Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford debated where he could but he poured his rage most forcefully into Quiz Show, a film studded with invective but mounted with the most meticulous control. To play Charles Van Doren, Redford chose the British actor Ralph Fiennes; for Herbie Stempel, the avaricious contestant who blows the whistle, he cast John Turturro; for investigator Dick Goodwin he cast Rob Morrow; Barry Levinson and Martin Scorsese were cast, “mischievously,” says Levinson, as voices of reason. For the role of the poet Mark Van Doren, Charles’s father, Redford wanted Paul Scofield, who had retired from theater several years before. In the eyes of some, Redford was wryly toying with stereotypes in the storytelling and the casting. “It felt biased,” says Jeremy Larner. “In the script Stempel becomes the sweaty shylock, a miserable human being who betrays himself and everyone else for money and celebrity. It’s anti-Jewish.” Michael Ritchie strongly disagreed, believing that of all Redford’s movies, this was the one laden with irony. Redford also refutes the bias: “It was historically accurate. Jeremy missed the point completely. If I was targeting anyone, it was those executives.” The real Herbert Stempel, still living in Brooklyn at the time of the movie’s release in the fall of 1994, publicly reiterated that the movie was “not a fraud.”

  Filmed by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, Quiz Show has the glazed beauty of a fifties commercial, where mechanical objects and furniture—the sparkling Chrysler 300 the Goodwin character covets, the art deco architecture—vie to outshine the performers, and everyone (except Stempel) is immaculately tailored and coiffed. There is, too, a breathless Steadicam pace to the drama that serves to replicate “live” television. This was a style markedly different from the slow-resolving rhythms of A River Runs Through It and bears witness to Redford’s range as a director.

  Redford knew he had a good movie in the can long before the edit. Having resisted video playback on location until then, he now relied heavily on it to check performances on a day-by-day basis. “But my style of directing remained exactly the same: give the actors their space, try it your way, try it theirs.” Fiennes, Morrow and Turturro all went on record praising what Morrow expressed as the “joy of working with a generous director who knows what you’re doing because he’s done it himself.”

  When the movie was released in September, it created a furor. Retired prosecuting attorney Joseph Stone, who, in real life, had led the Manhattan DA’s office investigation, objected. In his view, Redford was as venal as Twenty One’s producers, offering up “a trumped-up, scaled-down, pandering mishmash of half-truths, fabrication, distortion, omission and character assassination.” The fact that Stone had been the first man to expose the quiz show scandals but was not named in the film, said Stempel, may have upset the retired lawyer. But, insisted Stempel, “I am essentially the fuse that lit the dynamite. If I feel comfortable with the [honesty of the] movie, there’s no reason he shouldn’t.”

  Redford’s only regret was that he couldn’t persuade the Van Doren family to cooperate with the movie. William Goldman in Premiere compared his former friend’s offering with the other Oscar contenders that year—Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption—and damned Redford with faintest praise: “[It] did wonderfully with what it had. It’s what it didn’t have that bothered me.” The view, to some, had a self-canceling transparency.

  Redford was nearing sixty, a little weary of the boardroom vying at Sundance, a little ill at ease in his domestic arrangement with Kathy O’Rear. More and more—ironically—he sought retreat from Utah itself and spent more time with his children in their various homes. With them, he says, he felt anchored and challenged in equal measure. To the tune of the title song from Jesus Christ Superstar, the kids had redrafted the lyric:

  Double R Superstar,

  Who in the hell do you think you are?

