Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [58]
For days the men talked in a drunken free association that revived Redford. “He’d get plastered and cuss the world: the social injustice, the bent hierarchy, the lack of mettle in the youth. He was volatile, but he had great wisdom. All the time, with this crazy talk and the wind rattling the windows, piano music was playing, day and night. Finally, I asked him what it was, because it was like the counterpoint of sanity, a Greek chorus to our yarns. And he told me it was Pachelbel, Canon in D, which I promised to get for myself when I got back to L.A. Then I forgot the name of the composer and, try as I might, I couldn’t recall it.” It would be fifteen years later, while renting a Big Sur property to work on the script for The Electric Horseman with Pollack, that Redford rediscovered Pachelbel: “Sydney and I decided to go for dinner, and at the last minute I remembered Deetjen’s, so I said, ‘Maybe it’s still there. Let’s go back.’ ” The old man was dead—but everything else remained, including the Pachelbel music gently flooding the dining room. At that time, Redford was planning to direct his first film, Ordinary People. The Pachelbel music suddenly framed this unshaped work in his mind. “I reflected on that later,” he says. “It fit a pattern in my life of serendipitous moments. Those are the moments—the Big Sur walk and Deetjen’s—that you feel you are not so much the navigator of your life as the object of some design.”
Back in Laurel Canyon, emaciated and bearded as in his post-Europe days, Redford announced abruptly that he wanted to quit L.A. forever and concentrate his life in the mountains of Utah. He would resume theater, he said, and spend his working months in New York.
Then came news of an Emmy nomination for “The Voice of Charlie Pont.” On the heels of that came an offer from Bing Crosby Productions for Redford to play the lead role in a new ABC summer series, Breaking Point. Redford said no. “Then the honey trap opens,” he says. “The seductive talk starts. This would be groundbreaking drama, all about a psychiatrist running group therapy sessions. I would be the star counselor. I thought about that. I was twenty-four years old, and I was supposed to be counseling sick people? I told Monique James, ‘How can I play this? It’s me who needs the shrink.’ ”
Arthur Park came down hard on Redford: “Kid, I’ve been a lifetime in this business, so let me put you straight. Don’t be a schmuck. Movies are great, but forget about them. They pay television stars in the top guest slots $3,500. They want to pay you $3,750 a week, for thirteen weeks. Nobody your age is getting that. Take it.”
Redford still refused. “Lola stood by me at first, because she was keen to get back to Provo and build a homestead. Then the offer went up to $6,000 a week, which was unprecedented. She said, ‘Wait a second …?’ and I thought, Gee, maybe I should rethink it.”
Redford spent all night on the beach at Malibu, walking, getting his feet wet. “I became that kid of six on the bicycle in Sawtelle, looking for the answers in the stars. Lola and I had big debts. Stark had loaned me some money, and this house we wanted to build was obviously going to cost some. But I felt I’d already ransomed myself to the Sanderses’ contract, and that felt bad, like I was an Indian who’d lost his spirit to a photograph. I didn’t want any more of that, but I also had to think about the family.”
When Redford returned home, there was another summons from Park. When he arrived at Park’s office, the agent was shaking: “While you were out playing Hamlet on the beach, kid, Bing Crosby Productions upped the offer to $10,000 a week! I’m doing this job thirty years. Don’t throw this back in my face. Let me retire with this one under my belt.”
“Coming back from the beach, I was at the point of saying