Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [52]
Pollack remembered being struck by Redford’s “command” when they met in an audition room. Much of this, Pollack admitted, was superficial accoutrements. With his recent good television earnings, Redford was living at the Hotel Bel-Air; he had also acquired a Porsche 350 series speedster, the first of twenty he would own over the years. “I understood these markers,” said Pollack. “This is a business where appearance and reality vie with each other. But you quickly get the knack of looking beyond. And what I saw in Bob, as Stark said, was a man of quality.”
Very shortly, the two actors were hanging out, drinking vodka and talking long into the nights. “We were very different physically,” said Pollack. “Bob was Mr. Sports. I was never into the jock thing; I never held a tennis racket in my life. But Bob’s competitiveness was infectious. And though he was always into sports, always checking the sports results, the competitiveness was much broader and healthier than that. It came from his gut and it came from the spirit of the times, the Kennedy spirit. Even if you weren’t political, and Bob was only marginally then, it was impossible not to be revved up by all the changes that were going down in 1961. Bob was hot-wired, and that made him a very attractive guy to be with.”
Redford “loved Sydney from the get-go” and concedes his own political soft-focus. Still, he says, it was impossible to remain indifferent to Camelot: to Kennedy’s brain trust, the exhortations to young people, the fact that the White House itself was now a culture and arts center. “I wasn’t paying close attention, but it seeped in,” says Redford. “Later, looking back from the stance of supporting liberal politics, I saw that the fifties-sixties changeover was the pivot of everything that redefined America as a global force. I wasn’t a contributor, but I was lucky to be alive at a time when the notion of America as a concept came back into question, and people looked objectively, without the pressure of a world war, at the capacity of our role in world affairs. It was a time of open questioning, which I cherished and enjoyed discussing with Sydney.”
Redford and Pollack’s friendship took off during War Hunt, Redford’s first—albeit small-scale—movie, which he still regards affectionately. During Little Moon of Alban, two young film enthusiasts, Terry and Denis Sanders, had come backstage with a script they’d developed with Stanford Whitmore about the Korean War. Redford liked them before he read the script: “They were of Turkish extraction, very quirky and cutting-edge.” The brothers were UCLA film school graduates whose cinema verité short about the Civil War, A Time Out of War, had won an Academy Award. Because of that success, Universal had given them $250,000 to make their first feature, this modest War Hunt.
The script dealt with the spiritual abyss of war, examined in the erosion of sanity on the battlefield, where Private Raymond Endore, an exhausted reconnaissance man desensitized to slaughter, attempts to abduct his young ward, a Korean child called Charlie, and take him from the killing fields to the freedom in the hills. Other major roles were those of Private Roy Loomis, a man of reason and