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like those you review your life experience,” says Jamie. “I saw both my parents as being loving supporters. My mother was the nurturer of my youth. My father was sometimes absent, but always there in spirit. At the time of my operations, the roles reversed. My mother would have been there for anything I asked: she never let me down. But in the crisis it was my dad who oversaw it all. He needed to do that. I saw it clearly. It was not a case of redeeming himself or making up for anything. It was just his time to bat had come, and he was there.”

The instant Jamie opened his eyes after the second liver transplant, he knew the surgery had worked. “It was a beautiful dawning, like someone turning on the sunshine again. Just a feeling of, Yes, this is right! This is how I have been waiting to feel all my life.” The recovery, though, was complicated by recurring ulcerative colitis, which resulted in the removal of Jamie’s colon. It wasn’t until October of the following year that he was healthy enough to resume an active lifestyle, exercising, traveling, writing to deadlines for Wildwood. Redford felt “an unspeakable relief, one of the truly great moments of my life.”

Hume Cronyn believed Redford was “hardened” by the crisis, but Redford contends that the opposite was true, that he came more than ever to cherish life and found new depths of love within family that he’d hoped would also extend to friendships like Pollack’s. For Cronyn, Redford had become reclusive: “He let friends slip away; he stopped returning calls.” Jamie says no: “He was, and is, a snob in one sense only: he must receive something intellectually or spiritually from a friendship. I think his hurt at that time was that friends for both of us were thin on the ground. Some serious rethinking began. When you’re at death’s door, you reevaluate things like love and truth.”

The notion of truth, subjective and empirical, had been an intellectual preoccupation for as long as Redford could remember, and it was the appeal that lay behind his pursuit of Quiz Show. Richard Friedenberg contends that A River Runs Through It triumphed not as a homily but because it revolved around the absolute truth of who Redford really was: “It wasn’t the story. It was this guy on horseback resolving his personal issues of purpose and survival within the universe of a movie.” Carol Rossen believes Redford is someone who feels compelled to contribute to public life, while remaining committed to the isolated, reflective existence that centered on the verities. “Truth is his big hang-up in life,” she says. Film after film of his reflected a pursuit of the question: “What is wrong with this picture?” Quiz Show would be his sharpest commentary so far on “the truth” of national values.

Indecent Proposal opened doors for him, and he parlayed that into a deal with Jeff Katzenberg at Disney to acquire Quiz Show, a project that had been developed by Barry Levinson and Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh at TriStar, then abandoned when stars Richard Dreyfuss and Tim Robbins dropped out. Based on a nonfiction book by Richard Goodwin called Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, Quiz Show was an account of the NBC game-fixing scandals of the late fifties. Redford felt a personal connection. He had once been a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Play Your Hunch, where the promised fee of $75 morphed into fishing gear and he had been forced to identify himself as a painter, rather than the actor he had already become. Redford had watched Charles Van Doren’s performances on the Twenty One quiz show throughout 1958 and tried to believe his assertion of innocence. “I wanted to go on believing, but the Merv Griffin show straightened me out,” says Redford. “As a nation, we didn’t pay enough attention, and the fact was, we were experiencing a fundamental breach in morality.” Redford quotes social theorist Neil Postman’s argument for the two ways in which cultures can corrupt: they can be prison cultures in the Orwellian model or burlesques in the Huxleian prophecy. In a world dominated by technologies, Huxley