Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford helped combine the three local activist groups into one. Then he organized groups of sixth-grade and junior high school students to form a human chain march on the governor’s mansion. “It achieved no more than a holding action on the highway dispute,” says Redford, “but it got people talking in an enlightened way.” Lola advised her husband that the war might best be fought on several fronts. CAN was making itself known in Washington and making friends like Dick Ayres, who was raising funds for the new legal regulatory watchdog, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Redford followed this trail and introduced himself to a number of key movers and shakers with conservationist leanings, among them Wayne Owens, the administrative secretary to the progressive Democratic senator from Utah, Frank Moss, who himself had formulated an environmental platform for a run at Congress. These new relationships, says Redford, fed an urge to engage with society in ways other than moviemaking.

  “He opened up another part-time career,” said Sydney Pollack. “I used to say to him, ‘Bob, this is specialized work; this will drain your energies.’ But he just had to do it. It was a compulsion connected to the landscape.” Michael Ritchie, who had fallen out of touch since Downhill Racer, was fascinated by the stories of Redford’s multitasking. “One minute I’d hear he was recording some conservation album, the next he was back in Europe skiing, or down in the Caribbean. He’d promised me we’d do another movie from that trilogy he envisioned, that he was fired up by the experience of working with me, but nothing gelled. I’d hear from somebody that he was planning something with Peter Yates or George Hill, that he wanted to move on. But the overall impression was that he was spinning like a top.”

  Redford refocused again. Hendler and Frankfurt were polishing their plans to expand the Sundance business model, but suddenly he stopped showing up for meetings. Calls went unanswered, letters ignored. Stan Collins saw panic among the partners: “They wanted a business planner, a practical guy. He went artsy. There was an arena on the Sundance property that was an open-air theater. He decided that would become the children’s theater, and that’s what he gave his attention to. He didn’t want to talk about condo building or new potential partners with cash. He only wanted to talk about the obstacles to creating an arts community.”

  By 1971, Redford had slowed down the expansion of the Hendler-Frankfurt venture partnership. “It came to a head,” says Redford, “be-cause I saw that the bottom-line philosophy from the partners was, ‘Let’s sell the hell out of Sundance.’ Gary said, ‘Let’s put in water, power and development and cultivate a small city. We can take $15 million out of this in three years.’ I, of course, wouldn’t have that, so they all got to rethink and became magnanimous about saying, ‘Well, you have the vision, so maybe we should sell back our shares.’ And they were saying that because they saw the danger of their exposure. Then there was the problem of the alternative sidebar investments they wanted. I could not be involved in investments that were not emotionally led. Finally, their message to me was, ‘The way we see Sundance is different from you. You see some airy-fairy preserve.’ Gary’s message to me was, ‘Don’t push your version of Sundance. It’s a diseased dog.’ But to my thinking, I was just starting. I didn’t care how diseased it appeared: I was going to nurture it. I realized something had ended, that Sundance wouldn’t succeed the way Gary’s business group was headed. So I bought out everyone except Stan, whom I kept in for 10 percent, because he was a longtime buddy.”

  Frankfurt was not surprised by Redford’s U-turn: “I sensed that the sole architect of Sundance’s future would be Bob. Only Bob. The mom-and-pop aspect of developing the canyon was always more attractive to him than the corporate version. I knew where he was going, and for the next seven years, nominally supported by Collins and I, it was really just Bob cutting the course.”

  Few of the studio offers coming in now inspired Redford. There were several in the brew—projects in development with Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Arthur Penn—but the movies currently dominating cinema fare were potboilers. He especially hated the “yearbook” disaster films, so called because of the strips of star photos flanking the promotional posters. Stephanie Phillips believed he saw himself essentially as a hero figure, but Redford contests this: “No, I did not. People on the outside might have made assumptions on those lines, but I was interested in the individual who is overcome by outside forces, the suppressed or flawed individual. I did not want one-dimensional heroism, and that is why I avoided those blockbuster movies.”

  Some tantalizing, worthy projects came close. George Roy Hill was keen to adapt J. P. Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man, then playing on Broadway. Hill had befriended Donleavy and the real-life Ginger Man, Gainor Crist, in the fifties in Dublin and introduced writer and actor. Redford made several walks around Woodlawn Cemetery with Donleavy, but little substantial progress toward a film was made. He loved the writer’s eccentricity but, like Hill, lost interest in what Hill called “the gigs and reels.” Otto Preminger stepped in, but he failed to find studio interest.

  Another contender was Serpico, based on the true story of a Manhattan cop’s fight against police corruption. Redford liked Frank Serpico but hesitated when Serpico secured an agent. “That’s when all the nonsense of deal making and points positioning took over. It was a shame, because I was interested in Frank as a human being, and his story of the little guy against the institution was exactly what I loved.”

  Fred Zinnemann wanted him for Universal’s The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel about a plot to kill Charles de Gaulle. Redford thought not. “Freddie Fields said I was crazy, because it was Zinnemann, the surefire box office hit. But I couldn’t accept it. There was no depth to the story. I needed a journey into the character’s psyche and motivation. It wasn’t there. He was just a psychotic killer, and the story described his maneuvers to try to kill de Gaulle. It had a ‘So what?’ feeling for me.”

