Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [56]
The ebullience was short-lived and the play closed in April. On May 5, Lola gave birth to a baby son, David James, seven weeks prematurely. The horrors of maternity crises of the past—of his mother’s illnesses and the loss of his son—came crashing down. Mother and son fought to survive. The baby had the kind of extreme hyaline membrane disease that, says Redford, was life threatening. “The doctors gave Jamie just a 40-60 chance, but he hung in. Over a month his condition improved, and then he stabilized. It was a colossal relief for us.”
Pollack knew the near loss of the baby had deeply unsettled Redford. Pollack was still in Los Angeles, directing Gunsmoke, and urged his friend to come west, so that he and Lola could recover. Monique James also called, telling him about the many exciting offers for television work. “You almost lose a child, you reevaluate,” says Redford. “So I sat down and restrategized my career.” He told Hesseltine he wanted a break from theater. Simultaneously he instructed Monique James and the new movie agent she had recommended, Arthur Park, to concentrate primarily on big-screen work. He was straightforward about his aims: he wanted money to build a home in the mountains. “Family became the priority and I decided to concentrate on the most expeditious way of building a secure home.”
In July the Redfords returned west, first to Provo, then to a rented apartment in Laurel Canyon, not far from the Pollacks’ Mulholland Drive home. “Bob and I were always good for each other when we got together,” said Pollack, “because we fired up each other’s imaginations and fantasies. Neither of us skied then, but Bob suddenly started going on about this idyllic Rocky Mountain home he wanted to build, which would be hemmed in with snow half the year. I was thinking, He’s out of his mind—it’s all the stress of Jamie’s birth and everything. But then he surprised us by declaring that he’d already bought a plot near Provo and was getting ready to build, cutting clearings and laying foundations with his own hands. It came out of nowhere. I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘Wait a second! You want to work in movies and you want to live in the wilderness! How do you reconcile these two lifestyles?’ I told him he was nuts.”
The high-volume work, as he wanted it, rolled in: parts in Dr. Kildare, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, any number of TV westerns. Then Park called to say there was, finally, big movie interest. MGM had two promising projects: a movie version of Sunday in New York, which would be directed by Peter Tewksbury, and Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment, to be directed by George Roy Hill. “I was very hopeful,” says Redford. “I thought both were right for me, but the readings did not go well.”
Redford’s problem, Monique James felt, might well have been his ubiquity on television. “It was always a balancing act,” she said. “But I was encouraged all the time by the quality of what Bob was being offered. None were makeweight parts in TV, all had worth.” Huge consolation came in his role in ABC’s notable anthology series, Alcoa Premiere, hosted by Fred Astaire. Redford knew he was onto something: “Every so often you read a script and the part solidifies, living and breathing before you have the chance to apply yourself. This was my first experience of that.” The teleplay, by Halsted Welles, was called “The Voice of Charlie Pont,” about a failed writer, George Laurents, married and settled and working as an “assistant to an assistant to the janitor” at a Boston bank, who is preyed upon by an old school buddy, the criminally opportunistic charmer of the title. What most pleased Redford was the fact that, as in War Hunt, he was being offered “the soft-guy role,” and not the psycho. Redford was duly cast as the writer, and Bradford Dillman as the con man.
No production Redford had been involved with until that time had such audience impact. Among those who took notice was a newly emerging theater director,