Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  Evans was in love with his circular driveway. At its center he installed a graceful fountain, with water spewing onto a large and regal copper cock. It was as though the cock announced the mood of the estate.

  From the outset, Evans’s manor conveyed mixed messages, and that was the way he liked it. Though most of his visitors were youthful, the house itself bespoke formality. A butler in suit-and-tie greeted visitors, and the staff of housekeepers were attired as in British upper-class tradition. The screening room, too, reflected disdain for the aggressively contemporary look of other Hollywood home theaters. Again, Evans’s instinct was to emulate Old Hollywood rather than cater to the hippie impulses of the moment.

  Once the house became operational, its mood fluctuated radically from one moment to the next. Filmmakers and dealmakers were ushered into the screening room, where they would sit around the elegant card table, re-arraying themselves on the theater seats to screen film tests. If Evans was courting a star—a Jack Nicholson or a Mia Farrow—these encounters would take place at his main house rather than his studio office, which was a mere twenty minutes away.

  By early evening, the mood would shift. Tennis players might drop by the screening room or sip drinks at poolside. Young women would arrive to welcome guests. Evans would be on full alert greeting visitors, yet also fielding the unceasing blizzard of phone calls. The house would be at once all business yet all play.

  During the occasional formal dinner parties, the guest list would encompass a mix of stars and power players, plus visiting royalty—a member of the Agnelli family or even a sheikh from the Middle East. Almost every evening would conclude with a screening, with regular attendees such as the agent Sue Mengers or Warren Beatty.

  As the evening progressed, the mood and subtext of Evans’s salon subtly changed. The phones stopped ringing, the dealmaking ended. The salon would now become a playpen.

  The girls kept arriving. They were young and beautiful—aspiring actresses, party girls looking to hook up with a rich guy or movie star.

  The ground rules were clear. In this particular playpen, everyone was expected to be on his or her best behavior. There was to be no overt hustling and no drugs were to be in evidence, except for an occasional joint. A girl might end the night with Jack Nicholson, Ted Kennedy, or Alain Delon. Often, one of the bedrooms at the south wing of the house might serve as a way station.

  Evans himself liked to watch over the proceedings, always amused by the unfolding melodramas. If he witnessed what he felt was bad behavior, his intervention was prompt. He sharply rebuked his attorney, Greg Bautzer, when he saw him slapping around an actress, and told him to leave. A handsome, hard-drinking man, Bautzer never returned.

  While Evans reveled in his role as the grand host, he was sensitive about the community’s perception. When he learned that Freddie Fields, a top agent, had labeled him “the prince of all pimps,” he was genuinely offended. To him, beautiful women were a sort of treasured resource to be cultivated and traded, and the act of introducing them to the rich and famous was an act of graciousness, not of commerce. After all, the girls were willing participants in the roundelay. They were ambitious and they knew what they were getting into.

  Before his marriage to Ali MacGraw, Evans indulged his fantasies with energy and finesse. Usually his girls would stay the night. In admiring their beauty, he would often take photographs of the girls in uninhibited poses. On occasion, his friend Helmut Newton, the renowned German photographer, would shoot one of his favored beauties, always in the nude, always smiling.

  Evans zealously collected these photos along with other remembrances. One of his prize possessions was a small porcelain jar containing samples of pubic hair from his favored partners. On rare occasions he would display his “pussy pot” to fellow players, like Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson.

  As a connoisseur of sex, Evans felt a sense of accomplishment in enhancing Henry Kissinger’s range of acquaintances and those of other repressed friends. Evans also felt a kinship with other connoisseurs, like Beatty, but also a certain competitiveness. At the end of one production meeting, Evans and Beatty decided to compare their mastery at summoning up phone numbers. “276-8451,” Evans would say, to which Beatty would respond, “Janice.” Beatty would then say “472-9867,” to which Evans would say, “Melanie.” The exchange of phone numbers continued for three or four minutes with neither combatant stumbling, until Evans finally drew a blank. “I made that one up,” Beatty confessed with a grin.

