Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Rosenberg pressed Redford about maximizing his situation. Monique James reminded him that Louella Parsons was already formally announcing his arrival on the Hollywood star scene in the New York Journal American. His name, suddenly, was vying for space with Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando. The Brits were currently the toast of the town, with Sean Connery’s James Bond and the Beatles dominating the media, but there was plenty of room for new Hollywood stars. Redford still dawdled. Then Wood informed him that she and Stark were in discussion with several interesting directors, among them Arthur Hiller, John Frankenheimer and Clive Donner, though none had been confirmed. Redford thought of his friend Sydney Pollack. Pollack had just completed his modest movie directorial debut, The Slender Thread, and had an option contract with Paramount.

  Wood frowned. “Sydney Pollack? Who’s he?”

  “He’s the new hot guy. You don’t know about The Slender Thread? Have they been hiding him from you?”

  Wood called in Pollack for an interview.

  Pollack’s progress in Los Angeles and New York had been as serpentine as Redford’s, but he had won an Emmy for television directing, and The Slender Thread, a true-life story of a suicide hotline made for Warners, was gathering good notices. “We were butterflies emerging together,” said Pollack. “There was this dark, depressive state we shared when we got together, and we were getting together a lot at that time. Night after night we drank and debated. We drove back and forth to Provo in his Porsche. We never stopped talking. A lot of the people around us were intellectuals. But we were autodidacts; we did it ourselves. We loved drama. We loved fantasy. We liked the idea of the Method but we hated the fad. For me, Kazan was king. But, like Bob, I hated all the pretentious existential heaviness. Basically we were on the same page and so all the time we shared seemed productive.”

  “Long before Sydney directed me,” says Redford, “the director-actor dynamic was in play. It was a dialogue that could switch either way, real productive interactivity based on our curiosity about the world and a desire to put new spins on conventional platforms. Out of that bond came This Property.”

  On Wood’s say-so Pollack was assigned the job. While James Bridges labored on a new script and everyone waited, Rosenberg found the perfect project to fill the gap: Sam Spiegel, the producer of David Lean’s hit Lawrence of Arabia, wanted Redford for Columbia’s The Chase, to be directed by one of New York’s most eminent emerging television directors, Arthur Penn. Spiegel, well educated in Europe and exiled by Hitler, was on his way to establishing his reputation as the world’s most successful independent producer, maker of On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Suddenly, Last Summer. Spiegel’s reputation was founded on the literacy of his stories, his discernment in casting and the sheer size, ever growing in scale, of his productions. The script for The Chase was by Lillian Hellman, who had adapted Horton Foote’s fifties play about mob rule. Redford read it and couldn’t put it down. Superficially about a redneck murder hunt, it was layered with character insights and strong on metaphor. The story revolved around small-town Texan Sheriff Calder, under pressure in his community to find Bubber Reeves, who has escaped from prison. The oil-rich Val Rogers controls much of town life, and his son, Jake, is on edge because he has been having an affair with Anna, Reeves’s wife. Calder attempts to bring Reeves in unharmed, against the will of Rogers as the scurrilous mob instincts rage.

  Redford felt the script had the same power The Treasure of the Sierra Madre possessed. It was, clearly, less an entertainment than a commentary on human behavior. He was also stimulated by the extraordinary creative elements Spiegel had assembled. He had enjoyed Penn’s prodigious Playhouse 90 work and the string of stage triumphs that included Two for the Seesaw with Henry Fonda and An Evening with Nichols and May, and he was aware of Penn’s movies, The Left Handed Gun, about Billy the Kid, and The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller, both penetrating studies of parent-offspring relationships that examined the integral violence in human relationships. Most attractive was the casting: Robert Duvall, Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, E. G. Marshall and—best of all—Brando. “I was invigorated by the prospect of sharing screen time with Brando because I regarded him as an artist, like Robards,” says Redford. “I was also open to whatever education he might give me by association.”

  The part on offer to Redford was Jake Rogers, the son of the oil magnate. Redford called Meta Rosenberg. “I’ll do the film, but I want to play Bubber Reeves,” he told her.

