Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  “I knew Jeremy was sincere, well connected, anti-Vietnam,” says Redford, “but it was all very James Bond–ish. We’d be sitting at the table shuffling the script, and there’d be a noise back there and Jeremy would say, ‘Quiet, Dan! Take it easy now.’ ” These incidents passed without further discussion.

  Redford’s mind was as much on money for the moment as politics. He had earned about $3 million since his career began, and all of it was spent. The best money he had made, for The Hot Rock, was quickly absorbed in the various resort maintenance issues at Sundance, which was now more or less entirely his baby. With not much optimism for the box office success of The Hot Rock and low commercial expectations for The Candidate, he knew he had to look more into mainstream films. There were two possibilities in advanced stages, both George Roy Hill projects. One, a movie about Hill’s great passion for biplanes, had been commissioned from Goldman and was still in the writing. The other, The Sting, was almost set to go. But after The Candidate he was emotionally burned out. He called Hill and said he needed to take a break. Hill was supportive and told him to “go somewhere and forget all this gold mining.”

  Redford had one unavoidable obligation: to attend the Cannes screening of Jeremiah Johnson with Pollack. Disappointed with the fate of this movie in America and the implications of Warners’ commitment for the upcoming Candidate release, he was buoyed by the European enthusiasm. “I went for a vacation, but suddenly Sydney was waylaying me with a new script called The Way We Were.”

  Redford told Pollack no. “Ray Stark was the man behind it, and I told him it sounded to me like another Ray Stark ego trip. I didn’t even want to read it.”

  “I would not let him off the hook,” said Pollack. “I said, ’You’ve got it wrong. This isn’t a fuzzy piece for Barbra Streisand. This is substantial, and—what do you know—it’s political. I pressured and pressured him all summer as soon as we got back from Cannes.” Getting nowhere, Pollack decided to camp out in the foyer of Wildwood in New York. “It was the process of attrition,” said Pollack. “He did it with me on Jeremiah. It was payback time.”

  The Way We Were began with Stark, who was looking for a Sound of Music–type vehicle for Streisand. His association with her dated back to Broadway in the early sixties, when he had cast her as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. In 1968 he produced the movie version, which won Streisand an Academy Award. Stark had, said Pollack, “an ownership thing” about Streisand and, accordingly, envisioned another huge musical film, which he felt she owed him.

  Stark commissioned an original script from Arthur Laurents, whose career spanned Lux Radio Theater and work with Hitchcock on Rope. But Laurents objected to the “absurd” notion of another musical and came up with the alternative of a romantic parable based on the lives of some of his personal friends caught up in the HUAC-era blacklisting, particularly Frances Price and Jigee Viertel. Laurents subsequently wrote a 125-page essay featuring Katie Morosky, a Marxist agitator at Cornell in the thirties who falls in love with an apolitical novelist, Hubbell Gardner. Stark liked the idea but hated Laurents’s suggestion for Sydney Pollack as director. Laurents, impressed by They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, persisted and won the support of Streisand, who tried to sway Stark.

  “I was under no illusions,” said Pollack. “Barbra was smart. She liked my Sandy Meisner connections because she was ambitious, as an actress, to learn. Same with Jane Fonda on They Shoot Horses. Jane said, ‘Thank you, Sydney, because no one ever treats me as an artist. I am never requested to act. Just to “star in.” ’ Barbra wanted to push out, and she saw with They Shoot Horses that I could handle social issues, that I would give weight to it.” Pollack found it hard to contain his enthusiasm for the story concept. “I called Arthur right at the start and said, ‘You know what you’re proposing here? This is dynamite. This will be the first-ever blacklist movie, the first one to show how it was.’ ”

  Pollack’s role was still up in the air when the script was handed to Streisand and her lover, Ryan O’Neal, who was offered the role of Hubbell. Around that time, What’s Up, Doc?, a Streisand-O’Neal comedy, opened and failed and, says Laurents, ended the romance between the stars. Stark and Streisand now began talking about Redford as Hubbell.

