Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Two more different artists, two more different Hollywood outsiders, than Redford and Rafelson would be hard to conjure. Redford is polite about their disagreements. In his version, Rafelson was working on a deep and probing script. At the same time, Redford was refining his own deep and probing interpretation. When, just five days after the completion of The Electric Horseman, Redford arrived on location in Columbus, Ohio, however, there were immediate problems. Rafelson had not, for starters, fully decided on casting. Key roles were still unfilled with only days to go until the start of shooting. The set itself, built inside an old state prison, was overmodified and all but unusable. Murton expressed the belief that the screenplay showed evidence of “creative folk [who have been] smoking pot.” Redford felt that Rafelson was absorbed in “hip effect” and his own volatile ego, which was upsetting to the studio. “He was behaving like a martinet, which was not comfortable for anyone.”

  Redford stepped away from confrontation with Rafelson by preparing for the Brubaker character in his own way. He found himself internalizing more than usual. “It was an interesting place. My marriage was gone, despite my and Lola’s attempts to save it. When things are failing, you examine them. So I was dissecting human behavior and thinking about social disorder and making connections. This was a fascinating place to work from in terms of relating to Murton’s experience. I liked it that Brubaker was written as a gray character. I always liked that twilight area in projecting heroism, and there was some personal truth that felt hard earned on this one.”

  In widely reported accounts, Rafelson decked a senior Fox executive who was summoned to Columbus one week after shooting commenced to determine why the movie was already several days behind schedule. Other reports suggest Redford sought Rafelson’s removal and asked Paul Newman to recommend a replacement. What is clear is that Newman suggested Stuart Rosenberg, the mild-mannered director of Cool Hand Luke, who had also directed Redford for television in The Defenders. Newman believed “Stuart was a far better bet for Brubaker, because his field of excellence was psychology. He was good at close-quarters stuff like prison dramas, that much we all knew.” Redford welcomed Rosenberg and remembers him as a kindly man: “And he had the kind of sound temperament that I thought could salvage this from the brink, since the actors were starting to mutiny.”

  Rosenberg flew to Columbus on a borrowed Warners jet, shut down the production for ten days and barricaded himself in a nearby Holiday Inn with the script and a stack of notebooks. “I was absolutely appalled,” he said. “There was an out-of-control atmosphere. I looked at what Rafelson shot and I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, use it. Everything he did was against my style, and some of it seemed plain dumb. For instance, he sliced the roof off the location—which was a real prison—to facilitate studio arc lighting. I thought, What a complete, stupid waste of money! To find the real thing, then try to turn it into a Hollywood studio! That alone multiplied my problems because it restricted me from shooting any wide shots. I also hated much of the script, which was open-ended. Bob says the character was gray. He wasn’t—he was battleship gray. Dull. I wanted a poignant ending to the story, and Redford also wanted some reward for the audience who had to sit through a grim morality tale. First I thought of getting out of there. [There were] just too many problems. All this would take so much time to fix, but Fox gave me ten days.” Rosenberg’s biggest headache was what he called “despair” among the cast. “I had to take each of them aside in my hotel suite and sit them down to shore up their confidence. Then I was landed with the problem of Bob’s contract, which had the notorious ‘star clause.’ The schedule had to be twelve weeks. If I went a day past that, the penalties were so huge as to make the movie commercially impossible. I thought about it. Then I decided I liked what this movie was trying to say. So we started … running like sprinters.”

  Rosenberg had known about the Murton book for ten years. “But I always doubted that it would see the light of day as a movie, since it was so critical of our prison system. After All the President’s Men, Redford engendered trust. People knew he wouldn’t shortchange them, that he’d ‘do a Bob Woodward’ and get to the bottom of things. So I felt that Bob was entitled to a measure of respect, since it was happening because he put his name behind it. Murton was also in no doubt. But it also put me on my guard, because it’s not good for a director to be too respectful of actors. A director must lead.”

  The man Rosenberg remembered from The Defenders was much changed. Redford was, said Rosenberg, “a mess of contradictions, both calm and convulsive”—which was unsurprising, given the disarray of his personal life. “I can’t say a word against him as an artist,” says Rosenberg. “To me, he was very like Paul in his approach. He did not openly intellectualize as he went along, as Paul often didn’t. It was all done in private, beforehand. He carefully prepared every movement, every line, its meaning and the play-out. He invented a lot himself, as all good actors do, which means he takes responsibility for what happens up on the screen, just like Paul did. And the director’s contribution? I would say to him, ‘Bob, this isn’t working because the rhythm seems wrong.’ Just that. And he, like Paul, would take it on himself to go back out on the floor and find this elusive rhythm, without any big, heart-wrenching analysis. That, and simply that, is what makes a good actor. I experienced the same with Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Boyer. They were all good actors. Over the years, in all the movies I directed, I learned one thing: that stardom is defined by intuition. Stars are not ‘directed.’ They possess an intuition for the audience response that is beyond the likes of me, or anyone else who calls themselves a director. They have some hotline to a greater intelligence, however you attribute that. I observed that neither Barbara Stanwyck nor Robert Redford really thought things through. Their gift was their intuition.”

  Miraculously, Rosenberg brought Brubaker in just three weeks over time, though the overrun meant the budget was shot. Redford liked what he saw of the rushes, but he was distracted. Even as he wrapped the last days in Ohio, he had Alvin Sargent’s finished script for Ordinary People, the movie he would at last direct, in his hand. “I offered to help him with it,” said Rosenberg, “but he said no thanks. He was in a rush to move on.”

  On a bright winter’s afternoon, Stan and Mary Alice Collins waited at the bottom of the black run of Grizzly Bowl at Sundance, the snowy canyon winds whipping at their faces. Redford and Lola were up top, ready to go. As ever, Bob was first off the mark, slaloming off dramatically. Jerry Hill, the Sundance mountain manager, watched him go. Redford had learned to ski for Downhill Racer and never gave up the sport. “He was more showy than expert,” says Hill, who has watched thousands of skiers over fifty years. But the appeal for Redford was more than spartan exercise. It was the love for the mountain that had him out all summer carefully cutting back the weed aspens and preparing the runs with Jamie, so that they could ski on a pristine surface at the start of every season.

  This morning, Stan Collins was reveling in Redford’s relaxation. “I missed the old Bob,” says Collins. “In New York in the old days we played tennis in Central Park a couple of times a week and talked away the worries of the world. When he got his own court at Sundance, we played a lot. Then it became sporadic. There were always flights to catch and movie locations.”

  Stan watched the Redfords reach the end of the ski run. A table had been reserved at the Grill Room for dinner. Soft-shell crabs had been flown in, and he was looking forward to catching up. “But then someone came and said there was an urgent call for Bob. Hendler was calling from L.A., Hollywood business. Bob told Lola and the rest of us to go ahead for dinner, that he’d catch up later.” Collins remembers the shadow crossing Lola’s eyes. “She just looked at him and said, ‘You know, Bob. Do what you have to do. Don’t worry about us. We’ll do what we need to do.’ The meaning,” says Collins, “was obvious.”

  “I admit it,” says Redford, “I miscalculated the effects of fame and work. It took a toll, a hell of a
toll, on Lola and the family. I thought I could handle it. I thought I had the recipe. But I was wrong. No matter how focused you feel you are, the distractions and deviations are too many. It was kind of a shock, I think, to all the family, to realize we’d moved on.”

  Redford shared with no one the extent of his domestic breakdown, but it disturbed him and, though he had doggedly avoided therapy, he felt the pressing need for objective analysis. In his view, the marriage had been good for fifteen years, but he and Lola had changed as individuals. Still, they tried to address the changes and rebuild. They’d tried a trial separation, which didn’t work, and a recommitment, which didn’t work, either. “Bob was born to be alone,” believed Michael Ritchie. “Guilt was a real problem for me,” Redford says now, reflecting on his priorities during the marriage. “Where did I fail, because I was certain I did fail. And why?”

  At this emotionally intense time, the wheels started turning on his first film as a director, Ordinary People.

  As far back as 1975 Redford had told Pollack that he wanted to direct. Pollack considered it “inevitable. He had to do it, because he had a visual sense all of his own.” Professionally he seemed in prime position. But despite the money he had helped make for Warners, Columbia and Fox, and the many well-disposed influential friends, no one was especially keen on the idea of him as director of Ordinary People, a story considered dour. Finally just one—Bluhdorn’s new protégé at Paramount, Barry Diller—welcomed the project. “I wasn’t crazy about Ordinary People,” said Pollack. “I thought he chose a hard first subject, because it was entirely about emotion, so it was dependent on great directing of actors, of which he had no experience. Something more pictorially sumptuous, I thought, would have been right for his debut.”

  But Redford entertained no doubts. “I probably started as a director in the fifties,” he says. “I was a magpie. I collected bits and pieces of life observations. A line from a book here, a character in conversation there, a piece of music, a childhood remembrance.” Sure enough, elements of experience and observation, from the Pachelbel music first encountered in Big Sur to the North Shore Chicagoans he shared rooms with at the University of Colorado, populated his vision of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People from the moment he read the novel in galley form. “It was a flood of stuff I couldn’t stop, like I had been storing it all my life for this moment,” he remembers.

  Guest’s novel is the story of the Jarretts, tax attorney Calvin and his homemaker wife, Beth, and their high school jock son, Conrad, who live in the elegant Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. Everything is tautly ordered but the family is in trauma, attempting to fix itself after the accidental death by drowning of older son Buck, for which Conrad blames himself and over which he has attempted suicide. Against Beth’s wishes, Calvin supports Conrad’s psychiatric therapy, where he attempts to come to terms with deeply divided feelings about his mother. “She’ll never forgive me for getting blood all over the bathroom floor,” Conrad tells his shrink.

  Alvin Sargent had spent a year on the first draft but, says Redford, had trouble relating to the characters. “To him, the people in Guest’s book were boring and transparent. But I found them intriguing. I remembered hitchhiking to a wedding in Lake Forest with a friend back in 1958. We went to a place full of immensely rich people drenched in ennui whose main concern was the status of their tax returns. That was the life in that part of Chicago. These were the Chicagoans whose lives I wanted to look inside.” To egg on Sargent, Redford drove him to Lake Forest: “I dragged him to some parties to let him meet these people. I told him, ‘Look at these people. Look at how seamless the façade is. Go past it. It’s the hidden text that will lift the movie, not specifically the dialogue.’ ”

  The more Redford dove into the script, the more he shut off his own self-analytical urges. “I knew I was headed for therapy, but I decided to postpone it till after the film. I didn’t want to corrupt my read of the Jarretts, the analysis that I would put into the mouth of the psychiatrist Berger, by importing new analytical voices. I had a view of this family, of where it fell down through lack of talking, plain and simple, and I wanted to portray that on-screen, I suppose, as a kind of observational comment about the state of marriage in America at the end of the twentieth century.”

  Gary Hendler was brokering what would be one of his last deals for his client. While Diller himself was flexible, Michael Eisner, Diller’s second in command, was insisting that Redford also star in the movie. “They got me over the coals,” says Redford, “because they knew how badly I wanted to direct. But I refused point-blank to even consider acting in this film. I knew exactly what I wanted on-screen and I told Gary to hold out.”

  Hendler did. Eisner, according to his autobiography, was emphatic that if this gift of trust was to be given to Redford, an untried director, he would have to work for guild minimum wage. Hendler wanted a deal commensurate with what Redford was receiving as an actor. “I did not want to accept a high fee,” says Redford. “My line was, ‘Yes, I’d earned the best fees as an actor because I proved my worth. I had not proved anything as a director.’ So I insisted on Gary backing off. I said, ‘Whatever the standard first director’s fee is, that’s what I want.’ ” Hendler had been asking for $750,000. Now he accepted $30,000. When the movie scored, Diller chose to pay an unsolicited bonus of $750,000. Eisner lamented this payment, judging it “hardly worth it, since Redford never made another movie for us.”

  The casting of Ordinary People was a constant preoccupation throughout Brubaker. Redford entered the process with a clear picture in his mind: he wanted Gene Hackman for Calvin Jarrett, Mary Tyler Moore for Beth and Richard Dreyfuss for the psychiatrist. Little of this went as planned. Dreyfuss, when Redford called, confessed he was going through a nervous breakdown and was therefore incapacitated. Eisner, whose nature was to be intrusive, wanted Lee Remick for Beth, and Judd Hirsch, whom Shauna thought of as the ideal replacement for Dreyfuss, was tied up on the television series Taxi, with only eight days off in the foreseeable future. Redford dug in his heels, attempting to persuade Hackman and continuing to push for Moore. Slowly a new picture came into view. As a potential replacement to play the psychiatrist, Redford interviewed Donald Sutherland. “But suddenly Donald told me straight: ‘I want to play the father.’ I was more than surprised, but I was also very touched by his directness. He wasn’t iffy. He just laid it out and in that instant convinced me.” Sutherland became Calvin, which prompted Redford to go back to Hirsch. “I just felt it was too important not to lose authenticity in the casting, so I called up Judd, avoiding the agents, since they always mess things up, and made a proposal. My idea was if I could reschedule the work in such a way that all the psychiatrist scenes were done together over several days, like a minimovie within a movie, I could finish with Judd in a very short period of time and get him back to Taxi. Judd didn’t hesitate. He loved the part and he said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ ”

  The biggest casting problem was Conrad. “We literally went around the country, trying places like the Louisville Rep, trying Los Angeles, San Francisco, the high schools.” Finally Redford’s publicist, Lois Smith, sent him a hazy videotape copy of a movie called Friendly Fire in which Tim Hutton, the nineteen-year-old son of the actor James Hutton, who had died of cancer four months previously, appeared briefly. “From the high school roundup, I’d already cast Elizabeth McGovern to play the kid’s girlfriend,” says Redford. “In fact, she was the first person I’d cast: she was so fresh and unaffected. Then I called in Tim, who was like his father, whom I knew—gangly, sensitive and inquisitive about human behavior. The minute I got Liz and Tim to read a scene together—pow! That was it. They took it out the window! I knew I’d have to reel them in for the movie, but I knew it was chemistry I could work with.”

  Hutton was aided, undeniably, by the new emotions of his recent loss. “He opened up a lot, which was helpful for both of us,” says Redford. “But it was also dangerous ground, that no-man’s-land between the direct
or-actor engagement and personal interrelating. I was wary of transgressing. There was another factor. Many people considered the role of Conrad to be the heart of the piece. That wasn’t true. I felt the key was Beth. Berger, the psychiatrist, was the bridge. But Beth was the ailment. To understand what Conrad was going through, we had to experience the distress of this damaged woman. More than anyone, we had to cast Beth right.”

  Pollack had strongly recommended Jane Fonda for the role. Redford thought different. For several months, whenever he walked on the shore beside his new L.A. base at Trancas Beach, near Malibu, he’d see Mary Tyler Moore, the actress who dominated comedy television through the 1970s with her eponymous ABC show, walking in the opposite direction. Hers was the only light entertainment he watched on TV through the seventies, and he liked her elegance. “She really barely acknowledged me,” he says. “But I got to thinking what great, bright-eyed style she had and wondering about her own dark side.”

  Moore vaguely recalled a fleeting hello, but, she says, she “tended to avoid his eyes. All I ever saw of him were his shoes.” Her respect for Redford’s privacy was enhanced by her own shyness. “Neither of us, I learned, were social types. I was going through a period of major change. My comedy years were over. My marriage to [television executive] Grant Tinker was on the slide, and I was in a state of forced reevaluation.” Over the next three years would come divorce, the accidental shooting death of her depressed son, Richie, the suicide of her younger sister, Ann, and the serious illnesses of both her parents. Redford knew nothing of Moore’s problems but instructed his agent to call her agent, John Gaines.