Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [154]
Jamie, however, was struggling. He was prone to stomach ailments diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome, and by his mid-teens his general health was unstable. At Dalton his grades were bad, and his only interest was drama: “But, like Dad, I’m superstitious. I read the signs. And the signs told me early on that acting was not for me.” In fifth grade Jamie wrote a school adaptation of The Iliad; he was offered the lead but, true to his father’s perverse nature, chose instead “the bad-ass bastard” Achilles. “Everything in that play informed me I would never be the next Robert Redford. First, my helmet didn’t fit, so it was a struggle to hear the lines. Then, when Odysseus comes onstage to beg Achilles to join him in battle, I had my best lines, which ended, ‘Forget it, I shall sit in my tent and wait till Agamemnon comes.’ When I opened my mouth, out came, ‘I shall shit in my tent.’ ”
Increasingly Jamie drifted toward music for self-expression and would soon become a fixture on the club scene, hanging out at Manhattan’s Studio 54 until “the potentially lethal atmosphere for a kid with money and an association with fame drove me for cover.” Utah, in the circumstances, was an escape, though Jamie, who had no interest in horses, related to it as a boyhood laboratory where he had learned to ski and discipline himself with hard labor. Now he preferred to strut the deck that faced Timpanogos, with his amp turned to the max, blaring Eric Clapton riffs across the canyon. “I saw that Dad was putting more time and energy into Utah, but I also saw Mom at the center of this strong group of CAN women that tugged at her time. It was a family situation where trouble lay ahead.”
Christensen’s eco-home, Redford hoped, would be the magnet to draw the family back together. But as the demands of the new farm and horse business grew, Redford was prematurely forced to contemplate Hollywood work again. “I never made a movie decision based on money,” he says. “But that year was the exception.” All the President’s Men had proved a phenomenon throughout 1976, winning three New York Film Critics Circle awards and four Oscars, among them best supporting actor for Jason Robards and the one for Bill Goldman as screenwriter. The competing films that year included Rocky and Taxi Driver, movies that introduced new contenders to the Hollywood A-list in Stallone and De Niro. The following year brought Star Wars and the sweeping technology revolution. But Redford was still in demand. Prospective projects poured in. Even Hitchcock, preparing his swan song, Family Plot, expressed interest. Redford was “thinking differently. I knew acting per se was no longer enough. Directing now took center stage in my thinking. I knew nothing about the technicalities of cameras. All I knew was from observing great talents like Gordon Willis and Duke Callaghan. But I began to imagine some story I could visualize on-screen, with absolute control, like a painter.” He asked Barbara Maltby, a CAN friend, to try to find some story “about behavior and feelings” and was surprised when she quickly gave him the galleys of a novel by Michigan-born Judith Guest, a great-niece of the poet laureate Edgar Guest, called Ordinary People, about a dysfunctional family’s attempts to survive. “It hit me very profoundly. The point of contact for me with a script or story was always, Do I know these people? I did know the characters in Ordinary People. They were people I’d met at the university, wealthy North Shore Chicagoans who dealt in a specific way with issues of solution finding and communication. The book was about just that: communication. A family is in distress with the death of one son, and the mother can no longer relate to her remaining son or her husband. How do they communicate their inner feelings? How do they go forward?” Redford called the writer Alvin Sargent, and Wildwood commissioned a script. “But I had no idea