The Kid Stays in the Picture

by Robert Evans

  It’s the best hook I’d ever gotten on how to play a scene. And, with it, I got the part.

  From the moment we met, Jerry Wald and I became fast friends. Jerry was by far the most entrepreneurial producer in Hollywood. No one had a greater flair with both industry and press. Best of all, he even respected me as an actor and he wasn’t shy in telling anyone. From the Saturday Evening Post to Photoplay, to television, radio, and print, the industry was well aware that I was Jerry Wald’s pick as “the romantic rage” of the sixties.

  It didn’t happen. As a bullfighter, the head of a studio, or a crazy killer, at the very least, I was believable. Playing myself, I was a dud. Why? I was a better imitator than actor.

  Jerry Wald felt different. Maybe because he had already gone out on a limb announcing me for the second male lead in The Billionaire, opposite Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand. Who was I to argue?

  The title is not the only thing that got changed. Now called Let’s Make Love, principal photography kept getting pushed back and back. Monroe was being her usual indecisive self. Meanwhile, Jerry Wald offered me a co-starring part in Return to Peyton Place. What’s worse than being in a sequel to a piece of shit? Playing the same part I had just finished, that’s what. Only this time it was “Dexter Key Goes to New England.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Fine,” said Lou Schreiber, who ran business affairs at Twentieth. “You’re on suspension.”

  Dumb move, Evans. You’re only an actor. Being on suspension, Twentieth cast someone else in the Monroe film.

  Not wanting to play the third lead in a B gangster movie, I turned down Murder, Inc., even though May Britt, my lady at the time, had the female lead. Again, I was put on suspension. May Britt dumped me, and the guy who replaced me in the film, Peter Falk, was nominated for the Academy Award. Good judgment, huh?

  In the months that followed, I was set and unset in more films than I have fingers and toes. But none of it mattered. Finally, I got the break I needed—one of the lead parts opposite Audrey Hepburn in John Huston’s The Unforgiven. There was one problem. Two years earlier, in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had met a statuesque, five foot eleven Japanese beauty, Eiko Ando. She must have been extraordinary. After all, she was John Huston’s discovery to play opposite John Wayne in The Barbarian and the Geisha. What started out in the lobby didn’t end up there. What to me was a passing fancy was to John Huston one of the loves of his life. Naturally, I didn’t know. I was in wardrobe, ready to leave for location, when I got the call from my agent.

  “It’s over.”

  “What’s over?”

  “Huston’s found out about Eiko—you’re Unforgiven!”

  “Call Sam, will ya, Kurt? I’m perfect casting.”

  “He’s in London.”

  “I know. They’re starting the picture soon. They’ve gotta cast the part.”

  Kurt Frings, my new agent, got Spiegel on the phone. Though I wasn’t on the extension, I could tell Spiegel was less than excited. He told Frings he was going to Paris to speak to Alain Delon. If it didn’t work out, he’d think about it. I followed up on it like a private eye. Ten days passed, and through my network, I was tipped that Delon wasn’t available. Again, I prodded Frings to call Spiegel. He did and Spiegel suggested I go into makeup and wardrobe at Twentieth and have a photo shoot, in costume, as an Arab warrior.

  Excitedly, I went over to see my old pal, Dickie Zanuck. After all, I was still under personal contract to his old man.

  “I’ve got a shot for the second lead as the Arab warrior in Lawrence of Arabia. Spiegel just wants to see pictures of me in costume to show them to David Lean.”

  With all earnestness, Dickie got on the case, setting up the makeup, costume, and photo shoot at Twentieth. Together, we picked out the shots to send to London.

  A week later, I received a call from Owen MacLaine, Twentieth’s head of talent. “Bob, I’ve just received a cable from Sam Spiegel. I don’t quite know how to handle it; let me read it to you: ‘Please have Evans fly to London immediately. With him on scene, I am sure I can secure the role for him. Will work out details of contract with D. Z. personally. On no condition involve Kurt Frings. He will only complicate transaction. Sam Spiegel.’ What should I do?” asked MacLaine.