  Redford found what he wanted in a project written by Bill Goldman, The Hot Rock. On the face of it, it’s hard to see why this makeweight movie appealed. But the fee—$400,000 from Fox—explained much. “The real reasons were domestic,” says Redford. “Amy was new in our lives. I wanted to be in Manhattan for the summer, close to Lola and the baby. I wanted to get my bearings because the feeling I had was similar to the aftermath of that first Hollywood spell, after This Property Is Condemned, where I sensed I was spending too much time away from home.”

  Peter Yates, the project’s director, was a Royal Court stage-trained En-glishman, who, like Sidney Furie, had worked on Cliff Richard musicals. Three years before, he’d made his brilliant transition to American cinema with Warners’ Bullitt, a model police thriller laced with action scenes that made San Francisco seem like an arcade game. Yates saw Redford as “one of the great cinema treasures, like Clark Gable. It’s a matter of science, that kind of screen beauty, something to do with ratios and millimeters, like the Mona Lisa’s smile.” The men liked each other, though Redford was aware of a cross-cultural chasm: “In the middle sixties everything English was good. But that presented many problems, because the cultural essences and the patois are different. By the 1970s, people were beginning to think twice about this Brit invasion.”

  Goldman’s script, based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel of the same name, was a tall tale of a crack team of thieves, led by ex-con Dortmunder, who are commissioned to steal from a museum a diamond of importance to an African potentate. It had been written primarily for George Segal, who would play the locksmith Kelp, second in command to his brother-in-law, Dortmunder, the role offered to Redford. Pakula thought this was “the worst possible thing Bob could have done at that moment, because the eyes of the world were on him, and that plot was just the sort of facile garbage you see on television every week.” But Redford—a George Segal fan—was keen: “The story was about a gang of thieves, emphasis on gang, so there was the joy of playing in an ensemble team for the first time since the America
n Academy. I enjoyed that camaraderie,” he says.

  Structure, Goldman wrote in his memoirs, is all, and indeed structure, and Quincy Jones’s jazz track, was all that held the movie together. The rest was a repetitive (four attempts to steal the diamond) Pink Panther–esque muddle lightened by the casting of Zero Mostel and Paul Sand. In an apparent attempt to recapture the magic of The Sundance Kid, Goldman’s script piled on the witty lines: surveying the explosive devices needed to blow their way into the museum, fellow conspirator Sand offers Redford an unusual Molotov cocktail. “It’s a kinda European type,” he says. “I learned it at the Sorbonne.” Demonstrating another kind of bomb, Sand tells him, “I learned this one at Berkeley.” “You must like to study,” Redford quips.

  “I suspect Goldman was trying to outdo the Sundance Kid,” says Redford, “but this was an altogether lighter piece, so the jokes didn’t work so well. And Peter did have that difficulty of assimilating American humor. It’s a tough task for a non-American, and I think he struggled.”

  Ted Zachary, who was Yates’s first assistant, defends both Yates’s and Redford’s work on the movie. “Whatever the script deficiencies, Peter was adept. He’d done Robbery in Britain, which was sharp as anything, and then the in-between American picture, John and Mary, which was sensitive. So he had a wide understanding of drama, and of actors. He never once crossed with Bob. In fact, their relationship was the most harmonious I’ve ever experienced. Then again, Bob was the most ready actor I’ve worked with. I never remember him with a script in his hands. He knew what Goldman had written inside out, and he never missed his mark. For me, he was an education in perfectionism.”

  There was an education for Zachary, too, in the kind of stardom that hung about Redford. At East Meadow, Long Island, Yates, Segal and Redford were rehearsing a scene at an abandoned prison. Frank Serpico was visiting and hanging out with Redford in his motor home dressing room nearby. “My job was to control the location,” says Zachary, “but I got no forewarning of mob behavior. I’d never seen it, unless it was on television, watching the kids go crazy for the Beatles. But suddenly these Sundance Kid fans found out Bob was in there, and they laid siege on the motor home. They surrounded it and started trying to rock it off its wheels to get him out. Serpico was horrified. We all panicked. It was a cut-and-run scenario.”

  Redford’s image by now was in the hands of the grinders of the media mill. Six years before, Louella Parsons had allowed him a modest quote or two in her columns. By 1971 his opinions were being solicited on everything from lasting marriage to eggs Benedict. He acknowledges his complicity in this image building but says he regretted it even as it happened. The photo images that flooded magazine stands stirred the hysteria. Not since Sean Connery bounded onto the scene in Dr. No a decade earlier had thespian beefcake been so brazenly peddled. These ubiquitous images—usually from Little Fauss—perfectly bridged the gap between the coiffed pinup and the counterculture. In them, Redford is tanned and tufty, a bare-chested, tight-jeaned lothario with a louche, even menacing, gaze. Laurence Luckinbill, writing for Esquire, hinted at the turmoil beneath this gilded exterior. Hanging around at the Redfords’ apartment and chatting about every subject under the sun for several hours, Luckinbill deduced that the actor’s real passion was not for icons, but for losers. The journalist asked what’s next. “And my question lies there like a discarded sock,” wrote Luckinbill. Redford then confronted the interviewer “with the measured concentration of a pole-vaulter. ‘What’s next?’ he repeats. ‘Nothing, just nothing.’ ”

  “In reality,” says Redford today, “I was conflicted. On one hand, it was the most amazing time. I was young, celebrated, with plenty of work. On the other hand, it was a Faustian deal. No matter how you try, you are commodified. Whether you are a competent actor, or an artist, is incidental. The main business is, you are product. I had a hard time steadying myself against that stuff.”

