“I was not into shared soul-searching,” says Redford. “In that regard I was, and remain, a loner. I like to face the issues alone. Similarly, in deciding the direction I wanted to go in as an actor, I mostly engaged that dialogue with myself. Why did I want to persevere? Vanity is the easy explanation, but I now knew it was more than that. The nearest I can come to explaining the drive is something Jack Kerouac said about the problem facing the American artist. There are many voices in America, he said, so the best solution is to write one story in the bum dialect, another in the Indian dialect and so on. I liked that. I had a very broad sense of America, or the parallel Americas, and I knew I wanted to study the differences. I wanted the power of witness. Then I wanted to turn it into some performance truth. You have to be careful of overstatement, but I suppose I had some intuition or observation about America or Americans that I wanted to essay.”
James stretched, getting him tryouts for a few movies, but he consistently failed. “That taught me a lot about the business,” says Redford. “Slowly this tapestry unfolded: that show business—even art—was gladiatorial. I had to work harder.”
With new antitrust laws, MCA, which was ever expanding into movie production and had now acquired a record label, was under pressure to restructure. James urged Redford to retain a Beverly Hills lawyer, Alexander Tucker, and he signed a new movie agent contract with Citron and Park, the high-profile MCA spin-off. But he refused to sever contact with Stark Hesseltine. “I saw how one could become soulless in the pursuit of success, and I would not allow that to start happening. Stark had been loyal to me, and I felt I should reciprocate. He knew nothing about movies, but he was a decent human being, so I decided I would stick with him as my overall agent and adviser as long as I could.”
The fidelity facilitated the most productive and long-lasting friendship of Redford’s life. Sydney Pollack, a young actor from South Bend, Indiana, was also an MCA client, and met Redford during readings for a small-time movie called War Hunt. “It was Stark Hesseltine who got me interested in Redford,” Pollack recalled. “All I ever heard from Stark were stories about this young blond surf god who was such a great guy. That got me interested to know Bob.” Pollack had left home at seventeen, abandoning “the usual bourgeois expectations” of his shopkeeper father, first to join the army, then to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sandy Meisner. Resistant, like Meisner, to the literal Method, he made his Broadway debut at twenty-one in 1955; he also became Meisner’s paid assistant. John Frankenheimer, one of television’s most prolific young directors, introduced Pollack to Burt Lancaster, Frankenheimer’s production partner on The Young Savages. Pollack became dialogue coach to the street punks in the movie, and his work so impressed Lancaster that he convinced MCA’s Lew Wasserman to represent him. Under the patronage of Lancaster, Pollack headed west in 1960, first to coach actors for Frankenheimer, then to direct episodes of CBS’s courtroom drama series The Defenders and ABC’s medical series Ben Casey. When he met Redford, he was recently married to the actress Claire Griswold and taking time out from Ben Casey to return to his first love, acting.
Pollack remembered being struck by Redford’s “command” when they met in an audition room. Much of this, Pollack admitted, was superficial accoutrements. With his recent good television earnings, Redford was living at the Hotel Bel-Air; he had also acquired a Porsche 350 series speedster, the first of twenty he would own over the years. “I understood these markers,” said Pollack. “This is a business where appearance and reality vie with each other. But you quickly get the knack of looking beyond. And what I saw in Bob, as Stark said, was a man of quality.”
Very shortly, the two actors were hanging out, drinking vodka and talking long into the nights. “We were very different physically,” said Pollack. “Bob was Mr. Sports. I was never into the jock thing; I never held a tennis racket in my life. But Bob’s competitiveness was infectious. And though he was always into sports, always checking the sports results, the competitiveness was much broader and healthier than that. It came from his gut and it came from the spirit of the times, the Kennedy spirit. Even if you weren’t political, and Bob was only marginally then, it was impossible not to be revved up by all the changes that were going down in 1961. Bob was hot-wired, and that made him a very attractive guy to be with.”
