Producer hit Hollywood gold before his career imploded in spectacular fashion
Robert Evans, who has died aged 89, presided over a renaissance in the fortunes of Paramount Pictures during the late 1960s and early 1970s with acclaimed films such as Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and The Godfather, before his career spectacularly imploded.
With his gravelly voice, large-framed designer glasses, perpetual tan and fondness for gold chains and suede jeans, Evans brimmed with a rakish confidence and showmanship. He was long considered one of the savviest production chiefs in Hollywood, before cocaine abuse derailed his career.
He pampered his stars, paid his writers generously and created an atmosphere in which the art of moviemaking seemed to matter more than the bottom line. But eventually the profits came.
As Paramount’s head of worldwide production from 1966 to 1975, his commercial choices and hunch for talent were credited with helping lift the company’s sagging fortunes with a staggering variety of popular and often critical hits.
They included The Odd Couple (1968), True Grit (1969), Love Story (1970), Serpico (1973), Paper Moon (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Death Wish (1974), and three celebrated Francis Ford Coppola dramas, The Godfather
(1972), The Godfather, Part II (1974) and The Conversation (1974).
Evans and one of his lieutenants, Peter Bart, came to champion directors other studios wouldn’t hire – and who were cheaper. Roman Polanski was considered a young wild card from Europe when he was entrusted with the adaptation of Ira Levin’s Gothic novel Rosemary’s Baby. The 1968 film made a movie star of Mia Farrow.
‘‘My business is gambling,’’ Evans once told Esquire. ‘‘It’s the gambling instinct that makes me tick.’’
He often claimed to have no idea what many of the scripts were about but maintained that the right talent packaged together (actor Jack Nicholson, director Polanski, writer Robert Towne) could make for a dazzling success (Chinatown).
‘‘That’s the problem with today’s business,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in
2002. ‘‘It’s not an art form, it’s a barter form. The studios are run by committees of MBAs, but I’ve never seen an MBA who knows how to make people cry.’’
As a young man, Evans was blessed with pretty-boy looks and conveyed a sex appeal that won him many female admirers who happened to be the wives of very influential men. Yvette Bluhdorn, wife of industrialist Charles Bluhdorn, smoothed his path to run one of her husband’s smaller properties, Paramount Pictures. So in 1966 Evans catapulted from obscurity to one of the most powerful jobs in Hollywood.
He was married seven times to a succession of models and actresses, including Love Story star Ali MacGraw and former Miss America Phyllis George. His fifth marriage, to Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg, was annulled after nine days in 1998.
He struggled with a cocaine addiction for many years. And he drew unwanted headlines when Coppola’s 1984 film The Cotton Club, which Evans produced, was linked to a reallife kidnapping and murder case. The ensuing court case – and many bridges burned – left Evans a Hollywood pariah.
He was born Robert J. Shapera – the J ‘‘standing for nothing I knew of’’, he once wrote – in New York. He was 10 when his father changed his children’s last name to Evans.
His acting career was brief and forgettable. But the film that made his name was a script that had been rejected all over town. Love Story, a sappy melodrama, shocked the Hollywood establishment when it broke boxoffice records on its release in 1970.
Flush with Love Story’s success, Evans turned next to The Godfather. Making the film was a tumultuous experience. ‘‘Francis and I had a perfect record; we didn’t agree on anything – from editing to music to sound,’’ Evans wrote of working with Coppola.
Evans soon grew restive as a mere employee of the studio; he wanted to own a stake in his films. He got his chance by producing the 1974 LA noir Chinatown, whose screenplay won an Oscar.
In 1980, Evans pleaded guilty to cocaine possession; he was sentenced to one year’s probation. Worse trouble came his way when Cotton Club investor Roy Radin was found dead in a dry creek bed, having been shot 13 times. Evans’ connections to the case made him persona non grata for years.
In his later years Evans lived quietly, enjoying the flurry of attention stimulated by his autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994), which was made into a hugely successful audiobook and later a documentary film, with Evans narrating both; the tone of his gravelly voice was described by one critic as ‘‘thick with the sweet rot of sybaritic pleasure’’.
‘‘My life reads like fiction,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. ‘‘Cheap fiction. I was the lawless. But I came back from Jesse James-ville.’’
‘‘My life reads like fiction. Cheap fiction.’’
Robert Evans