Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  As negotiations commenced, Redford was in the process of splitting with CMA. Matters were complicated by the fact that Freddie Fields was also representing Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen—both of whom David Merrick wanted in the movie regardless. Evans asked his mentor, Charlie Bluhdorn, who still held the presidency of Paramount but was no longer active in moviemaking decisions, to intervene. At a group viewing of the female screen tests in New York in December, Bluhdorn, Evans and Paramount’s head of sales, Frank Yablans, joined Merrick and Jack Clayton to decide on either Mia Farrow, Katharine Ross, Candice Bergen or Faye Dunaway for Daisy. Merrick was stubborn. All the tests, he insisted, were inadequate. MacGraw remained the right casting for Daisy, he said, and Freddie Fields’s suggestion of casting McQueen as Gatsby made the greatest sense, since Fields was proposing also to defer fees. Jack Clayton politely said he wanted Mia Farrow for Daisy. Evans, desperate, agreed with Clayton. When Merrick became apoplectic, Bluhdorn stood up and bluntly told him: “Ali MacGraw is not doing this picture. Is that clear? Paramount owns the rights. If anyone wants to walk, have a merry Christmas.”

  Evans might not have been a Redford fan, but Bluhdorn had never lost his soft spot. When Clayton called Redford to tell him the role was his, Redford was overjoyed. “I wanted it because I wanted to play a desperate man. I had never played a desperate man before, and I wanted to chart this bizarre new identity a man fabricates for himself to achieve his aim.” When he’d first read the book, in college, he’d not considered it a great American novel. “It seemed florid. But when I went back to it, I saw it was something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some great screen work could come from it. It was American Gothic, a rarity and tantalizing.”

  Though Englishman Jack Clayton might have seemed an unlikely director for Gatsby, he came well prepared. A technician who had worked his way through the ranks since he started as a runner at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios in the 1930s, Clayton made his feature debut with Room at the Top, starring Laurence Harvey, a movie that was as much an indictment of the British class system as Gatsby was of America’s. That was not his only qualification. In his twenties in the 1940s, Clayton himself had attempted to buy the rights to Gatsby from Fitzgerald’s estate and had been, he said, fixated with the novel for thirty years. He consulted with Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Fitzgerald estate curator, and with Scottie; his research work was exhaustive. Clayton’s vision for the movie was specific from the start, and though it deviated in part from the novel, it had Scottie’s support. The tragedy of romantic idealism, he felt, was the center of the story. Clayton imagined the movie “with a golden look” and stylized in such a way that the two focused relationships—that of high-living Gatsby and Daisy alongside seedy Myrtle and George Wilson—were lit and dressed in strongly referential contrast to each other to emphasize the squalor of human passion.

  The novel presents the mysterious Jay Gatsby through the eyes of the kindly patrician midwesterner Nick Carraway, who has come to live on Long Island alongside Gatsby’s mansion and close to the home of socialites Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Carraway befriends the nouveau riche Gatsby, attends his extravagant parties and meets his New York cronies. The truth of Gatsby’s origins remains unclear—was he a war hero or a bootlegger?—but it is clear that he is obsessed by Nick’s cousin, Daisy, whom he fell in love with before the war and determines to seduce again. Gatsby clashes with Buchanan but he succeeds in reconnecting with Daisy. While driving in Gatsby’s car, Daisy accidentally knocks down and kills Myrtle, her husband’s mistress. As Gatsby tries to confront the crisis, Carraway advises him to get away from the community. He has made his judgment of his friend—“They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole bunch put together”—but Gatsby doesn’t flee. In the end, Myrtle’s husband, George, kills Gatsby in his swimming pool. This story arc is strong, but the novel’s structure is loose, with long sections of dialogue and sudden melodrama studded with Fitzgerald’s sidebar metaphors: Daisy’s green light, the valley of ashes that divides the privileged enclaves from the urban Manhattan huddle, the all-seeing oculist. These varied elements, Clayton felt, made for a difficult screenplay adaptation.

