Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [43]
Redford signed on. The rumor at AADA was that Hesseltine was gay and was wildly attracted to him. Redford says that was beside the point: “He treated me with brotherly respect. He looked after me. In time, he became a guest at my home, and when we ran into a crisis, he loaned me money. He was a good guy.”
Around this time, Mike Thoma also recommended him to director Herman Shumlin for a last-minute walk-on role in his production of Julius Epstein’s breezy Tall Story at the Belasco Theatre. Redford accepted $82 a week gratefully and found himself for the first time, at twenty-two, on the professional stage, albeit in a distinctly background role.
In no time, though, MCA was proving its worth. He was backstage one afternoon when he got a call from Eleanor Kilgallen, MCA’s New York television agent, offering him a part in an Armstrong Circle Theatre episode. Redford enjoyed the few television shows he watched—The Honeymooners, Sid Caesar’s show—but felt he was better set up for theater. Then Kilgallen told him the salary was $360 for a couple of rehearsals and a live transmission and he was overjoyed.
He wasn’t entirely new to television. Several months before, in March, he had made a humiliating appearance on Merv Griffin’s Play Your Hunch game show, an invitation accepted more in jest than with any career objective. “In the greenroom, when they’d ask me what I did,” says Redford, “I told them I was an actor. Their response was, ‘That won’t work at all. What else do you do?’ So I told them I was also a painter, and they said, ‘Okay, better. Let’s go with that. You’re an artist down on his luck. The audience will buy that.’ ” The scandal of the rival, fixed show Twenty One and the congressional hearings that would reveal Van Doren’s complicity in “winning” $129,000 were still six months away. “I’d already seen Twenty One and sensed it was a setup, and now I was playing the same game. I did what I was told to do, and when I took a dive, I put out my hand for the $75 fee they promised me. Instead, they gave me $75 worth of Abercrombie and Fitch fishing tackle. I was hardly going to feed Lola and furnish a room with that.”
Armstrong Circle Theatre was television of substance, in the style of CBS’s seminal docudrama You Are There, seen by millions live in the New York area and later broadcast in what was called a hot kine, a tape of the live broadcast. Redford’s episode was called “Berlin: City with a Short Fuse” and presented the tensions surrounding the 350-day blockade of Berlin by the Soviet Union. Redford was to play a southern soldier, Benjamin Peebles; he had a substantial forty lines. Also cast were Keir Dullea, playing the lead, and AADA classmate Johnny Carlin, who was already forging a career for himself in afternoon soaps. Douglas Edwards introduced the story, in grand Walter Cronkite style, then each soldier walked up to the camera and recited his name, rank and serial number before the drama commenced. As Private Peebles, Redford was supposed to be light relief, but at rehearsals he got big laughs as he milked the jokes. The producer complained, saying the laughter was too distracting. The process of chipping away Peebles’s lines began. “My forty lines became ten lines, then five, then four lousy lines. I became so invisible in the script that they had to invent a line that went, ‘Where’s Peebles?’ Some other guy had to answer, ‘Aw, he’s out back eating.’ I remember telling the producer, ‘So Peebles is eating again? You should have hired a fat actor.’ ”
After two days of rehearsals the show went on. As Redford prepared for his first line, Johnny Carlin moved up behind him. “He whispered, ‘See the red light on that camera? As soon as it comes on, you will have twenty million people waiting for you to screw up.’ ” Redford says he barely made it through. “But the adrenaline rush was something else. Forget mountain climbing! I had to do that again.”
In April, shortly before the