  Rosenberg was shocked. “You’re out of your mind,” she told him. “That’s the small part. That’s the guy on the run who we hardly see till the end.”

  “But it was the better part,” says Redford today. “It carried the movie, because Bubber’s fate determines the moral values of the community. Bubber makes the movie’s point. The role was also the renegade, done-down kid, and that was easy for me, since I’d considered myself an outsider to convention for a lot of my teens.” Rosenberg reluctantly called Spiegel, who conceded and cast James Fox as Jake instead.

  Arthur Penn had seen Barefoot on his friend Mike Nichols’s recommendation. “Bob came to read at Sam’s house,” said Penn, “and he was super confident. I was wary because Barefoot left no impression on me. I was prejudiced, too, because the guys I preferred were the Actors Studio people. And I was also prejudiced because I thought he’d be better as Jake, despite what he wanted. But I was smitten. More than anything it was his physical impact. He was right. He automatically fulfilled the role of Bubber Reeves, the convict, because Bubber, for me, was a representational figure who symbolized the purity that was lost after Kennedy’s assassination. He becomes a golden martyr. And Bob, the golden, confident guy, was exactly right for it.”

  In Foote’s play, Reeves is a convict bent on revenge against the sheriff who locked him up. Lillian Hellman softened him, and Penn decided to introduce a strong parallel between Reeves’s fate and the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. “It seemed natural to me,” he said. “There was a fortuitous intersection of recent events in American life and elements in Hellman’s script. The murderer-patsy, the Texan locale and the statewide bloodlust hooked in my mind with the national paranoia after Dallas. I thought about how Oswald had never been legally tried, that it was the court of public opinion that got him. Then The Chase became a commentary on our gun culture. Reeves is someone who’s been abused and fallen off the edge of society. When he escapes from the state prison farm and a man is accidentally killed, the small-town community that bred him wants him dead because he’s the target for their life rage. That became very poignant to me.” Hellman’s final script disappointed Penn, however, “because it seemed more obsessed with the fetish behavior of too many minor characters—though it was still laden with potential.”

  Jane Fonda, cast as Bubber’s wife, Anna, was curious about Redford and keen to work with him. She was a year younger than he, and her own relationship with acting had been bumpy. She had reluctantly tried it at Vassar before deciding, like Redford, instead to study art in Paris. The passion to act finally took hold when she played alongside her father in a production of The Country Girl in his hometown, Omaha. She was still, she says today, “pathologically hesitant,” until Lee Strasberg persuaded her into the Actors Studio and onto Broadway in a couple of so-so plays. Henry Fonda’s friendship with Josh Logan led to her being cast in the movie version of Tall Story, her debut, but it took another few movies, among them Sunday in New York, before Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic was acknowledging her skill and “the hum of magnetism.” A hit in France followed, with René Clément’s Les Félins, before she met director Roger Vadim on the set of his La Ronde and returned to America in iconic splendor, “the American girl gone to sex,” in Sheila Graham’s famous description. Fonda was, she says, “awkward” about the sexual identification. “It always felt contrived, and so I was very open to directors like Arthur and earthy roles like Bubber Reeves’s wife.” Cat Ballou, a comedy western she had just completed, was a
hit nominated for multiple Academy Awards that Fonda saw as a step onto the higher ground. The Chase, she felt, would be a worthy follow-up, “though, I have to say, I was about to settle into my marriage [with Vadim] and was emotionally compromised by debilitating personal insecurities as we began.”

  Spiegel told Fonda he’d chosen Redford because of his effect on women: “He was cast, Sam said, because of the reaction of women in the studio offices. They went all atwitter when he came in, and Sam judged that as the audience litmus. It was a fair criterion because I saw it myself. There are attractive people everywhere, but then there is that thing called charismatic attractiveness, which Bob had. A couple of years later, when we were making The Electric Horseman together, I witnessed it full force. A woman approached him at Caesars Palace in Vegas and said, ‘Hello,’ and then literally fainted at his feet. That kind of power is rare. Elvis had it, and Rudolph Valentino, and very few others.”

