The Kid Stays in the Picture

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The Kid Stays in the Picture Page 43

by Robert Evans


  Jealous? Never, ain’t my style. Respectful? You bet! Success is one thing, continued success another, it doesn’t happen by mistake. My hat’s off to all of them!

  Each month below-the-belt punches were hitting me—lower and harder, from all directions. My character, persona, and professional abilities were now lost. Festered anger overshadowed creative thoughts. It was a cop-out. The more it festered the more intransigent I became. Soon my life’s closest relationship eroded, until we were no longer brothers. Its resolve? Actual disownership. Where did the fault lie? With me. Intransigence—whether it be a nation’s or a person’s—makes it all but impossible to find a solution.

  In reality, the problem wasn’t my brother, rather the effects of public disgrace, the effects of drugs, and the effects of continued failure never before experienced that all but shriveled me into obscurity. Then lightning struck, bad lightning.

  Chapter Forty-One

  MAY 21, 1989.

  Nine minutes before midnight . . . from behind the bars of my cell-like room, I watched the elevators carefully. One of the four doors opened. I made my dash . . . hospital gown and all. The guy behind the desk tried to stop me. It was too late. The doors closed. But damn it, I was on the wrong elevator—one that stopped on every floor, five to be exact. The elevator hit the main floor. Two male attendants approached.

  “Mr. Lombardo, you’re not allowed to leave the facility unless you’re in the company of an attendant.”

  My throbbing paranoia was such that I had committed myself under the alias of “Lombardo,” shielding me from any further media damage.

  “May I go out front?” I asked them. “A friend of mine has driven down to see me.”

  Reluctantly, they escorted me through the revolving doors, leading me out to the carport of the mental-health ward—in reality, a loony bin—Scripps Memorial Hospital, a few miles north of San Diego.

  Waiting for me in a limo was my personal chauffeur from Ascot Limousine. What the guards didn’t know was that hours before I had snuck out of my cell-like room to a public phone in the ward, called my limo service—collect—and instructed them to have John Paul, my personal driver, come down—“on the double, wait for me as long as necessary and ready himself for a quick getaway.”

  With a guard on either side, I whispered to John Paul, “Come back tomorrow at noon on the dot, and wait! It may be an hour, a day, a week, keep your motor running. Got it?”

  If I weren’t his boss, he would have committed me himself! He must have thought I was crazy as I smiled, turned, and walked back to my cell block accompanied by my two escorts.

  Two days earlier I had committed myself to prevent the possibility of suicide. I was put behind bars and stripped of all my belongings. The claustrophobia alone shot my blood pressure up over the 200 mark. Sure in hell not wanting a D.O.A. on their hands, the nurses kept shoving sedatives down my throat, trying to calm me. I had made a horrible mistake, with no way out.

  The next afternoon, as the attendants were all busy checking in their new victims, I cautiously eyed the bank of elevators, waiting, waiting. . . . I’m off! The express elevator opened. I made my second dash. Wham! The doors closed. I made it! I made it! Flashing through my paranoid head: no one in a hospital gown is allowed on the main floor. I’ll stand out like a leper! The elevator doors opened. I took off. Two goons picked up on me immediately. Edwin Moses couldn’t have made it faster through the doors. An arm’s length behind, the posse was reaching out.

  John Paul better be there.

  He was, a good hundred feet away, in the carport. Tasting me, one of the goons grabbed for my hospital gown. Though I was older than the two of them put together, they came in second and third. I slammed the car door behind them, hardly able to catch my breath. “Move it!”

  Only three months earlier, subliminally masochistic, I rid myself of the last bastion left of my dignity—I sold Woodland. The effect was such that I all but lost the will to function. Nightmares were telling me I would never leave there alive. I begged the new owner, a wealthy French industrialist named Tony Murray, for more time. What had been my Garden of Eden for close to a quarter of a century was mine no more. Even more painful was that I was now a tenant in my own home, paying $25,000 a month for the privilege. Could I afford it? Not by a long shot.