Redford “loved Sydney from the get-go” and concedes his own political soft-focus. Still, he says, it was impossible to remain indifferent to Camelot: to Kennedy’s brain trust, the exhortations to young people, the fact that the White House itself was now a culture and arts center. “I wasn’t paying close attention, but it seeped in,” says Redford. “Later, looking back from the stance of supporting liberal politics, I saw that the fifties-sixties changeover was the pivot of everything that redefined America as a global force. I wasn’t a contributor, but I was lucky to be alive at a time when the notion of America as a concept came back into question, and people looked objectively, without the pressure of a world war, at the capacity of our role in world affairs. It was a time of open questioning, which I cherished and enjoyed discussing with Sydney.”
Redford and Pollack’s friendship took off during War Hunt, Redford’s first—albeit small-scale—movie, which he still regards affectionately. During Little Moon of Alban, two young film enthusiasts, Terry and Denis Sanders, had come backstage with a script they’d developed with Stanford Whitmore about the Korean War. Redford liked them before he read the script: “They were of Turkish extraction, very quirky and cutting-edge.” The brothers were UCLA film school graduates whose cinema verité short about the Civil War, A Time Out of War, had won an Academy Award. Because of that success, Universal had given them $250,000 to make their first feature, this modest War Hunt.
The script dealt with the spiritual abyss of war, examined in the erosion of sanity on the battlefield, where Private Raymond Endore, an exhausted reconnaissance man desensitized to slaughter, attempts to abduct his young ward, a Korean child called Charlie, and take him from the killing fields to the freedom in the hills. Other major roles were those of Private Roy Loomis, a man of reason and conscience, and the straight-ahead, unquestioning Sergeant Owen Van Dorn.
When Redford read the script, the role of Endore jumped out at him. “I thought, Oh, I get it. They’ve seen me do the psychos on TV, and now I’m going to be this neurotic wild guy.” Terry Sanders, the producer, told Redford that John Saxon, the longtime Universal contract player, would be his main costar. “Given John’s status, I assumed he’d play the heroic Roy Loomis. But I was wrong. I could not believe it when Denis, who was directing, told me to learn Loomis’s lines. Saxon would be playing Endore! I could not believe that these guys saw me as a friendly face. I thought, Finally! I told Monique: ‘What a relief! I was beginning to be typecast as a loony. Now these Sanders guys are opening it up. They see the actor.’ ”
When shooting began in Topanga Canyon, Redford encountered a crew top-heavy with talent. Apart from Saxon and Pollack (cast as Owen Van Dorn), there was John Houseman as UA’s creative adviser, Francis Ford Coppola as gofer, Dean Stockwell in charge of the still photography and Ted McCord as the cameraman. “These guys were the second generation out of UCLA film school, following the so-called breakthrough guys like Stanley Kubrick, who’d just hit internationally with The Killing,” says Redford. “They were the American New Wave and people had high expectations for them. I was elated. Sydney and I thought, Whoa, this could be really inventive and great!”
Redford’s fee for three weeks’ work was to be $500, somewhat less than a comparable television fee. But Redford and Pollack were quickly concerned about the immaturity of the producers. “I looked around and saw great actors on the set,” said Pollack. “There was no question about that. But there was a studenty feel about the Sanders boys, a feeling that they had many unresolved creative issues as we went along. I was experienced enough to know you simply have to have your plot worked out before you shoot a foot of film. You can’t risk boardroom
debates in the field, and that’s what they were doing.”
“Sydney and I were the kind of actors who avoided seeing the big productions like Cleopatra in favor of the new stuff the Europeans were doing,” Redford recalls. “So we were supporting all the edgy stuff. But Denis seemed less sure every day of where we were going. In my opinion, he opened a door that allowed John [Saxon] to take over the movie. John was experienced. They were not. And that might have been a mistake.”
