The Kid Stays in the Picture

By PETER CALDER

Self-promotion is Hollywood's long suit. And no one knows that better than Bob Evans. His 1994 book, The Kid Stays in the Picture, was a classic of the genre politely known as unreliable memoirs, an autobiography which focused largely on the heady years between the late 1960s and early 1970s when, as chief of Paramount Pictures, he reigned in Hollywood like the old-fashioned mogul he was.

In eight years he took the studio from the bottom of the industry ladder (it was "ninth out of eight", he likes to recall) to the top. Along the way, he produced some of the greatest movies of the modern era: Love Story, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby and The Godfather, to name a few.

The book also charts his spectacular fall from grace: convicted by the press on cocaine charges which were never laid, then tarred (though again, never arraigned) for his "involvement" in the murder of a man who was helping to finance the famous turkey The Cotton Club, he became an industry pariah before doing one of the greatest Lazarus acts in the history of show business.

The book was Evans' way of announcing his return from more than a decade in the wilderness. Self-serving, foul-mouthed and prodigiously entertaining, it was also his way of giving the fingers to his detractors.

It was narrated in an idiomatic, hardboiled prose which recalls Raymond Chandler ("Was I riding high? You bet", for example, or "Did I read the script? You're damned right.").

His speech, slurred from the series of strokes that almost killed him in 1998, matches his writing style perfectly: a creaky, croaky growl, it's the aural equivalent of a long stretch of bad road. That same voice, committed to audio tape before the strokes, narrates a film version which opened here this week.

Book and film take their titles from an incident early in Evans' career when he was cast as the matador Pedro Romero in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. His co-stars - including Ava Gardner - and Hemingway cabled 20th Century Fox boss Darryl Zanuck to demand the novice pretty boy be sacked.

When Zanuck arrived on the set "the cigar in his mouth was half the size of his body", Evans wrote and he replied using a bullhorn.

"The kid," he roared, "stays in the picture. And anybody who doesn't like it can quit."

"It was then," Evans concluded, "I learned what a producer was - a Boss. It was then I learned that I wanted to be [a producer] and not some half-assed actor ... desperate for a nod of approval."

At times the book - and the much less satisfactory film version - reveal more than Evans intended, one suspects, although he's not above recalling his errors such as passing up a Monet for some junk stock, and opposing the casting of a young man called Pacino in The Godfather.

But it's a fascinating glimpse into the last age of the mogul, after which film became what he calls "no longer an art to be nurtured but a commodity to be sold".

He has scant respect for the "marketeers" who run Tinseltown in the 21st century.

"In a way I feel a little envious of them," he says, "because these pictures do such huge grosses and people get very wealthy. But I also feel total disdain because people have lost the art of the art.

"I love making stories. I don't want to watch aliens coming out of people's stomachs. That's why I'm not a wealthy man, but in a way I am wealthy. My wealth is being remembered for making pictures that brought people to the movies because they were about how people feel.

"There's no such thing as producers any more. People are always thinking about the money, not the product. They haven't got balls any more. Their balls have shrunk to peanuts."

By rights - and not just because of the kilos of cocaine he hoovered up during his time at the top of Hollywood's food chain - Evans should be dead. Four years ago this month he had a stroke (he was having a drink at the time with horror director Wes Craven and he chuckles at the memory that he "scared the shit out of the king of horror").

"I had three strokes in two days and every doctor said I'd die. It took me three years of therapy to learn to walk again. I couldn't pick up a fork for six months. Now I'm busier than ever.

"And," he adds almost as an afterthought, "I'm also making a movie of it."

That movie will be based on his second book of memoirs called, with gallows wit, The Fat Lady Sang. And it's only one of the projects that Evans, who will be 73 next month has in the works. He co-produced How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days, a romantic comedy which opens here next month and he's voicing an animated film in which he is the main character called Kid Notorious.

"I'll tell you this," he growls. "There's nobody else in the business who started out as a head of a studio and ended up as a cartoon."

Meantime he maintains his reputation as a ladies' man (he happily announces to anyone who'll listen that the strokes have not impaired his libido). His colourful love life has included affairs with Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Cheryl Tiegs, Raquel Welch and Margaux Hemingway (he loves thinking about how much this last would burn up the woman's grandfather, Ernest) and his tally of wives - which includes Love Story star Ali McGraw - equals Henry VIII's.

"The current Mrs Evans" (that's how he puts it), 34-year-old Leslie Ann Woodward, has outlasted number five, actress Catherine Oxenberg, who stayed around nine days.

He regrets, he says, only one thing in his life: the second half.

"I was too cavalier. I pressed the edge too much and when you do that it comes back to bite you in the ass. My problem is that ever since I was a kid I made ink [attracted media attention] too much. The press has treated me wonderfully basically but when they turn against you and things go south you go really tropical, let me tell you that. And to point north ain't easy again."

Sure, he's had lucky breaks, such as being spotted on a hotel poolside by Norma Shearer and being cast in a movie on the spot.

"It's called being incident-prone," he says. "It's worked for me and against me. I bumped into a lady who ended up being a murderess. I had nothing to do with it. That's incident-prone.

"I got caught up in a cocaine bust where I was three thousand miles away. How could I be busted? My nose ain't that long.

"I've paid my dues and earned my dues. And lemme tell you something. It's a lot easier to watch it and read it than to live it."

* The Kid Stays in the Picture is screening at the Rialto.