Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  His frame of mind was changing, too. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In June, Bobby Kennedy was killed. By August, when the Democrats’ presidential convention in Chicago turned into a bloodbath, America seemed an alien place. “If you had any moral sensibilities,” says Redford, “you were reeling. Personally, as I’m sure for most Americans, it was a time of utter confusion. There was a frantic feeling of, What to do?” Absorption in work seemed the best medicine, and he pushed himself to perfect his skiing on the longest pro skis, 220 downhills. At the same time, in the spirit of a new commitment to social involvement, he raised funds for the Salt Lake Native Culture Center.

  “In New York, Bob and Lola attracted influential people,” says Mike Frankfurt, “and they utilized this as a political tool. Both had a clear picture of the divisions in American life, the rich and poor, black and white. They also had a clear picture of the Republican silent majority, and the divisions in the Democrats between the supporters of Eugene McCarthy and McGovern and Humphrey. More than that, they also had a clear understanding of the power of celebrity. They understood there was a direct correlation between the size of the media profile and the audience that could be commanded. They weren’t charging at political life, but there was an impulse. The initial activism came in fits and starts. But the tone of it changed around the time Nixon got elected [in 1968].”

  Redford had actively supported McCarthy until his landslide loss to Humphrey during the 1968 convention. “Maybe I was naïve to think he could pull it off,” says Redford. “But he was a lot better, in prospect, than Nixon’s gang.” In Frankfurt’s view, Nixon’s dramatic election victory that year sharpened Redford’s focus. “He wanted to engage debate. He had no vision of himself as a frontline politician, but the events of 1968 made Downhill Racer and commentary on American life more important to him. He wanted to make movies that got people talking. And he knew, of course, that he also needed to nurture the stardom that would give him the power.”

  As Downhill Racer slowly brewed, Redford engaged Creative Management Associates to find him those new starring roles. It should have been Gregson’s job, but he was preoccupied in Europe. CMA was an outgrowth of MCA headed by Freddie Fields and David Begelman. Fields took over Redford’s management but assigned day-to-day business to his assistant, Stephanie Phillips. Phillips had established herself molding careers for character actresses, including Joan Hackett. She had also worked closely with Begelman in the management of Henry Fonda, Peter Sellers and director George Roy Hill. In fact, it had been Phillips who was responsible for Redford’s joining with MCA to begin with. She became a fan after having seen him onstage in Barefoot. “Joan Hackett introduced us,” says Phillips. “And from then on I just kept whispering in his ear. I thought he was exceptional, for his looks, his swagger, his wit. I wanted to represent him from the start.” Her wish come true, Phillips immediately looked at the roster of available films and singled out Hill’s production in planning for Fox, called “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.” “I had a particularly good rapport with George since he did The World of Henry Orient in 1964,” says Phillips, “so I pressed Bob on him, and he was receptive. But we had obstacles. Paul Newman, we knew, was Fox’s first choice to star. So we had to knock Brando, Beatty and James Coburn out of the picture to get the role for Bob, which I felt we could do.”

  Richard Zanuck, Darryl’s son and recent head of Twentieth Century–Fox, wasn’t amenable. Fox’s fortunes had waned in the fifties, until Darryl Zanuck overthrew his former associate Spyros Skouras. Now they were riding high on the enormous success of The Sound of Music and, in the spirit of Darryl’s philosophy of three-ring entertainments, were keen on a glamorous western. Big stars were needed for the roles of Sundance and Butch. And in Zanuck’s view, the jury was still out on Robert Redford. Phillips pushed, but Zanuck preferred Warren Beatty by far.

  The dilemma fell in the lap of George Roy Hill. A graduate of Yale in 1944, Hill had served as a marine pilot in World War II and pursued graduate studies at Trinity College in Dublin before working in the Gate and Abbey theaters. He was an Emmy winner for television writing and directing in New York in the mid-fifties and moved into movies with adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment and Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic in the sixties. Hill was forty when he started in movies and always contended that it was maturity that impressed on him the centrality of the actor. Paul Newman, in his view, was the epitome of film art. “I knew Newman’s genius, which was a genius of understatement,” said Hill. “No matter how good the story, no matter how dexterous the cameraman, no matter how smart the director, you simply cannot achieve an effective motion picture without an immensely skilled screen actor.” Newman’s commitment to the Fox western was, said Hill, half the battle. “And then when Steffie pushed for Redford, I thought, Yes, that might be interesting. Only that.”

