Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  The idea of a strategic political follow-up to The Candidate, an assumption many make about Redford’s Watergate project, was not the prime motivation. What appealed, in the first instance, was a commentary on the state of journalism. Not much more than a hundred years before, Thoreau had queried the essential worth of communication from one village to the next. What is edifying for us to know? The question was lost in the nineteenth century when press objectivity was diluted by advocacy journalism. The selective view, the vested interest, became prominent in American publishing. Radical changes in the twentieth century fundamentally changed the Fourth Estate. Investigative journalism, its worth proved by Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, took precedence throughout the media and made stars of journalists. The emergence of New Journalism, and the literary elevation of news, further complicated the transmission of printed information to a point, Redford believed, where it was often impossible to unravel the value of the “straight news” story. Since Redford himself was being regularly interviewed and evaluated in print, the notion of interpreting the interpreter was very provocative to him. “I was asking, Who were Woodward and Bernstein? What motivated them? Had The Washington Post board decided to take down Nixon? Who was the front-runner here?”

  These issues of anatomizing principles were on his mind as he addressed a dilemma facing Sundance. As part of an incremental growth plan, he had now commissioned an on-site cinema and more recreation annexes. Was it possible to keep extending—indeed, to even hold on to—this vast acreage with only the small income generated by a short ski season and a restaurant with twenty tables? The simple answer was no. His earnings were increasing—he got $400,000 with a 12.5 percent deferred slice of the net profits for The Way We Were—but the money was being gobbled up faster than it came in. “I knew it wasn’t sustainable, and I knew my lifestyle was so peripatetic that Sundance often seemed a luxury, but it still boiled down to the question, Am I prepared to see this canyon go to tract house development? And the answer was no.” Brent Beck, the resort manager, saw disaster looming in the collision of Redford’s possessiveness with business reality. “We, the staff, thought he was crazy. He walked away from more than one potential investor with sound business expansion plans. We thought, How can there be long-term survival without a compromise? Okay, we don’t want this to be Disneyland, but we need new investors—fast.” Mike Frankfurt saw this as a moment to bow out. “I couldn’t keep up,” he says. “I was in Manhattan; Bob was mostly in L.A. It made sense that Gary Hendler, who was geographically closer, should fully take over the head contracts and supervise the deals he needed to make with Freddie [Fields] and Steffie [Phillips] to keep the cash flow going. As I saw it, Bob had set his course: he was going to make Hollywood movies to pay for Sundance, and he was going to utilize Sundance primarily as a base for his other operations in independent movies and environmental politicking.”

  Hurrying for cash, Redford resumed the work in planning his next movie, which was now many months late, with George Roy Hill. The Sting, their new project, is a film with a history almost as convoluted as its plot. It had started in October 1970, when David Ward, a young writer contracted to actor-producer Tony Bill, taped a ten-minute synopsis of an original concept inspired by the writings of Nelson Algren. Bill sent the tape to Redford, who liked it and arranged a three-way meeting in New York. Ward admits he was “kind of surprised by Tony’s choice of Redford, because the part of Hooker, the con man around whom the plot resolves, I had in mind for a young guy. But I was immensely impressed by this new notion of the wily Sundance Kid playing the very wily Hooker.” Ward had written just one movie for Tony Bill—the critically, if not financially, successful Steelyard Blues—and had, he says, a desire to do something in his favorite territory, “among the lowlifes of Algren and Steinbeck and in the era when you could best idealize criminal life, which was the twenties.” At the meeting, Redford was encouraging, says Ward, but unwilling to commit. The story, though, he liked. It was about two fast-talking Prohibition hustlers, Hooker and Gondorff, who scam and double-scam with the objective of taking down a murderous thug. Already tagged to play Gondorff was Peter Boyle. “I liked Ward,” says Redford. “But he was very inexperienced, and I wasn’t even sure I had a place in this. I told him, ‘Do a great script, and I’ll see what I can do to support you.’ ”

  Ward worked in the converted garage of his rented Topanga Canyon home, writing with a pencil on a yellow legal pad. He produced several drafts over twelve months before submitting a final one to Redford. Hill, who had been drawn in by Tony Bill, also received the script. Hill liked it immediately. “But I felt he’d made a mistake in the tenor of the dialogue,” said Hill. “It was too modern, not at all of the period, and that was its weakness. But, that said, David presented a fantastic script. It was so intricate that it needed no input from anyone, just dialogue adjustments.” The attraction for Hill was the stun-the-audience twist at the end and, even more, the evocation of the bygone era. “Period was my soft spot,” said Hill. “Nothing beats historical scene setting. That was what I liked about Hawaii, what I liked about Butch Cassidy. I used every trick and technology available to get the audience in. When I read The Sting, I imagined that old Universal art deco logo and sepia faces and Model Ts.”

