For years Redford had been swaying in and out of involvement with various Utah lobbies, the Environmental Defense Fund and other organizations. He had learned that the federal clean air and clean water acts in place since the mid-sixties were weak and operated basically by delegating everything to the level of state law, which was even weaker. The fact that NRDC had been to Washington and was fighting a proposal to build a power plant on the Hudson River was profoundly exciting, since Redford was already researching proposals to build massive new energy plants in southern Utah. “The thing they had above the EDF and others was that they were lawyers. All of the other lobbies had worth, but they didn’t have the means to take these issues to the resolution they needed. The timing of this was perfect for me. I also thought, It’s targeted in Washington, which is where I need to be.”
That Redford had long been separating from Lola’s organization was obvious to many people. Mike Frankfurt saw it as an inevitable result of divergent lives and Redford’s new interests. “CAN’s focus was the practical issues affecting Manhattan. That’s where those women began, and that’s where they psychologically remained. What really interested Bob was only the law and the Washington dimension. In that sense, at that moment they started to drift apart.”
And, of course, Watergate was drawing him to Washington, too. As Redford was wrapping up The Great Gatsby in the fall of 1973, Richard Nixon was digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. In November the president proclaimed to a stunned meeting of Associated Press editors in Florida, “I am not a crook.” By March, with the indictment of the Watergate Seven—the core group close to Nixon against whom the strongest evidence of dirty tricks had been amassed—the presidency was in peril. Shortly after, the House of Representatives commenced formal hearings on the possible impeachment of Nixon. Not long after that, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the 1972 burglaries and what preceded and followed them came close to completion. “Carl and I were pursuing the book our own way,” says Bob Woodward, “but we’d been influenced by Redford in the way we compiled it. It was he who suggested we make it about the investigation, and not about the dirty tricks campaign. He had his movie idea. We had our book to be getting on with. But the two ran side by side.”
“The film started to move after I’d first talked to Woodward,” says Redford. “After the Washington meeting he came to my apartment. When I knew he and Carl were coming by, I told Bill Goldman, since we were friends. Bill said, ‘Gee, I’d love to hear all this.’ And so Bill was there with Bob, Carl and me. And, of course, the story was magical. It was tremendously important nationally, obviously. But I was also interested in Bob Woodward as a man. He was quirky. He had some odd mannerisms. I liked that. When he left, I said to Bill, ‘There’s the movie. These guys. Their personalities. The aspects of each that propel the other. The way the investigation was led by these personalities.’ I made that observation to Bill as a general remark. I didn’t mean to involve him in the project, and I wasn’t commissioning him as the screenwriter.”
The release of The Way We Were, The Sting and The Great Gatsby six months apart in the winter and spring of 1973–74 pushed Redford to unrivaled status as the world’s number one box office star. George Roy Hill saw Redford struggle for balance. “It’s a condition I well knew, though in Redford’s case the fame was the most extreme kind. He was pulled in every direction. You could no longer have time in a public place with him. He was always looking over his shoulder. Always distracted.”
This was exacerbated by Redford’s “elastic perception of time,” a perennial problem that caused many aggravating late arrivals on set. Hill was troubled as they began preparing to make a movie for Universal that had long been a fantasy of his, The Great Waldo Pepper. “I was a little annoyed, to be honest. He was never the easiest guy to stay in touch with, since he was so bad at punctuality and, with my marines background, it was an obsession of mine. There were a few instances where I didn’t hear from him when he told me he’d call, and I said, ‘Fuck ’im, he’s doing this big-star thing.’ But that wasn’t his problem. His problem was some dismissal of authority he carried around, some unease with his own authority figures, maybe.”
All Hill’s fantasies, he said, were built around music and flying. He had learned to fly while still attending school in Minneapolis and earned a pilot’s license at sixteen. Air shows fascinated him, and his favorite Saturday sport was attending the frequent rallies at his local airport and fields around the state. The tragedy of aviator Charles “Speed” Holman, a Northwest Airlines pioneer who crashed and died at the first Omaha air races in 1931, left a deep impression on Hill when he was just nine years old, and he spent his teens, he said, meticulously studying the escapades of the early stunt aviators and the technology of their planes. During the war, he was a transport pilot in the Pacific, and when he resumed civilian life, as a cub reporter in Texas, he made the decision to someday essay the life of Holman and his peers.
