Peter Bart

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

  Ultimately a semblance of calm descended once again on California’s major cities, and I found time to explore other sectors of my new beat. I wrote pieces about the impact of the real estate boom, the developing surfer culture, the gay baths in San Francisco, and the fast-rising California university system. I described the increasing problems of coexistence between California’s robotic right-wing constituencies in Orange County and the radical activists of San Francisco. I even managed to sneak in some stories about Hollywood. To me, the big story in the movie business was not about glamour and glitz but rather its economic collapse. Television had simply eviscerated the movie audience—some 30 million filmgoers a week were now buying movie tickets versus 90 million a decade earlier. The studios had run out of money; they had also run out of ideas.

  Hollywood’s press agents were exasperated with the Times for no longer posting a full-time correspondent to cover the film scene. It was as though the nation’s most important newspaper was saying “movies don’t matter anymore,” which was partially true. I found time to do an occasional piece about a star. I took a ride with Paul Newman in his Volkswagen bug, which was equipped with a Porsche engine (he loved hurtling past Detroit’s ponderous clunkers on the freeway). Steve McQueen explained to me how he was trying to become “grownup” and shed his bad boy reputation.

  One week I decided to do a piece about a fellow New Yorker who had begun to cut a swath in Hollywood. Robert Evans had been introduced to me by a friend, a screenwriter named Abby Mann, and I liked his self-deprecating charm. Evans and his brother, sons of a New York dentist, had built a successful clothing company called Evan Picone, but his life had abruptly changed one day when Norma Shearer saw him lounging by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As she watched Evans, Shearer had an epiphany: In her eyes, he looked astonishingly like her late husband, Irving Thalberg, the fabled studio chief. A movie called Man of a Thousand Faces was about to shoot at Universal starring Jimmy Cagney, who was to play Lon Chaney, and the studio was looking for an actor to portray Thalberg.

  Thalberg had been an attractive, slender, and rather fragile young man. Evans was handsome and more robust, but he fit Shearer’s idealized memory of her husband, who had achieved mythic status as head of MGM.

  To his amazement, Evans won the role, and in November 1956 the Times duly reported on the decision declaring that “the real and reel worlds of Hollywood had merged.”

  Within a year, however, Evans was destined to be “discovered” yet again. He was dancing with a girlfriend at a posh New York nightclub called El Morocco, when Darryl F. Zanuck, the feisty studio boss at Twentieth Century-Fox, summoned him to his table. Zanuck was looking for a young actor to play the bullfighter in his movie The Sun Also Rises, based on the Ernest Hemingway novel, and, watching Evans’s dance floor moves, he was convinced that he would be right for the role.

  Evans had by then resigned himself to a return to the schmatta trade, as he called it—it paid better than his gig in Hollywood—but Zanuck’s enthusiasm startled him. Here was a chance to play opposite Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power. Zanuck even offered to sign him to a five-year talent contract. Evans stammered a “yes.”

  The notion of a clothing executive playing a Spanish bullfighter triggered skepticism in the gossip columns. When pressured to fire his protégé, the studio boss responded with his famous rant, “The kid stays in the picture.” Evans’s performance, though hammered by some critics, was praised by others. And so, having been doubly discovered by age twenty-seven, Evans decided on a sharp change in course. Considering that he had played Thalberg and been adopted by Zanuck, he now decided that he wanted to become a mixture of the two.

  He wanted to run a studio.

  He knew he had none of the necessary credentials and that he wasn’t a member of the club that still ran Hollywood. But as Evans and I (and often Abby Mann) hung out together, I began to understand certain qualities about him that ultimately would defy the doubters. He was bonding with those power players of his generation—Richard Zanuck, son of Darryl, who was now the new studio chief at Fox, was one of his friends. Eager to master the dealmaking lexicon, Evans also was analyzing every contract he could get his hands on. He saw every movie that was opening and, over dinners, he would tear apart the performances and story structures.