  Capote’s script, when it arrived shortly after Christmas 1972, was disastrous. It was dialogue-heavy and cast Nick Carraway, the narrator, as a flamboyant gay. Clayton immediately wrote to Capote that it was unsuitable: “It’s like a great fish that is all head and no tail.” What in fact he was identifying was the problem he’d noticed in the novel itself: Daisy and Gatsby don’t get together until the middle of the book, and only in the last third do plot and incident dramatically accelerate. Clayton’s need, he said, was to truncate the first half, get Daisy and Gatsby together within twenty minutes, then widen and pace the ending. Capote had no stomach for this, so Francis Ford Coppola was brought in as a replacement by Evans.

  Redford liked the Coppola script given him four months later. But while he was fine with the idea of expanding the “new” phase of the Gatsby-Daisy romance, he remained wary of many deviations from the novel dictated by Clayton. For example, all reference to Gatsby’s beginnings, to the seafaring millionaire Dan Cody who apparently gives him his break, was removed. Through the spring, Redford went back to the novel. “I became concerned there might be a built-in problem with so mythologized a book. It seemed to overawe the adapter. Capote couldn’t handle it. Coppola did better. But I wasn’t sure Clayton grasped the heart of it.”

  Clayton’s objective was twofold: apart from developing the modern-day relationship of Gatsby and Daisy, which Fitzgerald dismissively summarized in one line, he also wanted to create a David Lean–style romanticism that would heighten the otherworldly “impossible dream” of the story line, which, essentially, lambastes the class mentality that proscribes rich-poor unions. Above all, insisted Clayton, the tension within the story had to be tweaked in order to command its audience and drive home its point. Clayton wrote in his preparatory notes: “I intend in fact to keep throughout the film a constant feeling of extreme heat. I want people to perspire all the time and I want to see even stains on people’s dresses.… As [Gatsby] is a story basically about obsession, it is absolutely necessary that the film has constantly a kind of mystery to it. Mystery, mystique and absolute touching sadness.”

  Overarching objectives apart, Redford needed a hook on which to hang his personal Gatsby. He found it not in discussion with the director, but in reading Scott Fitzgerald. Says Redford, “Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby was awkward when he said ‘old sport’—it didn’t come out of his mouth easily. I thought that was terrific. There’s a whole encyclopedia right there, and it’s from there I started to build up my own version.”

  Gatsby started shooting in Newport, Rhode Island, on June 11, 1973. Much of the action of the story takes place at Gatsby’s mansion and Carraway’s “eyesore” bungalow on the mansion’s grounds. A Tudor home called Rosecliff, under the management of the Newport Preservation Society, was negotiated as the Gatsby property, while a construction crew under designer John Box, winner of four Academy Awards and the man who designed Lawrence of Arabia, built the Carraway bungalow from scratch. The only other major exterior location, Fitzgerald’s symbolic valley of ashes, was constructed at Pinewood Studios in England. Along with Box, many of the leading crew members, including emerging cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and hairdresser Ramon Gow, were British, but, said Clayton, “an unmitigated, unprecedented effort was made to build Fitzgerald’s American Jazz Age, which became a kind of surrealist-deco blend beyond any distinctive accuracy.” Box famously described the awkwardness of pinning down Clayton’s vision: “Call it [capturing] the quality of a butterfly or a bird.”

  There are many legends in the British film community about Redford’s unpopular presence on the set of Gatsby. He was said to be uptight and unapproachable. Bruce Bahrenburg, a writer commissioned to keep a diary of the film for publication, spoke of his remoteness. One British newspaper went so far as to suggest that Mia Fa
rrow had complained about Redford’s insensitivity. She denied it, sued and was awarded damages.

