Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford headed west when Barefoot wrapped, resuming the Provo–Los Angeles circuit, driving his new stripped-down 904 racing Porsche like a maniac, disappearing for days on end. Peer Oppenheimer, a journalist he’d met in Spain, reported a gathering storm in a piece written for Family Weekly titled “The Hide-and-Seek Life of Robert Redford.” “The danger of success,” Redford told Oppenheimer, “is that it forces you into a mold. I prefer independence.” In fact, what he was seeking was a purpose beyond movies. “I was aware that all this spiritual shit was a nightmare for the family,” Redford now says. “I had anger management issues; there were a lot of unresolved conflicts.” For succor he turned to Utah, to Mormon conviviality and the mountains. In a copartnership with Stan Collins, he put up $8,000 to purchase Hoover’s Clothing Store, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot property in Provo that specialized in ski gear. The venture failed, with only the ladies’ fashion basement, which Lola managed, showing a profit. “I thought it would be a lark, but it was a burden. At the end of the day, it was just a store, just money. It meant nothing.”

  What he was really searching for, Redford says, was peace of mind. Nothing could calm him. “I’d replaced the booze with pills. Stan introduced me to a diet pill that was supposed to keep me in shape, but it fried my brains. I took Seconal for sleep, but I was wired and yet tired all the time.”

  Talk of westerns filled his evenings. He had, he told Pollack, a new regard for them. Gene Saks had observed that, during Barefoot, whenever he was relaxing, Redford would “strip off Bratter’s suit and opt to wear a Stetson and boots to let us know who he really was.” The Virginian, Redford told Pollack, was one of his best experiences, “because of the story values and the character authenticity.” Pollack was at work on a gritty western for Burt Lancaster, United Artists’ The Scalphunters, about a trapper at war with the Indians who steal his hides. Pollack had come to it excitedly, having learned the western ropes from his TV years. “Like most Americans, Bob and I shared the experience of growing up on a diet of John Ford and John Sturges,” said Pollack. “It was a secondary education, this western thing, a birthright information source. We were also equally irritated by the phoniness of it. For The Scalphunters, I discussed it with Burt and we made a conscious decision to deglamorize it. Same with Bob. We started talking about creating a movie like My Darling Clementine. We’d say, ‘If we get the chance, we’ll break some ground, we’ll do it different.’ ”

  Now, as the third movie in Redford’s three-picture contract, Paramount offered him Blue, a script by television writer Ronald Cohen set in the disputed no-man’s-land between Mexico and Texas in the 1850s. The story was a gritty romance about a Mexican bandit who falls for a Texan, to the chagrin of his family. Redford felt an immediate attachment: here was the borderland, Tot’s territory. For a few weeks he researched the background enthusiastically. Then, in a planning meeting, the executive overseeing his contract at Paramount, Bob Evans, casually informed him he’d also signed Silvio Narizzano, the Canadian director riding high on the current British pop hit Georgy Girl. Redford winced. “I thought this was wrong. In my view, Blue would only work as a movie of historical reverence, never as a pop film.”

  During the early discussions about Blue, Redford experienced a clear understanding of the limitations of defining himself solely, or even principally, in movie terms. “Movie stardom was never going to do it for me. Neither was Hoover’s retail store, or diet pills,” he says. “Many of my Mormon friends, like Stan, saw my struggle as a religious crisis. And then the pressures for conversion came on, very kindly, very committed, very determined. I was courted, I was given Mormon literature, and though they tried, I was not blessed. The more they pushed me to commit to the Church, the more I pulled away.”

  After Christmas, Stan Collins and his wife, Mary Alice, invited the Redfords on a driving trip to Lake Powell, one of the country’s biggest man-made reservoirs, in southern Utah. The couples stopped at Gallup, New Mexico, and Redford rambled around on the Navajo reservation. It was five years since his Pacific-bound train had stopped for water at Gallup and the face at the window incited a healing Zen moment. “This time around I took my time. I explored and really lost myself in the culture,” he says. “It blew me away. I felt at peace and at home, with the faces, the postures, everything.” Redford talked to the traders, sat in the dirt to play with face-painted kids. “Some drunken Navajo called me Bonfaccio, and it stuck. From then on, to myself, I was Bonfaccio, the white interloper. Bonfaccio became a moniker and it was the name I wrote on the clapper slate when I first signed myself as director of Ordinary People.”