Saxon disputes that he took over the movie but believed War Hunt was a classic in concept and execution. “In the context of the times, it was an original gem,” he says. “It was a transition film, because the studio system had just shut down, Europe was happening and no one at the executive level knew where to go next. No decisions were being made in Hollywood, and this was the first moment that the independents stood out. In later life Bob would become the patron saint of the independents with Sundance, and I choose to believe this was his baptism. Had he come to movies at any other time, in any other way, he might not have found the inspiration. The Sanders brothers helped bring in the new era. We all benefited. And I believe Bob intuited the significance of what we’d all done even if he failed to process it at the time.”
Saxon admits that he angled to “supervise” the postproduction, working closely with Denis Sanders. But when UA saw their version in the spring of 1962, a recut was ordered and effected. Saxon objected, personally confronting the senior UA executive in charge, David Picker. “I told him, ‘You have to reinstate all the original Sanderses’ footage, please. These guys have a vision of something very deep and meaningful about war and human nature, and you need to show it that way—the intimate, disturbing way.’ ” Picker wouldn’t allow it. “UA had no time for metaphysics,” says Saxon. “They cut it again and dumped War Hunt onto the market, where it was just another low-budget black-and-white war picture.”
That may have seemed the case to Saxon, but the reviews didn’t bear him out. Howard Thompson in The New York Times praised “one of the most honest and haunting war movies in years,” in which Redford was “excellent.” Bosley Crowther declared it “a stunning achievement, a kind of poetry,” while the New York Herald Tribune and the Hollywood Reporter both singled out Redford’s noteworthy movie debut. “We got away with it,” said Pollack. “It was a combination effort: the Sanders brothers, UA—and some great acting chops. We didn’t deserve it, none of us, but it turned into a nice little film.”
After War Hunt had been completed, on a boozy night at Saxon’s home in the Santa Monica hills, he and Redford discussed the future of the movie business: “My life within the studio system was over,” says Saxon. “I was on my way to join Otto Preminger for a movie in Europe. I told Bob that all that remained in L.A. was television. I said the movie market was dead. He wouldn’t have any of it. He was still a relative unknown, had no real power, but he was emphatic. ‘There’s plenty left to do,’ he told me. I said, ‘But the movies are finished out here,’ and he just looked at me and shook his head. He was a stubborn critter.”
This stubbornness now focused on his theater failures. “I suddenly thought, Wait a minute, I’m missing something here. Forget drama. Laughter has always been my truth. It’s my personal sanity preserve. I decided I wanted to try comedy, and theater was rich in comedies at that time.” Tom Skerritt, whom Redford had also befriended when he too acted on War Hunt, remembers Redford outlining this decision: “It made absolute sense, once you knew him. He was never a straight-line guy. He’s an absurdist. He was also bizarrely ambitious. You could speculate forever on Freudian theories of alienation, of the artist’s inability to reconcile or overcome his childhood needs, and how that void opens the path to creation. You could say Bob’s alienation brought him to the higher ground. But however it happened, it happened. War Hunt was one piece of the mosaic. Comedy was the next piece.”
Hesseltine was appalled. “He said I was foolish,” says Redford. “He said I was already on my way in solid drama, that there was a momentum going since Iceman. He would not support me. He was, he said, grooming me for the classics. That, I felt, was his blind spot. He maintained some romantic vision of me as Paris in a skirt in Antigone. But that just wasn’t me. I put my foot down. I told him I’d rather rot than be remembered for Route 66. If I failed trying, at least I tried.”
In the middle of this debate, on an afternoon when he was visiting Monique James, Redford found a script on her desk whose author’s name caught his eye: Norman Krasna. Krasna, recipient of an Academy Award for Princess O’Rourke, had a marathon career dating back to the thirties, when he’d collaborated with Groucho Marx. Krasna’s wit was cornball and his style light-fingered. The script on James’s desk was Sunday in New York, and Redford became excited when he saw the name of Garson Kanin, a literary giant in his view, appended as director. “To me, Garson represented the ultimate Hollywood comedy sophistication, because of all the great Hepburn-Tracy movies he’d written with his wife, Ruth Gordon. I thought, This is my navigator!”
