by Robert Evans
“Have a beer, pal?” I asked McQueen. A double take? No, a triple take.
Both lawyers walked back into the room. Thompson’s color had changed from redneck to albino white.
“Steve, I’ve got to speak to you outside.” Nonplussed, McQueen looked up. “Now!” said Thompson.
Within minutes, hired gun and Macho McQueen walked back into the room.
“We’re leaving,” said Thompson, giving Crowley a curt good-bye. They began to walk out. I jumped in.
“Hold it, Macho, the meeting ain’t over.”
Macho turned.
“The kid, what’s his name?”
Hardily audible, “Josh.”
“Josh who?”
He mumbled.
“Speak up, Macho, don’t hear ya.”
Macho wasn’t up to being dressed down.
“Josh Evans,” he blurted, quickly turning to walk out.
“Hold it, Macho, I ain’t finished.” He swung around, a time bomb ready to explode. “From now on, Macho, it’s Mister Evans, got it?”
Get it he did, like it he didn’t. From that moment on, Macho McQueen addressed Joshua’s father as Mister Evans.
Sitting on the couch hysterically laughing were Nicholson and Hoffman. Maybe it was their laugh that got my goat, but I was on fire. I was on the phone with New York’s chief of protocol, Mr. Anthony Biddle Duke.
“Give me the rock, Mr. Protocol—no problem. But NBC, ABC, and CBS are going to be there tonight. Ever since you stole Manhattan from the Indians for forty-eight bucks, you haven’t been straight with anyone. That’s why the city is on its ass. The rock’s fine, pal, and read about it tomorrow.” This time, it was me slamming the phone down.
Tears of laughter were now coming from my royal actor pals. “Funny, huh?” I said. “I’ll bet you each a suit that by four this afternoon, his royal highness will be on his knees begging me to take the key.”
The phone rang. The royal voice.
“We must have been disconnected.”
“No, I hung up.”
“We’re in a crisis now, Mr. Evans. Two weeks ago President Sadat of Egypt was the key’s recipient. The Jewish population protested so vehemently, we were left with little choice. We rescinded the presentation. Even the powers that be in Washington couldn’t change the mayor’s mind. It wasn’t their problem. The emotions in the city were such that presenting the key could have ignited a revolt. I think it a bit cavalier, a slap in the face, as it’s been only two weeks, to present the key to the city to someone else, not even a head of state.”
“I didn’t ask for the key. It was offered to me. Give me the rock, Mr. Protocol, it’s okay, no problem. But get ready to get one back in the morning.” Down went the phone again.
Black comedy always gets to the Irishman. Shaking his head, “The rock, pal, the rock. Whatcha gonna do with a rock, break a window?” His wicked smile egging me on.
“No. Double the bet, Irish. The key will be mine by four.”
Again the phone rang. This time it wasn’t the royal voice, instead a very worried one, Mr. Walter Wood, the head of New York City’s film commission.
“Bob, we’re in a very tough spot here.”
I cut him off quickly. “Stay out of it, Walter. Just repeat my message: ‘The rock will be fine.’ ”
“But you threatened—”
“Walter, just stay out of it,” slamming the phone in his ear.
An hour passed. Again, the ring of the phone.
“Bob,” said Film Commissioner Wood. “We’ve called an emergency meeting at Gracie Mansion. That’s how serious the problem is. Reconsider, will you?”
“There’s nothing to reconsider, Walter. Tell the boys at Gracie Mansion that I’ll be honored to accept their rock. Oh, get a pencil. Write this down. I want you to tell ’em something else. Ready? Tell ’em I’ll take the rock, but I’m gonna clean their clock like it’s never been cleaned before.”
Down went the phone. Down went Nicholson in hysterics. Down went Hoffman with a pen, writing down the expression. It was one he had never heard.
The clock struck three . . . the phone rang too: damn it, the key was mine; I would have enjoyed the rock more.
During the past decade, I had brought more film production to the Big Apple than any film honcho since World War II. In the fall of ’75 the Big Apple’s finances were in even worse shape than mine. New York was flat-assed broke—worse, deep in the red. But it would have been even redder without Paramount’s infusion of business.
