Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Richard Altman, like Mastrogeorge, believed Redford could have found little of value at the Actors Studio: “He was past the point of tricks. The kind of acting breakthrough he made with The Seagull has to do with self-realization. Years later I watched him play a scene with Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie Up Close and Personal, and I was blown away again by his honesty. Superficially, one might reduce the key acting element to composure. But that’s understatement. There is a place beyond that where all great players go, which is just truth. Bob hit on that at AADA; others learned it at the Actors Studio.”

  The Actors Studio might not have been an option, but opportunities were opening up for him nonetheless. A few days after his performance of The Seagull, he received a cable from MCA, the leading actors’ agency, proposing a meeting with a view to representation. Redford says he had never heard of MCA.

  MCA started as a modest Chicago management company in 1924 under the directorship of a former eye doctor, Jules Stein. By the 1950s it had become a business phenomenon within the emerging television world. Led by Stein’s lieutenant Lew Wasserman, the agency had sidled from artist representation into television packaging, delivering to producers an all-inclusive package of creative talent, including writer, director and star. From there, it was a short step to launching a television production company, MCA TV. MCA thrived, acquiring the Universal Studios lot in 1958 and, later, Paramount’s movie library. Most significantly, it had been responsible for breaking the studio salary mold and obtaining for actors a percentage of movie profits. The deal brokered by Wasserman for James Stewart when the actor quit his MGM contract in 1944 still resounded through the industry and lured clients to MCA. At the time Maynard Morris, a senior executive at MCA, cabled Redford, the agency’s client roster extended to more than five hundred Hollywood actors and three hundred Broadway performers.

  It was one of AADA’s instructors, Mike Thoma, who set the ball rolling for Redford with MCA. In a term report, Thoma, who was also directing and producing on Broadway, had noted that “Redford shows a flair for comedy.” So impressed had he been, he recommended to MCA agent Stark Hesseltine, a friend, that he see The Seagull. It was Hesseltine who had advised Morris that Redford was a desirable client.

  Redford approached this important opportunity naïvely. His friend George Oakes, an AADA classmate who was already working on Broadway, told Redford that MCA would pay him $140 a week, whether he was working or not. “I badly needed cash, and I believed him. So when I sat down with Hesseltine and Morris, that’s what I asked for.” Redford would later re-create the scene that unfolded in Quiz Show, where the network suits put the squeeze on Columbia professor Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes), bullying him into accepting their questionable operating principles. Redford had done some homework and knew that Maynard Morris had discovered Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Lee Van Cleef and Marlon Brando. Morris was clearly a good talent assessor, but he was also used to getting his way. “I was a babe in the woods, knowing nothing about the rules,” says Redford. “What I depicted in Quiz Show is how it went for me. These guys were slick. Very slow, like a choreographed pitch, Stark got up from his table in the corner and sat at the edge of Maynard’s desk. Maynard came around to perch on the other side, all very smooth. I was the lamb in the middle. Right away I said, ‘So, wait a second. You will rep me, but you won’t place me on a retainer and you cannot guarantee me work? Well, that’s a weird scenario. I’ll have to sleep on it.’ But Stark wasn’t about to quit. He told me flat, ‘You don’t have a choice, kid. MCA is where it’s at. You walk out of here, you walk out of a career.’ ”

  Redford signed on. The rumor at AADA was that Hesseltine was gay and was wildly attracted to him. Redford says that was beside the point: “He treated me with brotherly respect. He looked after me. In time, he became a guest at my home, and when we ran into a crisis, he loaned me money. He was a good guy.”

  Around this time, Mike Thoma also recommended him to director Herman Shumlin for a last-minute walk-on role in his production of Julius Epstein’s breezy Tall Story at the Belasco Theatre. Redford accepted $82 a week gratefully and found himself for the first time, at twenty-two, on the professional stage, albeit in a distinctly background role.

  In no time, though, MCA was proving its worth. He was backstage one afternoon when he got a call from Eleanor Kilgallen, MCA’s New York television agent, offering him a part in an Armstrong Circle Theatre episode. Redford enjoyed the few television shows he watched—The Honeymooners, Sid Caesar’s show—but felt he was better set up for theater. Then Kilgallen told him the salary was $360 for a couple of rehearsals and a live transmission and he was overjoyed.

