What Princess Margaret Said to Robert Evans About His Film 'Love Story'
About four years ago, when I moved from New York City to Los Angeles, I was given an unusual welcome-gift from one of my editors. How would I like to interview Robert Evans? The Robert Evans, the legendary Paramount Studios boss, film producer, profanity artist, serial monogamist, ex-husband-of-Ali-MacGraw, bête-noir-to-Francis-Ford-Coppola, and self-styled Beverly Hills Gatsby of the ’60s and ’70s?
Yes, please. That suited me just fine. Arrangements were made.
I had already interviewed Evans, who died earlier this week, when I was researching my biography of Ernest Hemingway, Everybody Behaves Badly. The book was about Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Evan had famously (or infamously) made his Hollywood debut playing bullfighter Pedro Romero in the 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s first novel. I’d been researching that production, and Evans had agreed to talk with me about it by phone.
It turned out that he didn’t know a lot about Hemingway, other than the fact that ole’ Papa didn’t want him for the bullfighter role. (“I was a distant tenth,” he told me.) He did, however, seem to know an awful lot about Ava Gardner—the film’s star—and so our chat had rambled in that direction instead. He proudly reported that he’d had a great deal of romantic tension with Gardner. Was it a consummated romance? I asked nosily.
“No,” he replied. “But if it were, I wouldn’t tell you.”
I got a kick out of the faux discretion. Evans actually had quite an appetite for confession; he was, after all, the proud author of two gossipy and scandalous Hollywood memoirs. The first, The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life (1994) was also made into a documentary in 2002; in it, he dished on his friends, his stars, his women, and the cocaine conviction in 1980. Then, in 2013—perhaps worried that he was receding unacceptably from the public eye—Evans released another tell-all, The Fat Lady Sang.
Evans always seemed to elicit a spectacular array of reactions in people: admiration, fascination, utter suspicion, repulsion, but rarely did anyone seem to feel neutral about him. There were, and remain, people in town who absolutely worshipped him. I was never one of them—all of my gods were in far nerdier industries—but I always liked the idea of him. He was undeniably original, a quality that he too prized in others.
Plus, he was so unrepentantly profane, which goes a long way with me. One of my favorite anecdotes about him centers on the time he and MacGraw were presented to the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in London in 1970, around the premiere of his film Love Story. Evans watched the famously snobbish princess approach him in the receiving line. It had been a thrilling moment for him—that is, until the princess reached him and took his hand.
“Tony [i.e. Lord Snowdon, her then-husband] saw Love Story in New York,” she informed Evans. “Hated it.”
“Fuck you, too,” he said, smiling back.
My new interview with Evans was slated to take place at his famous house, which earlier had been captured by Slim Arons and became the ultimate monument to ’70s Hollywood decadence. I was speaking to him for Violet Grey, Cassandra Grey's hub for beauty, glamour, and Hollywood. (Grey's late husband, Brad, was himself a Paramount chieftain at the time of his death.)
What’s more, the interview would take place in Evans's bed, which had essentially become his office in recent years. Countless executives, actors, and writers had perched on its edge, with scripts, contracts, and cigarettes in hand.
There was a relevant peg for the choice of our rendezvous: Evans had even broadcast a Sirius radio show from atop his black satin covers; the program had been aptly named In Bed With Robert Evans. I fretted about this arrangement for about half a second: would it be credibility-killing to hop into bed with an interviewee? Oh, who cared—it seemed such an amusing Hollywood rite of passage that I agreed and hopped in a car to his house.
The Evans manse managed to be both stately and intimate at the same time; its shelves and tables teemed with books and photographs, evidence of sentimentality and perhaps even curiosity that went beyond optionable works. The whole place had been assembled decades earlier with an eye toward princeliness, and now had a shabby, endearing grandeur.
For the life of me, I don’t know how he maintained that place, with its famous pool and staff; by Evans’s own admission, in The Kid Stays in the Picture, he was a thousandaire, not a millionaire, as so many of his studio-head successors became. Plus, he’d had so many wives over the years—seven at last count—and that must have been terribly expensive.
