Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [126]
Early in the year, Redford discovered Evans was looking for a new Daisy and a Jay Gatsby. He asked Fields to call, but Evans turned him down flat. “He was no fan of mine. He wouldn’t even consider me. Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson were his preferences,” says Redford. Undeterred, Redford asked for a meeting with Jack Clayton, Evans’s chosen director. He met with a skeptical Clayton for ninety minutes in the terminal at Heathrow Airport in London. Clayton, who had been favoring Nicholson, was won over. He told his partner, Haya Harareet, “You can see the possibility of danger beneath that romantic WASP image.” Still, Evans resisted, telling Clayton, “No, he’s blond, Gatsby’s dark haired.” When Redford heard this, he exploded. “I began to think Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing a Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text. Nowhere in it does Fitzgerald say Gatsby’s hair is dark. He says, ‘His hair was freshly barbered and smoothed back, and his skin was pulled tight over his face.’ That’s it. That’s the description.”
As negotiations commenced, Redford was in the process of splitting with CMA. Matters were complicated by the fact that Freddie Fields was also representing Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen—both of whom David Merrick wanted in the movie regardless. Evans asked his mentor, Charlie Bluhdorn, who still held the presidency of Paramount but was no longer active in moviemaking decisions, to intervene. At a group viewing of the female screen tests in New York in December, Bluhdorn, Evans and Paramount’s head of sales, Frank Yablans, joined Merrick and Jack Clayton to decide on either Mia Farrow, Katharine Ross, Candice Bergen or Faye Dunaway for Daisy. Merrick was stubborn. All the tests, he insisted, were inadequate. MacGraw remained the right casting for Daisy, he said, and Freddie Fields’s suggestion of casting McQueen as Gatsby made the greatest sense, since Fields was proposing also to defer fees. Jack Clayton politely said he wanted Mia Farrow for Daisy. Evans, desperate, agreed with Clayton. When Merrick became apoplectic, Bluhdorn stood up and bluntly told him: “Ali MacGraw is not doing this picture. Is that clear? Paramount owns the rights. If anyone wants to walk, have a merry Christmas.”
Evans might not have been a Redford fan, but Bluhdorn had never lost his soft spot. When Clayton called Redford to tell him the role was his, Redford was overjoyed. “I wanted it because I wanted to play a desperate man. I had never played a desperate man before, and I wanted to chart this bizarre new identity a man fabricates for himself to achieve his aim.” When he’d first read the book, in college, he’d not considered it a great American novel. “It seemed florid. But when I went back to it, I saw it was something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some great screen work could come from it. It was American Gothic, a rarity and tantalizing.”
Though Englishman Jack Clayton might have seemed an unlikely director for Gatsby, he came well prepared. A technician who had worked his way through the ranks since he started as a runner at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios in the 1930s, Clayton made his feature debut with Room at the Top, starring Laurence Harvey, a movie that was as much an indictment of the British class system as Gatsby was of America’s. That was not his only qualification. In his twenties in the 1940s, Clayton himself had attempted to buy the rights to Gatsby from Fitzgerald’s estate and had been, he said, fixated with the novel for thirty years. He consulted with Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Fitzgerald estate curator, and with Scottie; his research work was exhaustive. Clayton’s vision for the movie was specific from the start, and though it deviated in part from the novel, it had Scottie’s support. The tragedy of romantic idealism, he felt, was the center of the story. Clayton imagined the movie “with a golden look” and