Robert Redford, The Way He Was

In 2014, I traveled from Los Angeles to New York to meet Robert Redford for the first and only time.

Even as an experienced and somewhat jaded journalist, I was nervous. Not because of Redford’s iconic stature, which was beyond doubt; and not because I’d grown up deeply affected by such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. The reason was that Redford, a brilliant actor and extraordinary director, had a reputation for showing up chronically late — if he showed up at all.

A friend of mine had told me a reporter’s nightmare about flying to Utah to meet with Redford, only for the star never to appear. Another friend had once spent more than a week twiddling his thumbs at a faraway location, waiting and waiting for an interview. At least he got lucky: Redford eventually arrived. On day 10.

Now here I was, ensconced in a fancy Upper East Side restaurant, wondering how I was going to write an article about a man who never appeared.

And then suddenly, mercifully, there he was, instantly recognizable, one of the most iconic faces in an industry built on them. His hair tousled, clad in a black sweatshirt and casual overcoat, he settled into a table with me for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation that weaved through one of the most legendary careers in recent Hollywood history. He was focused, intelligent, astonishingly direct, admittedly more complicated than I’d expected — and punctual.

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“I was always about breaking the rules,” he said. He was talking about his childhood, growing up in the 1940s and ’50s in a heavily immigrant part of Santa Monica, where his dad worked “brutal hours” as a milkman, but he might as well have been describing his career. As an impatient teen, “I was just getting more anxious about wanting out. I didn’t want to be wherever I was. And I felt a certain suffocation. I felt things were closing in around me, and it made me anxious. I wanted to be free.”

He dreamed of following in the footsteps of the great artists who had made Paris their hub; he didn’t consider a career as an actor until later, after dropping out of the University of Colorado, but was instantly successful, landing small parts on television, including a celebrated episode of The Twilight Zone (“Nothing in the Dark”) and playing a bisexual actor in 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover. Then came his co-starring role in Neil Simon’s Broadway comedy Barefoot in the Park, which he followed with its movie version opposite his frequent collaborator, Jane Fonda.

But, of course, it was 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman, that made him a star.

“The studio didn’t want me,” he recalled. “It all depended on Paul, and I met him, and he was very generous and said, ‘Let’s go for this.’ He knew I was serious about the craft. That’s what brought us together.”

The celebrated critic Pauline Kael made what may have been her worst judgment when she dismissed Butch Cassidy as “a facetious Western” in which everybody “talks comical.” Her review provoked a furious response from its director, George Roy Hill, who fired off a letter that began, “Listen, you miserable bitch.” But Kael sensed in her less dyspeptic moments that there was something special about Redford. “The great movie actors know when to cool it and how to relax on camera and just be,” she wrote. “Robert Redford has become a star without ever having had a really good role, because he’s an intuitive master of movie technique, of non-actorish readings and minimal gestures; he seems extraordinarily sensitive to the medium, and naturally wary about any inflation of feeling.”

When we talk of Hollywood’s second golden age, the 1970s, it’s in part because of films like Butch Cassidy and a swirl of other Redford vehicles that followed it, like The Sting and The Candidate. The actor may have looked like an old-school studio star, perfect for lush romances like 1973’s The Way We Were; he may not have appeared in other, grittier ’70s masterpieces like The Godfather or Taxi Driver. But the era is unimaginable without him.

Around the same time he was making these films, he was also becoming a force behind the camera. It was Redford who latched on to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting and realized it could make a remarkable film. It was he who spent months with Bernstein and others inside The Washington Post, he who hired William Goldman to write the script eight years after they’d first collaborated on Butch Cassidy. And when he grew dissatisfied with Goldman’s work, it was he who let Bernstein and his wife, Nora Ephron, tackle the story, then worked on it himself with director Alan J. Pakula. (Ultimately, Goldman’s work remained mainly intact, according to an analysis of the various drafts by Richard Stayton for the WGA’s magazine.)

