Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [67]
The movie, written for Wood, who was coming off West Side Story, a winner of multiple Academy Awards, was a fable about the destructive power of showbiz, a cogent, less romanticized version of A Star Is Born, and it pivoted on Lewis. In the script, Daisy swaps carny life shared with her nutty mother for the cynical patronage of Raymond Swan, a Hollywood mogul. Swan promises to mold every move she makes—deciding even when she may cut her hair—to effect her stardom. But Lewis takes her off the rails with him instead, marrying her and ditching her.
Pakula had wondered about his partner Robert Mulligan’s choice in casting Redford. “He wanted Bob more than I did, but when I saw this sinister side, I thought, He’s perfect.” The worry, said Pakula, was that this kid from Brentwood would play it like a spoiled brat. “But Bob had the smarts. He’d done the schoolwork, and he chewed up the faux Shakespeare like he’d seen it all, lived it all. As the scene moves on, as he asks Daisy if she would like to get drunk with him, and she says, ‘Yes, on sweet sherry,’ the savage arch of his brow, that sardonic double take, was the best cinema I’d seen all year.”
Redford had met with Pakula and Mulligan, a hot partnership since their 1962 collaboration on To Kill a Mockingbird, backstage at the Biltmore the previous summer. They had the script from English critic Gavin Lambert, based on his own 1963 novel, and they had Wood, whom they’d recently collaborated with on Love with the Proper Stranger. Wood, a friend of Lambert’s, dropped by at the Biltmore, too. Redford already knew her. They’d met at Van Nuys High, where the San Francisco–born actress, already established, was fulfilling California’s legal educational requirement while caroming from movie to movie. “She said she wanted me to do Daisy Clover,” Redford recalls. “She saw what I was trying to do with Paul Bratter, and she saw that I was all about taking a chance. And when I read Lambert’s script, I got it. Wade Lewis was gay, and I stalled. I told Pakula and Mulligan, ‘No, I will not play this role, because I won’t do it justice.’ Natalie had the power after West Side Story, and she insisted they redraft it for me, to make it more interesting and easier for me to play. They did. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ ”
Many, including Pakula, believed Lambert’s story was a commentary on the life of Norma Jean Mortenson, the naïf who became Marilyn Monroe. Lambert says the story was “fundamentally a woman’s tale, about enchantment, exploitation and survival in Hollywood.” For Lambert, whether Wade was gay or not was irrelevant. “What the story was about was how Daisy finds inner strength to overcome the abuses and regain herself, as she does in the end. Natalie was ideal for the character, because it was her life story. Daisy’s mother didn’t want her to be a star and Natalie’s did, but otherwise it was similar.”
Inside Daisy Clover, astonishingly Natalie Wood’s thirty-eighth movie, was originally a Columbia project developed to follow Love with the Proper Stranger. Michael Callan, the Columbia contract actor, was the first choice for Wade Lewis, but then Warners contracted Wood to make The Great Race and bought out Daisy Clover, too. The switch allowed Wood to take control of new casting, and, apart from Redford, she chose Ruth Gordon to play her mother and Christopher Plummer for Swan. Rosenberg refused to entertain Redford