Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [158]
Depending on whom you asked, Redford’s competition with Lola was either a spur or an omen. President Carter appointed her as EPA representative for the International Year of the Child, and she was now also on the boards of the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, and the Chicago-based National Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Society. “I don’t believe their competitiveness was a negative thing,” says Stan Collins, “but it was real enough. Its basis wasn’t vanity. It was results. They had their own goals within environmental politics, and they stuck the course.” Jamie wasn’t so certain. He knew his parents had started marriage counseling, and he feared the end of the marriage was near: “They also had a widening separation of interests. Mom was the great academic politician. Dad wasn’t like that. He saw grand themes. Mom would target the fine detail of phosphate damage to crops and carcinogens in the food chain. Dad went for the wide sweep. He was arguing for heritage, tradition and cultural integrity. I admired him for his devotion to anthropology, but I admired him from afar. I was too ill to be of any help.”
After years of being attended to by stomach specialists at the Utah Medical Center in Provo, during his senior year at Dalton, Jamie achieved a proactive breakthrough. Watching a PBS television special late one night, he learned about new endoscopy procedures in the GI tract. “Truthfully, I felt that no one had paid enough attention to getting me a proper diagnosis. The feeling always was, ‘Hey, Jamie is freaking out again!’ I don’t blame Dad or Mom. But you can only push the problem on the back burner for so long. After the PBS special, I made the appointment independently and walked into the gastroenterologist’s office in New York and handed over my files. The reaction was, ‘Oh boy, you have a serious ulcerative colitis condition and you need radical treatment very urgently.’ ” Redford spotted Jamie’s declining health—and the terminal crisis of his marriage—from the corner of his eye. “I was distracted,” he admits, “and in error.”
A Place to Come To had him fully engaged, more excited than he’d been about any story since the Woodward-Bernstein adventure. Close Encounters of the Third Kind may have been booming at the box office, but that wasn’t his kind of film. Robert Penn Warren’s epic is about Jed Tewksbury, a southerner whose beginnings remind one of Tot’s history and whose resolution tackles the human need for meaning. Tormented by his choice of women, Jed feeds his wandering urge, distinguishes himself as a jock and scholar, fights against the Nazis and becomes a figure of world renown. In the end he addresses the emptiness he still feels in a pilgrimage to his mother’s neglected grave: “I thought … maybe I might be able to weep. And if I could weep, something warm and blessed might happen. But I did not lie down. The trouble was, I was afraid that nothing might happen, and I was afraid to take the risk.”
The poetry of Warren’s writing, the metaphor, the subtext were what appealed to Redford. In years to come, the books he would choose for his own directorial adaptations would often be distinguished by metaphor and symbolism. “Yes, it was a story you had to reach for,” he says. “But it was a terrific Everyman tale. I also thought Penn Warren was neglected, and that his stories were powerfully visual in a way no one explored. I had the highest hopes.”
But in the summer of 1978 Pollack announced that the deal he’d been trying to set up with Warners was dead, and that the project was un-doable. Redford agreed that the script they had in progress with David Rayfiel was inadequate, but he was “pissed” that Pollack pushed it aside in favor of a new project for Columbia. “I thought we didn’t need to quit, and I told Sydney so. We argued some. In the end, the friendship was more important than the film.”