Moore recalls her first meeting with Redford at the Wildwood office newly sited on the Paramount lot as a square dance. “It was all very formal, and I had to pinch myself to remember that this was the Robert Redford. Then something I hadn’t expected occurred. He said, without apology, that he was concerned that my fame as TV’s Mary Richards, whom he enjoyed, would destroy believability for the Beth role.” Moore had read Guest’s novel the month it appeared and wanted the role because it touched her personal experience. The key relationship in her own life was an unresolved one with a remote and commanding father. “I thought, Well, okay, we’re off to a good start, because he has no trouble about being honest.”
After the first interview, Moore heard nothing for a month. Then the unlikeliest opportunity came up to replace Tom Conti in the long-running Broadway hit Whose Life Is It Anyway? Gaines suggested Moore for the part, and Manny Azenberg, a good friend of Redford’s since his Broadway days, endorsed her. Gaines’s strategy, says Moore, was brilliant: “There was no doubt that Bob was interested in me. After that first interview he left me in a state of hope. But the reality was that he had Eisner to appease, and why would Paramount buy me? John Gaines said, ‘Look, if Azenberg takes you, there will be this visible belief in you as a serious actor. You will be proving your credentials by taking on the legitimate stage.’ For me, of course, it was a lot of pressure. Ordinary People would come just before Whose Life Is It Anyway? Was I tenacious enough for all that? Could I deliver for Ordinary People in the first place? But I had faith in myself. I was deeply inside myself at that time, which was the right place to be. I felt, If Redford can just go that final mile, I can handle it.”
Azenberg’s judgment impressed Redford. After more reflection, he confirmed Moore’s casting as Beth. Moore had little time to “organize the terrors” before flying with her assistant and hairdresser to Chicago, where they moved into a rented property in Lake Forest that would form the hub of production. Bit by bit Redford learned about the chaos in Moore’s personal life: that her time in Lake Forest represented her first serious split with Tinker and the terminus of her marriage; that she had recently begun her first affair; and that her mind-set was both euphoric and depressed. “I didn’t doubt Mary’s strength as a woman and an actress,” says Redford. “It was an advantage because I was attempting to project a character that I’d never seen in movies. I’d known many women like Beth in real life, people who cannot connect with their emotions. But only in real life. I felt we had new ground to cross.”
Having studied so many directors up close, Redford knew that his point of entry to directing was to stay close to his actors. “I felt confident among actors. I felt I could relate in terms of reassurance and creating the positivity in the environment an actor needs.” A week of rehearsals began, in theater fashion, with the actors seated in a circle, with scripts in their laps.
Sutherland, whose headlining career had begun with Altman’s M*A*S*H, expected the momentary uncertainties of a first-time director but found Redford clearheaded and diametrically unlike Pakula, who had directed him on Klute: “Bob totally handed trust to the actor. He’d learned that himself, the need for space for the actor to find the role. I knew what I wanted to do with Jarrett, which is not to say he didn’t. He did. But he gave me room.”
For Moore, the process was like working with a master engineer. “We walked through it with the utmost detail. There was time to investigate the role, and then to let it fly. He restricted nothing. The only direction he gave me, other than the gentle shaping of the character, was about my mannerisms. There were gestures that hung over from [her television character] Mary Richards: the hand slapping the thigh, the raised hand jabbing in emphasis of a line, the snap-quick turn of the head.”
Tim Hutton, who had researched his role by reading books in the Children in Crisis series and by attending group therapy sessions at a mental institution under an assumed name, believed he benefited best from daily walks with Redford in which the topics varied from cinematographic objectives to Hutton’s struggle to overcome his father’s death. “Bob understood everything,” said Hutton. “It’s hard to explain how secure you feel working with someone who knows your struggle and who knows how to help.” In Moore’s view, Hutton’s comfort reflected the deeply personal connection Redford felt with the story. “We talked a lot about family. He gradually became open about his relationship with his father and how it impacted on him. He told me straight that he had great difficulty with his father’s judgments and attitude to him. There was no acrimony. There was a loving acceptance, but, as in my own case, I got the impression that there was also a desire to resolve that part of his emotional life once and for all. I suspected there was something of his father, in his eyes, in Beth.”
