Charles Evans, 81, Founded Evan-Picone, Produced Films, Built Office Complexes
Charles Evans, who died Saturday at 81, founded the fashion label Evan-Picone, developed a series of suburban office parks, and was executive producer of the 1982 film "Tootsie."
"There is no reason why any man should have only one challenge in his professional life," he told the New York Times in 1965, not long after selling Evan-Picone Inc. to Revlon for over $10 million in cash.
He was 39 at the time and convinced that his experience as a fashion designer and marketer had prepared him for something big in the field of consumer products. The example he thought of was more interesting can openers.
Instead, he soon became involved in commercial real estate, purchasing tracts along highways in New Jersey and Connecticut where speculatively erected office buildings and built trendy corporate headquarters for firms such as AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, and others.
As the entrepreneurially minded brother of Robert Evans, producer of "Chinatown" and "Urban Cowboy," it was perhaps surprising that Charles had never before been involved in films, the more so because, before his Hollywood days, Robert was a partner in Evan-Picone. But it was decades before Charles followed Robert to Hollywood. (Their sister, Alice, became a documentarian, and Charles's son, Charles Jr., was one of the producers on the 2005 film "The Aviator.")
"I got the script [for "Tootsie"] from Buddy Hackett (who wanted to play the role of the agent which director Sydney Pollack wound up with), and I couldn't stop laughing," Evans told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. He spent $35,000 on a screenplay option; the film went on to gross $200 million.
Evans went on to produce two more films — "Monkey Shines" (1988), a George Romero-directed thriller that failed at the box office, and the notorious "Showgirls" (1995), for which he provided $2 million in seed money that united writer Joe Eszterhas with director Paul Verhoeven to create perhaps the most expansive acreage of bare flesh in the history of Hollywood.
But films were never more than a sideline for Evans, whose entrepreneurial energies found more productive outlets in clothing and buildings, and even in promoting fire detectors.
Evans grew up in Manhattan, the son of a dentist, Archie Shapera, with a prosperous Harlem practice. (At his father's insistence, he and his brother changed their names.) He attended Horace Mann High School and the University of Miami, and found work as a clothing salesman. One day, he brought a new design he'd thought of for a skirt to his father's tailor, Joseph Picone. The two went into business together, concentrating on skirts and women's slacks. Picone proved adept at designing production line processes for the high-end sportswear, which was known for hand-stitching and other details. Evans brought in his brother Robert, who worked as a salesman between acting gigs, and his mother, Florence, who became chief sales manager. Evans — younger than Picone and given to Manhattan high life — was an early celebrity designer.
By the early 1960s, he had become convinced that "life was more than a pair of pants," he later told Business Week. He sold out to Charles Revson in 1962, and a few years later began his career as a developer. He eventually built more than 6 million square feet of office space.
Tragedy struck in 1975, when a blaze caused by a faulty fireplace killed his ex-wife and two daughters at his ex-wife's Upper East Side duplex apartment. Although overcome with grief for a time, Evans rebounded by helping found the Crusade for Fire Detection Ltd., which lobbied for fire detectors. One year he sent out 4,000 fire detectors, wrapped in bright red paper, as gifts to friends and acquaintances, according to Firehouse Magazine, which gave him an award earlier this year.
Charles Evans
Born May 13, 1926, in Manhattan; died June 2; survived by his fourth wife, the former Bonnie Lynn Pfeifer, a son, Charles Evans Jr., a brother, Robert Evans, and a sister, Alice Shure.