  Since his preteens he’d been reaching for a bridge of understanding between the two contrasting Americas of his parental origins: the frontier Texas of Tot and the urban East Coast world of Tiger. During The Chase, the activism of Brando, Penn and CORE had teased his awareness of Native American and minority issues, and in November, as he finished Barefoot, the eruption of youth politics in the Sunset Strip riots, where a coalition of liberals protested the overdevelopment of L.A., further focused him. At Lake Powell, contemplating Blue, he believed he had achieved some liberating clarity.

  Purchasing Timp, he reflected, was about reconciliation. It seemed fated, even, for it was close by in 1869 that the golden spike was driven into the ground at Promontory Summit, to mark the joining of railroads from east and west. He was attracted to Indian culture, he decided, because it was the root of all Americas. Redford calls this the moment of awareness that presaged his sense of stewardship about the canyon and also his commitment to explore the diversity of American culture, which would later be foundational in his creation of the Sundance Institute. “There’s always a key moment,” he says. “That was mine.”

  Soon afterward, a silversmith Hopi called Fred Kapote made Redford the ring he still wears today. It depicts a turtle, representing patience and endurance—two staples that would be well tested in the days ahead. In the spring, he was ready to face Bob Evans and the fight for a role beyond stardom.

  11

  Toward Concord

  Barefoot in the Park opened at Radio City Music Hall in the summer of 1967. It earned $9 million, five times its budget, in the first six weeks, a resounding success. But Redford had an appetite for change, and change was in the air. America was agitated. Disillusioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, anxious because of the missile crisis, the death of Kennedy and the war in Vietnam, Americans everywhere were reappraising core values. This was the year Brian Wilson retired the Beach Boys’ California Dream and the Beatles metamorphosed from mop-topped innocents to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was also the year Andy Warhol brought his avant-garde movies to the marketplace at Cannes. Change was everywhere.

  Redford listened to Sgt. Pepper’s, grew his hair, explored magic mushrooms as an alternative to hash. “There’s no question that a fresh wind was blowing,” he says. “People were impatient for answers, for newness. But new and good don’t necessarily correspond. This was at the center of my thinking when I saw what Paramount was attempting with Blue.”

  After several contentious script meetings at which Redford felt “the wrong sensibilities entirely” were being imposed on a western story, a date was finally agreed for production of Blue to commence. Redford was troubled because he had found Narizzano evasive and he didn’t trust Evans in his promise of a new script. He set out, however, by train from New York to join the production. “Halfway to Arizona,” he says, “I got off and rang Meta. I told her it wasn’t going to happen. I’d been promised sight of a final draft of the script but it was withheld from me. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I think this is going to be a very different movie from the one I signed up for. So I’m out.’ ”

  Paramount’s wrath seemed inevitable. The company had just come through a corporate takeover and the biggest reshuffle in its fifty-year existence. The previous October, Gulf + Western Industries, a conglomerate encompassing mining, manufacturing and finance companies and founded by entrep
reneur Charles Bluhdorn in 1957, offered Paramount’s embattled shareholders an acquisition deal for 10 percent more than the market price. Since its creation by Adolph Zukor, Paramount’s fortunes had risen and fallen. It was, of course, one of the Big Five that dominated Hollywood, and its star roster was unmatched. Valentino, William S. Hart, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly had all been contract players, and the studio had made classic works like Sunset Boulevard and The Ten Commandments. But in the forties an antitrust initiative required that Zukor sell off his theaters. Then television began making its mark. The record profits of $20 million in 1949 fell to $6 million in 1950. But Bluhdorn envisioned a fusion with other entertainment media and decided to take a chance. His area of specialization was the Caribbean sugar industry, but he was hot for Hollywood. Bluhdorn’s bid for Paramount was accepted by the shareholders, and he quickly proved his worth by establishing the Leisure Time umbrella, comprising Paramount, the publisher Simon and Schuster and New York’s Madison Square Garden. As movie ticket sales, in decline since the mid-fifties, started an upswing in the late sixties, there were those who regarded Bluhdorn as a visionary as well as a good businessman. His passion, he told everyone, was making Paramount the industry leader.