Redford insisted Hesseltine approach the producer, David Merrick, a leviathan of Broadway, for a role in the play. But at first, Merrick refused to even audition him. Redford continued to pressure Hesseltine with hourly phone calls. Finally Hesseltine broke through with Mike Shurtleff, Merrick and Kanin’s casting director, who had seen The Iceman Cometh and been impressed. On Shurtleff’s recommendation, Merrick conceded to test Redford, provided the actor paid his own fare to New York to meet Kanin. Redford was told he would be reimbursed if he got the part. “So I took the red-eye to New York, and I read for Kanin and landed the part. But Merrick, the cheap bastard, never reimbursed me.”
Crossbred from a wealth of George Cukor and Billy Wilder comedies, Sunday in New York benefited greatly from the participation of Kanin, who had directed a Krasna-written movie, Bachelor Mother, for RKO in 1939 but was, more importantly, Cukor’s magical collaborator on the classics Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike. Having cut his teeth on RKO comedies, Kanin had, by his account, “fine-tuned a revolutionary comedy directing style” of his own. “I knew what worked and what didn’t by trial and error over thirty years with some of the greatest light comedians and writers America has ever known.” Admiring as he was of Krasna, however, something about Sunday in New York sat uneasily with Kanin. Perhaps, as the actress Sondra Lee, cast in a prominent role, observed, it was the “acrobatic, in-your-face sexuality of a plot on the brink of the Swingin’ Sixties”—a will-she-or-won’t-she-yield-her-virginity romp that bordered on the pornographic compared with Tracy-Hepburn—that stalled Kanin. Or perhaps, as Redford believed, it was the fault of the writing. The story line, to be sure, was familiar. Eileen Taylor, an ingénue from Albany, visits her airline pilot brother in his New York apartment, argues the principles of modern morality, goes out to see a movie, meets Mike Mitchell, a part-time art critic on the make, catches her brooch on his suit, agrees to meet for tea at Longchamps restaurant to discuss the $2 repair and, over the next six comedic scenes, falls for him. They end up gamboling in bed, “laughing hysterically,” says the script, “which is an ideal way to begin a marriage.” Redford liked the jokes, but “let’s face it, this was not up to the standard of a Kanin-Gordon script.”
Whatever its weaknesses, the play was transformed, said Kanin, by Redford’s arrival. “I didn’t intend to cast him in a lead role. We already had a major New York actor signed and sealed and in the wings. But then Bob came in to read for a lesser part, and I thought immediately that he looked like Spencer Tracy. He did his small piece and Merrick and I thanked him, but he said, very politely, that he would like to read for the lead. We were a little shocked, but we said go ahead. There was nothing to lose. He walked into the wings and reappeared in a few moments, in the same clothes, and proceeded to give a subtle, funny, original performance as Mike Mitchell, the main character. He was canny. He’d been holding back on the first reading, which wasn’t terrific, because he believed he was the lead, and he was correct.”
/> Redford stressed the edginess in Sunday in New York and, according to Kanin, brought the trendy sexuality to the fore. “We jumped forward with Bob, and that was his contribution, not ours.” David Merrick avoided rehearsals, leaving Kanin in uncontested control. Kanin duly attacked Krasna’s script, replacing pedestrian lines with his own witticisms. For Sondra Lee, the rehearsals took fire when Redford and Pat Stanley, playing the virginal Eileen, “hit their stride within two days.” The entire play was dependent, says Lee, on sparks from that romantic chemistry. “And Bob and Pat delivered, big-time. They flirted. It was powerful. They were smooth as silk, and they made something from nothing very much.”
The play opened at the Cort on Broadway on November 29 to mixed reviews, but the critics had only good things to say about Redford. Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune said Redford “is really first-rate no matter what the evening is doing.” And Richard Coe of The Washington Post deemed him “a marvelously skilled farceur.” Redford was pleased. “But I knew it was a hairsbreadth success,” he says. “And the truth was that just one review turned it around for all of us.” Howard Taubman in The New York Times commended a play that “is inventive and chic [and] sparkles with freshness and humor.” That review alone, says Redford, secured the play’s survival and his first significant stage success.
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