Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Forty-two-year-old Robinson, whose modest baseball movie Field of Dreams had done so well, shared the kind of devotion to script that endeared him to his lead actor. The cover of the script given to Redford read, “Based on 27 man-years of drafts by Phil Alden Robinson, Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker.” It was Parkes and Lasker who’d pitched to Universal the notion of “a high-tech Dirty Dozen” as a follow-up to their 1983 computer-age War Games; but it was Robinson who, he says, “went on to write the forty million plot variations.” Robinson first saw himself as the screenwriter of the project only and refused Parkes’s initial entreaties to direct Sneakers, despite the career boost of Field of Dreams. According to Parkes, “we finagled Phil, and as soon as we had him, it seemed, we got Redford. Then Redford was the magnet for the other big hitters like Sidney Poitier and Ben Kingsley who came aboard.”

  The story line was unashamed Hitchcockian MacGuffin territory, involving National Security Agency infiltration that recalled Three Days of the Condor. Redford’s role was computer genius Martin Bishop (a name that references two of the CIA men listed as victims in Condor), whose electronic analysis team is tricked into stealing a mysterious black box that they subsequently learn has the power to breach all encrypted national security systems worldwide. What appears to be a story of NSA perfidy emerges as a grudge war between Redford’s Bishop and his college-days competitor, the devious Cosmo, played by Ben Kingsley.

  “My way of enjoying the role was hooking in to the whole issue of privacy in this information age,” says Redford. “Bishop’s team can get into anyone’s files. Not long before, I learned I’d been investigated by the Treasury Department and the LAPD. That blew me away. Treasury checked me out for six months because I went to Cuba to visit García Márquez for the Sundance Latin American program. In the case of the LAPD investigation, the best bet is they saw the Leonard Peltier film [Apted’s Incident at Oglala] and figured I was undercover with American Indian Movement radicals. All of it was paranoid nonsense, of course, but it made me think: this is Orwell’s Big Brother in the making. We are in a society now that has hidden cameras in malls, at banks, at drugstores. We have computers on our desks that are as much windows into our lives as windows on the world. People can hack into our personal information. Our credit cards are routinely stolen. Our Social Security numbers are traded. Sneakers reminds us to pay attention to all this new technology.”

  Redford worked from October through February, with breaks to wrap the edit of A River Runs Through It and ski with the family at Christmas. Frustrated as he was by the lightness of the subject, he was thankful for a movie that felt effortlessly sweet, especially because of Robinson’s humor and the kinship of ensemble acting. He found River Phoenix a gentle, respectful student; Dan Aykroyd (playing the gadgets wizard Mother) “all mischief and treason”; Poitier, Kingsley and Mary McDonnell, playing the love interest, stimulating dinner companions. The best moments, though, were the days in San Francisco when he found time to visit with Amy, who was attending San Francisco State University, studying film. In the last five years Amy’s interest in movies had grown through internships at the June labs. She had also spent time in London, where she’d started acting. Of the Redford children, friends say, Amy was most effusive in either applauding or criticizing her father. “She wasn’t good at phony politeness,” says a Sundance staffer. “In fact, she went punk, adopting a punk look with a punk attitude. When she addressed you directly, you tended to listen.” When Redford visited, says Amy, she was unimpressed by his description of Sneakers: “I told him he should be acting more and starring less.”

  Universal’s summer testing of a rough cut of Sneakers yielded such positive results that the release planned for Christmas was moved up to September. Decent reviews followed, and a satisfying gross: $51.5 million in the United States alone, a return doubled worldwide.

  The success did not dissuade Redford from breaking with Ovitz. “From the beginning I never really trusted him,” says Redford. “But I thought he was smart and shrewd in a tough business. I also thought that having someone represent you in so savage an environment who actually loves to do what you hate doing—that is, deal chasing—was a boon.” But, as he had told Lourd, he had grown uncomfortable with the direction in which Ovitz was nudging him.

  A number of projects Redford liked had died on the vine: a George Washington biopic; a morality tale about the rain forest that he discussed with Spielberg, who “got the visuals, but couldn’t get the subtext of the story”; a romantic comedy, The President Elopes, which Penny Marshall developed. Worryingly, none caught fire and he redoubled his efforts to find a script that would engage him and properly contrast River.

