Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Pollack stepped in as mediator: “I’d been through enough script crises on Ben Casey. I knew that it’s usually a case of the more writers, the more mess. My feeling was we had to slough off these writers.” Good-paying work on The Fugitive, another long-running series, had rewarded Pollack with a much-loved toy, a single-engine Cessna airplane. He flew to San Jose and locked himself in a motel room with two packing cases of scripts. “I threw out all the furniture except the bed and littered the floor with what we had, which was fourteen scripts. I took scissors, glue and a staple gun and assembled a matrix, which I then delivered to Bridges.” During The Slender Thread he’d engaged the television playwright David Rayfiel to produce a literate script that would keep his stars, Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, happy. Now he asked Rayfiel to save This Property Is Condemned. “David had the task of taking all the elements—mine, Natalie’s and Bridges’s—and blending them with dialogue that worked.” Pollack gave Rayfiel cash from his own pocket. Henceforth they would be lifelong collaborators, frequently fine-tuning Redford’s projects.

  Ray Stark, meanwhile, deliberated, calling endless meetings with Natalie, using extravagant home soirées as ersatz think tanks. Redford hated these afternoons chez Stark, peopled with odious glitterati served by liveried butlers, where Stark invariably referred to him as Sydney or Jim. On September 9, Redford bolted for Utah, where, in a phone call to Meta Rosenberg, he issued an ultimatum: “Either Stark shoots the movie Sydney Pollack’s way now, or they can go sue my ass.”

  “It was down to Bob and me in the end,” said Pollack. “Bob trusted me, just me, and we developed that mother together till we found something that was shootable. Not necessarily Tennessee Williams, but shootable.”

  This Property Is Condemned is set in Dodson, Mississippi, in the grip of the Depression. Owen Legate, played by Redford, is a railroad agent who arrives to lay off workers. Staying at a local boardinghouse, he begins an affair with Alva (Wood), the proprietor’s daughter, a flirt who is also seeing laborer J. J. Nichols, played by Charles Bronson.

  Filming started in October in New Orleans. If, as is often suggested, Pollack molded Redford’s romantic iconography, the process began here. This Property Is Condemned had all the components of Williams—anguished hearts, gothic gloom, vivid backdrops, vibrant exchange—but there was much else besides. Henry Jamesian restraint, moody camera work and poignant music were the evolving Pollack staples, and they were used, unremittingly, to power up the romance. And it was, undeniably, romance that held the film together—subtle, substantial romance that drew force when counterpointed against grander-scale social conflict, a device that Pollack and Redford would return to in The Way We Were, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana. “I had the feeling Bob and I were starting something,” said Pollack, “because the uniqueness of the way we worked was something else. We were like composers, the music writer and the lyricist, putting together an effect, and that was what we set up there on the screen with This Property.”

  Despite all its problems, despite the fact that Tennessee Williams insisted on removing his credit, This Property Is Condemned succeeded in many areas. It came in on time and just dimes over budget. Though Stark was equivocal, Pollack was satisfied and Redford and Wood liked it. Audiences, too, seemed to like it. However, Newsday called it “a horrendous soap opera” and The New Yorker blamed Wood. But Variety praised Redford’s “total acting [through] voice, expression and movement,” and in the New York Daily News Kathleen Carroll concluded: “[Redford] can’t help but succeed now in the romantic leading man category.”

  Nothing would come so easily. During the shooting in New Orleans, John Frankenheimer, Pollack’s friend, had visited, having just seen an early assembly of Inside Daisy Clover. “Frankenheimer said it was extremely daring of me to do what I did,” says Redford, “but I hadn’t seen the finished film and didn’t know what he was talking about. I asked him and he said, ‘Well, it takes guts for a start-out guy like you to play a flagrant gay character.’ I told him that I didn’t play a gay. I played Wade Lewis, the narcissist. And he said, ‘You’d better take a look at what they have on release.’ ”

  Redford was furious about what he saw as out-and-out perfidy. He told his tale to anyone who would listen. Mike Nichols listened, and agreed that Pakula and Mulligan “really fucked him over royally. Nothing to do with Bob’s homophobia or lack of it. What he created on-screen they corrupted. They took out parts of the story as he’d filmed them and stuck on a voice-over telephone scene where some character tells Natalie in plain English, ‘Didn’t you know Wade is gay?’ It was a complete turnaround for the story in his mind, and it upset him deeply.”

