Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford’s desire to repair the friendship equaled his need to rebuild his career—and his need to fortify Sundance. “I had an affection for Sydney that never waned. I also admired his creative skills and appreciated what he gave to me in those twenty years of good collaboration.” At the end of the eighties, the gift Pollack bore was an intriguing demi-hero called Jack Weil in a psychologically involving romance. In Rascoe’s plot, inveterate, expert gambler Weil heads for Cuba in the last days of the Batista regime, befriending Roberta (Lena Olin), the wife of rebel leader Dr. Arturo Duran (Raul Julia), on the Key West ferry. The country is about to fall to the revolutionaries, and Weil’s guess is that the high rollers will hit the casinos for one last big game. This, he reckons, is his last chance for a big score. His efforts are compromised by his passion for Roberta, which becomes a dangerous involvement when Duran mysteriously disappears. The love story evolves into suspense, building to a bittersweet finale that echoes Cuba’s fate.

  For Pollack (and, later, several critics) Weil was a quasi Finch Hatton, another adventurer inured to true human engagement—perhaps, indeed, an opportunity to “correct” Finch Hatton. Redford saw something entirely different. His identification with Weil, he says, was his strongest since the Jeremiah Johnson character. “No role is strictly autobiographical, but you transfer your ethos and experience. Weil was one of my more interesting characters because I related to his personal journey. He goes to Cuba looking out only for himself. Then he meets Roberta and attachment comes into it. One learns that there is no true state of independence. You can be as rebellious as you like, but finally you conform in order to survive, or to help those you love survive. Weil was fascinating because he made a snap decision to adjust his belief system. He was a man at the end of a long journey acknowledging the limits of his dream and facing up. It resonated personally.”

  Little of the old-style collaboration accompanied this, their seventh movie together, but Redford threw himself heartily into it, believing that the movie also had “something to say about the tragedy of Cuba.” Pollack said, “We were bound by a belief that a huge part of Latin culture is lost to Americans. This movie isn’t overt social commentary in any way, but I like to think most of my movies shot against political events stimulate productive discussion. I think Bob and I liked where we started on Havana.”

  The movie was filmed partly in Key West, mostly in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Redford loved the foreign location for its richness, verdantly opposite but not unlike the New Mexico of Milagro, where he’d just taken a long-term lease on a hideaway home. The location calmed the tensions between the men, if only because its remoteness isolated them from the irritations of routine life. For a while they bonded as of old, hanging out together with Pollack’s brother, Bernie, exploring the hill town bars and flying to and from locations in Pollack’s plane. Under the surface, though, the scars of Out of Africa festered. Michael Ritchie believed that the reforged union was doomed by the men’s recent histories.

  Havana became an overlong (almost six-month) shoot that The Washington Post blamed on “overstudied” plotting. In classic Pollack style, the script was being constantly reworked by Rayfiel, but it could not, said Michael Ritchie, get away from the fact that it was really a rehashed and uncredited Casablanca. “It was quite brazen, actually. In Casablanca Bogey is nuts about the sexy Swede, Ingrid Bergman, who’s married to the underground leader Paul Henreid. In Havana it’s Bob mad about the sexy Swede, Lena Olin, who’s married to the rebel leader played by Raul Julia. Even the musical atmospherics are copied, with Casablanca’s Dooley Wilson replaced by vintage Sinatra. I think the hard laboring was caused by Sydney and his writers striving too hard.” Redford blames the shadow of Out of Africa. “I think that movie set the bar too high, in Sydney’s mind. He was trying hard, too hard, to make Havana something it couldn’t be.”

  Redford had wanted Jane Fonda to play Roberta, but Pollack insisted on Olin, who had come to prominence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Enemies: A Love Story. In Redford’s view, Fonda would have presented “a perfect foil” to leaven his creation of the flinty, edgy Weil; as it turned out, Olin’s Scandinavian theater-trained aesthetic worked too often against his loose, shoot-from-the-hip, part-improvised style, “which is not to say she wasn’t a fine actress.”