  He wasn’t entirely new to television. Several months before, in March, he had made a humiliating appearance on Merv Griffin’s Play Your Hunch game show, an invitation accepted more in jest than with any career objective. “In the greenroom, when they’d ask me what I did,” says Redford, “I told them I was an actor. Their response was, ‘That won’t work at all. What else do you do?’ So I told them I was also a painter, and they said, ‘Okay, better. Let’s go with that. You’re an artist down on his luck. The audience will buy that.’ ” The scandal of the rival, fixed show Twenty One and the congressional hearings that would reveal Van Doren’s complicity in “winning” $129,000 were still six months away. “I’d already seen Twenty One and sensed it was a setup, and now I was playing the same game. I did what I was told to do, and when I took a dive, I put out my hand for the $75 fee they promised me. Instead, they gave me $75 worth of Abercrombie and Fitch fishing tackle. I was hardly going to feed Lola and furnish a room with that.”

  Armstrong Circle Theatre was television of substance, in the style of CBS’s seminal docudrama You Are There, seen by millions live in the New York area and later broadcast in what was called a hot kine, a tape of the live broadcast. Redford’s episode was called “Berlin: City with a Short Fuse” and presented the tensions surrounding the 350-day blockade of Berlin by the Soviet Union. Redford was to play a southern soldier, Benjamin Peebles; he had a substantial forty lines. Also cast were Keir Dullea, playing the lead, and AADA classmate Johnny Carlin, who was already forging a career for himself in afternoon soaps. Douglas Edwards introduced the story, in grand Walter Cronkite style, then each soldier walked up to the camera and recited his name, rank and serial number before the drama commenced. As Private Peebles, Redford was supposed to be light relief, but at rehearsals he got big laughs as he milked the jokes. The producer complained, saying the laughter was too distracting. The process of chipping away Peebles’s lines began. “My forty lines became ten lines, then five, then four lousy lines. I became so invisible in the script that they had to invent a line that went, ‘Where’s Peebles?’ Some other guy had to answer, ‘Aw, he’s out back eating.’ I remember telling the producer, ‘So Peebles is eating again? You should have hired a fat actor.’ ”

  After two days of rehearsals the show went on. As Redford prepared for his first line, Johnny Carlin moved up behind him. “He whispered, ‘See the red light on that camera? As soon as it comes on, you will have twenty million people waiting for you to screw up.’ ” Redford says he barely made it through. “But the adrenaline rush was something else. Forget mountain climbing! I had to do that again.”

  In April, shortly before the broadcast, Sallie died in Los Angeles, and on May 29 Tot died. Redford flew to Texas to sort out his grandfather’s affairs. “It was the end of an era,” says Redford. “Mom was gone, now Sallie and Tot. I felt a bond with the West cut, and I was not prepared to let it go. I loved New York, I loved my life with Lola. But I wasn’t prepared to say goodbye to everything I’d got from my grandfather.” In material terms, little was left of Tot’s labors. All Redford took from the estate was a 1949 jalopy that he drove back to New York and then found he couldn’t afford to keep. He gave it instead to Johnny Carlin.

  Redford’s AADA graduation took place soon afterward. But he was dismayed that, despite his A-plus sta
nding, the best Hesseltine could find for him was summer stock in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At first, Redford said no. “To me,” he says, “summer stock was play school. Stark said I was wrong, that summer stock was the farmyard for Broadway. You made your way either by apprenticeship dog work behind the scenes or in the good stock companies, preferably close to New York, where the casting people could come down and see what you had. And Bucks County was the top of the pile, he told me.”

  Carol Rossen had also become a client of Hesseltine’s. In her view, Hesseltine’s “deceptive gentlemanliness” was a double-edged sword: “He was literary, elegant, apparently a humane academic, not much older than either Bob or I. When you met him, you were swayed by his beautiful, lilting Boston accent, which sounded like one of the Kennedys. He also stuttered, and he had exquisite manners. But he was also a mean bastard with tunnel vision. When he saw something in you, it was that and that alone he nurtured, and you’d better buy into it. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him, because he had a capacity for bitterness that was unparalleled. I always believed, when he died, he’d die by a bullet fired by a disaffected actor.”

