Peter Bart

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

  The Gatsby idea was actually fostered not by Evans, but rather by his wife, Ali MacGraw, who had been a devotee of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel since discovering it in her teenage years (she said she had read it at least three times). Ali had given her husband a leather-bound copy of another Fitzgerald story, “Winter Dreams,” as a wedding present—she had copied the story word for word in her own meticulous handwriting. Deeply touched, Evans decided that his gift to her in return would be the role of Daisy Buchanan.

  The notion of remaking The Great Gatsby as a starring vehicle for Ali MacGraw was hardly popular within the company. Previous regimes at Paramount had already made two Gatsbys, both of them failures. From my jaundiced point of view, Fitzgerald’s novel represented a literary trap. Though seductively stylized, the piece lacked a strong narrative, or even a true protagonist. Gatsby himself was an observer—a shadow rather than a presence. Events happened around him; he did not propel them.

  There were business problems as well: the rights had reverted back to the Fitzgerald family, and his daughter, Scottie Lanahan Smith, had no desire to sell them to yet another Hollywood intruder.

  Mindful of the skepticism within the studio, Evans persistently reminded his colleagues of all the players who had expressed interest in the project, Beatty to Nicholson to Sydney Pollack. “This could be a great star vehicle,” Evans maintained. “It’s not just an Ali project.”

  The debate continued over several months, until Yablans laid down the gauntlet. “If you can deliver Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty,” he said, “I’ll go with Ali.”

  Encouraged, Evans knew he first had to secure the rights. David Merrick, the curmudgeonly Broadway producer, had a social relationship with Scottie, so Evans quickly recruited him to the cause, promising him coproducer credit.

  Merrick was renowned for his powers of persuasion, and Fitzgerald’s daughter agreed to an option.

  Evans decided on similarly Machiavellian tactics in choosing a screenwriter. Truman Capote had capitalized on his fame for writing In Cold Blood by becoming a chatty regular on the Johnny Carson show. His “act” was both tipsy and bitchy. Capote also had become a favored guest of Charlie Bluhdorn’s salon in the Dominican Republic. The chairman felt he added social panache to his gatherings: Bluhdorn’s guest list was otherwise a little heavy with shady financial types.

  “Capote is perfect for Gatsby,” Evans told me one morning, having just had his epiphany. “He’s got the literary style, plus Charlie Bluhdorn loves him.”

  “Capote also has the best-publicized case of writer’s block in literary history,” I warned Evans. “That means that he is drinking too much. Way too much.”

  “Well, he better remember how to type,” Evans responded. “Between Capote and the rights, I’m already in for $300,000 and have nothing to show for it.”

  It turned out Capote did remember how to type, but that was the extent of his talents at that moment. He willingly accepted his $150,000 fee and even showed up at Evans’s house a few times to entertain guests with his scandalous anecdotes. When asked about his script, Capote promised that he was hard at work “improving” Fitzgerald’s novel, which he humorously dismissed as “illiterate.” His fabled agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, also called a couple of times to reassure us that the project was coming along swimmingly.

  The script that Capote delivered, however, was both tragic and bizarre. I took it home on a Friday night and, after reading it, I poured myself a tall vodka and tried to put my thoughts together. It was about eleven at night when I phoned the news to Evans.

  “You won’t believe this, Bob, but the material Truman turned in—I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a screenplay.”

  “But I have it here. It looks like a script. I haven’t read it yet ...”

  “All he did was type,” I said. “He typed the dialogue from the book, typed Fitzgerald’s descriptions and made them look like stage directions. He didn’t contribute one original line or idea.”

  “But he delivered a script ... ?” Evans stuttered.

  “Technically it is formatted like a script, but it is not a script. It isn’t anything,” I reiterated. “It is just type.”

  Evans read the so-called script the next morning and was numb with disappointment. He admonished me not to tell anyone—not even anyone at Paramount. “What the hell are we going to do?” Evans demanded.

  “We should get Swifty to return the money, for one thing,” I blurted.