  By Christmas, Redford was wrestling with other problems. He had returned from Germany hopeful of career and family stability. But for half of 1965 the family was in Utah or New York while he was stuck in Los Angeles. There were long separations, stubborn, widening gossip about an affair with Natalie Wood and too many awkward, apologetic late-night phone calls. The talk of romance with Wood put the greatest pressure on his marriage. “It struck me that I was starting to ‘go Hollywood’ without noticing,” says Redford. “I’d bought a flashy Lincoln Continental and started driving around like a head of state. It was ridiculous. After a couple of weeks I took it back to the dealer and told him to take it off my hands. I suppose I was succumbing to the temptations like everyone before me. It was stress, and compensation. I drank too much, spent too much; everything was as phony as the statues in Ray Stark’s garden. I knew if I went on like that, my marriage, or I, would be dead inside a year.”

  On January 1, with no immediate movie commitment, the Redfords boarded an Italian liner bound for Gibraltar.

  Paramount’s start date for Barefoot in the Park was months away, so Redford had time to reorder his thoughts. Days before he left, he recorded in his diary the first stirrings to paint again, “watching Shauna, who is all the colors of the fall, a living Renoir.” Europe, he wrote, was the place to do it, specifically Spain. This, his third European excursion, was different in every way from the previous adventures. Stan Collins, now managing investments at the Provo branch of stockbrokers Goodbody and Company, waved him goodbye “as if he were royalty. It wasn’t like before. The first time, he had a suitcase. Now the family packed trunks.” There were also influential theatrical and movie friends to bid them adieu. Richard Schickel, the critic for Look and Show magazines, came to the dock for the send-off. Schickel, who had been introduced to Redford by Carol Rossen, observed “a very courageous, or foolhardy, move, depending how you looked at it: here was a guy, the better part of ten years looking for a career, abandoning it as soon as it got moving. I thought he was nuts.”

  The family took up residence in Mijas, an hour from Gibraltar, in January 1966. Redford took to sitting on an iron chair in the garden of the rented villa, just staring. For almost a month he hardly talked. Lola and the kids, familiar with this isolation, concentrated on fashioning a new home for themselves. “I had no practical plan,” says Redford. “I wanted to paint and read, that’s all.”

  The Andalusian coast Redford opted for was hardly a primitive Eden. Mijas was part of the fast-developing Costa del Sol, haven for the privileged likes of Aristotle Onassis and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had hideaway haciendas there. What had been, in the fifties, farmland dotted with fishermen’s cottages and Arab forts was now prime real estate. The previous year, Life magazine’s William Sansom extolled the best of what remained in a feature titled “The Great Game of Getting Away from It All”: “Dress is heterodox. Anything goes, from a Hawaiian shirt to a black sombrero. Students, of course, look like students, and beats like beats”—and all of this against a fading backdrop of “an Arcadian agricultural scene where oxen pull the plow between groves of olives and almonds, and limes and lemons loom as large as boxing gloves.”

  Mijas was an olive growers’ community the size of Greenwich Village, where the writer Robert Storey and Prince Bernadotte of Sw
eden lived. The Redfords’ villa, outside the town, was sparse, white and capacious, with an empty swimming pool in the yard and the hills of Churriana beyond. The unique square bullring was a ten-minute walk along the switchback two-lane road that led to the coast. Redford took to walking this steep road daily, winding down among the olive terraces to the seaside village of Fuengirola for wine and provisions. Jamie’s first clear memories of his father are of these days of decompression. “I was vaguely aware of my dad as a life force, but, for us, the home revolved around Mom,” Jamie says. “Looking back, I realize he was fighting his demons. But he was a buoyant force. Once he got moving, he was never inactive. There was a drama about him, and that affected all of us.”