  Fonda, who previously only knew Redford as a face on the audition trail, found herself in thrall. “I didn’t expect to fall so much under his spell. Looks apart, the first attraction was his humor. I was too much into myself to relax, and he drew me out because he was funny. Beyond that, I found echoes of myself in his darkness. The nature of the script, of whom we were portraying, also pushed us into deep waters. Like the characters in the script, we both had awkward childhoods. I had the same complicated relationship with my father that he had with his. I’d learned about how stardom happens, and my feeling was that he was bound for stardom. At the same time I saw a schizophrenic side: that he wanted this acting life while all the time resenting it, which is what I felt. Neither of us analyzed too openly, which was another thing we had in common. But the undercurrents of understanding were there, and they helped keep me going because, despite outward appearance, I was so personally very unsettled.”

  Redford was keen to work with Fonda, keener still to work with actors he admired who’d had Method training in New York. The role, however, was a fragmented one that meant a lot of prisoner-on-the-run physical movement, directed by the second unit, along the Russian River in northern California, with only a couple of dialogue scenes. Penn’s shooting schedule was five months; Redford worked just five weeks, only two of which were in the company of Brando, Fox and Fonda. “To some extent,” says Penn, “his was the most challenged role, because while he’s on the run in the early part, he’s a cipher. The action is like a chess game with the people in the town and their responses to the fugitive. Then in the last act, the last forty minutes of the film where Bubber returns to his hometown to face the mob, he is there in your face, explaining himself and his raison d’être, very suddenly and dramatically. Brando has dominated the picture till that point, then Bob is on equal airtime.”

  In the first act, the town’s moral dissipation is counterbalanced by Brando’s Calder, the Socratic sheriff who refuses to kowtow to either the feudal power brokering of E. G. Marshall’s Val Rogers or the bloodlust of the mob. He holds the moral center, convinced that Bubber is a victim of circumstances. Then Bubber shows up, hiding out at the auto scrap yard by the wharf. When Anna comes to Bubber, leading Calder in order to save Bubber from the mob, Bubber is forced to face what awaits him. The nighttime scene is effectively the movie’s climax, and the underlying emotions are the most complex Redford had yet handled—the mob wants a scapegoat; his family finds him confusing and pitiful; his wife loves another man. Reflecting on his two years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Bubber says he’s spiritually finished. Hellman’s dialogue, hitherto prolix, becomes brilliantly sparse: “I’m done with myself,” Bubber tells Anna. “When you’re ready to die, no one can take away your freedom.”

  Redford’s work was shaping up as his best to date. Throughout production, Penn was delighted with the performance, as, he says, he was pleased with Fonda. Redford, for his part, wrote in his diary that Brando was the best, that he was “role model stuff.” Contrasting Brando’s approach to Natalie Wood’s demanding attitude to detail, Redford felt Brando “drifted on the breeze.” Momentarily, the acting grail Redford sought was found. “Great acting,” he wrote, “is no more than child’s play. What a joy it is to look at it that way, to enjoy an extension of the great part of childhood. Fully. Self-indulgence. Spontaneous reactions, guilelessness, full and free. If you’re really good, you are still a kid. Brando is good because he’s a kid. He’s acting because it’s easy and he can get his jollies and still be a kid. Always playing around. Always. Talks like a kid. He just takes it in front of the cameras with him. He’s no genius. Nor is he brilliant or anything like that. He’s just a kid who stayed a kid. Fellini—a kid. 8½—a kid’s dream. He’s jacking off royally, with a whole load of charm. Wonderful! God bless him!” As a footnote on the same page, he added: “I am glad I am a kid still. The answer is in the kid’s eyes.”

  Ironically, the very self-indulgence Redford was cheering wore down the production. The trouble started, it appeared, when Spiegel began contesting Penn’s direction. Brando, once fun, became perverse. There were now long, showy standoffs, phone call distractions, no-shows. “Whether Marlon was doing this to challenge Sam is another matter,” Redford says. “I had a little rethink about him, and his process. On reflection, some of that internalized stuff bothered me. I later thought it was selfish and mean-spirited, because it seriously affected Arthur.” Jane Fonda concurred: Brando, for her, was a major disappointment.