Whoever was most responsible for the script, Redford drove the film, which became an instant classic. Watching it again recently, I was amazed by the propulsive drama, the naturalism of the acting and the magnificently understated ending: an image of ticker tape announcing the news that Nixon was resigning. Redford and Pakula fought over that: Pakula wanted footage of the president exiting the White House, while his star wanted something centered on journalism, in his mind the true hero of the story.

Of course, he made mistakes. In an alternate universe, it might have been Redford who picked up an Oscar nomination for The Verdict, not Newman; but Redford kept standing up the film’s director and writer, James Bridges, who speculated in his unpublished diaries that the actor had backed out of it because he didn’t want to play a drunk. How this was conveyed was what rattled him: “Redford’s assistant would call and say, ‘Bobby will be there in two days’ and ‘Bobby will be there tomorrow,’ and he never showed up,” the late Bridges’ partner told this reporter.

By then, the early 1980s, Redford could afford a few missteps. His acting may have been underestimated by some — Kael compared him to Lassie, no less — but he was evolving into a formidable director. Indeed, it was directing that won him his first Oscar, for 1980’s Ordinary People, the Alvin Sargent family drama starring Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore (who was also nominated). Subsequently, Redford brought his own elegant, humane touch to a slew of other pictures, like 1992’s A River Runs Through It and 1994’s Quiz Show.

Still, there was a lingering hesitancy that often got in his way. It reemerged on 1993’s Indecent Proposal, director Adrian Lyne’s drama about a billionaire who offers a couple of newlyweds $1 million if the bride would spend one night with him. “We all sat around this long table — Adrian, Stanley [Jaffe, one of the producers], Woody [Harrelson, a co-star], Demi [Moore], Redford and myself — and it was perfect,” recalls producer Sherry Lansing. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” Minutes later, she got a call asking her to meet with Redford in his hotel suite. “I thought he was going to tell us he didn’t like something in the script,” she continued. “But he said, ‘I want out.’ He said, ‘The kids are wonderful, but I’m not. It’s their movie.’ I said, ‘Bob, you’re amazing.’ And he said, ‘That’s very kind, but I have to leave.’ ” Only CAA’s intervention and the hiring of writer Robert Getchell as a script doctor kept Redford on board.

Lansing saw just how good he could be when they shot the picture’s pivotal moment, where Redford’s John Gage offers Moore the $1 million deal. “When [he] delivered the line…he just threw it away, as if he was asking to borrow a jacket,” she says. “A bad actor would have paused and delivered it sotto voce. But Redford made it lethal by his casualness.”

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Redford used his power well. In fact, he all but pioneered the idea of actor as activist.

A passionate environmentalist, he bought a massive spread in Utah and, in the late 1970s, made it home to the Sundance Film Festival. The irony was lost on no one that this staple of the studio system was now one of the most influential figures in the independent world. This was something we talked about in our lunch, which kept going long after Redford had said he must leave. I wondered, in fact, whether this meant he’d be late for his next rendezvous.

He admitted that he’d never imagined the festival would turn into such a behemoth, while also feeling disappointed by where it ended up. “How can I not be satisfied about a success?” he asked. “But those earlier years felt best.… It’s no longer the place it was. I don’t like what’s happened.”

He was, throughout his life, a zealous supporter of Native American and LGBTQ rights, and his movies were often tinged with his unabashedly liberal politics, from 1972’s electoral drama The Candidate to 2007’s anti-Iraq War story Lions for Lambs. Much of his thinking was fueled by a deep dissatisfaction with, so to speak, the way things were. “Tonight,” he posted on the Sundance website in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, “for the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life.”

Sitting in that restaurant, I wasn’t sure if he would ever find any true equanimity, and he was in his late 70s even then. But he did want to change one thing. He wanted to not get angry, not be infuriated by the little things, the day-to-day irritations that so bothered him.

“I was born with a hard eye,” he said. “[I’m] very, very critical. The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I would see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life. When I was a kid, I was told to be a good sport. It wasn’t whether you won or lost; it was how you played the game. I realized that was a lie.

“If somebody says, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” he went on, as we wrapped up and I finally had to let him go, “I have to stop myself from being so critical.”

Stephen Galloway is the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.