Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [44]
Redford’s AADA graduation took place soon afterward. But he was dismayed that, despite his A-plus standing, the best Hesseltine could find for him was summer stock in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At first, Redford said no. “To me,” he says, “summer stock was play school. Stark said I was wrong, that summer stock was the farmyard for Broadway. You made your way either by apprenticeship dog work behind the scenes or in the good stock companies, preferably close to New York, where the casting people could come down and see what you had. And Bucks County was the top of the pile, he told me.”
Carol Rossen had also become a client of Hesseltine’s. In her view, Hesseltine’s “deceptive gentlemanliness” was a double-edged sword: “He was literary, elegant, apparently a humane academic, not much older than either Bob or I. When you met him, you were swayed by his beautiful, lilting Boston accent, which sounded like one of the Kennedys. He also stuttered, and he had exquisite manners. But he was also a mean bastard with tunnel vision. When he saw something in you, it was that and that alone he nurtured, and you’d better buy into it. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him, because he had a capacity for bitterness that was unparalleled. I always believed, when he died, he’d die by a bullet fired by a disaffected actor.”
Redford gave in to Hesseltine. In July he met with Mike Ellis, the Bucks County producer of Anouilh’s Tiger at the Gates. Ellis offered Redford the co-lead role of Paris. “But then he said, ‘All these classical types had curly hair. So get yours curled.’ ” Redford’s reaction was to refuse the play again. “It all felt wrong. There was a basic problem with the creative thinking, I felt. Certainly I didn’t want a boring translation of an old text. That kind of conventionality did nothing for me. But neither did I want what seemed to me crassness. Ellis wanted the wigs, but what he was really after was a circus, not the Anouilh classic by any means. On the surface, he appeared well set up. He had a Shakespearean actor, Herb Hatfield, in the lead, and Louise Fletcher, all the way from Hollywood. But it was cockeyed, a Felliniesque concept.” A major row with Hesseltine ensued. “Finally, I looked at Lola and the financial situation we were in, and I said, ‘All right. But you’ve got to buy me a hat.’ ” Redford never got over his distaste for the production. Still, it marked his first leading role on the professional stage.
He was consoled almost immediately by an echo of the past. Dore Schary, author of Boys Town and onetime MGM wunderkind, had gone from strength to strength over the last year on Broadway. His hit play Sunrise at Campobello had won five Tonys. Now he was preparing a potentially controversial follow-up, The Highest Tree. Redford had been friendly with Schary’s daughter Jill in Brentwood, though he hardly knew Dore well. The connection was irrelevant, however, since it was casting director Ruth Frankenstein’s decision to offer him a key part in the new play.
The Highest Tree explored the conscience of a dying nuclear physicist, played by Kenneth MacKenna, trying to come to peace with his contribution to the parlous division of ideologies in the world. Redford had just a dozen lines as the son of a friend of the physicist. Elizabeth Ashley was the female lead, though she was then called Elizabeth Cole. From the start of rehearsals in August, Redford felt uneasy with Schary’s high-minded direction, which