Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  After the Christmas break, taken in Salzburg, Redford faced a few days of work to wrap the movie, then a return to New York. At Christmas, he says, he felt despondent. He had discovered a European tipple he liked too much—a juniper-flavored gin called Steinhäger. What faced him back home was a void. “He really had no hard plans,” says Mike Connors. “He told me he had an understanding that he’d probably do the movie version of Barefoot—if, indeed, they ever got around to doing it. ‘Beyond that,’ he said, ‘who knows?’ ”

  Meanwhile, Nichols, for his part, had decided he did not want to make the movie of Barefoot; he was eager instead to make his film debut with a modern masterpiece, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In December, as a Christmas gift, he couriered the script to Germany. Redford read it in Salzburg and disliked it. “I knew the play,” says Redford. “I didn’t like it when I saw it at the Billy Rose Theatre in 1962. I thought Albee was magnificent. I thought the George and Martha, husband and wife, roles were the best. But the role I was being offered, the younger professor, Nick, just died in the text. I felt he started powerfully, but the author didn’t know what to do with the character, and so he trailed off after the first half. I didn’t want that part.”

  Rosenberg was shocked by Redford’s decision to refuse the movie, as was Nichols. “I thought he could have invested some real magic in that role,” says Nichols. “I thought he made a mistake then, and I still think he made a mistake.”

  By January, Rosenberg had alternatives in place: one was a movie offer from producer Alan J. Pakula at Warner Bros., the other a three-picture deal at Paramount, inclusive of a big-screen version of Barefoot in the Park. “In principle,” says Redford, “I should have been ecstatic. But I loved being on the road in Europe. I loved connecting with Shauna and Jamie and discovering their personalities.” In his diary, Redford acknowledged his “risky” decision making, stubbornly insisting on an extended New Year’s family vacation in Europe, despite Rosenberg’s pressure. “I look forward to getting to Spain,” he wrote, “and to renting a villa where, hopefully, it will all end, the sleepless hours and the push, the nerves and the needless anguish.”

  On December 4, 1964, Redford’s last television performance, in an episode of The Defenders directed by Stuart Rosenberg and filmed during Barefoot, was aired on CBS. A month later he was in Majorca, family in tow, unemployed. “It was blissful as long as I could persuade myself that it would last,” he remembers. During Barefoot, a full-page presentation of his paintings had appeared in the pages of the New York Journal American. Now he tried to resume his art but found it next to impossible. “Writing seemed easier, so I kept a log of what I was seeing and feeling, and it served as my personal analyst. It was a devil’s advocate. It allowed me to question myself.”

  The family traveled to Can Pastilla in an attempt to reawaken what he describes in his diary as “the richest experience I have ever had.” But the marble villa he once lived in was neglected and overgrown, with a Coca-Cola billboard blocking its sea view. The Redfords moved west and found a blue-and-white villa perched on the cliffs at Port d’Alcudia. In the shade of Mediterranean pines, surrounded by bougainvillea (his favorite shrub), Redford walked the cliffs and mocked himself for his yearnings for “a Beatnik-type freedom.”

  Within days, he wrote in the diary, Lola had observed a major change in him. For the first time since they’d met, he was relaxing, happy to sit and idle by the fire. He was reading Saroyan; she, Aldous Huxley. On January 4, T. S. Eliot died, and the newspaper articles about his passing, as well as the contemporaneous reports of Allen Ginsberg’s street protest for the legalization of marijuana in New York, roused him. In his journal he wrote at length about American cultural values and his desire for a better understanding of what it is to be an American. T. S. Eliot represented “dignity and restraint” that had survived half a century—“He seems to have found the rare area between detachment and involvement”—while Ginsberg encapsulated everything that was wrong with the youth, “soaking his body in the Ganges, stalking the Far East” while becoming “confused, confusing and ridiculous.” Redford says his viewpoint has changed: “I could not then hook into Ginsberg’s work because, like him, it was too loudly desperate. It was about me, me, me. I preferred Gary Snyder or Robert Creeley. Ginsberg’s was not the voice I was open to at that time.”

