The Fat Lady Sang Read online

  He was enjoying the confrontation, certain I was lying.

  “Join me, then. We’ll pay him a visit together.”

  “Is that an invite?”

  “Absolutely!” Then, with a wide smile: “I’m sure he’ll take great pleasure in seeing you again!”

  We left together . . . by far the best exit of my young life. Them debu-tramps? Their open mouths matched their turned-up noses. What they didn’t know was that this actor from the west side of town was not showboating! He did know His Excellency. He knew him well. Well enough to put him right smack in the slammer!

  For the record, I was never invited back to East Seventy-Third Street.

  As he drove us across the park to West Ninety-Sixth Street, the congressman threw me a look. “Why did you say that you knew Bishop Donahue?”

  “I’m an actor. I like getting reactions.”

  “I was right! You don’t know him.”

  “You are wrong, Congressman! I do know him. I know him well . . . It’s a story you don’t want to hear.”

  The congressman’s street smarts matched his Harvard diploma. He didn’t ask another question.

  I had been introduced to His Excellency by my close friend Dino Cerutti, whom I had met through a dime-a-dance girl. I was seventeen then. Dino was twenty-six—a handsome, dashing ex–Army Air Forces pilot who was studying at Harvard Law School. While I probed the streets of Broadway, he probed the “halls of ivy.” Strange casting for a friendship, huh? Not really. We both shared one thing big-time . . . pussy on the brain!

  The kid from Broadway gave his elder from Harvard one new life. Not one that helps pass the bar exam, but one that opens your eyes to the fact that there is more to life than law—the lawless!

  Nicknaming me “Ripley’s Believe It or Not Kid,” Dino’s prestigious family looked upon his new, shaveless friend with, let’s say, more than a bit of skepticism. Poor Dino . . . from the moment our friendship began, he became an almost daily visitor to the church’s confessional booth. Blame me if you want, but I sure rocked his Ivy League world. Dino tried to rock mine, and rock it he did. He invited me to Bishop Stephen Donahue’s domicile. His Excellency was a close friend to the Cerutti family, who, naturally, were large contributors to the church.

  “This ain’t no domicile. It’s a fuckin’ palace on West Ninety-Sixth Street!” I told Dino. I thought I was at the Vatican, visiting the pope! Though he wasn’t the pope, His Excellency was considered the second-highest-ranking Catholic in America, under Cardinal Spellman. What followed was, without equivocation, the most bizarre experience of my bizarre young life.

  For propriety’s sake, I won’t delve into the details of what transpired, except to say that what started out as a religious experience ended up a cause célèbre within my family. Stopping my father from having His Excellency arrested and put behind bars posthaste was no easy task.

  Back in the young congressman’s car, he, quick on the pickup, knew that the kid sitting next to him was one hot ticket.

  “You know, Bob, I think it best I visit His Excellency alone. Don’t you?”

  “If I were you, Congressman, I would.”

  Pulling out of the Ninety-Sixth Street Transverse on Central Park West, he stopped his car at the corner. I think he felt somewhat guilty. “You know, the visit won’t take me more than an hour. How about a hot dog afterwards at McGuinness’s?”

  “Sounds great to me.”

  Putting in his clutch, he waved. “See you here at five.”

  At five fifteen, the congressman and the actor were driving down Broadway on our way to McGuinness’s on the corner of Forty-Seventh Street.

  I couldn’t help it, had to say it: “Congressman, did you give His Excellency my regards?”

  “You like trouble, don’t you?”

  “Yeah! I do.”

  “So do I.”

  For the next hour, it was first names all the way.

  Over grilled hot dogs splashed with mustard McGuinness-style, and chilled draft beer, the young congressman passed a bit of wisdom my way that all but changed the course of my life. Trying to recall verbatim words and thoughts expressed more than half a century ago would be remiss not only to the reader but to the writer and to the wisdom itself. What I specifically do remember is that I filled three paper napkins writing down, word for word, a brain exercise that the congressman explained to me in minute detail. And then, as we were walking through the revolving doors toward the street, saying our good-byes, he told me something to the effect that “word power is far stronger than muscle power. Stick with it. It could change your life.”