When I arrived, I was ushered into the heart of the home, and found Evans arranged in the middle of the sprawling gothic bed in his crazy office bedroom, clad in a white terry cloth robe, surrounded by books, papers, and magazines. He was being fussed over by his longtime butler, a small battalion of make up artists, and assistants. Some of his trademark deep tan was rubbing off on his collar, giving me a pang of simultaneous pity and admiration. Evans had had a stroke in 1998, but had refused to surrender the Evans persona, even at 85.
I sat on the side of the bed. We shook hands. I marveled to him about his home.
“It used to be like Gatsby around here,” he said.
“Still is,” I said, pointing to the wall of photos of his famous friends and comrades staring down at us: Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, the late Sue Mengers, Ali MacGraw (wife number three), Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Faye Dunaway. The list, and the wall, seemed endless.
We began the interview. In his heyday, Evans had a gift for finding and championing smart projects, such as Chinatown, The Godfather, and Urban Cowboy, to name a few. I wanted to talk about that; he wanted to talk about actresses instead. The best ones were always a mystery, he said, and had something of a “fourth dimension.” It was hard to describe—like originality, he went on.
“What makes a person original?” I asked him.
“You just know when you’re seeing something you haven’t seen before,” he said. He had been, he added, addicted to originality for decades: it was the most seductive but elusive quality any person could have. But like most addictions, the originals in his life had made him miserable.
“I haven’t had peace of mind for a second,” he announced, with obvious satisfaction. He said he had to give up dating actresses altogether: “The ride is like a roller coaster… They’re a tricky breed.”
Not as tricky as this interview turned out to be: It was incredibly difficult to get fresh stories or candid admissions out of Evans. Every anecdote about his life and career and collaborations—creative and romantic—came sassily pre-packaged. He had an image to project; he stuck to the script, because it was a good script and had served him well for so long. And everyone in this town knows that a good script is the most important element of any film.
“What does make you happy, then?” I asked him.
Well, success made him happy, he answered unapologetically, and recognition, too. That said, he would have liked a few Oscars—they were, in his opinion, far better company than even the loveliest actresses. (Alas, no Oscar statues adorned his living room mantle, although he had been nominated once—Best Picture for Chinatown.)
We talked for an hour or so, and looked through books and magazines together, and watched a recording of an interview he’d done years earlier; some news show, I can’t remember which. Evans sat up and watched intently, quite transported. When the interview recording was over, he sank back into his black pillows, exhausted by the effort of inhabiting this former iteration of himself. It was time for me to leave.
Gatsby’s house was quiet as I walked out, except for the sound of the water jets shooting in arcs over the pool outside. When I left, I sat outside in my car for a long time, also exhausted by Evans’s world. I thought about him and his refusal to give in and that long, relentless pursuit of glamour and the unremitting dedication it takes to uphold one’s idea of oneself.
Since Evans died earlier this week, I’ve also been thinking about how he compared himself to Gatsby. So many hyper-ambitious American men obnoxiously make this same self-comparison and idolize Gatsby, without perhaps remembering the ignoble end that character met. Yet Evans’s life seems to have some legitimately comparable through-lines.
Both Jay Gatsby and Robert Evans created wildly improbable, extravagant versions of themselves; both were shrewd and voracious, but distinctly naïve as well. Both desperately pursued some elusive version of the American dream that ran them through the goddamn wringer (although Evans did admittedly make out better than Gatsby in the long run).
What’s more, their respective personas exuded artifice. Despite his confessional memoirs, Evans never embraced authenticity. He embraced image, and he refused to break character, even when he was 85 years old, wearing make-up and reliving his glory days in fragments with a stranger on the side of his bed.
I did talk to Robert Evans once more, this time by phone. I remember asking him if he intended on writing any more memoirs.
“There may be more to say,” he laughed, “but I’ve said enough.”
Robert Evans is now done speaking for himself, but I suspect that we’ll be talking about him for years to come. Which is just how he would have wanted it.
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