  Hill met Redford for a drink at Joe Allen’s bar on Forty-sixth Street. “Since I liked the script,” says Redford, “I really wanted to get in. But the understanding was that Paul would be Sundance, since the title led off with that name, and Butch was the costar. George assumed I wanted to be Butch Cassidy, but I said, ‘To be honest, I’ve read it and I think I’d be better as Sundance. It’s the part that interests me.’ And from there the talk progressed, and George became intrigued by this notion. I learned that he felt Paul was really more like Butch anyway. George said that the role Paul played in Hud was really not him. Paul was full of nervous energy, and funny. And the more we talked, the more George came around to the idea that I should be the Sundance Kid.”

  “After that I decided I wanted him for Sundance,” Hill recalled. “It was that simple. You’ll read press pieces about me wanting Marlon and all the rest, but it’s garbage. Fox wanted Beatty. Paul wanted Jack Lemmon. But I wanted Bob. Then I had to go to Paul’s apartment and set about winning him over.”

  Newman had little or no interest in Redford’s progress: “I’d seen him onstage in Barefoot, and I’d seen Inside Daisy Clover, but I had yet to be convinced.” Personally, Newman said, he felt a sense of “ownership” with the Butch Cassidy film, since it had first been proposed to him in the fall of 1966, ironically, by Redford’s friend and neighbor, Bill Goldman. “He flew all the way down to Tucson, where I was filming, and dished it all to me, this marvelous story about the real Wild Bunch gang he was developing on spec. He said, ‘This is going to be the best cowboy picture ever made.’ Then he disappeared, and the next I knew, [Steve] McQueen called me and said we should make this thing called ‘The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy’ that somebody had shown him. I collected the script from McQueen’s house and read it overnight, and the next day I called Steve and suggested that the two of us should buy it outright from Goldman. He said no deal was available because Goldman’s agent was playing the auction game. So that was the end of it for McQueen and me. I forgot about it. Then, out of the blue, Dick Zanuck had it and Hill was offering it to me, with no Steve attached.”

  Newman had no problem relinquishing the role of Sundance. Hill informed him that the movie’s title could easily be reversed and, anyway, the character of Butch was a perfect fit for him. Despite the ongoing grumbling from the studio, Hill took Redford to meet Newman and Newman was won over. “George was probably right,” said Newman. “I’d wanted Lemmon as the costar to return a favor. But he hated horses and said no. When I met Bob, I liked him. After that, you go by instinct, and you go with the flow. It was an exceptional piece of writing anyway and, under George’s direction, I knew it would be a fine movie. So when George said, ‘Trust me, it’s Redford as the Sundance Kid,’ I said, ‘What the hell.’ ”

  Advised of Newman’s blessing, Fox agreed to Redford as Sundance. “It was humbling,” says Redford, “because Paul and George were obvious artists. I was the kid, and they went to bat for me with Zanuck. Was I sure the movie was something special? Yes. It was rich with humor and texture. I liked Goldman’s work, though I thought the script ha
d too many jokes. I had the highest admiration for George. When I was told I got it, it was a relief because I felt, Okay, if I make a mess of Downhill, I might still have a career. It was Paul who made the decision. I will always be indebted to him for that—taking a chance on a comparative unknown.”

  Late in August, still preparing for Downhill Racer, Redford joined some Broadway friends—Penny Fuller, an understudy from Barefoot, and production manager Bill Craver—for a weekend of sitting in the sauna and riding at Timp. On the first evening, says Fuller, he was preoccupied with “the immensity of the changes going down with the purchase of the canyon lands and the contradictory objectives of all these new movies.” They played jazz and sat late into the night under the tall windows of the A-frame. Redford outlined his plans. He would preserve the canyon for posterity. He would protect it from commercial exploitation. His own developments would be arts based. An on-site children’s theater would be the start of a program he’d yet to work out. He had toyed, he said, with various names for this mountain fastness, but now he had the best name. It evoked an Indian ritual of growth through pain. He would call it Sundance.

