Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [180]
Redford was in Buffalo, in upstate New York, on August 1, just settling into the first scenes of The Natural, when he got a call from a distressed Shauna in Boulder. She was at the apartment that Redford had recently purchased for her near the CU campus and had just been told that her boyfriend, a twenty-two-year-old fellow student, Sidney Lee Wells, whose mother owned the apartment block, was dead. Shauna and Wells had been close for months, even contemplating marriage. Wells had been shot in the back of the head. His body was found just a few doors down from Shauna’s place, in the apartment of Thayne Smika, a delinquent renter who owed several hundred dollars of back rent. Redford tried to comfort Shauna but she was, he says, “convulsed with confusion, in a terrible state.” Jamie, also attending CU, comforted his sister while Redford rented a jet, picked up Lola and flew to Denver, arriving at the apartment within hours. Inevitable gossip surrounded the killing. Allegations of cocaine trading involving Wells were made, but the police suspected the murder occurred when Wells confronted Smika for payment of the rent. Smika would be arrested on suspicion of the murder but later released when prosecutors deemed the evidence against him too circumstantial. Four years later Smika would disappear, evading charges against him of forgery and theft, unrelated to the murder. The lack of closure in Wells’s death would be a terrible burden on the family for years to come.
The Redford family attended Wells’s funeral at the Christ Congregational Church in Longmont, Colorado. The atmosphere there was hysterical, with British tabloids paying locals to climb trees, the better to get photographs of the mourners. Redford, who had hired bodyguards, was sickened by the mêlée. “He was always somewhat retiring, but he became reclusive after that,” said Alan Pakula. “I often wondered was it some natural paranoid response, some recognition that he and his family were higher-profile targets than the rest of us.”
Redford returned to Levinson’s location a week later in a tense mood. “My concentration, obviously, was dented. I was thinking of my daughter’s dilemma, not any fictional scenario.” The tragedy of the early part of The Natural, where Hobbs loses his career to the assault of a maniac, was intensified by the personal strain. At War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, Redford had to face a gallery of hundreds and pretend to play ball. “It was the hardest thing in the world, with those worries on my back,” he says, “but experience kicks in. You blank things and find the zone. That worked, because it was what Roy Hobbs was doing with Wonderboy, overcoming his troubles to win the big game for the Knights. The movie was about overcoming adversity, about the power of self-belief.”
The cast, over whom Redford had approval, was a source of strength. Glenn Close, playing Iris, became a good friend and would later join the board of the Sundance Institute. Kim Basinger, cast as the seductress Memo Paris, also became a close companion, and for a while they were inseparable. “She was a blessing,” says Redford. “I needed supporters and that was a lucky set for me. There was a lot of love going around.”
From Levinson’s point of view, Redford’s vulnerability was both a challenge and an asset. “We needed each other, because there was an awful lot of stuff in that movie—the mythology, the poetry, the history, the humor. I like