CORIE: You can’t even walk into a candy store and ask the lady for a Tootsie Roll. You’ve got to walk up to the counter and point at it and say, “I’ll have that thing in the brown and white wrapper.”
PAUL: That’s ridiculous.
CORIE: And you’re not. That’s the trouble. Like Thursday night. You wouldn’t walk barefoot with me in Washington Square Park. Why not?
PAUL: Very simple answer. It was seventeen degrees.
Nichols was pleased with his other casting: Elizabeth Ashley as Corie, Kurt Kasznar as Velasco, Mildred Natwick as Corie’s mother and Herb Edelman as the telephone man. “I knew they were all solid, all good at getting ‘the bounce’ in the thing. If I had reservations at all, it was with Bob and Liz’s mind-set at the beginning.” Ashley, whom Redford had met on The Highest Tree, was the hottest property around, having just won a Tony for Take Her, She’s Mine and having headlined Paramount’s summer hit, The Carpetbaggers, playing opposite her new lover, George Peppard. The stresses caused by this relationship—Peppard was extricating himself from a ten-year marriage to move in with her—were known but, says Nichols, not fully understood. “I thought lack of enthusiasm was my problem. I had to find a spark to ignite these fine actors and shake off some ennui.”
The laughs in rehearsals came slow. According to Neil Simon in his memoirs, “Once I heard a huge laugh coming from the rehearsal room. I couldn’t resist. I ran in to hear what part of the play they were doing. They weren’t. They had taken a break and Mike was regaling them with hysterical stories about his life.”
Within a week, Nichols, and the production, perked up. “I saw what Bob was giving us. He had the farce experience from Sunday in New York. He could roll with the unexpected moments. And Bob was also a very funny guy when he was pissed, and he was pissed a lot in those days, so that was great electricity for Paul Bratter. Once Bob himself got those elements by the neck, he had the character, and he was off and running.”
Redford, though, thought the prep time was insufficient. He felt unready when the show opened out of town at the Bucks County Playhouse. Ashley, emotionally spent from overwork and the complexities of her love life, was exhausted before the show started. No one saw the approaching nervous breakdown that would put her out of the show within three months, and ultimately out of show business for half a decade. But it was Simon who fell apart after the first night. “He just disintegrated,” says Nichols. “As far as he was concerned, we had on our hands the worst play ever written. He actually asked the theater manager that very question: ‘Is this the worst play you’ve ever had?’ In my opinion, apart from the fact that the third act didn’t work, we brought the house down. All the laughs came on cue, and I knew Bob was the center of it. He’d tightened up enormously and, for the performance, gave it everything. I learned he was the kind of actor who inhabits the role, and so it was perfectionism that lifted Paul Bratter. Neil wrote an uptight character. Bob’s eccentricity made him someone lovable.” Redford believes that Paul Bratter was unquestionably his most successful theater role.
After Bucks County, there was a hiatus before the play would begin its pre-Broadway tour, at New Haven, in the fall. Redford returned to the Utah building site and resumed what he calls his “soul work.” By August, the house was finished. “My whole psychological framework changed,” he says. “Simply, the day-to-day work, carving stone, digging, seeing this house grow like a flower in the landscape, touched me very deeply. I already felt I belonged in the canyon, that it had a hold on me. Now I felt that what I had just accomplished was far more important than Broadway.” Stan Collins, who knew the area well from childhood hikes, was impressed by the beauty and craftsmanship of the finished house. He also saw something beyond pride of ownership. “Bob definitely sensed a mission. The house was amazing, but it was a little too far up the canyon, a little too off the road, a little too inaccessible. You got the impression that he had a hidden hand, that there was more to this idea of building a house in Utah than met the eye.”
