Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [116]
In the recent past, Redford’s family life had changed. In 1968 Tiger died of heart failure in Waterford, Connecticut, his son at his bedside. The distractions of travel, of maintaining a life in New York and Utah and Los Angeles, had created wide, empty spaces in family life. Shauna, Jamie and Amy all strove to keep their relationships with their father, and all suffered the strain of his fame as much as his absence. Jamie remembers the early seventies as “the time of the crazies.” There was the well-circulated magazine report about the woman who claimed she married Redford in secret in Mexico in 1956; the frequent anonymous calls to the Redfords’ unlisted numbers; and the stalkers, hustlers and paparazzi who seemed to tag along everywhere. The family struggled to maintain normalcy and unity. They continued to spend holidays together, and constantly stayed in touch by phone. But an erosion was taking place. Jamie and Shauna insisted on walking the few blocks to the Dalton School each day, but this simple pleasure was often denied them. “From time to time security guards came into the picture,” says Jamie. “We absolutely hated the idea of it, but the escalation of my father’s fame was beyond Bill McKay in The Candidate. It was so extreme that we were made aware of the risks just by opening a newspaper. We worried about him because he was so visible. At that time he was everywhere, like Hershey bars. We wondered, Will he endure? Will the family endure?”
14
Idols
Over Labor Day weekend of 1971, while Redford worked with Larner in the living room of the writer’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment, he was unaware that the first act of the Watergate drama was unfolding in the kitchen. Larner had offered refuge to Daniel Ellsberg, the former marine officer turned RAND defense analyst. Ellsberg had purloined seven thousand pages of documents about the American government’s secret policy on Vietnam, the so-called Pentagon Papers. having failed to engage congressional interest in a public exposé, he had given them to The New York Times, which had published them in June. Attorney General John Mitchell had imposed an immediate restraint order, but the Supreme Court had overruled him, and damning new excerpts of the papers were published to widening public outrage. They established that the government knowingly lied about the facts of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for accelerating the Vietnam War. By the end of the summer of 1971, Ellsberg was on the run from agents of the Nixon government who, allegedly, wanted to silence him.
“I knew Jeremy was sincere, well connected, anti-Vietnam,” says Redford, “but it was all very James Bond–ish. We’d be sitting at the table shuffling the script, and there’d be a noise back there and Jeremy would say, ‘Quiet, Dan! Take it easy now.’ ” These incidents passed without further discussion.
Redford’s mind was as much on money for the moment as politics. He had earned about $3 million since his career began, and all of it was spent. The best money he had made, for The Hot Rock, was quickly absorbed in the various resort maintenance issues at Sundance, which was now more or less entirely his baby. With not much optimism for the box office success of The Hot Rock and low commercial expectations