The emperor, uncrowned then, was an actor just becoming known on the New York stage, Robert Redford. Somehow he had gotten hold of the script and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.
There come back to me many images of Redford when he was new and his aura that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You hired them,” I said to him afterwards. He broke out in a wonderful laugh, no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then. He was very likable and straightforward.
Together we went to the winter Olympics at Grenoble in 1968, slept in corridors as rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. I had been hired to write a film about a ski racer, which he would star in, and we traveled for weeks with the U.S. team.
At dinner one night I remarked that I saw for the main character, the role Redford would play, Billy Kidd, more or less, tough, in all likelihood from a poor part of town, honed by years on the icy runs of the East. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team at the time, and in the manner of champions somewhat arrogant and aloof — there may have been an element of shyness.
Redford shook his head, no. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself, which of course should have marked him from the first, sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. He was from California, however, and Redford was also, from Van Nuys, one of those vaguely appealing names of the Coast.
“Him?” I said, “Sabich?”
Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him.
The film was meant from the beginning to be about someone who was the opposite of that nearly vanished figure, the athlete who was supremely talented yet modest, who had the virtues of both strength and humility. Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish runner, a legendary champion — I have mentioned him — had always been an idol of mine. I pictured an older Nurmi, though knowing nothing about his personality, as a coach who had worked for years to have one of his racers win a gold in the Olympics, and who finally found the chance but with an individual he disliked, even despised, a crude, self-centered Redford. Athletes like this existed, but perhaps not coaches like Nurmi.
I thought the film would be about something which, in fact, survived in one line of casual dialogue, “the justice of sport.” The final moments were to show an exultant Redford at the bottom of the course, arms raised in acknowledgment of triumph, as meanwhile a little-known competitor, last in the seeding, is coming down, beating the successive interval times one by one, and as the faces of the crowd begin to turn in a great final tropism towards the mountain and the cheers ominously rise, he streaks across the finish line at the last moment to win. This was to be the greater justice, perhaps inachievable in life.
So easy, all of it, such play. To go into New York restaurants with him and his wife, in the beautiful filthy city, the autumn air in the streets outside, eyes turned to watch as we cross the room. The glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. There was, even for a long time after he had gained it, something in him that disdained stardom. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized and approached, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.
At forty, some years later, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of casual amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form, he accomplished something during them. Everyone wanted to see or talk to him. As if glancing at a menu he was able to choose his life.
One night on a plane, crossing the continent, he showed me a letter he had received. It was typewritten, from a small town in Kansas or Nebraska — a young wife, separated from her husband, having arranged for a baby-sitter, had driven forty miles to see a film of his. I forget which it was—Ordinary People, perhaps — but it had moved her profoundly, made her weep, and revealed to her in a new way the path her life should take. The voice of the writer, who was down somewhere in the darkness over which we were flying, was there on the page, truthful and lonely. Unlike thousands of other letters, boxes of them, he had carried this one around for months, meaning to reply but never able to. I’m still here, he wanted to say, I still have your letter.
The longing, I thought, is so vast that barely a part of it can be acknowledged. An unmeasurable sum comprises it, like the sea.
Our lives drifted apart. I wrote another film for him but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limits.
The last time, I saw him at a premiere. A mob was waiting, many with readied cameras to capture the scene. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the near gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as everywhere flashbulbs went off, and amid a small group moving down the aisle the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off — years, in fact — but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation. I shall be sent for in private, I thought, consoling myself. I shall be sent for soon at night.
—
As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city — New York was that — in which they began, and there seems to be, over everything, a kind of Athenian brilliance, which is really the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors — Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard — presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.
The theater at Lincoln Center was spacious and elegant, unlike the dreary, cramped ones where the first Buñuel or Brakhage — an amazing minor figure — might be seen. The screen was immaculate, the faces that appeared on it tremendously large and bright. They had a lunar intensity, powerful and pure. The patina of art lay upon everything, and we were part of it, elevated by it.
The city seemed to be leaping with films, schools of them, of every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea. I was living in the suburbs and I had only recently met, just down the road, by chance, Lane Slate. He was irreverent and well-read, with a handsome face and a mouth that never opened in a smile, his teeth were so bad. When he laughed he would stuff his necktie in his mouth to conceal them. He was the talented companion I longed for. There were two or three old automobiles, ruined classics, a LaSalle and a Delage among them, stranded in the yard outside his small white house. Inside was a piece or two of eyecatching furniture amid junk, a wife, an Old English sheepdog, and two well-loved little boys, indifferently clothed.