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By Root 791 0

in the film, but the hurt only hardened his resolve to do better. In Gregson’s absence, Wildwood was now a one-man operation, and he decided emphatically that this must be the epicenter of his art. Michael Ritchie contended that this was the enclave where the “secret” Robert Redford lived. “He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah Johnson but he really was an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even Salter. I always felt that was denied him, but he was in a no-win situation, because he had all this luminous stardom and neither the public nor critics have much patience for author-stars.”

It was at Wildwood throughout 1971 that Redford honed what was to become The Candidate. The first inklings of it came to him as he sat with a can of Coors in his hand, watching a televised fund-raiser for President Nixon moderated by Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson in October 1968. Redford was outraged that Nixon had refused to debate the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, because there was a third candidate, George Wallace. “It was incomprehensible arrogance in the face of a country in such turmoil,” says Redford. “To anyone with a brain in his head, there was a huge division between ‘old politics’ and ‘the politics of joy’ that Humphrey was attempting to present. A hundred cities across the country were in flames on racial issues; half the nation was calling for a stop to the bombing in Vietnam. The youth, the poor, the blacks wanted a voice, and those who might have spoken for them—Kennedy and McCarthy—were out of the picture. And here was this car salesman monopolizing the airwaves and selling us snake oil for a reelection. I thought, It’s not about substance, it’s about presentation, about perception of reality, which allows for manipulation.”

Incensed, Redford commissioned Village Voice journalist Pete Hamill to tackle “a script about character, national politics and the vested interest.” Thereafter, in the snatches between movies and star interviews, he embarked on a research campaign, befriending political columnists like Mike Barnicle, exploring CAN’s senatorial contacts, visiting the Kennedy archive. McCall’s reported Redford frequently in the company of former light heavyweight boxing champion turned activist José Torres and Hamill, haunting the corridors of the campaign offices of gubernatorial and senate candidates in the New York State elections. In fact, says Redford, this research proved much more edifying than the tedium of the movie promotional circus. More and more, he sought the company of political, rather than business, associates. Basketball star Bill Bradley, himself nourishing political ambitions, was among the most stimulating dinner companions. In such company, says Redford, he felt intellectually stimulated in a profound new way. “The forties were the war years. The fifties were the boom years. The sixties was the revolution. And the seventies offered the payoff. All those long-haired hippies and yippies divided into two groups. There were those who’d doped themselves into oblivion. Then there were the guys who went to the Ivy League colleges, and Stanford and Berkeley, and pulled out the stops when McCarthy and the Democrats let them down. They took it upon themselves to rewrite the rule book. They were lawyers, like John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took on the system surreptitiously. While Nixon was over in China working his realpolitik, these guys slid in underneath and were the brains behind the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Production and Recovery Act, everything that matters in calling a country a country. From 1972 onward the cream of the rebels rose to the surface: Tom Harkin, Pat Schroeder, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown—great political minds who concentrated on working the system against itself while Nixon was busy getting us involved in Cambodia. I was excited by this, that I was working at potentially the greatest time in American political life, when this vast swell of educated kids was taking on those profound issues raised