  Lourd now gave Redford an Amy Holden Jones script he had under development with new Paramount chairperson Sherry Lansing for his clients Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson. It was based on New York journalist Jack Engelhard’s hard-edged novel Indecent Proposal, with a flagrantly sexual theme. “It wasn’t drafted with Bob at all in mind,” says Lourd. “But he told me he was a risk taker, and I had an inkling this was just sufficiently outrageous for him.”

  Redford recalls reading the script in one sitting and being alternately engaged, surprised and amused by it. The role proposed to him was of a middle-aged billionaire intent on buying sex with a married young woman on a weekend in Vegas. “My gut did the talking,” Redford says. “Finally, it was fun and it was now. I didn’t ask for anyone’s opinions. I called Lourd and said, ‘Yeah, it will work.’ ” Lourd, together with his agent partner David “Doc” O’Connor, takes credit for revitalizing Redford’s career in the nineties. “Unquestionably he needed to find the new-generation audience,” says Lourd. “He was the megastar of the seventies, but tempus fugit and all that. It is the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who pay for the tickets. Bob had to shake up that market, and I knew putting him with Woody, who was huge from the TV series Cheers, and Demi, who was very hot, would open up that new audience for him.”

  Before the filming commenced, there was some irate discussion about the alterations to the source material. Engelhard, who viewed himself as a political conservative, felt his work was being distorted. He later deplored the choice of Redford: “The billionaire in my novel is not Robert Redford, but an Arab sheik. The husband is a Jewish speechwriter and the wife is a Grace Kelly type. So the novel, obviously, has many layers, political, religious, cultural, which Hollywood won’t touch.” English director Adrian Lyne reshaped the essence and under his supervision the Engelhard novel retained its Faustian theme but became less a study of cultural differences than of sexual role-play. Lyne, who began his career directing shorts in Britain fourteen years before, had stunningly captured the social fallout of sexual liberalism in Fatal Attraction, his fourth movie, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, earned $450 million and was labeled by Time “the zeitgeist hit of the decade.” One of his follow-ups, Jacob’s Ladder, about madness, comprehensively showed his grasp of deviant psychology. “The genius of Lyne was his timing,” says Lourd. “Fatal Attraction was the postfeminist, post–Fear of Flying kickback. Indecent Proposal cautioned against the sex-and-wealth ‘me me me’ nineties.” Redford’s enthusiasm was for “this nexus of energies, the morality tale, the timing, the subtexts.” Redford knew he was catching a wave. In 1992 Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct ingeniously blended Russ Meyer with Dynasty; Lyne’s Indecent Proposal had the same populist targeting, and was as illuminating of the insatiable urges of twenty-four-hour Las Vegas as Peyton Place once was of New England’s deceptive serenity.

  In the movie, David (Harrelson) and Diana Murphy (Moore), lovers since high school, run out of money building their Santa Monica dream home and try to recoup at the gaming tables; they fail. Entrepreneur John Gage (Redford) then offers David a million dollars for a night in bed with Diana. In the novel, the characters are shady. In the film, Diana is the dewy-eyed happily married wife who falls for her seducer. David in turn becomes the conscience-stricken sinner, a character
ization that owes something to Richard Gere’s role in Pretty Woman. “Of course this was perverse heroism,” says Redford. “But it worked as great entertainment in the Reagan era, when everything was about the cash and the cost and, it seemed, everyone was playing dirty.”

  In October 1992, the week Indecent Proposal wrapped in Las Vegas, A River Runs Through It premiered at the Ziegfeld in New York as another benefit for NRDC. A month before, Redford had joined the Maclean family for “a very moving and gratifying” American Rivers benefit screening at Bozeman, Montana. Of all Redford’s movies, only a handful enjoyed such unanimous critical praise, exemplified by Richard Schickel’s review in Time, in which he wrote that the movie scored “because [Redford] has rigorously maintained the understated tone of a book that never plea-bargains, never asks outright for sympathy or understanding, yet ultimately, powerfully, elicits both.”