  To Redford, Bluhdorn, who was just seven years older than he was, at first seemed fatherly. “He was this nice, silver-haired, big-smile guy who just shook my hand with enthusiasm and said, ‘Gee, this is a great moment for me. You’re the first movie star I’ve ever met.’ ” Three months later, after Redford had balked at Blue, Bluhdorn was launching a $250,000 lawsuit against him.

  Redford’s assets amounted to not much more than $100,000, and his personal debts topped $50,000. He had no contracts in hand, and no clear picture of the direction of his acting career. On top of this, Paramount was enjoining him from working until a settlement was reached. Redford’s response was knee-jerk. He changed agents, lawyers and business partners. Meta Rosenberg, who challenged his reasoning on Blue, was replaced by Natalie Wood’s new boyfriend, the former London International Artists’ agent Richard Gregson, who had come to Los Angeles to find talent for new British films. Gregson moved quickly from agent to production partner. The priority, though, was legal advice. Redford felt he had been badly served: “One of the great lessons of the movies in the sixties was the need for inventive legal support. The situation might be likened to environmental law, which didn’t exist in the sixties. In movies, the studios had been so all-controlling that personal lawyers were weaklings. Now it was the new era, and I needed someone more imaginative than lawyers who were old-school studio-serving guys.” At the Dalton School, Shauna and Jamie were friends with the Frankfurt kids, whose father, Steve, was Redford’s age and the youngest president ever of Young and Rubicam, the global ad agency. During social evenings, Steve introduced Redford to his brother Mike, a partner in a small law firm. The trio bonded. “Their whole family attitude was can-do,” says Redford. “It was amazingly refreshing after the narrowness of L.A. movie lawyers.” Bronx-born, the Frankfurts had humble beginnings but saw their father claw his way to prosperity. “Our father was an original,” says Mike Frankfurt, “a small-time lawyer who made a great life for his family by high-risk rolling. His motto was, ‘If we go to the poorhouse, we take a cab,’ and that was the principle I built my own legal practice on, and the one that attracted Bob.”

  Mike Frankfurt was a pragmatist who immediately saw that Redford’s great asset was the popularity engendered by Barefoot. “I saw that he had a lot going for him,” says Frankfurt, “but I also saw how the dice were loaded. Paramount had a good case. The fact that Bob’s concerns about Blue weren’t game playing but genuine creative concerns was almost incidental. One sympathized with Bluhdorn, who was looking for good news for the Paramount shareholders. He didn’t need troublemakers. From my perspective, it was a simple issue of utilizing Bob’s popularity and going in hard to meet in the middle. There was nothing to be gained for anyone by standing their ground and calling each other names. We needed them, and they needed us. So we must compromise, forgive, deal and move on.”

  In the end, Paramount dropped the injunction in return for Redford’s agreement to make two movies for a combined fee of $65,000, followed by three further films. Redford was not happy about the arrangement but was mollified by Mike Frankfurt’s creation of a far better boilerplate for all future contracts. “I worked closely with Gregson,” says Frankfurt. “Richard would use his European contacts to drum up some business. Contractually, from now on, we’d market Bob on the assumption that he had broken through. We needed to rewrite the rule book. Henceforth, we would require a percentage of the gross, and Bob would have script approval and casting approval written into all deals, like Natalie Wood and every other big star.”

  Early on it seemed the two films Redford would make to fulfill his initial commitment would be Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a Universal western based on true events that Paramount was happy to loan him out for, and an adaptation of Oakley Hall’s novel The Downhill Racers, to be directed by Roman Polanski. Robert Evans, now studio vice president, had brought Polanski over from Europe specifically to make a movie about skiing, which was the director’s favorite pastime, though Rosemary’s Baby, another pet project, had taken precedence. Earlier, in the planning stages of Rosemary’s Baby, Redford had met with Polanski. In his memoirs, Polanski wrote that he wanted Redford for the lead in his horror movie, but the meeting went awry when Redford arrived in a wig and a false beard to deflect legal servers, only to be cornered by a lawyer. Polanski claimed, somewhat bizarrely, that the information had been leaked by Evans, who wanted to dampen a Redford-Polanski friendship. The legal papers, Redford explains, arose from an incident at a restaurant where he had punched a paparazzo. “I don’t believe Evans was opposed to me working with Roman,” he says.

