Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Christmas of 1961 was heightened by Lola’s new pregnancy, steady income and, for the first time, late-night appreciative crowds at the stage door. Redford felt validated, and Sondra Lee remembers him blissfully happy, even crossing Manhattan on foot in a snowstorm to deliver her holiday gift. “Of all of us, he came best out of that play,” says Lee. “People were talking about him, not the play.”

  The ebullience was short-lived and the play closed in April. On May 5, Lola gave birth to a baby son, David James, seven weeks prematurely. The horrors of maternity crises of the past—of his mother’s illnesses and the loss of his son—came crashing down. Mother and son fought to survive. The baby had the kind of extreme hyaline membrane disease that, says Redford, was life threatening. “The doctors gave Jamie just a 40-60 chance, but he hung in. Over a month his condition improved, and then he stabilized. It was a colossal relief for us.”

  Pollack knew the near loss of the baby had deeply unsettled Redford. Pollack was still in Los Angeles, directing Gunsmoke, and urged his friend to come west, so that he and Lola could recover. Monique James also called, telling him about the many exciting offers for television work. “You almost lose a child, you reevaluate,” says Redford. “So I sat down and restrategized my career.” He told Hesseltine he wanted a break from theater. Simultaneously he instructed Monique James and the new movie agent she had recommended, Arthur Park, to concentrate primarily on big-screen work. He was straightforward about his aims: he wanted money to build a home in the mountains. “Family became the priority and I decided to concentrate on the most expeditious way of building a secure home.”

  In July the Redfords returned west, first to Provo, then to a rented apartment in Laurel Canyon, not far from the Pollacks’ Mulholland Drive home. “Bob and I were always good for each other when we got together,” said Pollack, “because we fired up each other’s imaginations and fantasies. Neither of us skied then, but Bob suddenly started going on about this idyllic Rocky Mountain home he wanted to build, which would be hemmed in with snow half the year. I was thinking, He’s out of his mind—it’s all the stress of Jamie’s birth and everything. But then he surprised us by declaring that he’d already bought a plot near Provo and was getting ready to build, cutting clearings and laying foundations with his own hands. It came out of nowhere. I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘Wait a second! You want to work in movies and you want to live in the wilderness! How do you reconcile these two lifestyles?’ I told him he was nuts.”

  The high-volume work, as he wanted it, rolled in: parts in Dr. Kildare, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, any number of TV westerns. Then Park called to say there was, finally, big movie interest. MGM had two promising projects: a movie version of Sunday in New York, which would be directed by Peter Tewksbury, and Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment, to be directed by George Roy Hill. “I was very hopeful,” says Redford. “I thought both were right for me, but the readings did not go well.”

  Redford’s problem, Monique James felt, might well have been his ubiquity on television. “It was always a balancing act,” she said. “But I was encouraged all the time by the quality of what Bob was being offered. None were makeweight parts in TV, all had worth.” Huge consolation came in his role in ABC’s notable anthology series, Alcoa Premiere, hosted by Fred Astaire. Redford knew he was onto something: “Every so often you read a script and the part solidifies, living and breathing before you have the chance to apply yourself. This was my first experience of that.” The teleplay, by Halsted Welles, was called “The Voice of Charlie Pont,” about a failed writer, George Laurents, married and settled and working as an “assistant to an assistant to the janitor” at a Boston bank, who is preyed upon by an old school buddy, the criminally opportunistic charmer of the title. What most pleased Redford was the fact that, as in War Hunt, he was being offered “the soft-guy role,” and not the psycho. Redford was duly cast as the writer, and Bradford Dillman as the con man.

  No production Redford had been involved with until that time had such audience impact. Among those who took notice was a newly emerging theater director, Mike Nichols. Nichols, in transition from his long-running comedy partnership with Elaine May, was preparing his directorial debut with Neil Simon for the 1963 Broadway season. “So I was on the lookout for talent,” he remembers, “but not particularly looking to fill any role in Neil’s play, which was to be called Nobody Loves Me. So, I’m casually watching this ‘Charlie Pont,’ watching the new blond guy whom I don’t know, and I experienced that frisson you get when you’re surprised by someone. It’s the unexpected wave that catches the swimmer off guard. It wasn’t a ‘Gee, he was interesting’; it was more a ‘Where the hell did he come from?’ ” Nichols took note of Redford’s name. “I just thought, He’s gonna crack it.”

