It’s the stuff of movie legend that Evans (born Robert J. Shapera in 1930 in New York) was spotted poolside by Norma Shearer, who tapped him to play her late husband, boy-wonder producer Irving Thalberg, in “Man of a Thousand Faces” (1957). Director Henry King wanted to drop him from his next movie, “The Sun Also Rises,” but Twentieth Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck – who thought Evans was a new Valentino – strode onto the set and proclaimed through his bullhorn: “The kid stays in the picture.” His liaison with Ava Gardner on this movie launched Evans as a legendary collector of such trophies as Lana Turner, Princess Soraya of Iran and four wives: starlet Sharon Hugueny, actress Camilla Sparv, Ali MacGraw (“the most extraordinary woman of my life”) and ex-Miss America Phyllis George.
But his real mistress, says Evans, was Paramount. Hired by Gulf+Western tycoon Charles Bluhdorn, the inexperienced Evans was known as “Bluhdorn’s Folly.” “The kid’s got balls,” explained his boss, in a line that occurs like a mantra throughout the book. Evans’s testicular testimony includes his defiance of J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted him to shut down a picture that made sport of the FBI. He showed even more guts in facing down Frank Sinatra, who he says ordered his wife Mia Farrow to stop shooting “Rosemary’s Baby” so she could appear in one of Sinatra’s movies. Evans talked Farrow into staying, and Sinatra promptly served her with divorce papers on the set. Evans got threats from the Mafia warning him not to make “The Godfather” if he wanted to save his “pretty face” and his baby son, Joshua, by MacGraw.
Evans’s two biggest hits couldn’t have been more different: the mushy “Love Story” (1970) and the gritty “The Godfather” (1972), and he fought corporate resistance on both projects. His decline was fueled by a serious drug problem; he was sentenced to a year’s probation for cocaine possession in 1980. In 1989 he pleaded the Fifth Amendment as a trial witness in the murder of Roy Radin, who had wanted to back Evans in a new production company. This led to a near-suicidal depression until attorney Robert Shapiro (now O. J. Simpson’s lawyer) helped clear Evans’s name.
The most bizarre parts of the book, about his friendship with Henry Kissinger, read like scenes from a Robert Altman satire. Evans begged Kissinger to break from his Vietnam deliberations in Washington to attend the New York premiere of “The Godfather,” and he did. Kissinger asked Evans for help in keeping his job as national-security adviser – some people in the Nixon White House, he said, felt that “this little Jew boy is getting out of hand.” Evans claims he advised Kissinger to enlist Hugh Sidey of Time-Life, who “writes about you like you’re the second coming of Christ.” Whether he did so is not known, but strong eulogies of Kissinger soon appeared in Life and Time. Evans, who sat at Kissinger’s table at his 50th birthday party, wasn’t in-vited to his 60th. “If I were him, I wouldn’t invite me either,” writes Evans. This is the flip side of Evans’s chutzpah. “I’ve been shot down . . . disgraced, betrayed,” he says. Evans was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon, except he’s come back. After last year’s embarrassing “Sliver,” he’s planning to film “The Saint.” As Bluhdorn said, the kid has – well, you know.
