Robert Evans has disappeared. A moment ago he was standing behind one of the black leather tufted chairs that encircle the huge oak table in the screening room of his Beverly Hills estate. He is still speaking. He is recounting, or rather, acting out, the events of the evening of May 8, 1998.

“John, it was almost curtains for me that night,” Evans had begun moments earlier, in his now-legendary, perpetually nervous-sounding, low-register mumble. “I had arranged a dinner party for director Wes Craven. He and I may do a proj ect together. I had just entered the room and was welcoming Wes to my home.” Evans then got up from his seat and went to the other side of the table, interrupting his narrative to reel off his guest list for that evening and to point out where the various luminaries had been seated. “I started to say, ‘Wes, it’s a pleasure to have you. . . .”

Suddenly, Evans had grabbed the back of the chair in front of him and, mumbling all the while, fallen to his knees.

I get up and walk around the table to find him writhing on the floor. It’s the death scene from Camille, and Evans is Garbo—a narrating Garbo. He describes how the stroke deprived him of all feeling on his left side, and how a second stroke on the way to the hospital left him unable to speak—a prospect that sent Evans, who has made his career at least partly on the basis of being the quintessential salesman, right past terror. But before he was temporarily robbed of words, Evans says, he got in a typical parting shot to his unsettled guests. As the ambulance attendants were hauling him out of the room on a stretcher, he turned to Craven and company and said, “I promised you an unforgettable evening, didn’t I?”

Those strokes were only two of the many, shall we say, near-death experiences that producer Evans, who after nearly a half-century in the business is still Hollywood’s prodigal bad boy, has survived. Some people in the industry joke that only a wooden stake through the heart will take out the man whose equally rakish buddy, Jack Nicholson, refers to as “The Keed.”

Nevertheless, the strokes have forced him to change a few things. “Master Evans is not very happy about his current lifestyle,” notes Alan Selka, the most recent in a series of British butlers Evans has employed over the years. (The British butler is, in fact, a fixture of the Evans lifestyle. “In all the years I have known him,” his longtime friend, producer David Brown, says, “Evans has never personally answered his telephone. Even in the middle of the night, the phone is always answered by an English-accented butler.”) Evans says ruefully, “Everything I love is prohibited, and everything I hate is compulsory.”

One compulsory feature is the two hours of physical therapy a day—sometimes more on the weekends. Still, things could be worse. Evans toughed out the depression that often sets in with stroke victims, and he has fully regained his ability to walk and talk. He now has a production deal with Paramount Pictures—the studio where he scored his greatest triumphs—that sources say is the most lucrative of his long career. This spring should see the premiere of a documentary on Evans, produced by, among others, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. It is reportedly also being financed by mogul Barry Diller—who by some accounts helped squeeze Evans out of Paramount back in 1974.

That’s the sort of irony Evans—who was head of production at Paramount during the go-go years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the studio reaped the rewards of such Evans-driven blockbusters as Rosemary’s Baby and Love Story; who still has his own explanation for the success of the first two Godfather films, on which he, as a production executive, frequently clashed with director Francis Ford Coppola; who is always news—would be apt to savor. His career has been full of bizarre turnarounds and improbable resurrections. His strokes interrupted, briefly, yet another phoenix-from-the-ashes rise in his life trajectory, one that began not as the result of producing another blockbuster picture but of writing a tell-all (or, perhaps, tell-a-lot) book—about himself. A book that ended with the words “Resolve: Fuck ’em, fuck ’em all.” The book, published in 1994 and titled The Kid Stays in the Picture, was a Hollywood must-read. A seemingly unsparing self-portrait written in a breezy (to say the least) style that un-self-consciously mixes the cornball with the profane, the book had an insider appeal that was further enhanced by the audio version, featuring Evans reading it himself in his irresistible mush-mouthed style (which Dustin Hoffman was said to have lifted for his role as a producer in the 1997 film Wag the Dog). The tape remains a cherished item among movie industry cognoscenti. His fan club ranges from former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, who has characterized Evans as “as real as they come . . . in the weird generation I was born into, he’s an icon”; to actor Val Kilmer, who appeared in the Evans-produced The Saint and has said of Evans, “What he’s gone through—what he did to himself and then what the business has done to him—would kill anybody else.” (What he’s gone through: The shortlist would include substance abuse, a cocaine conviction, being implicated in the murder of a potential business associate, the loss of his home, frequent near-bankruptcy—not to mention five marriages.)