Girls Still Make Passes At Bob Evans In Glasses
Never one to wile away all of his leisure hours cavorting on a custom-made bed (forget round; this thing is encased in a giant, ceiling-mounted gyroscope), septuagenarian superproducer Robert Evans is forever on the hunt for new ways to extend his brand. His partnership with Oliver Peoples sunglasses is a perfect example: Bob brings the cool, they bring the technical savvy to produce a lens that can repel the UV rays of a tanning bed strong enough to incinerate a 40-50 lb. child, and voilà— a hip new accessories line is born. Evans threw a party in its honor at his Woodland estate, and W magazine was on hand to take in the atmosphere:
[A] few friends of Evans [are] on hand, such as director Brett Ratner, who used to live in Evans's guesthouse.
Ratner bragged that he's making a biopic about Helmut Newton—the late photographer was perhaps Evans's closest friend—if, that is, he can secure the rights from Newton's indomitable widow, June. "I'm wresting with June," said Ratner, adding that he also wants to do a sequel to the documentary Helmut by June, which aired on HBO last year.
"Bob," as most people called him, was nowhere to be seen.
Turns out he was in his bedroom, the inner sanctum from which he often conducts business, and select guests were escorted in, either singly or in small groups, for a private audience. Behind a set of heavy wooden doors, Evans was perched on his velvet-upholstered bed like a pasha upon a pillow. He wore one pair of Oliver Peoples glasses and held a second in his left hand; occasionally he switched for effect.
"When I was growing up, glasses were medicinal," he said. "Now they're cosmetical."
If the reclusive Evans had his way, he'd probably not have appeared at all, choosing instead to narrate the entire party in his soothing baritone from a secret broadcast booth just off his brandy cellar. That leaves protégé Ratner to be the public face of a two-man operation, there to lull any starlets on hand into a comfortable, artistically credible space with bullshit stories about Helmut Newton biopics—the easier to lead them in groups of two and three up the grand staircase and into the master suite for a closed-door "frame modeling session" with the legendary spectacle-fetishist himself.