  “I’ve got to tell Kurt. He’s my agent.”

  I did and he blew.

  “That no-good Spiegel. I told you I didn’t trust him. He wants options on you—for nothing. Fuck ’em. We’re flying over together!”

  We did, taking the newly inaugurated polar flight directly to London.

  First, I called my mother, father, sister, and brother, telling them it looks like I’ve got the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. They were as excited for me as I was for myself.

  Upon arrival, reservations were awaiting me at the Grosvenor House, where Sam resided. I had missed him by just a few hours—he had left for the weekend. Kurt flew off to Paris to visit his client Elizabeth Taylor, while I paced for two days and nights awaiting Spiegel. By Monday, I needed a nail implant on eight of my ten fingers.

  I telephoned Spiegel’s suite. “Sam, I’m here.”

  Frings pushed a note written in capital letters in front of me: “DON’T TELL HIM I’M HERE.”

  “Good, Bob, good. Let’s play some gin? Nat Cohen’s free, so is Frankovich, we’ll get a foursome.”

  “Fine, Sam, can I come up to see you now?”

  “Of course, come on up.”

  I looked at Kurt. “He didn’t bring anything up about Lawrence.”

  “That’s why Frings is here. He wants options. He wants to steal you for nothing. He’s a gonif! Go up. See him. I’ll be by the phone.”

  Walking me to the elevator, Frings grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t let him bluff you. Play him like you play gin. Got it?”

  The elevator door opened. “Got it.”

  Into Spiegel’s apartment I went.

  Sam greeted me with his usual graciousness. Hot tea and heated scones were waiting (a very English practice).

  “What brings you to rainy town? No one’s here this time of year unless they have to be.”

  “You.”

  Sipping his tea, “Me?”

  “Lawrence.”

  Enjoying the taste of the scones, “Like a feather . . . only in Londontown.” Swallowing the feathery scone, “Lawrence who?”

  “Lawrence of Arabia.”

  “What about it?”

  “Sam, the cable . . . David Lean . . . you want me to meet with him.”

  “What cable? I never sent you a cable. I got pictures from you, yes. You’re totally wrong. I’ve just signed Omar Sharif; he’s an Egyptian actor. Ever hear of him?”

  “Can I use the john in the bedroom?”

  “Sure.”

  Slamming the door behind me, I didn’t know whether to throw up or call Kurt. I did both.

  Kurt barked, “I told you he’d do this! I’m coming right up!”

  Kurt arrived.

  Opening the door, Sam greeted Kurt. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, Kurt? What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? I’m here with Bob! That’s what I’m doing here.”

  Sam was not smiling.

  “I have no idea what either of you are talking about.”

  “You can bluff the kid, but you can’t bluff Frings,” as he angrily shook the cable in Spiegel’s face.

  “I did not send any cable!” Spiegel barked back.

  “You didn’t? Then read this,” screamed Frings.

  Quickly Sam read it, then turned it over. Purposefully angering Frings, he asked, “How many years have you been an agent?”

  Frings chuckled. “Longer than you’ve been a producer.”

  “Look at the back—it’s a fake.”

  For the first time, both of us looked at it, then at each other. Spiegel was right. The message was authentically stripped Western Union style, with a minor difference: it was the instruction for
m for sending a cable, not the cable itself.

  To make it worse, Sam began laughing. “A moron could see it’s a fake.”

  Kurt angrily interrupted, “No one knew about it.”

  “Dickie did,” I whispered.

  I looked at Kurt, and he at me.

  In duet, “That little cocksucker.”

  To this day, Dickie has never dared to admit he sent the cable.

  I spent the summer in New York. Rather than go out to the Hamptons, I spent weekends playing gin with the Wagners—R. J. and Natalie. Natalie Wood was having a difficult time helping a young actor play his first big screen role—Warren Beatty—in Splendor in the Grass, a picture being shot in Connecticut in which she was starring.

  One Sunday, dressed ready to join R. J. and Nat to celebrate her getting the lead in West Side Story, I was surprised by my doorbell. No one at my new digs at 36 Sutton Place South ever rang it without first being announced by the doorman.