  Ginsberg’s, though, was a critical new American voice at a time of ferment. Every American newspaper Redford got his hands on reported the convulsions at Berkeley, the Joan Baez rallies at Sproul Plaza, the helicopters teargassing students. It was, says Redford, a bewildering tapestry to unravel. On one hand, there was the clear progress of Johnson’s Great Society with the landmark bills for civil rights and wilderness protection. On the other was military escalation in Vietnam and the Merry Pranksters. “I alternately felt that the place was in trouble or undergoing a terrific change. More than anything, the confused signals I was getting reflected the confusion inside myself. I had sympathy with the reformists, but I was involved with starting a career and raising a family, so I was, literally, elsewhere. On the other hand, this terrible ferment was a place of some attraction to me.”

  The day he read of T. S. Eliot’s death, Redford also received a telegram from Meta Rosenberg summoning him home. In his diary, Redford recorded the “feeling of sickness in my stomach.” Lola was eager to get back to New York so the kids could start school; he was not. In his diary he wrote hopefully of meetings in Paris with François Truffaut and Tony Richardson, both of whom had expressed interest in working with him. “But when I got down to it, I knew my fate was with Rosenberg and the Warners soundstage. I was the one who asked for that. I was the one who set those wheels in motion.”

  10

  Child’s Play

  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. But don’t worry. May we meet in the castle of lost souls, in the land of the black swan, otherwise known as the Prince of Darkness. Welcome, little captive, to the waterfall of sweet dreams.”

  In the elegant faux-Grecian splendor of a Brentwood mansion, Redford has finished speaking and is sprawled drunkenly on a plump Empire bed, a half-full glass of brandy in one hand and Natalie Wood, one of the biggest stars in the world, at his feet. This introduction to the world of Daisy Clover, the wide-eyed teenager on the brink of stardom, is scintillating, Shakespearean even, and delivered with a panache that immediately secures the characterization of Wade Lewis, a rising actor uncomfortable in his skin. Alan Pakula, the young producer of Inside Daisy Clover, stood in the wings and watched Redford’s true baptismal moment with sheer delight. “I thought, He’s nailed it,” said Pakula. “And he’s pulled it off because he’s just as uncomfortable as Wade Lewis.”

  The movie, written for Wood, who was coming off West Side Story, a winner of multiple Academy Awards, was a fable about the destructive power of showbiz, a cogent, less romanticized version of A Star Is Born, and it pivoted on Lewis. In the script, Daisy swaps carny life shared with her nutty mother for the cynical patronage of Raymond Swan, a Hollywood mogul. Swan promises to mold every move she makes—deciding even when she may cut her hair—to effect her stardom. But Lewis takes her off the rails with him instead, marrying her and ditching her.

  Pakula had wondered about his partner Robert Mulligan’s choice in casting Redford. “He wanted Bob more than I did, but when I saw this sinister side, I thought, He’s perfect.” The worry, said Pakula, was that this kid from Brentwood would play it like a spoiled brat. “But Bob had the smarts. He’d done the schoolwork, and he chewed up the faux Shakespeare like he’d seen it all, lived it all. As the scene moves on, as he asks Daisy if she would like to get drunk with him, and she says, ‘Yes, on sweet sherry,’ the savage arch of his brow, that sardonic double take, was the best cinema I’d seen all year.”

  Redford had met with Pakula and Mulligan, a hot partnership since their 1962 collaboration on To Kill a Mockingbird,
backstage at the Biltmore the previous summer. They had the script from English critic Gavin Lambert, based on his own 1963 novel, and they had Wood, whom they’d recently collaborated with on Love with the Proper Stranger. Wood, a friend of Lambert’s, dropped by at the Biltmore, too. Redford already knew her. They’d met at Van Nuys High, where the San Francisco–born actress, already established, was fulfilling California’s legal educational requirement while caroming from movie to movie. “She said she wanted me to do Daisy Clover,” Redford recalls. “She saw what I was trying to do with Paul Bratter, and she saw that I was all about taking a chance. And when I read Lambert’s script, I got it. Wade Lewis was gay, and I stalled. I told Pakula and Mulligan, ‘No, I will not play this role, because I won’t do it justice.’ Natalie had the power after West Side Story, and she insisted they redraft it for me, to make it more interesting and easier for me to play. They did. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ ”

  Many, including Pakula, believed Lambert’s story was a commentary on the life of Norma Jean Mortenson, the naïf who became Marilyn Monroe. Lambert says the story was “fundamentally a woman’s tale, about enchantment, exploitation and survival in Hollywood.” For Lambert, whether Wade was gay or not was irrelevant. “What the story was about was how Daisy finds inner strength to overcome the abuses and regain herself, as she does in the end. Natalie was ideal for the character, because it was her life story. Daisy’s mother didn’t want her to be a star and Natalie’s did, but otherwise it was similar.”

