Larner approached the meeting, he says, wearing his “alienated novelist” hat. His first novel, Drive, He Said, had been written in 1960, when he was twenty-three. It took him four years to find a publisher for it. A career in sports and political journalism followed, then a first venture in filmmaking with Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, coscripting the movie of his novel, which Nicholson directed. In between came the work with McCarthy and a friendship with Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin that opened up a yearlong teaching post at the Institute of Politics, housed within the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “But I wasn’t professorial,” says Larner, “and I took pride in my storytelling, so I faced Redford and Ritchie as I faced Jack Nicholson, as a story maker, with the attitude of, ‘I bet this is just another Hollywood crock-of-shit offer.’ ”
Redford’s response, he says, was, “Relax, Jeremy. Just say what you feel like saying.”
According to Larner, Ritchie then told him: “We have about ten guys to consider for this writing job, and we have to start shooting in November. If we miss that window, Bob isn’t available.”
“That kind of straightened me out,” Larner recalls, “and I remember replying, ‘I write fast.’ ”
Redford explained his story line: he wanted to make a film about a liberal California senatorial candidate, the son of a respected former governor, who sets out simply to upset the front-running conservative candidate, then gets drawn into the battle and sells out.
Larner immediately challenged the concept. He told Redford, “In my experience, they don’t sell out. They get carried away. It’s like McCarthy, it’s like Nicholson, who are interchangeable. They fix on a belief and are confronted by the Niagara Falls of reality. They hear the sound of the rushing water but don’t see it. Then, before they know it, they are over the falls, and they evolve into something else.”
Redford was not happy with the response.
Larner felt he had not told Redford what he wanted to hear. “I learned quickly that Bob likes to control conversations. Ultimately, I gave in, because it is too disturbing not to. But there and then, at that first Wildwood meeting, I was talking turkey, in effect saying, ‘The problem with you guys—Nicholson, McCarthy, Redford, whoever—is that you fictionalize your own existence. It becomes tough for you to know when you have, in fact, gone over the falls.’ ”
The clash was momentary. In Larner’s view, “Redford got it. I looked into his eyes and saw that he could conceivably be insulted by me, but he wasn’t. He was challenged personally by my concept of celebrity corruption and it did not offend him. He could objectify. That was enough to engage me. And with that sparky energy, we began.”
California governor Jerry Brown came to believe The Candidate’s central character, Bill McKay, was based on him. Others would claim Larner and Redford had satirized Bobby Kennedy or McCarthy, and that the campaign manager, Marvin Lucas, was Dick Goodwin or the Los Angeles lawyer Nelson Rising, an aide to California senator John Tunney. None of this, says Larner, is true, though elements drawn from real life were incorporated. For Redford, some real-life templates were close at hand. Jamie and Shauna were close friends with John Lindsay’s children, and the Lindsays regularly skied at Sundance. In fact, not long before, Lindsay had chosen Sundance as the venue to announce a shifted allegiance from the Liberal Party to the Democratic Party, with Redford by his side for the photo op. Redford denies Lindsay was reflected in McKay’s character; Larner wasn’t so sure. “I think something of the post-JFK noblesse oblige brand of altruism that Lindsay represented slipped into every conversation we had about the film,” says Larner. “But it’s true that Lindsay’s ‘arc’ was completely different. That is, different in every way, except one: Lindsay’s failure demonstrates the failure of political humanism, which is precisely the moral we tried to project in McKay’s success.”
Redford early on employed spin doctor David Garth, a Lindsay ally, as technical consultant. Larner immediately saw a central character in his fiction come to life. Klein, the head of Bill McKay’s media campaign, he decided, would be a version of Dave Garth. “Klein/Garth was vital in my story,” says Larner, “because he would be the Greek chorus in the whole fictional campaign. He would be credibility. He was the guy who would say, ‘You are X points behind in the polls and you need to do such and such.’ I knew this breed of hustler—like Dick Goodwin also—who believe they can direct history as much as any candidate.” Larner’s first meeting with Garth was electric. “He told us that he was personally going to see to it that John Lindsay became the next president of the United States. He said he knew how to do it, that he would send Lindsay out in the primaries to do it the folksy way, the non-Republican way, by staying in people’s houses and not the big hotels. I thought this was horseshit, because in my time with McCarthy I’d heard all this magic elixir stuff from every type of hustler—including myself—and most of it was nothing. It was horseshit but it was sensational because I thought, If we can base our media hustler on Dave Garth, and then give a little of Lindsay to Robert Redford’s McKay, we’ll get attention and get our point across.”
