Evans knew it was his fault; he had left her first, many times, but not for another woman. For his boss, Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of Paramount, his first love. “I’m a failure in many ways as a man,” he confessed, “because of my obsession with what I do.” Bluhdorn guarded Evans as jealously as a teenage lover, calling him away from Ali in sickness and in health, to tend to studio matters, to The Godfather, to The Great Gatsby, which would now star not Ali, but Mia Farrow. One of many casualties of the divorce.
“If I can negotiate with the North Vietnamese,” said his friend Henry Kissinger, “I think I can smooth the way with Ali.”
“Henry,” replied Evans, “you know countries, but you don’t know women. When it’s over, it’s over.”
Alone, he kept the same schedule he had when he was married. He woke late, in time for lunch, and went to bed, with the help of sleeping pills, long after Hollywood had punched out. In between he was a man attached to a phone. His home, at one time, had exactly thirty-two, an average of two per room, but his favorite—a relationship that would last longer than any of his marriages—was the one he kept in bed, propped up on a pillow between his Rolodex and his view of the pool. Writers had the blank page; Robert Evans had the dial tone. All his imagining—his multilayered consideration of scripts and how to get them into movies—began here, on the phone, with slightly more than nothing, just seven digits and a hunch. What about Faye Dunaway for Chinatown? What about Jane Fonda? Would she come for dinner this week? He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to hear her ideas.… These invitations were stepping-stones Evans would place across dry riverbeds. Then he would step back, survey his progress, and ask, Will those get us to a movie? What else do we need? Are we ready for the flood? Daniel Selznick said: “He had the same thing that my grandfather and my father and other people who created the business had. How do you define it? It’s a crazy hunch, some combination of brains and instinct gambling.” Savoring the process (“Come for dinner tonight, Roman. We’ll keep talking.…”), he thrilled to the deliberate accumulation of stepping-stones, along the way asking, always asking, Has my dream changed? Has yours? Are we still having fun?
This is what Robert Evans, head of Paramount, did for a living: It was why he lived. A gambler, he bet on his taste, his talent for talent. The filmmakers were free to do the rest—almost. Unlike his colleague, the estimable John Calley of Warner Bros., Evans—though he made an exception for Polanski—rarely gave away final cut. “Unlike most of my counterparts,” he said, “I don’t get involved in the executive end of the business. I get involved in the making of the film, which annoys a lot of people.” But it wasn’t power Evans was after; he wanted some small say in the dream he got off the ground. As producer, midwife, and Medici, he wanted to stay close. “He’s the best producer I’ve ever seen,” said Dustin Hoffman. “He has the best taste, the best memory, suggestions for cutting.” To others, like Coppola, he asked for too much.
Hence the fine line he had to walk, like a responsible parent, keeping an eye out but never spying, or appearing to. Hence the distance he kept from the studio itself. Most days he wouldn’t even go in, but worked from home, taking and making calls and receiving his friends, the filmmakers of Paramount. He also rarely went on set, where he knew he would slow things down (or unnecessarily speed things up) and generally create a self-conscious disturbance detrimental to the artists’ concentration. So he stayed at Woodland, watching dailies in the screening room under the moon just beyond the pool. Why leave paradise?
He would bring the meetings to Woodland. The talent business was the people business, and the best way to get the best people, and the most talent from them, was to remove the proverbial office desk, welcome all into the living room for a chilled glass of afternoon wine, and give them a good time. From those good times came hunches, and from those hunches, more stepping-stones, more movies. “See, I was never a star-fucker,” Evans said. “I always writer-fucked. And people always star-fucked. I didn’t believe in that. If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t going to be on the screen.” He was a salesman, but he sold with heart.
“Help Yourself,” could have been chiseled over Woodland’s sumptuous front doors, and, during Evans’s reign, the same sign could have hung over Paramount’s famous front gate, for Evans’s personal and professional policy, the secret to his success with friends and film, was: Give. Give to get. Caviar? What kind of caviar do you want?
Designed in 1940 by John Woolf, favored architect of Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli, Fanny Brice, Cary Grant, and George Cukor, Woodland was a prime specimen of Southern California Regency, a relaxed stylistic descendant of eighteenth-century France. Evans first laid eyes on her in 1956. He had just been spotted, lounging poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, by Norma Shearer. It wasn’t so much that he looked like her deceased husband, the legendary, doomed producer Irving Thalberg, who had died twenty years earlier at thirty-seven; it was the way he powered the telephone. Though she couldn’t hear him from her cabana across the pool, she could see Irving’s passion in Evans’s intensity and enjoyment, his fullness of attention to what she presumed (correctly) was a business call. From that hunch Shearer would persuade Universal to cast Evans, a twenty-six-year-old former actor then working as an “executive clothier”—he was in women’s pants, he liked to joke—as Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces. “She taught me everything about Thalberg,” Evans said. They were instant friends. Together they strolled into the hills behind the hotel and discovered the estate, the century-old sycamores, the cozy splendor of 1033 Woodland Drive. “Robert,” Norma said, “isn’t it beautiful?” She could see what the place did to him. One day, she told him, you’re going to live here. It was just a hunch, but he was Thalberg, and she knew Thalberg.
A decade later, in 1966, Charlie Bluhdorn, seeking a throne room for his prince, instructed Evans to find a house where they could do business and pleasure incognito. Evans took his new boss to Woodland. That was it. For $290,000, the place was his, theirs. Then came the improvements, each tailored by Evans to Evans’s specifications: “Paramount put at least a million into it,” Evans said. “An army of 60 studio engineers, carpenters, painters, electricians, bricklayers, built outbuildings, and expanded the pool house into a screening room with state-of-the-art projection facilities and the largest seamless screen ever made—16 feet wide.” Inside the projection room a fireplace was just visible, across the pool, from the white marble fireplace in the living room. “There were more deals made in my projection room than there were at Paramount during those days.”
Of his home he said: “I know it’s self-indulgent, but it’s indicative of my work. I care about nuance.… I am a perfectionist to the point that it’s difficult to work with.” One of his girlfriends, feeling a lack but not minding, explained that with Evans “nothing’s rushed, no love or passion expected. You don’t feel you are with somebody.” He was a lover boy, always marrying (“Maybe they fell in love with the house and not with me”), but preferring always something better; his last night of monogamy ended with his first wet dream. “I’d rather have one week of magic … and a lonely six months,” he said, “than just an okay six months. One week of greatness. No, I’ll go to a great night, rather than just a decent month.”