Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [119]
But Pollack’s dilemma was that Fox had already indicated its refusal to support a political movie. “So we compromised, and what we had, however diminished, was good. I did know, though, that people were angry with me. Blacklisting was only fifteen years before, and it was fresh in people’s memory. People were thinking, At last! Finally, we get a movie that confronts this ghastly thing. And so they wanted more than Fox was prepared to support. But I was signed by Ray Stark to deliver a vehicle for Streisand, and that was the first principle I served. Dealing with Bob was another matter.”
Streisand was elated when Redford came aboard. Sue Mengers, another of her agents, sent a confirming two-word cable: “Barbra Redford?” “Barbra was delighted because she had a crush on him,” said Pollack, “even before we started. It was hard for women not to have a fixation, because he was everywhere, like Elvis. He was the golden boy long before Hubbell came along.”
On September 17, after more than a year’s preparation, filming started on The Way We Were. It had been delayed slightly when Redford, vacationing on Lake Powell with Dick Cavett, was bitten by a bat and had to endure seventeen days of the famously agonizing stomach injections against rabies. In the first weeks, location work jumped from Union College in Schenectady, New York, to the University of Southern California campus, Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills home, Harry Cohen’s old Columbia offices and the gated Malibu Colony. All the time, said Pollack, Redford grumbled. “I knew how uncomfortable he was with Hubbell, but I also knew a great persona would emerge. He wasn’t cruising, and he responded very well to the prodding I gave, which was a lot.”
Redford agrees that Pollack pushed him hard: “I give full credit to Sydney. And he did honorably respond to my script concerns. An important last-minute addition came. Alvin Sargent and Rayfiel wrote Hubbell up finally as someone with a point of view. Until then, he was Katie’s stooge, the guy who won’t either support her Communism or name names.”
In a new scene toward the end of the script, Hubbell meets Katie at Union Station at the height of the furor about naming names. Bissinger, the movie director to whom Hubbell is in thrall, pays lip service to the “martyrs” who brought the trouble down on themselves. Hubbell stays silent, but Katie rails against the immoral witch hunt. A riot breaks out, and a fight involving Hubbell, and the police are forced to throw Hubbell and Katie into a waiting room, where lines are finally drawn:
KATIE: Doesn’t it make you angry listening to Bissinger ridicule those men? Calling them martyrs first because they have guts, which he doesn’t, to fight for their principles, to fight for their Bill of Rights, his Bill of Rights, and yours?
HUBBELL: Bill of Rights? What Bill of Rights? We don’t have any Bill of Rights. We don’t have free speech in this country. We never will have.
KATIE: We never will if people aren’t willing to take a stand for what’s right.
HUBBELL: We never will because people are scared. This isn’t college. This is grown-up politics, and it’s stupid and dangerous.
KATIE: Hubbell, you are telling me to close my eyes and to watch people being destroyed.
HUBBELL: I’m telling you that people are more important than any goddamn witch hunt. You and me. Not causes. Not principles.
KATIE: Hubbell, people are their principles.
“Hubbell isn’t a victim anymore,” says Redford. “He’s his own man. And that strength gave him a weight in the romance that made the final split with Katie dramatic. The questionable nature