Back in my early 20s, I was a camera assistant for a photographer named Jeff Riedel. Jeff mostly photographs celebrities, and one day he got a commission to shoot Robert Evans, the film producer, at his home in Beverly Hills. Evans had produced The Godfather, and the film’s reels were still kept on his estate, in a notorious screening room that was separate to the main house. That’s where he and a load of other Hollywood execs got together to watch first cuts. There were stories about the types of things that went on in there, the cocaine.
Jeff and I went to meet him in July 2003. A day or two before we arrived, the screening room burned down, but when we asked about it nobody could explain exactly what had happened. People said some old film had spontaneously combusted, which could happen back then; others thought it was an insurance scam. Evans had been through some financial ups and downs, like everyone else in the industry. When we arrived, the air smelt like burned leather.
Evans was in his 70s at the time, and he liked to wear a lot of make-up, Donald Trump style, all orange face. When he showed us around, we noticed a spray booth in his bathroom. And then we saw a Jacuzzi, made especially for him by a fashion brand, in ectoplasm green. For some reason, Evans was incredibly proud of it, and he wanted to call the shots, so he came up with the idea to run the tub, start it up, and shoot him there. We said OK and I started running the water.
Have you ever turned a Jacuzzi on before the water covers the jets? Things get explosive, especially when you use soap, and I’d used a lot of soap. Evans had stepped out to get ready. When he returned, he pushed the “on” button and the tub erupted. In five seconds there was soap everywhere, and the thing wouldn’t turn off, it just kept going and going. At one point I ducked to protect a camera, and when I got back up Evans was just standing there, in the middle of this mirrored room, soap all over him, make-up melting off the tip of his nose into an orange-red puddle at his feet.
It was funny, really, but he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He called an assistant over, asked for five minutes to clean up, and then got on with the shoot as if the whole thing had been a production obstacle to work through. He was a professional. He must have known how absurd the situation was, how easy it would have been for him to be made fun of. And he just carried on.
Ten minutes later, make-up reapplied, he had another idea: to make watermelon martinis and do the shoot in his bedroom, which is where we’d wanted to shoot him all along. So there he was, Robert Evans, lying in bed like nothing had ever happened. And that’s where we took his picture.