  Redford, unsurprisingly, supported Pollack. “The truth is,” says Redford, “Stark had no affection for This Property Is Condemned, which he sold to Warners as part of his portfolio, and really dumped. To him, Sydney did not smell good. I pushed. I said, ‘If you want to even consider me for The Way We Were, it has to be Sydney developing it.’ So I made this noose for myself because Stark gave in and suddenly I had an outline written up for me that I hated.” It was reported at the time that Redford was unhappy with his role’s being secondary to Streisand’s Katie. Redford says he was distressed because his part was a symbol, not a character.

  “What I was really worried about was the whole concept of basing a movie on Barbra as a serious actress,” says Redford. “She had never been tested. I told Sydney, ‘Her reputation is as a very controlling person. She will direct herself. It’ll never work.’ ” Laurents claims he had difficulty understanding the concerns, since Pollack blocked him from communicating with Redford. Agent Steffie Phillips believed this was “an escalating problem of Sydney’s insecurity on top of Redford’s insecurity on top of Barbra’s inexperience.”

  In his memoirs Laurents reports his first clash with Pollack at Ray Stark’s condo in Sun Valley, Idaho. Pollack donned his usual script doctor’s hat, hacking out ideas on his own manual typewriter, a proprietary, authorial posture that set Laurents on edge. Pollack then upset the writer by saying, “You don’t know how everybody in Hollywood is amazed by you? Because you’ve written the best love story in years, and you’re a homosexual.” “What do you say to a man like that?” wondered Laurents. “Do you attack him? Do you attempt to educate him? Or do you just say to yourself, What an asshole!” Pollack’s insensitivity tilted the odds against productive partnership, said Laurents, but he hung in.

  Pollack saw events differently. Laurents was composing his characters from a diversity of bits, a little of Jigee Viertel, a nuance of someone else. The consequent fragmented psychology made the romantic story line “too unbelievable by half.” Worst of all, said Pollack, Laurents had not resolved the political story. “It was about a relationship complicated by HUAC, but those vivid subtexts were lost. It’s not that he didn’t understand HUAC, but he didn’t contextualize it properly. There had to be a kind of education curve for the audience, and Arthur was bad at that.”

  To fix it, Pollack employed eleven writers, among them Alvin Sargent, Paddy Chayefsky, David Rayfiel and Dalton Trumbo. Offended, Laurents left the production (though he was later rehired).

  Trumbo proved to be Pollack’s ace in the hole. He was one of the jailed members of HUAC’s notorious Hollywood Ten, and his prolificacy was dented by the witch hunt, but he recovered in the sixties, writing screenplays for Exodus, The Sandpiper and Hawaii. In a detailed correspondence, Trumbo analyzed Laurents’s story and suggested alternative real-life identities for the characters. He saw one character, Rhea, as a version of Meta Rosenberg, Redford’s former agent “who behaved like most informers when called before HUAC: she gave the names of communists she probably did not like, and withheld the names of communists she probably did like, my name among others, though I was in jail when she testified.” He saw Hubbell as “a good guy who is trapped by the committee into becoming an informer and thereby destroyed.” He could not, however, connect Hubbell with any actual person he knew. Pollack called Trumbo’s attention to the actor Sterling Hayden’s book Wanderer, which dramatized Hayden’s guilt over naming names to HUAC: “The reason I have been so hung up on Hayden’s book,” wrote Pollack, “is that I keep finding tiny character clues within it that seem like starting points for Hubbell. I think the blacklist should be dead center to the drama rather than keeping it to one side. This in turn makes the political material less talky and more dramatic immediately.
Secondly, it fulfills the metaphor of Hubbell as America. And, thirdly, it gives him something to do,” which had been Redford’s concern to begin with.

  “I was hung up on Dalton’s views,” said Pollack, “because I felt that historical veracity was the way to persuade Bob into playing the role. I thought that this was a huge story—a love story, yes, but so much more in the representation of Morosky as the do-or-die Marxist and Hubbell as the jock-novelist who doesn’t need to face the moral issues but is faced with the demands imposed by love and the compromises that come with love. Stark wasn’t as impressed by the HUAC stuff as I was, but we needed it, if only to beef up Hubbell. I did not alter Laurents’s story line ‘manipulatively,’ as Arthur accused. I did it because I had a hunch Bob and Barbra would be magical together, and I knew I had to engage Bob’s intelligence.”