  It did!

  I’d like to say the congressman and the wannabe became good pals.

  We didn’t. More than a decade passed before our eyes met again. What a decade! He went from congressman to president. Me? I went from screen virgin to the next Valentino. Not quite as meteoric, though. Valentino died at thirty-one . . . and my career did as well. Couldn’t help it. I wasn’t that good.

  It was now the spring of ’62. Alan Jay Lerner invited me to a post-theater supper on upper Fifth Avenue honoring the Camelot couple. A Harvard classmate of Kennedy’s, he knew my passion for wanting to go eye-to-eye with the then-president once again. Arranging an invitation was no easy task. The soiree was hosted by Flo Smith, an intimate—and I mean intimate—friend of the president’s. It was supposed to be restricted to ex-Harvard classmates only.

  Those Secret Service guys, they knew their service well. They warned the awaiting guests that the president and the first lady would be arriving at exactly 11:40 P.M. Big Ben couldn’t have been more accurate!

  Earlier that evening, the two of them had enjoyed a rare night out, taking in New York’s top comedy revue, a London import, Beyond the Fringe. Then, at exactly 11:40, the most glamorous couple in the world made their entrance. Everyone stood. The president and his fair lady shook hands with all. Our eyes met. Our hands shook. Would he remember me? The last time we eyed each other, I had yet to shave. At best, a trivial incident on his historic climb to the top step of the world’s ladder.

  But that’s why he was standing on it: He remembered well! “Did you take my advice?”

  “I did, Mr. President.”

  Smiling Jack got in the final lick. “You must have. I’ve followed your career closely. Congratulations.”

  And before I could utter another syllable, the president was off shaking the hand of another he knew far better.

  4

  Flat on my back in the hospital. Hours passed. I refused to open my eyes. Truth be, I was too fuckin’ scared. Hearing the doctors and nurses parade back and forth, whispering their doomsday prognostications. No, I wasn’t on my way to Heaven—I was traveling south to Hell.

  Keeping my eyes closed allowed me a dreamlike solace. Cowardly, yes, but I was too fuckin’ scared to face the reality that awaited me.

  A sudden concern was evident. The scan charts surrounding my cot started oscillating rapidly up and down. From the whispered conversations, I gathered I was going through a second stroke—generally considered more lethal than a heavyweight champ at his best.

  And that second stroke was followed by a third.

  I missed the DOA list, but I was now an odds-on favorite to make DOE: Dead on Exit. As I lay there, my eyes still closed, I could hear the disarray of the specialists, nurses, orderlies, all of whom were waiting for another stroke to blast me. I could almost hear them oiling the zipper on the body bag.

  In law and baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Life isn’t usually that generous, but it was to me. I didn’t die. I remained unconscious for more than twenty-four hours, but I was still breathing. Not a doctor in the joint had an inkling of what kind of vegetable I’d end up being.

  My first sensation upon awakening was that of a hand touching my arm. “You’re gonna pull through, and that’s an order.” The voice was coming from Sumner Redstone, who had flown out on his private jet to be by my side at this moment of crisis. His voi
ce carried an unexpected charge of reality—not because he was my boss, but because he was coming from a place that only few have ever survived.

  In 1979, Sumner Redstone was caught in a hotel room when part of Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel went up in flames. He survived by climbing out a window and hanging precariously from a third-story ledge. Only a person with a tremendous will could have clung as long as he did. He was rescued with burns that would have killed a lot of people; they required lengthy and painful skin grafting operations that other men might not have survived.

  He bent down, looked straight through my eyes, and whispered: “When I got out of the fire, I couldn’t lift a piece of paper. The pain was beyond belief. In those days they didn’t have artificial skin. They had to take the skin off the rest of my body. It was horror. . . . And out of that horror? I think I was always driven before, but out of that fire came most of the exciting things I have ever done.”

  That was no lie. There stood a man who, at seventy-five, lived the energetic existence of an Olympian, a brilliant businessman who was now on the very top of America’s corporate ladder, one of the richest men in the world. He had taken Viacom, a small communications company he considered his baby, and built it into the top media conglomerate in the world. His involvement in every company under the Viacom umbrella meant that he followed a horrendous work schedule. It was not unusual for one to wait three weeks to get an hour’s audience. And yet here he was.