  Looking through the peephole, “Who’s there?”

  “Robert Gordon.”

  “I don’t know who you are. Please leave.”

  I put my ear to the door and heard the sound of strange scraping footsteps. Robert Gordon . . . the name came back to me. Could that be the kid who’d lived next door to us on Riverside Drive, who’d gone to camp one summer and returned crippled with polio?

  I called the doorman, “Is the guy who’s just leaving crippled?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please have him come back up right away.”

  The Robert Gordon I let into my apartment was a young man in his twenties with heavy braces on both legs. Both his parents had died, he said, and he didn’t know where to turn.

  With an ingenuous laugh, he said, “All my friends think I know you well. But I didn’t come here to get an autograph. I need your help.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “When you have to, you find a way.”

  I was impressed. Here was a studious, serious guy with a terrible handicap, humble, obviously bright, looking at a guy who on the surface had everything.

  “How can I help?”

  A quick cut to a very long chase. For more than three years I paid for Robert Gordon’s tuition through law school, during which time he got married and had a baby—all on Godfather Bob, averaging $600 a week. But I did get letters upon letters of gratitude, snapshots of my new godson, who was named after me. Though a hundred Gs in, I rationalized that it was well worth it. Graduating with honors, it was celebration time. I invited the Gordons to New York. Robert showed up alone.

  “My namesake . . . I was looking forward to meeting him. Where’s Katy and Bobby?”

  “I have to talk to you alone, Bob. Katy and I decided I should take up accounting law. It’s one more year of school. I’d like you to take care of us for another year.”

  Didn’t sit well.

  “It’s been over three years now, Bob. Don’t you think it’s time to go out and test the turf? Go to school at night?”

  His face changed completely. Staring at me was a monster. “It’s easy for you to say—you’ve got everything!” He began to tremble. “I hate you,” he screamed. “I’ve always hated you!” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out several snapshots of his kid and flung them at me. “Look at them. Look at them! He wasn’t named after you! He was named after me!”

  I never heard from Robert Gordon again. I never learned from the mistake.

  “You’ve always wanted to be a producer, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, this is your chance to start at the top.”

  Over dinner with Kurt Frings, at Trader Vic’s, he told me his wife, Ketti, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for her dramatization of Look Homeward, Angel, had just finished writing her new play, The Umbrella. It had three acts and only three parts. Each part was already cast with a major star—Geraldine Page, the biggest star in the theater; Franchot Tone, among the biggest male stars in the theater; and Tony Franciosa, a theater and Hollywood heartthrob at the time. Also attached was the top Broadway director Gene Frankel. Kurt and I toasted to The Umbrella. How could it miss?

  That night, I read The Umbrella straight through. Maybe I had had one too many mai tais, but I didn’t understand it. I read it again. On the second time around, I was even more confused. Better get some shut eye.

  I woke up in the morning, my brain clear, as I turned page after page of The Umbrella, I still didn’t know what I was reading. (What the hell do I know to argue with Ketti Frings, Geraldine Page, Franchot Tone, and Tony Franciosa.)

  “It’s brilliant,” I told the investors.

  Within a month I raised the money, including some from my brother and some of my own. But, so what, here I was Robert Evans, Broadway bound.

  We tried out the play in Philadelphia. The opening was the biggest thing to hit Philly since Ben Franklin. The scalpers were having a heyday. You couldn’t hear a pin drop when the curtain parted. By the close of the third act, you couldn’t hear a pin drop either. There was no one in the theater. No one else understood it either. The Umbrella closed after one performance in Philadelphia.

  No longer was I Robert Evans, Broadway bound.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I now pronounce you man and wife. . . .”

  Our chapel was an ancient oak tree on the grounds of a romantic carriage house on La Colina in Beverly Hills. All my family were there, along with a host of friends—Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Natalie and R. J., Felicia and Jack Lemmon, Anne and Kirk Douglas, and more—gathered to witness the breaking of my marital virginity.