  As we drove north toward L.A., trying to settle my shattered nerves, I grabbed a tiny bottle of J&B, opened it, gulped it down. “Back to Woodland,” I said to John Paul. Putting up the divider, I turned on the television set, nervously flipping the channels. Can’t be, it’s me: “Tonight, for the first time, ‘A Current Affair’ will uncover the real story of Bob Evans and the Cotton Club Murder. Tune in at seven-thirty this evening for this shocking exposé.”

  I immediately switched the television off and lay back, staring up and thinking to myself, This is Kafka.

  Almost to the day a year before, I had been introduced to a young man named Bill Macdonald. He was handsome, educated, savvy, and desperate to be in the film business. Because he pretended to be in awe of me (an affirmation I so needed), I embraced him. Together we structured a prospectus to raise money to co-finance film production with a major distributor. The concept was original and bore credence.

  Aggressively, Bill searched for an investment group. He introduced me to two men, David Knight and David Bryant, the owners of a thriving investment company who were riding high. Beautiful offices, chauffeured cars—you name the accoutrement, they had it. Six months later, a deal was consummated. By far the smallest of any deal of my contemporaries, but to me a new beginning—or so I thought.

  Caution took precedence over cost. An army of lawyers from the distinguished law firm Shea Gould, supervised by Alan Schwartz, worked overtime and weekends. They double-checked every dotted i and crossed t, and checked every detail possible regarding my new partnership. My legal costs alone soared north of $150,000. Finally the papers were signed. It was good for the investors, good for Robert Evans Productions, but . . . the timing was bad. The recessionary 1990s had now begun and business crumbled. The Daves couldn’t deliver what they promised.

  Robert Evans Productions was on full go, with two major studios competing to be its partner. Then a ghost from hell resurfaced. After a five-year silence, Roy Radin’s murder hit the headlines in late October 1988. Now monikered the Cotton Club Murder, it made sexy ink for journalists’ fodder and prosecutors’ careers. Somewhat akin to a fighter who takes one punch too many, the barrage of accusatory blows that followed in the weeks and months to come put me into a tailspin of depression so deep that it was just a hair away from being lethal.

  I went cold turkey on every drug I had ever taken, prescription or otherwise. Was it difficult? Almost impossible. But I did it and paid the price for it too. This was when I sold my home to Tony Murray. So deep was my depression that I just wanted to get in a car and go south—one way. Now being but a tenant in my own house, I fell into a far deeper and dangerous abyss.

  Thoughts of being an unemployed vagrant haunted my every dream. One night, jolting up from a nightmare in a cold sweat, I took out a bottle containing a hundred Nembutals and dumped a pile of them into my hand. As I raised them to my mouth, I realized that if I took myself out now, I would be judged guilty of the ludicrous innuendos splashing across magazines, newspapers, television, and radio. I couldn’t bear to burden my son, Joshua, with this legacy. Throwing the pillows to the floor I buried my head in them, hysterically crying. If it were not for the love of my son, the pills rather than the pillows would have buried me.

  To prevent this from happening again, Bill Macdonald climbed into the driver’s seat of my green Jaguar and drove me to Scripps Memorial Hospital, a depression clinic where I had decided to check myself in.

  Now, forty-eight hours later, having escaped from my self-imprisonment where the examining psychiatrists were considering electric shock therapy, my limo was pulling into the gates of my once-owned Woodland sanctuary. I had to take control of the neve
r-ending bad dream that my life had become. Never having been psychiatrically oriented, I knew that action—not therapy—was my only shot at survival.

  Getting my home, my roots of twenty-five years back, was vital to my survival. There was a big problem: Tony Murray had no intention of selling it back.

  Without asking, Jack Nicholson did a Henry Kissinger. He flew to Monte Carlo and begged Tony to sell me back my home. Tony was shocked that Jack would fly halfway around the world to plead on my behalf for what he considered to be just a piece of real estate. Wherever Tony went that summer, he’d tell the story, capping it with “these film people . . . they’re all crazy. Imagine Jack Nicholson on his knees to me.” The impact of Jack’s plea, however, caused Tony to waver.

