Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [243]
For years he’d been trying to revive collaboration with Newman, and he’d come closest just recently, in optioning Bill Bryson’s sunny memoir, A Walk in the Woods, about the author’s trek with an ornery old buddy along the Appalachian Trail. Newman loved the idea, and the film was already alive in Redford’s mind, was even penciled in for a 2009 shoot. Friendship between the men had never wavered. They had a spontaneous mutual empathy, a love of sports and the arts. Humor kept it moving. Throughout its thirty-five-plus-year span they kept in touch, usually visiting each other in Connecticut, at Newman’s home in Westport. Newman’s pleasure in his children’s charity work and the initiatives that launched his Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) was as meaningful to him as Sundance was to Redford, but they never ceased taunting each other’s self-seriousness. Throughout the years, the jokes were so endless they’d become ingrained. Once, Newman wrote to ask Redford to include his daughter’s boyfriend’s hemp-woven western shirts in the Sundance catalog. “Sure,” Redford wrote back. “On the assumption that, if they don’t work as fashion, they can be smoked.” When Newman’s Own, the internationally marketed sauces and other food products whose profits went to the Hole in the Wall children’s charity, took off, Redford sharpened the gibes. In a scene in The Milagro Beanfield War, a shopper in the background asks the clerk for Newman’s Own salad dressing. “That’s no good,” says the storekeeper. “Try something else.”
Even in the grip of terminal illness, Newman remained ambitious. Keen on A Walk in the Woods, he also wanted to direct for the stage for the first time, and his production of Of Mice and Men was under way at the Westport Country Playhouse when he passed away on September 26. Redford saw him six weeks before he died. He had recovered well from a long bout of chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering and was at peace. “It was tough. He was frail. But we’d had such a joyous shared experience and his spirit was so strong that it was hard to be sad about it. I was pleased. He was pleased. It was a calm adieu.”
Making his peace with Sydney, though, was never going to be easy. Their history was too intense, their achievements over forty years too intricately interlinked. Living in Pacific Palisades, Pollack had been working nonstop until The Interpreter, his 2005 movie with Nicole Kidman. He hadn’t visited Sundance for several years but maintained an interest in indie film and was preproducing a drama for HBO about the Bush-Gore presidential election when stomach cancer was diagnosed. He resigned from the movie, Recount, and Redford heard of his illness through the children, Becky and Rachel, who had stayed very close friends with Shauna and Amy. Redford phoned the Pollacks’ home and spoke to Claire, his wife, but the requested callback from Sydney never came. Finally, Redford “just got in the car and drove over and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ ” The reunion was awkward. Pollack was upbeat, even exuberant. But there was no talk of the past.
“Sydney knew what lay ahead and had settled his mind on dealing with it, and I was just content that we were able to spend some time,” says Redford, “and to let him know how thankful I was for the friendship and the work.”
In June, at the private memorial service for Pollack at an aviation hangar in Santa Monica, Redford carefully prepared notes for his eulogy. Dustin Hoffman was there, along with Al Pacino, George Clooney, Harrison Ford and a throng of leading Hollywood figures reflective of Pollack’s achievement. Redford found himself divided. He’d once written to Carol Rossen that L.A. remained forever uncomfortable for him, “still and always the gorilla in the living room.” Now, surrounded by the faces that emblematized the L.A. Pollack loved, he felt depressed by the gap between them. “I’ve no doubt [the depression] was in response to the special nature of our friendship. It’s