by Robert Evans
“What you’re getting from Dunaway makes Svengali look like a peasant.”
A balk . . . a shout . . . a Polish moan of despair.
“An Oscar nod, or a Rolls Corniche,” I offered. “Without one, the other is yours courtesy of yours truly.”
A Polanski look. A Polanski laugh.
“Make it a Bentley and you can bring Dunaway back to the set.”
Luckily for me, they were both nominated for Oscars, and everything else you could name.
Chinatown’s last scene brought with it the heavy luggage of deep dispute and fence-straddling second guesses.
“Ruinous . . . immoral,” said Towne. “It is not the story that I told.”
Roman saw it another way, the evil way, the unexpected. “It’s what ‘memorable’ is all about,” he said.
“Demented,” Towne fought back.
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s why Roman will get his way.”
Till this day, Towne vents his anger toward me. How could I have sided with Roman? Poor Robert, for all his schreien he copped his one and only Oscar for his “fucked up” Chinatown. Subjectivity rarely allows the artist the proper perspective he needs to judge the merits of his work. An overview is needed, showing your canvas for the objective eye to critique. Call it by its proper name: previewing. This area, by far, is the biggest bone of contention that I have with the industry today.
With production costs inflated and the price tag for television advertising obscene, the final product is not left to the opinion of its maker, nor for that matter to the audience, but to “invitees.”
If you are invited to my home for dinner and the roast beef is served cold and dry, you don’t complain since you are a guest. If roast beef is served the very same way in a fine restaurant, back to the kitchen it goes. Why? When you pay the two bucks, your opinion matters. No different in film. Shopping malls are canvased, invitees are picked. If you hate the film, you don’t walk out; if you love the film, you don’t stand and applaud. In days of old (or days of mine), we’d test the response in the theaters. Many a time, the audience would stand and shout, “we want out,” or stand and shout, “we want more.” Today, that emotion is no longer there, only the invitee numbers telling us about how our film fared. It’s called the age of marketing. In reality, it is the age of despair.
The first preview of Chinatown, in San Luis Obispo, was a disaster. By the time the lights came up, half the audience had walked out, scratching their heads. Roman and I felt the only way to save the picture was to give it a new sound—eerie, haunting, mysterious—“a lonely horn.” It took only eight days of Jerry Goldsmith brilliance to accomplish the impossible, a solo trumpet played against strings. His theme was so erotic and eerie that magically Chinatown became mesmerizing.
When the lights came up the next time we previewed it, the same silence was there, but the audience was transfixed.
Chinatown had a gala screening at the Directors Guild. Everyone in town was there. When the film was over and the final credits began to role, there was no applause, but no one stood up to leave. It was more eerie than the film itself. The curtains closed; the lights came up. Still not a murmur. I was sure it was a bomb. I was reassured of my assurance when Rona Barrett, the gossip columnist of the day, passed me and gave me a nod of despair: “How could you make this picture?”
Sue Mengers was more blunt. “What kind of mishegoss is this?”
Next was my old pal, Freddie Fields, unable to hold back his smile. “Sorry, kid,” he waved to me.
Nine months later, Chinatown was honored with eleven Academy Award nominations. The film was a six-to-five favorite with the Las Vegas odds for a clean sweep. The reason it was swept under, instead of over, was because of me; it was the only picture of the five that a studio head personally produced. When one sits in the catbird seat, for every one yes you give, there are a hundred nos. Unlike the other four producers, my nos had alienated a preponderance of voters.
It would be my last year to helm “the mountain” and that year brought Paramount forty-three Academy Award nominations—more than any other studio had received in a single year since the beginning of the Academy. That wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to accomplish the impossible—run a studio and have my own picture win the Academy Award, then resign and go into independent production. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Bulls and bears end up in comfort, pigs in the gutter. I was a pig, and that’s where I ended up. Instead of resigning as head of Paramount three months earlier and being out there with the rest of the folk, I had to be a first. In doing so, I not only fucked myself, I fucked the others nominated for the film. Many of whom deserved to win but, because of the backlash against Mr. Big Shot, they were swept under the carpet with me.
