The Kid Stays in the Picture

by Robert Evans

  Looking at yourself in the mirror, calling a spade a spade ain’t easy—Evans, you’re not good enough to make it all the way. The parts you’re offered you don’t want, and the parts you want you’re not offered. Paul Newman? No shot. Tab Hunter? More like it. Not for me. I wanted to be the next Darryl Zanuck, and I paid the price, making the most difficult decision of my life. I gave up the glamour of Hollywood, two firm pictures with Zanuck, a storybook existence, and returned to New York City with my child bride, back to Evan-Picone’s showroom on Broadway.

  New York was a disaster. Every morning I would get out of the cab at 1407 Broadway, wishing I were going through the gate at Twentieth Century–Fox. Every evening, sitting in a restaurant entertaining an executive from Saks, Bloomingdale’s or Bullock’s, I was thinking how much I missed my actor, director, and writer pals. I hated the Hamptons. I loved Malibu.

  For my child bride, it was worse. One afternoon, my secretary buzzed me. Sharon was on the line, urgent.

  “Darling, what’s the problem?” All I could hear was weeping. “What is it, baby, what is it?”

  Childlike, “I don’t know where I am.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “I don’t know. I’m so scared!”

  “Sharon, darling, are you in a phone booth?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Inside or outside?”

  “Inside . . .”

  “What street are you on?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Listen carefully, darling. Open the door and look at the street sign.”

  “I can’t. I’m too scared!”

  My heart dropped. What had I been thinking, bringing this child to New York? It was like setting a Persian cat loose in the Amazon.

  “Please, darling. Just read the street sign. Tell me what it says and I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up!”

  I heard her open the phone booth door and say to a passerby, “Please, mister, where am I?” Apparently he thought she was crazy and kept walking.

  “Ask a lady.”

  I heard a woman answer, “You’re on Fifty-fourth and Lexington, dearie.”

  “You’re only four blocks from home, darling. Walk down to First Avenue, turn left, go one block, and you’re there.”

  “I can’t! I can’t! I’m too scared!”

  “Stay where you are—I’ll be there in ten.”

  My mother was right. How could I have been so insensitive to think this fragile flower could survive, no less me, but New York as well? I told Sharon I couldn’t stand by and watch her be hurt anymore. It was unfair to her. Listening like a child, she understood.

  Together we went to Mexico for a quickie divorce. Almost six months to the day of our wedding, we kissed good-bye. It was like the first day we met.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Fuck goin’ public! We’re goin’ private, fill our pockets with green, not stock!”

  If ever my brother was right, it was then. For months, Eastman-Dillon, Lehman Brothers, and Loeb, Rhoades—three of the biggest firms on Wall Street—had all been competing to bring Evan-Picone public.

  “Let me follow through with Charlie Revson,” said my brother. “If he wants us, it’s payout time. No papier-mâché shit.”

  Charlie Revson, founder and owner of Revlon, wanted to buy us out. None of us knew why, but who the fuck cared. My brother was the seducer and quite a lover was he. Akin to a sex-starved Victorian groom, the more time the two Charlies spent together, the more Revson wanted to get in Evan-Picone’s pants. The negotiations lasted over six months.

  Each Charlie thinking he was playing the other like a fiddle. Ahhh—but baby brother came up with the cat. Her name, Sheika Mosher—better known as Yellowbird, the only stripper on the Vegas strip to get equal billing with Milton Berle. We had known each other for a month and had fallen deeply in lust. For her, leaving Vegas for New York was a step in the wrong direction, but she wanted to change her style of life. I was there to accommodate that wish—from $2,500 a week at El Rancho Vegas to $140 a week at Evan-Picone as a showroom model, where she was more seductive putting her clothes on than she was in Vegas taking them off.

  One day Charlie Revson came in to look at our new fall line. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. And it wasn’t our clothes he was smiling at. Revson had never liked me and let everyone know it.

  My brother snuck into my office. He whispered, “Bob, do you mind if Revson takes Sheika to dinner?”

