The Fat Lady Sang
Readers expecting a follow-up to veteran film producer Evans’ swaggering 1994 memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, may be surprised by this book’s deeply personal slant and by its author’s vulnerability. In 1998, Evans, producer of such classic movies as Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, and Chinatown, was incapacitated by a trio of strokes. The right side of his body, “head to toe to tongue,” was paralyzed. Evans’ account of his difficult, almost miraculously speedy physical recovery sparks memories of his earlier life (a neurosurgeon with a bad bedside manner, for example, reminds him of his encounter, in the early 1970s, with famed “rice doctor” Walter Kempner, whose clinic Evans refers to, not entirely comically, as a concentration camp). Evans tells stories about his personal life that he left out of The Kid Stays in the Picture, covering the same period of his life but from a different angle, and his account of his life since the strokes is deeply personal, a mixture of tragedy (an impulsive marriage, barely two months after he nearly died, ends in annulment) and triumph (his narration of the audiobook of The Kid leads to a new career as a voice artist in film, television, and radio). The book feels, now and then, like a man on his deathbed telling us the story of his life, but by the time we reach the end, we see that, although his life has been fundamentally changed, Evans has no intention of leaving it just yet. A compelling and, at times, deeply emotional memoir. --David Pitt