When Things Come Together

The faces are familiar. He has, at various times in his career, been a Texas convict on the run (The Chase), a Southern rail boss (This Property Is Condemned), a hung-up Hollywood star (Inside Daisy Clover), and the harried young husband in Barefoot in the Park --the kind of guy who looks as if he parts his hair with a carpenter's level. Yet, partly as a result of his own sense of willful independence, major stardom has eluded Robert Redford. At least until now, with two Redford films in the theaters and a third coming.

As Sundance in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford plays a cool, sardonic renegade with a deliberate and precise sense of irony. As an eager young skier in Downhill Racer, he smoothly combines naivete and monomaniacal ambition. But his most impressive role is to come. In the new film Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here!, he appears as a cold-blooded sheriff and gives his most powerfully sustained performance so far. This is plainly the first of what should be many Robert Redford vintage years.

One Big Battle. He looks ready. With melancholy eyes and a guileless face only partially coarsened by a Sundance Kid mustache, he is reminiscent of the more or less traditional Hollywood matinee idol. The resemblance ends right there. He rejects the Hollywood scene, and his conversation is a pressagent's nightmare. "Let's face it," he confides with the sort of intensity that adds volumes to every sentence. "If you want to get anything done in Hollywood, you've got to fight. It's just one big battle out there, and I don't need that." If Redford can virtually write his own ticket now, it was a privilege won only after long wrangles with agents and legal battles over suitable roles with studios. "I work it this way," he says. "If I don't like it, I don't do it."

It's been that way ever since he dropped out of the University of Colorado in 1956 and went on a solitary expedition of discovery. It took him to art school in Paris, carried him through the rest of the Continent, and deposited him with a bump back in the States 13 months later. "It was a black period for me," he recalls. "I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do, except get out of California. I'd grown up there, but I always had this image in my head of living in New York. So I took off for the East with some idea of being an artist. When anybody asked me what I wanted to be--whatever that means, anyway--I'd tell them I wanted to be an art director. That seemed to be a pretty dodgy thing to do."

Enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Art ("They had the biggest ad in the paper") Redford took quickly to acting. "I could never talk about it, though. Still can't. All that stuff about motivation and inner meaning is bull. The guys who talk about those things in the restaurant next door are always the ones who freeze up onstage." Redford stayed loose enough to attract the attention of one of New York's most prestigious agents, who signed him up and got him a quick succession of Broadway roles, culminating in his appearance in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963. The show's biggest single laugh, in fact, came from a Redford improvisation: the moment when he entered his fifth floor walk-up carrying his wheezing mother-in-law in his arms. "That's a brilliant bit you did, just brilliant," observed Director Mike Nichols. "You realize, of course, that I will be given credit for it. And you also realize that I will accept it all myself."

Irish Furies. Redford's star was already rising over the West Coast, but its luster was somewhat dimmed by his continual refusal to accept uncongenial projects. "One of my agents wanted me to do this Viking movie. He told me, 'Listen, champ, this is it.' I said I really didn't want to run all over Yugoslavia in horns and a bear fur, so they said, O.K., that's the end, they couldn't work with me anymore." Soon after making the film version of Barefoot, Redford refused two more roles--the dreamy-eyed cowboy in Blue and the satanic husband in Rosemary's Baby. "That was it. They sued me, and I sued them." He spent a year in Hollywood out of work and out of money. It was a time when he used to take long walks to combat what he calls "the Irish furies." His wife Lola would answer the phone and explain to all inquirers: "I'm sorry, Bob went out for a walk to Big Sur. He'll be back in a week."

Although his work schedule has settled down into a more regular pattern (he has just finished shooting a film about motorcycling, called Little Fauss and Big Halsy), Redford still hungers for solitude. A resident of Manhattan ("California is only a place to work now"), he often retreats with Lola and their two kids to a three-level A-frame house in the mountains of Utah that he built himself. "I can't really say anything about the place, except that it's 8,000 feet up in the mountains and 45 miles from the nearest city. It's just somewhere I go, where things all come together." The only way things are likely to break apart now is if Redford himself makes the first move.

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