  There were several contributing factors for the bumpy ride. Farrow was pregnant. Merrick and Evans’s decision to do half the production in En-gland (where the budget could be pared back 20 percent, to $4 million) elicited criticism from several principal cast members because of “atmo-sphere” variations. Redford himself was struggling internally to grasp the amorphous soul of Gatsby and bridge the interpretative differences between Coppola, who wanted to remain faithful to Fitzgerald, and Clayton, who wanted something new. George Roy Hill had at first mocked the idea of Redford playing Gatsby. He had considered Alan Ladd wrong for the part all those years ago, and now, Redford. “I thought, for a start, it was one of the trickiest of all great American works. I thought that Gatsby is unknowable—that’s the key—and I wondered how any director or actor would play that out.” Then he thought about what he perceived as Redford’s “fundamental loneliness.” He said, “When I reflected on it, I could think of no one more apt for the role of Gatsby. Bob was the guy in the gray area. But when you got into the deep stuff with him, it was bottomless. And that’s where he went for Gatsby.”

  The power of The Great Gatsby as a novel is the poetic proficiency that incited more contradictory critiques than any novel of the 1920s. Superficially it’s a love story. But it is also a satire, in which Fitzgerald mocks the greed of the postwar, heroless Lost Generation. The strength resides, as critic Lionel Trilling pointed out, in the notion of Gatsby as the supreme metaphor for America. What exactly, the novel asks, is “great” about the average midwesterner Jimmy Gatz, who comes east to the Old World bridgehead of Long Island to conquer the beautiful Daisy? America’s greats were not of the stature of Alexander the Great; instead the epithet “great” belonged to vaudevillians and the likes of Rudolph Valentino. Was that great enough? Metaphors apart, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby was a significant literary mutt, steering away from the contemporary naturalistic trend of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and back to the romanticism of John Keats. “Nobody really grasped that,” says Redford. “Literature and Hollywood don’t seem to mix well, and if we failed as we went along, we may have failed by overlooking some aspect of the poetry other than the visual style. The truth is, Hollywood wanted to make The Great Gatsby because it was a literary success, not because it was great literature. Enough time may not have been taken to work that one out.”

  Clayton and Redford got on well enough, but there remained a variation in conceptualization. Clayton’s mistake, Redford felt, was that he often tried too hard to sustain the literal translation within a scene while, at the same time, striving for originality. Clayton’s complaint was Redford’s independence under direction: “If I had one issue with him, it was his refusal to do the same take twice,” he said. “His reasoning was that he was in process of discovery, and the ‘newness’ of a spontaneous movement made it real. There was also the problem of the pace of his delivery. He was slow. Everyone else had a beat to their lines. He was out of sync a lot of the time, but, again, he reasoned it by saying people didn’t react by rhythm. They were arrhythmic. They stalled and stumbled. Someone moaned to me that Redford never knew his lines. It became apparent that he was remote from us because he was inside Gatsby; he was resident in 1922 when we made that movie.”

  Redford insistently defends his “stumbling”: “Gatsby is only comfortable with Nick Carraway. With Daisy and everyone else he is trying to be someone he is not. I was projecting that, and I feel it was misunderstood, especially by some of our English crew.”

  In Coppola’s script, Carraway presents Gatsby as a mythic hero, “like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light.” When finally he is killed in the swimming pool by George Wilson, there is a stronger sense of historic destiny than of moral rectitude. The closely observed cinematic symbolism—as when Gatsby and Daisy kiss and the camera tilts down to record their embrace reflected in the goldfish pond, signaling Gatsby’s imminent end—speaks volumes about Clayton’s skills, and yet the movie, when it hit the theaters, was generally considered a failure. Among the major reviewers who rejected it was Janet Maslin in The New York Times, who castigated Clayton for expanding the modern-day aspect of the romance, and disdained his “maverick stupidity.” Coppola himself hated the movie and argued openly with Clayton, whom he insisted corrupted his faithful script. Coppola had told Clayton that this was a uniquely American story to which he personally related. Clayton disagreed; he felt the themes were universal: this broadening is what he set out to accomplish. Mia Farrow felt the fault lay not with Clayton, but with Merrick and the marketers at Paramount who positioned it as a successor to the previous year’s Love Story. “Ultimately,” said Farrow, “[it] was a victim of overhype. The market was flooded with tie-in promotions, from Ballantine scotch to Gatsby cookware, [and it was] blown into something it was never meant to be, and released as if it had been Gone With the Wind.” Scottie Smith said her father would have liked the finished film.

