Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  IN MARCH OF 1968, Paramount found itself with the opportunity to become the proud owner of the option on a 150-page manuscript by Mario Puzo called The Mafia, if only it could beat out Universal. Puzo waited uneasily in the outer office of Robert Evans, the studio’s head of production. Puzo was a fat man with a passion for gambling and good cigars. As Evans recalls it, Puzo said, “I owe eleven Gs bad. If I don’t come up with it, I’ll have a broken arm.’ I didn’t even want to read it. I said, ‘Here’s twelve thousand five hundred, write the fuckin’ thing.’”*

  Puzo never heard from Paramount again. Evans, according to his number two, Peter Bart, “idolized gangsters, but he was fascinated with Jewish gangsters—Bugsy Siegel—not Italian ones.” Moreover, distribution had turned thumbs-down. The Brotherhood, a Paramount mob picture with Kirk Douglas, had bombed in 1968. “There was no great enthusiasm for making The Godfather” recalls Albert S. Ruddy, who would become the producer. “That was the year they lost about $65, $70 million, which today would be like $250 million.” Then The Godfather became a best-seller. Paramount perked up, but still wanted to do the movie on a small budget, $2, $3 million. Continues Ruddy, “I do believe they would not have been unhappy if the book had dropped off the best-seller list. But it wouldn’t go away.” When Universal offered Paramount $1 million for the option, Evans and company realized they might have something, and decided to go forward. Puzo was asked to write a script that updated the story, fill it with hippies and other contemporary references.

  Director after director turned it down, including Bogdanovich. Evans and Bart screened mob movies, realized that they had all been written and directed by Jews. Evans concluded he needed an Italian if he were going to “smell the spaghetti,” as he put it. Bart suggested Coppola, whom Bart had written about when he worked for the New York Times in the mid-’60s. “That’s your esoteric bullshit coming out,” snapped Evans. “The guy made three pictures: You’re a Big Boy Now, artsy-fartsy, no business, Finian’s Rainbow, a top Broadway musical he made into a disaster, and Rain People, which everyone rained on.” But for Evans, the fact that Coppola was Italian was a big plus, and despite his reservations, he told Bart to go ahead.

  Ironically, as much as Bart was finding it difficult to persuade Evans to hire Coppola, he was having as much trouble persuading Coppola to take the assignment. The director thought of himself as an artist. The Godfather was Finian’s Rainbow all over again: a big best-seller, somebody else’s material, and worse, material that was beneath him. Recalls Coppola, “I was into the New Wave and Fellini and, like all the kids of my age, we wanted to make those kinds of films. So the book represented the whole kind of idea I was trying to avoid in my life.” Bart hammered him about his debts. He still owed $300,000 to Warners. “Francis, you’re just a kid,” he said. “You can’t live your life this way. This could be a commercial movie. It’d be irresponsible of you not to do it.” Coppola got angry, became more intransigent. Evans couldn’t believe it: “He can’t get a cartoon made in this town, yet he doesn’t want to make The Godfather.”

  But Bart was right; the debt to Warners hung heavily upon the young director. And he owed money elsewhere, to Roger Corman and others. Coppola was in the editing room where Lucas was recutting THX when the call came from Paramount. While he was waiting for Evans to come on the line, he turned to his friend and asked, “Should I do this?”

  “I don’t see any choice here, Francis,” Lucas replied. “We’re in debt, Warners wants their money back, you need a job. I think you should do it. Survival is the key thing here.” Adds Lucas now, “For him, it wasn’t really, Should I do this movie? It was, Can I really accept the fact that the dream of Zoetrope, of this alternative studio, all this stuff we’d been talking about for the last two years—failed? Because at that point, Zoetrope fell apart.”

  But Evans and Bart still had to sell Coppola to their boss, Gulf + Western head Charles Bluhdorn, and Stanley Jaffe, president of the company, who was the son of Columbia president Leo Jaffe. Evans called Bluhdorn in New York. “Look, this kid is coming east, just listen to him for half an hour.”

  “Vat is dis fucking guy, vaddid he do in his last fucking picture?” screamed Charlie, an Austrian immigrant.

  “His last picture was Finian’s Rainbow”

  “How dare you zend me Phhinian’s fucking Rainbow! Id vas disgusting piece of shit.”