  Six months later, Indecent Proposal opened nationwide on a maximum-distribution twenty-five hundred screens and raced around the world, earning more than $260 million, Redford’s greatest moneymaker to date. His nineties rebirth had come after a thirty-year career of determined variety, experiment and invention. He had proved again his imagination and durability as he straddled the art house and middlebrow markets. He was back at the epicenter.

  21

  Delivering the Moment

  Redford’s attitude toward his children had always been one of tough love. Financial indulgence, he believed, suffocated the families of the rich. He would give each of his children a home and beyond that nothing other than trust, care and emotional support. After an interrupted period of study in Chicago, Jamie and Kyle returned to make a home in Denver, where their son, Dylan Larson, was born and from where Jamie pursued the life of a writer independently, working under the guidance of Josh Donner, a William Morris agent. It was while he was drafting a soon-to-be-abandoned sci-fi version of The Odyssey for Universal that the call came from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a hospital renowned for its treatment of liver disease, reporting the availability of a suitable liver for transplant. Redford was in New York, in the final days of preparing a new film, Quiz Show. He left the production and joined Jamie to fly to Nebraska. En route Redford told Jamie he wanted him to write the next Tony Hillerman movie for Wildwood. “It was such a boost,” says Jamie, “because his attitude had always been one of promoting self-sufficiency. On that flight he changed. He knew I was at my lowest, that there were so few people for me to lean on, and he gave me this gesture of hope, something to hang in for.”

  Though Quiz Show was a fragile project that had almost slipped from his grip on several occasions, Redford felt he should delay it for one year. “My son’s well-being obviously came first. I sat by his bed and reassured him. I told him, ‘I’ll be there, hell or high water.’ But Jamie made the decision. ‘Get on with the movie,’ he told me. ‘Do what you were put here for, and let me do what I have to do.’ ”

  Jamie’s first operation, an eight-hour procedure, seemed to be a success, but his recovery was hampered by a faulty valve in the new liver. Each Friday night after shooting in New York, Redford took a plane to Omaha. “I knew the operation didn’t work,” says Jamie. “Your body tells you. The blood tests were coming back okay, but something felt wrong.” On the day Jamie was due for release from the hospital, an ultrasound test showed a thrombosis on the hepatic artery, a condition that suggested fatal atrophy of the bile ducts. It was dealt with surgically. Jamie was again registered for a nationwide liver search. For the next three days, says Redford, Jamie was “out of it, but steady.” There followed, says Redford, twelve of the worst weeks of both their lives. Finally, over the Fourth of July weekend, a replacement liver was located. “People often asked me about the value of celebrity in such a situation,” says Jamie. “They say, ‘I’m sure Robert Redford gets to pull strings.’ But it’s not true. My father was 100 percent involved. He consulted on every aspect of the surgeries. He never stopped talking with the consultants. But that’s as far as it went. Celebrity can’t help in the life-and-death department.” The constant tension brought father and son closer than they’d been since their days together in Europe. “At times like those you review your life experience,” says Jamie. “I saw both my parents as being loving supporters. My mother was the nurturer of my youth. My father was sometimes absent, but always there in spirit. At the time of my operations, the roles reversed. My mother would have been there for anything I asked: she never let me down. But in the crisis it was my dad who oversaw it all. He needed to do that. I saw it clearly. It was not a case of redeeming himself or making up for anything. It was just his time to bat had come, and he was there.”

  The instant Jamie opened his eyes after the second liver transplant, he knew the surgery had worked. “It was a beautiful dawning, like someone turning on the sunshine again. Just a feeling of, Yes, this is right! This is how I have been waiting to feel all my life.” The recovery, though, was complicated by recurring ulcerative colitis, which resulted in the removal of Jamie’s colon. It wasn’t until October of the following year that he was healthy enough to resume an active lifestyle, exercising, traveling, writing to deadlines for Wildwood. Redford felt “an unspeakable relief, one of the truly great moments of my life.”

  Hume Cronyn believed Redford was “hardened” by the crisis, but Redford contends that the opposite was true, that he came more than ever to cherish life and found new depths of love within family that he’d hoped would also extend to friendships like Pollack’s. For Cronyn, Redford had become reclusive: “He let friends slip away; he stopped returning calls.” Jamie says no: “He was, and is, a snob in one sense only: he must receive something intellectually or spiritually from a friendship. I think his hurt at that time was that friends for both of us were thin on the ground. Some serious rethinking began. When you’re at death’s door, you reevaluate things like love and truth.”