  The memory of his own disfigurement, pain, and immobility convinced Sumner to change his entire work itinerary, and fly out from wherever he was to visit me, sit by my side, in the intensive care unit. He was intransigent: If I willed myself to be functional, he said, to return to normalcy, it would happen. Painful, yes, but if he could do it, so could I.

  Each time he left the ICU, the doctors whispered to him, suggesting that he call next time before he bothered to come. After all, it could be a wasted trip. “He’s traveling a very thin line,” they said. Redstone didn’t answer, nor did he call. He just came. Almost every single day. The doctors couldn’t make a dent in his determination to see me through. Survival—not white-coat prognostications—was the only thing that mattered to him. Call it instinct, but he knew that at times like these, there’s a thin line between life and death. He believed that his passion to overcome mortal adversity could help me find the will to beat the odds. That belief went beyond friendship or loyalty. It was the quintessential example of character, an all-but-lost quality of human behavior.

  How blessed I was to have him in my life at that moment. Without him, I wouldn’t be writing this book. Did it tire him? No! It invigorated him. And it saved me.

  After Sumner’s umpteenth departure from the ICU, I was told by the attending specialists that I’d miraculously pulled through.

  In the month that followed, I went through every type of physical pain. The triple-stroke crisis—a miracle? Yes! I was a triple-stroke survivor. But I was also paralyzed on the entire right side of my body, head to toe to tongue. What followed was a month of sheer hell, better known to polite society as “rehabilitation.” Days turned into weeks and weeks into months, all of them filled with therapeutic torture administered by the Therapists Three.

  I should have seen it coming. For decades, many a practicing doctor had warned me I was pushing the envelope. My ego told me I was immortal. Never feared dying, never feared failing. Illness? Never entered the equation.

  Well, that equation made me a statue: a lopsided one. Half my face and body on GO, the other half on STOP. As I said, the right side of my body was paralyzed head to toe, my speech hardly audible. I couldn’t swallow food; I was being fed by IVs, decorating my distorted body like locusts on a carcass.

  My first thought was to pull them all out—each and every one. After two weeks, I still had the same thought. There was one problem: I couldn’t. Not one finger could move one inch.

  Strokes are widely, and wildly, misunderstood. There are plenty of half-assed sophisticates who think they know about heart attacks, but those sophisticates rarely have a clue as to the vengeance of a stroke.

  A stroke is a brain attack. Mankind’s most lethal insult. The brain controls one’s entire anatomy, both mentally and physically.

  The heart? That’s corner drugstore time. It can survive without oxygen for five, six, seven minutes and not only be brought back to life, but fully recover. When heart attack strikes, there’s a whole array of techniques—open heart surgery, angioplasty, transplants, arthoscopic operations, and drugs galore—to keep the ole heart a-pumpin’. Heart bypass surgeries are as common today as gallbladder operations.

  Ah, but a brain attack—that’s different. It still remains, and from all indications will forever remain, earth’s greatest mystery. The brain? A millisecond of oxygen deprivation and it’s dead. Unlike the heart, once dead, always dead. It leaves no prisoners. Cripples, yes. Ravaging their victims beyond dignity.

  Death would be kinder than the rehabilitation many endure.

  Supposedly, today we live in the world of atomic medicine, nuclear medicine, PET scans, CT scans, MRIs: This is heroic medicine. State-of-the-art. Doctors can look into the brain and see it at work. They can see a migraine, see the ravages of stroke or Parkinson’s.

  They know what’s happening. But they don’t know why. And they don’t know what to do about it. Just as we can see a supernova, but we still can’t do anything about it.

  Comparing the brain to the heart is like comparing Grand Central Station to a bus depot in Dubuque. The brain runs one, two, and three as the most complicated organ of the anatomy. Just as geologists cannot predict volcanic eruptions, neurologists cannot predict an attack of the brain. What makes it more disheartening is that once the lightning strikes the brain, there isn’t a neurologist alive who can do a fuckin’ thing about it except talk.

