In May, as Redford was rehearsing “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion,” Lola discovered she was pregnant again. That seemed like the cue to leave Los Angeles. “I didn’t want the baby to be born there, and I’d had enough of shows like Maverick. So when the Shaw play was done, I was done.” The Redfords were literally filling the trunk of their Chrysler when another call came from Monique James. Redford remembers, “She told me, ‘You simply cannot miss this one, Bob. This is Playhouse 90. This is gold.’ ”
James had fought to keep Redford in L.A. She recalled: “Ethel Winant, the casting director for Playhouse 90, told me emphatically she didn’t want a newcomer for this particular big role because this was a historically important show. It was a Nazi war story, said Ethel, and it called for George [Peppard] because he had the best Aryan look. She also wanted a heavyweight actor, not some have-a-go fellow. I lied to her, telling her George didn’t want the part. All I was doing was trying to create an opportunity for Bob. I gave Ethel no choice: she had to check out Redford.”
Playhouse 90, which had been running on CBS since 1948, was regarded as the apogee of TV drama. In the mid-fifties, producer Hubbell Robinson refined its format to provide a kind of social debate forum for America’s leading television writers. Although it was among the most Emmy-awarded shows, CBS announced its end in the summer of 1960. Rod Serling’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto during Nazi occupation, would be its grand finale.
Redford read twice for the role of a young Bavarian Nazi, Sergeant Lott. The part was big, interwoven throughout the script. Fielder Cook, the director, stopped him in midsentence during the second audition and told him the part was his. He also mentioned that Redford would be playing alongside Charles Laughton, who was to portray the terrorized rabbi of the ghetto. Arthur Kennedy was also in the cast.
Redford found Serling’s script the most thought-provoking of any he had worked on since The Seagull. As a decent young “soldier of the soil,” Redford’s George Lott vacillates between detachment and concern for the five hundred thousand Jews trapped in the ghetto. He becomes attached to the rabbi and tries to defend him when the rabbi avenges a rape. Bit by bit, the rabbi gently tries to convert and transform Lott.
“It was among my most nerve-racking experiences because of Laughton,” says Redford. “Part of it was his sheer physicality, which was as commanding as his legend. He was also intense and introspective. I had to make the emotional adjustment to play a co-lead with this legend.” At one point, as the rabbi insults the Nazi commander, Lott is instructed to strike him. In rehearsals, Cook insisted Redford mime the assault. Redford felt increased apprehension as the broadcast night, May 18, approached. “Just a few minutes before we went on air, Laughton came up to me,” says Redford. “He announced, very authoritatively, ‘Do not under any circumstances hit me. I cannot tolerate it. Fake it, do something, anything … just do not, I mean do not, touch me.’ ” Redford tried to consult Cook, but with seconds till air, Cook couldn’t be bothered. When the moment came, Redford smacked Laughton hard across the face. “He looked absolutely horrified, and I felt terrible. When the show was over, I went to him and apologized. You did what you had to do, he said. And he was right. Dramatically it worked. It was honest. That scene reminded me that it was only authenticity that counted.”
“In the Presence of Mine Enemies” was Redford’s first unmitigated success, finally winning him the attention of the media. He “stole the show,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter. Jack Gould in The New York Times praised “an exceptional contribution in his depiction of a man trying to reconcile a personal code with military brutality.” The play was controversial because it acknowledged the humanity of Nazis like Lott who empathized with the Jews. But thousands of callers clogged the switchboard at CBS, demanding apologies. Leon Uris publicly condemned Serling. But Redford felt it was “a courageous work” and he was privileged to be associated with it.
In June the Redfords returned to New York, apprehensive about the second pregnancy, but excited by the renewed enthusiasm of MCA. The success of Playhouse 90 had hiked theatrical interest, and Hesseltine was already dangling a carrot. It seemed as if the days of sideline performances were over. In the offing was a major role in an important television version of a play by the matchless Eugene O’Neill.
