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Long before I ever interviewed Robert Redford, who died in his sleep last Tuesday, I had been told that, among the many qualities that the legendary movie star possessed, punctuality was not one of them. He was known to be forever behind schedule.
Yet, as near as I can recall, Redford—meaning Redford’s people—called me at the appointed time in March of 2017, when I was writing an article for the DGA Quarterly magazine that was about, in part, filmmaker Michael Ritchie, who had directed the star in two of his most consequential pictures, Downhill Racer, in which he played a tenacious skier, and The Candidate, in which he starred as the titular political contender. Both films are terrific and worth revisiting.
Having gotten Redford on the phone, I must admit that rumors of his lateness were the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, as he gamely launched into an answer of my first question, I was far more aware of his charisma and charm—reflected in his willingness to talk about whatever I wished to ask him.
Don’t ever let journalists tell you they are immune to star power. I was by no means a novice when I did this interview—I had, by then, interviewed such interesting (and eclectic!) luminaries as Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Robert Wise, Carl Reiner, Patty Duke, Barbara Hershey, Sam Waterston, and the longtime companion of Orson Welles, Oja Kodar—but, still, this was Robert Redford: The Sundance Kid, Jay Gatsby, conman extraordinaire in The Sting. Of course, Redford could have been all of those things and still been dismissive, unhelpful, or in a hurry, but such was not the case.
What makes interviewers susceptible to the magnetism of stars is the flattering notion that their questions are being listened to and honored by an important person. In other words, the star is playing along—behaving as though the interviewer’s inquiries are worth his time. So, when I asked Redford what appealed to him about the improvised-seeming, “accidental” quality of Downhill Racer, it was quite gratifying when he answered—and at length:
Well, because I had been very affected by watching documentaries. I started by watching Emile de Antonio’s work, and then Pennebaker and Leacock. And what I liked about it was you were there. In other words, it had a feeling that you were eavesdropping on something happening, rather than having it formally structured. I just was drawn to that because of the reality and also the humanness of it.
It was quite ego-boosting, too, when I would make an assertion about this or that film, and Redford would say “Oh yeah, absolutely” or “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” And glad he was: As I was to learn over the 40 minutes of our conversation, Redford seemed to enjoy talking about his movies, even those I had not asked about. Was this why he was always late?
For example, asking about the genesis of Downhill Racer, Redford treated me to a discourse on the inner workings of the studio that produced it, Paramount Pictures. The head of Paramount’s parent company Gulf+Western, Charlie Bluhdorn, was lukewarm about the project but willing to play along. “He liked me because of the film Barefoot in the Park,” Redford said. On the other hand, top executive Robert Evans was not a fan. Redford had wanted Roman Polanski, then known for such macabre confections as Knife in the Water and Repulsion, to direct. “But Evans, I think, wanted him for something bigger,” Redford said. “They saw this as a small, small, more or less an independent film that wouldn’t have much traction in the marketplace, so they kind of steered him towards Rosemary’s Baby.”
By the end of the interview, perhaps inevitably, Redford had steered the conversation all the way to his classic film version of All the President’s Men, in which he and Dustin Hoffman starred as Washington Post Watergate reporting impresarios Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
In Redford’s telling, it all goes back to the release of The Candidate in the summer of 1972. In a marketing gimmick, he said, he had consented to board a train running from Jacksonville to Miami in a kind whistle-stop-style promotional tour. “They’d promote my being there, so we’d have maybe two, three thousand people there, and then I had these statistics in my hand about what Muskie and Scoop Jackson and McGovern drew doing the same thing,” said Redford, noting with bemusement—and certainly nothing like pride—that his crowds appeared larger than those for real presidential contenders. As he recounted to me, he told the crowd: “It looks to me like there’s several thousand people here today. I just want to thank you all for coming, and I want to remind you I have absolutely nothing to say!”
Tagging along the promotional tour were members of the press, disinterested in Redford’s stunt, he told me, but buzzing about the then-recent break-in at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. “I said, ‘Hey, by the way, what happened with that?’” Redford recalled. “They looked at each other and kind of smiled, and they said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, what happened is never going to come out.’ . . . They were suggesting that Nixon had something to do with it.” Redford was incensed, but the ink-stained wretches gave him a lesson in reality. As Redford remembered: “That’s when they read me the riot act. They said, ‘Boy, do you not know how it works. First of all, it’s summer. All anyone cares about is whether Hank Aaron is going to break Babe Ruth’s record. Secondly, it’s summer, no one’s paying attention. And thirdly, this guy has a switchblade mentality, Nixon. He’s going to win on a landslide, McGovern is going to self-destruct, and nobody wants to be on the wrong side of this guy.’”
Redford went home in a state of depression, he said, but shortly thereafter, he recalled, he spotted an article about Watergate with a dual byline: Woodward and Bernstein. “I didn’t pay much attention to the names, I just knew it was always two guys, but it kept growing, it kept growing, and building and building,” said Redford, who, after reading a profile of the two newshounds, saw movie potential in their getting of the story.
As he explained to me, Redford was initially unable to rouse interest in his burgeoning cinematic plans from either the newspaper or from Woodward. “No one was interested in me because they thought I was from Hollywood,” he said. Eventually, as the scandal grew in scope, Redford succeeded in getting some face time with Woodward. “He and Bernstein came to my apartment, and we spent eight hours just talking through what was going on,” Redford said. “This is before the hearings, this is before Nixon’s resignation. I got into this thing really early, but it all started with The Candidate.”
He would have gone on, but at that very moment, his assistant chimed in to say that “Bob” was late for another interview. Of course. I thanked him, and he said, cheerfully, “You’re sure welcome. Bye-bye.”
Robert Redford handled our fleeting telephonic encounter with such class that I, of course, resisted telling him that I thought Nixon was a pretty good president and excellent diplomat who got a raw deal, and that I was not entirely persuaded of the greatness (or, at least, the nobility) of the movie All the President’s Men. But who cares? Goodbye, Bob.