  Pollack contended that the friendship stayed intact while the frustrations over Redford’s work habits grew. “It was not the punctuality problem this time, but his refusal to do the homework was a killer. For example, Jack Weil’s dexterity with cards was essential. So I employed an expert to groom him and I begged him to practice. But he wouldn’t do it. An hour or two was all he’d put in. His attitude was, ‘I can play poker, man! I’ve been playing poker for forty years!’ ”

  Redford insists he did the homework. “But we’d got to the point where I, too, was a director, and I sometimes saw the shot differently. He knew that, and maybe it caused tensions. Also, I was not interested in his controlling my relationship with the leading actress, as he’d tried to do on Out of Africa. I was comfortable in my own space.”

  In the judgment of many, Redford insidiously took control to the point that Havana became his. Alongside the other Redford-Pollack collaborations it stands alone in mood and inflection, with Redford’s stubborn individualism stamped clearly throughout. The underlying philosophies, the moral values, the societal judgments, the wit seem comprehensively his. David Rayfiel states that Redford had small but meaningful writing input, adding depth to characters beyond his own. “He didn’t subvert it but he had a vision of its tone, and Sydney didn’t challenge that.”

  The handful of wry lines written by Rayfiel as the movie’s epilogue were among Redford’s favorites. Weil saves Roberta’s life but cannot remove her from the coming revolution. He returns alone to Key West. In the last scene he walks down to the ocean in a bleak sunset. The year is 1960. “It’s a new decade,” he says in voice-over. “I’m doing okay these days. But it’s not the same. I sit with my back to the wall, watch the entrance. You never know who’s going to walk in. Somebody blown off course? This is hurricane country.” The strife of existence and the moral ambivalence it commands, says Redford, are what Havana is about. “It’s that glorious gray area so rare in Hollywood films. When Jack Weil meets Roberta, he substitutes one dream for another. First he’s a hustler. Then he buys into something altogether more conventional: love. Neither dream saves him. He does the bad thing, he does the good thing, he loses either way.”

  When Havana opened around Christmas 1990, even the well-disposed critics pasted it. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone reported no chemistry at all between Redford and Olin. “Not a glimmer.… Nothing. Nada. And without it, you don’t have a love story. Some fundamental things still do apply as time goes by.” Peter Rainer in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “However much we might want to re-experience Casablanca, we can’t go home again using the same old road map.” Citing The Way We Were as Redford’s “most impassioned work,” Rainer concluded that the actor was now “armored in impassivity.” The movie, which cost $40 million, earned $9 million, making it by far the biggest failure of all the Redford-Pollack collaborations.

  Toward the end of Havana, Redford was increasingly concerned about Jamie’s worsening health, especially because he was so far away. This worry, added to the tensions with Pollack, made him uneasy. “Bob really needed comforting,” says Bernie Pollack, and he found it from Bernie’s new costume assistant, Kathy O’Rear, a thirty-five-year-old Californian of Irish descent. Bernie had known Kathy since the mid-seventies, when she’d worked as a tour guide on the Warners lot. Bernie gave her a break into costuming on Police Academy 2 and also assigned her as costume assistant on The Milagro Beanfield War, where, he says, she showed no interest at all in Bob. “But she had an attribute that Bob finds sexiest of all in women: wit. She was the kindest person, but also one of the most witty.” Between takes and through the wardrobe sessions, the co-workers became intimate friends. �
��And so something important ended on Havana, and something began,” says Pollack.

  Sonia Braga visited twice during the filming of Havana, but Kathy O’Rear would shortly replace her as Redford’s full-time live-in partner.

  Things were changing at Sundance, too. In 1989, Fox’s Suzanne Weil replaced Tom Wilhite as director of programs. Joyce Deep, once a senior adviser to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, became Redford’s new spokesperson and all-purpose troubleshooter. He first employed Deep to tackle a delicate labor crisis on the Arizona desert set of the Wildwood-produced The Dark Wind. The Tony Hillerman novels had been introduced to Redford by the Canadian-born former Goldcrest producer Jake Eberts. Redford had taken Eberts’s advice that a James Bond–type franchise was possible, optioned all the books for Wildwood and, with Eberts, made a funding deal with Columbia. The deal also involved complex product placement sponsorship for shortfall funding, where individual commodities are promoted by being featured in the movies. It was hardly worth the bother. Errol Morris, maker of the award-winning indie The Thin Blue Line, was assigned to direct the first movie, and Lou Diamond Phillips was cast as Officer Jim Chee. The decision to shoot entirely within the Navajo and Hopi reservations of Arizona for authenticity immediately mired the production. There were accusations of cynical cost cutting by engaging lowest-salaried extras and exploiting Native American resources without payment. Redford was forced to interrupt work on Havana to intervene. “But his real mistake,” says Wildwood producer Patrick Markey, a friend of Redford’s since Brubaker, “was that he didn’t insist on actually directing the movie himself. Bob had the Indian sensibilities; Errol did not. I tried to fire Errol in the first week, because his attitude to the Native Americans was all wrong. We got sunk, financially, morally, in every way, because of Errol’s patronizing attitude. We called in Bob because we had to rebuild faith quickly before we lost the extras, the backgrounds, everything.”

