Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  The first media preview in San Francisco, as Goldman described in his memoirs, was “disastrous.” Then came the nationwide opening later in September. “It was the strangest opening I ever experienced,” said Hill, “because it started really ‘up’ at Yale, and then it plunged down. It didn’t go to plan. Goldman and I went to a midtown Manhattan theater to watch, and the audience yawned. I told Bill, ‘Well, we tried.’ And I did my best to forget it, which was tough, because I had thrown everything into it.”

  The print reviews mostly were poor. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael’s lambasting review was titled, “The Bottom of the Pit.” Hill was deeply offended and wrote personally to her, in a letter that began, “Listen, you fucking cunt.” “I thought she was unkind,” said Hill. “Her way was to be snide when she personally disliked you, and it’s unfortunate, but a lot of very smart people get away with appalling crudity because they’re articulate and witty. I especially hated self-serving wit, so I answered her with the crudity and tastelessness she commanded.”

  Audiences nationwide rejected the critics’ consensus. Within months box office receipts exceeded $40 million. The movie had cost just $6.5 million. “It moved by great word of mouth,” says Redford. “People saw it and told their friends. It was an instance where the critics meant little. The audiences made up their own minds.” Hill was stunned, “because I’d decided, Okay, it didn’t work.” Newman was more phlegmatic. “Movies are like kids. They’re always surprising. Butch Cassidy was just one of those brats that races past anything you hoped for.” Redford believed inserting the Bacharach song made a huge difference. “How bad can a guy’s judgment be? I hated the song, and suddenly, for the next six months, I had to listen to it everywhere I went. I mean everywhere: cabs, restaurants, stores. There was nowhere to go to get away from it, and it was at the top of the music charts for half a year.”

  The effects of Butch Cassidy were far-reaching for Redford. In February 1968 he had been sleeping in hotel hallways in Grenoble with James Salter to save money. Two years later, in February 1970, he was a national icon on the cover of Life magazine, labeled “New Star Robert Redford: A Real Sundance Kid.” The magnitude of the hit, believed Michael Ritchie, helped the recut of Downhill Racer. “We were sometimes a little down about recutting, and I think it helped, if only to remind us how great an actor Bob was and how good his instincts were.”

  Universal, too, was encouraged and finally released Willie Boy, which had been sitting on a shelf, a month after Butch Cassidy. Eight weeks later Paramount officially released Downhill Racer.

  “I really cared about Downhill Racer,” says Redford, “but Paramount distribution threw it away. First, they wanted to open it big, like another Butch Cassidy. I, of course, resisted. I said, ‘It’s a small film, not a blockbuster.’ So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll change tack.’ But they opened it, of all places, in Kitzbühel, Austria, playing it like an après-ski treat. I later learned what really happened. Charlie Bluhdorn had moved back to his sugarcane operation. The honeymoon was over in terms of his intercession, so we were back in the hands of the so-called distribution pros. I learned they used small movies like Downhill Racer as an expenses dump. People ran up lunch expenses on other productions and attributed them to costs for our promotion.” Redford earned not a dime—not even a salary—from Downhill Racer. But the sad fate of the film did nothing to diminish the level of stardom he had now achieved. By year’s end he was a daily staple in the gossip columns in newspapers, and the networks were rescheduling the forgotten TV shows he starred in. Richard Schickel, who knew him well, wrote a long feature on him in Time magazine in December. Lorillard, the tobacco company, launched a Redford cigarette, with a face that looked remarkably like his on the promotional packs handed out to sales reps.

  “There we had to draw the line,” says Redford. “I called up my lawyers and we hit Lorillard with a lawsuit. They fought back, but it cost them half a million dollars in the end.” Redford was pleased, then amused when Martin Garbus, the civil rights lawyer who presented the case on his behalf, gave him a token gift of one of Lorillard’s promotional packs, with his pseudoface beaming out. Redford took the packet home and placed it in a glass display case. A week later, he came home to find his kids had breached the case and smoked the cigarettes.