  “But I need a script. I’m talking with Warren and Jack and I have to show them something soon. They are all interested, but I have to give them a screenplay.” The whole Gatsby exercise, he realized, was becoming a con.

  “I’ve talked about the project in the past with Francis,” I said, grasping at straws. “He admires Fitzgerald and he may need the money—you know, he’s always in financial trouble. Maybe a quick rewrite for a few hundred thousand. ...”

  I heard Evans gasp for a breath. “Coppola’s Gatsby. Maybe it could work.”

  I immediately hated myself for suggesting the idea. I knew it was dangerous to try to retrace one’s steps from an earlier journey. Over the next few days I called two or three people in the Coppola camp and learned that he, indeed, might be open to a healthy financial offer. However, I also knew Coppola still felt a bitter resentment toward Evans for grasping credit for The Godfather.

  Knowing there would be static to overcome, I decided to phone Coppola directly. His response was predictably cool. Yes, he loved Gatsby. Yes, he was open to a job, but he wanted time to reread the novel and think it over.

  He called back in a few days to list his demands. He refused to work directly with Evans. Further, he did not believe Ali MacGraw could master the role of Daisy. In fact, the Daisy character itself needed work. Rereading the novel, he found there were no true scenes between Gatsby and Daisy—nothing that could define their cinematic relationship. He would have to create a major scene—perhaps one where they talked through the night and truly engaged one another. He had been working on just such a scene.

  I could tell Coppola was intrigued and also that he needed the money. It was time to pass the baton to Evans. They would have to talk on the phone and make their peace.

  Evans would offer Coppola a $350,000 payday. He would also emphasize how important this was to him, how desperately he needed Coppola to rescue his pet project.

  A deal was made.

  Braced with Coppola’s commitment, Evans resumed his conversations with his list of proposed stars. He and Ali also started running films night after night, reviewing the possibilities and weighing their attributes. They were joined by some tough critics—Sue Mengers, the agent, and her husband, Jean-Claude Tramont, Roman Polanski, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and, on occasion, Cary Grant and Mike Nichols would all be invited to the screenings. Mengers in particular, was acerbic in her critiques of the performances on display. No one was good enough for Gatsby—except, of course, the actors in the screening room.

  But then, inevitably, came the moment of truth. Despite all the warm rhetoric, all the florid praise for Fitzgerald’s writing, none of the actors wanted the role. Money was not the issue. They all were offered top dollar. But no one wanted to star in a movie opposite Ali MacGraw. Not Nicholson or Beatty or any other “bankable” star.

  As usual, the most diplomatic turndown came from Beatty, who a few years earlier had himself tried to secure the screen rights to Gatsby.

  “The only person to play Gatsby is Bob Evans,” Beatty declared.

  Evans was confounded. He knew his limitations as an actor. He also knew that, as head of the studio, he could not take an acting sabbatical.

  “Evans is Gatsby,” Beatty reiterated to me one night as we stood at the tennis court adjacent to the Evans screening room. “Maybe I’d produce it and give him line readings, if necessary.”

  I didn’t believe him for a moment. Warren Beatty had a whimsical sense of humor—I had witnessed it many times. I
n addition, he was famously self-protective; there was no way he would produce a Gatsby with Ali MacGraw and Bob Evans starring.

  But now, yet another star name was tossed into the equation—one whose entry would trigger a dizzying series of events. Steve McQueen was looking for his next movie, and Gatsby surprisingly held his interest. Several possible projects were also looming, but they were all encumbered. He liked a screenplay written by Walter Hill titled The Getaway, but I, coincidentally, had already offered it to Peter Bogdanovich to direct, and Bogdanovich felt it would be a good role for his girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd. But Bogdanovich had confided to me that he couldn’t commit to The Getaway or to McQueen until yet another project had resolved itself, which he described as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Bogdanovich, a big fan of westerns, felt he could bring John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart together one more time on a project that was being written by Larry McMurtry. This would truly be a coup, Bogdanovich said, and he would be the first to see the finished script because McMurtry had written The Last Picture Show—a big success for them both.

