Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [62]
Nichols felt the need to confront Redford on another matter. “I became fascinated by the fact that he had no interest in his beauty. It was depressing, because he wanted to plaster his hair down and play the nerd. He had come to like Bratter again, but he felt himself playing against Liz, and that confused him. She, after all, was supposed to be the object of desire.” Once again over dinner the play was reenergized. Nichols says, “I told him, ‘Look, I’ve had years of experience in a double act, and I’ve learned one thing: you cannot win the battle unless you accept that it’s a battle.’ Bob just nodded and we ended our meal. When we did the show that night, it was a completely different show. Liz became invisible. He pulled out every trick and knocked her off the planet. That’s when we really took off.”
Ashley’s affair with Peppard, she later said, added to the burden of years of overwork and derailed her emotionally. “I felt like a failure,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I had a lot of energy and flash and was as adorable as I could be. But I wasn’t any good and I knew it. I could tell that Redford knew it too, and every time I went out onstage it compounded my sense of inadequacy. The more I acted the worse it seemed to get.” Nichols disagrees. “Certainly, as we headed for Broadway, she didn’t slacken in terms of commitment. Bob challenged her, and she gave him a run for his money.”
When they played in Washington, Richard Rodgers deemed the play “irresistible.” Newsweek declared it sublime. Redford, however, was in despair. He recalls, “What the reviews said to me was, This play is finished. It was done, it worked! So for me the work was over. I went to a bar to have a drink with Mike. He asked me what was wrong and I told him, ‘I feel lonely onstage. It’s the signal for me that something’s wrong, that I’m not connecting.’ I told him I couldn’t go on with Barefoot because the critics had put the cap on it. He asked me to reconsider, and I told him honestly that I couldn’t. And then he did a very smart thing. He said, ‘All right, forget all that’s been said tonight. Forget what the critics like. Forget that Richard Rodgers likes it. From now on it’s a completely blank sheet of paper, it is no longer blocked out. Whatever we have is whatever you want to do. Just take it and go with it. You are Paul Bratter. Play it whatever damned way you feel.’ ”
Nichols remembers the conversation as stressful but invaluable, both in securing a friendship and in developing their respective careers. “Bob taught me something. I wanted a play set in stone. He didn’t. He wanted a play that was evolving every night. Something that was always new. In my experience, very few actors would go that far. It’s too energy consuming. That, I felt, was the mark of his integrity.”
The results, momentarily, were disastrous. “It was a case of swinging too far to the left to counter the swing to the right,” says Redford. “But it bonded us so tight and together we made the adjustments and straightened it all out.”
The play became the toast of Broadway’s fall 1963 season, opening on October 23 and garnering the biggest receipts of 1963–64 and a Tony for Nichols. Over the next two years it would earn $50 million, a 500 percent return for its investors.
Redford, Simon and Nichols were elevated to a kind of national stardom with the enormousness of Barefoot’s success; so was Ashley, who appeared on the cover of Life in November, the week before she was admitted to a psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney. For Simon, after years of laboring in television, fame was bewitching. Nichols found it exhilarating. For Redford, national attention was wonderfully confusing. “I was suddenly Mr. Focus. Eleanor Roosevelt and Noël Coward dropped by. Natalie Wood came backstage. Bette Davis summoned me to her suite at the Plaza. For me, the best was Ingrid Bergman, who came backstage. When she was leaving, I went after her to