Hardly the worst reason for making me the first guy in flicks to be the recipient of the key.
Neither his royal highness, Sir Anthony Biddle Duke, nor the mayor, Abe Beame, made an appearance at the Americana Hotel ballroom that night. They weren’t missed! To name but a few of the rainbow that flanked me on the dais: from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, his Lordship Laurence Olivier, frick and frack, Dustin and Jack, many a beauty—Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Jennifer O’Neill, Marthe Keller, to Shirley MacLaine. Wow, writers galore: Alan Jay Lerner, Bill Goldman, Pete Hamill, Bob Towne, and on and on and on.
And toasts aplenty. When my pal Kissinger, who flew in from Washington especially for the night, stood up to speak, he was greeted with a standing ovation. As it subsided, Kissinger started:
I am extremely jealous that someone managed to get the key to the city this week. I wouldn’t feel too badly, Bob, if the mayor didn’t come to present it himself. I know what it takes to get the mayor anywhere.
But, if I can borrow the key, I will give it to our current state guest on loan, when he comes through Washington again. I am extremely self-conscious when I speak before a group as talented as this. Especially since I know a good percentage of you are trying to get my accent straight, so you can imitate me. . . .
I have not worked with Bob Evans. I know nothing about the film business and I don’t have to be here. I am here because Bob is a very good friend of mine, with a great capacity of warmth and friendship. In good times and difficult times. And in my job, one meets many people who are interested in power and many people who have something that has to be accomplished politically. But Bob has been a friend. When neither of us could do anything in the world for the other—except human relationship. So I wanted to express my appreciation for being able to share this evening with him and all of you. It has been said that a friend is somebody with whom it is possible to be silent. That’s exactly what I am going to do now. Thank you very much. . . . (Another standing ovation)
Breaking two barriers in one year ain’t bad: the first recipient in my industry of New York’s key, and the first adjunct professor of the arts in Ivy League history. Not a bullshit Honorary Professor either, but a full-fledged one; a member of the faculty, cap, gown, and all. Though my credentials fell a bit short—never receiving a high school diploma—it didn’t matter. Call me by my rightful name: Professor Robert Evans of Brown University.
How did it happen? Months and months of prodding through more red tape than a new tax bill. Why? Professor Von Nostrand, the university’s dean of English, pleaded to the affirmative action committee that I was the only one who could fulfill the university’s criteria, enabling the English department to introduce a needed credited course to their curriculum—“The Anatomy of Film.” My compensation? Zero. Begrudgingly, the high llamas of the Ivy League acquiesced.
Not unlike a president, governor, senator, or ambassador, once a professor, always a professor. Forget getting letters till this day from students addressed to Professor Robert Evans. How about suggesting to a young beauty that she tell her folks she was dating an Ivy League professor, not a Hollywood producer?
“Send ’em a picture if you want, I’ve got plenty of ’em—cap, gown, and all . . . it ain’t no lie.”
If only my mom and pop could have seen their black sheep Bobby in cap and gown, an Ivy League Professor. Wherever they are, I hope they found out.
Brown was a coed university, with hundreds of many hungry you
ng ladies yearning to discover “the magic of Hollywood,” rather than the magic of medieval art. I swore to myself that I’d play it straight . . . no more alley cat time. “You’re a professor—don’t forget it,” I kept telling myself. It worked. For three years, Professor Evans was beyond reproach.
In March 1979, Liv Ullmann—a great actress, a great lady, and my lady as well—joined me at my university as a contributor to my monthly seminar, discussing in detail Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, which Liv had completed the year before. Her co-star was Ingrid Bergman, in her last picture. At the time, Liv was rehearsing to open in the Broadway musical I Remember Mama. Although it was inconvenient to shuttle back and forth between Rhode Island and Broadway, she was always there for me.
Putting her into a cab bound for the airport for her flight back to New York, I whispered, “See you at midnight, Norway.”
Kissing me good-bye, she replied, “Leave early, darling. . . . New York’s so cold.”