8
The New Frontier
New York was electric. This was the run-up to the Kennedy era, the year of the election, with a breeze of newness in the streets. It was also, for Redford, a bounteous time—he had scored ten roles on television in just eight months, including, in his last days in L.A., a good part in NBC’s first coast-to-coast color broadcast, an episode of the thriller series Moment of Fear, called “The Golden Deed,” opposite Macdonald Carey. The excitement of significant progress had gone some way toward assuaging the pain of Scott’s loss, and Redford was feeling serene.
He was also looking good. Too good. He had a golden tan after spending long days at Malibu, clearly evident as he played a slick psychopath opposite Carey. The problem was that Sidney Lumet, in the midst of casting his television production of The Iceman Cometh for the National Network, a precursor of PBS, could not abide the notion of Parritt, a neurotic and thin character in the play, as a surf dude. Lumet liked what he’d seen of Redford in Playhouse 90 but disliked the tan. Lumet’s casting director, Marion Dougherty, met with Redford nonetheless. “I can do it,” Redford said to her. “I will bring myself to the requirement.” She was won over: “I knew the text, and The Iceman Cometh is all about subsurface,” says Dougherty. “Appreciating Bob’s looks was easy. But listening to what was underneath is what convinced me. He had a lot to say for himself. He was sensitive and probing and intelligent. I called Sidney and asked him to rethink. He finally said okay.”
An O’Neill role was, for Redford, a walk into Tiger’s past. Once, in a casual conversation, Tiger had told him that Doc Gainey’s, O’Neill’s favorite pub, was also one of his. “Did you know him?” Redford asked. Tiger chewed his cigar, scratched his head and said, “His brother was a bum.” Redford’s frequent visits with Tiger in the cramped, dark rooms of New London would now serve the young actor well.
Sidney Lumet, Redford well knew, was the ultimate actors’ director, having started in the Yiddish Art Theatre at the age of four and having appeared on Broadway often since the 1930s. In 1947 he’d set up a rival acting group with disaffected members of the Actors Studio (among them Eli Wallach and Yul Brynner) and had ten years’ experience directing more than 150 episodes of crime series for CBS television. The regard in which he was held was evidenced by Henry Fonda’s insistence that Lumet direct Twelve Angry Men, which became Lumet’s movie debut in 1957 and garnered three Oscar nominations. “I was more anxious to please him than any director I’d encountered,” said Redford.
The four-hour, four-act production of Iceman was to be an exact re-creation of the 1956 Circle in the Square stage production, directed by José Quintero, which was regarded as the definitive version and consecrated Jason Robards as O’Neill’s signature actor. Robards was back in the lead role of Hickey, the bar bum philosopher, as were several members of the 1956 cast. The play was to be taped over several days in October, for transmission in November.
Set in 1912, Iceman deals with salesman Hickey’s arrival at his regular haunt to harangue his old drinking friends about their habitual despair. His apparent conversion throws the gathering into turmoil, but his posturing covers up the fact that he is traumatized because he cannot come to terms with the fact that he has murdered his wife. Essentially a work that posits a dark confusion in the center of the American psyche, The Iceman Cometh is often described as O’Neill’s most autobiographical work. O’Neill himself insisted to his friend, the writer Dudley Nichols, that it was not pessimistic. “[O’Neill] did not feel that the fact that we live by illusion is sad,” said Nichols. “The important thing, he felt, is to [recognize] that we do.”
Redford’s Parrit
t urges Hickey to abandon delusion by choosing suicide. Redford understood the centrality of the role and wrestled for weeks with text and subtext. “My Parritt came from a place of intuition, accessed from my own contradictions. What was marvelous about Sidney was that he allowed intuition. He had a Method reputation, but he didn’t do the Stanislavski thing. There was no heavy analysis. Instead, it was organic development. Drawing on the actor’s instinct made absolute sense to me.”
Jason Robards coached Redford more than Lumet did. “We got on right off the bat,” Redford would write in his eulogy for Time after Robards’s death in January 2001. “He was extremely generous to me. In the play, when his character meets mine, he says, ‘We’re members of the same lodge in some way.’ Because of our personal connection he invested that moment pretty heavily, and I’ll never forget that line.” Redford was aware of Robards’s reputation as the peerless O’Neill interpreter. “So it was critical for me to pay attention to him. He wasn’t preachy about acting, but he was an encyclopedia. I learned more watching his nuances than I did from any stage actor.”
