The great pretender
Opinion
Maureen Callahan
Robert Redford: The Biography
by Michael Feeney Callan
Knopf
Very few are left, those iconic American movie stars who hold the public’s imagination and...
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New York Post
Robert Redford: The Biography

by Michael Feeney Callan

Knopf

Very few are left, those iconic American movie stars who hold the public’s imagination and affection for decades, the ones whose passings, as Liz Taylor’s did recently, make headlines around the world. There’s Jack Nicholson, who recently gave a depressing interview to the UK press about aging and has largely disappeared from public view; Harrison Ford, who rarely acts anymore and does press with the same frequency; Warren Beatty, more beloved by his peers than the public; Clint Eastwood.

And, of course, Robert Redford. He’s been a movie star for nearly 50 years, his name as much an American brand as Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Apple: the sunny California jock, the outdoorsman intellectual, the serious matinee idol, the liberal political activist and preservationist, the founder of Sundance and the godfather of American independent film. In short, decent.

So it’s bracing to read the first in-depth biography of the actor, which affects the reader on two levels. There are the hints, strewn throughout, that the gulf between the person and persona is vast, that Redford is far darker, more complex and even Machiavellian than one would ever guess. And there is the gradual and unsettling realization that the author is complicit in sanding down the sharper angles of Redford’s personality.

The biography was, author Michael Feeney Callan says, initially conceived to be a chronicle of the actor’s interior life, with his films and activism important but peripheral concerns. What has emerged, 16 years after Callan began writing, is a book that strains to be respectful; Redford’s image remains placid as a lake, the author skipping stones, causing only the most minor ripples. We travel with Redford — “Bob,” to just about everyone — from movie set to movie set, are privy to disagreements about character and motivation and writing credits. We are given lots of detail about the environment and organic architecture and the mountains that move Bob. These passages are all virtue and no vice — and though no one wants to say they hate that stuff, they hate that stuff. To quote Dustin Hoffman, bored senseless by Redford’s proselytizing on set: “I love mountains too, Bob. But I’m happy to look at them — I don’t need to be in them.”

Here’s what one can glean by sticking with the book through its more stagnant, reverential passages: Redford is, at his core, a loner. He married young, at 22, to a 19-year-old Mormon named Lola van Wagenen. For a time, he considered converting, till he realized he just lacked structure. Their first child, Scott, died of SIDS two months after his birth. His experience of this loss is as “self-absorbed” as he admits: “It felt like retribution,” Redford tells Callan. “This, I felt, was a disaster entirely of my creation.”

Prone to depression, Redford’s gone through major bouts with booze and pills, and after wrapping “Barefoot in the Park,” on the brink of major movie stardom, he says he was “tired and wired” all the time. (His ejection from college and the loss of his baseball scholarship due to drinking is barely acknowledged in the book.) Redford had what he calls “anger management issues,” was ferociously ambitious but hid it, was a control freak who wanted to dominate people’s time, attention and conversation.

He and Lola went on to have three more children, but he was never home, often taking off in his car for weeks at a time just to clear his head. And because he felt like it and he was Robert Redford, he could. He’s bad with finances and has nearly gone bankrupt more than once. Many in Redford’s life remark on his ability to form “tactical friendships”; as a young acting student in New York, he was a frequent guest at the home of Nikki Lubitsch, daughter of legendary director Ernst.

Yet Redford had, at least career-wise, the kind of charmed life his looks would seem to confer. From his earliest days studying theater in New York, just about everyone he came across knew he was going to be a movie star. Redford, too, was keenly aware of being so handsome, and the power that afforded. He made a decision early on never to play anything other than a hero or a leading man. He got into serious fights on the set of his first film, “Inside Daisy Clover,” because he wouldn’t play his character as written, which he describes to Callan as “a gay.” When the director re-cut his performance, Redford was furious.

He knew his brand — the masculine leading man with a deep reservoir of emotion, one most people, himself included, often had trouble accessing. It led to work in films that have become bound up in American myth: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and “The Sting,” both with Paul Newman; “All the President’s Men,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “A Bridge Too Far,” “The Way We Were,” “The Candidate,” “The Natural.” His last great role was in 1985’s “Out of Africa,” playing Meryl Streep’s lover, but here — as with all his leading-man parts — he worried his character was two-dimensional, overshadowed by a far more complex female role. It was an ironic concern, given that Redford carefully cultivated his own safe image as an accidental movie star and devoted family man.