  The movie dominoes were lined up, and I was excited to see how they would fall.

  The upshot was not at all as I expected. Wayne read the McMurtry script and passed. This unsettled the other two stars—Fonda and Stewart—and both pulled out. Bogdanovich then informed us that he was ready to do The Getaway, but Evans told him that Paramount would not do it with Cybill Shepherd. Ali MacGraw had just become available because, he announced, The Great Gatsby wasn’t coming together as expected. “She would be perfect for The Getaway,” said Evans.

  Bogdanovich was dumbfounded, and so was I. The Getaway was about a trucker and his trashy Southern girlfriend—not exactly a fit for Ali. Besides, Steve McQueen was suddenly now passionate about The Getaway and it was becoming clear to me that Ali MacGraw was equally passionate about Steve McQueen.

  Assimilating all these elements one evening, I took Sue Mengers aside for a reality check. Mengers was already angry because her client, Bogdanovich, was in a huff—he had no intention of making The Getaway with Ali MacGraw. Mengers’s antenna had also picked up on the budding McQueen-Ali flirtation. The two had met at dinner parties and screenings, but had never spent one-on-one time together. Ali, we knew, had been complaining to friends that her relationship with Evans was becoming wobbly. McQueen, a prototypical diamond-in-the-rough, was immensely attractive to her. Her lovers in the past had been smoothly urbane men—never a McQueen type.

  Most perplexing of all, despite the McQueen rumors, Evans was now trying to persuade his wife to take The Getaway. “Gatsby will take a long time to come together,” he told her. “The Getaway will keep you in the middle of the action.”

  “I don’t want to be in the action,” she responded. It was a different sort of action she was coveting.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked Mengers. “Why is Evans persuading her to do a movie with McQueen? Doesn’t he get it?”

  But Mengers, too, had conflicting agendas. Her former boss at the CMA talent agency, Freddie Fields, was now chief of a company called First Artists, which was co-owned by McQueen, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, and Sidney Poitier. And Fields had told Mengers that he wanted to produce The Getaway at First Artists with McQueen and MacGraw. The legendary Sam Peckinpah was standing by to direct the film and it had “hit” written all over it.

  For Mengers, this solved lots of problems. Two of her clients, MacGraw and McQueen, would instantly get big paychecks—her friend Freddie would see to that. Bogdanovich would be out of a job, but it had been his decision to walk away.

  The problem child was Evans: Was Evans into his own head to such a degree that he didn’t sense the electricity between Ali and McQueen? Further, was he unaware of Freddie Fields’s plot to steal The Getaway away from Paramount and set it up for his own company?

  When I tried to question Evans, I found him evasive. Gatsby had created a distance between us. Evans’s growing dependence on cocaine was making him fuzzy. He was seeing situations from another perspective or from no perspective at all.

  Yablans, meanwhile, was furious at Evans for losing The Getaway to a rival studio. Bluhdorn was yelling at him for blowing a Steve McQueen movie. I myself was feeling a growing frustration: The Bogdanovich Getaway that I had been developing was, in my view, a far better movie—with or without Ali. And Gatsby seemed a blatant waste of money and energy.

  Six weeks into production of The Getaway in El Paso, Evans, following the hugely successful premiere of The Godfather , decided impulsively to fly down to visit his wife. The reception was predictably chilly. Ali was forthright about her involvement with her costar. McQueen had quickly left the location, refusing to shoot until Evans disappeared. Sam Peckinpah barked at Evans to go away so he could finish shooting. Evans saw that both Ali and their son, Joshua, then a year old, were distraught over the confrontations. Devastated, he headed home.

  The confrontation in El Paso was perfect grist for the gossip columnists—a helpless Evans, a victorious McQueen. The accounts in the press were so melodramatic that even Henry Kissinger, an occasional visitor to the Evans compound, called from Washington to offer his services as a negotiator. When Evans told me of the phone call, I responded, “He’s messing up in Vietnam, Bob; I don’t think he’ll do any better with Evans and MacGraw.”