  Joyce Deep was summoned to stem the rebellion. Her reward was an invitation to join what Redford now decided was Sundance’s “second team,” whose environmental crusade, locally and nationally, would go on. “I checked him out,” says Deep, “and I judged him to be a brilliant national cultural asset who was really, worryingly disorganized. The reason I joined was his energy, which reminded me of Mike Dukakis’s. He was very holistic, very universal in his approach to culture and politics. I understood quickly that he was overcommitted with the movies and what he then called ‘the Sundance entities.’ It was a complicated situation that covered national environmental awareness, local energy issues in Utah, fund-raising for his nonprofit arts institute and all the other bits and pieces of commercial endeavor in retail catalogs, farm produce, the resort, et cetera. It seemed unmanageable, but he wanted help to simplify it. There was no grand plan. It was all in motion. He asked me how I saw it, and I said, ‘It’s all about reprioritization.’ He liked that. We agreed that was a great place to start.”

  The employment of Deep, Ted Wilson felt, cast the mold for all future activism. “He basically said, ‘From now on I’ll fight the battles by proxy. I’ll support the key congressional movers, I’ll debate in the op-eds, but I’ll do it at one point remove. Stop thinking of me as an elective candidate. I’m a moviemaker.’ ” Redford was supporting NRDC’s campaign to block Congress from exempting nuclear reactors from the provisions of the Clean Air Act, activism that brought him close to Julie Mack, another new assignee. Mack was the prime organizer of the Utah Clean Air Coalition, which he had joined in the highway-planning dispute. She became his environmental spokesperson, aligning Sundance with the newly formed Utah Wilderness Coalition to help draft a Citizens’ Proposal Bill, to counteract a wilderness-limiting Republican proposal that was in the offing. Logan-born Mack professed herself “shocked” by Redford’s preparedness for the fight. “When I came for the job interview, he was disorganized. There was a fat file of issues spilling onto the floor. But he had done his research. He didn’t want to be a figurehead. He wanted to be in the action, anatomizing the legislation, analyzing the court judgments, dismembering government. He would constantly cite his belief in grassroots political action. He would say, ‘The little fight is as important as the heavyweight bout. We can’t let precedent steamroll the people. We have to rewrite legislation.’ He made it very clear to me and Joyce that this was a new, fighting Sundance.”

  Stormy waters lay ahead. Within months, Weil was gone. A major investigative feature by Peter Biskind in Premiere magazine charged Beer with mismanagement and Redford with naïve neglect. According to Biskind, Sundance, in Redford’s absence, had become a fiscally compromised embarrassment. Wilhite, said Biskind, failed because, despite innovative creativity, he didn’t click with Redford. Weil did, but, wrote Biskind, she failed because she followed Beer’s example of rudderless extravagance. According to Gary Burr, resort manager Brent Beck’s assistant, Beer “charged the institute for flowers and catering expenses for parties,” incurring entertainment bills of $200 to $300 per night, two or three nights a week. His expenses often approached $20,000 monthly, said Burr. “By the time the summer [programs] came around, there wasn’t enough money for [the institute] to pay for food and housing. Gary didn’t understand that he was working for a nonprofit, and that the people around him were working for almost nothing.”