In the eyes of Marcella Scott, Redford had “never divested himself of the need to impress Charlie. They seemed bound together by destiny.” In 1979, Charlie retired from Standard Oil to settle permanently in a large, timbered house overlooking San Francisco Bay. They wrote and talked often, but Redford admits to ongoing sparring: “I didn’t visit him during The Candidate [filmed in nearby Marin County] and he resisted visiting Sundance for the longest time. When I finally arranged it for him, he complained about the altitude. I accepted that we were not of the same cut. But forgiveness wasn’t the issue. Understanding was. He was a man bent out of shape by being exiled as a teenager, a man with self-worth problems, perhaps. But a good man.”
Alan Pakula, the eternal analyst, adamantly believed Redford was engaging in some subtle personal transference with Ordinary People. “When I read it, I said, Oh, I get it. The novel is about parental tyranny. The catalyst, the character causing the dysfunction, is the mother. Bob is moving some furniture here. He is co-opting the novel’s dysfunctional family for his father’s or his own and investigating himself at a critical time.” Redford is emphatic that both Pakula and Moore were wrong. “It had nothing to do with my father or his or my family. These were simply types of people I’d met, people whose lives were sequestered in privilege and made you wonder, What goes on beneath that veneer?”
Redford had made a decision back in 1962 as an actor never to get too caught up in the position of key lights or other technical markers during production. Now, as filming started, suddenly those technicalities were of paramount importance to him as a director. John Bailey, the young camera assistant from Downhill Racer, had graduated to cinematographer and was standing in front of him asking bewildering questions: “Do you want a Baby Junior on this, or a seventy-five …?” Redford was frustrated. In his head, he already had the movie. It had come together first on paper, then while he drove around the North Shore looking for landscapes. He had instructed Phillip Bennett and Mike Riva, the art directors, about the empty lawns, trimmed topiary and stern houses he wanted. The landscape was in his mind, physically and spiritually. “But I got frustrated talking with John and the technicians, because I couldn’t articulate it. Finally, I found myself tearing off strips of paper and drawing stick figures with light angles. Then it became easy, because I could literally ‘paint’ the movie. We went from there to the point that I created the storyboards, and John worked from them. It became a question of capturing that painted frame.”
For all the participants, the unhesitating control Redford exercised over the production was impressive. To Donald Sutherland, such “mean-ass economy in direction” was extraordinary for a first-timer, even a little discomfiting: “He didn’t say a lot but he was very specific when he did comment, and I discovered that what he said was almost always correct. Every time he suggested a different way of doing something, suddenly the words and the scene came out right.” The trick of empowerment by inviting limitless improvisation, the trick first gifted to him by Mike Nichols, was passed on to all. Mary Tyler Moore found it joyous, but exhausting. “He allowed us to improvise whenever we wanted to. We knew what each scene was. His direction was, ‘Try what feels good.’ And if I felt something was only so-so and wanted
another shot at it, he’d say, ‘Try it whatever way.’ ” Moore averaged, she estimates, three or four takes per scene. “Paradoxically it felt tight, like whittling down a piece of wood to get to the point.”
The precision with which Redford “saw” the Jarretts’ world, Moore contends, is revealed in the one instance of multiple varied takes, in a solitary scene where Beth puts a cake in the refrigerator. Moore skipped over the scenes in read-throughs, but Redford had other thoughts about it. “It was about behavior,” says Redford. “I wanted to capture this woman in an unobserved moment and see her rhythm, how she copes, how she handles things. It was about her fastidious way, her uptightness, her weakness.” Moore experienced it as pure hell. “It was the bane of the production, and we tried every few days, every time we had a kitchen scene, to reshoot it. The scene had no dialogue. It was just me, as Beth, holding a cake with a circle of cherries around the top, looking at it, then adjusting the cherries and slipping the cake into the fridge. All I ever heard from Bob was, ‘Mary, maybe we can try that cake scene again.’ In the end, we shot it about twenty-five times, but still it didn’t make it through to the final cut. I felt exhausted, naked, frustrated by that scene. I never understood while it was going on exactly what Bob was looking for. Later, I did. It was manifest in the book and in Alvin’s screenplay and in the talks Bob and I had. What he was looking for was what the entire quest of the movie was for him: he was looking to capture the soul of Beth Jarrett in an unguarded moment. I felt he achieved that in the end.”