  Redford took pride in his business sense. He took pride in the fact that he built his A-frame for $14,000 and spent just $20,000 for the first-phase development of the Sundance acreage (the money was borrowed against his Willie Boy contract). But almost immediately the partnership founded by Frankfurt started to disintegrate. “None of us had real money to begin with,” says Stan Collins, who was responsible for the financial management of this new, amorphous business. “We were all to pitch in $20,000. Bob did his bit. But I didn’t have $20,000, so I gave my services in lieu. Mike Frankfurt provided his legal services. Which meant that, apart from Bob, only Gottschalk and Hans Estin put hard cash up.” Gary Hendler, a tax management expert, had structured the deal with the less experienced Frankfurt, but Redford took the bulk of the risk, and it was Redford who first spotted the defects in the partnership. The 98 percent mortgage was signed in his name, with repayments amounting to $360,000 a year. “At first, I didn’t notice it. Everything moved so fast, and all I cared about was securing the canyon. To do that I had to keep working, to keep solvent, and I was working so intently I wasn’t taking care,” says Redford.

  There was progress, though. Redford assigned Wayne, Lola’s brother, to build a new guesthouse, the Mouse House, beside the A-frame. On the resort side, a second chairlift was installed at a cost of $200,000. The new lift system spanned over a mile to an elevation of fifty-two hundred feet above the base camp, complementing the existing Poma lifts, which took novice skiers to an elevation twenty-six hundred feet above camp. The objective of all this, says Frankfurt, was to compete with Alta, Utah’s only major ski resort, just thirty miles away.

  Despite the progress, Redford was nervous: “It became pretty evident that the promises made were not going to be kept,” he recalls. “There was no money. And I began to worry that no one was sincerely committed.” Hendler, who was slowly taking over from Frankfurt, was ostensibly following the boss’s orders, but Redford was concerned about him, too. Hendler had been skeptical about the purchase of the canyon lands to begin with, but had come around to Frankfurt’s idea of developing the resort as a nationally advertised vacation spot. Redford saw the conundrum: Hendler’s appetite was for building, but his, essentially, was for preservation.

  Hendler was Brooklyn born and Harvard educated. Despite being short, he had become a star varsity basketball player, an achievement, Redford opines, that reflected his determined stubbornness. While others preferred to take weekends off, he worked nonstop. Hesitant at first, he had seen the opportunities afforded by the property boom of 1970 and surrendered to Sundance. “Prior to Gary,” says Frankfurt, “our setup in New York was hand-to-mouth. With EYR, we were always begging for the loan of office space. We found Bob a hole in the wall on East Fifty-fifth Street and that was our business base in its entirety. Gary wasn’t interested in any of this small-time panhandling. He saw the big picture. The economy was booming and the property market was on the up. People had disposable income. It was a good time for vacation properties. Gary came to see the light and he wanted Bob to benefit.”

  Hendler moved fast. First, a number of half-acre plots were sold at $10,000 each to a pool of friends assembled by Frankfurt and Hendler, including Steve Frankfurt, Universal’s Lew Wasserman, producer Dan Melnick and Sydney Pollack. The idea was for them to build vacation homes adhering to controlled architectural guidelines. A search was then begun for venture capital partners for a major expansion, led by Hendler and his mentor from Harvard, Larry Fleischer, who managed sports stars. Fleischer had managed the basketball careers of New York Knicks Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley. Frankfurt, like Redford, was comfortable in these circles, but less comfortable with the business operations o
f Fleischer. “No one was saying yet that this would be the arts center of the Southwest,” says Frankfurt, “but it was clearly going to be arts connected, and I worried that Bob’s art vision and Fleischer’s business would clash. We all accepted that the facilities had to be expanded, and Gary said Fleischer would involve Restaurant Associates, the restaurant and catering enterprise he was heading up, and they would buy into the resort and invest seed capital. We all hung on for this deal, but nothing happened.”

  Some began to believe the new setup was a ready-made disaster. Brent Beck, who joined as resort manager at the end of the first Sundance season, found “low morale among the few staffers and a feeling that this so-called new resort was operating beyond itself.” For Jerry Hill, who had worked in the canyon since he was fifteen, the early scenario was “nightmarish—it was a race to the bank in Provo every Friday to get in first and make sure the darn check didn’t bounce.”