  Evans took pride in his salon, and he became resentful if he felt either his home or his services were being taken for granted. He grumbled to me on one occasion when Bluhdorn commandeered his screening room for a high-level corporate meeting to which Evans was not invited. Similarly Evans was infuriated when one of the girls provided for Bluhdorn was hospitalized after a prolonged evening of sexual activities with the chairman. “He’s a savage,” Evans snorted.

  Evans was all the more disdainful of Bluhdorn’s vulgarity because Evans had lifted himself from the rough-and-tumble of the “schmatta business.” In dealing with Hollywood’s brand of thugs, Evans felt he had graduated to a different social class. He was a studio chief, and like Irving Thalberg, the icon he had once portrayed, he was a gentleman studio chief. As such, Evans dressed impeccably in custom-made shirts and suits and usually wore a tie to work.

  The tennis scene, too, was an important element in the Evans landscape, the games cast as carefully as his movies. Champions like Pancho Gonzales or Jimmy Connors would be on hand to boost the egos of celebrity players like Ted Kennedy or his brother Bobby. The drinks flowed and a movie would follow. To Evans, tennis was a mind game; his backhand was weak but his strategy astute. He would suddenly bet an opposing doubles team $1,000 a point, and then start lobbing balls to throw off their concentration. Evans usually lost money, but his guests relished the contests.

  At its zenith, in 1969 to 1971, Evans’s salon was the hottest scene in town. The turnout of guests was dazzling, the dealmaking was incessant, and the undertone of sexual adventure was pervasive. Like the studio itself, it seemed a wonderland of limitless possibility. Everyone who happened by understood both its excitement and its evanescence.

  Its moment would quickly pass.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Boss’s Bombs

  When Charles Bluhdorn stormed into London shortly after acquiring Paramount, one of the first producers who courted him was a shrewd young Brit named Michael Deeley. A business partner of the actor Stanley Baker, Deeley had heard from an agent friend that Bluhdorn had an avid appetite for deals, and the aptly named Deeley had an expertise in formulating them. Deeley was experiencing modest success with a low-budget film called Robbery, which Stanley Baker starred in, and hence thought it a good idea to pitch Bluhdorn on other projects that would offer low financial exposure.

  No sooner had Deeley launched his presentation but Bluhdorn cut him off. Projects of this sort were of no interest to him, Bluhdorn barked, his hand gesturing dismissively. Bluhdorn had just completed a study of the film business which, he said, had demonstrated clearly that big-budget movies outgrossed low-budget ones throughout the history of the movie business. “You spend the most, you make the most,” ranted the Gulf & Western chairman. “Research proves it, but Hollywood doesn’t get the message. I’m going to run Paramount like a business,” he said.

  Deeley went away a bit intimidated. His own experience in the British film industry, limited though it was, had seemed to prove the opposite of Bluhdorn’s theory. Respected filmmakers including Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson had recently formed a company called Woodfall and had started to do well with movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger, and even Tom Jones (the latter became a hit on a budget of only $1.2 million), but Bluhdorn discarded all this as a local British phenomenon.

  He was intent on demonstrating the validity of his own theories on a worldwide stage.

  In the coming months, Bluhdo
rn put his ideas into action as Deeley, along with many others in the industry, watched with a mixture of envy and astonishment. A lavish musical called Paint Your Wagon was launched by Paramount, starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Yet another semimusical, Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews and set against the background of World War I, was also given the green light. Sean Connery and Richard Harris got the go-ahead to make an expensive film called The Molly Maguires, which focused on a union dispute in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

  Deeley was impressed. Big bucks were being spent, as Bluhdorn had promised. But Deeley was nonetheless skeptical about the results. The subjects, he felt, seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and anachronistic. Yet, if Bluhdorn wanted and favored this sort of material, he and Stanley Baker owned a musty script called Where’s Jack?, which might pass the Bluhdorn test.

