Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [69]
Wood clearly appreciated Redford’s obduracy. In an interview she told Photoplay: “He’s the most unbendable actor I know. He sticks to his principles when all about him are shedding theirs. He is unbribable by fame. He’d sooner starve than conform.”
One incident during filming sealed the friendship between Wood and Redford. As they shot in a small boat off Santa Monica Pier, a sudden change in the wind direction cast them adrift in the Malibu current. Mulligan, on the unwieldy camera launch, attempted to leash the boat but snapped the retaining cables, breaking an assistant’s leg. For twenty minutes Redford and Wood rode the squall, all the time moving farther out to sea. Wood, who hated the sea, panicked. Redford laughed her through it. “He was laughing so much, she surrendered and trusted him,” said Mulligan. “Later, when he realized how precarious the situation really was, he sobered up. But that jock heroism impressed Natalie, and, as friends, they never looked back.”
Rumors of an affair between them were rife on the set. Pakula observed “a natural connection that arose from mutual recognition of the rebel heart.” According to Wood’s personal assistant Howard Jeffrey, Natalie “fell head over heels for Redford” during the shoot, while accepting that “he not only looked like Jack Anderson, the all-American boy, but he lived like him as well.” Redford admits to a great attraction to Wood and a closeness beyond friendship, “but I was aware very early on of the liabilities of intimacy with the women you act with. There are two industries: the film business and the parasite called the gossip industry, which can devour you. I loved Natalie’s seriousness. She wasn’t crazy like Monroe. She was the kind of girl who’d sit up all night writing notes: a trouper, the real thing. Nat and I became tight. When she married the agent Richard Gregson, I was her best man, and we stayed close until the end of her life” (with tragic irony, in a boating accident, off Catalina Island, in 1981).
Gavin Lambert, visiting the set, judged Redford, like Wood, an actor of instinct, not intellect. As the movie progressed, Lambert was surprised by Redford’s intensity. Approaching a defining sequence, where Lewis interrogates himself in the dressing-room mirror before making love to Daisy, Redford sought out Lambert and insisted on his presence on the soundstage. “He felt it was critical to have me at hand,” says Lambert, “undoubtedly because of the sexual plurality of what he was portraying. But he really didn’t need me. He sailed through it, and I thought, My God, his comprehension is precocious. You’d expect it from someone who has made forty pictures, not someone who’s made two. At the same time, his skill wasn’t an intellectual one. It seemed more what we’d call a natural gift.”
After seven weeks of filming, Redford was happy to be back in Provo for the first blaze of the spring flowers. In his diary he wrote that he was on the run again, hiding away on his hill, happy to be reunited with Lola and forgetting the calendar. In April, just before he left Los Angeles, Wood proposed a role for him in her next project, a Tennessee Williams adaptation for Seven Arts and Paramount called This Property Is Condemned. Redford met with Wood’s producer, Ray Stark, and disliked him. “He had the character of the mercenary merchant who will say anything to get his way but can never be trusted. He lived like a Roman emperor merely because he lived beneath the Hollywood sign.” The script, a leftover from an abandoned Taylor-Burton project, was poor. “The only appeal was Natalie. The script wasn’t authentic