  But Pollack’s dilemma was that Fox had already indicated its refusal to support a political movie. “So we compromised, and what we had, however diminished, was good. I did know, though, that people were angry with me. Blacklisting was only fifteen years before, and it was fresh in people’s memory. People were thinking, At last! Finally, we get a movie that confronts this ghastly thing. And so they wanted more than Fox was prepared to support. But I was signed by Ray Stark to deliver a vehicle for Streisand, and that was the first principle I served. Dealing with Bob was another matter.”

  Streisand was elated when Redford came aboard. Sue Mengers, another of her agents, sent a confirming two-word cable: “Barbra Redford?” “Barbra was delighted because she had a crush on him,” said Pollack, “even before we started. It was hard for women not to have a fixation, because he was everywhere, like Elvis. He was the golden boy long before Hubbell came along.”

  On September 17, after more than a year’s preparation, filming started on The Way We Were. It had been delayed slightly when Redford, vacationing on Lake Powell with Dick Cavett, was bitten by a bat and had to endure seventeen days of the famously agonizing stomach injections against rabies. In the first weeks, location work jumped from Union College in Schenectady, New York, to the University of Southern California campus, Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills home, Harry Cohen’s old Columbia offices and the gated Malibu Colony. All the time, said Pollack, Redford grumbled. “I knew how uncomfortable he was with Hubbell, but I also knew a great persona would emerge. He wasn’t cruising, and he responded very well to the prodding I gave, which was a lot.”

  Redford agrees that Pollack pushed him hard: “I give full credit to Sydney. And he did honorably respond to my script concerns. An important last-minute addition came. Alvin Sargent and Rayfiel wrote Hubbell up finally as someone with a point of view. Until then, he was Katie’s stooge, the guy who won’t either support her Communism or name names.”

  In a new scene toward the end of the script, Hubbell meets Katie at Union Station at the height of the furor about naming names. Bissinger, the movie director to whom Hubbell is in thrall, pays lip service to the “martyrs” who brought the trouble down on themselves. Hubbell stays silent, but Katie rails against the immoral witch hunt. A riot breaks out, and a fight involving Hubbell, and the police are forced to throw Hubbell and Katie into a waiting room, where lines are finally drawn:

  KATIE: Doesn’t it make you angry listening to Bissinger ridicule those men? Calling them martyrs first because they have guts, which he doesn’t, to fight for their principles, to fight for their Bill of Rights, his Bill of Rights, and yours?

  HUBBELL: Bill of Rights? What Bill of Rights? We don’t have any Bill of Rights. We don’t have free speech in this country. We never will have.

  KATIE: We never will if people aren’t willing to take a stand for what’s right.

  HUBBELL: We never will because people are scared. This isn’t college. This is grown-up politics, and it’s stupid and dangerous.

  KATIE: Hubbell, you are telling me to close my eyes and to watch people being destroyed.

  HUBBELL: I’m telling you that people are more important than any goddamn witch hunt. You and me. Not causes. Not principles.

  KATIE: Hubbell, people are their principles.

  “Hubbell isn’t a victim anymore,” says Redford. “He’s his own man. And that strength gave him a weight in the romance that made the final split with Katie dramatic. The questionable nature of true free speech was a provocative notion, and I attached to that. It also reflected some of the polemic of The Candidate.”

  Streisand and Redford became close from the outset. “I think we’d both have preferred a more political Dalton Trumbo–type script,” says Redford. “But finally Sydney came down on the side of the love story. He said, ‘This is first and foremost a love affair,’ and we conceded that. We trusted his instincts, and he was right. The Way We Were became a success because Sydney controlled the project with his point of view, which was not easy given Ray’s behavior and interference.”

  Word from the set was that Streisand and Redford were igniting extraordinary personal chemistry. An observer on the set saw this as “useful, because it was obvious that Barbra was just too, too crazy about Bob. She had a hard time controlling her emotions, and when she played scenes with him, like the fireside courtship scene at Malibu, she was drooling. But Bob was very tactful.”

