Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Christensen’s eco-home, Redford hoped, would be the magnet to draw the family back together. But as the demands of the new farm and horse business grew, Redford was prematurely forced to contemplate Hollywood work again. “I never made a movie decision based on money,” he says. “But that year was the exception.” All the President’s Men had proved a phenomenon throughout 1976, winning three New York Film Critics Circle awards and four Oscars, among them best supporting actor for Jason Robards and the one for Bill Goldman as screenwriter. The competing films that year included Rocky and Taxi Driver, movies that introduced new contenders to the Hollywood A-list in Stallone and De Niro. The following year brought Star Wars and the sweeping technology revolution. But Redford was still in demand. Prospective projects poured in. Even Hitchcock, preparing his swan song, Family Plot, expressed interest. Redford was “thinking differently. I knew acting per se was no longer enough. Directing now took center stage in my thinking. I knew nothing about the technicalities of cameras. All I knew was from observing great talents like Gordon Willis and Duke Callaghan. But I began to imagine some story I could visualize on-screen, with absolute control, like a painter.” He asked Barbara Maltby, a CAN friend, to try to find some story “about behavior and feelings” and was surprised when she quickly gave him the galleys of a novel by Michigan-born Judith Guest, a great-niece of the poet laureate Edgar Guest, called Ordinary People, about a dysfunctional family’s attempts to survive. “It hit me very profoundly. The point of contact for me with a script or story was always, Do I know these people? I did know the characters in Ordinary People. They were people I’d met at the university, wealthy North Shore Chicagoans who dealt in a specific way with issues of solution finding and communication. The book was about just that: communication. A family is in distress with the death of one son, and the mother can no longer relate to her remaining son or her husband. How do they communicate their inner feelings? How do they go forward?” Redford called the writer Alvin Sargent, and Wildwood commissioned a script. “But I had no idea where to start mounting such a production. Who would trust me to direct? I knew one thing: I wouldn’t make money from it. It was a labor of love.”

  But money he needed, and a remarkable opportunity fell into his lap. The British actor-director Richard Attenborough had been trying for years to mount a film on Gandhi. When the project stumbled for the umpteenth time, a producer friend, Joe Levine, offered him an alternative. Levine was a onetime garment maker who started his Hollywood career distributing Italian musclemen movies before producing significant successes like The Graduate and The Lion in Winter. While neither as prolific nor as discerning as Sam Spiegel, Levine had sound instincts and was happy to package Fellini’s 8½ for American distribution alongside Steve Reeves’s Hercules, despite the fact that he personally considered Fellini “as phony as a glass eye.” Whether the barons of established Hollywood yet took him seriously, Levine was undeniably a force in maverick moviemaking and was known for his clever marketplace footwork. He had earned more than $30 million from The Graduate and pushed much of it back into his company, Avco Embassy. When it stalled, he set about establishing a new venture, the Joseph E. Levine Presents company, whose flagship, he decided, would be a prestige classic.

  During a conversation in a bar in Los Angeles, seventy-year-old Levine explained to Attenborough his passion for A Bridge Too Far, Cornelius Ryan’s posthumously published book detailing the Allies’ attempt to foreshorten the war in Europe in September 1944. Attenborough saw immediately that the project was as complex as any potential Gandhi, and that though Levine constantly invoked another Ryan opus, The Longest Day, which had been a triumph for Fox in 1962, the dramatic dynamics of the stories had little in common. The Longest Day concerned the success of D-Day. A Bridge Too Far was the account of Operation Market Garden, a story of failure. During the fated mission, nine thousand airborne troops had slipped behind enemy lines with the objective of taking the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem; only six hundred survived to dig in and fight two elite panzer divisions with small arms. Unquestionably the event was laden with tales of individual heroism, but the campaign was defined by its gross mismanagement.