Within days, Redford called to say Garth had had words with his lawyer and had withdrawn from the film, “in case it impinged on his legitimate political work.” He had wanted $200,000 to advise.
No matter. Larner still wanted to “keep it real.” Redford, however, seemed keener on the poetry than real-life role models. The men verbally sparred, says Larner, and he realized that despite the triumph of the Sundance Kid, Redford still didn’t have the clout to drive the movie as radically as he wished. “His power with the studios was fragile, and he was still beholden to the deal. Maybe that’s the grand illusion of Hollywood star power. Maybe it always comes with a begging bowl.”
As for the deal, it was Redford’s good fortune that Richard Zanuck, riding high on Butch Cassidy, had moved to Warners. Redford was yet to experience the annoyance of Warners’ lame distribution of Jeremiah Johnson and was content to make a deal that was as lean as Downhill Racer. The budget, drawn up by Ritchie and production manager Walter Coblenz, was agreed to at a rock-bottom $1.5 million, with no off-the-top fee for Redford. “I accepted because I wanted to get on with it, and Mike and I decided we’d do it tight and in documentary style, with the camera frame jumping around.” Redford was also amenable because he liked the new regime at Warners, with Zanuck in the driver’s seat and Frank Wells serving as production chief. “It was a brand-new dawn for them. They were up against it as a working enterprise, and suddenly hungry for risk. We had a lot in common; we were idealists and we made good partners at that time.”
The scriptwriting for The Candidate was unlike what Redford calls his “fireside collaborations” with Pollack. To begin, Larner and Redford created index cards on which were written pertinent headlines concerning the campaign as Redford envisioned it: The cards said “Fund-raiser” and “Environment” and “Hotel Room Service.” These were laid out like a puzzle and placed in order of good “beats” for the screenplay. “Once we had that,” says Redford, “it was down to Jeremy to create the people.”
While Redford worked on The Hot Rock through the summer, he and Larner jogged or played tennis when they could in Central Park, all the time massaging the script. When Redford’s shoot wrapped, they holed up at Larner’s home in Massachusetts. The first of what would be seven drafts of The Candidate was finished by summer’s end. Redford found it “delightful, but too windy” and set about fierce editing. Larner, at first, took offense.
“He wouldn’t allow the dialogue I’d written for Bill McKay’s mistress,” says Larner. “He told me his public would not accept the mistress as a personality. I questioned this, the historical reality, the Kennedy brothers’ mistresses, all that. I was stunned by his concept of his personal image. It was annoying, I suppose, but you had to credit his clarity.”
As the movie came together, Ritchie delighted in what he saw as “another Pyrrhic arc” story line, similar to Downhill Racer, whe
re an objective is sought at huge personal cost, the war is won and the audience is left to meditate on the putative rewards. When we first encounter McKay, he is consulting with autoworkers, sleeves rolled up, a high-minded lawyer without guile or venality. Then he is manipulated by his campaign manager, Marvin Lucas, into tackling the incumbent senator, Crocker Jarmon. McKay agrees because it allows him a podium from which to state what he truly feels about social problems. When McKay’s openness elicits a strong response from the electorate, the party pros step in to repackage him. To his astonishment, McKay, the rank outsider, ends up winning the senatorial campaign. When Chappellet wins on the ski slopes in Downhill Racer, a reporter asks him, “What will you do now?” to which he mumblingly replies, “I don’t know.” At the end of The Candidate, McKay faces the same conundrum, asking his campaign manager, “What do we do now?”