  Streisand looks back on the experience as a high-water mark. “I just loved working with him,” she says. “Every day was an exciting adventure. We played well together—in the moment, slightly different, slightly unknowing, always interesting. He’s a man of depth who has what it takes to be a great movie star: mystery behind the eyes. You wonder, What is he really thinking?” Redford in turn found her very attractive. “When we started on The Way We Were, she wanted me to be Hubbell. That was how she conceived me. And then, as the shoot went on, she saw I was not that man, not in any way. So she reoriented herself, and the professional took over. But afterward I wondered, Did she return to that banal concept of me? Was I—am I—a Hubbell figure in her mind? I never fully sorted that out, and some of that tension made our chemistry on-screen.”

  Pollack dealt with other tensions: “Each of them was a pain in the ass from time to time because they both knew how they liked to be presented; Barbra knew about camera positions and editors’ options and all that. So I directed, but they would challenge it. At Malibu, we went on for hours because she had a favorite profile, and I had to play around it to satisfy both.”

  Redford bit the bullet: “Yes, it was troublesome. I was dancing with her, and I was in my place, doing just fine. But she wasn’t dancing; it was awkward. Then Sydney pulled me aside and whispered, ‘Come on, man, she’s uncomfortable.’ Apparently she had a side she favored, right or left. A discomfort about her nose from one or the other angle. Fine by me. I acknowledge that kind of thing, when it affects that actor’s confidence. I said, ‘Okay, whatever works.’ ”

  Of no dispute was Redford’s utter inability to do the same take twice, a given, Redford admits, with most good actors. “He could not do it,” said Pollack. “It made hell for me and it made hell for the editor to match continuity. Over the years with Bob, I learned to make adjustments. Like running five angles on a scene to cover my ass so that it will cut in the editing. Like not showing my anger when he showed up late, which is normal for him, dishing some bullshit excuse. I kept my anger in check until the scene was in the can, till the weekend, when I could say outright, ‘You son of a bitch’ without messing up his mind for the scenes he needed to play.”

  But The Way We Were helped engender a deeper mutual respect. Redford had started resentfully. By the end he was laughing. Pollack slapped his back at the finish and said, “Man, that was some hot stuff. You know what this is going to do to your box office?”

  All summer Redford was absorbed with the slow-burning Watergate story. In June 1972 there was the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices, followed by the launch of a lawsuit by the Democrats against the Republican Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). On a promotional junket for The Candidate
in August he was aware of “a buzz” among the many journalists traveling with him. “There was obviously some big story brewing,” he says, “because I kept hearing the words ‘Nixon’ and ‘scandal’ and ‘burglaries.’ I started trying to fit a picture together.” Shortly after, for the first time, he became aware of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting. “I noted their names, and the fact that the story was so bizarre. I thought, This is something beyond a thriller.” On October 25, The Washington Post published the first of Woodward and Bernstein’s revelatory features, reporting testimony to the grand jury naming Nixon aide Bob Haldeman as the so-far-unnamed fifth person controlling CREEP’s political espionage. “That got me,” says Redford. “I immediately called Lois Smith [his publicist] and asked her to get in touch with Woodward or Bernstein. I was interested in these guys.”

  In November, as The Way We Were was being filmed, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. The blow for Redford was softened somewhat by his friend Wayne Owens’s congressional victory, but he still felt agitated. “I really hated Nixon. It went back to that ‘pinko’ incident with Gahagan Douglas. I felt he was a dirty fighter, and we didn’t need him in high office.” In December, Lois Smith called to say Woodward would meet Redford, not formally, but at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Motion Picture Association hall in Washington, D.C.

  The meeting seemed secretive, “with Woodward hiding in the shadows and giving me snatches of information.” It emerged that he and Bernstein had a book deal with Simon and Schuster and were about to embark on writing their account of Watergate. “I told him I wasn’t interested in any book. But I was interested in them, and in what was unfolding on the national stage. I said, ‘There’s a movie in this.’ He said maybe—maybe he’d be interested in taking that further—and then he disappeared.”