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The more visible the venue, The more public the plunge. In the glittering world of Hollywood, stars are made to fade. In the big-money, big-ego realm of professional sports, heroes jump higher - only to fall harder. In the rarefied air of the media, a single misstep separates sitting on top of the world from standing in the unemployment line. The list goes on and on: academic achievers who are accused of defacing university property; star journalists who are discredited when they fabricate stories; Wall Street investment bankers who are convicted of insider trading; corporate chieftains who get caught cheating on their wives.

The list of business stars who have pushed themselves to the heights of success, only to plummet to the depths of excess, is so long that you can't write them all off to bad luck. Today's crackups have the smell of intentionality. They feel fabricated - as if the act of willfully forging success also involves the courting of failure.

John B. Evans Goes Down the Up Staircase

Everyone who comes into John B. Evans's presence thinks that they've been given an exclusive ticket to an off-Broadway event: John Evans - the One Man Show. The minute you meet him, you know that you are in the presence of a rare, larger-than-life figure. He quotes Dylan Thomas from memory in a native Welsh brogue that makes you beg for tea and scones. His command of history is encyclopedic and esoteric: Hitler's dog, he offhandedly tells you, was named Blondi. The furniture in his office, located in the funky Chelsea section of New York City, is held together, he explains, not with glue or nails but by a delicate balance in the cut of the wood and by moisture in the air.

Evans, 60, owns a consultancy, REM Productions Inc., that works with such cutting-edge Web companies as Biztravel.com and Visual Radio Inc. He also offers advice to the likes of Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks. This is the same John Evans who launched Elle and Premiere magazines - and the same John Evans who, 20 years ago, at the end of an average workday as head of the Village Voice, would fall asleep in a gutter, collapsed in an alcoholic stupor.

In a world of success and excess, Evans is the alpha and the omega. Success has come easily to him. His hard work has been dedicated to destroying what he's achieved. Why did he devote himself to tearing down his accomplishments as fast as he posted them?

"Imagine life as two barometers," he says. "One is how the world sees you. The other is how you feel about yourself. As your worldly position rises, your self-image crashes. People abuse themselves with fine food or drink or drugs or sex - so they can avoid getting too successful. Why do CEOs who are sitting on top of the world have a problem with self-esteem? It's simple: People who feel like bags of shit overcompensate and act like gods of creation."

One of Evans's gifts is his clarity of vision. It served him well in the mid-1970s, when he saw an opportunity that few media moguls had grasped: Why not make classified advertising a form of personal communication - and a source of increased revenue? The classified department that he built at the Village Voice became a gold mine. Rupert Murdoch, who owned the Voice, rewarded Evans by naming him to the post of executive vice president for development at News Corp. Ltd., a job he held from 1980 to 1994. Success took him to the highest reaches of Murdoch's operation and brought him inside the charmed circle of the power elite. When Murdoch needed to fire people, Evans often did the beheading - and did so with such charm that the victims were grateful for the shave-and-haircut. When a Murdoch executive would get into an alcohol-related scrape, Evans would be dispatched to clean up the mess. When the Internet blossomed into a serious business proposition, Evans became Murdoch's technical adviser, educating his boss on the value of that new medium.