Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [166]
“I admit it,” says Redford, “I miscalculated the effects of fame and work. It took a toll, a hell of a toll, on Lola and the family. I thought I could handle it. I thought I had the recipe. But I was wrong. No matter how focused you feel you are, the distractions and deviations are too many. It was kind of a shock, I think, to all the family, to realize we’d moved on.”
Redford shared with no one the extent of his domestic breakdown, but it disturbed him and, though he had doggedly avoided therapy, he felt the pressing need for objective analysis. In his view, the marriage had been good for fifteen years, but he and Lola had changed as individuals. Still, they tried to address the changes and rebuild. They’d tried a trial separation, which didn’t work, and a recommitment, which didn’t work, either. “Bob was born to be alone,” believed Michael Ritchie. “Guilt was a real problem for me,” Redford says now, reflecting on his priorities during the marriage. “Where did I fail, because I was certain I did fail. And why?”
At this emotionally intense time, the wheels started turning on his first film as a director, Ordinary People.
As far back as 1975 Redford had told Pollack that he wanted to direct. Pollack considered it “inevitable. He had to do it, because he had a visual sense all of his own.” Professionally he seemed in prime position. But despite the money he had helped make for Warners, Columbia and Fox, and the many well-disposed influential friends, no one was especially keen on the idea of him as director of Ordinary People, a story considered dour. Finally just one—Bluhdorn’s new protégé at Paramount, Barry Diller—welcomed the project. “I wasn’t crazy about Ordinary People,” said Pollack. “I thought he chose a hard first subject, because it was entirely about emotion, so it was dependent on great directing of actors, of which he had no experience. Something more pictorially sumptuous, I thought, would have been right for his debut.”
But Redford entertained no doubts. “I probably started as a director in the fifties,” he says. “I was a magpie. I collected bits and pieces of life observations. A line from a book here, a character in conversation there, a piece of music, a childhood remembrance.” Sure enough, elements of experience and observation, from the Pachelbel music first encountered in Big Sur to the North Shore Chicagoans he shared rooms with at the University of Colorado, populated his vision of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People from the moment he read the novel in galley form. “It was a flood of stuff I couldn’t stop, like I had been storing it all my life for this moment,” he remembers.
Guest’s novel is the story of the Jarretts, tax attorney Calvin and his homemaker wife, Beth, and their high school jock son, Conrad, who live in the elegant Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. Everything is tautly ordered but the family is in trauma, attempting to fix itself after the accidental death by drowning of older son Buck, for which Conrad blames himself and over which he has attempted suicide. Against Beth’s wishes, Calvin supports Conrad’s psychiatric therapy, where he attempts to come to terms with deeply divided feelings about his mother. “She’ll never forgive me for getting blood all over the bathroom floor,” Conrad tells his shrink.
Alvin Sargent had spent a year on the first draft but, says Redford, had trouble relating to the characters. “To him, the people in Guest’s book were boring and transparent. But I found them intriguing. I remembered hitchhiking to a wedding in Lake Forest with a friend back in 1958. We went to a place full of immensely rich people drenched in ennui whose main concern was the status of their tax returns. That was the life in that part of Chicago. These were the Chicagoans whose lives I wanted to look inside.” To egg on Sargent, Redford drove him to Lake Forest: “I dragged him to some parties to let him meet these people. I told him, ‘Look at these people. Look at how seamless