  Redford joined Paul Newman, Katharine Ross (again), Bill Goldman and Hill at Fox for two weeks of rehearsals in September. Hill reminded Redford of his uncle David. He was convivial, a sharp-as-a-pin military man with a perverse sense of fun. “It was easy to talk with George,” says Redford, “because it felt familiar.” In Hill’s view, “Redford had layers. He had a Celtic wildness that shone through the laid-back dude. Zanuck called him a playboy. But he made a mistake: that was just the look.”

  Marcella Scott, Martha’s friend from childhood, worked as a studio secretary assigned to Hill and sat in on the earliest meetings for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She was impressed by Hill. “He was a loudmouth in the nicest sense, a stage Irishman. He wore tennies everywhere, hated ties—just like Bob—hated rules. But he was fastidious beyond belief within his own universe. I’ve never known a man to read so much and work so hard, and he demanded, usually in a roar, that everyone around him contribute the same energy. He was the kind of man who’d suddenly realize at midnight that he had been remiss in not replying to some obscure memo, and he would think, I am not being professional, and sacrifice a night’s sleep to dictate something generous and unnecessary. Bob and he were made for each other, because Bob, too, had energy beyond everyone else.”

  Erudition spilled naturally from Hill, a man who drew heavily on his Irish temperament (both sets of grandparents were Dublin Irish) while, unlike John Ford, shying away from romanticizing his Irishness. Pauline Kael viewed Hill’s work as “implacably impersonal,” which Hill manfully construed as a compliment, since “restraint” was his personal byword. But film historian Andrew Horton, later evaluating his oeuvre, concluded the director deployed “Voltaire’s traits of the master storyteller who frames a serious view of life in a comic-ironic vein, manipulating genres for his own purposes.” Redford appreciated Horton’s analysis. “George was chronically underrated on account of his eclecticism. He was not a ‘straight-line’ director, in that he did not obsess about one style or one subject. When I see directors like Marty Scorsese being so celebrated for excellence and George so ignored, it upsets me. Marty is brilliant as a stylist, but George was an immense storyteller and he had the gift to jump genres and never let you down. In my movie experience till then, George was the first real storyteller I’d met. His approach was analytical and lyrical, and consequently comprehensive.”

  For Newman, Hill’s specialty was his genius with actors: “George’s preference was New York theater actors, people like Cloris Leachman, whom he loved. They were trained with improvisational skills, which he relished. Add to that his deep respect for the art of acting, which came from his being an actor in Ireland, and you got the magic. He didn’t slow you down when you were hot; he rolled with it. On the other hand, when you stumbled, he stepped in to help in the blink of an eye. That’s a very rare attribute for a director: understanding acting. In my opinion, on Butch Cassidy, Redford and I might have been any two decent actors. What George did from the rehearsals onward was allow us to run with the script, to just go nuts, then nurse the whole shebang in the direction he wanted, which was original and visionary.”

  Humor, on which the simple, linear story of the demise of Butch and Sundance at the end of the outlaw era was built, also oiled the day-to-day production, which began in Durango, Colorado, on September 16. Newman, who loved auto racing, showed up in his souped-up Volkswagen and immediately taunted Redford in his cherished Porsche 904, one of only 103 ever made, specially designed for the Sebring race of 1964. Francis Feighan, Fox’s publicity man, saw “two overgrown kids on separate sides of a dusty track, revving their engines like gladiators getting ready for the fray. You knew it was all in jest, but the testosterone in the air was overpowering.”

  Jamie, just settling into Dalton, was given eight weeks off, as was Shauna, who joined Lola and Joanne Woodward on location. This family camaraderie—“incessant talk, gags and laughs,” says Jamie—helped a twelve-week shoot hampered by the kind of stunt accidents and injuries that might be expected from a reenactment of the dying days of the Wild West. “There was a feeling of unusual intensity from the start,” said Feighan. “The legend of Hill’s dedication preceded him. He’d knocked Hawaii, which was a sprawling three-hour movie, into shape when Fred Zinnemann couldn’t. And he was sure as hell going to make a silk purse out of Goldman’s script. He worked sixteen hours a day from the first week in June of 1968, when he called Goldman to Fox to discuss the script, till the end of the final edit in June 1969. He even worked from a stretcher for ten days when he put his back out. And later on he got studio dispensation to sleep in a dressing-room loft beside the edit suite.” Redford says he found this degree of application inspiring. He also loved the locations—“among my favorite scenery anywhere in the world: Silverton, Colorado, Virgin and St. George in Utah, and the Mexican desert.”