When Redford rejoined the play in New Haven, he “behaved badly. I did not want to be there, and I did not cooperate. It was really tough on Mike, on everyone, and today I feel ashamed of how I was.” Neil Simon had fixed the technical problem, boosting the third act by adding a love affair between Velasco and Corie’s mother. A jolting review brought Redford to attention, a local critic remarking that “the play was fine, except for Redford, who couldn’t be heard past the first few rows.” Redford says, “It was true—I was lying down. I was spiritually still in Utah, so you might say I was on my way out the door.” Over dinner Nichols inadvertently saved the day. They talked of the characters, of the personalities of the actors, of Ashley’s troubles. “And then,” says Redford, “Mike said something that connected me once again with Bratter, whom I’d lost. He said, ‘You have the secret’—meaning, the answers to the character rested with me. I suddenly saw the power of my choice, that Paul Bratter could be whoever I wanted him to be. There wasn’t any analysis beyond that. I made some actor decisions. I went onstage, and I just kept silent. Elizabeth delivered her lines, and I just smiled and looked at her. And it worked! She looked at me, waiting for the line … and she had to look again, waiting. The tone between us sharpened. Freshness and power came back into Bratter, and I was connected with acting again. The show was back on the road.”
Nichols felt the need to confront Redford on another matter. “I became fascinated by the fact that he had no interest in his beauty. It was depressing, because he wanted to plaster his hair down and play the nerd. He had come to like Bratter again, but he felt himself playing against Liz, and that confused him. She, after all, was supposed to be the object of desire.” Once again over dinner the play was reenergized. Nichols says, “I told him, ‘Look, I’ve had years of experience in a double act, and I’ve learned one thing: you cannot win the battle unless you accept that it’s a battle.’ Bob just nodded and we ended our meal. When we did the show that night, it was a completely different show. Liz became invisible. He pulled out every trick and knocked her off the planet. That’s when we really took off.”
Ashley’s affair with Peppard, she later said, added to the burden of years of overwork and derailed her emotionally. “I felt like a failure,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I had a lot of energy and flash and was as adorable as I could be. But I wasn’t any good and I knew it. I could tell that Redford knew it too, and every time I went out onstage it compounded my sense of inadequacy. The more I acted the worse it seemed to get.” Nichols disagrees. “Certainly, as we headed for Broadway, she didn’t slacken in terms of commitment. Bob challenged her, and she gave him a run for his money.”
When they played in Washington, Richard Rodgers deemed the play “irresistible.” Newsweek declared it sublime. Redford, however, was in despair. He recalls, “What the reviews said to me was, This play is finished. It was done, it worked! So for me the work was over. I went to a bar to have a drink with Mike. He asked me what was wrong and I told him, ‘I feel lonely onstage. It’s the signal for me that something’s wrong, that I’m not connecting.’ I told him I couldn’t go on with Barefoot because the critics had put the cap on it. He asked me to reconsider, and I told him honestly that I couldn’t. And then he did a very smart thing. He said, ‘All right, forget all that’s been said tonight. Forget what the critics like. Forget that Richard Rodgers likes it. From now on it’s a completely blank sheet of paper, it is no longer blocked out. Whatever we have is whatever you want to do. Just take it and go with it. You are Paul Bratter. Play it whatever damned way you feel.’ ”
Nichols remembers the conversation as stressful but invaluable, both in securing a friendship and in developing their respective careers. “Bob taught me something. I wanted a play set in stone. He didn’t. He wanted a play that was evolving every night. Something that was always new. In my experience, very few actors would go that far. It’s too energy consuming. That, I felt, was the mark of his integrity.”
The results,
momentarily, were disastrous. “It was a case of swinging too far to the left to counter the swing to the right,” says Redford. “But it bonded us so tight and together we made the adjustments and straightened it all out.”
The play became the toast of Broadway’s fall 1963 season, opening on October 23 and garnering the biggest receipts of 1963–64 and a Tony for Nichols. Over the next two years it would earn $50 million, a 500 percent return for its investors.
Redford, Simon and Nichols were elevated to a kind of national stardom with the enormousness of Barefoot’s success; so was Ashley, who appeared on the cover of Life in November, the week before she was admitted to a psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney. For Simon, after years of laboring in television, fame was bewitching. Nichols found it exhilarating. For Redford, national attention was wonderfully confusing. “I was suddenly Mr. Focus. Eleanor Roosevelt and Noël Coward dropped by. Natalie Wood came backstage. Bette Davis summoned me to her suite at the Plaza. For me, the best was Ingrid Bergman, who came backstage. When she was leaving, I went after her to say, ‘Miss Bergman, I just wanted to tell you how great I think you are.’ She smiled with the greatest charm and said simply, ‘Do only good work.’ It came with such sincerity that it stopped me dead in my tracks, and it felt like the most positive result of the whole business.”