  A smile crossed my face. “Charlie, the price of poker’s just gone up for Evan-Picone.”

  Revson’s life was his work. Dining out each night with six to eight of his top lieutenants, strategizing their next move to gobble up Evan-Picone, he never realized that Mata Hari was smack in the middle of his high command. My little Sheika became Revson’s constant girl Friday, each night listening, listening, listening.

  In June 1962, the deal was closed. Our sale price on signing was $12 million in cash. The only hitch was that Charles, Joe Picone, and I had to sign five-year employment contracts. Some hitch. By today’s standards, those numbers would equate to several hundred million.

  Sheika was right. Her talents lay in New York. Where else could she strip several million out of one pocket into another? Thank you, dear Sheika, thank you again. Proving the prophecy true that it’s a woman’s world! While men think it’s theirs.

  What should have been a triumphant time was not. My mother died, mercifully. In the last year of her life we had tried every known cure, experimental or illegal, including pure enzyme shots administered by the infamous Dr. Max Jacobsen, who had administered addictive amphetamine mixes to John F. Kennedy, Eddie Fisher, Alan Jay Lerner, and scores of others on his cure-all, which was nothing more than a highly addictive form of speed.

  It’s strange, but women are so much stronger. Had my father died first, I’m sure my mother would have recovered in time and gone on with her life, possibly a better one. But Pop, who had stayed by his Florence’s bedside throughout her illness, never recovered. He retreated further and further into his shell. The tentacles of Alzheimer’s had struck. Within a few years he couldn’t walk, talk, or express pain.

  Charles and I refused to put him in a home. For the last ten years of his life he had round-the-clock nursing at 737 Park Avenue. In 1982 he finally passed away. Pop was dealt a bum deck. He never once picked up aces. Yet the indelible memory of both my mother and father’s moral standards remain deeply imbedded in Alice, Charles, and me. Rarely does a day pass without a loving thought toward Mom and Pop. We were lucky kids.

  Thanks to the combination of Hollywood notoriety and newfound green, New York became far more friendly. When my mother passed away, I moved into a town house on East Sixty-seventh off Fifth Avenue, complete with elevator, two terraces, and three skylights. It was there I discovered a new passion—interior design—and learned that background makes foreground. If I was paid too many compliments on the tie I was wearing, it would immediately go into a shredder. The tie is there for me to look better, not for me to make the tie look better. If my drawing room’s eighteenth-century armoire was given too much attention, off to Sotheby’s it went. Again, the armoire is there to enhance the drawing room, not the reverse. That’s what background makes foreground is all about.

  My new pad was akin to a corner of Paris in New York. Maybe it was because, for the first time, I had “fuck you” money in my pocket, but I began feeling better about myself. Living on the East Coast, even being a so-called movie star puts you on the A list. Combine that with being a fashion tycoon and you end up on the A+ list. I never made that. A Jew never does. The A+ list is boring anyway. The A list is good enough for me. Certainly, it dealt more of an action hand.

  I became great pals with Porfirio Rubirosa. I met him with Darryl Zanuck a year earlier. This legendary cocksman and sportsman, ex-husband of three of the richest women in the world (from whom he asked nothing after divo
rcing them), was the best company in the world: wonderfully self-deprecating, intensely focused on whomever he was with. A man’s man, that’s for sure. A woman’s man? There was never anyone like him.

  In the winter of 1962 we went together to the International Red Cross Ball in Palm Beach. There were movie stars galore there—from Cary Grant to Yul Brynner. When Ruby walked in, the word “background” is what fit their presence. Ruby was the star. Excitedly, every woman’s eyes turned to him, then to his crotch. That was his legend. In the forties and fifties, the popular quote was “in like Flynn,” referring to Errol. In the fifties and sixties it was “How’s your Rubirosa?” referring to my pal. Strange I should know both guys!

  A few months later, Ruby was in New York. Would I dine with him and his wife? By the way, he added, an extraordinary-looking girl from Brazil would be joining us. A half hour later, the four of us were at Côte Basque, a great French restaurant. The girl didn’t speak a word of English and my Portuguese was even less. But her beauty and charm made up for it.