  Shauna had enrolled at the Dalton School in Manhattan and Jamie was due to begin there that spring, but the trip upended the plan. In later life, Jamie and Shauna would both observe that education was a priority in their father’s eyes. “But at that time,” says Jamie, “he truly felt there was more to be learned traveling than studying.” Jamie has hazy but happy memories of these Spanish days. “I enjoyed it, except for the Semana Santa Easter festival. It was a crucifixion scenario, where the faithful parade through the streets reenacted the journey to Calvary. But this wasn’t playacting. It was extreme self-mortification. There was blood everywhere, and the person playing Christ was actually nailed to the cross. It was upsetting for a kid of four to endure, but Dad thought it was okay, that it was honest cultural exposure, which I guess it was.” Jamie is less sure of the outing to the local butcher’s shop, in preparation for Sunday lunch: “Right before my eyes, they slaughtered a lamb and cut it up. Okay by Dad, not okay by me. I hollered the place down.” Redford himself saw this exposure as “my own reenactment of how I’d learned the rules from Tot and Gil in Texas. It was like my mom being thrown into Barton Springs to sink or swim. It was tough love, but I didn’t feel it was excessive.” He hesitates. “Well, maybe a little excessive.”

  The dreams of painting Shauna in all her Renoir colors disappeared in the dazzling distractions of summer. Like the French Riviera, the Costa del Sol doubled its population from May through September, and well-wishers came to the Redfords’ villa with letters from mutual friends in New York and Los Angeles. Gradually the social whirl absorbed Redford, displacing the meditations on career and family. The writer Tom McGuane was one of many houseguests. “It was pleasant,” says Redford, “but it was a diversion I didn’t want. I began to understand that the community I was fantasizing about wasn’t on the costa. It was really just a combination of Palm Springs and the dropout guys.” Redford indulged, but became frustrated when he encountered the partner of Lorenzo Semple Jr., the Hollywood screenwriter, on a pathway one day. The men conversed, and it emerged that Lorenzo was living down the road, writing Batman scripts that were then sent by overnight courier to ABC in Los Angeles. “I thought, That’s it! This is just another Hollywood-on-location. Time to get out of here.”

  The family made for Crete instead. Here he mimicked Henry Miller again, settling down on the island’s north shore. Jamie and Shauna loved the fantasy tour and the high spirits. “It all stepped up a gear,” says Jamie. “Suddenly it was lectures about myths and monsters, and they all scared me stiff. Dad lived for this storytelling. I can see myself sitting on some beach, and him telling me about the Cyclops that lived in the cave there.” The family stayed in Iráklion, exploring the coastal sweep from Chania to Sitia and the long, winding hiking trails of Europe’s longest gorge, the ten-mile Samaria, flanked on one side by the White Mountains and on the other by the cypress forests of Mount Volikas. Bit by bit the diary, and the conceit of bohemian living, were lost to the joys of what Redford calls “a simple extended family vacation with a little bit of social research thrown in.” He knew now that he had outgrown the part of Beat bum, that he was a family man with duties and gifts to give. “The days in Iráklion were among the best, but I knew I had to come back, that it was important for me to build a future for my family.”

  In July, Stan Collins received a postcard from Crete in which Redford described his change of heart. Lola had suffered enough waiting for the career break; now, wrote Redford, “she’s on the spending trail, cutting through Europe like a Mack.” Redford recalls, “We did indulge ourselves. We overspent like crazy, but I was confident that I had a career to come back to and a check in the pipeline.”

  The check he was referring to was for the movie of Barefoot in the Park, this time costarring Jane Fonda, assigned to television director Gene Saks when Nichols turned it down. Redford was refreshed by his sabbatical and, in a more profound way, renewed. Stan Collins believes the trip had “sorted out his marriage and his family and got his discipline back in order.” Shauna, too, felt the Mediterranean trip had sharpened his perspective. “He had something to work out of his system, relating to his place in acting and, maybe more importantly, to his place in a marriage,” she says. “When he came back, it was new ideas and new energy.”

