“Fuck goin’ public! We’re goin’ private, fill our pockets with green, not stock!”
If ever my brother was right, it was then. For months, Eastman-Dillon, Lehman Brothers, and Loeb, Rhoades—three of the biggest firms on Wall Street—had all been competing to bring Evan-Picone public.
“Let me follow through with Charlie Revson,” said my brother. “If he wants us, it’s payout time. No papier-mâché shit.”
Charlie Revson, founder and owner of Revlon, wanted to buy us out. None of us knew why, but who the fuck cared. My brother was the seducer and quite a lover was he. Akin to a sex-starved Victorian groom, the more time the two Charlies spent together, the more Revson wanted to get in Evan-Picone’s pants. The negotiations lasted over six months.
Each Charlie thinking he was playing the other like a fiddle. Ahhh—but baby brother came up with the cat. Her name, Sheika Mosher—better known as Yellowbird, the only stripper on the Vegas strip to get equal billing with Milton Berle. We had known each other for a month and had fallen deeply in lust. For her, leaving Vegas for New York was a step in the wrong direction, but she wanted to change her style of life. I was there to accommodate that wish—from $2,500 a week at El Rancho Vegas to $140 a week at Evan-Picone as a showroom model, where she was more seductive putting her clothes on than she was in Vegas taking them off.
One day Charlie Revson came in to look at our new fall line. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. And it wasn’t our clothes he was smiling at. Revson had never liked me and let everyone know it.
My brother snuck into my office. He whispered, “Bob, do you mind if Revson takes Sheika to dinner?”
A smile crossed my face. “Charlie, the price of poker’s just gone up for Evan-Picone.”
Revson’s life was his work. Dining out each night with six to eight of his top lieutenants, strategizing their next move to gobble up Evan-Picone, he never realized that Mata Hari was smack in the middle of his high command. My little Sheika became Revson’s constant girl Friday, each night listening, listening, listening.
In June 1962, the deal was closed. Our sale price on signing was $12 million in cash. The only hitch was that Charles, Joe Picone, and I had to sign five-year employment contracts. Some hitch. By today’s standards, those numbers would equate to several hundred million.
Sheika was right. Her talents lay in New York. Where else could she strip several million out of one pocket into another? Thank you, dear Sheika, thank you again. Proving the prophecy true that it’s a woman’s world! While men think it’s theirs.
What should have been a triumphant time was not. My mother died, mercifully. In the last year of her life we had tried every known cure, experimental or illegal, including pure enzyme shots administered by the infamous Dr. Max Jacobsen, who had administered addictive amphetamine mixes to John F. Kennedy, Eddie Fisher, Alan Jay Lerner, and scores of others on his cure-all, which was nothing more than a highly addictive form of speed.
It’s strange, but women are so much stronger. Had my father died first, I’m sure my mother would have recovered in time and gone on with her life, possibly a better one. But Pop, who had stayed by his Florence’s bedside throughout her illness, never recovered. He retreated further and further into his shell. The tentacles of Alzheimer’s had struck. Within a few years he couldn’t walk, talk, or express pain.
Charles and I refused to put him in a home. For the last ten years of his life he had round-the-clock nursing at 737 Park Avenue. In 1982 he finally passed away. Pop was dealt a bum deck. He never once picked up aces. Yet the indelible memory of both my mother and father’s moral standards remain deeply imbedded in Alice, Charles, and me. Rarely does a day pass without a loving thought toward Mom and Pop. We were lucky kids.
Thanks to the combination of Hollywood notoriety and newfound green, New York became far more friendly. When my mother passed away, I moved into a town house on East Sixty-seventh off Fifth Avenue, complete with elevator, two terraces, and three skylights. It was there I discovered a new passion—interior design—and learned that background makes foreground. If I was paid too many compliments on the tie I was wearing, it would immediately go into a shredder. The tie is there for me to look better, not for me to make the tie look better. If my drawing room’s eighteenth-century armoire was given too much attention, off to Sotheby’s it went. Again, the armoire is there to enhance the drawing room, not the reverse. That’s what background makes foreground is all about.
My new pad was akin to a corner of Paris in New York. Maybe it was because, for the first time, I had “fuck you” money in my pocket, but I began feeling better about myself. Living on the East Coast, even being a so-called movie star puts you on the A list. Combine that with being a fashion tycoon and you end up on the A+ list. I never made that. A Jew never does. The A+ list is boring anyway. The A list is good enough for me. Certainly, it dealt more of an action hand.
