Producers may be the power behind the throne but they are not supposed to be stars. Robert Evans clearly didn’t get the memo.
Evans, who has died aged 89, was a maverick, genius producer who, during his eight years at the head of Paramount Pictures, oversaw a true Hollywood Renaissance and helped revolutionise movie-making. A marmite character who adored being centre-stage, Evans was a supremely shrewd operator who prized creativity as much as he did profit.
The films that epitomised the Evans era were huge critical as well as box office hits: The Godfather (I and II), Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, The Conversation, to name just a few, were daring, controversial and compelling, and took Hollywood in a totally new and exciting direction.
Born Robert J Shapera, he was the son of “second-generation Jews”: Florence Krasne was a housewife, and Archie worked as a dentist in Harlem but was also a talented pianist. His was a comfortable upbringing in New York’s Upper West Side, thanks to the wealth from his mother’s family. The Shaperas would later change their name to Evans after Archie’s mother’s maiden name.
Evans was determined to be an actor and, never a shy violet, started auditioning for roles at the young age of 12. Thanks to his clear voice and knack for foreign accents, he had already notched up 300 shows by the time he was 18.
A good-looking guy with the gift of the gab, he also worked as a model and salesman for a men’s clothing business and then started, together with his brother Charles, a women’s fashion company, Evan Picone. It was so successful that, still only in his 20s, Evans was a millionaire.
But his heart was set on acting and when Norma Shearer picked him to play her late husband Irving Thalberg in the 1957 movie Man of a Thousand Faces, and even coached him herself, it looked as if he had finally made it. Even more so when, that same year, producer Darryl Zanuck cast him as matador Pedro Romero in a big-name adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
However, things didn’t quite work out as expected on set and the whole cast, including the scriptwriter and Hemingway himself, rebelled against Evans’ casting and asked Zanuck to sack him. In a scene that has become part of Hollywood folklore, Zanuck took the rebels to the bullring where a matador was training Evans for the part and told them: “The kid stays in the picture and anybody who doesn’t like it can quit!”
According to Evans, that’s when he decided he’d rather be the guy making the decisions, than “the guy who has the decisions made for him.” This change of heart was, undoubtedly, helped by the fact that his acting career had stalled.
So after selling his lucrative fashion business to Revlon he used the cash to set himself up as a producer and immediately scored a hit with The Detective starring Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick. His distinctive, aggressive style drew the attention of Peter Bart, whose article in The New York Times caught the eye of tycoon Charlie Bluhdorn who had just acquired Paramount.
When in 1966, in a move that shocked the industry, Bluhdorn appointed him head of production at Paramount, Evans was just 36, had hardly any experience and nobody in Hollywood thought he would last more than a month.
Yet, when he left Paramount eight years later, he had transformed the studio’s fortunes, making it Hollywood’s most successful. His string of hits started with The Odd Couple (1968), for which he had personally handpicked the two leads, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. He did the same with his next film, Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
When Evans believed in a movie, he was happy to break long-standing Hollywood rules: he helped reshape The Godfather (1972), which was originally much shorter, by urging the director to reinstate scenes that had been cut.
He fought to make Chinatown (1974), even if the original script was deemed incomprehensible, and acted as a peacemaker on set between director Roman Polanski and its star, Faye Dunaway.
One of his biggest hits, Love Story (1970), featured his real-life wife, Ali MacGraw. Unfortunately, the great producer took his eye off the ball when he convinced her to make The Getaway (1972) with Steve McQueen. The film was another success but it cost him his marriage.
When he finally left Paramount to strike out on his own, the studio was Hollywood’s largest. In spite of the odd success, such as Marathon Man (1976) and Urban Cowboy (1980), his career in the years that followed went into decline, thanks also to a raging addiction to cocaine.
It didn’t help that what was supposed to be his comeback movie, the 1983 musical, The Cotton Club, was overshadowed by the murder of his co-producer Roy Radin and the subsequent scandal.
The publication of his hugely successful autobiography, aptly called The Kid Stays in the Picture in 1994, recalling Zanuck’s public endorsement, put him back in the public eye, although by then he had been ingrained in the legend of Hollywood for so long that he had become part of it.
Robert Evans was married seven times. All his marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his son with MacGraw, Josh, and a grandson.
JULIE CARBONARA
Robert Evans: born June 29, 1930. Died October 26, 2019