  Deeley, Baker, and his agent, Martin Baum, marched on Bluhdorn’s office in New York to make their pitch. The chairman was impressed, as always, to meet a movie star. Baum, the high-powered agent, told Bluhdorn that Where’s Jack? would be a “can’t miss”—its director, James Clavell, had just completed a modest hit called To Sir with Love; its coproducers, Deeley and Baker, had just finished Zulu, also a success; and its star would be Tommy Steele.

  The mention of Steele would have brought most Hollywood meetings to a close. A young musical star in London, Steele was very much a local celeb—and his appeal was very British. His newest movie, Half a Sixpence, was about to be released amid negative advance reports, but Bluhdorn was in a dealmaking mood, and he gave an exuberant “yes” to the pitch.

  Martin Davis, Bluhdorn’s number two, had sat in on the presentation, and he looked unhappy. Moving to his boss’s desk, Davis said, “Charlie, we’d agreed not to commit to a deal until we’d read the script.”

  “I’ve read it mentally,” Bluhdorn replied. “Goddamn it, Marty, it will be a smash. Now get out of here.”

  Deeley and Baker exchanged a befuddled glance. They’d managed to make a Paramount deal even without a star like Julie Andrews. Indeed, the only element of Bluhdorn’s favored formula they could meet was the budget: the two Brits knew that Where’s Jack? would cost far more than the typical British movie, and, indeed, far more than it deserved.

  Even as Where’s Jack? rolled into production, Deeley did a Bluhdorn runaround by quietly submitting a project to me called The Italian Job. Unlike Where’s Jack?, this film had a very hip script, a tight budget, and starred a young actor who, unlike Tommy Steele, had true breakout potential. His name was Michael Caine. Neither Deeley nor I let Bluhdorn know about The Italian Job until it was well into preproduction. By that time, the reviews of Where’s Jack? deemed it disastrous, and Bluhdorn’s theory about megafilms already was proving self-destructive.

  In retrospect, Bluhdorn’s “research” on movie financing had a germ of validity. It presaged the blockbuster mentality that began to overtake Hollywood in the 1980s, when films like Jaws and Star Wars opened up a whole new audience to buy not only theater tickets but also videos of favorite films. By the year 2000, the studios were reserving a major portion of their development budgets for so-called tent-pole or franchise films—mostly sequels or prequels, many based on comic book characters or video games.

  But to Bluhdorn, films like the Batman series or Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction projects were far beyond his field of vision. A European by birth and an outsider by instinct, the chairman of Gulf & Western was a sucker for Hollywood glitz. To him, Hollywood musicals were box office gold, even though the studio that invented them, MGM, had effectively gone out of business by the time Bluhdorn bought Paramount. Having spent his years with businessmen who knew about automobile bumpers or zinc mining, he was hungry now to surround himself with the glamour that Hollywood represented to him.

  Bob Evans did not share this obsession. As much as he himself reveled in the legends of Old Hollywood, Evans believed that musicals now represented an expensive anachronism. The mood of the audience was shifting, and while no one was smart enough to predict the direction of this shift, this was not a moment to try to re-create the past.

  Four months after moving into his new job, however, Evans got a tip from an old friend, an agent named Charlie Feldman. Columbia Pictures was having trouble securing the financing for Funny Girl, a filmed version of the runaway Broadway hit. Its producer, the mercurial Ray Stark, had a brief window of time in which he could take the project to another studio. “This is your chance to steal a hot project,” Feldman advised. Evans immediately snapped to attention: Securing Funny Girl would give Bluhdorn the musical that he craved; at the same time, Funny Girl’s brash young star, Barbra Streisand, was the celebrity of the moment. Young audiences would respond to her.

  Several problems confronted him, however. First, Evans would have to elicit Bluhdorn’s green light, and there was only a forty-eight-hour window during which the project could be wrested from Columbia.

  The other problem was Ray Stark, the producer who had discovered Streisand and was locked into Funny Girl. Charlie Bluhdorn felt Stark had suckered him into financing the disastrous venture Is Paris Burning? Hollywood had laughed at him for impulsively funding a movie no one else wanted. Stark had exploited Charlie’s virginity in the film world.