  As I got to know him better, I realized my new friend was smart and funny. He also had an insatiable appetite for beautiful women. He wanted to date them, photograph them, flatter them, and sleep with them, and his attentions were eagerly reciprocated. The girls were amused by him: He had money, he didn’t do drugs (at the time), and there was a disarmingly old Hollywood quality to his romantic pursuit. The women understood that he’d be a one-night stand, and they seemed all right with that.

  But Evans’s reputation as an obsessive player further fueled the town’s skepticism about him. It was understood in the community that Evans hungered to be a hot producer and to achieve power beyond that, but no one felt he would get there. Indeed, Abby Mann, who by now had won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Judgment at Nuremberg, took a certain amount of needling because of his friendship with Evans, as did I.

  To further his producing ambitions, Evans soon hired a story scout in New York—a professional reader named George Wieser, who, for $175 a week, analyzed material coming into the publishing trade journals and talent agencies. Evans would forage through every novel and screenplay that was recommended to him. Wieser knew that Evans wasn’t looking for great literature: he needed material to bait the studios.

  The first book Evans submitted around town was a cheesy women’s novel called “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann. With a certain naive excitement, Evans neglected to acquire film rights but simply offered the novel to Twentieth Century-Fox as a possible Evans production. The studio covered it and liked it but, when Evans inquired about a deal, he was abruptly told there wouldn’t be any. A studio producer had been assigned to the project. Evans was shut out.

  Angry but undaunted, Evans quickly settled on yet another potential property. It was a novel called The Detective, written by a onetime New York police officer named Roderick Thorp. This time Evans put down $5,000 for an option before he went back to Fox. Again, the studio agreed with his taste in material, this time offering him a meager deal as an associate producer. Even as the talks were still going back and forth, Evans assaulted the studio with yet another property—F. Lee Bailey’s vivid account of the murder case involving Dr. Sam Sheppard. Evans persuaded a high-profile attorney named Greg Bautzer to plead his case at the studio, demanding an overall three-picture contract encompassing offices at the studio and a development fund.

  This bold foray again met with rejection, but rather than being affronted, Evans seemed genuinely amused by the process. He knew he was earning a reputation as a major pain in the ass at the studios, but he didn’t care.

  I decided to write a short piece for the Times about Evans’s relentless campaign to storm the fortress. Evans knew the town already put him down as the fringe actor who once played Thalberg. He was worried that a possible Times story would bring further ridicule down on him and did his best to talk me out of it, but I wrote it anyway.

  My piece caused a minor stir in town. Why was the Times devoting space to an outsider who, at this moment, simply didn’t matter?

  What neither Evans nor l could know at the time was that the story had been avidly consumed by another outsider who had a yearning for Hollywood glitz. His name was Charles Bluhdorn.

  I had never heard of Bluhdorn, nor had Evans. But a few days after my story appeared, a somewhat breathless Evans called to confide that he had received a surprise phone call from his attorney, Greg Bautzer. The gist of the call: Charles Bluhdorn had read about Evans and liked what he read. He wanted Evans to fly to New York for a meeting. And since Bluhdorn had just closed a deal to acquire control of Paramount Pictures, Bautzer thought it would be a damn good meeting. This was Paramount, after all—one of Hollywood’
s fabled studios, which had sprung to life some sixty years earlier under the name of Famous Players. The Famous Players had proved to be infamous in some cases, Bautzer reminded his friend, but the opportunity was real.

  Evans was in shock. What was this meeting about? Bautzer’s response was forceful: Bluhdorn wanted to be a player, he advised. “Pack your bags.”

  Some quick checking produced a few skimpy facts about this new player. Born somewhere in Central Europe, he’d come to the U.S. in 1942 and started work as a cotton broker and wannabe entrepreneur. He’d begun stringing together an odd mishmash of companies, starting with an auto parts company called Michigan Bumper, but his ambitions were far more glamorous. His acquisition of Paramount reflected not only a love of movies but also an urgent desire for social acceptance.