Ritchie, whose capacity for intellectual theorizing was impressive, be-lieved that form followed function in film. His prize example was Hitchcock, who thematically loaded interwar movies like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes with national paranoia but never lost sight of paced storytelling. In The Candidate, said Ritchie, the trick was reversed. “I know it might be said of me, in my earlier days, that I was a ‘form’ director. But that’s not how I approached it. I was a story guy. So was Larner. But it was to Bob’s eternal credit that the form, the theme, if you like, of this movie was the center. Very few productions I’ve been involved with developed with such evaluative power. I remember reading what Larner and Bob came up with and saying, ‘If we get the beats right, we really have something amazing.’ ”
Unlike Pollack’s, Ritchie’s career had hardly leaped forward in the last few years. His current film with Lee Marvin, produced by Joe Wizan, was another studio-less production, but Ritchie was comfortable. “I liked finding the oddball script. I liked finding unknown actors. I liked being the outside guy. And this fit in with the radical Bob. I often thought we were like fugitives on the run. It put great pressure, in a good way, on the imaginative process because, in every department—design, costume, all of it—we were always improvising.”
In choosing actors, Redford and Ritchie collaborated closely. Peter Boyle was selected for Lucas, Don Porter for Senator Jarmon, Allen Garfield for Klein and for Nancy, McKay’s wife, Karen Carlson, a twenty-seven-year-old Louisiana-born Miss America runner-up. Natalie Wood and Bill Bradley had walk-ons. “Those were impromptu situations,” said Ritchie. “Someone would drop by the day we were shooting, and Bob’d say, ‘Okay, you’re in.’ ” Natalie Wood became a McKay fan in a jostling crowd; Bradley a bus driver. Actual ABC and NBC anchormen covered McKay’s campaign in the film.
The most exciting casting for Redford was Melvyn Douglas, a frontline victim of McCarthyism who was “graylisted” in the fifties for his support of liberal Democratic causes. It was Douglas’s wife, Helen Gahagan Doug-las, who had fallen afoul of Nixon in the bitterly contested 1960 Senate race, when Nixon labeled her “a pinko right down to her underwear.” Gahagan Douglas, in response, christened Nixon “Tricky Dick” and went on to fill the post of treasury secretary in Kennedy’s administration. Redford recalled how his father had stood up for Gahagan Douglas all those years ago, and took great pride in offering her husband the role of McKay’s father, a former governor of California, who attempts to call his son to task in the film.
The Candidate started shooting in November 1971, a studio film in name only, based in offices at Mill Valley in Marin County, not far from Charlie and Helen’s new home, on San Francisco Bay at Tiburon. It was shot over forty-one twelve-hour days, wrapping shortly after Christmas. Logistically, it was a massive undertaking, spanning media events, campaign speeches and endless traveling scenes. Said Ritchie, “We were constantly hustling for favors from department stores, cabs, everybody we crossed. Someone loaned a limo, someone else had a radio show crew who were willing to drop by. Our ticker tape parade was the classic example. There was no way we could fund a proper street parade. So we cashed in on the fact that there was a New Year’s Eve tradition in San Francisco where, at 1:00 p.m., office workers opened their windows and threw out the shreds of last year’s calendar. ‘Okay,’ we said, ‘here’s our parade!’ So we staged McKay’s drive-through and everybody participated. They clustered at the windows to see the great Robert Redford! And that became a very expensive-looking campaign parade on film.” The improvisations stretched to the final hours of filming when, on a United flight home to Los Angeles, an extra scene with McKay and his fellow travelers was shuffled together.
For Ritchie, the biggest disappointment was Karen Carlson, who, he said, “became besotted” with Redford as production progressed. “I didn’t like that, because she became emotionally involved. I tried to intervene, but it’s impossible when you are dealing with real people, with real obsessions. I spoke to Bob and he was helpful but, I think, also concerned. Her role was the dutiful wife. It often felt like Fatal Attraction.” Carlson herself admitted to “schizophrenic” feelings, confessing to writer Bruce Bahrenburg during production that McKay/Redford’s dallying in the wings with an attractive extra upset her: “I didn’t know whether it was [the wife] Nancy reacting to McKay or myself to Bob Redford,” said Carlson. “But I knew that it was time to try to separate my feelings. I had a long talk with Bob about them.”
