Robert Evans Changes Cable Providers, by Matt Warren
Hello, Charter Communications? This is Robert Evans. That’s right: Kid Notorious; Bobby Box Office; The Pied Piper of Paramount. Look kid, breaking up’s hard to do. I should know. I have 34 ex-wives. And there are things in life I enjoy doing, like having sex with a fourteen-year-old Carrie Fischer, or smoking PCP out of a human skull at Bruce Dern’s birthday party. And then there are things I don’t, like waking up at the bottom of an open grave smelling like Ned Beatty, or canceling my cable service. Bob Evans may be a stone-cold sonuvabitch, but he’s no cad. Mrs. Evans raised him better than that. So better you hear it from me now than from the streets: there’s a new piece of telecommunications ass in town, and her name is Verizon Fios.
Now, do I want to call it off? No sir. Do I enjoy calling it off? Not on your life. But will I call it off if I have to? In a New York minute. I’m tired, Charter. Tired of the pixilated live sporting events. Tired of the sound and picture getting out of sync. Tired of paying high premiums for even the most basic cable packages. No IFC? No Investigative Discovery? I haven’t been this frustrated since casual handjobs went out of style in the late 1970s. I’m tired of the bullshit, if you’ll excuse my French. Nobody, but nobody, tells Bob Evans that Crest tooth whitening strips have been discontinued, and nobody, but nobody, tells Bob Evans he can’t get a DVR hooked up without paying for extra installation and usage fees. I’ve had men killed for less, some white. Just ask Sherri Lansing. I had them all buried underneath the Forrest Gump bench on the Paramount lot.
And let’s talk user interface. Sometimes when there’s too much liquid cocaine on the remote, my thumb slips and I end up ordering Keeping Up with the Kardashians on demand. Now, don’t get me wrong. Bob Evans is no fruit. No sire, I’m straight as a fucking arrow, and I’d gladly slip any one of those swarthy young Armenian ladies a dose of the old Evans family bone sauce. Even the broad-shouldered one who looks like she should be playing linebacker for the L.A. Rams. Hell, I’ve screwed a lot worse. I once humped a prospector’s pan full of radioactive mine tailings shipped in from Chernobyl on a bet with Jack Nicholson. I won’t tell you if I won or lost, but let’s just say that a slightly irradiated phallus would have been more than worth courtside seats for the Lakers’ 1987 championship run. Yes, Earv and the boys really brought home the Oscar that year—the basketball Oscar.
Not that Robert Evans wasn’t one hell of an athlete himself, back in the day. In fact, I once pitched two non-consecutive no-hitters during a celebrity softball triple-header while high on blotter acid. Our opponents? 1948 Negro League champs The Homestead Grays. Charlie Bluhdorn said it was the greatest display of athletic prowess he’d ever seen. And this was a man who once hired Rubin “Hurricane” Carter to box a chimpanzee in an exhibition match for the 1965 Gulf + Western Christmas party. The contest lasted eight rounds and took place aboard Charlie’s yacht in international waters off the coast of Catalina. Unfortunately, I missed most of it because I was off in the galley smoking hash and fingerblasting Mia Farrow.
Do I have some miles on my odometer? Sure, like a ’58 Chevy. And does my face look like someone killed an alligator and then painted it brown? Guilty as charged. But am I still as upright and virile as the Pope is a fat Catholic bastard? You bet your ass I am. I’ve got the best doctors in all California. Only three people have ever survived a full-body blood transfusion: Mahatma Ghandi, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, and—you guessed it—yours truly. And guess who’s the one still walking around? That’s right, the Kid. I’m not God, but I’ve got him on speed dial. It’s how I managed to bed some of the world’s most beautiful and gorgeous women. We’re talking real knockouts, like Shelly Duvall, Charo, and Carol Channing. And it’s how I got one Miss Alice “Ali” McGraw to fall in love with me. For a little while at least.
And that’s another thing. Do you know how hard it is for a Bob Evans to watch Love Story in standard def? I need to be able to see each and every crease in Ali’s face anew; to remember what it was like to look at her as we lay together as man and wife in our waterbed filled with Seagram’s gin. The movies are like a vampire. They keep things young forever, but can only exist in the dark. Sunlight kills it, makes it disappear. That’s why we watch. When Love Story’s on AMC, the last four decades simply disappear and I’m still Robert Evans, King of Hollywood. My career never went down the tubes. Drugs and drink never had their way with me. Money never destroyed my sense of self. I never went broke. Friends never died. And Ali never left.
That’s why, when I see on the TV Guide Channel Love Story is going to on at 3am, in-between Death Wish 3 and Brubraker, I like to head down to the First National Bank of Beverly Hills, check out my safe-deposit box, get out a pair of Ali’s old panties, go home, turn the lights way down low, and just sit and sniff and watch and pretend that it’s still 1972—pretend that it’s never not 1972—until the front of my shirt is soaked through with nicotine-stained tears. Because for all the power I once held at my fingertips, I was always thwarted by one simple fact: that the only place where time moves in more than one direction is inside the human mind.
That’s why I need an HD signal. But goddamned if I’ll pay extra.
I mean, who do you think I am? Somebody who’s not Robert Motherfucking Evans?! I produced fucking Chinatown, for fuck’s sake. You think that was all Bobby Towne? Fucking Bobby Towne wanted to make the Faye Dunaway character a talking Ford Edsel—it was my idea to make her a pretty lady! Mine! And now I’m a fucking joke. Fucking internet bloggers who’ll never taste one one-millionth of my success write satirical humor pieces in my voice, except that they can’t quite manage to keep the tone consistent and decide to deconstruct the entire thing in the final paragraph, essentially hitting the prose equivalent of the eject button, spinning way off the rails as sweat rolls down their pockmarked foreheads and they finally collapse in an exhausted heap on top of their keyboards, quivering bodies wholly depleted of some type of vital life essence. No, I’m fucking Robert Evans, and I deserve better.
So we’ll just say that May 1st is the cancellation date, then. Sure, I’ll be here between 10 and 3. I’ll be here forever.
That was great!
You tell ’em, Kid! Would a channel dedicated to your 15 year stint at Gulf+Western Paramount on Charter be a good idea? Not a good idea. A great one. You can take that to the bank and buy for yourself and Phyllis George a yacht to a Costa Rican villa for a year of champagne baths and nude sponge diving.
Also- “I’m not God, but I’ve got him on speed dial.” Actually Mr Evans, according to a “Mr. Show” episode titled “Eat Rotten Fruit from a Shitty Tree”, you just might be He.
The buyer isn’t a moron; she is your sweetheart.
For many people, the weekly paycheck is ‘take-home pay’ because home is the only place they could manage to choose it.