Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [226]
George Roy Hill, confined to his Upper East Side apartment in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease, hadn’t spoken to Redford in years but was aware of the inevitable changes he faced. For him, Redford’s career as an actor divided in two: he was the buckskin saddlebum, a part of his nature that grew from the Texas frontier; the other part arose from his friendship with Pollack, a probing Jewish sobriety that extracted the seductive Casanova from what Hill called “troubled” Irishness. “Everyone wants to be Irish in Hollywood,” said Hill, “because it connotes Shaw and Joyce and that long, tormented history of suffering and alienation. Nowadays they’re even calling Jack Nicholson an Irishman. But Bob’s Irishness, as remote as it is, springs from the genuine well of despair. He has trouble balancing himself in the world.” Reflecting on his work over the years, Hill concluded: “There’s a lack of resolution that makes Redford special. It’s summed up in that final scene in The Candidate, his best picture, where, after the shenanigans of the election, McKay says, ‘What do we do now?’ That question is in Bob.” For Hill, the way forward for Redford in his sixties was “to turn inward, and give voice to some of that turmoil we’ve only seen glimpses of.”
At the turn of the century, Redford seemed ready for transformation. He was in contact with Robert Pirsig, whose Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a personal account of recovery from a nervous breakdown on a road trip with his son, deeply touched Redford. He found it “familiar” in the best sense and had met with Pirsig years before in an attempt to mount a movie based on the book. Pakula had wondered if Redford’s seemingly exotic desire to make the movie wasn’t unfulfilled remedial family work. Redford thought not. It was, he insists, a desire to connect with “the freedom inherent in the surrender to insanity, or the insanity inherent in freedom.” Pirsig invited Redford to join him on the road in a battered old Cadillac. Redford imagined the delights of immersing in Pirsig’s spiritual adventures and finding out more about the “energetic facts” of true awareness poached from Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui guru, Don Juan Matus, that Pirsig so obsessively beat the drum about. But Redford was tied up with Sundance business, and the Pirsig connection slipped.
At that moment, serendipitously, Jake Eberts arrived with the outline of a novel called The Legend of Bagger Vance. In Eberts’s recollection the novel “somehow seemed important. I found myself flying to L.A. to see Bob with a sense of urgent purpose.” An arrangement to meet at Redford’s beach house was made, but with a flight delay and heavy traffic, Eberts arrived at Trancas Beach in a sweat, running late. “I was wired, and when Bob saw the state I was in, he offered to find me a change of T-shirt. I thought, That’s it, then. Knowing him, I’ve lost my window. He’ll start taking calls and answering faxes and I can forget Bagger Vance.”
Eberts offered to read the outline there and then to Redford, and within the space of one page, he saw the change in Redford. “He switched off the fax and phone and settled in. ‘I like this,’ he told me, and I knew my instinct was right: that he was waiting for a movie like this, something mystical and fresh, to take him in a new direction.”
Steven Pressfield’s novel The Legend of Bagger Vance was attractive to Redford in part because of its subject matter, golf. He had started playing golf while caddying at the Bel Air Club in 1948 and at one time played to scratch.