and I’m sure it ain’t heaven.

  An executive I was not. That’s why Bluhdorn hired me. But now that “the mountain”
was beginning to see light, it needed a chief executive in New York, Gulf + Western’s main office. It sure as hell wasn’t me, nor did it bother me that the corporate title of the person Charlie and I chose be over mine.

  “Who better to fill it,” I said, “than Stanley Jaffe?”

  “He’s hardly old enough to shave.” Bluhdorn started to laugh.

  “That’s the reason.”

  That evening Charlie and I met to discuss it further at Frankie & Johnnie’s Steakhouse. By cheesecake time, Jaffe was the guy. By the end of the week Stanley was Paramount’s president—the youngest president in the oldest place, New York; for a moment, the New Hollywood.

  If ever one plus one equaled eleven, it was with Stanley and myself. We were opposites on every level, except for handshake honor and loyalty to each other—an emotion we share to this day. He wasn’t looking to be me, nor was I looking to be him. Whatever capabilities I lacked in being corporate, Jaffe had in youthful spades.

  He was pragmatic—tough and straight—while I was romantic, a pushover, and not so straight. Our bond in film was instinctively sharing a priority to the power of the written word—though unheralded to most, to us it was sacred.

  Stanley, Peter Bart, and I spent time together strategizing the future of Paramount.

  “Every half-assed guy in the business is making films about where it’s at,” said Stanley. “Let’s take a different road, Bob . . . give the audiences something they haven’t had for a while—stories about how it feels.”

  Paramount’s strategy of telling stories about how it feels was the secret flag we were going to carry in the years to come.

  Peter was still the devil’s advocate.

  “I’m not disagreeing with your philosophy, Stanley. Let’s get down to facts—like agents, managers, lawyers, money. Writing about where it’s at is easy pocket money; about how it feels, that’s different. Not only does it take talent, which most of these penholders don’t have, but writing about feelings takes a helluva lot more time. Stanley, you know it better than me—we’re in the business of deals, not excellence. The ten percenters know their clients can write three concept scripts a year. To write texture takes time; time is money and money is what pays their light bills.”

  “You’re right, Peter. That’s why we’re all overpaid. If we can’t accomplish what we think is right, let someone else be overpaid. We don’t deserve it.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with this dame, Larry? Is she jerking me off? Does she ever want to work again? I give her the biggest break a dame can get, a lead in her first flick. Don’t I deserve a break? I’ve got a five-picture deal with her and it’s worth shit. She turns down everything.”

  Larry Peerce lit up his pipe. “That’s her,” he grinned. “Want it straight?”

  “You’re damn right, got a big investment in this broad. I offer her the lead in The Adventurers, tells me she doesn’t like the script. It’s only the biggest picture we’re making this year.”

  Peerce couldn’t hold back his laughter.

  “Hate to tell you. You’ve got one bad investment. She hates Hollywood and couldn’t care less if she ever works again.”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  “That’s true,” Peerce said. “She’s the real thing, a total meshuggeneh. She was working for one hundred and twenty-five bucks a week as a stylist when she could have been making thousands as a model. Told you she’s a meshuggeneh. I think she enjoys being poor. You want her for a picture? You got her.” Larry smiled.

  “Damn right I do. Bluhdorn enjoys givin’ me heat. ‘What kind of business is this? You invest and own something cheap, but you can’t use it. We own her for twenty thou a film. She’s already turned down three.’ ”

  “I got a script she’ll pay to do.” Larry laughed.

  “Is it in Hebrew?”

  “Might as well be.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “She likes it, huh?”

  “Doesn’t like it—thinks it’s great!”

  “Can I read it?”

  “You’ll hate it.”

  It was a rainy Saturday afternoon. Larry Peerce and I were having lunch at my home. Both of us were looking for a project for him to helm. After Goodbye, Columbus, Larry was one of the new hot kids in town, with at best a half-assed allegiance to me since I broke his big screen directorial virginity with Goodbye, Columbus. Walking back into my sitting room with a rumpled script, the top page half torn off, he handed it to me, laughing.

  “When you call her, don’t be too tough on her—she’s a good kid. Now can we get down to business. The Sporting Club: let me get my teeth into it, will ya, Bob?”

  “Let me give it to you straight, Larry. I read The Sporting Club and I didn’t understand it. Because it came from you, I read it again and I still didn’t understand it. I’m not Mr. Intellectual, but when I read something twice and still don’t understand it, let someone else make it a hit.”

  “It’s brilliantly written.”

  “That’s why I don’t understand it.”

  Less than forty-eight hours later, Larry Peerce was on the horn.

  “You weren’t too tough with her, were you, Evans?”

  Silence.

  I finally said, “I want to make it.”

  “You want to ruin her career. That’s it, huh?”