  The individual that Evans met in New York was a coarse man with a guttural accent, a frenzied energy, and the instincts of a true gambler. He hurled question after question at Evans, starting another even before Evans had finished his response to the previous one. Evans had never met anyone quite like this, but he instinctively felt a chemistry. He was less impressed, however, by the person who hovered at Bluhdorn’s side, a public relations man named Martin Davis, who had helped orchestrate the Paramount acquisition. Davis was like a Doberman, Evans later told me. He hovered, listened, rarely talked.

  Evans admitted he was bewildered by the encounter, yet within weeks an astonishing offer came via Davis: Bluhdorn wanted to hire Evans to become his head of production in London. If he did a good job, he would be shifted to Los Angeles within a few months and become the production chief at the Paramount studio.

  When Evans and I next sat down to dinner, I picked up on his mix of excitement and abject panic. I also realized there was a curious bond emerging between us. To a degree I had been responsible for this bizarre change in his life. It was my article that triggered the interest from Bluhdorn. This was becoming not only his adventure, but our adventure.

  Typically, Evans was quick to acknowledge his own vulnerability. “I don’t know how to be a head of production,” he said. “I wasn’t even convincing playing the part in a movie. I don’t really know London. I think I’ve been there once. What am I getting into?”

  I wanted to ask him the obvious question, but could not decide how to phrase it: Why did Charles Bluhdorn offer you this job? Why didn’t he go after a member of “the club”—a Hollywood player with an established reputation?

  There was no point asking, I decided, because I could tell Evans didn’t have the remotest clue as to the answer. Indeed, it was months before I myself had any insight into this curious relationship.

  Evans, I decided, personified a sort of dream fantasy version of Bluhdorn. He was an attractive, smooth-talking ladies’ man; Bluhdorn was homely and abrasive and sexually repressed. Evans had an ingratiating boyishness and transparency. He wore his heart on his sleeve. Bluhdorn was devious, his appetites opaque. He was a European who had mastered the business mystique of his new country but none of its social subtext. He felt himself the foreigner, the outsider. Evans was the total insider.

  Except he wasn’t. Evans had figured out Hollywood’s surface secrets, but had not really broken the code.

  And over dinner, he urgently wanted to make a deal with me. He would be leaving for London shortly, and my responsibility as a friend was to watch his back in Los Angeles. More important, he wanted me to agree to read and give my opinion on a few scripts that he would send me.

  He said he would arrange to pay me, but I told him emphatically that I would not accept any money. I had a great job at the Times and had no intention of compromising it. Besides, I had no experience as a script analyst. If he wanted to send something to me I would do my best to read it and tell him what I thought. It would be a personal favor, not a business one.

  I told myself nothing would emerge from this conversation. I was wrong. Within days the scripts started arriving. I ignored most of them, but if the subject matter seemed interesting, or the author’s name struck a bell, I started reading. Two or three times a week I would get a call from Evans in London asking, “What did you think of The Italian Job?” or some other title.

  While I didn’t really have much insight into screenplay writing, neither did Evans. At least I had time to read some of them, and clearly he did not. He was enmeshed in meetings with London movers and shakers and was relishing the experience. Suddenly he was no longer doing the pitching, people were pitching him! Talented young filmmakers were seeking him out. Plus an entirely fresh cast of beautiful women seemed to await him at every corner.

  But Evans’s exultant phone calls quickly began to take on a worried tone. The same hustlers who were now pitching Evans had previously found a patsy in Charles Bluhdorn who, in his first six months as owner of the studio, had committed to a bizarre array of what he considered surefire hits.

  Bluhdorn had proved to be an easy target. A young performer named Tommy Steele had scored a success in London with a musical called Half a Sixpence, and Bluhdorn had committed to a movie version. The result was daunting: Here was a film, Evans told me, that could find no possible audience in the U.S. Another Bluhdorn acquisition based on the bestseller called Is Paris Burning? had just been screened in Paris—again, a film with no American appeal.

  As the weeks went by, it became ever more obvious that London was not going well for Evans. A mini-bureaucracy had remained in place from the pre-Bluhdorn regime, and it was resisting Evans’s efforts to connect with new ideas and new talent. London, too, had its “club,” and Evans was not a welcome member. Before long, it seemed Evans’s Paramount adventure would be over; he would be back in Hollywood putting together his production deals.