  Naturally, my ego told me, She really digs me. Ah, possibly the next Mrs. Evans.

  Better we don’t speak, it’ll last longer, I thought to myself.

  Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrialist, joined us for dessert with the actress Julie Newmar on his arm. After the soufflés, Gianni suggested we try out a new private disco called Le Club. Though the weather was bitter cold as we took off on foot, I felt the warmth of heaven.

  “Florinda Evans,” I kept repeating to myself, “sounds good, sounds good,” as we entered the newest hot spot in New York.

  Florinda and I danced till we were drenched in sweat. Once we sat, Odille, Ruby’s wife, leaned forward across her husband, the century’s greatest lover, put her hand on top of mine and shocked me like I had never been before, which ain’t easy.

  “Forget her, Bob. She’s mine.”

  * * *

  Months later, Alan Jay Lerner invited me to a small after theater party for his old roommate, Jack Kennedy, and his wife, Jackie. My date that evening was one of Eileen Ford’s top models, Renata Boeck, whom I’d been seeing for several months. Renata and I were just about the only people there who’d never met the Camelot couple. I would have liked to believe that the President really knew as much about me as he pretended, but he’d undoubtedly had somebody do his homework. We shook hands and he recited my screen credits and asked me about the stars I’d worked with—especially Ava Gardner. Wow, I thought. What a terrific guy!

  Renata and I were sound asleep when the phone rang at three in the morning. I picked up the receiver.

  “This is Jack Kennedy calling. Can I please speak with Renata?”

  “The President?”

  Without a slight raise of voice, “That’s right.”

  I woke up Renata.

  “It’s the President on the phone. . . .”

  I handed her the phone—what else could I do? They chatted a few minutes and no chat was more charming than Renata’s purr. After hanging up, Renata nestled close to me and fell back to sleep. As tempting as it was, I never asked her what they talked about. Nor later did I ask her if she ever saw him. She wouldn’t have told me the truth anyway.

  From the moment Revlon took over Evan-Picone, its business went south. It was run by a committee that knew everything about fragrances but nothing about fashion. Soon our bottom line was lipstick red. In November 1963 a sit-down was called in my brother’s office. Revson and his honchos were there, along with Charles, Joe Picone, and me.

  Outside the temperature was chilly. Inside it was freezing. Adolf Revson was terrorizing the group when my brother’s secretary ran into the office.

  “The President’s been shot!”

  All of us jumped up and rushed to the television. Not Uncle Charlie.

  “Sit down,” he demanded. “This is not a social call. I don’t like looking at red numbers. Let’s get down to business.”

  I pulled my brother aside. “I hate the motherfucker and he doesn’t like me either. Help me get out of my contract, will ya?”

  It was easy. Revson was glad to get rid of me.

  As brothers, Charles and I were so alike yet so different. Charles ultraconservative, me a gambler. Today, Charles is a millionaire a hundred times over. Me, I’m still in hock.

  Our first investment, after selling Evan-Picone, was in a speculative mutual fund. Charles, the far richer, put in $25,000; me, a quarter of a million. Two months later, the fund went bust, I mean bust—zero back on the dollar. How depressing it would have been to know then that it was a portent of our financial futures. Even in the gold-rush eighties, I came up a loser.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the late fifties, Warren Beatty was playing second fiddle to Dwayne Hickman in the TV series “Dobie Gillis.” Me, I was playing opposite Ava Gardner in Cinemascope. Five years passed. He was now a top movie star and I was back selling ladies’ pants. Even then we were competitive as to whose pants we were in the night before.

  Warren kept a pad in New York, which he shared with Charlie Feldman, his mentor and friend.

  Over lunch at P.J. Clarke’s, Warren, Charlie, and I were discussing Charlie’s new flick, which Warren was to star in, written by a rising comic named Woody Allen—What’s New Pussycat? The title was taken from real life—Warren’s life, that is; it was his opening line to whichever new girl was on the other end of the phone. Charlie was telling Warren and me how brilliant this new kid, Woody Allen, was.