  “I never abused the institute finances,” says Beer in his defense. “But I was the sitting target because, after Sterling Van Wagenen, I came to oversee all the different areas at the same time. That was one hell of a juggling act, and I defy anyone to string together all the different cultures of L.A., the studios, the Beltway, the politicos, the trust funds—and not spend money. Also, whatever I did, I did with Bob’s and [lawyer] Reg Gipson’s full support.” Gipson believes that “blaming Gary was cheap and mean-spirited, because there were so many complicated aspects concerning the seeking of grants, pursuing benefactors, forging friendships with studios, and generally building up a machine that empowered independent filmmaking. Biskind may have forgotten that we were dealing here with something no one had ever attempted before.” One of Biskind’s sharpest swipes was at Redford, who, he claimed, maneuvered undeserved tax relief against resort expenses. Redford admits only to “some really dumb errors of judgment in the power I entrusted in people. There’s no question that there were mistakes, but they weren’t of the sinister caliber that was implied. They were mistakes of inexperience, maybe of overambition.” Still, the core indictment was a cruel one: that Redford couldn’t or wouldn’t run Sundance himself and, in the words of an anonymous staffer, “wouldn’t let anyone else run it either.” Redford doesn’t disagree: “Much was true, and it was painful for me as the years unfolded and the true nature of some of my senior management people emerged and the skeletons came out of the cupboards. Our problem was the relative size of Sundance. It was not a little arts colony by the Provo River. It was always meant to reach out, and by the nineties, with the festival booming, we had affiliates in Cuba, Russia and Japan. That’s a lot of people moving in a lot of directions at the same time, and that means it’s going to be hard to keep track. I made a mistake with Gary Beer because he worked for his own interests. He didn’t relate to the junior staffers, and I saw the rifts, but ignored them. I also made a mistake with Reg Gipson, whom I allowed too much latitude.”

  As public scrutiny of Sundance went on, Redford redrew the lines. Among Wilhite’s innovations was the Great Movie Music symposium, a black-tie fund-raiser staged at Lincoln Center that mustered many of Hollywood’s scoring luminaries and their families and supporters. It raised $600,000, with Redford hosting. Redford canceled subsequent fund-raisers, proving to some that Biskind was right in his accusation of “schizophrenic leadership.” In Redford’s mind he was reestablishing the tactical position he had taken back in 1981, when the institute began. “I told Gary, ‘Do not use me as the flag carrier in this way. I will help. I will meet people and state our case. But I do not want to become the calling card. If the institute
’s principles are good enough, it is destined to work. If not, so be it. So no more black-ties.’ ”

  The consolation of moviemaking remained impervious. For several years Redford had been circling one project, an adaptation of Norman Maclean’s elegiac novella A River Runs Through It. Its resonance of times past, of the joy and dilemma of family and the mystery of origins, lured him first in 1981. Now it assumed an urgent relevance, and by a series of fortuitous events, the rights came his way.

  Maclean, a University of Chicago professor, published the pithy, part-autobiographical book shortly after his retirement in the 1970s. In 1981, while visiting Tom McGuane in Montana, Redford found himself debating the authenticity of the concept of the western. “We were discussing the essence of the western experience—living it, as opposed to loving it,” says Redford. “We started talking about authors who caught the truth: A. B. Guthrie, Vardis Fisher, Wallace Stegner. Then Tom told me about this amazing little story by a retired professor. He said, ‘Trust me, read it, it’s the real thing.’ ” Redford says he was overcome by the last line in the book: “I am haunted by waters.” “I thought, Whoa, this cuts to the heart all right. This connects environment, family and the immutable nature of destiny. This is the western I want to see.”

  In the mid-eighties, Redford invited the reclusive Maclean, who still lived in Chicago, to Sundance to discuss a possible adaptation, but before he could conclude a deal, the rights were snatched from him by Annick Smith, a lab student who’d established a homestead ranch in Montana’s Blackfoot River Valley, the locale of A River Runs Through It. Smith developed her adaptation at Sundance but failed to win studio backing. Others before her had tried to mount this film, including the actor William Hurt. When Smith’s option lapsed, Redford stepped in.

  Redford kept up a constant correspondence with Maclean and visited Chicago repeatedly. “I was fatalistic. Norman was idiosyncratic. If his views and my views corresponded, then it would work. I confronted him like that. I said, ‘I will tell you what I’d like to do, and you tell me straight if you like my thinking or not. When it comes down to it, I’ll give you the draft script. If you dislike whatever it is I want to shoot, you be the decider: you pull the plug. If you say stop, I’ll stop.’ ”