  Francis went to New York, talked to Bluhdorn. Two days later, Bart got the call. “Da kid’s a brilliant kid, he talked great line, but can he direct?” asked Bluhdorn.

  “Trust me, Charlie; he can direct.”

  UNLIKE STEVE ROSS at Warners, Charlie Bluhdorn soon took a very personal interest in the studio Gulf + Western had acquired back in the fall of 1966. He was thirty-nine when he replaced Paramount chairman Adolph Zukor. (Mel Brooks would refer to the corporate mother ship as Engulf and Devour.) Bluhdorn was a balding, choleric man who wore Wasserman-like Groucho glasses clamped down on a broad nose. His mouth was filled with large, square teeth, like Scrabble tiles. Everyone who worked for him was certain he was Jewish, but if so he took great pains to conceal it. Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak told Evans that his sister went to synagogue with Bluhdorn in Chicago, but the Gulf + Western chief always professed ignorance of Jewish holidays.

  Bluhdorn was a brilliant financier who played the commodities market like a violin. After a meeting, he would pound the table, announce, “Vile ve’ve been zidding here, I made more money on sugar dan Paramount made all year.” He had an infectious laugh, and could be extremely charming when he wanted to be, but mostly he screamed in a guttural accent, terrifying his minions. They took pleasure in mimicking his Hitlerian inflections, referring to him as “Mein Führer” behind his back. One executive recalls that when his boss lost his temper, which was often, “these little white foamy stalagmite, stalactite type things appeared on both sides of his mouth. I thought, Does he have rabies?”

  Bluhdorn had vast holdings in sugar and cattle in the Dominican Republic, where he reigned like a medieval lord. He had his own landing strip, where the company Gulfstream would sit in readiness, and where his own armed guards patrolled. When Gulf + Western acquired South Puerto Rican Sugar, Bluhdorn got a resort, Casa de Campo, along with it. Later in the decade, Barry Diller, who would head Paramount, encouraged him to develop it. Bluhdorn built an elaborate guest compound for the studio’s use, called Casa de Paramount. When visitors arrived, a phalanx of maids, gardeners, and guards dressed in white posted themselves around the circular driveway to greet them. Don Simpson, who became head of production in the late ’70s, recalls traveling down there with Bluhdorn. He says, “Charlie had these black slaves in white linen uniforms with gold braid serving him drinks. It was evident that they wanted to slit his throat. I tried to make friends with the servants, like, ‘By the way I’m not with him. When the revolution comes, spare me; I’m poor.’”

  The Gulf + Western chief was a man about whom it was impossible to be neutral, and reactions to him ran the gamut from devotion to fear and loathing. Evans swore by him, but to Peter Bart, “He was a thug, a terrible person, an absolutely unmitigated awful human being.” And Simpson says, “He was a mean, despicable, unethical, evil man, who lived too long. He was scary be-cause he always had a sharp stick and unless you batted it away and said, ‘Fuck you,’ he’d poke you until you bled to death. He was a man who clearly had a chemical imbalance. He had no problem breaking the law. He was a criminal.” Simpson apparently kept his feelings to himself while Bluhdorn was alive. He was respectful to a fault in Bluhdorn’s presence. Indeed, there was a rank smell about Paramount in those days; it was better not to know too much. Bluhdorn seemed to have few qualms about turning to gray money. He was under investigation by the SEC throughout the ’70s, and he was close to Korshak, the real Godfather of Hollywood.

  Bluhdorn’s head of distribution was Frank Yablans. Yablans had earned a reputation as someone who could squeeze a profit out of the worst clinkers Paramount released,
and when he had something to work with, he made miracles. He had gotten a lot of the credit for Love Story, with its gnomic, but effective tag line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  Yablans was the son of an immigrant Brooklyn cabbie who was still plying his trade while Frank was climbing the Paramount ladder. Frank liked to say he graduated from the “Brooklyn Street Corner School of Economics.” He was short and tough, a street kid quick on his feet with a wicked sense of humor he used as a bludgeon. He had an enormous ego. Says Friedkin, who got to know him later, “Frank had the biggest Napoleonic complex of anyone short of Napoleon.” As Al Ruddy puts it, he was “a bully, crass, corny, and loud, just trying to beat the shit out of everybody. Frank was truly, ‘It’s me baby, I can write, produce, direct, I know more than anyone in the history of Hollywood.’ He believed everyone was full of shit but him.”

