Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [68]
Redford flew from Spain to New York at the beginning of February, saw the kids into nursery school, then traveled on to rehearsals in Los Angeles. On February 16 the first read-through took place at Lambert’s Santa Monica home. Bronx-born Pakula, who had come to Hollywood via Yale, found much to talk about with Redford: “I’d been through Warners animation and produced theater plays and kissed ass to do some movie directing, so our experiences were similar in many regards. I also knew enough to recognize the outsider. I’d known Jimmy Dean quite well, double-dating Pier Angeli’s sister while Jimmy courted Pier. I knew the Jimmy Dean edge when I saw it, and I saw it in Bob. Natalie was the one who spotted him first, but I’d seen him do the Schary play, where he hadn’t a lot to say, but he kind of growled, demanding attention. I’d auditioned him and passed on him then. This time around I saw he could be the great outsider, like Tod Hackett awaiting the burning of Los Angeles in Day of the Locust, a guy with a big agenda. It’s inside him, I thought. So, if he can get it out …?”
Redford was disoriented by his homecoming. One moment, he says, he was barefoot in the Balearics, the next he was being fêted at the best suite at the Beverly Wilshire. “It was full-on Hollywood, a hint at a lifestyle I’d previously only observed as a very distant outsider growing up in the town. I was treated like royalty, by Warners’ decree. The first morning, the room service guy came to serve me breakfast and laid it out and started giving me the weather report for the day—‘Good morning, Mr. Redford. It is fifty-four degrees outside, but the forecast is fine. It will be eighty degrees by midday’—as if by rote. I said, ‘Where are you from?’ And he mumbled something, because my question wasn’t in his ‘script.’ But I wanted to know where he was from. I didn’t want bullshit, but I was going to get it. It took me ten minutes to get the details: that he was from Gary, Indiana. When I said I knew Gary, he just wanted to be out of there. I was overstepping. He had his role, and I had mine. I hated that game.”
Lola and the kids flew out, and Redford rented an expensive family home on Rockingham for the duration, where Lola’s brother and sister, Wayne and Betty, resided with them. “Bob was the new prince in town,” says Wayne, who loved the nights out at Trader Vic’s, the favored eatery. “They were on the learning curve themselves and found a lot of fun working out the dos and don’ts of etiquette.” At one point, an invitation to a Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor party in Bel Air arrived. Wayne was excited, Lola noncommittal, Redford plain dismissive. “Work always preoccupied him,” says Wayne. “Just work.”
The movie was shot on the Warners lot, on location at Apple Valley and at the pier area of Santa Monica. “It was a milieu I knew like the back of my hand,” says Redford, “and it should have been conducive to great work. As I saw him, Wade Lewis was mysterious, arrogant and charming, attractive to both sexes, but he could not be captured. Mulligan and Pakula seemed to buy into my vision of the character. But Gavin wasn’t buying. I liked Gavin very much, and I was told he’d based Wade Lewis on Monty Clift. I knew enough by then to understand that a whole generation of actors like Rock Hudson lived the lie. But I did not want to go there. What I opted for was something sexually more subtle. I tried to depict an entirely different species: the insatiable hedonist, the guy who has the power and the appetite and uses them to screw men, women, dogs, cats, anything. A complete narcissist. A guy like Caligula, who doesn’t care.” Lambert insists Redford misread his, Pakula’s and Mulligan’s intentions: “I wrote Wade as a gay man. Apart from the one relationship he had with Melora, the wife of the studio boss, he was unwavering in his gayness. I thought that Bob had accepted that, and Mulligan