The Kid Is Out Of The Picture: Robert Evans, 1930-2019

When Robert Evans’ frank, eccentric, and at times nearly scurrilous autobiography The Kid Stays In The Picture was published in 1994, Hollywood was shook to the core. But the book’s impact strengthened, if such a thing can be believed, when its audio version of the book — read by the onetime actor, studio executive, and producer himself — followed. All of young Hollywood listened to it while tooling around, or stuck on, various Tinseltown highways. They honed their Robert Evans impersonations — his distinctive way of speaking was parroted by Dustin Hoffman in the 1997 film Wag The Dog — and traded anecdotes in his voice.

Prior to this time, Evans was a show business kid whose tale some might have considered cautionary. Born to an affluent New York family in 1930, he and his brother Charles founded the women’s clothing company Evan-Picone while Robert was barely into of his 20s. He was a young millionaire when the actress Norma Shearer spotted him in 1956, and was struck by his resemblance to the MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who left Shearer a widow twenty years before. She helped maneuver Evans into the role of her husband in the Lon Chaney biopic The Man of a Thousand Faces, which starred James Cagney as Chaney.

Evans’ work as an actor did not garner many plaudits or any awards. The title of Evans’ book is what Fox’s Daryl F. Zanuck said when Ernest Hemingway himself balked at Evans’ casting in an adaptation of Papa’s The Sun Also Rises. That’s when Evan’s realized he wanted to be the guy calling the shots rather than appearing in them.

His golden age began at the end of the 1960s, when he improbably (in the book, he himself seems as surprised as anyone) rose to top Paramount’s production department. Eccentric company head Charles Bluhdorn’s gamble on Evans paid off. (His book’s portraits of old-school Hollywood power brokers are all great, but his Bluhdorn stuff is particularly entertaining.) His solid commercial instincts yielded big hits such as Love Story — from which a romance with its leading lady Ali MacGraw would bloom and soon wither — Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and more. Evans also had some instinct for work that bridged the commercial and the artistic. He welcomed Roman Polanski to Hollywood for the classic horror picture Rosemary’s Baby, and, of course, oversaw Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather.

His instincts were not entirely infallible, however. He pushed for his buddy Alain Delon for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather. That Delon’s English wasn’t great, and his accent completely French, didn’t seem to bother Evans; in his mind, Coppola’s gangster picture could have been made as 1969’s The Sicilian Clan, a Delon starrer, was — ready to dub for the international and American market. Coppola’s insistence on his own ideas of authenticity led to his intractability on the casting of Al Pacino. “Ok, you got your midget,” Evans admitted saying to Coppola when he gave the director his way.

Evans’ autobiography teems with anecdotes that zig-zag between self-aggrandizing and self-deflating, which is part of what gives it its charm. He closes a deal with Roman Polanski by hosting a seder for him! But he didn’t do it to close the deal, he did it out of friendship! He tortures himself when Ali MacGraw leaves him for Steve McQueen! Then glories in getting some of his own back from McQueen in a face-to-face confrontation! The book gets more peculiar the more you dig into it, its mix of hardened cynicism and sentimentality nearly schizoid. “Fuck ’em all” are his book’s last words. Elsewhere, in the picture section, is a shot of him and his brother Charles, soaking wet and shirtless in tight black swimsuits, arms around each other, with the caption “Love is better the second time around!” They had once feuded, you see.

Of the many tallish tales in the book, my favorite is when Evans, after styling himself an uber-fan of mandarin author Vladimir Nabokov, if not an out-and-out Nabokov scholar, flies out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline. Not to make records with the Mobile, but to read a manuscript of old Vlad’s latest novel, Ada. The knotty, weird, kinky “family chronicle” is almost 200,000 words long and spectacularly dense, but Evans powers through it overnight, and is utterly defeated by it. It is by almost any account, and under any circumstances, impossible to read Ada overnight, but there you are. He wasn’t wrong in concluding the novel was unfilmable, however.

This might be a good time to mention that Evans once complained in an interview that he’d always be known as Bob “Cocaine” Evans because, well, he was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980. For which he was sentenced to make a PSA. No really. This was part of the “fall” section of Evans’ rise and fall.

Another exciting thing that happened in his orbit was the murder of Roy Radin, a genuinely odd impresario who came to Evans with the idea of a movie about The Cotton Club, a project that would reunite Coppola and Evans after years of bad feelings, and would then go on to revive those bad feelings.

Evans is pretty mum about Radin in Kid. (He was not involved; rather; a onetime business associate of Radin’s who was frozen out of the Cotton Club deal hired a hit man to kill Radin.)  But he writes freely about how his cocaine adventures almost threatened his friendship with Henry Kissinger. Evans was one of those fellows who liked mentioning he was friends with Henry Kissinger, for what it’s worth.

He published Kid at a point where his filmmaking career had stalled. The book fueled the legend, sort of. In the months and years that followed, rumors swirled about all the stuff he left out of it. His Woodland Drive compound in Hollywood was said to be the scene of nearly-unspeakable Sadean depravity. A master-slave relationship with a famous actress was speculated upon in hushed tones. A pubic-hair collection was also mentioned. (One is kind of staggered that he managed to pass away without having been massively Me-Too-ed.) His “notorious” rep notwithstanding, he did make a comeback into active production, albeit a brief one, including salty, gossip-generating stints on the erotic thrillers Jade and Sliver.

What’s his cinematic legacy, ultimately? His name is associated some of American cinema’s greatest achievements. Not just some of the aforementioned pictures but also The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Chinatown. And he wasn’t merely present at the creation; he stood up for his filmmakers, as with Polanski on the ending of Chinatown. He wasn’t always right OR benevolent. He screwed over Elaine May on her directorial debut A New Leaf, taking the picture away from her before she could finish editing it. (May does not figure in Evans’ book.)

I wonder how that legacy would look had he not turned himself into a cartoon.  Literally. The success of his book and a largely animated documentary based on it led to the creation of one of Comedy Central’s most ill-advised concoctions, Kid Notorious, an absurdist animated series of Hollywood misadventures with Evans voicing himself. It did not last a full season, but is one of those things that is not forgotten once seen.

Also, he was best friends with Jack Nicholson and he was married seven times. Seven times. And once to a former Miss America, the squeaky-clean Phyllis George. (The union, consecrated in 1977, did not last a year; lifestyle differences, one infers. A later marriage to Catherine Oxenberg was annulled after a little over a week. I won’t even ask, especially as there’s no way I’d get an answer.)  You can’t say the man didn’t live.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream The Kid Stays In The Picture