I became great pals with Porfirio Rubirosa. I met him with Darryl Zanuck a year earlier. This legendary cocksman and sportsman, ex-husband of three of the richest women in the world (from whom he asked nothing after divorcing them), was the best company in the world: wonderfully self-deprecating, intensely focused on whomever he was with. A man’s man, that’s for sure. A woman’s man? There was never anyone like him.
In the winter of 1962 we went together to the International Red Cross Ball in Palm Beach. There were movie stars galore there—from Cary Grant to Yul Brynner. When Ruby walked in, the word “background” is what fit their presence. Ruby was the star. Excitedly, every woman’s eyes turned to him, then to his crotch. That was his legend. In the forties and fifties, the popular quote was “in like Flynn,” referring to Errol. In the fifties and sixties it was “How’s your Rubirosa?” referring to my pal. Strange I should know both guys!
A few months later, Ruby was in New York. Would I dine with him and his wife? By the way, he added, an extraordinary-looking girl from Brazil would be joining us. A half hour later, the four of us were at Côte Basque, a great French restaurant. The girl didn’t speak a word of English and my Portuguese was even less. But her beauty and charm made up for it.
Naturally, my ego told me, She really digs me. Ah, possibly the next Mrs. Evans.
Better we don’t speak, it’ll last longer, I thought to myself.
Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrialist, joined us for dessert with the actress Julie Newmar on his arm. After the soufflés, Gianni suggested we try out a new private disco called Le Club. Though the weather was bitter cold as we took off on foot, I felt the warmth of heaven.
“Florinda Evans,” I kept repeating to myself, “sounds good, sounds good,” as we entered the newest hot spot in New York.
Florinda and I danced till we were drenched in sweat. Once we sat, Odille, Ruby’s wife, leaned forward across her husband, the century’s greatest lover, put her hand on top of mine and shocked me like I had never been before, which ain’t easy.
“Forget her, Bob. She’s mine.”
* * *
Months later, Alan Jay Lerner invited me to a small after theater party for his old roommate, Jack Kennedy, and his wife, Jackie. My date that evening was one of Eileen Ford’s top models, Renata Boeck, whom I’d been seeing for several months. Renata and I were just about the only people there who’d never met the Camelot couple. I would have liked to believe that the President really knew as much about me as he pretended, but he’d undoubtedly had somebody do his homework. We shook hands and he recited my screen credits and asked me about the stars I’d worked with—especially Ava Gardner. Wow, I thought. What a terrific guy!
Renata and I were sound asleep when the phone rang at three in the morning. I picked up the receiver.
“This is Jack Kennedy calling. Can I please speak with Renata?”
“The President?”
Without a slight raise of voice, “That’s right.”
I woke up Renata.
“It’s the President on the phone. . . .”
I handed her the phone—what else could I do? They chatted a few minutes and no chat was more charming than Renata’s purr. After hanging up, Renata nestled close to me and fell back to sleep. As tempting as it was, I never asked her what they talked about. Nor later did I ask her if she ever saw him. She wouldn’t have told me the truth anyway.
From the moment Revlon took over Evan-Picone, its business went south. It was run by a committee that knew everything about fragrances but nothing about fashion. Soon our bottom line was lipstick red. In November 1963 a sit-down was called in my brother’s office. Revson and his honchos were there, along with Charles, Joe Picone, and me.
Outside the temperature was chilly. Inside it was freezing. Adolf Revson was terrorizing the group when my brother’s secretary ran into the office.
“The President’s been shot!”
All of us jumped up and rushed to the television. Not Uncle Charlie.
“Sit down,” he demanded. “This is not a social call. I don’t like looking at red numbers. Let’s get down to business.”
I pulled my brother aside. “I hate the motherfucker and he doesn’t like me either. Help me get out of my contract, will ya?”
It was easy. Revson was glad to get rid of me.
As brothers, Charles and I were so alike yet so different. Charles ultraconservative, me a gambler. Today, Charles is a millionaire a hundred times over. Me, I’m still in hock.
Our first investment, after selling Evan-Picone, was in a speculative mutual fund. Charles, the far richer, put in $25,000; me, a quarter of a million. Two months later, the fund went bust, I mean bust—zero back on the dollar. How depressing it would have been to know then that it was a portent of our financial futures. Even in the gold-rush eighties, I came up a loser.