  Some investors introduced to Redford were less than desirable. There was the Utah tourism executive who proposed the training and sponsoring of America’s first all-black Olympic ski team as a novelty draw. There was the executive of an NBC division interested in cashing in on the current second-home tax break advantages for staffers. And then there was the southern businessman who saw great potential in a cowboy-themed mountain park that would be accessed from the Alpine Loop by motorists driving under a Disney-like hundred-foot-high billboard depicting a smiling Redford as the Sundance Kid.

  When they started out, Hendler was a junior partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Irell and Minella. Within a year he was in partnership with Art Armstrong and handling the legal affairs of star clients like Ella Fitzgerald and, later, Sean Connery, Pollack and Streisand. “That’s where the real trouble started,” says Redford. “Gary was clever, and he made money for these people. I did not want to be dragged into the territory of, ‘You must do this picture for X cash, because we need X cash.’ Everything I’d done till that point was about avoiding that trap. But Gary would sit me down and say, ‘Sean [Connery] is doing three movies a year. You can be like Sean. He’s financially far better off than you. You can use this money for the resort.’ I would say to Gary: ‘Who made the world? An accountant? No, it was made from chaos, and creativity led the way out of the chaos, so for God’s sake let us focus on the creativity.’ ” Later, Redford would say that Hendler had his best interests at heart, but that down deep Hendler really conceived of Sundance as little more than a tax write-off.

  Redford had also become uneasy about Gregson, now an equal partner. Too many projects Redford expressed interest in were sidelined, and the easy communication between the men had lapsed. “I felt affection for him,” says Redford. “He was a smart man. But I never knew exactly the truth of how Wildwood was being run. I was never told. When he set it up, he insisted on structuring it as a Bermuda-based company, for tax reduction purposes. It was legal and impressive on paper, but it was far too complicated and maybe compromising for my liking. And then, like Gary, his vision and mine diverged. I discovered his ambition for Wildwood was an empire. He wanted an alliance with a major entertainment music company, and he put the wheels in motion to start that without consulting me. We were thinking differently, so I saw separation as the best option. We stayed friends, but I told Dick, ‘No, this Wildwood isn’t for me,’ and I shook his hand. It cost me $25,000 that I didn’t have to buy out his share, but it was a price I was happy to pay.”

  The underlying dilemma, however, was about the essence of his acting career. Gregson, like Paramount, saw a big future for Redford as a glamour attraction, making headline movies with the likes of Paul Newman and earning big paychecks to underwrite Sundance or whatever extracurricular notion appealed to him. Redford was more considered. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a joyous experience, but he was realistic about it: it might be a fluke. He also didn’t want to base his decision making on Hollywood mores. He wanted independence and experiment. “The trouble was, his obligation to Paramount meant they had some control over his direction,” says Mike Frankfurt. “He liked the experience of the small-time movie with Ritchie so much that he wanted more. But Paramount now had a positive sense of what Robert Redford should be. He was a romantic adventure boy, and that’s how they’d pitch him from now on.”

  Redford rejected the first half-dozen scripts Paramount offered, but accepted Little Fauss and Big Halsy, which had an edginess that smacked of the emergent alternative cinema. That Hollywood was changing under the weight of foreign influences and youth power was unquestionable. The Brits were here in force, evidenced in movies like John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, an essay in social agitation. Elsewhere, the piss and vinegar of youthful experiment was flowing in Woodstock, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces. This “adventurous disinhibition,” in Redford’s words, was also in Little Fauss. The script was written by bit-part actor and playwright Charles Eastman. Eastman, whose family served in the technical and secretarial departments of various Hollywood studios, had worked for three uncredited months on This Property Is Condemned. As a writer he’d become legendary for holding on to the screenplays he wrote. One of his unproduced works, “Honey Bear, I Think I Love You,” was cited by Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Chinatown, as highly influential. His breakthrough, such as it was, was his self-directed The All-American Boy, a six-part meditation on human fallibility, couched in the profile of a boxer, played by Jon Voight. The movie languished on the shelf for years, and was only released in 1973, following Voight’s success with Deliverance. Eastman’s next project was Little Fauss, which new producers Brad Dexter and Al Ruddy sold to Paramount.