The Great Waldo Pepper, a period piece, was the fruition of that promise. “I couldn’t have turned that one down even if I wanted to,” says Redford, “because it was George’s obsession and I was in his debt.” Unlike Redford’s relationship with Pollack in which “Sydney intellectually dissected things,” his relationship with Hill, Redford says, was more intuitive. “The friendship was father-son in a most intersupportive way. I had the highest regard for his spirit. And when something was totally his, like Waldo Pepper, the joy of just being around him was contagious.”
Like Butch Cassidy, Waldo Pepper dealt subtextually with the pathos of myth. By now, Hill, Redford and Bill Goldman had an almost family empathy, so it was no surprise that Hill chose Goldman to write his dream story. Though Goldman wrote the script, the concept, plot and resolution were Hill’s. “I got a little of Huck Finn into it,” said Hill, “and a little of Holman. I wanted to start it the way it starts, with the camera lovingly tracing over the scrapbooks of my childhood, my flying heroes, the great barnstormers, and showing their dates of birth and dates of death. And then the story of Waldo commences, the story of a man defining himself only against his self-set challenges, a man who connects with the dream, who can make a friendship, or make love, but who never touches the crowd. He is a circus freak. He entertains everyone. But he is alone inside a fantasy. And he will live and die like that, which is both his glory and his tragedy.”
After a period of friction with Hill (“about Golman’s inclination to talk too much,” said Hill), Goldman delivered a script that Hill felt “had a lot of good things, though nothing too remarkable.” The production was pressured into moving forward, however, by the brief window of Redford’s winter availability.
Casting was coordinated by Bob Crawford. Scores of actors were interviewed, especially for the co-leads of Waldo’s girlfriend, Mary Beth; his barnstorming rival, Axel Olsson; and his flying idol, the German wartime ace Ernst Kessler. For Hill, much of this casting was trickier than usual because he was measuring the aspirants against the heroes of his childhood, men like Ernst Udet, the second-ranking German ace after Manfred von Richthofen, who on numerous dogfights saluted and spared the lives of disabled airmen and who finally committed suicide when called up for service in Göring’s Luftwaffe; or Jimmy Doolittle, the daredevil who first achieved the miraculous “outside loop” maneuver that Waldo attempts in the movie. “I felt some duty to those men,” said Hill, “because they were like astronauts to me. They were the aviation pacemakers.”
Hill’s notebooks attest to great ambition in the casting. Among those considered to costar with Redford—“or to substitute [for] him if Gatsby runs ridiculously over as The Way We Were did”—were Jack Nicholson, George Segal, Donald Sutherland, Sam Waterston and Warren Oates. Bo Svenson and Bo Brundin were cast as Olsson and Kessler, with Susan Sarandon nudging out Patti D’Arbanville to play Mary Beth. “For the women the issue was the type,” said Hill. “Here I wasn’t affected by the history, but by the aerial movies I loved, like Bill Wellman’s Wings or Hell’
s Angels. Those castings were spot-on, great chiseled faces so evocative of the era.” Redford, too, was spot-on in Hill’s book. “He had the Errol Flynn debonair look right out of my scrapbooks. No stretch of the imagination to see him in leathers, with a white scarf trailing in the wind. I wanted all the others to look 1920s, too. In the end, I settled for faces with character over acting experience. Which may have been a huge mistake.”
Though the story was set in Nebraska, the Texas locations Hill chose, partly for sentimental reasons, around Elgin, Floresville and Lockhart were areas he knew well from his postwar flying, with second unit shooting in Florida and California. The choice of locations was further dictated by the winter sky profile: the kind of cumulus cloud cover so typical of Texas in February would enhance the illusion of death-defying speed in the many biplane flight sequences.