  Soon after, Polanski was in trouble with Evans because he was running late on Rosemary’s Baby and incurring heavy costs. Rumor had it that Evans was on the point of dumping the ski project. Redford saw an opportunity. “I believe that I was screwed by Evans and the makers of Blue,” says Redford, “and I wanted Bluhdorn to know what really occurred. I bided my time. I knew I had to wait till the lawsuit was settled, but then I went to him and told him in detail the promises that were made, and how I was let down. He was most understanding. He said, ‘That’s bad. I had no idea. I hope Paramount can make it up to you.’ ” Redford made his proposal there and then to Bluhdorn. If Evans ditched Polanski, Redford wanted to step in and take over the ski movie, maybe set it up as a flagship project for the production company he was in talks with Gregson and Frankfurt about. “Charlie was very decent,” says Redford. “He didn’t mess around. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Here’s the deal. If you can make this skiing movie for less than $2 million, it’s yours to do.’ ”

  It was an exhilarating moment—for Frankfurt, Gregson and Redford. “We knew we had an opportunity par excellence,” says Frankfurt. “The way I saw it, Bob had managed to turn a terrible, career-compromising lawsuit into a production company!”

  Redford had only just begun to ski. He also lacked production experience, as did Gregson and Frankfurt. “But I knew it was my best option,” says Redford. “Firstly, it represented autonomy. If I could crack it with my own production company, I had choices beyond the studio or the agent. Secondly, I would in principle be in a situation where I could control the integrity of a production. As a producer, I could have my say in what appeared on-screen, like Spiegel did.” Indeed, Redford’s first decision was that the skiing movie would be shot in Europe. “For me, Europe was still the big tease. I’d seen the mountains of Italy and Switzerland. I knew it would all be extraordinary on film. But I also knew the cost would be twice what Charlie was offering if we went the Europe route. It didn’t worry me. It was a chance to build my own film for the first time.”

  Redford’s team named their production company Wildwood, after a fork i
n the road leading to Timp Haven. It was to operate out of the West Los Angeles office of Richard Gregson. “Bob’s confrontation with Bluhdorn took balls,” says Frankfurt. “But this was the sixties, remember, and we took chances. It wasn’t just Bob, it was everyone.” Redford’s courage was fed, says Frankfurt, by the new social circles in which he was moving: “New York was his power pack. He’d begun to hang around with some smart, motivated people. And it struck me that he was quite tactical about these friendships.” Among the Redfords’ new friends were Ilene Goldman and her husband, Bill, a novelist and recent screenwriter, who was just finishing a big speculative script called “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy,” based on folklore surrounding two of the Wild West’s most controversial bandits. Redford also befriended the new liberal mayor of New York, John Lindsay, a friend of Steve Frankfurt’s. “Those were dynamic days,” says Frankfurt. “So much was happening with youth culture, the Brit invasion, black actors like Sidney Poitier finally making the mainstream, Bobby Kennedy championing the poor. There was a feeling of real cultural rebirth, and all our conversations were filled with massive ideas of all the great changes that could be. Bob was at the head of the pack, thinking big.”

  Before the ink was dry on the Wildwood shareholding papers, Redford astonished Frankfurt with the audacity of another, grander scheme. Timp had begun to obsess him. It was more than a family hideaway. It was a place of history. Redford told Frankfurt he had become “soul-bound” to the canyon, which to him was “a slice of John Muir’s America.” Lola and the kids used the A-frame during summers and through the holidays. “But for Bob,” says Frankfurt, “it was much more than a vacation home.” The bordering lands were all owned by the Scottish Stewarts, who had staked their claim in 1900 under the terms of the Desert Land Act and displaced the remnants of the roving Ute Indian tribe. The Stewarts first started a sheep farm, then in the fifties the brothers Ray and Paul Stewart developed the mountainside opposite into a Tyrol-styled ski resort that attracted hundreds of locals all through the winter. Timp Haven, as the resort was called, was on its last legs when Redford started buying acreage around the old sheep pasture. What remained was a Polynesian-themed timber refreshment hut called Ki-Te-Kai (“Come and get it” in Maori), an old T-bar lift and a grassy slope. Redford loved visiting. The winter skiing had become a social highlight of his year, and the Lindsays, the Schickels, the Goldmans and the Frankfurts joined in for seasonal weekends on the slopes.