  Inside Daisy Clover, astonishingly Natalie Wood’s thirty-eighth movie, was originally a Columbia project developed to follow Love with the Proper Stranger. Michael Callan, the Columbia contract actor, was the first choice for Wade Lewis, but then Warners contracted Wood to make The Great Race and bought out Daisy Clover, too. The switch allowed Wood to take control of new casting, and, apart from Redford, she chose Ruth Gordon to play her mother and Christopher Plummer for Swan. Rosenberg refused to entertain Redford’s hesitation on this project. “She told me to get real,” says Redford. A $6,500 fee was agreed on, small change compared with Wood’s $33,000 a week, plus 5 percent of the gross.

  Redford flew from Spain to New York at the beginning of February, saw the kids into nursery school, then traveled on to rehearsals in Los Angeles. On February 16 the first read-through took place at Lambert’s Santa Monica home. Bronx-born Pakula, who had come to Hollywood via Yale, found much to talk about with Redford: “I’d been through Warners animation and produced theater plays and kissed ass to do some movie directing, so our experiences were similar in many regards. I also knew enough to recognize the outsider. I’d known Jimmy Dean quite well, double-dating Pier Angeli’s sister while Jimmy courted Pier. I knew the Jimmy Dean edge when I saw it, and I saw it in Bob. Natalie was the one who spotted him first, but I’d seen him do the Schary play, where he hadn’t a lot to say, but he kind of growled, demanding attention. I’d auditioned him and passed on him then. This time around I saw he could be the great outsider, like Tod Hackett awaiting the burning of Los Angeles in Day of the Locust, a guy with a big agenda. It’s inside him, I thought. So, if he can get it out …?”

  Redford was disoriented by his homecoming. One moment, he says, he was barefoot in the Balearics, the next he was being fêted at the best suite at the Beverly Wilshire. “It was full-on Hollywood, a hint at a lifestyle I’d previously only observed as a very distant outsider growing up in the town. I was treated like royalty, by Warners’ decree. The first morning, the room service guy came to serve me breakfast and laid it out and started giving me the weather report for the day—‘Good morning, Mr. Redford. It is fifty-four degrees outside, but the forecast is fine. It will be eighty degrees by midday’—as if by rote. I said, ‘Where are you from?’ And he mumbled something, because my question wasn’t in his ‘script.’ But I wanted to know where he was from. I didn’t want bullshit, but I was going to get it. It took me ten minutes to get the details: that he was from Gary, Indiana. When I said I knew Gary, he just wanted to be out of there. I was overstepping. He had his role, and I had mine. I hated that game.”

  Lola and the kids flew out, and Redford rented an expensive family home on Rockingham for the duration, where Lola’s brother and sister, Wayne and Betty, resided with them. “Bob was the new prince in town,” says Wayne, who loved the nights out at Trader Vic’s, the favored eatery. “They were on the learning curve themselves and found a lot of fun working out the dos and don’ts of etiquette.” At one point, an invitation to a Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor party in Bel Air arrived. Wayne was excited, Lola noncommittal, Redford plain dismissive. “Work always preoccupied him,” says Wayne. “Just work.”