Since the Chinatown crew went in as overwhelming favorites, the bookies cleaned up. Of the three Paramount films nominated for best picture—Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation—Chinatown was nominated in the most categories (eleven), but ended up with only one Oscar—best screenplay.
One of the conditions Francis Coppola had insisted on in agreeing to make Godfather II was total control. He certainly didn’t want the likes of me around again. Its first preview, however, at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco, was a disaster, and he suddenly became collaborative. Paul Hagar, Paramount’s super post-production man, and I were invited into Francis’s inner sanctum to restructure his Sicilian fiasco.
“It’s your night,” the maestro now said, as we stood together in back of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before the ceremonies started.
“No, Francis, it’s yours.”
My pal Beatty, who had never before graced the Oscar telecast as a presenter, had offered to present the best picture award; he wanted to announce my name in front of the world as producer of the best picture of the year. There I sat, front row, with my brother as my date, watching Beatty open the envelope for the world to hear. A subliminal look, an unnoticeable wince—I was the first to know the Oscar was not mine to take.
Smile and all, Beatty announced the winner: “Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather Part II.”
It was mine too, but by proxy only. To Roman’s chagrin, the one Oscar for Chinatown went to Shakespeare himself, Robert Towne.
Post-showtime, Prince Machiavelli graciously approached me. “I’ve lost all the joy of winning. Again I forgot to thank you.”
He ain’t called the Prince for nothin’.
“If you ever want to get rid of Evans at a party, just light up a joint,” cracked Polanski.
Though I was in my forties, the entire drug era passed me by without notice. It wasn’t my scene; I barely even drank.
Nineteen seventy-four ended with a platinum bang: a new five-year contract with Paramount. No raise in green, but here I was the only head of a studio with my own production company, with the calling card of Chinatown as my first at-bat. Envied by the outside world, but how little they knew.
Continuing sciatica left me throbbing with pain too weary to even touch the taste of success. From the Mayo Clinic to every half- and full-assed specialist in the country, the consensus was unanimous—operate. Surgery would mean having to learn to walk again, but there was no assurance that the pain would not come back in full force. I passed and continued searching for something to numb the pain.
Lying beside me, a Hollywood princess. “Is it me?” she asked. “The pain can’t be that bad.”
“It is.”
“It’s the third night we’ve shared. It must be me.”
With that, I gave it my best. Valiant, but no cigar—instead, a searing pain from my back down to my leg. In a cold sweat, I turned on my side to catch my breath. She snuggled close.
“Don’t even try.”
Wearing only a necklace, she handed it to me. A gold cylinder dropped from its chain. Unscrewing the top, she whispered to me, “Take a sniff—a sniff of life.”
“Is it what I think it is?”
“It’ll he
lp.”
“Uh-uh, not for me.”
“For me?” she cooed.
My first experience into the world of white.
Did it help my back? No. Did it help my nose? No. Did it fuck up my career? More than that—it fucked up my life.
With Ali and Joshua no longer at Woodland, I was overseeing fifteen to twenty pictures a year, working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week—much of the time from hospital beds set up at home.
There’s nothing more debilitating and draining than constant pain. There’s nothing more false and destructive than artificial energy. Keeping your motor on high eighteen hours a day, which I was doing, commuting from one editing room to another. What started out as a fuck drug all but ruined my life of fucking. Cocaine being one of the “caine” brothers—Novocain, Xylocaine, procaine. It’s a cold bunch of guys; they’re all freezers. Dentists use Novocain before they drill you to freeze the surrounding nerves. Like his brother, cocaine freezes the nerve as well. The wrong one. A snort of brother coke stops the rush of blood from brain to tool. Coming up short is your cock. Coming up long is dialogue and energy.