  While Redford was absorbed on The Way We Were, Hill met with Tony Bill and his partners, Michael and Julia Phillips, made a deal and took the project to Richard Zanuck, who was now producing independently with David Brown. It was Zanuck and Brown, finally, who sealed the production with Universal. For Ward, the only moment of hesitation was when Dan Melnick, a former drama executive at ABC, suggested they cut loose from Hill and Zanuck to make the movie themselves, with Ward directing. “In the end,” says Ward, “I knew I would be selling a great story short. The option was either a very-low-budget movie directed by me or the blockbuster directed by George. It was a no-brainer.”

  When Hill called Redford to tell him of the great new script he’d found, Redford laughed. He had already read it, and approved. “But the truth is, I didn’t see it as the massive project it became. I saw it as a modest, tricky little thing,” says Redford. Then Hill told Redford he wanted Paul Newman for the role of Gondorff. “I was surprised,” says Redford, “because Peter Boyle was already there. So I said, ‘Okay, I trust you. I love Paul, and if the studio will go with him …?’ ” The problem, however, was that for Universal, Newman’s star was on the wane. This shocked, then amused, Redford and Hill. For seven years through the sixties Newman had ranked in the top ten of box office earners. He had been nominated four times for an Academy Award. He had won a British Academy Award, for The Hustler in 1961, and a New York Film Critics Circle best director award for Rachel, Rachel, made just before Butch Cassidy. Hill thought the situation laughable. Freddie Fields called to propose a resolution: Redford was being offered $500,000, with 15 percent of the gross. Newman was being offered a fee, but with no points—a proposal he immediately refused. The only way Newman could be fit into the deal, said Fields, was if Redford conceded his percentage points to him. Redford was unhappy. “But I felt obligated to Paul, for what he had done in supporting me at the start of my career. I gave in. Paul got my points, and that turned into a considerable fortune of earnings, millions and millions of dollars. I told him later that it pissed me off, but I forgave him.”

  In Ward’s story, Hooker steals illegal gambling money from Illinois mobster Doyle Lonnegan, who kills Hooker’s partner and issues a death warrant. Hooker flees to Chicago, where he schemes with Gondorff, a friend of Hooker’s dead partner, to lure Lonnegan to town and fleece him in a racetrack scam. When the Feds close in, it appears that the con will be curtailed, but Hooker and Gondorff conspire with the Feds to round off a coup.

  For Newman all this was “just brilliant, really the best twist I’d ever read. It was also a better drama than Butch Cassidy, because of the equality between the characters of Gondorff and Hooker. There was no star role. That, in turn, brought out the best in Re
dford and me, because the invitation was there, and we were competing. But I won. I took the audience sitting down. Redford spent the whole movie running.” Sure enough, Redford’s sole complaint about The Sting was the physicality of the film. “I knew it the minute I read it. That movie starts with me and ends with me, and in between I’m the one on the run from the mobsters and the Feds. I’m the one carrying the plot to the audience and dodging around corners.” In acknowledgment, Hill presented him with a plaque inscribed ROADRUNNER, which became his nickname for the duration.

  In January, a week after The Way We Were wrapped, Redford and Newman were making The Sting on the Universal back lot. Just before shooting got under way, George Roy Hill stormed into the office of the Phillipses with press clippings of another Universal movie, The Mack, which appeared to have an identical story line. Michael Phillips remembers that Hill was frantic: “ ‘Let’s can this,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth the trouble if we’re making a movie that’s already been made. I don’t want the grief, the injunctions, the lawsuits.’ But I calmed him down. The other movie had a different background, a black cast; it was a whole other universe. I said, ‘George, get a grip. We have Newman and Redford, an incredibly smart screenplay and the wittiest dialogue either of us has ever read.’ I gave him a lot of warm reassurance, and so he went out on the soundstage and started working.”