While filming “Inside Daisy Clover,” he had a serious affair with co-star Natalie Wood, or, in Redford’s parlance, “a closeness beyond friendship.” While filming “Legal Eagles,” his marriage was breaking up, and the thicket of polite language seems to indicate a liason with Daryl Hannah. Redford was estranged from his father and his siblings, but we never learn why, and Redford’s bloodless description of reconnecting with his family after his father’s death reads like cliched dialogue that Redford himself, if asked to read as lines, would send back for rewrite: “Just priceless time together . . . Lots of memories. Seminal moments. The need to escape as teenagers. The madness in Westwood. The crazy hot-rodding in the valley. The bust-ups, the breakdowns. A lot of misunderstanding was patched up. We were brothers again, tighter than ever.”

Redford’s children — daughters Shauna and Amy and son Jamie — share their father’s facility with language and are delicate when describing his itinerant approach to parenting. All admit to their father’s absence from their life and the difficulty of securing his attention when he was around — unless you were doing something he enjoyed, like riding horses. They took to reworking a line from the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” and would openly mock their father, singing: “Double R superstar/Who do you think you are?”

The most plainspoken and affecting admission comes from Jamie, who suffered lifelong health issues and who, in his 20s, was told he would die without a liver transplant. He’d never been particularly religious, but turned to the Unitarian church, because, Jamie says, “There were limitations to what Dad could provide, and the Unitarians filled the void.”

From the ’60s through the ’90s, Redford was a true movie star, but aged out of the romantic leading-man category with a disastrous role in the pulpy “Indecent Proposal,” playing a billionaire who buys one night of sex with the married Demi Moore. The premise was crass, his character sleazy, and the film — coupled with his rapid aging, his once beautiful face as craggy as those mountains he loves — ended his run. His mantle was assumed by Brad Pitt, who evoked Redford in the prime of his youth and beauty. (Redford went on to cast Pitt in 1992’s “A River Runs Through It” — his first leading role — and any complicated feelings that this may have provoked are not discussed.)

Redford’s vanity boxed him in, while peers such as Nicholson, Eastwood — even Ford — remained culturally relevant. Redford would never allow himself to get fat and play an old man having an existential crisis (Nicholson in “About Schmidt”), a cranky old racist (Eastwood in “Gran Torino”) or a mentally imparied trial lawyer (Ford in “Regarding Henry”). Instead, he’s gone on to direct, making one very good movie (“Quiz Show”) and a lot of stately, mediocre ones (“The Legend of Bagger Vance,” “The Horse Whisperer,” “An Unfinished Life”).

Redford operates on his own clock, and his disregard for other people’s time is the stuff of legend in Hollywood. He was chronically late to his sets, sometimes not showing up at all, no calls, no excuses. In the book, the late Sydney Pollack — who was also a close friend — recalls being exasperated while directing “Three Days of the Condor”: “I remember complaining to him, ‘Excuse me, can I get five f – – – king minutes of your time, please?’ ”

Eventually, Pollack grew so disgusted with Redford that the two stopped speaking; years later, dying from stomach cancer, Pollack refused to take Redford’s call. (The actor eventually drove over anyway and files this typically generic report: “I was just content that we were able to spend some time.”)

Such disdain extended to the author, who writes, in the book’s forward: “I flew halfway across the world for meetings that never happened or were largely unproductive because of distractions.” Today, Callan describes Redford’s indifference as “part of his process” and insists that he “really has no perception of time.”

The author admits that he fell under Redford’s spell upon their first meeting, in March 1995. Callan had been working on the biography for two years already, and though Redford did not want it written, he agreed to cooperate, to sit for interviews, provide journals and family photos — he even had the author come stay at his house in Utah a few times. It’s this relationship that shadows the book’s ostensible narrative; it’s hard not to feel frustrated when the author casually and suddenly mentions, say, Redford’s divorce — no context, no content, no comment. It’s clear where his loyalties lie.

When asked if he ever wondered if he was just another “tactical friendship” Redford had formed, Callan says yes: “I think you hit the nail on the head.” It made the biography nearly impossible to complete: “I’d never spent so much time rewriting,” he says today. “I kept looking at the book and saying, ‘What’s been afflicted by friendship? Did I apply the brakes? Am I being too easy on him here?’ ”

Well, yes. Callan is far too easy on Redford, but he’s written a book he never intended to write — one that’s a fascinating study, in miniature, of fame and our uneasy relationship with it. Redford may have gotten what he wanted — a largely anodyne biography — but in the end, he did himself a disservice, attempting to preserve an unimpeachable image at the expense of the very complicated human inside.

George Roy Hill once explained Redford’s essential inaccessibility as connected to his Irishness: “Everyone wants to be Irish in Hollywood, because it connotes Shaw and Joyce and that long, tormented history of suffering and alienation,” he said. “But Bob’s Irishness, as remote as it is, springs from a genuine well of despair. He has trouble balancing himself in the world.”