Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [219]
Redford’s profound enjoyment in Up Close and Personal amounted to a new mission statement. “Not everything need be War and Peace,” he says. “I lost no sleep over it.” The box office returns crowned his instincts: more than $100 million. He was, once again, at sixty, an uncompromised romantic idol. But that, as ever, turned out to be the salve, not the be-all.
After Ordinary People, Redford stated emphatically that he would never appear in a movie he directed. But in the flux of middle-age self-challenge, he reversed this decision and suddenly decided to direct himself in a movie for the first time. The Disney relationship was rosy, and with substantial new hits behind him, brokering the premium deal was straightforward. He chose The Horse Whisperer, an as-yet-unreleased novel by new English author Nicholas Evans, which had been hotly auctioned at the October 1994 Frankfurt Book Fair. Wildwood’s development chief, Rachel Pfeffer, acquired the rights, believing the blend of romance with a western setting ideal for Redford, whom George Roy Hill had once described as “the natural-born saddlebum.” In Evans’s novel, Tom Booker, the horse whisperer, is part Zen master, part equine doctor. Romance between Booker and hard-nosed Manhattan businesswoman Annie Maclean begins when Booker tries to help Annie’s daughter, Grace, who has been maimed in a riding accident that also severely injured her horse, Pilgrim. In the book, the emotionally frozen Annie becomes pregnant, leaving many unanswered questions. Redford liked the book but disliked the overly melodramatic ending. “My immediate thought was that it would work as a movie if the romance simmered and came close to the boil, but then the Booker character and the woman are stranded by moral dilemma,” says Redford.
Readying The Horse Whisperer—with Eric Roth, the screenwriter of Forrest Gump, drafting the script—Redford decamped to a rented Italianate stucco villa in the foothills of Mount St. Helena at Calistoga, California, an hour north of San Francisco and close to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, where he intended to do the postproduction work. He was at the end of his romance with Kathy O’Rear and the start of a new relationship with a Hamburg-born expressionist artist, Sibylle Szaggars. Bylle was in her mid-thirties, dark haired and adept at riding and skiing. She had worked for the Andrew Lloyd Webber organization in London and New York before deciding to pursue her own art out west. They’d met at Sundance, where she stayed while absorbing the southwestern environment for her work. “The relationship with Kathy ended because they were just too different,” says a family friend. “Kathy worked like a miner to keep it going, sending him daily letters and sermons, and trying to keep up. But their lives weren’t in harmony. She was spending time with her mother in Florida, where her father was very ill; he was elsewhere.” Bylle’s nature, the same friend observes, was closer to his. “She’s a true artist, literate, humorous and active. But the key is, she puts no pressure on him. She’s not a woman who sits around waiting for his call. She gets on with her painting and her life, and he loves that sense of freedom she provides.”
At too few times throughout his life had he enjoyed domesticity. Now he slipped into a happy routine, shipping in his favorite furniture and his portable sauna, which stood on the tiled terrace overlooking the mountain where Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne had honeymooned in a shack a hundred years before. Bylle pitched in in the kitchen, her dog, Max, always at her heels. Their life in Napa County, she says, was relaxed in a way it could not have been in Los Angeles, Utah or New York. They hiked together, took daily five-mile jogs and read. Jamie, recovering well from his transplant and beginning to write for Wildwood, was in the process of moving to nearby Fairfax. More than ever father