  The movie was shot on the Warners lot, on location at Apple Valley and at the pier area of Santa Monica. “It was a milieu I knew like the back of my hand,” says Redford, “and it should have been conducive to great work. As I saw him, Wade Lewis was mysterious, arrogant and charming, attractive to both sexes, but he could not be captured. Mulligan and Pakula seemed to buy into my vision of the character. But Gavin wasn’t buying. I liked Gavin very much, and I was told he’d based Wade Lewis on Monty Clift. I knew enough by then to understand that a whole generation of actors like Rock Hudson lived the lie. But I did not want to go there. What I opted for was something sexually more subtle. I tried to depict an entirely different species: the insatiable hedonist, the guy who has the power and the appetite and uses them to screw men, women, dogs, cats, anything. A complete narcissist. A guy like Caligula, who doesn’t care.” Lambert insists Redford misread his, Pakula’s and Mulligan’s intentions: “I wrote Wade as a gay man. Apart from the one relationship he had with Melora, the wife of the studio boss, he was unwavering in his gayness. I thought that Bob had accepted that, and Mulligan and Pakula certainly went for those undercurrents.” But Redford was emphatic: “I wanted to experiment. I wasn’t aware about the waves I was raising. I was selfish in developing what I thought was a more complex character, and probably not respectful of the intentions of such a special, important writer. In ways, it was like my experience with Lettin and The Seagull. I was insisting on doing it my way, and maybe not the way the writer or director had interpreted it.”

  Wood clearly appreciated Redford’s obduracy. In an interview she told Photoplay: “He’s the most unbendable actor I know. He sticks to his principles when all about him are shedding theirs. He is unbribable by fame. He’d sooner starve than conform.”

  One incident during filming sealed the friendship between Wood and Redford. As they shot in a small boat off Santa Monica Pier, a sudden change in the wind direction cast them adrift in the Malibu current. Mulligan, on the unwieldy camera launch, attempted to leash the boat but snapped the retaining cables, breaking an assistant’s leg. For twenty minutes Redford and Wood rode the squall, all the time moving farther out to sea. Wood, who hated the sea, panicked. Redford laughed her through it. “He was laughing so much, she surrendered and trusted him,” said Mulligan. “Later, when he realized how precarious the situation really was, he sobered up. But that jock heroism impressed Natalie, and, as friends, they never looked back.”

  Rumors of an affair between them were rife on the set. Pakula observed “a natural connection that arose from mutual recognition of the rebel heart.” According to Wood’s personal assistant Howard Jeffrey, Natalie “fell head over heels for Redford” during the shoot, while accepting that “he not only looked like Jack Anderson, the all-American boy, but he lived like him as well.” Redford admits to a great attraction to Wood and a closeness beyond friendship, “but I was aware very early on of the liabilities of intimacy with the women you act with. There are two industries: the film business and the parasite called the gossip industry, which can devour you. I loved Natalie’s seriousness. She wasn’t crazy like Monroe. She was the kind of girl who’d sit up all night writing notes: a trouper, the real thing. Nat and I became tight. When she married the agent Richard Gregson, I was her best man, and we stayed close until the
end of her life” (with tragic irony, in a boating accident, off Catalina Island, in 1981).

  Gavin Lambert, visiting the set, judged Redford, like Wood, an actor of instinct, not intellect. As the movie progressed, Lambert was surprised by Redford’s intensity. Approaching a defining sequence, where Lewis interrogates himself in the dressing-room mirror before making love to Daisy, Redford sought out Lambert and insisted on his presence on the soundstage. “He felt it was critical to have me at hand,” says Lambert, “undoubtedly because of the sexual plurality of what he was portraying. But he really didn’t need me. He sailed through it, and I thought, My God, his comprehension is precocious. You’d expect it from someone who has made forty pictures, not someone who’s made two. At the same time, his skill wasn’t an intellectual one. It seemed more what we’d call a natural gift.”

  After seven weeks of filming, Redford was happy to be back in Provo for the first blaze of the spring flowers. In his diary he wrote that he was on the run again, hiding away on his hill, happy to be reunited with Lola and forgetting the calendar. In April, just before he left Los Angeles, Wood proposed a role for him in her next project, a Tennessee Williams adaptation for Seven Arts and Paramount called This Property Is Condemned. Redford met with Wood’s producer, Ray Stark, and disliked him. “He had the character of the mercenary merchant who will say anything to get his way but can never be trusted. He lived like a Roman emperor merely because he lived beneath the Hollywood sign.” The script, a leftover from an abandoned Taylor-Burton project, was poor. “The only appeal was Natalie. The script wasn’t authentic Williams. It was a hundred pages blown up from a twenty-minute one-acter about two kids remembering the Depression that Williams himself didn’t like. Ray Stark threw every writer he had at it, from John Huston to Francis Coppola, but none of them managed to get over the fact that it was a one-act play.”