The insights of the play left a mark on Redford. In his diary he jotted down a few of Hickey’s searing lines: “The history of the world proves that truth has no bearing on anything” and “Men don’t want to be saved from themselves because then they’d have to give up greed … and they don’t want to pay that price for liberty.” Redford underlined the last speech. “It summarized what I felt about American life as I knew it growing up. We were all looking for the good life, but we didn’t want to probe too deeply. It was a life of illusions and noncommunication, and that had always felt wrong. O’Neill was about reaching for understanding, and working that text made me comfortable for the first time about this life I’d found myself in. I wasn’t yet an actor, but I was in a state of becoming.”
Before Iceman aired, Hesseltine finally found Redford work in theater again, in another Hibernian drama, James Costigan’s stage version of his Emmy-winning television play, Little Moon of Alban. Harryetta Peterka, a friend from AADA, remembered Herman Shumlin, the director of Little Moon, who had also directed Redford’s walk-on in Tall Story, voicing uncertainty about his own decision to cast Redford. “He’d seen Bob in an episode of The Deputy and was unimpressed. He said, ‘Frances Fuller keeps saying he’s shaping up like Spencer Tracy. I can’t see it. He’s too glib.’ But then he liked the Playhouse 90 and Hesseltine convinced him to take a chance with him in the Costigan play.”
Redford had seen the NBC version of Little Moon of Alban and loved Costigan’s dark musicality. It reminded him of all Lena’s old Fenian stories. The play is set in Ireland at the time of the 1916 rebellion and revolves around the conflict of an Irish nurse from a Republican family, Brigid Mary, forced to tend to a British army lieutenant, Kenneth Boyd, who is responsible for the death of her lover, the IRA gunman Dennis Walsh. Brigid Mary, despite herself, falls for Boyd as she urges him to fight for life in the face of death. Redford would have preferred the Boyd role but happily took on Walsh. “Walsh’s last big speech, just before he’s killed, is spectacular,” says Redford. “He walks onto a Liffey bridge and recites a lament about Irish martyrdom. I knew I could knock that down so well. I only had to tune back in to Lena.”
Experienced actors—John Justin as Boyd and Julie Harris as Brigid Mary—surrounded Redford. But Shumlin’s direction, Redford now feels, weakened the production. “He was no Sidney Lumet, though he did try to expand the historical content of the play, which was a plus. But he was from the old school, like Jehlinger, bossy, rigid and backward-looking, and he succumbed to the temptation to simply re-create what had been done before in the television version.
“It absolutely killed me to see what Shumlin allowed Justin and Julie to do with those sensitive scenes Costigan wrote. Brigid Mary resolves her problem by deciding to become a nun. I remember sitting at the read-throughs watching this beautiful finale Costigan had written where Boyd accepts his personal concession to faith and walks away, kissing Brigid Mary one last time with the words, ‘I shan’t say goodbye, it seems mundane. I shall simply say this: that I kiss your mouth, most humbly and gratefully.’ I would have sold my soul to deliver those lines. But they played them sentimentally and threw it away.”
Among those filling the IRA roles in the play were the Clancy brothers, on the brink of an international career as a folk group. “Redford was one of the lads,” said Liam Clancy, “and as comfortable in his Irishness as I am in mine. But there was a problem. We drank together, and he told me all his concerns about the play, and all he wished it to be. He had all the focus of a serious stage actor, but I sensed he was being pulled away. Most of the young actors like me among the cast were struggling. Redford was around my age, but he was different already. He had big, important champions in his corner: MCA, casting people that brought fear to young thespians. I felt he was fighting to keep focus and not get lured into the falsehood of stardom. I also felt he was at his best talking about the character in the text, not show business.”
During the previews of Little Moon of Alban in Washington, D.C., The Iceman Cometh aired on the National Network on November 14. It was just a week after the election of John F. Kennedy as president, and the air was charged with excitement. As Redford was preparing makeup, the call came from New York that Lola had gone into premature labor. He left the theater and took the night train, arriving just in time for the birth of a daughter, Shauna. “The death of a child can destroy a couple,” says Provo friend Stan Collins. “In their case, I believe it did put a distance between them. But Shauna’s arrival reversed the damage. They were no longer absorbed in what might have been. They finally had a family to pull together for.”