  Meanwhile, a lady friend of mine from years past, Merete Van Kamp, who was now engaged to a Frenchman, Jean-Claude Friederich, visited me many a time, watching me wither away.

  “If I get my house back, Merete, it’ll give me back the strength I need to get through this hell.”

  Joshua also saw me withering away before him.

  Trying to be positive and not to show my deepest, darkest fears, I kept on saying, “If I get my house back, Joshua, on New Year’s Eve you gotta promise me we’ll go out together and at the stroke of midnight, we’ll kiss each other to bring in the nineties.” It was dream talk, but I was desperate to hide my fears and project a positive thought to my son.

  By coincidence, Merete’s fiancé, Jean-Claude, was a close friend of Tony. As a show of love to Merete’s persistent plea on my behalf, Jean-Claude nailed down what Nicholson had started—the return of my home. Call it pity, call it style, Tony did not want to make one dime of profit on a transaction he could have made millions on. What was a token to him was a lifesaver to me. Tony, I owe you a big one.

  At the Bistro Gardens that New Year’s Eve, Merete, Jean-Claude, and my friends Gary Chazan and Susan Cox joined Joshua and me in ringing in the new decade. When the clock struck twelve, I put my arms around Joshua, hugged him tight, and we kissed smack on the lips. A far-fetched dream come true.

  “Happy decade, son.”

  “Happy decade, Papa.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Nervously I opened a small velvet jewel box. I looked inside at a medallion hanging from a gold chain.

  “It’s the saint of good fortune, your guardian angel,” whispered Faye Mancuso. “The jeweler made two of them—one for you, one for Frankie.” Frankie was her son, Frank, Jr., who was a close personal pal. His first professional stint was working for me as a gofer on Urban Cowboy.

  It was Christmas. Around the table sat the entire Mancuso family. I was the only outsider. Our lives had been interwoven for more than two decades, and my fall from grace did not in any way alter our friendship. Quite the contrary—there wasn’t a Thanksgiving, a Christmas, an Easter that I was not invited to join their family table. So sincere was their embrace that my last name could have been Mancuso.

  Faye was right. The guardian angel medallion brought me heavenly luck. Within the week, the final papers were drawn and Woodland became mine once again.

  At the time, I was a producer in name only of The Two Jakes, which had already been completed. Unlike Chinatown, not only wasn’t I a contributor—I was more of a hindrance. Jack had revived The Two Jakes, mainly to get it off his conscience, with himself as director and star. Now four years later, the script of The Two Jakes was still only 80 percent complete. Bob Towne eighty-sixed Jack, never turning in the last 20 percent of the script, which Jack desperately needed to make Jakes work. Today it’s paid for—but, yes, still not written.

  Four years earlier, I had been co-star and co-producer. Now I was no more than a charity throw-in. It was only Nicholson’s insistence that allowed me entrance.

  A few days before Jakes was to start shooting, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s front-page headline read, “ROBERT EVANS NOT RULED OUT AS ‘COTTON CLUB’ MURDER SUSPECT.”

  Now they had The Two Jakes to shit on as well. Nicholson joked: “Hey, we’re making a flick about a murder and the Keed’s living it out.” His smile on full, “That’s Notorious for ya.”

  “Should I take my name off?”

  “Sure, and I’ll take mine off. Fuck ’em all. Let’s be arm in arm at the Lakers game together.”

  Nicholson, a basketball fanatic, has seats right on the floor—front and center, next to the team.

  “Hey, Jack—I feel like fuckin’ Dillinger on the set.”

  Crooked smiling me, “You are, Keed. They don’t call you ‘notorious’ for nothin’.”

  Harold Schneider, my co-producer, was the one who really produced the film as well as protected my ass. By contract I held a single production credit: “A Robert Evans Production.” At picture’s end, I insisted Harold get credit as presenter as well. If ever anyone deserved it, it was he.

  Nicholson wouldn’t start his first shot of the flick without my being on the set to share the results.