  From the first days of shooting there was a brotherliness in the partnership of Newman and Redford that had Hill, said his assistant, Bob Crawford, “hopping around like a four-year-old who’s finally cracked the candy jar.” Stephanie Phillips, though, remembered a nervous start. There had been controversy about Redford’s bandito mustache. Phillips disliked it, and Redford was reminded of the story of Darryl Zanuck returning from Europe halfway through the shoot for The Gunfighter, where Gregory Peck wore a mustache. “That facial hair is going to cost me $2 million,” said Zanuck. “Given Stephanie’s commercial instinct,” says Redford, “the mustache was in trouble. But I was emphatic it stayed, because that was the way those bandits looked at the turn of the century. It was authentic. And George agreed, so it stayed put.” Hill enjoyed Redford’s cheekiness. “Bob was a little rougher and less mature than Paul,” he recalled. “So there was a definite experience discrepancy. Paul played on that, which created some fine moments that weren’t in Goldman’s script. Paul was Actors Studio, Redford was ‘the other side’—that was another pretense for rivalry. That’s all good stuff, but it can slide out of control. It can become too much fun for the actors, and lose the point. At the end of the day it’s the director’s job to make a characterful relationship out of all this. I had to rein them in at times.”

  “We got it up on its feet real quick,” Newman remembered. “Redford worked different to me, a bit faster. But Method fades as soon as you face the movie camera. The technology of the film set works against Stanislavski, and good film actors know it. I once asked Elia Kazan how often one should rely on sense memory, and he said sense memory never worked for him. So you take what works for you, which was what I did, and it varies with the definition of each production. Orson Welles complained that he’d made The Long, Hot Summer with Tony Franciosa and Lee Remick and Joanne [Woodward], who were all Method trained, and it was like trying to cycle a bicycle through a barrel of molasses. I was always conscious of that, so I didn’t bring Stanislavski to the set.
I brought a Porsche-engined Volks.”

  In real life, Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, renamed the Hole in the Wall Gang to avoid confusion with Sam Peckinpah’s movie of that name, were serial bank robbers and murderous postfrontier thugs. Harry “Sundance” Longabaugh was a dangerous Pennsylvania-born gun for hire. Goldman proposed an alternative, Robin Hood version of villainy. “I always loved Bill’s writing,” says Redford. “Temple of Gold and Boys and Girls Together, his novels, seemed very much like J. D. Salinger to me. He had the ability to capture and emulate a style. In this movie he wanted to emulate Gunga Din. But in some of his writing his wit and imitative style became over-blown and reduced what might have been. George was aware of this with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So he took out many jokes and reordered it to allow the scenes to breathe. He was very ruthless in a discriminating way.” Hill said, “I was always aware that we were exaggerating history. In our movie, Butch and Sundance are lovable because they are polite, despite their mania for bank robberies and their complete incompetence. They fuck up all the time but come back with aplomb. I played off Newman’s history and Redford’s newness. Up till then, Paul was known as the hard rebel loner of Hud or Cool Hand Luke. Bob was a blank sheet of paper. For the movie we made them goofballs, and because that was so fresh in context of what we were doing, it won over the audience.”

  Where, though, was the Darling Clementine earnestness or the western veracity Pollack and Redford aspired to? For Hill, the validity was in the symbolism. “The movie was about Vietnam. Not literally, of course, but it symbolized a whole contingent of society that was bailing out. It was, I suppose, in sympathy with the dissenting voice, maybe even supporting it.” Redford preferred to see core truths in the depiction of banditry. “George asked me at one point, ‘What is your motivation for playing Sundance?’ And I said, ‘He’s a killer, a psychotic. So when I’m looking at some guy, all the time I’m thinking, Will I kill him?’ ” Within that subtextual hardness, says Redford, the movie retained a quasi reality that gave it worth.