Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [89]
Redford had actively supported McCarthy until his landslide loss to Humphrey during the 1968 convention. “Maybe I was naïve to think he could pull it off,” says Redford. “But he was a lot better, in prospect, than Nixon’s gang.” In Frankfurt’s view, Nixon’s dramatic election victory that year sharpened Redford’s focus. “He wanted to engage debate. He had no vision of himself as a frontline politician, but the events of 1968 made Downhill Racer and commentary on American life more important to him. He wanted to make movies that got people talking. And he knew, of course, that he also needed to nurture the stardom that would give him the power.”
As Downhill Racer slowly brewed, Redford engaged Creative Management Associates to find him those new starring roles. It should have been Gregson’s job, but he was preoccupied in Europe. CMA was an outgrowth of MCA headed by Freddie Fields and David Begelman. Fields took over Redford’s management but assigned day-to-day business to his assistant, Stephanie Phillips. Phillips had established herself molding careers for character actresses, including Joan Hackett. She had also worked closely with Begelman in the management of Henry Fonda, Peter Sellers and director George Roy Hill. In fact, it had been Phillips who was responsible for Redford’s joining with MCA to begin with. She became a fan after having seen him onstage in Barefoot. “Joan Hackett introduced us,” says Phillips. “And from then on I just kept whispering in his ear. I thought he was exceptional, for his looks, his swagger, his wit. I wanted to represent him from the start.” Her wish come true, Phillips immediately looked at the roster of available films and singled out Hill’s production in planning for Fox, called “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.” “I had a particularly good rapport with George since he did The World of Henry Orient in 1964,” says Phillips, “so I pressed Bob on him, and he was receptive. But we had obstacles. Paul Newman, we knew, was Fox’s first choice to star. So we had to knock Brando, Beatty and James Coburn out of the picture to get the role for Bob, which I felt we could do.”
Richard Zanuck, Darryl’s son and recent head of Twentieth Century–Fox, wasn’t amenable. Fox’s fortunes had waned in the fifties, until Darryl Zanuck overthrew his former associate Spyros Skouras. Now they were riding high on the enormous success of The Sound of Music and, in the spirit of Darryl’s philosophy of three-ring entertainments, were keen on a glamorous western. Big stars were needed for the roles of Sundance and Butch. And in Zanuck’s view, the jury was still out on Robert Redford. Phillips pushed, but Zanuck preferred Warren Beatty by far.
The dilemma fell in the lap of George Roy Hill. A graduate of Yale in 1944, Hill had served as a marine pilot in World War II and pursued graduate studies at Trinity College in Dublin before working in the Gate and Abbey theaters. He was an Emmy winner for television writing and directing in New York in the mid-fifties and moved into movies with adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment and Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic in the sixties. Hill was forty when he started in movies and always contended that it was maturity that impressed on him the centrality of the actor. Paul Newman, in his view, was the epitome of film art. “I knew Newman’s genius, which was a genius of understatement,” said Hill. “No matter how good the story, no matter how dexterous the cameraman, no matter how smart the director, you simply cannot achieve an effective motion picture without an immensely skilled screen actor.” Newman’s commitment to the Fox western was, said Hill, half the battle. “And then when Steffie pushed for Redford, I thought, Yes, that might be interesting. Only that.”
Hill met Redford for a drink at Joe Allen’s bar on Forty-sixth Street. “Since I liked