Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [168]
Hutton was aided, undeniably, by the new emotions of his recent loss. “He opened up a lot, which was helpful for both of us,” says Redford. “But it was also dangerous ground, that no-man’s-land between the director-actor engagement and personal interrelating. I was wary of transgressing. There was another factor. Many people considered the role of Conrad to be the heart of the piece. That wasn’t true. I felt the key was Beth. Berger, the psychiatrist, was the bridge. But Beth was the ailment. To understand what Conrad was going through, we had to experience the distress of this damaged woman. More than anyone, we had to cast Beth right.”
Pollack had strongly recommended Jane Fonda for the role. Redford thought different. For several months, whenever he walked on the shore beside his new L.A. base at Trancas Beach, near Malibu, he’d see Mary Tyler Moore, the actress who dominated comedy television through the 1970s with her eponymous ABC show, walking in the opposite direction. Hers was the only light entertainment he watched on TV through the seventies, and he liked her elegance. “She really barely acknowledged me,” he says. “But I got to thinking what great, bright-eyed style she had and wondering about her own dark side.”
Moore vaguely recalled a fleeting hello, but, she says, she “tended to avoid his eyes. All I ever saw of him were his shoes.” Her respect for Redford’s privacy was enhanced by her own shyness. “Neither of us, I learned, were social types. I was going through a period of major change. My comedy years were over. My marriage to [television executive] Grant Tinker was on the slide, and I was in a state of forced reevaluation.” Over the next three years would come divorce, the accidental shooting death of her depressed son, Richie, the suicide of her younger sister, Ann, and the serious illnesses of both her parents. Redford knew nothing of Moore’s problems but instructed his agent to call her agent, John Gaines.
Moore recalls her first meeting with Redford at the Wildwood office newly sited on the Paramount lot as a square dance. “It was all very formal, and I had to pinch myself to remember that this was the Robert Redford. Then something I hadn’t expected occurred. He said, without apology, that he was concerned that my fame as TV’s Mary Richards, whom he enjoyed, would destroy believability for the Beth role.” Moore had read Guest’s novel the month it appeared and wanted the role because it touched her personal experience. The key relationship in her own life was an unresolved one with a remote and commanding father. “I thought, Well, okay, we’re off to a good start, because he has no trouble about being honest.”
After the first interview, Moore heard nothing for a month. Then the unlikeliest opportunity came up to replace Tom Conti in the long-running Broadway hit Whose Life Is It Anyway? Gaines suggested Moore for the part, and Manny Azenberg, a good friend of Redford’s since his Broadway days, endorsed her. Gaines’s strategy, says Moore, was brilliant: “There was no doubt that Bob was interested in me. After that first interview he left me in a state of hope. But the reality was that he had Eisner to appease, and why would Paramount buy me? John Gaines said, ‘Look, if Azenberg takes you, there will be this visible belief in you as a serious actor. You will be proving your credentials by taking on the legitimate stage.’ For me, of course, it was a lot of pressure. Ordinary People would come just before Whose Life Is It Anyway? Was I tenacious enough for all that? Could I deliver for Ordinary People in the first place? But I had faith in myself. I was deeply inside myself at that time, which was the