On November 22, in the middle of the hysteria for Barefoot, Redford was being wined and dined at the Four Seasons by agents from William Morris, who were enthusiastically discussing movie possibilities. As he was sandwiched between them in a crosstown cab, the news came on the radio that Kennedy had been assassinated. Redford stopped the cab and went walking. “I walked for hours, in shock like everyone else, but also recording the public reaction like a journalist.” The night’s performance of Barefoot was canceled. The following night, and in the nights after, Redford noticed a strange phenomenon in the theater. “We’d had to adjust the text a little, to take out, for example, a jokey reference to me, Bratter, dying in the prime of my life. All that was understandable. But after a short period, I found the oddest thing. The sound of the audience laughter changed. It was subtle, but it was very marked. The laughter became raucous and harsh. And it never returned to the way it was before. It was as if innocence was gone from American audiences. At least, that’s what it felt like.” Redford, like many, later saw the assassination, and the following tragic deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as representative of a ground shift in American attitudes. “It was a terrible erosion of the belief system that had been in place since the Civil War. These were serial deaths of a president and national leaders at the hands of fellow Americans. This poked a finger in the chest of every American alive, saying, ‘This country isn’t the United States. This is a coalition of interests, not all of which are in alignment. Let’s think this through before it’s too late.’ ”
Through late 1963 and into 1964, as Barefoot ran, Redford continued to appear on television in quality shows, his favorite of which was an episode of The Virginian. He rationalized this work simply: it paid the bills, the $6,000 for The Virginian coming in especially handy to help fund a new apartment on West Seventy-ninth Street. But he would only take parts he could learn from. “The criterion I applied was, What can I absorb from this? Who wrote it? Who’s in it?” He accepted an episode of The Virginian called “The Evil That Men Do,” written by Frank Chase and directed by Stuart Heisler, to work alongside Lee J. Cobb. “You couldn’t go wrong studying him,” says Redford. “Here was an actor who did it all, starting in the Group Theatre, doing stage, the classics, movies, and now he was in television. He’d had a heart attack and had obviously slowed down, but I was keen to learn from him.” After a particularly intense scene, in which Redford found himself stretching to impress the great man, Cobb took him aside: “I know what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t get it from me. I’ve paid my dues, done my work, and now I just want to be comfortable.”
Redford’s television career was soon over. The decision was made, he says, by television, not by him. The fifties, as the film historian Leslie Halliwell has pointed out, was television’s Elizabethan age, a time when the medium offered interpretations of O’Neill, Shakespeare and Molière and introduced the contemporary genius of playwrights like Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) and Paddy Chayefsky (Marty). All that changed in the sixties when twenty-four-hour demand and sponsors’ greed greatly diminished quality. What followed, said Halliwell, was “the age of the beer can, with America’s anonymous network selection committees consciously gearing all their programs to the mentality of the fat little guy in the midwest who slumps in his armchair pouring Coors down his throat.”
Redford wanted no part of it. Through the trials of the last five years and especially the ups and downs of Barefoot in the Park, he realized that acting per se truly interested him, that the attachment was honest and edifying. “But I wasn’t sure that theater could sustain me, either. Like television, it was on the slide. The swing was toward the pop hit formula. I tried to look beyond Broadway for inspiration and found plenty to admire in actors like Richard Burton, Albert Finney and, especially, Paul Scofield, who enchanted me that year in A Man for All Seasons. But at that point, even in England, these great actors were being badly served. I felt, and still believe, that theater is the center of the universe for actors. It’s intimate, and therefore it’s a force for honesty. You sit and say to your audience, at arm’s reach: ‘Sit down, let me tell you my story. I am a salesman with a home and a family.…’ You earn their trust one by one. But I was a realist as much as I was an idealist. I knew I wouldn’t be able to feed my family on the scraps thrown to me by Arthur Miller or Edward Albee, and I knew Neil Simon wouldn’t produce a Barefoot every season. So I had to move on.”
