Beverly D’Angelo gets a five-star, rave review from Robert Evans in “The Fat Lady Sang,” the sequel to his bestselling 1994 memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture.”
Evans — the brash New Yorker who ended up running Paramount and producing “The Godfather,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story” and “Chinatown” — tells how the actress lured him back to LA from Paris, where he was partying with his pals Jack Nicholson and Roman Polanski.
A mutual friend, socialite Nikki Haskell, gave Evans D’Angelo’s number, and he called her from Paris. D’Angelo told him: “Let’s cut to the chase. No getting-to-know-you stuff. Saturday at noon I’m coming over . . . Don’t be a disappointment to me. Get a good night’s sleep on Friday. You’ll need it.”
Evans writes that he cut short his Paris trip to get back to his Beverly Hills mansion. Shortly after noon, a red rose arrived with a note from D’Angelo. Evans had been stood up.
But a week later, she invited him to visit her at the Beverly Prescott Hotel, where the actress, best known for the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movies, was recuperating from knee surgery, with her leg in a cast. Evans didn’t get home until the next morning.
“What happened during those eight hours?” Evans writes. “I never thought so many firsts could happen in one night. Especially with a cripple!”
High praise from a man who was dating Broadway showgirls while he was still in high school, and who met Frank Sinatra after bedding two of the singer’s exes, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.
“The Fat Lady Sang,” out Nov. 12, refers to the debilitating stroke Evans suffered in 1998. Evans thanks Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who produced “The Kid Stays in the Picture” as a documentary, for “putting his entire being into resurrecting filmland’s highly controversial bandito.”