  Evans knew he had to play his hand carefully with his boss, to choose the right moment, stressing the musical angle first then sliding into the Stark problem. On a project of this size, he would need not only Bluhdorn’s acquiescence but also his enthusiasm.

  “Charlie takes a bath every Sunday afternoon—that’s the only time he turns off the phones,” Evans told me. “I have got to nail him just before his bath so he can think about it in a relaxed setting.”

  “Or maybe he’ll drown himself,” I put in.

  I was present at Evans’s house that Sunday as he placed his call. He talked for several minutes, spelling out the various elements. When he put down the receiver, he drew a deep breath.

  “OK, I think it went well,” Evans told me. “Charlie was talking in his Sunday voice. He wasn’t yelling. I think he will go for it. He said he wanted the afternoon to think it over.”

  What neither of us knew was that Bluhdorn decided to forgo his ritual bath that afternoon. Having been criticized for acting hastily on Is Paris Burning?, the chairman opted to do some crash homework. One by one, he started phoning Paramount offices around the world—subdistributors and marketing specialists—soliciting their opinions on a Streisand musical. The “troops” were startled to hear from him.

  Later that evening, Bluhdorn called Evans back with the upshot of his impromptu survey. “They don’t like her,” Bluhdorn announced. “They don’t like her in London or Johannesburg or Hong Kong or Rio. Maybe with Shirley MacLaine, they would like Funny Girl, but not with the Jewess.”

  The word “Jewess” did not resonate pleasantly with Evans, especially given Bluhdorn’s guttural German accent, but he was not going to get drawn into a fight over ethnicity. A bigger principle was at stake. Paramount’s distributors, he felt, had hardly distinguished themselves in selling the studio’s pictures around the world. Would they now be given a veto over future movies?

  The argument raged for roughly twenty minutes over the telephone before Bluhdorn angrily brought it to a close. “You’ve been in your job for four months, not four years,” he shouted. “I’m not going to go against the advice of all my distributors. They don’t want a Streisand movie and that’s the end of it.”

  Evans understood that he had lost that battle, but what he could not know was the ultimate price the studio would pay. Ray Stark would soon manage to put his financing back together and get his musical into production at Columbia, where it would become a major hit. Its success left Bluhdorn feeling frustrated and out-maneuvered. He had lost his chance for a hit musical, but that only re-doubled his determination. “The audience wants musicals,” he reiterated to me during one of his visits to the studio. “I know what the audience wants.”

  D
etermined to sign a musical star who was bigger than Streisand, Bluhdorn was an easy target when a well-known filmmaker named Blake Edwards flew to New York to pitch his movie titled Darling Lili. It was a romantic comedy set during the Great War, and Edwards admitted the screenplay was still a work-in-progress. But his wife, Julie Andrews, would star in it, several songs would be added, and it would, he promised, become a worldwide hit.

  What Edwards chose not to mention was that the script had already been seen by several studios, including ours. To my taste, the script was neither funny nor romantic. I didn’t get it and had told Edwards’s agent my opinion.

  Then there was also the matter of the budget. A final estimate, Edwards said, would await completion of a rewrite and the addition of the songs. Ireland would be an ideal location—its prices were reasonable and it was far removed from distractions, he added.

  When Charlie Bluhdorn laid out the project to Evans and me he did so in near ecstatic terms, and was visibly exasperated by our cool response. To him, the equation for success was self-evident. Julie Andrews meant Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Blake Edwards was the man who gave us Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And Edwards and Julie had recently been married; this movie represented their first time working together. It was a sort of wedding present to his wife. How could it go wrong?

  Much later, Charlie Bluhdorn gave me a more personal insight as to why he was drawn to Darling Lili. “Yvette told me her big ambition was to have dinner with Julie Andrews,” he confided. Bluhdorn’s rather stately and steely French-born wife, Yvette, was not a movie buff and normally kept her distance from her husband’s frenzied business activities, but she venerated Andrews’s work on the stage. To both Bluhdorns, Julie Andrews represented the ultimate superstar, and Yvette’s demands would have to be honored.