Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [79]
Fonda was happy with the outcome. “It was light entertainment,” she says. “Neither Bob nor I saw it as a career movie. It was marking time, a movie with a nice script and a nice director. Sometimes that’s enough.”
During days off, Redford spent time with his Van Nuys High School buddy Dave Brockman. Brockman, who had shared a hot-rod fanaticism with the teenage Redford, had always suffered from depression; now Redford noticed a sharp decline. As Thanksgiving approached, he invited Brockman to visit Utah for the holiday. “I had a sense that it might be important for him to get away, and I looked forward to reconnecting and finding out what was wrong.” But the production schedule necessitated an overnight trip to New York to shoot the Washington Square Park exteriors the day after Thanksgiving. The Redfords had to withdraw the invitation to Brockman. Over the weekend Brockman gassed himself to death in the garage of his home in the Valley. Redford was devastated. “I felt responsible. I always had this thing that death was on my shoulder, 24/7. My dogs, as a kid. My uncle. My mom. My firstborn. A darkness right on top of me.”
Redford headed west when Barefoot wrapped, resuming the Provo–Los Angeles circuit, driving his new stripped-down 904 racing Porsche like a maniac, disappearing for days on end. Peer Oppenheimer, a journalist he’d met in Spain, reported a gathering storm in a piece written for Family Weekly titled “The Hide-and-Seek Life of Robert Redford.” “The danger of success,” Redford told Oppenheimer, “is that it forces you into a mold. I prefer independence.” In fact, what he was seeking was a purpose beyond movies. “I was aware that all this spiritual shit was a nightmare for the family,” Redford now says. “I had anger management issues; there were a lot of unresolved conflicts.” For succor he turned to Utah, to Mormon conviviality and the mountains. In a copartnership with Stan Collins, he put up $8,000 to purchase Hoover’s Clothing Store, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot property in Provo that specialized in ski gear. The venture failed, with only the ladies’ fashion basement, which Lola managed, showing a profit. “I thought it would be a lark, but it was a burden. At the end of the day, it was just a store, just money. It meant nothing.”
What he was really searching for, Redford says, was peace of mind. Nothing could calm him. “I’d replaced the booze with pills. Stan introduced me to a diet pill that was supposed to keep me in shape, but it fried my brains. I took Seconal for sleep, but I was wired and yet tired all the time.”
Talk of westerns filled his evenings. He had, he told Pollack, a new regard for them. Gene Saks had observed that, during Barefoot, whenever he was relaxing, Redford would “strip off Bratter’s suit and opt to wear a Stetson and boots to let us know who he really was.” The Virginian, Redford told Pollack, was one of his best experiences, “because of the story values and the character authenticity.” Pollack was at work on a gritty western for Burt Lancaster, United Artists’ The Scalphunters, about a trapper at war with the Indians who steal his hides. Pollack had come to it excitedly, having learned the western ropes from his TV years. “Like most Americans, Bob and I shared the experience of growing up on a diet of John Ford and John Sturges,” said Pollack. “It was a secondary education, this western thing, a birthright information source. We were also equally irritated by the phoniness of it. For The Scalphunters, I discussed it with Burt and we made a conscious decision to deglamorize it. Same with Bob. We started talking about creating a movie like My Darling Clementine. We’d say, ‘If we get the chance, we’ll break some ground, we’ll do it different.’ ”
Now, as the third movie in Redford’s three-picture contract, Paramount offered him Blue, a script by television writer Ronald Cohen set in the disputed no-man’s-land between Mexico and Texas in the 1850s. The story was a gritty romance about a Mexican bandit who falls for a Texan, to the chagrin of his