As The Candidate drew to a close, Michael Daves, the assistant director, observed Larner as “a permanent fixture in Bob’s life, working under horrendous pressure to draft, redraft, find a new scene, lose a new scene, find an angle, stick in a commercial, take out a name or a face or a place.” In the end, perhaps, this very closeness overwhelmed the friendship. Redford liked Larner, found him hugely gifted, but one incident sounded the death knell for Larner. “I wanted to write a scene based on a true-life experience, where the candidate goes onto an Indian reservation and pumps the flesh,” says Larner. “The chief adorns him with a headdress that doesn’t fit, and the scene, visually and verbally, has all the imagery of the humiliating phoniness of what candidacy truly is. I wrote it but Bob said he couldn’t play it, that his relationship with the Indian community was too precious to him. I defended my scene, saying, ‘This is just a movie, Bob, and McKay, the character, loses his integrity here.’ But Mike Ritchie took me aside and warned me to drop it. He told me, ‘You won’t get Bob to do what Bob doesn’t want to do. This isn’t a matter of negotiation, so please spare all of us the trouble.’ ”
Robert Penn Warren once wrote of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms that its triumph was the summing-up of “the inner meaning” of its era, not in historical overview but because “it cut back to the beginning of the process.” Ritchie believed the same held true for The Candidate: “When I looked at the finished cut, I knew we had made a statement. McKay wasn’t Robert Kennedy or Tunney or anyone the media claimed he was. The way Bob conceived it, he was the encapsulation of ‘the moment’ just after Eisenhower. He was a reduction of all of the innocence and naïveté that drove the youth revolt of the sixties. The suits were the corruption. McKay was every kid who ever burned a flag on a campus or stuck a flower in the barrel of a gun. He was Bob: the guy who believed an individual can change the system. But then gets eaten by the system once in it.”
In the recent past, Redford’s family life had changed. In 1968 Tiger died of heart failure in Waterford, Connecticut, his son at his bedside. The distractions of travel, of maintaining a life in New York and Utah and Los Angeles, had created wide, empty spaces in family life. Shauna, Jamie and Amy all strove to keep their relationships with their father, and all suffered the strain of his fame as much as his absence. Jamie remembers the early seventies as “the time of the crazies.” There was the well-circulated magazine report about the woman who claimed she married Redford in secret in Mexico in 1956; the frequent anonymous calls to the Redfords’ unlisted numbers; and the stalkers, hustlers and paparazzi who seemed to tag along everywhere. The family struggled to maintain normalcy and unity. They continued to sp
end holidays together, and constantly stayed in touch by phone. But an erosion was taking place. Jamie and Shauna insisted on walking the few blocks to the Dalton School each day, but this simple pleasure was often denied them. “From time to time security guards came into the picture,” says Jamie. “We absolutely hated the idea of it, but the escalation of my father’s fame was beyond Bill McKay in The Candidate. It was so extreme that we were made aware of the risks just by opening a newspaper. We worried about him because he was so visible. At that time he was everywhere, like Hershey bars. We wondered, Will he endure? Will the family endure?”
14
Idols
Over Labor Day weekend of 1971, while Redford worked with Larner in the living room of the writer’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment, he was unaware that the first act of the Watergate drama was unfolding in the kitchen. Larner had offered refuge to Daniel Ellsberg, the former marine officer turned RAND defense analyst. Ellsberg had purloined seven thousand pages of documents about the American government’s secret policy on Vietnam, the so-called Pentagon Papers. having failed to engage congressional interest in a public exposé, he had given them to The New York Times, which had published them in June. Attorney General John Mitchell had imposed an immediate restraint order, but the Supreme Court had overruled him, and damning new excerpts of the papers were published to widening public outrage. They established that the government knowingly lied about the facts of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for accelerating the Vietnam War. By the end of the summer of 1971, Ellsberg was on the run from agents of the Nixon government who, allegedly, wanted to silence him.
Robert Redford Page 25
