How “the Kid” conquered Hollywood
Robert Evans was already a millionaire when, in 1956, he was spotted sunbathing by a hotel pool in Los Angeles by the 1940s screen icon Norma Shearer. Noting his resemblance to her late husband, the producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him if he would like to play Thalberg in a new film. The bronzed Evans, who ran a women’s fashion business in New York, shot back that he was not an actor: he was “in ladies’ pants”. And he would always remain so, in every sense, said The Times. However, he followed up on the idea, and made the film. But while he had matinee idol looks, his talents as an actor were so limited that on the set of his next film, The
Sun Also Rises (1957), his co-stars demanded he be fired. Its producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, refused to have his casting challenged. “The kid stays in the picture,” he famously declared. But at that moment, Evans, who was thereafter known as “the Kid”, came to the life-changing realisation that he didn’t want to be “some actor shitting in his pants waiting to get a part or not. I wanted to be him.”
Evans, who has died aged 89, would become one of the most successful producers of his age – ushering to the screen a host of major films, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, Love
Story, Serpico and Chinatown. Along the way, the perma-tanned film mogul partied with the likes of Warren Beatty, played tennis with Henry Kissinger, dated scores of glamorous women – and married some of them. He also became a raging cocaine addict. In bed with a woman, but unable to move because of his sciatic pain, she’d suggested he try “a little of this”. It was 1974: “I was the last person I knew to use it.” And he didn’t take a little, he took a lot. “Didn’t help my nose. Didn’t help my back. It didn’t help my career.” In 1980, the music stopped when he was convicted of cocaine trafficking, said Vanity Fair. Three years later, Evans made the expensive flop The Cotton Club, and was linked to the so-called Cotton Club murder – of an investor in the film. Although he wasn’t implicated in the killing, he refused to testify in the case and emerged a pariah. There followed ten terrible years, he said. “There were nights when I cried myself to sleep.” His $11m fortune dwindled to $37, not helped by his serial divorces. In total, he was married and divorced seven times. The most prominent of his wives was Ali MacGraw, with whom he had his only child, Josh. She left him for Steve McQueen. A later marriage to another actress, Catherine Oxenberg, lasted nine days.
Evans was born Robert J. Shapera – “the J sounding good but standing for nothing I knew of” – in 1930, and grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. His father was a dentist, his mother a housewife. Evans had some success as a radio actor in his teens, said The Guardian, then joined his brother’s successful fashion firm. It was on a sales trip to LA that he had his fateful meeting with Shearer. When his brief career as an actor ended, he returned to New York. Not long after, he was able to use the proceeds of the sale of the fashion business to kick-start his new life as a producer, by optioning the rights to hot new books. By the mid-1960s, he’d been hired by Paramount.
The studio was in decline, making safe movies with known stars. Evans championed a new generation of writers and directors, leading to a string of hits that transformed its fortunes. Not that his judgement was infallible. He bought the rights to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, but during filming he grumbled about Marlon Brando’s mumbling delivery, Nino Rota’s score and the casting of Al Pacino. Setting up his own production company in the 1970s, he made Marathon Man and Popeye, before his career imploded. He bounced back with a memoir, The Kid Stays in the
Picture (1994), which cemented his status as a Hollywood legend, and in 2003, had a final box office hit with How to Lose a Guy
in 10 Days. “I’m still alive,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “A little battered. But I like myself. For not selling out. There are people who have bigger homes, bigger boats. I don’t care about that. No one has bigger dreams.”