  It was also hard to stabilize against the vicissitudes of Hollywood business. As The Hot Rock was completed, Redford looked forward to the parallel release of Jeremiah Johnson. Side by side, he felt, these very different movies would demonstrate his substance. It wasn’t to be. Exactly as happened with Paramount and Downhill Racer, Warners’ distribution showed contempt for the finished Jeremiah Johnson, which was ready for release late in 1971 but was left on the shelf. The following spring, to Warners’ surprise, the movie was invited to feature out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The stir it raised prompted Warners to finally release the film properly in cinemas nationwide in December 1972.

  Redford was hurt by Warners’ lack of confidence in the film, but the hurt only hardened his resolve to do better. In Gregson’s absence, Wildwood was now a one-man operation, and he decided emphatically that this must be the epicenter of his art. Michael Ritchie contended that this was the enclave where the “secret” Robert Redford lived. “He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah Johnson but he really was an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even Salter. I always felt that was denied him, but he was in a no-win situation, because he had all this luminous stardom and neither the public nor critics have much patience for author-stars.”

  It was at Wildwood throughout 1971 that Redford honed what was to become The Candidate. The first inklings of it came to him as he sat with a can of Coors in his hand, watching a televised fund-raiser for President Nixon moderated by Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson in October 1968. Redford was outraged that Nixon had refused to debate the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, because there was a third candidate, George Wallace. “It was incomprehensible arrogance in the face of a country in such turmoil,” says Redford. “To anyone with a brain in his head, there was a huge division between ‘old politics’ and ‘the politics of joy’ that Humphrey was attempting to present. A hundred cities across the country were in flames on racial issues; half the nation was calling for a stop to the bombing in Vietnam. The youth, the poor, the blacks wanted a voice, and those who might have spoken for them—Kennedy and McCarthy—were out of the picture. And here was this car salesman monopolizing the airwaves and selling us snake oil for a reelection. I thought, It’s not about substance, it’s about presentation, about perception of reality, which allows for manipulation.”

  Incensed, Redford commissioned Village Voice journalist Pete Hamill to tackle “a script about character, national politics and the vested interest.” Thereafter, in the snatches between movies and star interviews, he embarked on a research campaign, befriending political columnists like Mike Barnicle, exploring CAN’s senatorial contacts, visiting the Kennedy archive. McCall’s reported Redford frequently in the company of former light heavyweight boxing champion turned activist José Torres and Hamill, haunting the corridors of the campaign offices of gubernatorial and senate candidates in the New York State elections. In fact, says Redford, this research proved much more edifying than the tedium of the movie promotional circus. More and more, he sought the company of political, rather than business, associates. Basketball star Bill Bradley, himself nourishing political ambitions, was among the most stimulating dinner companions. In such company, says Redford, he felt intellectually stimulated in a profound new way. “The forties were the war years. The fifties were the boom years. The sixties was the revolution. And the seventies offered the payoff. All those long-haired hippies and yippies divided into two groups. There were those who’d doped themselves into oblivion. Then there were the guys who went to the Ivy League colleges, and Stanford and Berkeley, and pulled out the stops when McCarthy and the Democrats let them down. They took it upon themselves to rewrite the rule book. They were lawyers, like John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took on the system surreptitiously. While Nixon was over in China working his realpolitik, these guys slid in underneath and were the brains behind the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Production and Recovery Act, everything that matters in calling a country a country. From 1972 onward the cream of the
rebels rose to the surface: Tom Harkin, Pat Schroeder, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown—great political minds who concentrated on working the system against itself while Nixon was busy getting us involved in Cambodia. I was excited by this, that I was working at potentially the greatest time in American political life, when this vast swell of educated kids was taking on those profound issues raised by Udall and Carson, and I wanted to be part of it.”

  Hamill’s script didn’t work out. It was too much like Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. “This was not Pete’s fault, because I hadn’t sufficiently enunciated the kind of satire I wanted. I wanted a snipe at the fallibility of government when it’s based on personality.” When Redford told Bradley of the script problem, Bradley recommended Eugene McCarthy’s speechwriter, Jeremy Larner. Redford learned that Larner—like Michael Ritchie—was steeped in politics. New York–born, Midwest-raised, Brandeis-educated, he was the speechwriter who allegedly pushed McCarthy most to the left. Redford liked the notion and flew to Canada, where Ritchie was shooting Prime Cut with Lee Marvin, to sound out his willingness to direct the as-yet-unnamed project. With Ritchie aboard, Redford summoned Larner to the Wildwood office in the West Fifties, just before The Hot Rock commenced shooting.