  He found this amusing, not least because the incisive wit showed they knew what he knew: it was time to fundamentally reassess himself. Not long after Quiz Show he agreed to appear on Inside the Actors Studio. He told his audience of three hundred mostly film students (and also Paul Newman and Arthur Penn) that his greatest regret was not learning to play a musical instrument and that, while he would like a reunion movie with Newman or Streisand, he didn’t favor sequels. “I was thinking of this theory I developed,” says Redford. “It’s called taking responsibility for a talent. I came to accept that a large audience wanted to see me as this representational romantic character of some moral standing. I concluded there was a rightness in that.” Once, Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote that he’d liked The Electric Horseman and admired the whole attractive, lovable heroic icon business. “Kroll ended his feature saying Jane and I were fine actors, and then he added, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see what these two people could bring to roles of bad character?’ That pissed me off. Three years later Jack Kroll did a personal interview with me and I said, ‘Can we go off record?’ And he was a nice man and said, ‘Sure.’ Then I laid it out for him. I told him what he said was bordering on the unethical. The implication was that I was in some way shortchanging people because I played heroes. I told him, ‘You want me to play the psycho? I did that in my apprenticeship, did it for years. An actor learns by experiment. I have been there and back. Now I play the hero, but one who has earned whatever he has to give by way of some sacrifice, some study. If you want me to play the Arnold Schwarzenegger hero, I cannot do that. I cannot be the stuntman. But I can do the guy in Electric Horseman, I can do Jack Weil. There’s no disgrace in playing to your strengths.’ ”

  After Quiz Show, says Bryan Lourd, “he confused me utterly, because he was marching to a different drum. The projects that seemed right he avoided. For example, because he wanted to stretch and because he liked to sing, he told me he wanted to do Phantom of the Opera. Andrew Lloyd Webber was interested in meeting him. But then every time I tried to set up the meeting, Bob cried off. I’d say, ‘You need to meet him, to sing for him.’ And all he’d do was say, ‘Sure, no problem at all.’ But he just wouldn’t see it through.” The only project that came close to realization was The Hot Zone, a story of runaway viruses that might wipe out life on earth, based on a book by Richard Preston. “I got the impression that he was more interested in the documentary, social value of the story line, and not entertainment,” says Lourd. “And that was the abiding mood: he accepted his position as an iconic pinup and he wanted to stretch but his course was undefined.”

  Bit by bit Redford came to accept that the dilemma within himself was best resolved by making movies that played to his core audience while reserving formal experiment for Sundance and its programs. Accordingly, Lourd tried to encourage the new, entrenched relationship with Disney and its affiliates. After the death of Walt Disney and some lean years, the company under Michael Eisner was building new amusement parks worldwide that complemented its new movies. During the first five years of Eisner’s reign, the studio’s audience share had grown from 3 percent to 20 percent. In 1992, Eisner welcomed Joe Roth, the cofounder of Morgan Creek, under the Disney umbrella with a newly created division, Caravan Pictures, and the following spring Disney bought Miramax, the indie distribution company of brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, for $60 million. Lourd felt Redford had a double advantage at Disney, since Frank Wells, who was still very much part of the management equation, was so fond of the actor. Indeed, late in March 1994, as Quiz Show began filming, Wells had invited Redford to join a helicopter ski trip in Nevada. Redford had to decline the invitation and thus was spared the tragedy that followed. Flying home on April 3, the helicopter carrying Wells and his party crashed into a mountainside, killing all on board. The death of Wells created a feud at Disney when Eisner refused to give the vacated executive post to next-in-line Jeffrey Katzenberg. After a flurry of lawsuits, Katzenberg quit Disney to join Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in the founding of DreamWorks SKG. One of Katzenberg’s last projects within the Disney organization, Jon Avnet’s Up Close and Personal, was offered to Redford. He accept
ed.