While she was on the plane, I was in an important faculty meeting, discussing new plans for a new theater for Brown’s new prominence in the Ivy League. Suddenly, it was blizzard time in Rhode Island—not a tropical state. By nine that evening, the airport, town, and even the gas stations closed, as did our faculty meeting. Not easy getting back home, with chained wheels, at five miles an hour. The dean of English kindly trudged me to the nearest hotel—a Howard Johnson manor.
“Made reservations for the first plane out. Sorry you’re stuck, but that’s Rhode Island. Get a good night’s sleep, Professor.”
Entering my cubicle room, I quickly unzipped my fly, desperate to take a piss, but the ring of the phone interrupted. It had to be a mistake, no one knew I was there.
“Yeah?”
“Professor Evans?”
“Yeah?”
“Ann Smith.” (In the spirit of chivalry, a pseudonym.)
“Yeah?”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“No.”
“Tonight at the faculty meeting, the redhead, the one who brought you over the danish.”
Remember? Fuckin’ A I did!
“How’d you know I was here?”
A fetching giggle. “Never underestimate a lady.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m studying theater. Opening Monday at the Providence Playhouse, doing Chekhov’s Three Sisters.”
“That’s a big bite.”
“A fun one,” she cooed.
What the fuck is she calling for?
“When the semester’s over, I’m coming to Los Angeles to stay with my cousin.”
Ah . . . she wants to see the studio.
“Wonderful. Call me at Paramount. I’ll arrange a tour for you and your cousin, take you to lunch at the commissary.”
No response. What the fuck’s going on? Finally . . .
“Professor . . . what are you doing now?”
Cupping the phone with my hand. No fuckin’ way! You’re a Professor. Don’t go back on your word. Play it straight. She can’t get here anyway—can’t see two feet in front of you. Fuck it!
“Room 536 . . . get here quick!”
An alley cat is an alley cat is an alley cat is an alley cat.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I will not use him. It’s that simple, Bob. I want an actor in his twenties.”
John Schlesinger, whose Midnight Cowboy was one of the best pictures I had ever seen, was adamant and rightfully so. The role called for a twenty-four-year-old. Yet I insisted Dustin Hoffman play the Marathon Man.
A dentist solved the age problem by building a bridge across Dustin’s six front teeth, making them a quarter of an inch longer. Enlarging them subliminally erases a good five years. Strangely, the older you get the larger your nose, the longer your ears, the shorter your teeth.
The making of Marathon Man provided my career’s most treasured casting in Sir Laurence Olivier. Olivier had not worked much in recent years, outside of cameo parts in films such as The Seven Per Cent Solution. I investigated and found out that it was impossible to use Olivier for more than a week’s work at a time. Why? He was uninsurable, his body riddled with cancer. “Uninsurable” means that if an actor dies or becomes incapacitated during production, insurance does not cover the loss. As brilliant an actor as he was, not only was he unemployable, but destitute to the point of not being able to afford sending his son to college. Richard Zimbert, head of Paramount business affairs, told me to forget the thought of Olivier. “Vegas wouldn’t cover him at a hundred to one.”
I tasted it—the high drama. My good friends Merle Oberon and David Niven arranged for me to meet with the House of Lords. Off to England I went. Billy Graham couldn’t have been more persuasive. Members of the House of Lords persuaded Lloyd’s of London to bend. Begrudgingly they gave me the impossible—six weeks of insurance.
Olivier arrived in New York, frail, hardly able to clothe himself. Miracle time, Song of Bernadette revisited. But this was no movie—this was the real thing; the only actual miracle I’d ever witnessed. With practically every organ in his body infected with cancer—remission! Spirit overcame illness, and Olivier was reborn to continue on for thirteen more years making film history.
Possibly the most emotional embrace of my life was his simple whisper to me: “I’m here because of you, dear Robert. I never believed in miracles—I was wrong.”
Olivier and Hoffman, the most virtuoso actors of their generations. A rhapsody of opposites, however. Olivier depending on the written word, the text. Hoffman, the organic, transferring himself into the character itself. Playing a compulsive runner, just for a take he’d run a mile to be out of breath.
