Gambler's Guts

I've been absorbing the life of Robert Evans lately. Taking things exactly backwards, I watched the great doco "The Kid Stays in The Picture", then nabbed the audiobook off Audible.com, and now I have a hardback of the book next to my bed. Evans narrated the documentary and read his own audiobook; he sounds like Elmer Fudd at 60 with half a bottle of absinthe in him. I can't get enough of it.

The fabulous accident of learning the details of Evans' life: moving from documentary to the sorta kinda unabridged audiobook to the book, the story gets seedier and seedier. I'm skimming past oft-heard passages and am slammed to a halt by the jarring presence of "new" text. "The property is king," Evans often says. He stresses reading the whole text instead of a synopsis. Discovering new text in folds and creases of this tale in this manner isn't what he meant by that, but it's a heck of a way to come to a greater understanding of the man.

It's more like how you actually get to know a person; you learn the basics (name, job, place of birth), then you start to hear their stories. Then after you get to know them a while and they tell the same stories a few times, more details emerge, ah, then you get to know them. Love 'em or hate 'em, you know 'em. Not easy, but not bad, either.