As Waldo, Redford portrays a gutsy individualist in the style of Charles Lindbergh, determined to live out his dream, which is to capture the kind of glory given to World War I pilots. Along the way he is demeaned—he even appears briefly in drag for a flying circus—but his goal is to be a real hero, unlike the silver screen Valentino whom Mary Beth so adores. The opportunity for undisputed greatness comes in attempting the allegedly impossible outside loop. He tries but is beaten to his goal by Kessler, the German ace glamour boy, and only settles the score by joining the Hollywood dream factory, where he finds employment as a stunt pilot in a war movie. Here, in a last-reel twist, he eventually outmaneuvers Kessler in a mock dogfight and wins the kudos.
Bob Crawford saw the venture as a home movie for Hill. “He had such fun doing it. He flew planes on location and directed scenes with the actor in the seat behind him. Most of the derring-do was either something he’d already flown or something he dreamed about. He’d done it all himself already. He’d crashed planes. He’d won races. Bob got to live out the bits in between.”
Most famous of those bits was the wing walking, with minimal harnesses, at three thousand feet. Redford found this exhilarating. “I’m not sure what the insurance connotation was, but George wouldn’t have cared. He would have lied to them. Risk came easy to him, as it did to me. It was scary, but I liked it.” Bo Svenson did not. He refused to participate and was, accordingly, suspended by Hill, with the threat of dismissal. Svenson sued immediately, stating Hill’s objectives put his life in peril. “I made a mistake in casting based on image,” said Hill. “What I should have done was take each of them up in a barnstormer, done some loops and set them down, then said, ‘Okay, now you fly it.’ It wasn’t a movie for blue screen [studio back-projected images]. It always lived and breathed for me as the real thing. And I loved how Redford served that.”
Redford, however, never felt it was important work. He sensed it would not do well. In the end, the script downed the movie. In the story, Waldo’s relationship with Mary Beth is carefully graphed in the first act and a half. Dialogue and wit are sharp, and Mary Beth emerges as a lovable, if overpossessive, supporter of Waldo’s. “But then bang in the middle of the second act, she’s inveigled into wing walking and she’s killed. It was a disaster. We killed the movie there and then,” said Hill. “If we’d cast Jack Nicholson, the audience would have accepted that level of despair and darkness. But Bob had taken on the role as our national glamour king. He was the sunny good-luck guy—even when he was playing a bandit—and the audience expected light around him. Dramatically, the decision to kill Mary Beth in itself wasn’t bad. But in a Redford movie, in the vicarious way women were relating to him after The Way We Were, we were doomed because we were effectively killing them off. I recognized that problem only in the editing, but by then it was too late to fix.”
Though the movie generated $20 million in receipts, its reception in the spring of 1975 was bleak, with Robert Lindsey in The New York Times pronouncing it a dud. Lindsey’s comments provoked the often impulsive Hill to urge Universal to sue The New York Times over the review.
Redford’s prolificacy was such that his Olympian position seemed untouchable. The sixteen-point addendum to his Waldo contract exemplified the power he now held: he had approval of director and all costars; he was covered for living expenses if he was more than fifty miles from home, charged at $1,000 a week; five first-class air tickets were to be supplied to him to travel to and from all locations; he had the use of chauffeured limousines throughout filming or related work; sole-star billing above the title was guaranteed, as was health insurance, the use of a personal makeup artist and costumer (Gary Liddiard and Bernie Pollack, Sydney’s brother, respectively), Wildwood’s right to approve all publicity images, and one 16 mm print of the movie for personal use. He also received a percentage of the gross box office earnings, without deducting costs.
With bristling confidence of his status, he moved on to the Watergate story. In June 1974, the previously unknown and totally incriminating tape of Nixon and Haldeman colluding against potential investigators was released, and the following month the House Judiciary Committee recommended the first article of impeachment against the president on the charge of obstruction of justice. The second and third articles, for abuse of power and contempt of Congress, were subsequently passed, and a few days later, on August 8, Nixon resigned.
