Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [131]
That Redford had long been separating from Lola’s organization was obvious to many people. Mike Frankfurt saw it as an inevitable result of divergent lives and Redford’s new interests. “CAN’s focus was the practical issues affecting Manhattan. That’s where those women began, and that’s where they psychologically remained. What really interested Bob was only the law and the Washington dimension. In that sense, at that moment they started to drift apart.”
And, of course, Watergate was drawing him to Washington, too. As Redford was wrapping up The Great Gatsby in the fall of 1973, Richard Nixon was digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. In November the president proclaimed to a stunned meeting of Associated Press editors in Florida, “I am not a crook.” By March, with the indictment of the Watergate Seven—the core group close to Nixon against whom the strongest evidence of dirty tricks had been amassed—the presidency was in peril. Shortly after, the House of Representatives commenced formal hearings on the possible impeachment of Nixon. Not long after that, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the 1972 burglaries and what preceded and followed them came close to completion. “Carl and I were pursuing the book our own way,” says Bob Woodward, “but we’d been influenced by Redford in the way we compiled it. It was he who suggested we make it about the investigation, and not about the dirty tricks campaign. He had his movie idea. We had our book to be getting on with. But the two ran side by side.”
“The film started to move after I’d first talked to Woodward,” says Redford. “After the Washington meeting he came to my apartment. When I knew he and Carl were coming by, I told Bill Goldman, since we were friends. Bill said, ‘Gee, I’d love to hear all this.’ And so Bill was there with Bob, Carl and me. And, of course, the story was magical. It was tremendously important nationally, obviously. But I was also interested in Bob Woodward as a man. He was quirky. He had some odd mannerisms. I liked that. When he left, I said to Bill, ‘There’s the movie. These guys. Their personalities. The aspects of each that propel the other. The way the investigation was led by these personalities.’ I made that observation to Bill as a general remark. I didn’t mean to involve him in the project, and I wasn’t commissioning him as the screenwriter.”
The release of The Way We Were, The Sting and The Great Gatsby six months apart in the winter and spring of 1973–74 pushed Redford to unrivaled status as the world’s number one box office star. George Roy Hill saw Redford struggle for balance. “It’s a condition I well knew, though in Redford’s case the fame was the most extreme kind. He was pulled in every direction. You could no longer have time in a public place with him. He was always looking over his shoulder. Always distracted.”
This was exacerbated by Redford’s “elastic perception of time,” a perennial problem that caused many aggravating late arrivals on set. Hill was troubled as they began preparing to make a movie for Universal that had long been a fantasy of his, The Great Waldo Pepper. “I was a little annoyed, to be honest. He was never the easiest guy to stay in touch with, since he was so bad at punctuality and, with my marines background, it was an obsession of mine. There were a few instances where I didn’t hear from him when he told me he’d call, and I said, ‘Fuck ’im, he’s doing this big-star thing.’ But that wasn’t his problem. His problem was some dismissal of authority he carried around, some unease with his own authority figures, maybe.”
All Hill’s fantasies, he said, were built around