  None of them, I doubt, had ever seen a bride more beautiful than Sharon. I remember Rossano Brazzi telling Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in his most charming Italian manner, that my raven-haired bride was the brush of Michelangelo.

  I had met Sharon Hugueny on a dare. At the time she was Warner Brothers’ entry as the next Elizabeth Taylor playing a starring role in Parrish. It was her first picture and for some strange reason she was being protected as if she were the Hope diamond. No one could get near her. No one knew why.

  One day, Ray Danton, while shooting a film at Warners, dared, “Even you, Evans, won’t be able to get to her.”

  That’s all I needed. The next afternoon, she was shooting a scene with, that’s right, Troy Donahue. After each take, she would disappear into her trailer, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of her.

  The following day I came back with Ray. “What are the odds?” I asked.

  Ray said, “Name it.”

  While the hairdresser was putting her hair in a bun, I went up and introduced myself.

  “This is my second day on the set,” I said. “I just wanted to watch you.”

  She smiled sweetly. “You’re the bullfighter, aren’t you? Are you really a bullfighter?”

  “No, just a lousy actor.”

  She laughed.

  “When do you finish shooting?”

  “I have one more shot. Then I’m off for the day.”

  “Let’s take a drive to the sea.”

  “Really?”

  We eluded the bodyguards and spent the afternoon on the beach, just talking. For me, Sharon was from a different planet. She had been raised by loving, affluent parents in the San Fernando Valley, educated by private tutors, never allowed to touch money. (Her allowance was twenty-five cents a week.) She was so pure I felt guilty kissing her.

  Sharon fell madly in love with me, yes, but it could have been anyone who was the first to touch her. That’s how protected she had been every day of her life until that moment.

  Nine months earlier my own family had been hit with the horrible news—our mother had cancer. It was lodged in her jawbone. So devastating was its tentacles that it traumatized our family’s every waking moment.

  No one deserves the indignities my poor mother had to suffer. Being among the first to serve as a guinea pig to chemotherapy (better describ
ed as mustard gas), she was the victim of excruciating pain, losing her hair, her beauty, but not her dignity. It angers me that more than thirty years have passed, yet we haven’t found anything resembling a cure for the most dreaded disease of all. It’s still death the hard way.

  Was I in love with Sharon? I didn’t know. What I did know was my mother’s one desperate wish. To have her overly adventurous son, me, settle down to a life of normalcy. Just as my father before me gave his mother something prior to her passing, so did I want to give something to my mother. What better gift could there be than mother of the groom.

  Literally, I swept Sharon off her feet, proposing to her and setting a date. Her parents were vehemently against it—and rightfully so—but I wasn’t thinking of their daughter. I was thinking of my mother. My mother, who barely had the strength at the time to make the trip, traveled west for her shining moment.

  The night before the I dos, my mother wanted to meet her new daughter-in-law, and meet her alone. After she saw Sharon, my mother asked to see me alone too.

  In a voice hardly above a whisper, she said, “You can’t marry her, Bob. She’s a baby; she’s untouched. It’s unfair to her.”

  I lay down beside my mom and cradled her. “I love her, Mom. I’m a changed man. It’s going to be wonderful. A year from now you’ll see a little Bobby running around.”

  We both knew that would never be. What she didn’t know—and what I couldn’t tell her—was that I was only marrying Sharon for her.

  From Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons to Photoplay, Sharon and I were the couple of the moment. Together, we were a fan magazine’s dream. Being with me was far more important to Sharon than being in front of the cameras. This beautiful, genteel innocent not only was a virgin when I married her, but had never been on a date. Her family’s strict rules were not without reason.

  Still under contract to Darryl Zanuck, who had now become more active and was showing renewed interest in my career, I was signed to two of his most ambitious projects: The Longest Day and The Chapman Report.

  At the same time, I was feeling guilty living in Los Angeles while my mother withered away back east. Then came the ultimatum. Evan-Picone, unlike my career, was making huge strides. Though I owned a decent chunk, my brother, Charles, and Joe Picone were the major partners. Justifiably, they both confronted me. “Either come back or sell out.”