Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [182]
The fact that Redford did his job as well as he did in the midst of Shauna’s trauma was an achievement. But the squabbles about distribution that followed mitigated all sense of accomplishment. The relationship with Hendler from this point on was never better than awkward. They shared one more movie transaction, but within two years, as Redford predicted, Hendler lost control of TriStar. He was replaced and slipped into semiretirement, dying of cancer five years later.
Depressed and anxious as Shauna still was, Redford sought to distract her by involving her in prep work for a project that had been offered to him as potential director, but that Sydney Pollack had inherited. Out of Africa, based on Danish novelist Karen Blixen’s memoirs, would be set in Kenya, and already he and Pollack had started their routine of fireside conversations to build the movie, in which he would star. As Christmas approached, he took Shauna with him to Africa. For months he had been corresponding with the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who shared an interest in conservation. “I knew Shauna hadn’t allowed herself to grieve,” Redford remembers. “The shock was still in her system. She needed distance and she needed something to absorb her intellect. So I called Leakey and asked him to help out.” In response, Leakey asked them to join an archaeological dig at Lake Turkana on the Ethiopian border. The trip helped them both recover.
But back in the United States in March, while Redford was returning from an institute board meeting, he received a call telling him Shauna had been involved in a serious car accident outside Provo. As she drove in darkness, her Bronco had run off Interstate 215 and plunged into the Jordan River, where she was trapped in the car. Only the heroic acts of four passersby who dove into the freezing waters in which Shauna’s car was fully submerged saved her life. Press reports called Shauna “continually depressed,” an understatement to those close to her. “It was the nightmare I dreaded,” says Redford, “but she got through it, she got the help she needed. Lola, everyone, did their best.”
Those who knew both Pollack and Redford felt the latter’s success with Ordinary People created a new tension between the men, relieved to some degree by Pollack’s success just a year or so later with Tootsie, a movie he also appeared in alongside Dustin Hoffman and which was nominated for ten Oscars. In Paul Newman’s opinion, “those guys were in hot competition, no doubt about it.” In Redford’s view, though, Pollack was different from him, a deft traditionalist whose terrific skill was making serious subjects popular. He could deal diplomatically with the studios and was a master of patience, tact, organization. Redford felt himself edgier, attracted as much to whimsy as experiment and never content to repeat the formula. Some, like the actress Carlin Glynn, who served as adviser at the Sundance June lab tutorials, believed the spiritual differences of the friends opened a chasm. Each wanted elements of the other’s expertise—Redford with directing, Pollack with acting—but found no common language of shared endeavor beyond their initial roles, with Redford acting and Pollack behind the camera. “I think it made for some cynicism,” says Glynn. “They were buddies, but Sydney would not shy away from belittling Bob in front of people. I recall his attendance at one of the Sundance labs, addressing some students alongside Bob. Bob mispronounced some word, and Sydney was happy to correct him in front of the crowd, which I thought was unnecessary. They had this close connection, but it really started to strain.”
For both men, the odds were