Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Those who knew both Pollack and Redford felt the latter’s success with Ordinary People created a new tension between the men, relieved to some degree by Pollack’s success just a year or so later with Tootsie, a movie he also appeared in alongside Dustin Hoffman and which was nominated for ten Oscars. In Paul Newman’s opinion, “those guys were in hot competition, no doubt about it.” In Redford’s view, though, Pollack was different from him, a deft traditionalist whose terrific skill was making serious subjects popular. He could deal diplomatically with the studios and was a master of patience, tact, organization. Redford felt himself edgier, attracted as much to whimsy as experiment and never content to repeat the formula. Some, like the actress Carlin Glynn, who served as adviser at the Sundance June lab tutorials, believed the spiritual differences of the friends opened a chasm. Each wanted elements of the other’s expertise—Redford with directing, Pollack with acting—but found no common language of shared endeavor beyond their initial roles, with Redford acting and Pollack behind the camera. “I think it made for some cynicism,” says Glynn. “They were buddies, but Sydney would not shy away from belittling Bob in front of people. I recall his attendance at one of the Sundance labs, addressing some students alongside Bob. Bob mispronounced some word, and Sydney was happy to correct him in front of the crowd, which I thought was unnecessary. They had this close connection, but it really started to strain.”

  For both men, the odds were against a comfortable ride on Out of Africa. There was disorder in Redford’s career. Directing Ordinary People seemed to confuse his attitude toward himself as an actor. During 1981, he had been offered a role in The Verdict, a courtroom drama written by David Mamet that Sidney Lumet was to direct. Lumet, who had employed Redford long ago in The Iceman Cometh, was appalled by the actor’s requests for six rewrites. The part required Redford to play a drunken lawyer hustling his way from one low-life client to the next, until he finally finds a case that offers salvation. Redford’s aim with the rewrites, said Lumet, was to “eliminate the unpleasant side of the character, trying to make him more lovable so the audience would ‘identify’ with him.” This, said Lumet, was “a misdirected cliché of movie-writing.” After a year of procrastination, Richard Zanuck and Fox gave the role to Newman, who won an Academy Award nomination for it. “I don’t concede it was about striving for the cliché,” says Redford. “I just found the character unrelatable to me at that time.” Before Out of Africa emerged, there were prospective projects with political satirist Garry Trudeau and with Tom McGuane, projects based on the Leonard Peltier case and the story of Irish nationalist hero Michael Collins—but few moved to the polished-script phase, let alone production planning. Only one, John Nichols’s magic realist novel The Milagro Beanfield War, truly roused him, but he thought this could be a future directing project, and, anyway, the rights belonged to someone else.

  Sensing career momentum slipping away and Wildwood teetering on the edge of extinction, Redford changed agents, signing with Mike Ovitz, who was in the process of setting up Creative Artists Agency, based on the Lew Wasserman–MCA model. Redford was wary of Ovitz, a failed law student who had started in the mailroom at William Morris, but he was respectful of Ovitz’s chutzpah. In less than ten years Ovitz had established a client list of 675 leading players, covering all aspects of entertainment. He also admired Ovitz’s CAA game plan, which was to sweeten the Wasserman technique by prepackaging movies in their entirety—concept, script, actors, all key creative personnel—and selling them to the studios. When they talked, Ovitz laid out his vision. He would not only remold Redford’s acting career, but reboot Wildwood. Out of Africa became his first contractual coup.

  Ovitz negotiated for Redford a fee of $6.5 million plus 10 percent of the gross, the actor’s best terms since A Bridge Too Far. Some opined that Pollack was jealous that his own deal lagged far behind, but nothing was discussed between the men, who embarked on the project, says Redford, as equals.

