Robert Evans
Hollywood producer
ROBERT EVANS, who has died at 89, was a Hollywood producer who in the 1970s backed seminal films like Chinatown and The Godfather. His career was a story of comebacks and reinventions. Evans had launched a successful women’s clothing business with his brother, Charles, and was visiting Los Angeles on business when the actress Norma Shearer saw him sunbathing by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
She persuaded producers to cast the handsome, dark-haired 26-year-old as her late husband, the MGM mogul Irving Thalberg, in Man Of A Thousand Faces ,a film about the horror movie star, Lon Chaney.
On the strength of his performance, the industry giant Darryl Zanuck signed Evans to a contract at Twentieth Century Fox and cast him as a bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises. The filmmakers insisted the young actor wasn’t right for the role, so Zanuck went to Mexico City, where it was being shot, to see for himself. “The kid stays in the picture,” was his judgement.
But other acting roles were harder to come by, and Evans left Hollywood to re-join his brother in the clothing business. He was lured back in 1966, however, when Zanuck offered him a three-picture contract as a producer. That same year Paramount Pictures hired him as head of production, and he quickly converted the studio from a maker of mediocre films to the biggest hit machine in Hollywood, home to Harold And Maude and Love Story, among others. His time in charge saw him presiding over such other hits as The Odd Couple, Rosemary’s Baby and Goodbye, Columbus, and backing storied directors like Sidney Lumet, Hal Ashby and Peter Bogdanovich.
Albert Ruddy, who won an Oscar as producer of The Godfather, credited Evans with filling an essential role in the film’s success. When Paramount’s head of distribution objected to the nearly three-hour running time, Evans supported the filmmakers and insisted that the movie not be cut.
For the next few decades, the permanently-tanned Evans was one of Hollywood’s most outsized and flamboyant personalities, encapsulating the romance of a now bygone movie era where films were commissioned more on instinct than market research.
He was married and divorced seven times, and was the model for Dustin Hoffman’s pettyminded Hollywood producer in the 1997 satire, Wag the Dog.
He did not share in Paramount’s prosperity. He received no bonuses, and his string of divorces drained away much of the money he made. After brief marriages to actresses Sharon Hugueny and Camilla Sparv, he wed Ali MacGraw, who became a star with her performance in Goodbye, Columbus, and who gave birth to his only child, Joshua.
Ms MacGraw became a star after Love Story, then went off to Texas to spend four months making The Getaway with Steve McQueen, with whom she had one of Hollywood’s more notable affairs. She and Evans divorced in 1972 and he married a former Miss America, Phyllis George, in 1977. They parted a year later.
Meanwhile, Evans had formed his own production company, and turned out one of the biggest hits of the time, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. It earned Evans his only Oscar nomination. The next decades brought a string of failures, however, including Coppola’s The Cotton Club, and the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes.
In 1980 Evans pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and was placed on a year’s probation.
In 1983, he was called to testify at a preliminary hearing in the murder of a Cotton Club investor, Roy Radin. On the advice of his lawyers, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and although never connected to any wrongdoing, his refusal to testify to avoid self-incrimination sullied his reputation. His last movie as a hands-on producer was a hit – the 2003 Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey comedy, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. “That’s the problem with today’s business,” he said at the time. “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.”