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for Redford was Melvyn Douglas, a frontline victim of McCarthyism who was “graylisted” in the fifties for his support of liberal Democratic causes. It was Douglas’s wife, Helen Gahagan Doug-las, who had fallen afoul of Nixon in the bitterly contested 1960 Senate race, when Nixon labeled her “a pinko right down to her underwear.” Gahagan Douglas, in response, christened Nixon “Tricky Dick” and went on to fill the post of treasury secretary in Kennedy’s administration. Redford recalled how his father had stood up for Gahagan Douglas all those years ago, and took great pride in offering her husband the role of McKay’s father, a former governor of California, who attempts to call his son to task in the film.

The Candidate started shooting in November 1971, a studio film in name only, based in offices at Mill Valley in Marin County, not far from Charlie and Helen’s new home, on San Francisco Bay at Tiburon. It was shot over forty-one twelve-hour days, wrapping shortly after Christmas. Logistically, it was a massive undertaking, spanning media events, campaign speeches and endless traveling scenes. Said Ritchie, “We were constantly hustling for favors from department stores, cabs, everybody we crossed. Someone loaned a limo, someone else had a radio show crew who were willing to drop by. Our ticker tape parade was the classic example. There was no way we could fund a proper street parade. So we cashed in on the fact that there was a New Year’s Eve tradition in San Francisco where, at 1:00 p.m., office workers opened their windows and threw out the shreds of last year’s calendar. ‘Okay,’ we said, ‘here’s our parade!’ So we staged McKay’s drive-through and everybody participated. They clustered at the windows to see the great Robert Redford! And that became a very expensive-looking campaign parade on film.” The improvisations stretched to the final hours of filming when, on a United flight home to Los Angeles, an extra scene with McKay and his fellow travelers was shuffled together.

For Ritchie, the biggest disappointment was Karen Carlson, who, he said, “became besotted” with Redford as production progressed. “I didn’t like that, because she became emotionally involved. I tried to intervene, but it’s impossible when you are dealing with real people, with real obsessions. I spoke to Bob and he was helpful but, I think, also concerned. Her role was the dutiful wife. It often felt like Fatal Attraction.” Carlson herself admitted to “schizophrenic” feelings, confessing to writer Bruce Bahrenburg during production that McKay/Redford’s dallying in the wings with an attractive extra upset her: “I didn’t know whether it was [the wife] Nancy reacting to McKay or myself to Bob Redford,” said Carlson. “But I knew that it was time to try to separate my feelings. I had a long talk with Bob about them.”

As The Candidate drew to a close, Michael Daves, the assistant director, observed Larner as “a permanent fixture in Bob’s life, working under horrendous pressure to draft, redraft, find a new scene, lose a new scene, find an angle, stick in a commercial, take out a name or a face or a place.” In the end, perhaps, this very closeness overwhelmed the friendship. Redford liked Larner, found him hugely gifted, but one incident sounded the death knell for Larner. “I wanted to write a scene based on a true-life experience, where the candidate goes onto an Indian reservation and pumps the flesh,” says Larner. “The chief adorns him with a headdress that doesn’t fit, and the scene, visually and verbally, has all the imagery of the humiliating phoniness of what candidacy truly is. I wrote it but Bob said he couldn’t play it, that his relationship with the Indian community was too precious to him. I defended my scene, saying, ‘This is just a movie, Bob, and McKay, the character, loses his integrity here.’ But Mike Ritchie took me aside and warned me to drop it. He told me, ‘You won’t get Bob to do what Bob doesn’t want to do. This isn’t a matter of negotiation, so please spare all of us the trouble.’ ”

Robert Penn Warren once wrote of Hemingway’s A