  “You got it. And I want to ruin yours too. I want you to direct it.”

  “I’m losin’ my fuckin’ mind with you, Evans. You won’t make Sporting Club, but you’ll make this piece of dreck.”

  “I read The Sporting Club again. Still didn’t understand a fuckin’ word. This piece of dreck made me laugh. Get this, Larry—it made me cry too. Not a bad parley, huh, Mr. Director?”

  “Don’t do it to me, Evans, please. I direct this and I’m back on the tube again.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “An agent from William Morris. His name is Minsky. He’s schlepped it all over town. I don’t think it’s gotten past one reader.”

  “How come Paramount didn’t get a crack at it?”

  “They did. It was turned down. No one had the guts to give it to you.”

  It was the easiest deal I’d ever made. Howard Minsky believed in this supposed piece of dreck with such conviction that he resigned his position at the Morris office to go for it and get Love Story onto the screen.

  Poor guy. By the time it got to me, he was a beaten man. I think, in all of filmland, mine were the last eyes to see it. His dance card still totally on empty, Minsky was quick to his knees to close the deal. I give the guy great credit, giving up a cushy job to wildcat. Howard did and hit a gusher. A gusher so big that he never had to work again for the rest of his life.

  The starlet-turned-star, whose undying belief in the potential of this one-on-one story of two young kids falling in love, was Ali MacGraw. Erich Segal, the author, was at that time a Harvard professor. His pulpy, somewhat autobiographical, love story was already packed in his summer luggage. No one wanted it. The heroine of the piece was a J.A.P., as she had been in his life. While Ali, the quintessential WASP, had gotten away with playing a J.A.P. in Goodbye, Columbus, I didn’t want to press my luck. Our heroine’s moniker suddenly changed from Cohen to Cavileri—this time an Italian American princess. Did it bother Erich Segal? She could have been an Arab princess. From the trash can, it now had a chance to end up in a film can.

  Larry Peerce, having a tough time putting Sporting Club together, desperately needed a gig. Between alimony and child support, he was running on empty. Closing his eyes, he reluctantly agreed to helm this “piece of shit.” After a month of collaborating, there he was across my desk, shaking his head.

  “I can’t be a hooker, Evans. I wake up in the morning, look at myself in the mirror, and I don’t like what I see. No matter how you put it in the mixer it comes out shit. I’m passing. I’d rather do daytime soaps; at least no one will know I’m doing it.” Hunching over the desk, his face almost touching mine, he
said, “You wanna fuck her, right? That’s why you’re makin’ it.”

  “It never entered my mind, but maybe he’s right,” I said to myself.

  That night I sent the script to Jaffe, Davis, and Bluhdorn, telling them that Larry Peerce just quit. Davis had little interest in reading it. Jaffe had a big interest. After all, he was mentor to both Larry and Ali.

  Within forty-eight hours, Charlie and Stanley reluctantly admitted that it not only got to them, but got a tear from them as well—not an easy feat.

  Separately, I said to each of them, “If I can get a tear from you, that’s the picture I want to see on the screen.”

  Enter Tony Harvey. The previous year he’d won everything for The Lion in Winter, from the New York Film Critics Circle Award to the Directors Guild Award; at the time he was the only director in the history of the Academy who didn’t cop the Oscar after winning the nod from the Directors Guild. Hooked by MacGraw, Love Story was his to helm. After weeks of collaboration with Erich Segal revising the screenplay, he too walked off. Suddenly Love Story was no love story at Paramount.

  The dictate from the forty-third floor in New York was simple and direct: “Go forward” with a big asterisk. If you go over the budget even with one telephone call over $2 million, no love.

  Though he was not yet thirty, Jaffe’s eye was as keyed to the top sheet of a budget as a Vegas pit boss’s was to a blackjack table.

  “Over $2 million, Evans—it’s from your pocket.”

  Damn it, I should have taken him up on it. For a $2 million put, I could have cornered at least 10 points on the back end of the picture. The picture came in 1 percent under budget and the 10 points would have given me “fuck you” money for the rest of my life.

  In the spring of 1969, holding Love Story sure as hell wasn’t holding aces. I went to New York to find Mr. Right to helm my flawed jewel. I batted a thousand—turned down by all.

  I set up a lunch date with Love Story’s mentor and star, MacGraw, at La Grenouille. By the time dessert was served, I would have made the phone book with her. Would you say she got to me? I sure in hell knew I didn’t get to her. With all my props, my position, my “boy wonder” rep, she was as turned off to me as I was turned on to her. My competition was a model/actor she had been living with for three years, sharing the bills in a 3½-room apartment on West Eighty-seventh Street. Almost purposefully, she kept on interjecting how in love she was. Leaving the restaurant, I hailed a cab. As it pulled up she gave me her last zinger.