  “You can fool all of the people all of the time,” Joe Levine famously said, “if the advice is right and the budget is big enough.” And he was ready to throw countless millions into A Bridge Too Far. Attenborough was impressed by Levine’s stated desire to make a tribute to fallen heroes. “We’ve had three decades of lousy noisefests like Midway,” Levine told a journalist in 1977. “All those movies were self-congratulating. Operation Market Garden couldn’t be like that. It had to be honest and compassionate because it was about the self-sacrifice of forgotten men.” Attenborough was persuaded by the sentiment, the star-studded vision Levine had—and the $20 million budget, part pledged by United Artists, a company then cruising on its James Bond profits. UA was in for distribution, though only on condition that Levine could supply more than a dozen high-profile stars in the style of The Longest Day. Levine instructed Attenborough to go out and find the biggest names around. It was then agreed that Bill Goldman would be the screenwriter.

  In a matter of weeks, and without a script yet, Attenborough had secured the services of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Olivier and a number of other notable British stars, many of whom were friends of his. “Once we had that ring of quality,” said Levine, “we went for Hollywood.”

  The offer to Redford came during the height of the excitement about All the President’s Men. Attenborough was in Holland assembling a demi-army and wanted a name to fill the lead role of Major Julian Cook. Steve McQueen had been offered the part and was procrastinating. At first Redford demurred. He had made his commitment to lobbying, family and Sundance. Hendler, though, saw a golden moment. McQueen was driving the fee higher and higher, Levine was running out of time … and suddenly Redford, if he accepted the role, would be able to cover the extra costs incurred in developing his property. Hendler closed the deal, securing a record-breaking $2 million, with very lucrative penalty money for Redford if the movie overran.

  Whereas at first the role seemed to Redford “like a name in a telephone directory,” there was a sentimental dimension for him. Operation Market Garden was a prelude to the Third Army thrust during which his uncle David was killed. “In that way A Bridge Too Far was a kind of homage to Uncle David. I’d never been to the battlefield area where he died. The movie gave me a chance to visit his grave in Luxembourg and acknowledge him in a personal way.”

  Levine sweated like a workhorse, he said, to make his movie work. “Darryl Zanuck had the best advantage with The Longest Day because the heroes die in his movie. That makes for a dramatic audience experience. We were faced with the opposite. None of the leading guys died, and then the mission failed. Add to that all the different skirmishes, the airborne assault with gliders, the ground attacks, the planes, the boats, the tanks, the parachutes, and it was War and Peace. Dickie [Attenborough] worked harder than any director I have ever known just getting the military hardware right. He was having daily breakdowns trying to negotiate with the Dutch and the Brits and the Germans to borrow guns, tanks, trucks, and everything else we couldn’t afford to build. I regarded that movie as a nightmare. Gratifying, but a nightmare.”

  Goldman overcame the inherent dramatic weakness by redefining the scenario simply as “a story about the cavalry that arrives too late.” The roles of the lesser ranks who fought and died were beefed up. Redford liked the approach: “The risk with the story was always diffusion. It was a three-hour movie documenting parallel stories about the parachute assaults from the 1st British, the 82nd American and the 101st American Airborne Infantry paving the way for the main British thrust. That’s a lot of moving targets, a lot of talking heads, a lot for the audience to comprehend and remember.” Employing immediately recognizable faces—Ryan O’Neal, James Caan and Anthony Hopkins, among others—solved the problem. “I normally dislike movies that rely on star cas
ting, but this time it seemed valid for plot clarity.” There was also much to admire, he felt, in the sharp-focus roles written for Caan, playing a lowly sergeant who fights for his principles, and Anthony Hopkins, as Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, the tenacious frontline British commander. Redford came to love his own irascible character, Cook, who unwittingly led his men into a massacre while crossing the Waal River to back up the Arnhem bridge defenders. Among the most moving moments in a movie every bit as full of action and as noisy as Midway was Cook’s conducting his men in the communal recitation of the Hail Mary as they dove into battle. “Bill gave me some good words to work with,” says Redford. “That role could easily have been a cipher, but the choices that Attenborough and Goldman made gave it a great dignity.”