  To compensate for his diminutive stature, Yablans turned his office in the Gulf + Western Building on Columbus Circle into a split-level affair. Staring down from the platform on which his desk sat, he had a six-inch advantage on people sitting on the other side. In the days before the women’s movement, Yablans would think nothing of walking past one of his female employees saying, “Nice tits today, honey.” But he was liked because he was forthright and direct, you knew where you stood. He ran things like a family business, was “Frank” to the troops, knew everyone by their first names. He was always accessible, always open to ideas.

  Predictably enough, beneath Yablans’s bluster was a man filled with self-loathing. Bart recalls, “We were in London together, going out for dinner. I picked up Frank in his room. He was finished dressing, looking at himself in the mirror, and he said, ‘You know, I’m a really ugly man, I’m a homely fat Jewish man.’ He was furious at Evans because he was a great-looking guy and all the girls were buzzing around him.”

  Bluhdorn liked Yablans. They were cut from the same cloth, both willing to go for the jugular. It was management by fear and testosterone. The two men would trade extravagant insults, no holds barred. Yablans would think nothing of calling his boss a Nazi. He says, “Charlie was a very sinister, Machiavellian kind of guy. You went along with him, or you fought him. I chose to fight him, because if I didn’t, he’d run amok. But either way you lost.” After one particularly vitriolic exchange, Bluhdorn sent Yablans a case of mouthwash.

  The fights were often over money. Yablans says, “Me and Evans had a father-son relationship with him. But he had that Eastern European mentality: ‘I’ll pay your rent, I’ll buy you a car, anything you want, so long as you’re under my thumb.’ The minute you try to break free, he’d turn on you like a jackal. Had we done for Steve Ross what we did for Charlie Bluhdorn, we’d be worth together a billion dollars today. Charlie was so cheap, I said, ‘Charlie, your logo should be two pushcarts, crossed. You’re a peddler, that’s all you are.’”

  As his head of production, Bluhdorn, in a typically impulsive move, hired Evans, a failed actor (his claim to fame was the role of a matador in The Sun Also Rises and a featured part in The Fiend Who Walked the West), totally devoid of qualifications. According to Howard Koch, Sr., whom Evans replaced in 1966, Evans had cozied up to Bluhdorn’s French wife, Yvette, who told her husband, “He’s gorgeous. We’ve got to get a good-looking guy, real sexy, to run the company.” Possibly, Bluhdorn hired Evans because he didn’t care very much what happened to the studio, which accounted for no more than 5 percent of Gulf + Western’s revenues. In any event, he was a gambling man, and he gambled on Evans, telling him, “The Paramount caca in charge there now is ninety years old. He saw Alfie and couldn’t even hear it.” People in the business regarded Evans’s appointment as bizarre, even by Hollywood standards. “What a joke,” said BBS’s Steve Blauner. “I figured he was fucking Bluhdorn or something.”

  Evans was one of the great crash-and-burn stories of the ’70s, but then he was only thirty-six, brash and ambitious, and indeed strikingly good-looking, in a Robert Wagner sort of way, a permanent tan, dazzling white teeth, hair slicked back, and later, long and casually tangled. The son of a Riverside Drive dentist (he grew up in the same building as Rafelson), Evans was born on June 29, 1930, and had been in the clothing business with his brother, Charles. (When Bluhdorn was angry, he used to refer to Evans as “that pants cutter.”) Evans was very much the ladies’ man, a sharp dresser given to sartorial clichés like suede jeans and gold chains. Had he not had the good fortune to meet Bluhdorn, he might well have spent his youth as a gigolo, squiring dowagers around the spas of Europe. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, sounded like he had swallowed ground glass, and he mumbled.

