Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [78]
The check he was referring to was for the movie of Barefoot in the Park, this time costarring Jane Fonda, assigned to television director Gene Saks when Nichols turned it down. Redford was refreshed by his sabbatical and, in a more profound way, renewed. Stan Collins believes the trip had “sorted out his marriage and his family and got his discipline back in order.” Shauna, too, felt the Mediterranean trip had sharpened his perspective. “He had something to work out of his system, relating to his place in acting and, maybe more importantly, to his place in a marriage,” she says. “When he came back, it was new ideas and new energy.”
Upon his return from Crete in early fall, committed though he was to Barefoot, he went to see Mike Nichols, who was in the middle of preparing a movie adaptation of Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate. Redford immediately pushed, says Nichols, to audition for the role of Benjamin, the sexual innocent seduced by the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson. In October, just days before the scheduled start of Barefoot, Nichols, against his instincts, conceded to a screen test. In the screen test, shot with Candice Bergen, Nichols was troubled by Redford’s robust, suntanned presence. “I told him he was wrong for it,” says Nichols, “but he wouldn’t let it go. I was living in Brentwood and he came for supper and we shot some snooker and he went on and on about his ability to play the part. He said he perfectly understood the character, who was a social misfit. I finally said to him, ‘Bob, you’re a vastly talented man. But be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. Do it. And then tell me: Can you honestly imagine a guy like you having difficulty seducing a woman?’ He couldn’t answer me, because it was self-evident. A guy who looked like Dustin Hoffman could play Benjamin. A guy who looked like Redford would be a joke.”
As the five-week shoot for Barefoot began, Fonda and Redford looked forward to reconnecting. “There was a certain amount of balancing to be done in the day-to-day rehearsals,” says Fonda, “because I was the newcomer to this text and he had the role down pat. But he was a gentleman. He let Gene do what he had to do, and he made room. He never preached, and anytime I needed redirection he contributed caringly. He would take Gene aside and make the point in private, then Gene would coach me.” Redford had been worried about staleness with the Bratter character. “It’s something I knew could get in the way,” he says, “so I pushed to get through that barrier.” He joyfully renewed friendships with the members of the Broadway cast. “I’d forgotten how much I’d enjoyed Milly Natwick and Herb Edelman. Herb was my type of guy, the court jester who bought people little gifts and tried to make them laugh all the time. That was great, because moviemaking gets boring.”
For Gene Saks, a veteran of Armstrong Circle and Kraft Theater live broadcasts and an old friend of Neil Simon’s, the most important task was overcoming Redford’s boredom. Saks recalls: “Bob wanted to remind everyone every day that he wasn’t as starchy and uptight as Bratter. So whenever I called, ‘Cut!’ he threw off the suit and tie and loafed.” Redford agrees that “boredom” was the key challenge. “I’d taken Bratter everywhere I could, and the character was just hot air compared with, say, Parritt in The Iceman Cometh or the stuff I’d done with Sydney on This Property Is Condemned.” Neil Simon, only just embarking on his movie writing with the concurrent Peter Sellers movie, After the Fox, had adapted his own play, adding little more than the obvious outdoors expansion, where Bratter finally gets to actually walk barefoot in Washington Square Park. “What gets interesting, in those circumstances, is the chance to break down the mechanism,” says Redford. “You have done the play as an organic whole; now you are assembling the collage in film style and you get to see some new things. You say, ‘Hey, I could do this just with my eyes’ or ‘Hey, I could do this sotto voce.’ Gene helped. He was adaptable and he knew he’d get the best from me by letting