The Kid Stays in the Picture, Signed to Jack Nicholson
[Signed Presentation to Jack Nicholson] Evans, Robert. The Kid Stays in the Picture. First Edition. 1994. Book is in very good minus condition; dust jacket is in very good condition—upper page edges show foxing, and there is a small edge tear to the jacket. The book is inscribed, “Without your embrace, dear brother, ‘The Kid’ never would have made it. ‘Stayed in the Picture’ you know it. I know it. Now the world will know it—Embarrassed? Ashamed? You bet your ass I’m not! I’m proud. Loyalty has no price. Me, I’m the luckiest, wealthiest Jew I know…. Who else could have had ‘Irish’ by his side, when no one else stood. I love you Jack, how can I not always love you…. The kid. P.S. I’m calling Larry on Monday to discuss his planning our trip ‘South.’ 1 of unlimited signed edition[s]. Robert Evans.”
Robert Evans, a true Hollywood original, knew a thing about comebacks. As head of production for Paramount, he resuscitated the near-bankrupt movie studio in the early 1970s with hits like Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown. Personally, he had a few of his own, having become a near-pariah in the 1980s with first, a drug conviction and his involvement (indirect) in the Cotton Club murder. Through it all, one person stood by him, his friend Jack Nicholson, to whom this copy is inscribed, whom he refers to as “Irish” in Nicholson’s frequent appearances in this book. Nicholson not only was with Evans in his glory days, but remained by him at his nadir, taking the all-but-canceled Evans as his “date” to the 1987 Oscars and inviting Evans to sit by him at the most public place in town, Nicholson’s floor seats at LA Lakers basketball games. The memoir is written in the manner in which Evans spoke, a stylized Hollywood vernacular somewhere between Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and Martin Scorseses’s Good Fellas.
“Know, dear brother, that second act trauma makes for third act magic. That’s theater. That’s life. That’s us.”
--Robert Evans