  “The kid’s a genius. We went to Danny’s Hideaway for a steak last night. I laughed so hard, I couldn’t eat.”

  “Yeah,” said Warren, “and I had the most boring night of my life with the new Miss Iceberg.”

  When he told me how he’d batted out with Eileen Ford’s latest Scandinavian discovery, I knew this was a girl I had to meet.

  Her name was Camilla Sparv. The moment she arrived in New York, she was a star model. A tall, leggy blonde, she had a natural patrician quality money can’t buy. After many calls to the Ford agency, the best I could land was a Friday breakfast. I had a forty-minute shot at her. Like a fool I broke my old rule against talking about myself.

  We met in the coffee shop around the corner from her hotel—she in curlers, me in a three-piece suit with my hair slicked back. I never saw anyone so skinny eat so much. I babbled. She ate. Finishing off the last of her eggs, pancakes, and bacon, she gave me a quick good-bye.

  Not liking her attitude, “Suppose the more you eat, the taller you get.”

  “That’s right,” laughing in my face. “Too tall for you, Mr. Smoothie.”

  Royally opening her cab door, I half-whispered, “Really.”

  Within twenty-four hours we were together and stayed that way until the day we divorced.

  Within a year we were married. I knew then it was time to get serious or get in trouble. It was safer to get serious. I had everything going for me. A sensational new wife, my pockets bulging with green, and for the first time in my life I was unemployed, with no less than a rainbow of options to pick from.

  Big screen parts were still being offered me. Opposite Mamie Van Doren not Elizabeth Taylor. Going for broke rather than going backward had always been my style. I wanted to be the next Zanuck. From my townhouse in New York, I set up a nonexistent Robert Evans Production Company. Through a friend, I met a reviewer at Publishers Weekly named George Wieser who had access to every new book before it went anywhere. Though his position was influential, his salary wasn’t. For $175 a week, he agreed to moonlight as my literary scout.

  Before his second check, he gave me a sneak look on the manuscript of a new novel, Valley of the Dolls, written by a then unknown author, Jacqueline Susann.

  “It’s hot pulp, Bob,” he said. “Make a quick deal on it. Lock her up on her next three books.”

  Five years earlier I became friends with a producer at Fox, David Brown. Under contract to the studio at the time, he wanted me to be one point of the triangle in an erotic screenplay, The Chin
ese Room. Monty Clift and Brigitte Bardot were set as the other two points. Announced to be made, it was pulled at the last minute. Distribution thought it was too hot to handle. Now David was based in New York and married to the brilliant new editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown. I had always thought of David as a fan. Naïvely, I went to see him.

  Laying the galleys of Jackie Susann’s novel on his desk, I said, “David, I think I have Fox’s next big picture. I can get a lock on the author too.”

  David glanced at the title page. “Thanks, Bob. I’ll get back to you in a week.”

  A week later, Fox bought the film rights to Valley of the Dolls, but they didn’t buy Bob Evans to go with it. Instead they assigned one of their staff producers, David Weisbart, to produce it. Money talks and bullshit walks. For five Gs, I could have had an option on the film rights to what was to become not only a best-selling novel, but a smash film to boot. Once a mistake—twice a failure. It never happened again.

  If ever a guy was worth his $175 a week, it was George Wieser. Less than a month later, he brought me another first novel, this one written by an ex-cop, Roderick Thorp.

  Holding up the manuscript, he said, “It’s gonna be big, Bob, I can smell it. The guy knows what he’s talking about. It’s called The Detective.”

  For five Gs, I was the proud owner of an option of a new manuscript written by a totally unknown author. But for some reason, knowing that possession is 99 percent of ownership, I had the balls of Goliath when I went back to see David Brown.

  “I didn’t do too badly with Valley of the Dolls, did I, David?” I dropped The Detective on his desk. “Insiders say this is the sleeper of the year.”

  Again, David glanced at the title page. “Hmmm, I’ll get back to you in a week.”