  The movie was featherweight but its antecedents were intriguing. It was based on the life of Jessica Savitch, a television broadcaster briefly famous for her rise at NBC at a time when men dominated the news. Drug addiction unhinged her and she came unglued on air during a live prime-time broadcast in 1983. Fired from the network, Savitch drowned shortly after in a bizarre car accident in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The rights to Alanna Nash’s 1988 oral biography Golden Girl were acquired by John Foreman, the producing partner of Paul Newman, who commissioned John Gregory Dunne to develop a script for Katzenberg. According to Dunne in his memoir, what ensued was a nightmare of greed and whim in La-La Land. From the start, said Dunne, Disney wanted the real-life characters reinvented. Neither Savitch, a bisexual who had had an interracial affair, nor her abusive mentor, Ron Kershaw, were deemed palatable. Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, who also contributed, quit the project after a dozen dead-end drafts. Thereafter Up Close and Personal languished until Foreman died in 1993 and a team at Touchstone, a Disney division, gave the project to producer Scott Rudin, who brought Dunne and Didion back on board. But Rudin’s subsequent choice of Avnet as director—and the further fifteen rewrites—wore everyone down. What Dunne described was a phalanx of subliterate boors attempting to justify executive salaries by ascribing dramatic gravitas to what was a pulp story line about a long-in-the-tooth TV news hack playing Henry Higgins to a sexy pseudo-Savitch wannabe. The pragmatic Rudin was remorseless, said Dunne. For the umpteenth “fine-tuned” draft he instructed Dunne and Didion: “Deliver the moment.… We need a stronger credit sequence, use the bookend frame, we have a POV deficit, we want another beat here, deliver the moment, stretch it out, this is clunky … cut all the Washington chat in the S&L scene, but save her line, ‘Get the fuck out of my shot,’ it’s who she is, lose the Taco Bell sequence, it’s OTN [for ‘on the nose’] or OTT [for ‘over the top’], split the first newsroom sequence, do it over two days, deliver the moment … deliver the moment.…”

  Avnet, fresh from the Academy Award–nominated Fried Green Tomatoes, cast Michelle Pfeiffer as the newsgirl and delivered the umpteenth script in preparation to Redford. “I chose not to be cynical,” says Avnet. “There’s no shame in creating a smash hit. Entertainment need not negate intelligence. It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, is very calculated and incredibly schmaltzy, but it is also now regarded as a masterpiece.” Avnet’s first major work, The Burning Bed, made for television and starring Farrah Fawcett, was superficially racy but about battered women. “That’s the prime example of what’s possible in so-called pedestrian Hollywood,” says Avnet. “What was The Burning Bed? Just another movie of the week. But the hidden text was loaded. It generated one hundred thousand telephone calls from battered women, it changed the national vernacular, it brought the issue to the table. Fellini did it, too, in La Strada. R. D. Laing had a patient who wanted to commit suicide and decided not to after seeing La Strada. That makes for a political achievement. This is what so-called simple entertainment can do.”

  Rudin saw no hidden layers in Up Close and Personal: “It’s about two movie stars,” he repeatedly reminded Dunne. In the end, there was no mixed-up Savitch, or shadowy Ron Kershaw. Instead, Pfeiffer and Redford signed on unconditionally to play sexy Tally Atwater and her wise, sexy old-hand mentor Warren Justice.

  Fried Green Tomatoes had wonderful wit, most memorable in the scene depicting the mutual lesbian passions of two lead characters in a food fight. No such subtlety inspired Avnet in Up Close and Personal, which played out as a media age My Fair Lady. In the final act, Tally earns her network stripes by broadcasting live from inside a prison during a murderous riot, with Warren Justice coaching her by radio. “It’s the great showdown,” says Avnet, “the gunfight scene, the rite of passage, the big seduction all rolled into one. Michelle knew what I wanted to achieve, as did Bob. It was old-style movie drama.”

  Based in Miami and Philadelphia, with interiors at Culver City, the movie was shot over seventy-seven days in the summer of 1995. “Bob engaged all the way,” says Avnet, “from our first meeting with John and Joan at his home in Connecticut until the last day and the wrap. He was a full collaborator, even suggesting the music montage. He loved Michelle, who brought her family along to location, as I brought my son, Jake. Sometimes he had his kids and his grandkids along. He was at home with us, because we were this band of strolling players and this was his natural habitat.”

  Redford’s profound enjoyment in Up Close and Personal amounted to a new mission statement. “Not everything need be War and Peace,” he says. “I lost no sleep over it.” The box office returns crowned his instincts: more than $100 million. He was, once again, at sixty, an uncompromised romantic idol. But that, as ever, turned out to be the salve, not the be-all.