  Bob Evans was a single man once again. Despite the dramatics, I sensed that this status better suited him. As a creature of the movies, Evans had been playing a role as husband and daddy. He’d done a good job at it for a brief period of time, but it was still role-playing

  Meanwhile, Coppola, the man who had won his first Oscar for Patton, had restructured Gatsby into a coherent movie. The characters actually interacted with one another, though they still seemed tantalizingly out of reach. Coppola had managed to preserve Fitzgerald’s impeccably stylish veneer but at the same time had created a narrative drive.

  There was a movie here—possibly a commercial movie—and I understood what Bob Evans wanted Gatsby to be. He had come out of the fashion business, and he saw in the Gatsby-Fitzgerald aura a chance to build what would be closer to a fashion brand than a movie—a consummate triumph of style over substance. And his friends got that, too. A then-emerging young designer named Ralph Lauren was eager to create the wardrobe, and others of his ilk also were stepping forward.

  Indeed, throughout Paramount, there seemed to be a building obsession with the Gatsby brand. And there was no doubt anymore that this would be a blockbuster in the making. The only doubt, that is, seemed to be harbored by me.

  To my mind, if Gatsby were to be made at all, the key to putting it together was to pay Francis Coppola another million bucks to direct it and sign Brando to play Gatsby. Neither was stepping forward, I realized, but money—big money—could change their minds. Both desperately resented their meager back-end deals on The Godfather. Both were susceptible to creative bribes.

  And Brando would add a menace to the character of Jay Gatsby. It would be an older, more battle-scarred Gatsby, but a fascinating one nonetheless.

  But now a new prospective candidate entered the Gatsby derby. Robert Redford was willing to cut his price drastically to play Gatsby, and to my colleagues this was star casting. Redford’s Gatsby would be younger and better looking. A Redford vehicle would appeal to a wider audience.

  Redford’s main concern was dialogue. “In the book, Gatsby didn’t speak like a real person. His dialogue bordered on the absurd,” he told one interviewer. While the Gatsby character was “not fleshed out,” Redford admitted he was fascinated by the subtle implications about his past.

  Was Redford’s commitment real? Those of us at the studio who had lived through Blue were dubious about yet another Redford adventure. He had walked out on Blue and had done little to sell Little Fauss and Big Halsy. Still, he was a star and he seemed resolute about Gatsby.

  Redford was also the first choice of the several directors who seemed interested in
the film. The leading candidate to direct in Evans’s mind was a Brit named Jack Clayton, whose reputation rested on a small English film titled Room at the Top.

  Clayton seemed an odd choice. I had known him for several years, and liked him, but he had never directed a studio film. Still, with Clayton at the helm, Gatsby could be shot in London and structured to qualify for generous subsidies. And Redford and Clayton had met and found that their views of the material meshed.

  If Redford were Gatsby, then who would be his costar? Several top actresses were being tested for the part and the idea was to run the tests before a “committee” in New York to achieve a final judgment. I begged off the New York trip; my colleagues knew I was distressed that my Coppola-Brando scenario had been shunted aside. The committee consisted of Evans, the producer David Merrick and his chief aide Alan DeLynn, plus Clayton, Yablans, and Bluhdorn.

  After running the tests, Clayton cast a vote for Mia Farrow. Merrick, to everyone’s surprise, voted for Ali MacGraw, and said he wanted McQueen to play Gatsby. At this point Evans stammered objections, but Merrick, an intimidating presence, snapped, “Let’s start being professional here, Evans.”

  Charlie Bluhdorn had had enough. He stood up and roared, “I agree with Clayton. It’s Mia.” Merrick was apoplectic. “You’re turning down MacGraw and McQueen for Mia Farrow ...?”

  But Bluhdorn would not budge. Other actresses had been tested, including Candice Bergen, Katharine Ross, and Faye Dunaway, but discussion was cut off.

  What neither Bluhdorn nor Clayton knew at the time was that Mia Farrow, who was married to the conductor André Previn, was pregnant, and hence a stretch to play Fitzgerald’s teasing sparrow of a character (her wardrobe was continually expanded and ruffles added during the shoot).