  And that would certainly be fine by me. While I’d appreciated my basic education in script reading, I was never getting much feedback on my personal assessments. There was no indication that anything that I liked was actually getting attention.

  My intuition was wrong again. Five months after Evans disappeared into the London fog, I received another urgent phone call. He was indeed coming back to Hollywood—not as a producer but as Paramount’s chief of production. He would be replacing Howard W. Koch, one of the most respected executives in the movie industry. And he urgently wanted me to become his right-hand man.

  Now it was my turn to be genuinely shocked. I had been playing a game, or what I thought was a game, and suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore. It was one thing to chat about scripts with a friend, but now the stakes had been raised.

  Much as I liked Evans and respected his native intelligence, I couldn’t believe that Bluhdorn had decreed that he could be molded into a corporate executive. The reaction in the press to the Evans announcement matched my skepticism.

  “Bluhdorn’s folly,” trumpeted one trade story. “Bluhdorn’s blow job,” said Hollywood Close-up, a gossip paper.

  Arriving back in town, Evans made it very clear to me that his new job was real and so was mine, if I decided to take it. He had cleared my deal with Bluhdorn and his subordinates. There had been some resistance, but he’d won his point. “I told them I wasn’t equipped for my new job, so I wanted someone at my side who was also not prepared,” Evans said. That was such an absurd argument that I believed he’d actually made it. “This will be an adventure,” Evans told me with a smile that was at once friendly and fatalistic. “What’s the worst they can do to us? They won’t kill us. What have we got to lose?”

  I realized that was both the good and the bad news. Still only thirty-six, Evans had succeeded at everything he had tried. As a sort of playboy prince, he’d made his fuck-you money, earned a measure of celebrity, and had made it all seem like one grand party. Now along came Charles Bluhdorn to make the party even grander.

  But what about me?

  Pondering this “adventure,” I found myself conflicted on several levels. Journalism was not a casual endeavor for me; I had been consumed with writing and reporting since boyhood. I’d been editor
of my high school paper and of my college paper. When I walked into my first newsroom, I literally palpitated with excitement.

  And my Times assignment in California had been a rewarding one; I had experienced the best and the worst. I had ducked behind cars in darkened streets as the bullets flew and cops sprawled next to me. I had also hung with the hippies at Haight-Ashbury and shared joints with them. And I had made a point of having lunch with those icons of the movie business who I felt deserved attention from the Times—Walt Disney, Jack Warner, Lew Wasserman, Sam Goldwyn, Alfred Hitchcock.

  I appreciated what it was like to live in the Times’ aura. You could ask any question of any dignitary, and they felt compelled to answer. You were neither artisan nor celebrity, but you occupied your own unique space. You had amazing access but also unique responsibility: It was your job to get it right.

  I knew I could never explain those things to Evans. He was in another orbit.

  But I kept waking up in the middle of the night, realizing that the decision was not that easy. It wasn’t just about the job, it was about the moment. The movie industry was in a state of collapse, studio regimes were tumbling. Paramount represented not so much a studio as a power vacuum. The place had ground to a halt.

  And that’s what was haunting me. Movies were either going to become anachronisms or there would be a rebirth, and maybe I could be a small part of it. Even a big part of it.

  But the question remained, would our voices be heard over the din? Paramount itself was a maelstrom of competing agendas. We would be the new faces in production, and the old guard would resist the initiatives of newcomers. The writing and directing jobs were being recycled among the familiar faces, and they were not youthful faces.

  So would I be able to change that? I solicited the advice of a few friends both in journalism and in the film business, and they all were dubious. I even sought out Howard Koch, the man Evans was replacing. A convivial and unpretentious man, Koch admitted he’d always been uncomfortable in his role as studio chief. As he explained it, “For every time you say ‘yes’ in this job, you say ‘no’ a hundred times, and I hate saying ‘no.’ I don’t like disappointing people. Do you really want to do this job?”