  The history of the project was convoluted. Blixen, who wrote novels under the name of Isak Dinesen, led the life of a coffee planter in colonial Africa. Orson Welles, David Lean and Nic Roeg had variously tried to mount a film about her life and romances, and a script, partly based on the memoir Out of Africa, had been in circulation since 1975. But it was Judith Thurman’s 1982 biography, which uncovered Blixen’s unhappy marriage and her strange love affair with Denys Finch Hatton, that mobilized the studios. Universal acquired the rights and, having sounded out Redford as a possible director, contracted Pollack. Pollack read Thurman’s biography and loved it: “I thought it was feminist and unusual. I also saw the pictures unfolding in my mind of a landscape no one knew. I’d never visited Kenya, where the story was set. I knew David Lean’s Africa, but this was completely different and therein was the excitement.” Pollack made a handshake arrangement with Redford to star as Finch Hatton and commissioned a screenplay from Kurt Luedtke, the Brown-educated former editor of the Detroit Free Press, who had recently written Absence of Malice for him.

  After the comedy of Tootsie Pollack was looking for something cerebral. “Apart from the obvious incongruity of the Jewish guy from South Bend, Indiana, tackling the life story of a Danish baroness among the Kikuyu and Somali tribesmen, there were a couple of big pluses from an adaptation point of view. Blixen’s memoirs were not narrative in any film sense, so we could speculate a lot. Her autobiographical writings were very self-analytical, which allowed us accurately into her heart and soul. And, of course, there was the bigness of the landscape, which created an extraordinary background for storytelling. It’s the kind of setting that amplifies everything, so you get power like a Shakespearean sonnet that seems small and yet has huge, huge resonance. I told Kurt, ‘We’re not into social history here, but every bit of it will tell the British colonial African story.’ ” Redford saw the risks of this kind of contextual storytelling. Referencing McCarthyism was one thing, but this was remote alien territory. “It didn’t faze me. I was as stimulated as Sydney. But I saw that risk of ‘America abroad’ films. Foreign culture has been historically difficult for American filmmakers. There’s often that ‘John Wayne abroad’ shallowness, which is the problem of one culture misinterpreting the subtleties of another. I thought the redeeming factor might be a damn good love story, which Sydney was so good at.”

  The character of Karen Blixen intrigued Redford. Born into wealth, she had been spurned by her first love, but settled for his brother, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who extravagantly invested her money in a plantation on the inhospitable slopes of the Ngong Hills near Nairobi. Bror hunted game while Karen dallied with Finch Hatton, another hunter who used the coffee plantation as a base between safaris. When Bror and Karen divorced, Finch Hatton refused marriage and died shortly thereafter in a plane crash. The intrigue in Blixen’s story centers on Finch Hatton’s true nature. According to Thurman’s biography, the evidence suggests Karen and Finch Hatton never made it to the bedroom; Blixen’s personal writings suggest otherwise, and there is evidence that she miscarried his child. Redford welcomed this ambiguity: “Firstly, it gives me, the actor, a wide range of possibilities in playing out the fantasy. But it’s also dynamic because the presence of Finch Hatton, historically and otherwise, becomes mystery incarnate. I thought he could be an interesting subject to portray.”

  Pollack wasn’t troubled by the blank canvas. “Blixen hardly mentions Denys [in Out of Africa, published in 1937], but Kurt gathered enough from Judith and from another book by Errol Trzebinski on Finch Hatton to build this great, fated romance,” he said. To play Blixen, Pollack considered a variety of actresses. In the sixties, there had been talk of Greta Garbo playing the role, and Pollack felt that a strongly sexual actress was vital. When Meryl Streep was proposed by Universal, he demurred. Streep was brilliant, but not, he felt, sexy enough. The decision was reversed when Streep insisted on an interview and showed up in a low-cut blouse and a push-up bra. “I really needed no convincing,” he said. “She was our national treasure,
and when we met, I understood that of course she could ooze sex when she chose to.” Streep’s involvement, too, was a further inducement for Redford. “It was always going to be the woman’s story. The bottom line was her suffering. She was a pioneer as much as Jeremiah Johnson. The hardship she endured, trying to manage a thousand native workers, struggling against the economic and cultural odds, was too much. But she never gave up. She was sustained with the hope of this phantom lover, Denys, to keep her going. Meryl found the role very touching, very worthwhile.”

