In the End, Luck Always Comes to Rescue : THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE <i> by Robert Evans</i> ; Hyperion $24.95, 412 pages

For a perverse moment in history, I was fascinated by the real estate shows on cable television, the ones where you get to glide through a house that’s for sale while a soothing voice describes the details.

There was something about the tortured syntax that amazed me: The sentences weren’t just backward, they were fractured in the middle and reset, wrong ends out. It was English from outer space.

Perhaps Robert Evans wrote their scripts on the side. The most astonishing thing about a good Hollywood memoir is supposed to be who slept with whom, or who was supposed to be cast in the part that someone else got. There is plenty of that here, enough to satisfy any show-biz junkie, and fascinating stuff about how a place like Paramount works.

But I am here to tell you, it’s not easy to get at. This guy writes the chewiest, most discombobulated prose I’ve ever read (and I am not a grammar prude; I end my share of sentences with prepositions and have been known to sacrifice propriety for effect).

There is an absolutely identifiable set of Evans grammatical tics that will, depending on your disposition, leave you apoplectic or laughing hysterically. Try: “One night in the middle of a rather intimate embrace, four hands grabbed me from the back.” Is he making love with an octopus?

Or: “Not wanting to leave him alone at Paramount, Roman moved into my guest house,” when the him in the first part is also the Roman Polanski of the second part.

To decode all of this: Evans is Sammy Glick in a higher-income bracket, one of three impossibly handsome and ambitious children born to Dr. and Mrs. Shapera: He the one dentist brave enough to practice and, so, to profit in Harlem; she a loving mom.

Evans and his brother, Charlie, got into women’s pants (his joke, not mine) just at the moment in history when pants were deemed politically correct, and so, before you could say Evan-Picone, he was not only good-looking, he was filthy rich.

So his on-again-off-again acting career turned into a producing career, in part because he had the money to buy up properties, in part because he wanted to have the one job where he wasn’t dependent on the kindness of strangers.

I am making this sound much more linear than it is.

Along the way, Evans met, married and divorced Sharon Hugueny, Camilla Sparv, Ali MacGraw and Phyllis George--and to hear him tell it, bedded more than his quota of lovely damsels, sometimes in between marriages and sometimes during.

He has worked with Erroll Flynn, Ava Gardner, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Redford, Polanski and Mia Farrow. Jack Nicholson is his avenging angel, Henry Kissinger his close personal friend.

Evans has had interesting enemies, too, including Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra and plenty of others; this is a cast-of-thousands memoir if ever there were one.

What emerges? That Evans has a particular talent for recognizing great material and helping to guide it through the Hollywood maze, a not inconsiderable skill, even if he can’t always depend on it. This is the man who brought us “The Godfather” and “Chinatown”--then turned around and tried to sell us “Sliver,” a movie whose most provocative question remains, did Sharon Stone get to take the wardrobe home?

If it’s difficult to tell where happy memory leaves off and fact begins, that’s the luxury of writing your own life story. Did Evans really salvage an unreleasable “Godfather”? Perhaps we’ll have to wait for Coppola’s memoir to hear the other side. For that matter, did he learn anything from the romances he botched? Evans seems to have led a strangely charmed life, one with just enough success, just enough last-minute good fortune, to spare him from ever stopping to reflect, too deeply, on the life he’s lived.

So don’t expect a sadder but wiser tragic hero. Evans ends up as arrogant and full of bravado as he started out, not so much because he figured out how to maneuver, but because luck continued to break his way.

It’s just the sort of story that civilians love to read, because it keeps the dream alive.