  After Ordinary People, Redford stated emphatically that he would never appear in a movie he directed. But in the flux of middle-age self-challenge, he reversed this decision and suddenly decided to direct himself in a movie for the first time. The Disney relationship was rosy, and with substantial new hits behind him, brokering the premium deal was straightforward. He chose The Horse Whisperer, an as-yet-unreleased novel by new English author Nicholas Evans, which had been hotly auctioned at the October 1994 Frankfurt Book Fair. Wildwood’s development chief, Rachel Pfeffer, acquired the rights, believing the blend of romance with a western setting ideal for Redford, whom George Roy Hill had once described as “the natural-born saddlebum.” In Evans’s novel, Tom Booker, the horse whisperer, is part Zen master, part equine doctor. Romance between Booker and hard-nosed Manhattan businesswoman Annie Maclean begins when Booker tries to help Annie’s daughter, Grace, who has been maimed in a riding accident that also severely injured her horse, Pilgrim. In the book, the emotionally frozen Annie becomes pregnant, leaving many unanswered questions. Redford liked the book but disliked the overly melodramatic ending. “My immediate thought was that it would work as a movie if the romance simmered and came close to the boil, but then the Booker character and the woman are stranded by moral dilemma,” says Redford.

  Readying The Horse Whisperer—with Eric Roth, the screenwriter of Forrest Gump, drafting the script—Redford decamped to a rented Italianate stucco villa in the foothills of Mount St. Helena at Calistoga, California, an hour north of San Francisco and close to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, where he intended to do the postproduction work. He was at the end of his romance with Kathy O’Rear and the start of a new relationship with a Hamburg-born expressionist artist, Sibylle Szaggars. Bylle was in her mid-thirties, dark haired and adept at riding and skiing. She had worked for the Andrew Lloyd Webber organization in London and New York before deciding to pursue her own art out west. They’d met at Sundance, where she stayed while absorbing the southwestern environment for her work. “The relationship with Kathy ended because they were just too different,” says a family friend. “Kathy worked like a miner to keep it going, sending him daily letters and sermons, and trying to keep up. But their lives weren’t in harmony. She was spending time with her mother in Florida, where her father was very ill; he was elsewhere.” Bylle’s nature, the same friend observes, was closer to his. “She’s a true artist, literate, humorous and active. But the key is, she puts no pressure on him. She’s not a woman who sits around waiting for his call. She gets on with her painting and her life, and he loves that sense of freedom she provides.”

  At too few times throughout his life had he enjoyed domesticity. Now he slipped into a happy routine, shipping in his favorite furniture and his portable sauna, which stood on the tiled terrace overlooking the mountain where Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne had honeymooned in a shack a hundred years before. Bylle pitched in in the kitchen, her dog, Max, always at her heels. Their life in Napa County, she says, was relaxed in a way it could not have been in Los Angeles, Utah or New York. They hiked together, took daily five-mile jogs and read. Jamie, recovering well from his transplant and beginning to write for Wildwood, wa
s in the process of moving to nearby Fairfax. More than ever father and son spent time together, often walking on the beach at Bodega Bay. “I saw my father sharpen up in a way he hadn’t done in quite a time,” says Jamie. “He had been diffuse. I feel in the middle nineties his purpose became clearer to him. The inner conflicts were less, and Bylle was a positive force in calming him. He worked out hard for The Horse Whisperer because he was anxious about the difficulty of directing and starring and fusing all the elements he wanted. He knew he had to be in top physical form.”

  The one disturbance in his routine was the weekly trip to L.A.—a town he had come to loathe—for casting meetings. He met with Emma Thompson, hoping to interest her in the female lead. “The British do austerity better than any American. The concept I had was to portray Annie as a version of Tina Brown of Vanity Fair, with a little of the visible brittleness of Margaret Thatcher.” Thompson turned down the part, citing personal problems. His next choice was Kristin Scott Thomas, whom he’d first spotted as the woman secretly in love with Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Redford wanted “an actor who could instantly relate dignity” to play Annie’s husband, the romantic competitor to Booker, and chose Australian Sam Neill. Hardest to cast was Grace, the preteen accident victim. Working with casting coordinator Michelle Hartley, he finally decided on fifteen-year-old New Yorker Scarlett Johansson, who had just completed her first lead in Lisa Krueger’s modest indie film about foster home runaways, Manny and Lo.