“You can’t fake being out of breath, Bob—it has to be real,” said organic Hoffman.
In a scene where the killers all but drown him in a bathtub, Dustin rehearsed by holding his head underwater until he almost drowned himself—ending up in the hospital with an oxygen tank.
At least on Dustin’s part, there was great unspoken competition between the two. On the set they were enormously respectful of each other, but occasionally the surface cracked. “Why don’t you just act?” Olivier would say after Dustin kept everyone waiting an hour while he analyzed whether he should or should not take off his shirt.
It was a turn-on to Dustin that his filmography would now include playing opposite the great Olivier in his good-bye scene, before going to greater heights—heaven. Sorry Dustin, it didn’t quite work out that way. Whenever I asked Hoffman how he liked acting with Olivier, he’d always say, “He’s marvelous in the theater.”
Olivier stayed in my guest cottage for several weeks. He was playing a monster, a Nazi dentist who had drilled gold out of Jewish prisoners’ teeth before their trip to the furnace and was now forced to leave his hideaway in the Uruguay jungles and chance a trip to New York to retrieve his hidden wealth of diamonds. While Olivier was preparing for the scene in which he was to torture Hoffman with the tools of his profession, he told me he had found the missing link to his character.
“The gardener, dear boy, in front of the window, cutting the roses, the care he took pruning each branch. The delicacy of his touch. That is how I shall torture Dustin.”
“Larry, I don’t get it.”
“Not condescending to who I’m playing. For the character himself doesn’t look upon his torture as wrong. The dental tools I use . . . I savor. The hurt they inflict, that’s my pleasure. No different than one who savors his gun, his knife to inflict wounds. They don’t look upon themselves as doing anything wrong. Nor shall I.”
He had finally found the core to the character, one that made his portrayal quietly, chillingly evil. So mesmerizing his evil, his performance captured most every award around the world; his lordship lived to accept them all. When production of Marathon Man moved to L.A., Olivier was the star everyone wanted to meet.
One evening I gave a dinner to celebrate the rebirth of a beautiful lady I was seeing, who had months earlier survived a suici
de attempt. It was the first birthday of her new life, and I invited Dustin and Anne Hoffman, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson with their dates, and among others, Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Alain Delon, and my house guest, Lord Olivier, to celebrate it.
After dinner all of us adjourned to the projection room for dessert. When the cake with a single candle was brought in, Olivier gave a moving speech about the preciousness of life and the miracle of being reborn. Everybody reached for their hankies. Then I stood up.
“Larry, you ain’t a lord for nothing. I’ve arranged for you to critique four scenes from four films. All four were done approximately at the same time twenty years ago. After you view them, your lordship, I ask of you one favor. Pick the one actor of the four who had the best chance to become the next big star.”
Perplexed? You bet. Not only Larry, but the entire room. The lights dimmed. The curtains closed. The screen went down.
The first image was that of a pockmarked, rodentlike Dustin Hoffman, speaking out of synch in some terrible French-Italian co-production—his first film. Everyone roared but Marathon Man Hoffman.
“How did you get this, Evans? There’s only one print and I own it!” Dustin screeched.
“There ain’t nothin’ I don’t have on you, kid. Don’t forget it.”
I pressed the intercom. “Next.”
The image was not a film. Rather a segment of a half-hour TV sitcom. Dwayne Hickman the actor, “Dobie Gillis” the TV show. Into frame walked his pompadoured rival. Who was it? Looked familiar. Could that be Warren? It sure as hell was. Did he get laughs? More than anything he’s ever done in his whole career. The only one who didn’t laugh was him.
Nudging me, “How’d you get this, you prick?”
“Easy. The guys who had the film wanted me to do it. They must really like you.”
Pressing the intercom again, “Next please.”
A choirboy’s face filled the screen. A high-pitched voice echoed through a house. It was The Cry Baby Killer—a two-day Roger Corman quickie. The choirboy was sure as hell no choirboy. It was the Irishman himself, Nicholson. Laughs? Before or since, never louder.