  That fall there continued to be plenty of heated talk about his potential, but no clear breakthrough. He wanted more movie auditions, but he was suddenly advised by the Sanderses’ company that he was committed to them exclusively for at least another film. “My mistake, but it was terrible because I really didn’t like what they were offering,” says Redford. In response to his rejections, the Sanders brothers were threatening to sue. At this point Carol Rossen reentered his life. That spring, by chance, he had found her photograph among Hesseltine’s files. Surprised she was working as an actress around New York, he told Hesseltine to send her warm greetings. Now Hesseltine surprised the Redfords during a beach barbecue by bringing Carol along. Redford was delighted. “I’d cut off that part of my life, and in doing so I lost some good people. Carol was one of the good ones. Reconnecting with her was good, because it brought the past into perspective and allowed me to assess the distance I’d traveled.”

  But Carol observed that her old friend was on the edge: “He’d changed in one way: what had always been a fiery temperament had become a very short fuse. I was in admiration for all he was achieving, and I loved Lola and the kids. But he felt he was in the wrong place, not just in the entertainment industry, but in life. It exuded from his pores. Everything of worth was happening in Europe, he said, not here. In movies they had the nouvelle vague, and the British had the New Wave. We had Doris Day and Pat Boone. This was also the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the feeling that Kennedy’s sociable foreign policy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We were supposed to be living in Camelot, but you had youth revolts and that feeling of the powder keg. America hadn’t got over McCarthy, and Bob was desperate to find a way not to be part of the status quo.”

  Carol was more accurate in her judgment of Redford on the edge than she knew. Shortly after, having disrupted family life with petty arguments that masked his true inner turmoil, he suddenly decided to take to the road again by himself. “I drove two hundred miles,” he says, “through Big Sur to Morro Bay, and parked the car. I just knew, for everyone’s sake, that I had to put a distance between me and the world. Big Sur was always a fabulous mystery to me, something that sat on the edge of my imagination, beckoning. It was a mystery I wanted to solve by being in it. So I decided to walk it.” That November there were subzero temperatures and the coast road was closed because of landslides. Redford didn’t care. He had a sleeping bag, writing materials, a sketchbook and a flashlight. “I was Kerouac walking back to face the demons at the cove in Big Sur. Of course, I was processing as I went, all the time questioning myself. Did I want to continue in the rat race? Was I letting Lola and the kids down?”

  Over several days Redford walked ninety miles toward Monterey, finally stopping at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, where he made a new friend in the Norwegian proprietor, a fanciful image of his darkest self. “Here was a man who’d come full circle in the journey of life. He’d come to America to build a better life. Somewhere he flipped and murdered a man. In consequence, he went to Alcatraz. From there he was out on a convict chain gang, digging the coastal highway during the Depression. And through that he ended up, like Miller at Big Sur, isolated from the world, free of self-contempt, managing an inn at th
e edge of nowhere. He was occupying a shack he had to build while a member of the convict road gang that built the Big Sur access road in the thirties.”

  For days the men talked in a drunken free association that revived Redford. “He’d get plastered and cuss the world: the social injustice, the bent hierarchy, the lack of mettle in the youth. He was volatile, but he had great wisdom. All the time, with this crazy talk and the wind rattling the windows, piano music was playing, day and night. Finally, I asked him what it was, because it was like the counterpoint of sanity, a Greek chorus to our yarns. And he told me it was Pachelbel, Canon in D, which I promised to get for myself when I got back to L.A. Then I forgot the name of the composer and, try as I might, I couldn’t recall it.” It would be fifteen years later, while renting a Big Sur property to work on the script for The Electric Horseman with Pollack, that Redford rediscovered Pachelbel: “Sydney and I decided to go for dinner, and at the last minute I remembered Deetjen’s, so I said, ‘Maybe it’s still there. Let’s go back.’ ” The old man was dead—but everything else remained, including the Pachelbel music gently flooding the dining room. At that time, Redford was planning to direct his first film, Ordinary People. The Pachelbel music suddenly framed this unshaped work in his mind. “I reflected on that later,” he says. “It fit a pattern in my life of serendipitous moments. Those are the moments—the Big Sur walk and Deetjen’s—that you feel you are not so much the navigator of your life as the object of some design.”

