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By Root 733 0

whipped me to some other consciousness. You can rationalize this however you want: the urban guy, jaded with the buzz of Manhattan, suddenly blasted into the bleakness of the desert world, whatever. But for me, in the way it happened, it was a transcendent experience. In simple terms, it yanked me backward, to the forties, to driving with my mother and encountering this native culture, upon which modern Americans are parasites. But it was not memory or nostalgia. It was a feeling of being sucked into timelessness. I was bogged down in the business of a career, asking myself, Should I choose this, or decide that? And that face at the window just pushed me into a feeling of, Just be. It was an unexpected Zen moment that alters you in some way.”

Transformed—hardened, he says—Redford arrived in L.A. determined to press Monique James for parts akin to the one in Iceman. She complied, finding him roles in an episode of the series Bus Stop, directed by Robert Altman, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a showcase Twilight Zone with Gladys Cooper, in which he played Death in the guise of a friendly neighborhood policeman knocking on the door of a smart old-timer. “He suddenly drove me hard,” said James. “My specialization wasn’t movies, but I had a soft spot for Bob. There were lots of pretty boys around, but not so many who made you think twice the way he did. He was driven. He was also the kind of guy, when he left the room, you looked after him and said, I wonder what’s really going on inside that lovely head? What’s the dark secret that makes him so determined?”

“I was not into shared soul-searching,” says Redford. “In that regard I was, and remain, a loner. I like to face the issues alone. Similarly, in deciding the direction I wanted to go in as an actor, I mostly engaged that dialogue with myself. Why did I want to persevere? Vanity is the easy explanation, but I now knew it was more than that. The nearest I can come to explaining the drive is something Jack Kerouac said about the problem facing the American artist. There are many voices in America, he said, so the best solution is to write one story in the bum dialect, another in the Indian dialect and so on. I liked that. I had a very broad sense of America, or the parallel Americas, and I knew I wanted to study the differences. I wanted the power of witness. Then I wanted to turn it into some performance truth. You have to be careful of overstatement, but I suppose I had some intuition or observation about America or Americans that I wanted to essay.”

James stretched, getting him tryouts for a few movies, but he consistently failed. “That taught me a lot about the business,” says Redford. “Slowly this tapestry unfolded: that show business—even art—was gladiatorial. I had to work harder.”

With new antitrust laws, MCA, which was ever expanding into movie production and had now acquired a record label, was under pressure to restructure. James urged Redford to retain a Beverly Hills lawyer, Alexander Tucker, and he signed a new movie agent contract with Citron and Park, the high-profile MCA spin-off. But he refused to sever contact with Stark Hesseltine. “I saw how one could become soulless in the pursuit of success, and I would not allow that to start happening. Stark had been loyal to me, and I felt I should reciprocate. He knew nothing about movies, but he was a decent human being, so I decided I would stick with him as my overall agent and adviser as long as I could.”

The fidelity facilitated the most productive and long-lasting friendship of Redford’s life. Sydney Pollack, a young actor from South Bend, Indiana, was also an MCA client, and met Redford during readings for a small-time movie called War Hunt. “It was Stark Hesseltine who got me interested in Redford,” Pollack recalled. “All I ever heard from Stark were stories about this young blond surf god who was such a great guy. That got me interested to know Bob.” Pollack had left home at seventeen, abandoning “the usual bourgeois expectations” of his shopkeeper father, first to join the army, then to study acting