Man of a Thousand Lives
If Bludhorn was Evans’s Godfather during his golden age as a mogul
and producer, Evans’s current Don, the man who’s keeping the Robert
Evans Company on the Paramount lot (although Evans insists these
days on doing his business from home—over the phone, as always),
is Sumner Redstone, chairman-CEO of Viacom, Paramount’s parent company.
Evans’s relationship with Redstone goes very far back, to the days
when Redstone was a film exhibitor in New England. Evans used to
host Redstone on his visits to the West Coast and challenge the
future corporate head at tennis. “In those days,” Redstone says,
“Evans and I would play tennis for clothes. I’m sure I kept him
outfitted for years. It was not that he was a good tennis player,
but he would constantly distract me by talking on the court.” Laughing,
he adds, “Today, I’d kick his ass.” Redstone was one of Evans’s
first visitors at Cedars-Sinai hospital after his strokes. Evans’s
production deal at Paramount has yet to yield either big hits or
movies of the sort of stature Evans became known for in his heyday;
the last two pictures Evans produced were The Saint and a
remake of The Out-of-Towners, starring Goldie Hawn and Steve
Martin. Neither made much of an impact commercially or critically.
But it’s believed that as long as Redstone is calling the shots,
Evans will continue to have a berth at Paramount.
Evans’s autobiography is brimming with accounts of powerful people
doing favors for him, pulling him out of various jams. One such
instance has a single phone call from his “mentor,” Chicago mob
lawyer Sidney Korshak, straightening out Mafia-based labor disputes
on the set of The Godfather. (According to Godfather
producer Al Ruddy, that tale is apocryphal: “Sidney had nothing
to do with it. Before production began, I met with New York Mafia
boss Joe Colombo. In exchange for peace and cooperation on the set,
we agreed to invite ‘certain people’ to the premiere, as well as
hire certain, shall we say, ‘good fellows.’ ”) In another, Evans,
against his better judgment, begged his pal Henry Kissinger to write
him a letter that would enable him to film in Malta, and Kissinger
eventually assented.
Both Korshak and Kissinger attended the premiere of The Godfather,
where Evans basked in glory, with then-wife Ali MacGraw on his arm.
Evans’s brother Charles says, “I told Bob to enjoy the night, because
it was never going to get any better.”
The words proved highly pro phetic. In the years to come, as his
book recounts, Evans would no longer be able to turn to Kissinger
and Korshak. Kid also provides a painfully detailed account
of the dissolution of his marriage to MacGraw (she left Evans for
Steve McQueen); his departure from Paramount; his disgrace and humiliation
following his being convicted of cocaine possession, along with
his brother Charles; and more, with Evans chastising himself constantly
as the narrative becomes more and more harrowing. Along the way,
there are occasional triumphs—Evans, did, after all, produce the
likes of Chinatown and Marathon Man. And there is,
of course, a parade of beautiful, sometimes quite unlikely women—Evans’s
fourth wife was the squeaky-clean former Miss America Phyllis George.
There is not, however, as much as one might want to know concerning
a story that Evans knows, to his chagrin, will forever be linked
to him: the story of the Roy Radin murder. A jam he got himself
into well after Kissinger and Korshak washed their hands of him.
It’s not that Evans doesn’t want to tell his side of this story.
It’s just that . . . well, as he writes, “Until the day I die, I
am not allowed to discuss the case without consulting with my attorney,
Robert Shapiro.” (Yes, that would be the same Robert Shapiro of
the O.J. Simpson defense team.)
The Radin tale is just one of many pieces of lore surrounding
the making of The Cotton Club. Evans insists in his book
that Radin’s murder really had nothing to do with The Cotton
Club. It’s merely that during the early-’80s development and
preproduction of the film, Evans met and shook hands with certain
characters whom anyone in their right mind would’ve known to steer
clear of.
The facts that can’t be disputed are these: On Friday, May 13,
1983, Roy Radin, a showbiz entrepreneur who had been introduced
to Evans by one Karen Jacobs-Greenberger (a woman Evans had approached
in the hopes of raising money for a production company), disappeared.
About a month later, his body was discovered in a California canyon.
He had been repeatedly shot in the head and a stick of dynamite
had been set off in his mouth.
The real story behind Radin’s death was a labyrinthine tangle
mostly involving drugs. Karen Jacobs-Greenberger (who was eventually
convicted in 1991 of kidnapping and second-degree murder in the
Radin case) turned out to be a woman of many names and interests.
Radin’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of his corpse
was not only the beginning of a legal nightmare for Evans, but it
fueled a paranoia that’s already part and parcel of a high-powered
moviemaker’s life. According to a detective and an un dercover witness
on the case, three days after Radin’s disappearance, Karen Jacobs-Greenberger,
her trigger man, and her private pilot flew from Miami to New York
and confronted Evans at the Hilton, where he was a guest. The exact
conversation is unknown (Evans can’t talk at all about any aspect
of the meeting, or even confirm that it happened), but that same
afternoon, Evans called L.A. and had security placed at his Woodland
home. Evans then flew to Las Vegas to stay with casino owners Fred
and Edward Doumani, who would become backers of The Cotton Club.
According to the detective involved in the case, three weeks before
Radin’s body was discovered, Evans told the Doumanis, “The bitch
killed Radin, and I’m next—you’ve got to hide me.” (Evans has denied
this account.)
In June of 1983, Evans celebrated his 53rd birthday. One of the
guests was a brunet named Denise Beaumont, who had come to L.A.
to advance her acting career. Denise stayed the night with Evans.
“Late that night, I went into the guest room to make a phone call,”
she says. “Bob overheard me and, for whatever reason, thought I
was there to kill him. He ran out of the house naked, and I had
to coax him out from behind a cactus to come back into the house.”
Producer Scott Strader, who worked for Evans during those years,
recalls another incident. “Bob asked me to drive him and Denise
to Palm Springs. He said that he wanted me to drive the butler’s
car, and that because he feared he was being watched, he and Denise
would hide on the floor in the backseat until we were safely away
from his home. Everything went well, until we were near Cabazon.
All of a sudden, the car starts to stall out. Bob is complaining
that it is a setup, but I had no choice but to pull to the shoulder
of the interstate. As I pull to a stop, gunfire erupts all over
the place. Evans is screaming, ‘I told you they were going to kill
me!’ and throws himself onto the floor in the back.” Inadvertently,
Strader had pulled off the road adjacent to a firing range.
The Cotton Club reunited Evans with Godfather director
Francis Ford Coppola. They’d clashed on the first film, clashed
on Part II, and clashed again here, destroying whatever remnant
of a relationship they’d had. Cop pola declined to be interviewed
for this story, but he issued this statement through a spokesperson:
“For years Evans has put out a stream of nonsense about me, and
I have pretty much ignored it. I only wish him well.”
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