  Hill first painstakingly rehearsed the movie, theater-style, then “let the actors go.” On Butch Cassidy, said Hill, Redford never talked back. By now he’d learned the knack. “A couple or three times I had to tell him to shut it or I’d kill him,” said Hill. Newman remembered only “sharp, theater-type ensemble work that seemed to go unusually well, in that there were no revisions, no callbacks, no second thoughts.” David Ward was told not to speak with Newman. “George’s reasoning was that Paul was a Method actor who loved to worry the character out. He needed to talk and talk and talk. So my engaging him would have slowed The Sting down. Bob’s working style, on the other hand, was ‘Let’s get it over with.’ The best part for George was that Bob didn’t want to analyze. He would say, ‘The script works, leave it alone.’ And George was delighted for that cut and thrust that helped keep things moving fast.”

  The one glitch during the fifty-day schedule was a breach in studio security. Since 1967, Redford had been stalked by a fan, Nadine Davies, from San Francisco. It started with obsessive fan mail after Barefoot in the Park, then, during Willie Boy, intrusions. In the spring of 1968, Redford was filming at Universal Studios: “Suddenly [his friend from War Hunt, the actor] Tom Skerritt rushed up to me and said, ‘Watch out, there’s some weird woman going through stuff in your dressing room, and security is worried about her—she doesn’t seem to be sane.’ ” The police were called and Davies was removed. Weeks later Redford was at the Hotel Bel-Air watching television when the report of Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel came on. In a stunned state, he was suddenly informed to stay in his room, because a stalker was in the bushes and the police were on their way. Davies was arrested outside his room, and later a California court issued a restraining order. Back at the same studio, the same lot, for The Sting, Nadine Davies was back, too. Redford was rehearsing a gambling scene opposite actor Ray Walston with Newman watching when, all of a sudden, Redford saw “absolute terror” in Newman’s eyes. “I knew instantly that something wasn’t right, and I swung to follow his line of vision. I can’t say what was on her mind, but it wasn’t good. Paul knew it; I knew it. Time froze. There was this awful suspended silence as I watched this woman bear down on me—rush at me—with a frantic, fixed stare. I’ve seen a million fans. This wasn’t a fan. She was demented. Newman suddenly started hollering so hard he blew my ears out. He just yelled, ‘Get her! Get that fucking woman out! Now!’ She got close—maybe fifteen feet away—then security jumped on her.”

  Though they hadn’t many scenes together, closer friendship with Newman built over these weeks. Since Butch Cassidy, aspects of their journeys mirrored each other. Newman had set up his own independent production partnership, First Artists, with Streisand, Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier. He had also made WUSA, a political allegory that was well received but failed at the box office. “I saw Bob had changed,” said Newman. “He was more sure of himself, maybe a little more serious. The similarities between what Joanne and I were doing and what he was doing at Wildwood and with his local politics gave us a zone to operate in. I’d gone out for McCarthy in ’68 and worked for civil rights. When he made The Candidate, I think he was saying he wanted to do something more than dumb acting, too. We didn’t make a deal about these things. We didn’t sit around discussing where McGovern went wrong and how Lindsay screwed up. But it was there, in the dinner table gossip. Sometimes when I looked at him, I saw myself ten years earlier, saying to myself, This acting business is stupid. How do you plant a device that blows it up? By the time of The Sting he was beginning to formulate a direction.”

  When Hill wrapped The Sting, he had an inkling that some alchemy had been achieved. Newman said, “I believe it was a mosaic. We had Edith Head, the great costumer, who made us all look so good. We had Robert Shaw, who was the best villain. We had John Scarne, the Italian card shark, do the sleight-of-hand stuff. We had those Saturday Evening Post title boards for the different acts, and we had a great set and ragtime music. George was a master builder. He layered all that on, and he kept his distance. You see nothing show-offy in George’s directing, ever. There’s no ‘Oh boy! What a shot!’ fancy stuff. You are there to be told a story, and he tells you the story. All of that came together on that picture, and that’s why it ended up with all those Academy Award nominations.”