  Redford gave in to Hesseltine. In July he met with Mike Ellis, the Bucks County producer of Anouilh’s Tiger at the Gates. Ellis offered Redford the co-lead role of Paris. “But then he said, ‘All these classical types had curly hair. So get yours curled.’ ” Redford’s reaction was to refuse the play again. “It all felt wrong. There was a basic problem with the creative thinking, I felt. Certainly I didn’t want a boring translation of an old text. That kind of conventionality did nothing for me. But neither did I want what seemed to me crassness. Ellis wanted the wigs, but what he was really after was a circus, not the Anouilh classic by any means. On the surface, he appeared well set up. He had a Shakespearean actor, Herb Hatfield, in the lead, and Louise Fletcher, all the way from Hollywood. But it was cockeyed, a Felliniesque concept.” A major row with Hesseltine ensued. “Finally, I looked at Lola and the financial situation we were in, and I said, ‘All right. But you’ve got to buy me a hat.’ ” Redford never got over his distaste for the production. Still, it marked his first leading role on the professional stage.

  He was consoled almost immediately by an echo of the past. Dore Schary, author of Boys Town and onetime MGM wunderkind, had gone from strength to strength over the last year on Broadway. His hit play Sunrise at Campobello had won five Tonys. Now he was preparing a potentially controversial follow-up, The Highest Tree. Redford had been friendly with Schary’s daughter Jill in Brentwood, though he hardly knew Dore well. The connection was irrelevant, however, since it was casting director Ruth Frankenstein’s decision to offer him a key part in the new play.

  The Highest Tree explored the conscience of a dying nuclear physicist, played by Kenneth MacKenna, trying to come to peace with his contribution to the parlous division of ideologies in the world. Redford had just a dozen lines as the son of a friend of the physicist. Elizabeth Ashley was the female lead, though she was then called Elizabeth Cole. From the start of rehearsals in August, Redford felt uneasy with Schary’s high-minded direction, which was in conflict with the relaxed, improvisational style he was honing for himself. “It was potentially presumptuous to be standing there as a new actor, saying to this great man, ‘Hey, I think you have this wrong.’ But I was thinking that a lot of the time.” Playwright Garson Kanin observed the problem: “Schary never lost the desire to stage-manage every breath everyone took,” he said. “That was his handicap.” Cast member Natalie Schaefer remembered Redford as being nervous and insecure, and blamed Schary entirely. “Because he wasn’t really a director. [Schary] kept harping on about Bob’s [poor] projection and nervous aspects of his performance. Bob wasn’t sure enough of himself at that point to argue.”

  On September 1, while the show was previewing out of town, Lola gave birth to a son, Scott Anthony. Redford took a day out to celebrate and was, he says, “elated, spinning, really.” He always enjoyed the company of children and, despite the disappointments of his own childhood, looked forward to building a family. Lola’s brother Wayne, who was a small child when he first met Redford, recalls his natural facility with kids. “Mormon houses are kid oriented, and Bob loved that. He was playful, that’s the thing. Given the choice of hanging out with the old folk or the kids, it was no contest. I know my family was skeptical about the marriage, but when I look back, no one had any doubts about one thing: he was always going to be a good dad.”

  On November 4 the play opened at the Longacre, but the reviews were uniformly appalling. As it staggered onward, playing to half-empty houses, catastrophe struck at home. The Redfords had recently moved to a marginally bigger apartment at 180 West Ninety-third Street. There, baby Scott died, the victim of crib death. Redford felt total despair. Ginny recalls the anguish, the questions, the reverberating shock that reduced everyone to monosyllabic mumbles.