  Evans evinced a peculiar mixture of treacly Hallmark Card sentimentality that would flower in his romance with Ali MacGraw, and a self-destructive darkness that would lead him into murky waters way over his head. A natural-born patsy, he was a mob groupie, proud of his close friendship with Korshak, who was his lawyer. But for all his vanity and foolishness, Evans was a warm, loyal, and generous man. Says Ruddy, “Bob wasn’t egocentric in the way Frank was egocentric. Bob wanted to be seen with beautiful women, had wall-to-wall pictures of himself with every actor who ever came to town. But there was a softness to Bob. He was basically a gentle person.” Evans got away with a lot because he was never threatening to those above him. He had a real talent, often exercised, for eating crow. When Evans did damage, it was more often to himself.

  For $290,000 or so Paramount bought Evans a sixteen-room Regency house with an egg-shaped pool protected by one-hundred-foot eucalyptus trees and high walls in Beverly Hills. Out front stood a two-hundred-year-old sycamore, and a thousand ornamental rose bushes sprouted from beds around the house. He called it Woodland, and it became his pride and joy. At the high tide of his success, he played tennis with Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Henry Kissinger, Ted Kennedy, John Tunney and his other trophy friends. He attracted players like Jimmy Connors and Pancho González, who teamed up with him in doubles. He would bet on the matches, but he still had to serve every fourth time, and always lost.

  Evans had a genius for self-promotion. Joyce Haber had replaced Hedda Hopper at the Los Angeles Times. Evans provided paragraphs of material for her column to her over the phone. She was a regular at his dinner table. He practically turned the studio publicity head into his own personal press agent. Whenever he visited the set of one of his pictures, he brought the production to a halt so he could pose with the stars.

  Most of all, Evans liked the company of women, especially models, actresses, and hookers. When he woke up in the morning, he could never remember their names. He had a housekeeper who brought him breakfast in bed—black coffee and a piece of cheesecake. Under the cake dish she put a piece of paper with the name of the girl. It is said he gave away his pajamas to the girls as souvenirs. Everyone suspected that Evans supplied Bluhdorn with women. Says an executive who worked at the studio in those days, “At Bob’s house there was pussy all around the place. Bluhdorn bought Paramount ‘cause he figured it was an easy way to get laid.”

  On October 24, 1969, Evans wedded Ah MacGraw, whom Love Story would make into a star. Bart didn’t like her. “Ali was one of these people who felt like she had to decorate herself like a ’60s person,” he says. “She was about as much a ’60s person as Leona Helmsley. She was materialistic, self-aggrandizing, and basically would fuck any actor she played opposite of.” But on the surface it was one of those storybook marriages that the press loves. Evans seemed to have it all.

  In the light of later events, particularly his addiction to cocaine, it is easy to underestimate Evans, but he was an extremely effective executive for nearly a decade and presided over Paramount’s renaissance. “You have no idea what a great mind Evans was in those days,” says Friedkin. “Sharp, attentive. The drugs have just destroyed it.” Evans was a great packager, a great stroker of talent. He gave his actors, writers, and directors parties when they got married or divorced, he got them lawyers, got them laid, babied them, solved their pr
oblems. “You were dealing with a guy who was swimming in the same pool, and it gave you a sense of community,” says Buck Henry. “Calley was the same way. Those guys didn’t seem to be at the service of Wall Street. They seemed to be in the service of the filmmaker, and it made a huge difference.”

  Bluhdorn’s penchant for making deals personally was making a mess of things, and Paramount had something like $100 million tied up in five or six productions, movies like Darling Lili, Catch-22, and The Molly Maguires, all of which bombed. To save money, the executive offices were moved to a modest building at 202 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. Evans wanted to be near his favorite restaurant, the Bistro, in which Korshak held a major interest.

  Evans and Bart began to sing the same song as Calley and Co.; they began to put their money on directors. “Everybody was looking for an answer,” says Bart. “One answer seemed to be, if you found a brilliant young director with a vision, go with him. It was Kubrick, more than anybody, that had an impact on us.”

  After the move to Canon Drive, the studio’s luck changed. With Bluhdorn chastened, the run of flops became a run of hits: Romeo and Juliet, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story. Between Bluhdorn, Jaffe, Yablans, and Evans, Paramount was a loony bin of big personalities, egos, and tempers. The studio worker bees used to refer to them as “the Manson family.” It was amazing any pictures got made at all, but they were smart and they all loved movies. By 1971, Paramount was head of the studio class.