Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [213]
Six months later, Indecent Proposal opened nationwide on a maximum-distribution twenty-five hundred screens and raced around the world, earning more than $260 million, Redford’s greatest moneymaker to date. His nineties rebirth had come after a thirty-year career of determined variety, experiment and invention. He had proved again his imagination and durability as he straddled the art house and middlebrow markets. He was back at the epicenter.
21
Delivering the Moment
Redford’s attitude toward his children had always been one of tough love. Financial indulgence, he believed, suffocated the families of the rich. He would give each of his children a home and beyond that nothing other than trust, care and emotional support. After an interrupted period of study in Chicago, Jamie and Kyle returned to make a home in Denver, where their son, Dylan Larson, was born and from where Jamie pursued the life of a writer independently, working under the guidance of Josh Donner, a William Morris agent. It was while he was drafting a soon-to-be-abandoned sci-fi version of The Odyssey for Universal that the call came from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a hospital renowned for its treatment of liver disease, reporting the availability of a suitable liver for transplant. Redford was in New York, in the final days of preparing a new film, Quiz Show. He left the production and joined Jamie to fly to Nebraska. En route Redford told Jamie he wanted him to write the next Tony Hillerman movie for Wildwood. “It was such a boost,” says Jamie, “because his attitude had always been one of promoting self-sufficiency. On that flight he changed. He knew I was at my lowest, that there were so few people for me to lean on, and he gave me this gesture of hope, something to hang in for.”
Though Quiz Show was a fragile project that had almost slipped from his grip on several occasions, Redford felt he should delay it for one year. “My son’s well-being obviously came first. I sat by his bed and reassured him. I told him, ‘I’ll be there, hell or high water.’ But Jamie made the decision. ‘Get on with the movie,’ he told me. ‘Do what you were put here for, and let me do what I have to do.’ ”
Jamie’s first operation, an eight-hour procedure, seemed to be a success, but his recovery was hampered by a faulty valve in the new liver. Each Friday night after shooting in New York, Redford took a plane to Omaha. “I knew the operation didn’t work,” says Jamie. “Your body tells you. The blood tests were coming back okay, but something felt wrong.” On the day Jamie was due for release from the hospital, an ultrasound test showed a thrombosis on the hepatic artery, a condition that suggested fatal atrophy of the bile ducts. It was dealt with surgically. Jamie was again registered for a nationwide liver search. For the next three days, says Redford, Jamie was “out of it, but steady.” There followed, says Redford, twelve of the worst weeks of both their lives. Finally, over the Fourth of July weekend, a replacement liver was located. “People often asked me about the value of celebrity in such a situation,” says Jamie. “They say, ‘I’m sure Robert Redford gets to pull strings.’ But it’s not true. My father was 100 percent involved. He consulted on every aspect of the surgeries. He never stopped talking with the consultants. But that’s as far as it went. Celebrity can’t help in the life-and-death department.” The constant tension brought father and son closer than they’d been since their days together in Europe. “At times