  The movie, which Universal opened confidently on Christmas Day 1973 with simultaneous New York and Los Angeles premieres, garnered ten Academy Award nominations in most of the main categories, including for Redford as best actor. Oddly, Newman was not nominated, though Hill felt there was aptness to this. “Bob delivered a lot more. There was more on him, and he pulled it off.” Redford himself was flattered, but fixed on avoiding the frills. “I just think the movie worked as an ensemble piece, so I took no special pride. Anyway, I always believed that no one participant really wins an Oscar. We’re all in it together.” In the seven winning categories, including for best picture, best original screenplay and best director, Hill certainly felt Redford won out. “His presence was right through it, really. I don’t believe it would have happened without him.” For the best actor award, Jack Lemmon’s performance in Save the Tiger beat out Redford’s.

  Such a massive success inevitably drew the brickbats. Four lawsuits were launched against The Sting, mostly from academics who had written books on one aspect or another of Prohibition life, card games or FBI methodology. David Ward had been paid $300,000 to write the movie. By 1979, Universal’s lawyers were demanding the money back in settlement of a Kentucky lawsuit. “Bob, Paul and George came out for me,” says Ward. “They called Universal’s legal department and said, ‘Get real. This guy has given you a huge moneymaker. You owe him. You don’t penalize the good guys. You penalize villains.’ ”

  Though Redford benefited enormously through his early career by good patronage—the support of Nichols, Pollack, Newman, Goldman and especially Hill—he remained resolutely his own man. Stephanie Phillips remembers that, despite the power of CMA and Freddie Fields, he was stubbornly autonomous: “He would listen very intently to your advice, then go do it his way.” After The Sting he was once again perceived to be on a run. Both the rebooted Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were triumphed, each earning around $22 million. The Sting grossed a near-record $160 million. “There was a positive soar of support,” said George Roy Hill. “I saw him grasp it. He had been viable, but now he had real power. It made it easier for me to plan bigger-budgeted pictures with him, and it made it possible for him to be choosy in what he did.” It was, then, by the most comfortable serendipity that he would be able to sidestep a handful of half-hatched proje
cts—a script about Henry Miller–esque bums by Five Easy Pieces writer Carole Eastman and a version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that he wanted to produce—to submerge himself in a classic Jazz Age role he’d long coveted.

  One of Hollywood’s hottest recent stories was that Bob Evans had persuaded Scottie Smith, the daughter of Scott Fitzgerald, to release the rights to The Great Gatsby for a remake. For years Sam Spiegel and Ray Stark had chased the project. Pollack had made a bid, too. But Evans wanted to gift the famous role of Daisy, Gatsby’s vaporous inspiration, to his wife, Ali MacGraw. The idea had come to Evans the year before, when MacGraw gave him a leather-bound, personally calligraphed copy of Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” a short story thematically linked to Gatsby, for Christmas. Evans’s return gift came too late. During the making of The Getaway, MacGraw fell in love with costar Steve McQueen and decided to leave the marriage. The new movie, however, was too good an opportunity to pass by. Already Evans had partnered with Broadway’s David Merrick to produce, and Truman Capote had been commissioned to write the screenplay. Evans had his work cut out. The first film version, by Herbert Brenon in 1926, was irretrievably lost, and the second, made in 1949 by Elliott Nugent and starring Alan Ladd, was rarely seen. Both had been overshadowed by the power and durability of the literary source. Evans himself was quoted as saying that pulling off a decent film version was “a mammoth task.”

  Early in the year, Redford discovered Evans was looking for a new Daisy and a Jay Gatsby. He asked Fields to call, but Evans turned him down flat. “He was no fan of mine. He wouldn’t even consider me. Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson were his preferences,” says Redford. Undeterred, Redford asked for a meeting with Jack Clayton, Evans’s chosen director. He met with a skeptical Clayton for ninety minutes in the terminal at Heathrow Airport in London. Clayton, who had been favoring Nicholson, was won over. He told his partner, Haya Harareet, “You can see the possibility of danger beneath that romantic WASP image.” Still, Evans resisted, telling Clayton, “No, he’s blond, Gatsby’s dark haired.” When Redford heard this, he exploded. “I began to think Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing a Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text. Nowhere in it does Fitzgerald say Gatsby’s hair is dark. He says, ‘His hair was freshly barbered and smoothed back, and his skin was pulled tight over his face.’ That’s it. That’s the description.”