Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [63]
On November 22, in the middle of the hysteria for Barefoot, Redford was being wined and dined at the Four Seasons by agents from William Morris, who were enthusiastically discussing movie possibilities. As he was sandwiched between them in a crosstown cab, the news came on the radio that Kennedy had been assassinated. Redford stopped the cab and went walking. “I walked for hours, in shock like everyone else, but also recording the public reaction like a journalist.” The night’s performance of Barefoot was canceled. The following night, and in the nights after, Redford noticed a strange phenomenon in the theater. “We’d had to adjust the text a little, to take out, for example, a jokey reference to me, Bratter, dying in the prime of my life. All that was understandable. But after a short period, I found the oddest thing. The sound of the audience laughter changed. It was subtle, but it was very marked. The laughter became raucous and harsh. And it never returned to the way it was before. It was as if innocence was gone from American audiences. At least, that’s what it felt like.” Redford, like many, later saw the assassination, and the following tragic deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as representative of a ground shift in American attitudes. “It was a terrible erosion of the belief system that had been in place since the Civil War. These were serial deaths of a president and national leaders at the hands of fellow Americans. This poked a finger in the chest of every American alive, saying, ‘This country isn’t the United States. This is a coalition of interests, not all of which are in alignment. Let’s think this through before it’s too late.’ ”
Through late 1963 and into 1964, as Barefoot ran, Redford continued to appear on television in quality shows, his favorite of which was an episode of The Virginian. He rationalized this work simply: it paid the bills, the $6,000 for The Virginian coming in especially handy to help fund a new apartment on West Seventy-ninth Street. But he would only take parts he could learn from. “The criterion I applied was, What can I absorb from this? Who wrote it? Who’s in it?” He accepted an episode of The Virginian called “The Evil That Men Do,” written by Frank Chase and directed by Stuart Heisler, to work alongside Lee J. Cobb. “You couldn’t go wrong studying him,” says Redford. “Here was an actor who did it all, starting in the Group Theatre, doing stage, the classics, movies, and now he was in television. He’d had a heart attack and had obviously slowed down, but I was keen to learn from him.” After a particularly intense scene, in which Redford found himself stretching to impress the great man, Cobb took him aside: “I know what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t get it from me. I’ve paid my dues, done my work, and now I just want to be comfortable.”
Redford’s television career was soon over. The decision was made, he says, by television, not by him. The fifties, as the film historian Leslie Halliwell has pointed out, was television’s Elizabethan age, a time when the medium offered interpretations of O’Neill, Shakespeare and Molière and introduced the contemporary genius of playwrights like Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) and Paddy Chayefsky (Marty). All that changed in the sixties when twenty-four-hour demand and sponsors’ greed greatly diminished quality. What followed, said Halliwell, was “the age of the beer can, with America’s anonymous network selection committees consciously gearing all their programs to the mentality of the fat little guy in the midwest who slumps in his armchair pouring Coors down his throat.”
Redford wanted no part of it. Through the trials of the last five years and especially the ups and downs of Barefoot in the Park, he realized that acting per se truly interested