  Though A Bridge Too Far took six months to shoot, Redford was in Holland just four weeks. Throughout the shoot at Deventer, thirty miles north of Arnhem, he was hounded by the media as never before. When Costa-Gavras, the Greek director of Z, invited him to dine in Paris, he fled willingly. “I was trying to escape the craziness,” says Redford, “because Europe was saturated with All the President’s Men, and by association I was being connected with the downfall of Richard Nixon. I’d rarely had to use personal security guards, but the violations were freaky. One German newspaper sent a naked woman to my hotel room with a birthday cake, presumably to get a scandal story. The paparazzi were all over Deventer like flies. One New York guy even flew to Amsterdam, spending a fortune in time and dollars just to get one candid shot. I naïvely thought, If I get away from the production location, I’ll be fine. Paris will be a break from all that madness.”

  Sanctuary turned into a circus. “It was worse,” Redford recalls. “The crowds outside the restaurant were insane. Gavras’s wife was knocked to the sidewalk and I tried to lift her up, but Alan Burry, a publicist present, shouted, ‘Don’t do it!’ The paparazzi would just die to get that shot: Redford helping some broad to her feet. In the end we escaped through the kitchen and I had to run ten blocks back to the hotel.” The next day, Burry summoned Century Security, an internationally recognized bodyguard agency. “The guy who ran it knew his stuff,” says Redford, “and he chilled me to the bone. This wasn’t just fan delirium, he said. Century did some digging to find there was a kidnap plot against me. You could have knocked me over with a feather. A plot against me? Why? Who could I have offended so badly? In fact, I had offended the right-wing contingent, the Nixonites. All the President’s Men left a stink, and they had me on the hit list. When I was in Paris all those years before, it was predominantly left-wing. Now it was the other way, and the press had me as the Man Who Took Down Nixon. The security guy literally threw me in the back of a car and took off for the border like he was competing at Le Mans. I thought it was melodrama and, to be honest, I believed none of it. I was wrong. We later learned, from an independent investigation, that it was justified, that those people were real, and their order to get me was real. I read the reports, I saw the evidence and it horrified me.”

  A Bridge Too Far was released with great fanfare in June 1977. Redford had seen the rushes of the movie, thought it was fine, thought Hopkins was good, “but overall it was not as good as The Longest Day.”

  Back tending to his horses in Utah, he surprised himself with the realization that he’d seen just four movies in a year. Only Buñuel’s Cet Obscur Objet du Désir left a good impression. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was too parochial for his taste; others were just unmemorable. “I was also not touched by the big new movements in technological and disco films. They seemed hidebound, with nowhere to go in terms of substance.”

  With Pollack, he resumed work on the script for Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To; at Wildwood he continued to collaborate on Alvin Sargent’s retooling of Judith Guest’s novel. Pollack believed his friend was suffering burnout. “I knew him well enough to know when the fire was gone. He was a guy with such remarkable discipline. He was up and out jogging at 7:00 a.m. He was playing tennis in subzero temperatures. He was relentless. But when he was tired, he was ornery and not disciplined, and that’s how he had become. We fought a lot over A Place to Come To, and that summed up the problem. He was juggling too many sidelines. He needed to stop.”

  Redford continued to blend art with activism. He collaborated with Saul Bass and Charles Eames on a Dalíesque animated short promoting alternative energy, called The Solar Film. Solar energy had become another battle cry of his. Over the weekend of May 3–6, 1978, to help increase awareness of it, CAN mounted Sun Day, launched with a tribal sunrise ceremony on the steps of the U.N. in New York. Barry Commoner, Margaret Mead, Bishop Paul Moore and Andrew Young were among the event leaders, lecturing and giving media interviews. “Earth Day identified the environmental problems,” said Lola. “Sun Day identifies the solutions.” Central among the solutions Redford expounded upon in an interview he gave to his friend Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Today was a national commitment to exploring solar energy for industrial and domestic use along the lines of the Christensen experiment he had committed to at Sundance. This interview incited Mobil Oil to place a large advertisement in The New York Times sniping at the principles of Sun Day and defending the practicality of fossil fuels. Herb Schmertz, vice president of Mobil, went so far as to rebuke Redford personally in a letter to the editor. Redford found this “a real victory for the cause, because the fact that they took note meant they were scared. It was the Ralph Nader principle at work again: think globally, act locally, and you shake up the big boys.”