  The notion of truth, subjective and empirical, had been an intellectual preoccupation for as long as Redford could remember, and it was the appeal that lay behind his pursuit of Quiz Show. Richard Friedenberg contends that A River Runs Through It triumphed not as a homily but because it revolved around the absolute truth of who Redford really was: “It wasn’t the story. It was this guy on horseback resolving his personal issues of purpose and survival within the universe of a movie.” Carol Rossen believes Redford is someone who feels compelled to contribute to public life, while remaining committed to the isolated, reflective existence that centered on the verities. “Truth is his big hang-up in life,” she says. Film after film of his reflected a pursuit of the question: “What is wrong with this picture?” Quiz Show would be his sharpest commentary so far on “the truth” of national values.

  Indecent Proposal opened doors for him, and he parlayed that into a deal with Jeff Katzenberg at Disney to acquire Quiz Show, a project that had been developed by Barry Levinson and Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh at TriStar, then abandoned when stars Richard Dreyfuss and Tim Robbins dropped out. Based on a nonfiction book by Richard Goodwin called Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, Quiz Show was an account of the NBC game-fixing scandals of the late fifties. Redford felt a personal connection. He had once been a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Play Your Hunch, where the promised fee of $75 morphed into fishing gear and he had been forced to identify himself as a painter, rather than the actor he had already become. Redford had watched Charles Van Doren’s performances on the Twenty One quiz show throughout 1958 and tried to believe his assertion of innocence. “I wanted to go on believing, but the Merv Griffin show straightened me out,” says Redford. “As a nation, we didn’t pay enough attention, and the fact was, we were experiencing a fundamental breach in morality.” Redford quotes social theorist Neil Postman’s argument for the two ways in which cultures can corrupt: they can be prison cultures in the Orwellian model or burlesques in the Huxleian prophecy. In a world dominated by technologies, Huxley said, spiritual devastation is likely to come from th
e enemy with the smiling face. “When a population is distracted by trivia,” wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.”

  Redford engaged former Washington Post critic Paul Attanasio to write a new screenplay. Goodwin was a congressional investigator who had drawn the details of his book from public records. To this, Attanasio and Redford added characters from Redford’s New York television experiences, transforming MCA agents into CBS executives. “They were interchangeable. I’d met enough Ray Starks in my time to know. It was all a machine dictated by profit, and it was immoral. Maybe television was always like that. Maybe the voracity of it, the volume of airtime to fill, dictated it. But at the time of the Twenty One scandal, something sordid was unveiled. Bizarrely, people accepted it. Maybe the sinning was in the pact the viewers made with the program makers. The people wanted these shows, and they wanted heroes like Van Doren, and maybe they didn’t care that they were being lied to. My take on the project was as a reminder of our choice at that moment in national life to say, ‘Hey, this is what we did, this is the deal we made, and this is how we are. We accept venality; we are not too interested in honesty or decency, only in rhetoric.’ ”

  As Redford prepared Quiz Show, he was drawn into a controversy. In 1987, the NEA had been castigated when it contributed $75,000 to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, in whose gallery New York photographer Andres Serrano displayed his “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine. The religious right’s complaints were nothing compared with the storm accompanying the following year’s retrospective at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, which featured 170 studies, mostly of flowers, with five explicit images that celebrated his gay lifestyle exhibited in a secondary, screened-off area. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, the show was suddenly deemed improper and withdrawn. Senator Jesse Helms was the main objector, and he went on to propose a censorship amendment to the NEA’s charter. Subsequently, Congressman Philip Crane took up the fight, introducing bills in 1992 and 1993 to abolish the NEA that so incensed Wallace Stegner that he turned down the National Medal of Arts in protest of “political control.” Redford dove into the fray. “Like Wally, I found it impossible not to speak out. What we were witnessing was an attempt to restrict freedom of speech. The arts were always the forum for discovery. The problem with Helms and the do-gooders is they induce stagnancy. Cultural stagnancy reinforces prejudice and imbalance. The job of the arts is to challenge that.”