  The funeral service was attended only by Bob, Lola, Ginny and Hesseltine. Redford dropped out of The Highest Tree for several days. He did what he always did at times of turmoil: he started moving. For three days he and Lola drove aimlessly around Pennsylvania and Maryland. “It was an unspeakable pain for us,” says Redford. “For myself, the gothic part of my nature came down on me. I know it sounds self-absorbed, and in hindsight it was, but it felt like retribution. I had rejected common sense to pursue this reckless life. My father had told me I was irresponsible. The Van Wagenens told me I was irresponsible. This, I felt, was a disaster entirely of my creation.”

  In the last week of November The Highest Tree closed after just twenty-seven performances. The cast took up a collection to help fund the Redfords in crisis, and the money was used for a trip to Los Angeles to distance themselves from the tragedy. “It’s what you do,” says Redford, “when you face the unsurvivable.” In New York little progress was being made with theater offers for Redford, so MCA focused on television. Close to 80 percent of all homes had television now, so production was copious, and there were acting opportunities aplenty that might easily lead to movie work.

  Hesseltine introduced Redford to Monique James, who handled MCA’s West Coast TV operation. James liked him. “It was the era of George Peppard,” said James. “All I ever heard from producers was, ‘Get me George Peppard.’ When I met Bob, I immediately saw a similarity. A little more sandy or red haired, maybe, but that general look. I also liked his manner, which was very open and direct and unaffected. I saw he was grieving and vulnerable, but he had strength, too. I wanted to help. I told him, ‘It may work well for you here.’ ” James worked fast, securing him parts in Perry Mason, Rescue 8 and Maverick. When the new year arrived, to their own surprise, the Redfords were still in Los Angeles.

  Michael Ritchie, the director who would partner Redford’s independent movie breakout in the late sixties, became aware of Redford’s screen presence in these first hesitant efforts. “But he meant nothing,” said Ritchie, “because television was hemorrhaging product and you couldn’t keep up. It was just wall-to-wall entertainment and, even then, through overproduction, the standards were starting to slip.” Two years later, Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission would characterize TV as “a vast wasteland.” “It was all Madison Avenue cowboys,” said Ritchie, “and that was the world Bob risked sliding into.”

  But Redford saw West Coast television as a learning lab. “From a technical point of view, it was great,” he says. “Television moved very quickly from live transmissions to tape, then film. My timing was good from that point of view. Because, the truth is, there is no difference between, say, a filmed episode of Maverick and a big Hollywood movie, other than the obvious: budget. The geography of the set is the same. A gaffer is a gaffer, and a grip is a grip.”

  The Redfords rented a two-room apartment on the pier at Malibu as soon as the television earnings allowed it. Life became calm again.

  Within MCA, however, Redford was seen as an increasingly attractive property. “Stark rather selfishly wanted
Bob back in New York, in theater,” said Monique James. “That was his fantasy. I challenged that, and I wanted to prove him in television. Bob could be a funny guy, a cutup, but he was also very, very tough. He was impervious to the humiliations of the business. He had the tenacity for the casting trail. Because of all that, I knew he’d never get stuck in Rescue 8. So I pushed for better roles for him.”

  NBC offered Redford a part in “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion,” an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play for the estimable Hallmark Hall of Fame. The role was small but, significantly, alongside two great Hollywood players, Christopher Plummer and Greer Garson. Redford saw irony in this. Since childhood he had fancied Greer Garson and, while working as a janitor at the ANTA Theatre, had often watched while Plummer rehearsed. He was thrilled to be sharing a soundstage with acting legends. “It’s not always the size of a part, but the connections involved that are important,” said Monique James. “Neither of us wanted to bed down in Maverick, and this was a turning point.”

  In the Shaw play, Redford’s part was just six lines as a soldier called Blue Jacket, who shows Greer Garson into a cabin. “Somehow I impressed her,” says Redford, “probably because I so obviously relished every second of being around her. She took to me like I was her little puppy. Finally I got her to myself in her dressing room and told her how much I admired her. She was sitting regally in a flowing, frothy pink gown, looking like all I’d romantically dreamed her to be. She responded with such grace: ‘My dear, dear, dear, dear Blue Jacket …!’ Her kindness made me weak at the knees. Now, I thought to myself, if only I could play opposite Maureen O’Hara.”