Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [54]
After War Hunt had been completed, on a boozy night at Saxon’s home in the Santa Monica hills, he and Redford discussed the future of the movie business: “My life within the studio system was over,” says Saxon. “I was on my way to join Otto Preminger for a movie in Europe. I told Bob that all that remained in L.A. was television. I said the movie market was dead. He wouldn’t have any of it. He was still a relative unknown, had no real power, but he was emphatic. ‘There’s plenty left to do,’ he told me. I said, ‘But the movies are finished out here,’ and he just looked at me and shook his head. He was a stubborn critter.”
This stubbornness now focused on his theater failures. “I suddenly thought, Wait a minute, I’m missing something here. Forget drama. Laughter has always been my truth. It’s my personal sanity preserve. I decided I wanted to try comedy, and theater was rich in comedies at that time.” Tom Skerritt, whom Redford had also befriended when he too acted on War Hunt, remembers Redford outlining this decision: “It made absolute sense, once you knew him. He was never a straight-line guy. He’s an absurdist. He was also bizarrely ambitious. You could speculate forever on Freudian theories of alienation, of the artist’s inability to reconcile or overcome his childhood needs, and how that void opens the path to creation. You could say Bob’s alienation brought him to the higher ground. But however it happened, it happened. War Hunt was one piece of the mosaic. Comedy was the next piece.”
Hesseltine was appalled. “He said I was foolish,” says Redford. “He said I was already on my way in solid drama, that there was a momentum going since Iceman. He would not support me. He was, he said, grooming me for the classics. That, I felt, was his blind spot. He maintained some romantic vision of me as Paris in a skirt in Antigone. But that just wasn’t me. I put my foot down. I told him I’d rather rot than be remembered for Route 66. If I failed trying, at least I tried.”
In the middle of this debate, on an afternoon when he was visiting Monique James, Redford found a script on her desk whose author’s name caught his eye: Norman Krasna. Krasna, recipient of an Academy Award for Princess O’Rourke, had a marathon career dating back to the thirties, when he’d collaborated with Groucho Marx. Krasna’s wit was cornball and his style light-fingered. The script on James’s desk was Sunday in New York, and Redford became excited when he saw the name of Garson Kanin, a literary giant in his view, appended as director. “To me, Garson represented the ultimate Hollywood comedy sophistication, because of all the great Hepburn-Tracy movies he’d written with his wife, Ruth Gordon. I thought, This is my navigator!”
Redford insisted Hesseltine approach the producer, David Merrick, a leviathan of Broadway, for a role in the play. But at first, Merrick refused to even audition him. Redford continued to pressure Hesseltine with hourly phone calls. Finally Hesseltine broke through with Mike Shurtleff, Merrick and Kanin’s casting director, who had seen The Iceman Cometh and been impressed. On Shurtleff’s recommendation, Merrick conceded to test Redford, provided the actor paid his own fare to New York to meet Kanin. Redford was told he would be reimbursed if he got the part. “So I took the red-eye to New York, and I read for Kanin and landed the part. But Merrick, the cheap bastard, never reimbursed me.”
Crossbred from a wealth of George Cukor and Billy Wilder comedies, Sunday in New York benefited greatly from the participation