Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [73]
Redford’s work was shaping up as his best to date. Throughout production, Penn was delighted with the performance, as, he says, he was pleased with Fonda. Redford, for his part, wrote in his diary that Brando was the best, that he was “role model stuff.” Contrasting Brando’s approach to Natalie Wood’s demanding attitude to detail, Redford felt Brando “drifted on the breeze.” Momentarily, the acting grail Redford sought was found. “Great acting,” he wrote, “is no more than child’s play. What a joy it is to look at it that way, to enjoy an extension of the great part of childhood. Fully. Self-indulgence. Spontaneous reactions, guilelessness, full and free. If you’re really good, you are still a kid. Brando is good because he’s a kid. He’s acting because it’s easy and he can get his jollies and still be a kid. Always playing around. Always. Talks like a kid. He just takes it in front of the cameras with him. He’s no genius. Nor is he brilliant or anything like that. He’s just a kid who stayed a kid. Fellini—a kid. 8½—a kid’s dream. He’s jacking off royally, with a whole load of charm. Wonderful! God bless him!” As a footnote on the same page, he added: “I am glad I am a kid still. The answer is in the kid’s eyes.”
Ironically, the very self-indulgence Redford was cheering wore down the production. The trouble started, it appeared, when Spiegel began contesting Penn’s direction. Brando, once fun, became perverse. There were now long, showy standoffs, phone call distractions, no-shows. “Whether Marlon was doing this to challenge Sam is another matter,” Redford says. “I had a little rethink about him, and his process. On reflection, some of that internalized stuff bothered me. I later thought it was selfish and mean-spirited, because it seriously affected Arthur.” Jane Fonda concurred: Brando, for her, was a major disappointment.
During the shooting of the finale, where Bubber, Anna and Jake are cornered by the mob, Fonda found herself in the trunk of a car at midnight, really getting to know Redford. “We ended up bunched together like little kids,” she says, “waiting for our filming cue, just talking about our lives. Night shooting induces intimacy, so we were ready to open up.” Redford talked about his wild days in Westwood and Van Nuys, about climbing the tower of the Fox Village Theater, about how mountains always challenged him. “Out of that conversation came a really devoted, understanding friendship that has lasted over the years,” says Fonda. “Who can say why it works? Similar values, really, and a similar outlook about the world and its problems.”
Political activism was a part of The Chase coterie—a new experience for Redford, as much as for Fonda. For the duration, Penn was dwelling in Sammy Davis Jr.’s Beverly Hills home, where he threw weekend fund-raising parties for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, with which he’d long been involved. Brando, a supporter of Native American rights, was a regular guest, but Redford and Fonda tended to shy away. Fonda says her noninvolvement was because she was “politically ignorant.” As for Redford, “he just wasn’t social; tact went right over his head,” says Fonda. “It took him fifteen years, until we made The Electric Horseman, to learn to play the games of professional diplomacy, and even then his attitude was conditional.” Redford was inspired by other things. “We had endless talks about this miraculous A-frame, which was his personal experiment in alternative living,” said Penn. “More than anything,