  Medical research remains totally clueless to the workings of an organ that accounts for approximately 2 percent of your body weight, and at the same time absorbs 30 percent of its oxygen intake. Yet this tiny organ ravages more human and animal life than all the tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, floods, and earthquakes combined.

  Despite all talk of progress, I can’t help believin’ there’ll be life on Mars before we figure out how to bring life back to the brain.

  One day, a memorable reprieve from such gloomy thoughts: a joyous call from Sumner in Monte Carlo, giving me the details of his glamorous night at the Red Cross Ball, hosted by Prince Rainier.

  “I’m sitting here with the royal couple. Next summer I’m gonna enjoy it with you. No buts, Evans! So get to work!”

  I closed my eyes. If he only knew the haunting mystery Monte Carlo had played in my life.

  5

  My mind traveled back thirty years. It was August 1967.

  The place: Monte Carlo.

  The occasion: the annual International Red Cross Gala, sponsored by her Serene Highness, Princess Grace. The titans of film, politics, industry, and royalty—from around the world they flew for the social event of the summer. More diamonds glittered from below than stars from above. You name ’em, they were there.

  A decade earlier, the same gala would have attracted more waiters than guests. What made the difference? The magnetic mystique that Hollywood brings to the party. I know—I was there.

  I’d been invited by David Niven and his wife, Hjordis. My evening’s companion was no slouch herself. Rather, a princess—not a Jewish one, a real one. Princess Soraya by name. Considered by many the most desired woman in the world, her beauty matched that of Grace at her best. Recently divorced by the Shah of Iran, not because of love lost or infidelity, but rather “fertility, lack thereof.” Being royally fucked, yet unable to bear a royal heir, left her enormously wealthy but throneless.

  Lucky me! For a fleeting moment—a fleeting month—she was my every fantasy come true.

  Sitting at our table were France’s most celebrated heartthrobs, Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan. What a starry table
on a starry night in August!

  Then, in a flash, the band stopped. A sudden hush. Everyone stood. Their Serene Highnesses made their entrance, sauntering royally toward their table, Princess Grace wearin’ that royal tiara to the tens. No one looked, dug, or played the part with greater aplomb. As the band played on, Princess Grace gracefully made her way through the crowded gala toward her most kindred table, all of whom had played a part in her life’s journey. First embracing Princess Soraya, she then proceeded to extend a separate welcome to each at the table . . . that is, until it came to me.

  Suddenly, memory took a holiday. What a royal fuckin’ switch! The princess who was standing there, lookin’ straight through me, knew me better than the princess I was with.

  Faster than gossip spreads, my mind flashed back eighteen long years, circa 1950.

  On my third callback for a juicy role in Fourteen Hours, a flick Twentieth Century Fox was shooting in New York, I met a real looker. She too was on her third callback. She got the part—her first. I didn’t. But I got her.

  Being much sought after, she had little interest in an aging teenager. Yeah, but persistence and good dancing got my foot in the door and her foot on the floor. That winter, we spent many a snowy night dancing up a Latin storm at the Rendezvous Room of the Plaza hotel.

  What the looker didn’t know was she had a hundred-dollar bounty on her head . . . and I couldn’t tell her. How could I? I was the hunter, lookin’ to collect the bounty!

  For months, my pal Dickie Van Patten and I had been doing everything but ending up in jail trying to meet her. Stalked her digs at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Tried to bribe Oscar the doorman. No luck on all counts. Finally, Dickie copped a dare. A hundred bucks to whichever one of us got her on his arm first.

  So was I dreamin’ now? Here she was, dancing in my arms to the beat of the tango. Yeah, but how could I prove it?

  Dickie at the time was costarring in Broadway’s new smash hit, Mr. Roberts. One night, I insisted that Miss Hundred-Dollar Bounty join me in catching Dickie’s performance under the guise of introducing her to the director. As the final curtain closed, we quickly hopped backstage. The director? Oh! He must have left early. Yeah, but not Dickie. He was in his dressing room, taking his makeup off. Seeing us walk in, makeup and all, his face paled. There was Miss Hundred-Dollar Bounty . . . on my arm, not his.