  Not everyone was equally confident about Redford playing Finch Hatton, the archetypal Englishman. The son of the thirteenth earl of Winchilsea, Finch Hatton was educated at Eton and Oxford and had served in the military in Egypt but was essentially a man of leisure, most comfortable sipping port on safari with the Prince of Wales. The leap for Redford was difficult, not least with the accent. But he resolved from the start to immerse himself in the Britishness. “I knew I could do it. I worked with a voice coach in London called Joan Washington. I worked it. It was good. I was clear about how I wanted to play the character, and I understood Sydney was, too. I understood, as we began, that we were on the same page.” Pollack, though, had others to answer to. “They all came up with the same beef,” said Pollack, speaking of executives’ response. “ ‘What about the accent?’ My feeling was, It’s a small concern. It won’t matter. What does matter is we are getting a great star who generates electricity by the power of his presence. He is also a fine actor.”

  During the first days of filming at Mbogani, Blixen’s first home near the Ngong Hills, Pollack took Redford aside. Redford recalls him saying, “Bob, I’ve just had a call from Frank Price [Universal’s studio head], who says you won’t be accepted as an Englishman, that it will confuse audiences. So we have to drop it.” Redford pleaded his case, but was overruled. “From that point on, I began to struggle with the part,” says Redford. “It’s basic psychology. You have your approach. It works. You’re on your way. And then the rug is pulled from under you. It damaged the process.”

  Though some crew members claimed Streep and Redford didn’t get along, Redford is adamant that, in fact, their chemistry bore him up when some frustration with Pollack affected him. “She and I hit it off big time. Not only did we get along, we probably got along too well. It caused ripples. We liked to talk. We’d be off camera, between takes, taking it easy. We had a sense of humor in common. But Sydney didn’t like that. He would break it up. It bothered him that I was connecting with her in some way that didn’t fit his picture of me, or of us as a team. That wasn’t easy to deal with, because I felt I was in a vise and I became resentful.”

  After Tootsie, says Redford, he believed that, if anything, their relationship might improve. “Till then, all his successes were movies in which I starred. I felt good that he’d got some important individual success. I thought our friendship would be the better for it. But it wasn’t. He seemed to want more control than ever, and I wanted to be controlled less.”

  Pollack denied that. He claimed instead that the logistics of this, the most unwieldy production he’d ever attempted, diverted him from his usual close collaboration with Redford. “It was $31 million of pure hell,” Pollack recalled. “We were very far from home, very reliant on the good offices of people we didn’t know. We were importing animals, importing fake bone-stretched ears for the natives, marshaling giraffes, buffaloes, you name it.” Peace Corps volunteers, expat students and tourists beefed up the legions of extras. “We had so many people problems, because the white extras were harder to find in big numbers. But it was worse than that. There was also a lot of local misunderstanding, that we were shooting a colonial story about two people who, today, would be judged as racist. With all those nuisances, I gave Bob my best.”

  Still, some cast members observed Redford retract. He avoided social contact, buried himself in books and newspapers, disappeared for days on end. “I was making this romantic movie, which required the most delicate emotions,” says Redford, “and at the same time I was on the phone negotiating a divorce settlement and the dissolution of my former life with lawyers.”

  He was also beginning to have serious second thoughts about how Sydney wanted Finch Hatton portrayed. A number of memorable scenes, paramount among them the famous hair washing beside the hippo watering hole, conveyed the best of Hollywood magic. “As an actor inside that moment, there is an awareness of specialness,” says Redford. “But there were issues. Sydney, I always felt, was afraid to express sex in an open, liberal way. He wanted to stay inside the safety boundary. But I always wanted to push it. I felt that a great electrical sexuality can be achieved in touch, in looks, in the caress. Meryl, of course, got that. She was nervous of the hippos, because they’re territorial and we were in their space. But she gave a hell of a sensuality to that scene, and the movie gave me great joy in those times.”

  As Redford strove to project apt Englishness of manner opposite Streep’s sharply Danish Blixen, Pollack pushed him to “reduce, reduce, reduce.” Redford interpreted this as Pollack falling back on the easy option, substituting Redford the romantic icon for a properly realized characterization. In his view, Streep was “encouraged to fly,” while he was restrained: “I felt I was a symbol, not a character.” By the time the filming ended, Redford and Pollack were hardly talking.

