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By Root 819 0

about the last five years. After Butch Cassidy, it was just one movie after another. Want to see the dailies? Sure. Want to have a script session? Sure. Want to view the location? Sure. Want to stand on the wing of a biplane? Sure. Want to go north, south, east, west? Sure, sure, sure. I’d hardly seen my family. The kids were growing up. Lola was working two weeks every month in Washington, and had moved there to try to stabilize family life while we were shooting in town. But Wildwood’s offices were then on the Warners lot in Burbank, and I was there more than I was with her. Right after All the President’s Men I stopped dead. I decided to wind it all down. I felt: Maybe I won’t be an actor anymore. I thought: I’ve forgotten how to paint. Maybe I will write—poetry, short stories, maybe a screenplay. But I was exhausted, and I longed for the tranquillity of the West.”

Tranquillity was the one thing Utah could not then provide.

16

Out of Acting

While working on All the President’s Men, Redford visited Gerald Ford in the Oval Office. “We spoke about skiing, a lot of platitudes,” says Redford. “Then he went out and made a speech about Cambodia. What did I learn? That the air ain’t so rarefied up there. You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to be president.”

The entire experience of All the President’s Men heightened Redford’s confidence in his political possibilities. It was while researching the movie that he met Joan Claybrook, the public interest lobbyist then running Ralph Nader’s organization, Congress Watch. Redford had always been mindful of the accomplishments of Nader’s activism. He didn’t need to read CAN’s newsletters to know that it was through Nader’s lobbying that car safety had improved, car emissions were controlled and literally millions of lives had been transformed. Grassroots politics, Nader reminded him, is where it all begins. But agitating and lobbying were different animals, he knew. Was he prepared for the committed discipline of lobbying?

It was over dinner with Claybrook that the gauntlet was thrown down. “Bob was whining about Ford’s nomination of Stanley Hathaway, the former governor of Wyoming, as secretary of the interior,” says Claybrook. “He stated what we all knew, that Hathaway was a promoter of overdevelopment of wilderness for mining. And I said, ‘You know, Bob, I’m so tired of guys like you complaining about situations like this. You have fame, ergo you have power. You are opposed to this guy? Try and stop him, then.’ He said, ‘What do I need to do?’ And so his formal political education began.”

Claybrook found Redford keen to tackle Capitol Hill. “I told him he had to personally meet fifteen or so senators who were going to vote to see Hathaway in, and state the case. I made the appointments with all but two or three of the guys we knew would never vote with us, and put together the background files for him to hand out. I didn’t think, with his movie commitment, that he’d be able to follow through, but he did. So we developed a little routine. We would meet at the corner of the Senate building and I’d hand him his notes and in he’d go, alone, with his rap down pat. I told him, ‘You have to look in the guy’s baby blues and ask him, ‘Are you going to vote with us?’—and count every one of those votes on a handshake. If the senator says he’ll think about it, it’s not good enough. You tell him you will call tomorrow.”

CAN contacts opened some doors; his celebrity some others. Senators Tip O’Neill, Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy—a regular skier with his family at Sundance—were all helpful. Over the course of forty meetings, Claybrook and Redford finally had their majority. Redford was ecstatic, but Claybrook cautioned him about the hurdle to come. “Next, the committee will meet for their formal vote. And when they do that, you have to be there, sitting in the front row to look every one of them in the eye when the time comes.”

On the day, Redford and Hoffman were filming until dawn. Claybrook was certain Redford would never make the committee meeting. “But, what do you know, he made