  During the eighteen tense weeks of production, Redford’s family had joined him on location. Throughout, says Jamie, Redford found daily escape in the day-to-day media speculations about Watergate, arising from the trial of the burglars and subsequent developments. In the spring and summer, the Senate hearings dominated national television broadcasting, achieving the highest audience ratings in history. Redford couldn’t get enough of it. Says Jamie, “You’d go to chat with him in his dressing room and he’d be there with Mia, transfixed, watching the box, and he’d say, ‘Hold on, Jamie, look at this. Can you believe Nixon ditched Haldeman and Ehrlichman? Can you believe what [John] Dean just said: that the burglary goes beyond [G. Gordon] Liddy and [James] McCord? Was Nixon behind all this personally? Have we got him in the net?’ ”

  By 1974 and the publication of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, he had his answers.

  15

  Watergate

  The evening Redford first encountered Bob Woodward in Washington, D.C., he also bumped into Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, a woman he much admired. She had seen The Candidate and, responding to the McKay role, told Redford she was no fan of it. Her view of politics, she said, was that it represented the highest calling. Redford found this not upsetting, “because I felt that Bobby Kennedy proved that the system works best when it’s challenged. We set out to do a little of that, and the urge to challenge is also what drove me to keep following Watergate.”

  The eighteen months from October 1973 through March 1975 was the most concentrated period of Redford’s life in terms of movies. It started with the premiere of The Way We Were. Within ten days of completing The Great Gatsby at Pinewood, he was in Texas readying George Roy Hill’s biplane barnstormer, The Great Waldo Pepper. Immediately after came Three Days of the Condor, the next big picture with Pollack.

  All the while, Lola was making great advances with CAN, fighting for consumer rights and environmental protection. “The big difficulty was that Mom was going through huge life changes just as he hit his stride,” says Jamie. “She was at the center of a circle of women who had shifted their power base from consumer awareness newsletters to Washington lobbying. They had a grant from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to introduce a consumer-environment program into a pilot schools scheme in District 25 in Queens. Mom was no longer working from the apartment. She was flying to Washington a lot, and that put a strain on her, on us, on everyone.”

  CAN’s progress, says administrator Cynthia Burke, was based on defining issues of state legislative neglect, like clean water management in Manhattan. Out of CAN came the specialist boards set up to tackle single issues, and it was on one such committee that Lola befriended Rich-ard Ayres and John Adams, two of the six Yale lawyers in the process of cofounding the Natural Resources Defense Council. According to Adams, a recruit from the state’s attorney’s office who would become director, NRDC arose to fill the vacuum in federal legislation: “What we had till then were three bodies
: the Wilderness Society, the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, each with a separate and specific brief, and each scientifically weak. What NRDC set out to do was add science to the problems under review and establish a committee that would pull together the strands of each organization into one powerful lobbying group.” Ayres especially admired Lola’s drive. He got to know her well doing door-to-door fund-raising for clean water lobbying. “That was a nightmare concept,” says Ayres, “since Manhattanites don’t like people hammering down their apartment doors at night, even if it is for a great cause. It was also legally tricky. I admired Lola’s courage, and when I got to know Bob, I saw his equal courage and I saw he had grassroots politics in him, too. Lola was a big asset, but we saw Bob in an entirely different way as a potential political figure for us.”

  In 1972, Adams asked Ayres, who was closest to Lola, to sound out Redford’s interest in a formal working partnership removed from the women’s group. Adams had read about Redford’s interest in Native American issues and his local environmental work in Utah. “In one piece about the abuse of Utah’s lands, he spoke of the desirability of an academy for the management of our natural resources. This was exactly our thinking at NRDC.” Redford called Adams and told him he was interested. “I talked to him about ‘the prevention of serious deterioration issue,’ which is pollution law jargon for clean air,” said Adams. “He was excited. He said yes, he would be interested in joining. We had what we wanted: a figurehead.”