  Back in Laurel Canyon, emaciated and bearded as in his post-Europe days, Redford announced abruptly that he wanted to quit L.A. forever and concentrate his life in the mountains of Utah. He would resume theater, he said, and spend his working months in New York.

  Then came news of an Emmy nomination for “The Voice of Charlie Pont.” On the heels of that came an offer from Bing Crosby Productions for Redford to play the lead role in a new ABC summer series, Breaking Point. Redford said no. “Then the honey trap opens,” he says. “The seductive talk starts. This would be groundbreaking drama, all about a psychiatrist running group therapy sessions. I would be the star counselor. I thought about that. I was twenty-four years old, and I was supposed to be counseling sick people? I told Monique James, ‘How can I play this? It’s me who needs the shrink.’ ”

  Arthur Park came down hard on Redford: “Kid, I’ve been a lifetime in this business, so let me put you straight. Don’t be a schmuck. Movies are great, but forget about them. They pay television stars in the top guest slots $3,500. They want to pay you $3,750 a week, for thirteen weeks. Nobody your age is getting that. Take it.”

  Redford still refused. “Lola stood by me at first, because she was keen to get back to Provo and build a homestead. Then the offer went up to $6,000 a week, which was unprecedented. She said, ‘Wait a second …?’ and I thought, Gee, maybe I should rethink it.”

  Redford spent all night on the beach at Malibu, walking, getting his feet wet. “I became that kid of six on the bicycle in Sawtelle, looking for the answers in the stars. Lola and I had big debts. Stark had loaned me some money, and this house we wanted to build was obviously going to cost some. But I felt I’d already ransomed myself to the Sanderses’ contract, and that felt bad, like I was an Indian who’d lost his spirit to a photograph. I didn’t want any more of that, but I also had to think about the family.”

  When Redford returned home, there was another summons from Park. When he arrived at Park’s office, the agent was shaking: “While you were out playing Hamlet on the beach, kid, Bing Crosby Productions upped the offer to $10,000 a week! I’m doing this job thirty years. Don’t throw this back in my face. Let me retire with this one under my belt.”

  “Coming back from the beach, I was at the point of saying maybe,” says Redford. “But that decided it. Somewhere between the Sanders brothers and this horseflesh deal was my personal reality. I told Arthur, ‘The offer is great, because it makes it easy for me. Let them offer me twenty thousand, or thirty, or forty. It just makes it easier to say no.’ ”

  Redford had resolved his priorities. It wasn’t money he wanted, it was roots.

  9

  Big Pictures

  The two acres Redford had purchased for $500, a onetime chicken-coop plot at the north fork draw at Timp Haven on the flank of the hill facing Mount Timpanogos, would become the physical nucleus of Sundance. Incrementally, over the next five years, he would purchase six hundred more acres of wild lands from Justin Stewart to broaden his base. Redford insists “there was no long-term strategy.” But a significant pattern was forming. With every peak of achievement came an act of withdrawal.

  Lola and the children were housed in an apartment in town while Redford took to camping on-site, intent on constructing his house with only local builder Garn Phillips and his son to help. In 1961, Redford had seen Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, built in Arizona, in Sunset magazine. “That started my love affair with organic architecture, and also the organic notion of building.” The highlight of Taliesin West for Redford was a unique stone-in-cement chimney. Redford wanted his A-frame built around this design, but both Phillips and Lee Knell, the Provo architect consulted in the planning, were stymied. Finally Redford found stonemason Jay Bown, a half-Cherokee Mormon based in Cash Valley on the Iowa border. “I drove 130 miles north to find this apparently hostile guy who met my plan with indifference. He was standing on his sixty-foot flatbed truck and wasn’t impressed by the fact that I was this actor who wanted to do the impossible. Finally I said to him, ‘Okay, I’m going to try it anyway. I just don’t want to screw it up,’ and he came around.” The timber used was local; the granite shipped from nearby Deer Creek and Strawberry was so ancient it was studded with dinosaur-era fossils. They labored through the summer and fall. The house became an obsession for Redford. As it came together, it comprised fourteen timber A-frames, thirty-eight-foot-wide windows looking out to Timpanogos, an encircling pine deck, three bedrooms and a cathedral living space. “We had moose and deer, a mountain lion, bald eagles, every sort of wilderness creature—but no running water,” he remembers. “When the winter snows came, we boiled water to cook and bathe with. When the snows were heaviest in January, the house was half buried, and we used sleds to trek from the canyon entrance. When the family came to stay, it took an hour to transport them, and the supplies, from the entrance to the house. It was nineteenth-century living.”