  In truth, Redford’s iconography was the director’s best asset. In what would end up to be a long, digressive two-and-a-half-hour movie, it is Redford’s quixotic Finch Hatton—not Streep’s virtuosity—that dominates. Once Finch Hatton begins courting Blixen, insistently inviting her to join him as he scouts for a camp base in the Mara for his soon-to-be safari tourists, a dull drama becomes engaging.

  The southwestern premiere benefit for the Sundance Institute was staged at Redford’s behest in Provo a week before Christmas 1985. Already there was talk of awards. The box office boomed, grossing $250 million—surpassing Redford’s best earner to date, The Sting—and, duly, the Academy Award nominations came in copious measure, equaling those for Steven Spielberg’s contender, The Color Purple. Pollack went on to win best director, and the movie won best film and five other awards.

  The movie’s one casualty was Redford. Not only was he overlooked on the awards circuit, but the critics were unkind. Pauline Kael once again singled him out: “He seems adrift, lost in another movie, and Pollack treats him with unseemly reverence.” David Denby was harsh, too: “He is so far out of his league that at first one feels sorry for him. But only at first. Whether he can’t do it, or won’t do it, we’re disgusted with him by the end.” Vincent Canby in The New York Times understood the heart of the problem: “It’s not Mr. Redford’s fault. There is no role for him to act.”

  Mike Ovitz felt he had a radical recipe for recovery. The package Ovitz put together with his clients, director Ivan Reitman and Top Gun writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., was a fluffy thriller called Legal Eagles, which he urgently pressed on Redford. Alan Pakula, when he heard it, cringed: “It was light entertainment. I think Mike believed Bob should get back to Barefoot in the Park, which, given how Bob had strived to evolve, was ridiculous.” Reitman, a Czech-born Canadian and an alumnus of the Saturday Night Live comedy coterie, had produced the crossover comedy Animal House in 1978. His directorial successes with Meatballs and Stripes should have served fair warning: they defined the coarse comedy Redford hated. “When I thought movie comedy, I thought Capra, Wilder, Cary Grant, Tracy and Hepburn,” says Redford. “And when I wanted alternative comedy, I went for George Carlin. But I hated where ‘hip’ comedy went in the seventies. It was a terrible cycle. When I took on Legal Eagles, I didn’t look into the people or the style closely enough. I just felt I should be open to Mike’s advice.”

  Reitman’s original choices for his Legal Eagles leads were Bill Murray, whom he’d discovered for SNL, and Dustin Hoffman. But their unavailability, said Ovitz, was Redford’s opportunity. This was also Ovitz’s golden moment. “Mike needed name pl
ayers and neon lights to lift his own career and I walked into it. And it kind of made sense at the time. Reitman had just had a major success with Ghostbusters, so he was hot. And … it had to be something I could chill out with.”

  The script had started life as a documentary project about the battle over the estate of the artist Mark Rothko. What it had become was jokey fiction about rising district attorney Tom Logan’s romantic attachment to a defense lawyer whose sexy client is accused of stealing a famous work of art by her father. The best part of the project for Redford was the financial deal Ovitz made: $8 million up front—most of which, one way or the other, went right into the institute projects. “But the script was the worry,” says Redford. “It was a patchwork of clichés from any number of TV legal dramas and caper movies, and I should have been wiser.” Debra Winger became his love interest, with Daryl Hannah, Terence Stamp and Brian Dennehy supporting.

  Despite Redford’s obvious marquee value, Reitman worried about his appropriateness for the role of Logan. As soon as they started, though, he says, he was won over. “I had very little sense of who Redford is. He is known as a fine, upstanding man who has a strong social conscience, which was great for the part of an assistant district attorney. But I was wondering where the comedy would come from. In time, he started telling me stories about himself, about his sense of humor, about his now-and-then bemusement, about his clumsiness.” The redrafted version of Logan was a divorced man with a teenage daughter who skips lightly through life’s trials. In Reitman’s eyes, he would be “a kind of Spencer Tracy sparking off Debra’s tough, sassy Kate Hepburn.” Redford embraced this with open arms “because it gave me something concrete to hook up to, something to shape these very unreal lives.”