  Depending on whom you asked, Redford’s competition with Lola was either a spur or an omen. President Carter appointed her as EPA representative for the International Year of the Child, and she was now also on the boards of the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, and the Chicago-based National Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Society. “I don’t believe their competitiveness was a negative thing,” says Stan Collins, “but it was real enough. Its basis wasn’t vanity. It was results. They had their own goals within environmental politics, and they stuck the course.” Jamie wasn’t so certain. He knew his parents had started marriage counseling, and he feared the end of the marriage was near: “They also had a widening separation of interests. Mom was the great academic politician. Dad wasn’t like that. He saw grand themes. Mom would target the fine detail of phosphate damage to crops and carcinogens in the food chain. Dad went for the wide sweep. He was arguing for heritage, tradition and cultural integrity. I admired him for his devotion to anthropology, but I admired him from afar. I was too ill to be of any help.”

  After years of being attended to by stomach specialists at the Utah Medical Center in Provo, during his senior year at Dalton, Jamie achieved a proactive breakthrough. Watching a PBS television special late one night, he learned about new endoscopy procedures in the GI tract. “Truthfully, I felt that no one had paid enough attention to getting me a proper diagnosis. The feeling always was, ‘Hey, Jamie is freaking out again!’ I don’t blame Dad or Mom. But you can only push the problem on the back burner for so long. After the PBS special, I made the appointment independently and walked into the gastroenterologist’s office in New York and handed over my files. The reaction was, ‘Oh boy, you have a serious ulcerative colitis condition and you need radical treatment very urgently.’ ” Redford spotted Jamie’s declining health—and the terminal crisis of his marriage—from the corner of his eye. “I was distracted,” he admits, “and in error.”

  A Place to Come To had him fully engaged, more excited than he’d been about any story since the Woodward-Bernstein adventure. Close Encounters of the Third Kind may have been booming at the box office, but that wasn’t his kind of film. Robert Penn Warren’s epic is about Jed Tewksbury, a southerner whose beginnings remind one of Tot’s history and whose resolution tackles the human need for meaning. Tormented by his choice of women, Jed feeds his wandering urge, distinguishes himself as a jock and scholar, fights against the Nazis and becomes a figure of world renown. In the en
d he addresses the emptiness he still feels in a pilgrimage to his mother’s neglected grave: “I thought … maybe I might be able to weep. And if I could weep, something warm and blessed might happen. But I did not lie down. The trouble was, I was afraid that nothing might happen, and I was afraid to take the risk.”

  The poetry of Warren’s writing, the metaphor, the subtext were what appealed to Redford. In years to come, the books he would choose for his own directorial adaptations would often be distinguished by metaphor and symbolism. “Yes, it was a story you had to reach for,” he says. “But it was a terrific Everyman tale. I also thought Penn Warren was neglected, and that his stories were powerfully visual in a way no one explored. I had the highest hopes.”

  But in the summer of 1978 Pollack announced that the deal he’d been trying to set up with Warners was dead, and that the project was un-doable. Redford agreed that the script they had in progress with David Rayfiel was inadequate, but he was “pissed” that Pollack pushed it aside in favor of a new project for Columbia. “I thought we didn’t need to quit, and I told Sydney so. We argued some. In the end, the friendship was more important than the film.”

  In his notebook he records his feelings:

  Wildwood stationery lies fallow in the briefcase unused. Unnecessary. Accouterments of waste. The swarm of beehive activity is but the noise of anticipation. Nothing more. All is calm. No wind blows and no birds sing. Sitting here heavy headed beneath the enveloping shroud of depression and clarity. The clear eye I’ve waited for. The eye that sees what really is, and there is nothing. Alice in Wonderland is my book. Hollywood has paid me back in full for my disloyalty. Fear and trembling pass as business as usual. Lying, cheating, treading water, waste, anxiety, resentment, distortion, shallowness are the trade qualities and if you are so possessed—then—you are all right.