  As Redford labored in bliss, his future was being shaped by yet new advisers. Arthur Park had been replaced, by mutual agreement, by Meta Rosenberg of Rosenberg and Coryel, who had a plan to pay off the Sanderses from the proceeds of a possible movie deal with Columbia. Rosenberg already had that deal in hand, with producer Irving Allen, who wanted Redford for his Viking movie, The Long Ships. Ostensibly this was what Redford sought: good casting, alongside a major star—Richard Widmark—in a movie to be directed by the respected Jack Cardiff. But Redford dithered. Hesseltine was calling at the same time, telling him of Mike Nichols’s interest in casting him in Nobody Loves Me, the follow-up to Simon’s Tony-winning Come Blow Your Horn. “I was very flattered,” says Redford, “because I obviously knew Neil’s and Mike’s reputations. And, of course, I’d always said I wanted good theater. But I was so at peace in Provo that I didn’t want to get back in the race.” After weeks of phone exchanges, Redford finally offered an equivocal agreement. Sticking to his word and choosing East Coast over West, he told Nichols he would accept the play, but strictly on the condition of his finding comfort in the project. “I was emphatic,” says Redford. “I told Mike, ‘I will do the tryouts in Bucks County. But I will not commit to Broadway.’ I know it was half-assed, but it was the best I could do, given where I was at emotionally.”

  Redford accepted a fee of $110 a week, much to Rosenberg’s dismay. “I know that was a time of reconsideration for the people professionally associated with me,” says Redford. “My judgment was in question. It seemed unthinkable that an actor on the brink would turn down $10,000 a week to take a pi
ttance. People started saying, ‘He’s unstable—watch out!’ But the only appeal for leaving Provo was the old challenge of theater. That’s all that got me moving again.”

  In April, Redford left the building site, more physically fit than ever, and drove his Porsche to New York. At producer Arnold Saint Subber’s house, Nichols found him unapologetically reluctant to dive in. Nichols became alarmed, mostly because the play was loaded with importance for both him and Simon. “Neil needed the follow-up and I needed at least a professional show. After I split with Elaine [May], I was the leftover guy who didn’t know what to do with his life. I needed some break, and Saint Subber had handed it to me. He was the guy who said, ‘Direct!’ and sent me this Neil Simon work in progress. I’d played prima donna at first. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it in summer stock if we can get that blond guy from “The Voice of Charlie Pont.” ’ Saint Subber could have told me there and then to go get lost, but he supported me. So I wanted to pay him back … and here was Bob, offering a halfhearted commitment.”

  Nobody Loves Me had the same romantic breeziness as Sunday in New York. It had the same occasional bumptious wit, too. It seemed to Redford very much a product of its time, about indolent young lovers playing out misunderstood affections. Simon, a fluid and prolific writer since his high school collaborations with his brother, Danny, had graduated, via the CBS radio writers’ school, Catskills revues and Sid Caesar’s shows, to the faultless Sergeant Bilko. He would later write in his autobiography that Nobody Loves Me—shortly to be retitled Barefoot in the Park—came in fits and starts over many years. As they convened at Saint Subber’s, said Simon, he was still laboring.

  Redford’s role would be Simon’s alter ego, Paul Bratter, a fastidious, newly married attorney. His wife, Corie, the whirling dervish of the piece, struggles to organize their ridiculously inappropriate newlyweds’ apartment while sparring with the exotic, Tyrolean-hat-wearing upstairs neighbor, Victor Velasco. What ensues is Corie’s conversion of uptight Paul to Victor’s laid-back bohemianism: