The IRM was officially launched in the fall of 1982. Robert Wood, Carter’s secretary of housing and urban development, was chairman. Wayne Owens, Ted Wilson, Stewart Udall and Howard Allen were among the principals. Chris Dodd and California congressman George Miller, straddling action committees, joined Beer in fund-raising duties.
Redford spent the year sharpening his political game. In April, he was on the campaign trail with Ted Wilson, who challenged Orrin Hatch for the Utah Senate seat. For three months, says Wilson, Redford sidelined all his arts work in order to accompany him on the stump. “He was the lifeblood of my campaign,” says Wilson. “Hatch had the fiscal advantage, raising $4 million, against my $1 million. But most of what I raised was thanks to Bob. He drove it, and he didn’t do it from behind a desk. He did it just like those scenes in The Candidate, joining me at street-corner rallies in places like Ogden and Provo. He was tireless.” When they traveled together, says Wilson, all they did was scheme. “His objective was symbiosis,” says Wilson. “Central to my politics was environmental review and new control mechanisms for the energy industry. Bob saw my election essentially as a tool for his own aims.” Though Wilson failed in his bid, he saw Redford’s objective harden: “He told me, ‘At some point soon there will be a conservation crisis. As a nation we’ll be forced to face the consequences of bad energy policies. We need a better information system to get ready for that day.’ There’s no two ways about it: he was visionary regarding energy and environment.”
The previous spring, the National Committee for Air Quality had filed a shocking impact report that triggered marathon congressional debates about the enforcement of environmental laws. Then the NRDC launched the first coordinated scheme of legal actions against industrial polluters under its own Citizen National Enforcement Program. Redford joined the battle, seeking meetings with energy companies, landowners and local authorities all across the Southwest.
By 1982 America was deep in recession, with unemployment above 10 percent and interest rates sky-high. Beer observed Redford extend himself even at this time of economic downturn, digging deep into his own pockets, working with Indiana congressman Phil Sharp, another environmentalist, and drifting away from the world of movies and art. In his only major magazine interview of the era, Redford told journalist George Haddad-Garcia that he might direct another film, might star in two more.
But in truth the grip of the movies was unshakable. It was a calling to do with storytelling and polemic, with making people ruminate and infer and choose. It pressed upon him all the time, in his long insomniac nights of obsessive reading and now in the Sundance Institute, with the student labs bustling with activity at the end of his garden. After months of finance meetings and political rallies he found himself, once again, lured back to a movie. The previous year Barry Levinson, director of the recent Diner, had come to assist at the June lab and asked Redford, in return, to consider a role in his follow-up project. Sharing a flight to Los Angeles after a second lab session, Redford suggested Levinson forget the work he was developing and look instead at a script by Roger Towne, based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, The Natural.
Redford had never forgotten the joy Tiger and Charlie found in baseball when he was a small child, or his own teenage fascination with Ted Williams, the left-handed (like himself) Boston Red Sox great. “I loved his individualism,” says Redford. “He had no time for the media. His business was hitting, period. When I watched Ted, I saw a man with a mission.” Redford’s occasional fantasy of portraying Williams in a movie came alive when he read Towne’s adaptation. Over the years he had poo-pooed the baseball movies he’d seen. None, not Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees nor James Stewart in The Stratton Story, touched him at all. “Because I was a baseball player, I saw all the flaws, none worse than Tony Perkins in Alan [Pakula] and Bob’s [Mulligan] Fear Strikes Out, which was a poor depiction of the Red Sox’s Jimmy Piersall.” Apart from technical inaccuracies, no baseball movie had ever reflected the grandeur of the game for him. The Towne script, however, was onto something new.
Redford believed Malamud’s source novel had a Swiftian dimension. It told the story of Roy Hobbs, a gifted midwestern kid who heads off to Chicago to try out for the Cubs, armed with Wonderboy, the bat he carved from a tree felled by lightning. En route he is seduced by Harriet, a strange siren who distracts him with tales and fables, then insanely shoots him. Recovered fifteen years later, Hobbs emerges from the shadows to become the star player of the New York Knights and win his choice of ladies. At this point, Malamud’s fable about the corruption of heroes took a new turn in Towne’s hands. In the novel, Hobbs falls for another venal woman, Memo Paris, niece of the team manager, and takes a bribe to throw the game of the season. But Towne introduced redemption in the angelic Iris, Hobbs’s childhood sweetheart, who helps him overcome his injuries to right things.
Primarily based on the bizarre true-life story of Eddie Waitkus, the Philadelphia Phillies player whose career was cut short when he was shot by a crazed woman who then jumped out of a window, the novel also drew material from the 1919 World Series Black Sox scandal, where eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw games. On top of this, Malamud referenced an encyclopedia of fabled yarns, from the Fisher King to Orestes. Redford found the sources fascinating, “because I was convinced it was the only way to tell the Big Story of baseball. You could make a movie that would follow all the rules and maneuvers, but it would miss the symbolic scale of it all. Malamud’s achievement, enhanced by Towne, was to introduce the mythic aspect.”
Baltimore-born Levinson had evolved from television comedy writing in Los Angeles to scriptwriting for Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie and High Anxiety to the semiautobiographical Diner. He, too, found the mythology of The Natural appealing. For Diner, he had abandoned conventional narrative to tell his story through vignettes. The originality of Towne’s approach, which emphasized Malamud’s fancy, was, to him, hypnotic: “First of all, I was attracted by Bob’s personal attachment. Secondly, I am a huge baseball fan, just like Bob. But more than anything, I was won over by Malamud’s story and Towne’s development of it. It was simply one of the best things I’d ever read. Towne took this intricate tale and turned it into an edifying story about goodness. Bob didn’t have to convince me. I said, ‘Yes, yes, this will do.’ ”
A flood of creative ideas flowed between actor and director. Redford decided, as an homage, to adopt Ted Williams’s number, 9. It was also decided that the photography by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel would take its cue from a character in the novel, Judge Banner, who refers to people in terms of darkness and light. The opposing female figures, the gunwoman Harriet and the bighearted Iris, would be depicted in darkness and iridescence, respectively. Hobbs’s childhood would be shown in a two-color sepia-like palette that would emphasize the pale greens and burnt yellows of a summery Midwest. These conceptualizations were planned in detail with Redford and carefully hand-drawn before a foot of film was shot. “What Bob and I wanted from the movie was lightness and irony,” says Levinson, “though most of the critics eventually chose to see it as a serious, even grim, piece of work.”
Through June 1983 Redford prepared for the movie with a rigorous fitness routine that included weeks of batting practice with a team of semipro players. He phoned Ted Williams, who was fishing in Nova Scotia and missed his call. Williams would later affectionately acknowledge Redford’s homage and send him signed memorabilia. “It was the best place to be,” says Redford, “full of childhood dreaming and hardball playing. After my long absence, I was ready for a good movie.”
The Natural would fulfill the first part of a two-picture deal that Gary Hendler had brokered for him with Columbia two years before. But Hendler was no longer Redford’s legal counsel—he was the president of a new movie company, TriStar, a partnership between divisions of Columbia, HBO and CBS, which had inherited The Natural. The men took a walk on the beach at Malibu to discuss Hendler’s new role. They had been toge
ther for sixteen years, and Redford was happy to credit his friend with enormous help in building his career and holding on to Sundance. But he had doubts about Hendler’s ability to move into moviemaking. “It seemed to me a no-win scenario for him,” says Redford. “He was being asked to run a studio with no practical knowledge, and that, to my thinking, had to be the role of the fall guy.” Hendler wanted Redford’s blessing of support and, reluctantly, Redford gave it. “But it was a lousy decision by me. Gary had the look of trouble in his eyes and I feared he was headed for disaster. I felt a loyalty to him that if that’s what he wanted, I felt that’s what he should get to do. But it got awkward when this new role he played put unwanted pressure on me at the worst time.”
Redford was in Buffalo, in upstate New York, on August 1, just settling into the first scenes of The Natural, when he got a call from a distressed Shauna in Boulder. She was at the apartment that Redford had recently purchased for her near the CU campus and had just been told that her boyfriend, a twenty-two-year-old fellow student, Sidney Lee Wells, whose mother owned the apartment block, was dead. Shauna and Wells had been close for months, even contemplating marriage. Wells had been shot in the back of the head. His body was found just a few doors down from Shauna’s place, in the apartment of Thayne Smika, a delinquent renter who owed several hundred dollars of back rent. Redford tried to comfort Shauna but she was, he says, “convulsed with confusion, in a terrible state.” Jamie, also attending CU, comforted his sister while Redford rented a jet, picked up Lola and flew to Denver, arriving at the apartment within hours. Inevitable gossip surrounded the killing. Allegations of cocaine trading involving Wells were made, but the police suspected the murder occurred when Wells confronted Smika for payment of the rent. Smika would be arrested on suspicion of the murder but later released when prosecutors deemed the evidence against him too circumstantial. Four years later Smika would disappear, evading charges against him of forgery and theft, unrelated to the murder. The lack of closure in Wells’s death would be a terrible burden on the family for years to come.
The Redford family attended Wells’s funeral at the Christ Congregational Church in Longmont, Colorado. The atmosphere there was hysterical, with British tabloids paying locals to climb trees, the better to get photographs of the mourners. Redford, who had hired bodyguards, was sickened by the mêlée. “He was always somewhat retiring, but he became reclusive after that,” said Alan Pakula. “I often wondered was it some natural paranoid response, some recognition that he and his family were higher-profile targets than the rest of us.”
Redford returned to Levinson’s location a week later in a tense mood. “My concentration, obviously, was dented. I was thinking of my daughter’s dilemma, not any fictional scenario.” The tragedy of the early part of The Natural, where Hobbs loses his career to the assault of a maniac, was intensified by the personal strain. At War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, Redford had to face a gallery of hundreds and pretend to play ball. “It was the hardest thing in the world, with those worries on my back,” he says, “but experience kicks in. You blank things and find the zone. That worked, because it was what Roy Hobbs was doing with Wonderboy, overcoming his troubles to win the big game for the Knights. The movie was about overcoming adversity, about the power of self-belief.”
The cast, over whom Redford had approval, was a source of strength. Glenn Close, playing Iris, became a good friend and would later join the board of the Sundance Institute. Kim Basinger, cast as the seductress Memo Paris, also became a close companion, and for a while they were inseparable. “She was a blessing,” says Redford. “I needed supporters and that was a lucky set for me. There was a lot of love going around.”
From Levinson’s point of view, Redford’s vulnerability was both a challenge and an asset. “We needed each other, because there was an awful lot of stuff in that movie—the mythology, the poetry, the history, the humor. I like to talk. Bob sometimes likes to talk. And, boy, did we have a lot to talk about.” The biggest challenge was the story’s time span, which obliged Redford to portray Hobbs as a teenager and an aging player. “I wasn’t concerned about the wide age issue,” says Levinson. “But I was bothered by his batting. You cannot fake a great batter. We wanted ‘the natural’ and there must have been some anxiety for him because the word went out that he was Bob the Jock. There was apprehension. People laid bets. But we needn’t have worried. Soon as he hit the field, he was sizzling. He took scores of pitches and lined them into the outfield and hit several three-hundred-footers into the right-field stands. He didn’t just look the part of the ace. When push came to shove, he delivered Ted Williams.”
Of some concern to Redford was the warmth he was conveying as Hobbs, who, in Towne’s script, is impressively lovable. “I reviewed my work of the seventies and found I’d begun to come across on-screen as cold, something I hadn’t intended,” says Redford. “I decided this was the time to fix it.” For The Natural he sought openness and innocence and was encouraged by Levinson’s wry take on the world. “The trick really was Barry’s spin on the humor. He was a comedy writer who started with Marty Feldman and Brooks, so he had a grin going on all the time. That carried into Hobbs. He said, ‘Let’s not be crease browed about this. We’re looking to leave the audience with a smile on its face. It’s a fun tale.’ ”
There were different kinds of complex challenges for Gary Hendler. The Natural was to be his big chance, the test of TriStar’s marketing. Levinson and Redford both felt the sharp edge of Hendler’s nervous impatience. “It was heartbreaking,” says Redford, “because suddenly he was in charge of having to figure out the studio logo and come up with production schedules and deal with not just one star ego, but many, many star egos. He tried to deal with it valiantly, but all the time he was ill. He’d always suffered from stomach ulcers. When things went wrong, it was his stomach that gave in first. It was pushed into the background for a long time, but bit by bit we discovered the illness was more serious, that he had developed stomach cancer and was fighting that as well.”
In the spring of 1984, Redford and Levinson found themselves burning the midnight oil for a rushed print to satisfy Hendler’s too-hasty distribution schedule. “It made no sense,” says Levinson, “because we’d spent $20 million making The Natural look so good, and here was this early completion deadline just to get in theaters to fit a summer social calendar.”
The first cut, a three-and-a-half-hour assembly that included a subplot centering on actor Michael Madsen, quickly bit the dust. “We had so many elements so well balanced,” says Levinson. “Randy Newman’s Americana music was spot-on. Mel Bourne gave us a wonderful design look. But then Hendler gave us a put-up-or-shut-up date, and we stupidly caved in. He pressured us to death, and we let the movie go without it ever being properly finished.” What doubly upset Redford and Levinson was Hendler’s last-minute decision to use a second-rate picture, Where the Boys Are ’84, as the TriStar flagship instead. “I don’t think there was malice of any kind in it,” says Redford, “just terrible misjudgment, which arose from Gary’s inexperience. The problem was, he was being pressured by higher-ups and gave in to that. He could have rationalized it with TriStar with greater strategy. But he was inexperienced and he didn’t see the long view, so we all lost out.”
When The Natural opened in May, just as TriStar had demanded, business was slack, and though it made its money back and garnered reasonable reviews, it seemed a hollow victory. For Levinson it left a sour taste “because there was a better version available”; for Redford it was “worthy, something I’m proud of.” Nevertheless, its fate represented a downturn for Redford, if only in Hollywood icon terms. Alan Pakula thought it was a miscalculation. “He hadn’t been on-screen as an actor for five years [sic]. His intellectual strengths were proved in All the President’s Men and Ordinary People. My belief was that he needed something far grittier, more believable, than The Natural. I thought he was at a crossroads, winning that Academy Award. There was never a better time for him t
o turn to the classics, or roughen up. But he took the soft option.” George Roy Hill felt the film was “vaporous.”
The fact that Redford did his job as well as he did in the midst of Shauna’s trauma was an achievement. But the squabbles about distribution that followed mitigated all sense of accomplishment. The relationship with Hendler from this point on was never better than awkward. They shared one more movie transaction, but within two years, as Redford predicted, Hendler lost control of TriStar. He was replaced and slipped into semiretirement, dying of cancer five years later.
Depressed and anxious as Shauna still was, Redford sought to distract her by involving her in prep work for a project that had been offered to him as potential director, but that Sydney Pollack had inherited. Out of Africa, based on Danish novelist Karen Blixen’s memoirs, would be set in Kenya, and already he and Pollack had started their routine of fireside conversations to build the movie, in which he would star. As Christmas approached, he took Shauna with him to Africa. For months he had been corresponding with the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who shared an interest in conservation. “I knew Shauna hadn’t allowed herself to grieve,” Redford remembers. “The shock was still in her system. She needed distance and she needed something to absorb her intellect. So I called Leakey and asked him to help out.” In response, Leakey asked them to join an archaeological dig at Lake Turkana on the Ethiopian border. The trip helped them both recover.
But back in the United States in March, while Redford was returning from an institute board meeting, he received a call telling him Shauna had been involved in a serious car accident outside Provo. As she drove in darkness, her Bronco had run off Interstate 215 and plunged into the Jordan River, where she was trapped in the car. Only the heroic acts of four passersby who dove into the freezing waters in which Shauna’s car was fully submerged saved her life. Press reports called Shauna “continually depressed,” an understatement to those close to her. “It was the nightmare I dreaded,” says Redford, “but she got through it, she got the help she needed. Lola, everyone, did their best.”
Robert Redford Page 39