Hooked? How could I be. Every time a new woman entered my world, or my life, or my bed, I immediately stopped with the straw. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, rather the freeze prevented me from performing in the sack. There was one problem; almost every new lady I met was using the stuff. Not being the most self-disciplined person, it wasn’t long before I was using it again. Soon I started to peter out. And there went the relationship.
Cocaine loosens the tongue and softens the weewee. Soon you forget you have one. I remember taking a well-known German actress to Acapulco. Lying in bed one evening—snorting—she began showing me pictures of various castles she owned in Europe.
“Old family, huh?”
“No, rich business. I’m an international courier.”
“Of art?”
“No, of drugs.”
“You’re putting me on.”
She wasn’t. She proceeded to describe her incredibly lucrative double life.
“You’ve made enough money. Why don’t you get out?”
“They’d kill me.”
My friend and associate Gary Chazan was with us in Mexico. Later that night I told him the story. He looked at me as if I were Macauley Culkin.
“Get her the fuck out. Now!”
“We’re getting along great.”
“Are your brains in your ass? She’s history! Got it?”
The next afternoon my lady fair flew out of Acapulco, and out of my life forever.
A decade later, another lady would enter my life. Gary was gone, and I was still Macauley Culkin.
Chinatown’s success was a double-edged sword. “What about our films?” complained Paramount’s other producers. “Evans shouldn’t be allowed to run productions and make his own pictures.”
“Bob,” said Bluhdorn, “it’s just not working. Why did you have to make Chinatown? Couldn’t you have made an ordinary picture?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Charlie?”
“Go back and just run Paramount.”
“I’ll think about it, Charlie.”
“Evans, don’t give me more problems. Stick to running the company.”
In love, in health, in life, it takes but one bad night to destroy a thousand good ones . . . and so it did.
Yablans, Bluhdorn, and I strolled over to the Coronet Theater in New York where Chinatown was playing. The line was around the block. We listened to the conversations of the audience as they exited the theater. The awe of their reactions to what they had just viewed was somewhat akin to the second coming of Christ. To Bluhdorn and Yablans, it wasn’t just a minor but a major miracle. Why? Neither of them yet understood the film.
On to Pietro’s Steakhouse to celebrate. Frank, who had the shyness of P. T. Barnum and the balls of Goliath, abruptly ended his career at Paramount.
“Charlie,” he toasted, “there are the haves and have-nots, and Evans and I are the have-nots. Paramount reached the heights of Mt. Everest and we’re two schmucks without so much as a rope to climb it.”
The celebration turned into an altercation. Frank hung himself with the rope he said he didn’t have; it was over for him before dessert arrived. For defending him, I was paid back with Bluhdorn’s perversity. A corporate shake-up. Yablans was out. Barry Diller was in. Too bad for Frank—there was no brighter guy, no harder worker. He thought he was a throwback to the old movie tyrants of yesteryear—the Mayers, the Warners, the Cohns. There was a slight difference. Those guys owned the candy store, Frank didn’t. He was expendable as toilet paper. The pedestal that he sat on was not high enough for him to put the wrong people’s noses out of joint.
Enter Barry Diller, who epitomized the new breed of Hollywood bosses: pragmatic, insightful, and more focused on the future than on the process. Barry set the mold. Mike Eisner, Jeff Katzenberg, Bob Daly, Jon Peters, Peter Guber, Frank Mancuso were to follow.
Not unlike the tennis pros of old—for instance, Alex Olmedo, a Wimbledon winner, who went on to servitude as a Beverly Hills tennis pro—Yablans and I were the last not to touch the brass ring. Following Olmedo, Jimmy Connors came onto the scene, breaking barriers, bringing the brass ring of green to championship tennis (Connors and all the champions to follow became multimillionaires). Diller and Eisner, like Jimmy Connors, broke the financial barrier of top honcho executives.
Yablans was rough and tough. Diller, smooth and lethal. Oh, and throw in a little brilliance to boot. The day after he was appointed corporate head of Paramount, Barry flew out to California to meet with me. Over breakfast at the Bel-Air Hotel, I let Barry know he could count on me to make it a good partnership.