Earlier, in April, on his return from Waldo Pepper location shooting in Texas, Redford had met up again with Woodward and Bernstein in Washington. Their book was near completion and he agreed to pay $450,000 for the film rights. Shortly afterward, due to a misunderstanding, Simon and Schuster, the publisher, sent the galley proofs of the book to Bill Goldman’s agent, and before Redford knew it, Goldman was the screenwriter on the movie. “I was troubled from the beginning about Bill but friendship kept it going,” says Redford. Woodward never doubted that Goldman would be the screenwriter. “He was there at the start,” says Woodward, “and we spent a lot of time together. So I assumed …”
Redford recalls setting out his vision for the film to Goldman. “I told him I didn’t want a thriller,” he says. “This story was allegory, about a certain innocence that was corrupted by Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein personified the innocence. They were the old school, the journalists who investigated, extrapolated and worked to a standard. Because they were personally such a study in contrasts, I thought there was amazing psychological material to mine. Bill, I knew, was very skillful. But I had reservations about that. When he wrote his novels, it was homage to his favorite novelists. When it came to Butch Cassidy, it was homage to his favorite buddy movies, like Gunga Din. One admired him for it. But what troubled me on a personal level was the fact that his views were caustic. It was fun to be in his company and hear him, until you thought, What happens when this judgmental bit is turned on me? I became uncomfortable in some aspect of our friendship, and that should have warned me off.”
In a very short time, Goldman turned in his screenplay, which no one liked. Woodward, Bernstein and Redford were dismayed, mostly because Goldman had not visited the Washington Post offices nor interviewed the key participants, like Ben Bradlee, the executive editor. “He put a lot of work into it,” says Woodward. “There was no question of it. But it wasn’t accurate to The Post or the way we worked.” Nevertheless, Redford stayed loyal and sent out the script to a few directors he was interested in. When Elia Kazan and William Friedkin turned it down, he started to seriously rethink. “I got the impression that no one took it seriously. Bradlee felt it was glib, like another Butch Cassidy, and that was very worrying.” For a while, Redford confided to friends that he thought he was losing the proj-ect. And then one day, with no prior notice, Carl Bernstein and his wife at the time, Nora Ephron, showed up with their own version of the screenplay. “They just took a shot at it,” says Woodward, “because the other one was so wrong. But Bob hated it. He told Carl, ‘Don’t you know Errol Flynn is dead?’ ”
Goldman was offended that Bernstein had even attempted a script, and when Redford started to plead with him to rewrite his version, he resisted. “It was a predicament to
be in, since we were losing ground, given the time frame of topicality,” says Redford. By this stage, having briefly considered Michael Ritchie and Pollack as potential directorial collaborators, Redford had made a handshake deal with Alan Pakula, who was fresh off another journalistic conspiracy movie, The Parallax View, and whom, he says, he had “fully forgiven for any perfidy on Daisy Clover.” When finally Goldman handed his reluctantly reconstructed new script to Pakula, utter despair set in. “All hope was lost,” says Redford. “Alan hated the script, and we immediately made arrangements to rewrite it ourselves, since we learned Bill was tied up already, writing Marathon Man for John Schlesinger. I was furious, but to what purpose? The friendship was gone—that made me sad—but there was a movie that had to be made.” Redford booked rooms at the Madison hotel across from the Post offices for one month, and he and Pakula repaired there to redraft the screenplay. About one-tenth of Goldman’s draft remained in the end. “Bill gave the start point and the ending,” says Woodward, “and those never changed.” Goldman would win an Academy Award for the script, but his participation was by now finished.
With the publication of their book, Woodward and Bernstein hit the promotion trail while Redford, in Washington, did additional research. He called on his CAN and NRDC contacts. The allies made in his previous fund-raising work for Wayne Owens and Tip O’Neill opened doors to congressional staffers with tales to tell. Joan Claybrook, the lawyer and lobbyist for Ralph Nader, served as a navigator. “Basically these people gave me insight into the universe of Washington—how it operated, who depended on whom, who knew the inner workings of whomever else.” He also talked with reporters Mary McGrory, John Chancellor, Dan Rather and Sy Hersh—“all of whom had their own spin on what really happened with Watergate, why burglar James McCord blew the whistle, how Nixon masterminded the evasion, where the rot began. You couldn’t talk to any of them without new insider information on Cox or Mitchell or Liddy raising its head,” says Redford. “It had a snowball effect, which helped the fine detail of what Pakula and I were doing with the new screenplay.”
Robert Redford Page 29