The cinema, after his meditations on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was always the good option and by the summer, he had a workable movie offer. Paramount, excited by Barefoot’s success, proposed a good project, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious, with Alec Guinness. In one fell swoop, Rosenberg resolved the Sanderses’ contract and Redford was free to proceed as he wished. The Paramount movie would be shot in Europe. “I got excited,” says Redford. “Europe had thrilled me and I wanted to go back, to get that stimulation. It was serendipity again.”
In October 1964 Redford left Barefoot and flew to Munich with Lola and the kids. He started writing in his diary again, carefully logging the developing opportunity. The movie was based, he was pleased to record, on actor Robert Shaw’s 1960 novel, The Hiding Place, “a wonderful work” that had already been twice adapted for television, most recently as a Playhouse 90 episode with James Mason and Trevor Howard. It is the story of two American airmen, Captain Hank Wilson and Sergeant Lucky Finder (Englishmen in the book), from opposite ends of the social divide, who are incarcerated in a basement in Nazi Germany by a storekeeper, Frick, who enjoys their company so much that he refuses to tell them the war is over. Guinness would play Frick; Mike Connors, star of the police television series Tightrope, would be Finder; and Redford would play Wilson. The director was Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the famous Max. Reinhardt’s wife, Silvia, was script consultant. “And there I had problems,” says Redford, “because Shaw’s original work was rock solid. Silvia danced around with it unnecessarily, as is the Hollywood custom, to validate her fee.”
Silvia’s main redevelopment was to further Americanize the story, something Robert Shaw was reluctant to agree to. The drama was tilted toward comedy or, as the work was routinely described around Paramount, satire. Shaw’s novel was a wry, serious narrative that The Times of London had commended for its “high dramatic value.” Redford’s journal reveals fast-developing gloom. Ten days into shooting at the Bavaria Studios in suburban Munich, he wrote that the director was an overfunded boor, his wife a sexually playful attention seeker. Worse, Guinness was “cold in manner, overcontrolled, [a man who] does it all by numbers.” Today Redford says, “It was my first experience of working with English actor
s, who appeared, at that time, more involved with craft than movies. They worked ‘out to in,’ as opposed to ‘in to out,’ and that was hard for me. Alec was a good actor, but he had it all worked out for himself before he got to the set, which left nothing for the spontaneity I’d learned to love under Mike Nichols’s direction. For me, as a new actor, the lack of opportunity to connect was demotivating.”
Mike Connors believed the problem was with the Reinhardts and their failure to come to grips with the material. “This type of yarn was Guinness’s perfect territory,” says Connors. “The story of the cellar with these captive ‘pets’ was pure Ealing comedy. It was fun! Alec understood that, but they didn’t. Gottfried’s failing was that he was not authoritative, he had no control over Guinness or any of us, and Silvia’s problem was that her writing was pedantic. So they combined to drag us down.”
What is clear to all in hindsight is that Situation Hopeless failed to gel as a comedy. It was assembled awkwardly, with little accent on the rhythms of wit. The acting styles clash. In all the long, sedentary dialogue sequences Guinness indulges in circus mode, while Redford and Connors give stock performances. “But it wasn’t one of those productions where you could actively contribute,” says Connors. “It was more a case of, ‘Stand here, say this.’ ”
While he socialized with Connors and his wife, Redford mostly preferred family evenings at the hotel in the Leopoldstrasse, playing with the kids. He would put them on each knee facing him and tell them the tale of the Three Little Pigs. In his diary he wrote, “During one of these [play] moments, time past came thundering into the present. I remember myself as a child, and my father, so vividly. I remember having the extraordinary ability to make him truly laugh. I knew his ticklish spot and hit it time and again. I could clearly again see him laughing till tears came into his eyes. This great bear who so dominated my childhood leaning back, his teeth bare to the gums, face contorted and beet red, nose bunched and wrinkled. And me pouring it on, going at it with such vigor and ham, all encouraged and feeling important. Those times were wonderful.” They also provoked gloom, given the joyless “humor” of Silvia Reinhardt’s script.
Robert Redford Page 14