  During the shooting of the finale, where Bubber, Anna and Jake are cornered by the mob, Fonda found herself in the trunk of a car at midnight, really getting to know Redford. “We ended up bunched together like little kids,” she says, “waiting for our filming cue, just talking about our lives. Night shooting induces intimacy, so we were ready to open up.” Redford talked about his wild days in Westwood and Van Nuys, about climbing the tower of the Fox Village Theater, about how mountains always challenged him. “Out of that conversation came a really devoted, understanding friendship that has lasted over the years,” says Fonda. “Who can say why it works? Similar values, really, and a similar outlook about the world and its problems.”

  Political activism was a part of The Chase coterie—a new experience for Redford, as much as for Fonda. For the duration, Penn was dwelling in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Beverly Hills home, where he threw weekend fund-raising parties for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, with which he’d long been involved. Brando, a supporter of Native American rights, was a regular guest, but Redford and Fonda tended to shy away. Fonda says her noninvolvement was because she was “politically ignorant.” As for Redford, “he just wasn’t social; tact went right over his head,” says Fonda. “It took him fifteen years, until we made The Electric Horseman, to learn to play the games of professional diplomacy, and even then his attitude was conditional.” Redford was inspired by other things. “We had endless talks about this miraculous A-frame, which was his personal experiment in alternative living,” said Penn. “More than anything, I got the impression that he wanted to be away in the hills, but I never got the time to crack him, because I was too busy fighting my own fights.”

  According to Penn, he was satisfied when he wrapped the movie in August. He oversaw the first assembly, but while he was fulfilling a theatrical directing contract, Spiegel took the half-cut footage to London to reedit to his liking. Some of Penn’s most beloved scenes were consigned to the floor. “I was devastated,” said Penn, “not because he took the plot, or my work, in a different direction, because he didn’t. The movie was already there. But he selected the wrong shots. There were so many instances where the take he went for was the bad take, the one I would never have used. Cumulatively, it was a disaster.” The film, released in February 1966, was not well received, though Variety liked Redford. He himself felt it had good and bad things in it—“and fortunately the good outweighed the bad.”

  Just weeks before The Chase opened nationally, Paramount opened Situation Hopeless quietly. It was just as well. Redford was appalled to lear
n that Reinhardt, like Spiegel, had botched the editing. Mike Connors had seen the rough cut and liked it but was horrified with the finished film: “Either Silvia or Gottfried changed the vital scene where the airmen who have been incarcerated break out of Herr Frick’s basement and stumble on a movie crew shooting a war movie. They run scared, because they think it’s a real battle. That’s how we, the actors, played it, and that scene played beautifully. What came out in the end was something else entirely, where the airmen realize it’s a movie and laugh it off. It became utterly meaningless, and it busted the movie.”

  This Property Is Condemned, meanwhile, was in development hell. Pollack was standing by, but Ray Stark had now brought in John Houseman to rescue the ailing script. Redford saw disaster coming and wanted to avoid it. He wrote in his diary, “I think that if Natalie gets nervous enough, she will say, ‘Hold it!’ and walk, she being a million-dollar property with the million-dollar career who really doesn’t want to blow it. And that will be my out! If she goes, then I’m free.”

  In September, before The Chase was released, Redford lashed out. He had been informed that filming would begin in New Orleans in three weeks, but he had yet to see a usable screenplay. Summoned to Stark’s office to review Houseman’s latest version, he railed: “There is no character for me to play!” As a result, James Bridges started yet another rewrite, churning out twenty-five new pages a day, while Charles Eastman, a friend of Wood’s, developed a parallel new script for her. Redford’s diary records the chaos: “Natalie arrives, is furious. She thinks. She wants to know why her character, Alva, has been changed (she hasn’t), why my part is now bigger, why Simone Signoret hasn’t been cast as the mother (she is wrong for the part), or Vivien Leigh (she thinks the movie is a piece of shit) and why Charles Eastman hasn’t been signed as the main writer.”