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Wildwood stationery lies fallow in the briefcase unused. Unnecessary. Accouterments of waste. The swarm of beehive activity is but the noise of anticipation. Nothing more. All is calm. No wind blows and no birds sing. Sitting here heavy headed beneath the enveloping shroud of depression and clarity. The clear eye I’ve waited for. The eye that sees what really is, and there is nothing. Alice in Wonderland is my book. Hollywood has paid me back in full for my disloyalty. Fear and trembling pass as business as usual. Lying, cheating, treading water, waste, anxiety, resentment, distortion, shallowness are the trade qualities and if you are so possessed—then—you are all right.

He was not all right, and he knew it. In a state of suppressed rage he agreed with Pollack to take on The Electric Horseman for Columbia. Anything but epic, yet mordantly resonant, it was a movie about a champion rodeo rider and a champion horse abused by commercialism and about to make a valiant escape to more honorable values. It had, for Redford, a poignant biographical ring.

17

Painted Frames

America had vastly altered over the last ten years, beginning with the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., then with the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate. The dissidents who smoked pot in the Summer of Love became the graduate environmentalists and politicians who, too briefly, breathed hope into the seventies. But while politicians like Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter promised much and accomplished little, some significant spiritual ground shift was undeniable.

Redford’s relationship with Pollack had also changed. Over the decade Pollack’s career had been consistent. He had made half a dozen movies and enjoyed a stable married life with Claire Griswold and their three children. Redford’s career was stellar. This was the decade that gave him superstardom beyond his wildest imaginings, where his name and image were so ubiquitous that even dictionaries listed him under words like “glamour” and “idol.” He had acclaim, wealth and opportunity, but he also had a failed marriage. Now, when the men got together, they inclined toward argument. Three of Pollack’s six movies that decade were Redford movies. In the same period Redford had made a dozen movies, of which The Sting and All the President’s Men, movies unrelated to Pollack, garnered the most attention. When All the President’s Men proved so successful, Redford felt Pollack was jealous. Pollack expressed “surprise” that the movie worked at all and told Redford wryly, “I should have done it.” Pollack, for his part, found his friend less accommodating and kind.

John Saxon, who joined the cast of The Electric Horseman, saw Redford, fifteen years after they worked together on War Hunt, as a man divided. That his fame was “monolithic” Saxon found ironic: “Not least because I was once a studio contract star. I played by the rule book, the studio way, and saw my career terminated by studio decree. Bob did it the other way, by bucking the system. He was an emblem of the new style, where artists took control of their destinies. This was what the seventies were about, from Scorsese to Lucas, from Redford to Stallone.” Redford was a decent man, Saxon says, a man who had secured his casting in the film without making any big deal of it: “But he wasn’t an easy guy to say thank you to. There was a chasm, a distance he’d put between himself and the rest of the world. I thought, This is the price you pay for that kind of fame.”

“I was aware of it,” says Redford. “I knew I was facing a sea change. I knew what was coming and it probably made me a tough person to be around.”

The Electric Horseman was very much a stopgap that facilitated continuity in the relationship between Pollack and Redford, which might otherwise have fractured irreparably. Its preproduction, according to Pollack’s files, was a mess, commenced upon with no script, no coherent casting plan, no sensible scheduling. All they had, in fact, was an agreement to make a movie for Ray Stark