  A trailer-park-trash story about two dirt-track-bike-racing enthusiasts, the unctuous Fauss and his manipulative, sexually insatiable buddy, Halsy, the new script was distinguished mainly by its insistence on glorifying losers. This Milleresque cynicism was the appeal of the proffered role of Halsy. Michael Ritchie felt the choice was “plain ornery, just Bob’s way of flipping the bird at convention in general.” But Redford says, “It was the great writing that got me. It wasn’t Henry Miller, but it was sweet and iconoclastic. Plus it did exactly what we tried to do with Downhill Racer, which was deflate false myths.”

  Sidney J. Furie, a Canadian whose career began directing Cliff Richard, the British equivalent of Elvis, in travelogue musicals, was the unlikely director. Redford didn’t know his early work, but Gregson had introduced him to Furie’s quasi–James Bond movie, The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine, and the recent Frank Sinatra vehicle, The Naked Runner, which Redford liked. He was stimulated, too, by the proposed costars. Michael J. Pollard, the New Jersey–born actor who started in television and was nominated as best supporting actor for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, would play Little Fauss, and Lauren Hutton, the leading Revlon model, would play Halsy’s girl, Rita Nebraska.

  Shot in three different western states through the summer of 1970, Little Fauss tested Redford’s physical and emotional stamina. The bike racing, filmed at the Willow Springs Raceway outside Los Angeles, at the Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix, and at Sears Point in Sonoma County, in the sweltering heat of June, was the easiest part. But Furie and Pollard made the going tough. “Furie was one of the dictatorial, do-it-my-way-and-don’t-ask-questions brigade,” says Redford, “and that works with a lot of actors; in fact, they crave it. But it wasn’t for me. The trouble was, I knew this Halsy character. He was the kind of self-serving bum I’d known in my younger days, and that was an interesting psychology in the context of where America was going in the early seventies. But Furie wasn’t up for that.” Pollard, another of Stark Hesseltine’s finds, was moody and introverted. Redford made several attempts to discuss the deeper levels of the script, but gave up. He found Furie entrenched and Pollard “a self-absorbed, freewheeling Actors Studio anarchist” who had no patience with revision. No friendships were formed.

  That the end result was eccentric was no great surprise. Jamie, Redford’s son, later regarded Little Fauss as a
personal favorite because he felt it captured his father’s essential rebelliousness. Alan Pakula regarded it as the last unself-conscious revelation of the actor’s real-life “edge.” These revelations, however, struggled against a thinly plotted script that was remarkable for its repetitiveness. Longueurs apart, Redford’s Halsy might be seen as a metaphor for the blind self-centeredness of rebellion: he uses women like Kleenex and compulsively manipulates the hero worship of Little Fauss for his own purposes. Beyond the generalities, the plot plods: Halsy sweet-talks Little Fauss into joining him on the race circuit, causes the accident that breaks Little Fauss’s leg, abandons him, then borrows his name, license and bike to compete elsewhere. The biker groupie, Rita, the object of contention for both, gets pregnant, but neither her pregnancy nor Little Fauss’s being drafted affects Halsy at all. At the end, the men drive to another race at Sears Point and disappear among the faceless competitors. The mood in turns is darkly comic, then wildly self-referential, then finally nihilistic.

  The epilogue of Eastman’s original draft, the draft he and Redford cherished, contained this sentence: “Somewhere is Halsy, somewhere is Little, but they are lost in the crowd for they are not winners but rather among those who make no significant mark and leave no permanent trace.” Redford loved this subtle observation of a crucial social lie. “Because we are in a remedial society that actually isn’t about remedies at all. It’s a lie. And people like Halsy do their thing and vanish. Their lives have no consequence.”

  In the end, Redford felt keenly that the movie was a lost opportunity. He described it to Rolling Stone as “a fucked movie.” But he remains fond of it. “I thought the underlying sentiment was an expression of what was truly at risk in the sixties fallout: loss of faith. It was about the condition that makes losers. Furie didn’t get that. There were so many moments when he told me to do it one way, and I just couldn’t. I knew the truth of these people, but he couldn’t go there.”