Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [129]
Clayton and Redford got on well enough, but there remained a variation in conceptualization. Clayton’s mistake, Redford felt, was that he often tried too hard to sustain the literal translation within a scene while, at the same time, striving for originality. Clayton’s complaint was Redford’s independence under direction: “If I had one issue with him, it was his refusal to do the same take twice,” he said. “His reasoning was that he was in process of discovery, and the ‘newness’ of a spontaneous movement made it real. There was also the problem of the pace of his delivery. He was slow. Everyone else had a beat to their lines. He was out of sync a lot of the time, but, again, he reasoned it by saying people didn’t react by rhythm. They were arrhythmic. They stalled and stumbled. Someone moaned to me that Redford never knew his lines. It became apparent that he was remote from us because he was inside Gatsby; he was resident in 1922 when we made that movie.”
Redford insistently defends his “stumbling”: “Gatsby is only comfortable with Nick Carraway. With Daisy and everyone else he is trying to be someone he is not. I was projecting that, and I feel it was misunderstood, especially by some of our English crew.”
In Coppola’s script, Carraway presents Gatsby as a mythic hero, “like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light.” When finally he is killed in the swimming pool by George Wilson, there is a stronger sense of historic destiny than of moral rectitude. The closely observed cinematic symbolism—as when Gatsby and Daisy kiss and the camera tilts down to record their embrace reflected in the goldfish pond, signaling Gatsby’s imminent end—speaks volumes about Clayton’s skills, and yet the movie, when it hit the theaters, was generally considered a failure. Among the major reviewers who rejected it was Janet Maslin in The New York Times, who castigated Clayton for expanding the modern-day aspect of the romance, and disdained his “maverick stupidity.” Coppola himself hated the movie and argued openly with Clayton, whom he insisted corrupted his faithful script. Coppola had told Clayton that this was a uniquely American story to which he personally related. Clayton disagreed; he felt the themes were universal: this broadening is what he set out to accomplish. Mia Farrow felt the fault lay not with Clayton, but with Merrick and the marketers at Paramount who positioned it as a successor to the previous year’s Love Story. “Ultimately,” said Farrow, “[it] was a victim of overhype. The market was flooded with tie-in promotions, from Ballantine scotch to Gatsby cookware, [and it was] blown into something it was never meant to be, and released as if it had been Gone With the Wind.” Scottie Smith said her father would have liked the finished film.
During the eighteen tense weeks of production, Redford’s family had joined him on location. Throughout, says Jamie, Redford found daily escape in the day-to-day media speculations about Watergate, arising from the trial of the burglars and subsequent developments. In the spring and summer, the Senate hearings dominated national television broadcasting, achieving the highest audience ratings in history. Redford couldn’t get enough of it. Says Jamie, “You’d go to chat with him in his dressing room and he’d be there with Mia, transfixed, watching the box, and he’d say, ‘Hold on, Jamie, look at this. Can you believe Nixon ditched Haldeman and Ehrlichman? Can you believe what [John] Dean just said: that the burglary goes beyond [G. Gordon] Liddy and [James] McCord? Was Nixon behind all this personally? Have we got him in the net?’ ”
By 1974 and the publication of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, he had his answers.
15
Watergate
The evening Redford first encountered Bob Woodward in Washington, D.C., he also bumped into Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, a woman he much admired.