Little Moon of Alban opened at the Longacre in December. The New York Post, Variety, Newsday and other periodicals praised Redford’s performance, but the play closed, to Redford’s dismay, after just twenty performances.
The compensation was a sudden influx of TV parts. “For the rest of us struggling thesps,” said Liam Clancy, “a failed play means poverty. But, in that regard, Bob was way ahead of us all.” In a Reginald Rose Play of the Week he was the murderous son of a senator. Memorably for all who saw it, he then played a psychotic neo-Nazi in a particularly nasty episode of ABC’s Naked City. “I’m not sure what made Bob happier,” says Stan Collins, “the acting or his home life. But it seemed very critical to him to measure himself in acting progress.” Redford concurs: “I felt acutely compelled to prove my worth. But that should not detract from the fact that Shauna and family life were hugely satisfying then.”
In a bravura gesture Redford decided to rent a Cadillac and visit Tiger to show off the new baby. Tiger was now a resident at a nursing home in New London. Charlie had once told his son that when Tiger was informed of Redford’s artistic ambitions, he’d said, “Tell the kid he can’t eat art.” During the visit with Lola and the baby, it was clear Tiger’s opinion had changed. “I was sitting drinking coffee,” says Redford, “and he shuffled across the floor in his big wool overcoat and threw down a copy of TV Guide. I looked, and there was the listing for Perry Mason, costarring me. It was his silent way of acknowledging what I was doing.”
At Christmas, Redford and Lola decided to return to Los Angeles in part to introduce Shauna to Charlie and Helen and in part to reconnect with Monique James since, clearly, television was the meal ticket. “The Shumlin experience left a lousy feeling about New York theater,” says Redford. “An incident during Little Moon summed up my problem. It was my central scene, where I’m shot by the Black and Tans and dragged into Brigid Mary’s kitchen. I lie dying in her arms. This was hard for me, because I was finding it difficult to connect with Julie Harris. Just as I hit my stride, Shumlin grabbed my wrist, saying, ‘Don’t cover the face, dear boy. Hold your hand this high, not that high. No, lower, lower, lower.’ I could not handle that mechanical way. I thought, There’s no art in this. If this is acting, I cannot be an actor.” Redford now found himself brooding, won
dering if his altered domestic setup and the trip west were not some terminus.
Lola flew on with Shauna, while Redford took the train, wanting time alone to contemplate his future. The train stopped to take on water in Gallup, New Mexico. “Since Florence when I was depressed, I’d perfected a kind of meditation, a self-hypnosis that tuned out the world and reoriented me. At Gallup, while meditating, something bizarre happened. I was locked inside myself, and suddenly there was an Indian face at the window. This apparition cut in and whipped me to some other consciousness. You can rationalize this however you want: the urban guy, jaded with the buzz of Manhattan, suddenly blasted into the bleakness of the desert world, whatever. But for me, in the way it happened, it was a transcendent experience. In simple terms, it yanked me backward, to the forties, to driving with my mother and encountering this native culture, upon which modern Americans are parasites. But it was not memory or nostalgia. It was a feeling of being sucked into timelessness. I was bogged down in the business of a career, asking myself, Should I choose this, or decide that? And that face at the window just pushed me into a feeling of, Just be. It was an unexpected Zen moment that alters you in some way.”
Transformed—hardened, he says—Redford arrived in L.A. determined to press Monique James for parts akin to the one in Iceman. She complied, finding him roles in an episode of the series Bus Stop, directed by Robert Altman, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a showcase Twilight Zone with Gladys Cooper, in which he played Death in the guise of a friendly neighborhood policeman knocking on the door of a smart old-timer. “He suddenly drove me hard,” said James. “My specialization wasn’t movies, but I had a soft spot for Bob. There were lots of pretty boys around, but not so many who made you think twice the way he did. He was driven. He was also the kind of guy, when he left the room, you looked after him and said, I wonder what’s really going on inside that lovely head? What’s the dark secret that makes him so determined?”
Robert Redford Page 11