“Robert, let’s get something straight. We’re good friends, we’re confidants, but we’re not partners. You work for me. Is that clear?”
This was coming from the guy who but two years before, as a television executive, had raced to the airport in Acapulco to pick up couriered Godfather reviews and rush them back to me. Yet, he was right. The catbird seat was his and it was not to be shared. There could only be one boss.
“No one can ever say you lack candor, Barry. It hurts, but I respect it. It’s your candy store! Now, can I go out and just make pictures, try to make a living?”
Diller laughed. “Fine, Robert, but we never want you to leave Paramount. I’ll construct a producing deal that’ll make you happy. I expect you to stay on for six months as head of the studio, at least to fill me in on who my enemies are.”
Across the banner of both trade papers, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and many entertainment pages across the world, the headlines trumpeted, “MOGUL EVANS TURNS INDEPENDENT WITH HISTORIC DEAL.” Never running short of being in the headlines, take it from me: big headlines do not make for big pockets.
It didn’t take long for me to get a taste of my new deal. On a handshake, I had already given Yablans half my points on Chinatown—it’s called stay-alive money. Now that he was gone, Bluhdorn wanted Frank’s share. Charlie, Barry, and I met for dinner.
“Charlie, they’re my points.”
“You gave them to Frank and I’m taking them from Frank.”
“They’re a pimple on your ass, Charlie. I need them to pay my taxes!”
“You gave them to Frank. They belong to Gulf + Western!”
“Goddamn it, they don’t. They’re mine. It was an oral agreement, a handshake, stay-alive time. Now Frank’s gone. It’s in my contract, they’re mine.”
“You’re right. Legally they’re yours. There’s also a closet in your office. Do you want to be in it?”
Listening to the coldness of his words, I couldn’t help but think love has many faces—some of them ugly.
My lips quivered, hands shook, heart pounded, all but cracking through my chest.
“Your butler’s a homosexual,” said Steve McQueen, on the other end of the phone. “Your surroundings, the way you live, is not the environmen
t that’s right for Joshua. We’re a family unit. For Joshua’s sake, I intend to change his name to McQueen . . . have full control . . . see that he’s brought up properly.”
“Are you finished?”
“Not quite,” said McQueen. “Bill Thompson is preparing custody papers.”
“Good. Take your best shot, motherfucker. One of us, pal, only one of us, is going to come out in one piece.”
A call to godfather Korshak. A clandestine meeting with the toughest Irishman attorney west of Chicago—Arthur Crowley.
“No problem, but it’s gonna cost two hundred big ones, maybe more. Is it a problem?”
“Put in my left and right arm if that’s the price.”
A steel-eyed look. “We’ll set a meeting here at my home, two weeks from today, with his mouthpiece. This actor punk’s gonna get a second asshole.”
Two weeks to the day, a meeting was called; I arrived an hour early by request. Before me lay a dossier almost a foot in height.
“You got off cheap,” Crowley said. “It came in for less than a hundred and fifty.”
“What?” I asked.
Holding up his bible, he explained, “This, you schmuck! Your actor friend . . . his passport to oblivion.”
“What’s in it?”
“None of your business.”
The doorbell rang. In walked lawyer Thompson, with his client Macho movie star McQueen.
A quick whisper from Crowley. “You’re holding four aces, kid. Sit back, relax, and watch the show.”
The most bizarre meeting of my bizarre life began unfolding before me.
Smiling, Crowley cordially asked McQueen and Thompson if they would like a drink. Both shook their heads no. Then looking to me.
“Sure, a scotch would be fine.”
With the casualness of hosting a cocktail party, he walked to the bar and fixed me a scotch. Then he eyed Thompson.
“Bill, before we start, could we have a word outside alone?”
The two walked out by the pool, leaving McQueen and me alone. Awkward? Not for me; after all, Crowley told me I was holding aces. I hope they ain’t deuces.