  He also insisted the dailies be shown in my home projection room rather than at the studio. Strange, here’s a guy directing and starring, knowing that showing the dailies at my home would cost him a much needed two hours’ sleep. But it mattered little. He knew by doing that it gave me a much needed legitimacy. Not quite understanding why they had to be there, each night the entire crew would meet at my home to watch dailies. The Irishman made it clear why; he needed my approving eye (even knowing full well not only couldn’t I see straight, but I was on the verge of a breakdown).

  The picture opened and closed quickly. This was not Nicholson’s fault, except possibly for his naïveté in expecting the last 20 percent of the script to be there for him from his old pal Bob “the Beener” Towne. Alan Finklestein, a producer on the film, specifically remembers that not only did Robert Towne not deliver a completed script, but went to Bora Bora with his wife, claiming he would complete the remaining 20 percent from there. The only line of communication with Towne was to call the main hut between certain hours of the day. The “staff” would then try to locate him because Towne’s hut had no direct phone line. That was the last we ever heard from Robert Towne. What a friend.

  A new decade, a new year, a house newly back. I was now on the prowl, one hungry cat. Looking for one shot to get my foot back into the door of major studio play.

  Knowing that I was iceberg cold, I returned to basics. Learning from success. What originally gained me entrance to an impossible door was owning something that no one else could get. No easy task. But who says success comes easy, especially coming from a coffin?

  Concept-oriented was the M.O. of all the studios. “Franchise flicks”—Superman, Batman, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Star Trek, all blockbusters—became the cure-all for box-office cancer. Each studio desperately searched for the fix.

  Bill Macdonald showed me a script with a penciled drawing on its cover. For the next nine months, all my efforts were focused. With Alan Schwartz untangling a half century of interwoven rights, I traveled the world on bended knee, knowing this was my one and possibly last shot—and a long shot at that. No studio exec had the time or the passion to untangle its multifaceted web. For me it wasn’t mere passion—it was survival.

  Faye Mancuso’s gold guardian angel shined all the way to heaven. My 100-to-1 shot came in. Its recognition international, a one-line drawing, without even a name. Why? Because it was on the cover of sixty-eight books written over thirty years and was the opening frame on hundreds upon hundreds of television segments. The Saint, halo and all, a franchise prize, was now mine. Unlike any hero in the recent past, wit, not brawn, was his M.O.; Cary Grant, not Arnold Schwarzenegger his prototype.

  Finally, with all the rights locked up, a visit was paid to my dear friend Frank Mancuso at Paramount. Walking into his office, the outlaw knew he was holding the aces. A few moments of polite conversation, then with sadness Frank questioned my future, asking what I was working on. Me? I laughed.

  “This is a strange racket, Frank.
As a kid, I got my foot in the door owning something everyone wanted. They had to buy me. Sad, ain’t it? I’m in the same position today. Think I own somethin’, though, somethin’ that everyone wants.”

  Opening my black satchel, I took out my scriptless script, the haloed saint on its cover.

  Mancuso chuckled. “You don’t own that.”

  “Yes I do.”

  His smile disappeared. “It’s impossible! You’re talkin’ about the most complicated rights situation that goes back fifty years. No one’s been able to disentangle them.” Then he laughed. “And we’ve all tried, every studio. Now you’re telling me you’ve unraveled them.” Looking at me quizzically. “Bob, come on.”

  Surely he thought I was stoned.

  “True, Frank—I own them.”

  “Can’t be. How?”

  “Poverty, Frank. When your back’s against the wall, the impossible becomes possible. You’re the one who said it to me—I’m a cat, and there’s still another life there. Call Schwartz—he’ll fill you in.”

  He did. After fifteen minutes of questioning, Mancuso put the phone down, saying words he thought would never come out of his mouth.

  “You’re not leaving this office until we make a deal.”

  At the lowest point in my career, I closed the richest deal of my life.

  Photographic Insert 3

  The quintessential example of a picture telling a thousand words. It sure in hell summed up my relationship with Dustin Hoffman.

  “Just act, dear boy,” quipped an impatient Olivier as Hoffman relentlessly searched for his character’s motivation in the climactic final scene of Marathon Man.

 

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