  Upon his return from Crete in early fall, committed though he was to Barefoot, he went to see Mike Nichols, who was in the middle of preparing a movie adaptation of Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate. Redford immediately pushed, says Nichols, to audition for the role of Benjamin, the sexual innocent seduced by the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson. In October, just days before the scheduled start of Barefoot, Nichols, against his instincts, conceded to a screen test. In the screen test, shot with Candice Bergen, Nichols was troubled by Redford’s robust, suntanned presence. “I told him he was wrong for it,” says Nichols, “but he wouldn’t let it go. I was living in Brentwood and he came for supper and we shot some snooker and he went on and on about his ability to play the part. He said he perfectly understood the character, who was a social misfit. I finally said to him, ‘Bob, you’re a vastly talented man. But be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. Do it. And then tell me: Can you honestly imagine a guy like you having difficulty seducing a woman?’ He couldn’t answer me, because it was self-evident. A guy who looked like Dustin Hoffman could play Benjamin. A guy who looked like Redford would be a joke.”

  As the five-week shoot for Barefoot began, Fonda and Redford looked forward to reconnecting. “There was a certain amount of balancing to be done in the day-to-day rehearsals,” says Fonda, “because I was the newcomer to this text and he had the role down pat. But he was a gentleman. He let Gene do what he had to do, and he made room. He never preached, and anytime I needed redirection he contributed caringly. He would take Gene aside and make the point in private, then Gene would coach me.” Redford had been worried about staleness with the Bratter character. “It’s something I knew could get in the way,” he says, “so I pushed to get through that barrier.” He joyfully renewed friendships with the members of the Broadway cast. “I’d forgotten how much I’d enjoyed Milly Natwick and Herb Edelman. Herb was my type of guy, the court jester who bought people little gifts and tried to make them laugh all the time. That was great, because moviemaking gets boring.”

  For Gene Saks, a veteran of Armstrong Circle and Kraft Theater live broadcasts and an old friend of Neil Simon’s, the most important task was overcoming Redford’s boredom. Saks recalls: “Bob wanted to remind everyone every day that he wasn’t as starchy and uptight as Bratter. So whenever I called, ‘Cut!’ he threw off the suit and tie and loafed.” Redford agrees that “boredom” was the key challenge. “I’d taken Bratter everywhere I could, and the character was just hot air compared with, say, Parritt in The Iceman Cometh or the stuff I’d done with Sydney on This Property Is Condemned.” Neil Simon, only just embarking on his movie writing with the concurrent Peter Sellers movie, After the Fox, had adapted his own play, adding little more than the obvious outdoors expansion, where Bratter finally gets to actually walk barefoot in Washington Square Park. “What gets interesting, in those circumstances, is the chance to break down the mechanism,” says Redford. “You have done the play as an organic whole; now you are assembling the collage in film style and you get to
see some new things. You say, ‘Hey, I could do this just with my eyes’ or ‘Hey, I could do this sotto voce.’ Gene helped. He was adaptable and he knew he’d get the best from me by letting me take it wherever I could.”

  Fonda was happy with the outcome. “It was light entertainment,” she says. “Neither Bob nor I saw it as a career movie. It was marking time, a movie with a nice script and a nice director. Sometimes that’s enough.”

  During days off, Redford spent time with his Van Nuys High School buddy Dave Brockman. Brockman, who had shared a hot-rod fanaticism with the teenage Redford, had always suffered from depression; now Redford noticed a sharp decline. As Thanksgiving approached, he invited Brockman to visit Utah for the holiday. “I had a sense that it might be important for him to get away, and I looked forward to reconnecting and finding out what was wrong.” But the production schedule necessitated an overnight trip to New York to shoot the Washington Square Park exteriors the day after Thanksgiving. The Redfords had to withdraw the invitation to Brockman. Over the weekend Brockman gassed himself to death in the garage of his home in the Valley. Redford was devastated. “I felt responsible. I always had this thing that death was on my shoulder, 24/7. My dogs, as a kid. My uncle. My mom. My firstborn. A darkness right on top of me.”