Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [199]
At the time, Jamie was in remission, suffering no symptoms. “So I backed off. I told Dad, ‘I’ll fix it my way, don’t worry.’ And I tried, I really tried. I tried acupuncture, herbs, every sort of quack cure.” Redford took great joy in the fact that family life was stabilizing. In 1986 Shauna had finally emerged from the shadows of Sidney Wells’s murder to marry the new man in her life, Eric Schlosser, the journalist son of Herb Schlosser, president of NBC. Jamie married Kyle in June 1988, shortly before his planned transfer to Northwestern. But soon afterward he collapsed and was hospitalized. “The Jesuit chaplain visited me at the hospital and asked my views on life and death,” says Jamie. “That was the moment. It suddenly hit me: I’m really ill. I can die at any moment.” Bothered by the insensitivity of the Jesuit, Jamie set out on a three-month exploration of faith, visiting dozens of churches and spiritual centers. He found sanctuary, temporarily, with the Unitarians. “There were limitations to what Dad could provide, and the Unitarians filled the void. I was different from my father. I was a believer in chaos theory. Dad was a believer in benevolent fate. I remember flying from Vegas to Utah with him during The Electric Horseman. We had time totally alone on the mountain then. Suddenly I understood that he viewed that tranquillity as a God-given thing. He had a superstitious religious outlook that was half Indian, half Christian. All of his life was a meditation on the interpretation of the signs. If he thought about some old friend and then the next day that friend called, he believed it was purposeful fate. I was not like that. I saw the mountain as nature, nothing with an agenda. Dad had ‘belief’ in a way I didn’t, and the Unitarians, who believe in no afterlife, helped me accept the roll of the dice, the bare, pragmatic realities.”
Amy describes her father’s response to Jamie’s illness as “that stubborn old mechanism of ‘You cannot succumb to the false mythologies—it’s all about winning.’ ” Redford concedes this might be true but adds, “I could not imagine the loss of Jamie, and wouldn’t tolerate the concept. I was proud of him as a fighter. At his weakest moment I sat by his bedside and held his hand and told him, ‘There’s all sorts of right things I should say. But let me just cut to it: you have to get this devil off your back. You know that? You have to beat it.’ ”
Redford paused to reevaluate the allotment of his time. For the moment, the world of formal politics had lost its luster. There was progress on environmental reform: Wayne Owens was back in Congress after a twelve-year hiatus and was beginning to work the wilderness initiatives they’d long discussed; Bruce Babbitt, the Democrats’ torchbearer since Gary Hart fell out of the 1988 presidential race, was another new friend with a strong, hopeful reformist slant. But Ted Wilson believed a fire had gone out in his friend: “[Bob] was upset by the ignominious outcome of Gary Hart’s campaign, because he’d supported him very actively. On top of that was the disappointment of the IRM. All of it had a cumulative effect and movies seemed to be a far safer bet.”
But the movies were far from a safe bet in the wake of Legal Eagles and The Milagro Beanfield War. For a decade Redford had off and on given the appearance of being bored and disinterested. Now he was forced to remind himself of the continuing importance of his maintaining a high profile to help Sundance. What he still had going for him was his working relationship with Mike Ovitz. And Ovitz had ideas, principal of which was packaging Redford with Spielberg. Spielberg