The bleakness of the story was the main challenge for Redford. The title, he decided, wasn’t ironic. There was truth in the irreconcilable conflict of trauma survival and disabling guilt. No answers were posited. Berger, the psychiatrist, probes Conrad’s depression, but the critical resolution, which, in the visual reenactment, confronts Conrad with the flashback of his brother’s drowning, fixes nothing in any practical sense; instead, Conrad is obliged to accept a continuum: that what has occurred is irreversible and will rebound onward, affecting not just his life, but the lives of his parents, especially Beth, who abandons her family at the end of the story. “What I wanted was to deal with people who have concerns they cannot handle because they cannot define them,” says Redford. “I was trying to say this is what happened, this is how it is, accept it. To achieve that, we tuned in to the finest twitches of the performances. A face that reacts in a scene saying, ‘I know what this is about’ is miles away from the look that says, ‘I cannot comprehend this.’ The actor’s gesture is minimal, but everything is in the tiniest inflection. That’s what we sought.”
Of enormous importance, says Redford, was the decision to base the production on Chicago’s North Shore, away from Hollywood. It allowed for intimacy and independence, two critical elements of his debut. Several people, including Diller and Pollack, had suggested they visit the location to consult, but he had said no. Three months later, convening with editor Jeff Kanew at Paramount to view the first assembly, Redford felt immensely satisfied with his decision. Stuart Rosenberg, an early viewer of the finished product, quite liked the movie. Sydney Pollack, for whom Redford organized a private screening, liked it, too, but disliked the depiction of Beth. To Redford he said plainly, “The woman doesn’t work”—which, says Redford, might as well have been, “The movie doesn’t work.” Pollack believed Moore was “clumpy and obvious” and unable to rise above her Mary Richards image. Says Redford, “He felt I’d made a grievous error of judgment casting her. I was hurt, but I had belief. I knew I had a good cut; it worked beautifully with the Pachelbel. I finished the movie and then I headed for the hills.”
In January 1979, during the edit, Betty Webb, his grade school sweetheart, now a New Age counselor, visited with Bill Coomber’s wife, Lucrecia, and found “a vastly changed man.” Her memory was of the bright-eyed competitor, suave and determined to best any competition. He was now soft-spoken, even “subdued.” Redford, in fact, judged it otherwise. “There’d been a long buildup of emotional issues. By the time I had locked down Ordinary People, which carried its own high toll, I was dumb with tiredness.”
“After Ordinary People, his Hollywood world became more accessible to us kids,” says Shauna, who, at that point, was studying art at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Previously he had kept us away from it. Now the boundary came down. It was as if, with the movie, he’d at last expressed his true art and that Hollywood was finally a positive thing.” But Amy, just ten, still found an obstacle in the relentlessness of her father’s fame: “It just got bigger and more demanding. I was arts oriented, too, and I wanted to work close to him. But with the time pressures on him, it was hard to get enough personal time.” Within a few years, teenage Amy would break ranks, shave half her head, stud her ears with rings and flee to England to study acting “and objectify things for myself, to get a grip on real life and real people.” Stan Collins saw Redford struggle to hold his family together. “But it wasn’t like it used to be. They were a great family. He and Lola were terrific, affectionate people. They were incapacitated, though, by lack of time.”
Redford lamented the obligations of work and felt that “[Lola and I] were fulfilling our goals and, at the same time, measuring the distance between us.” When Lola enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont to restart her education and begin building an independent life—a situation that coincided with Ordinary People—the sense of finality was unavoidable.
In the spring, with The Electric Horseman playing to receptive audiences and Brubaker set for a nationwide summer opening, Redford tried to balance himself by taking a road trip, exactly as he’d often done throughout the fifties and sixties. Supping with the kids in Denver, he decided to rent a car to drive solo to New York. “I wanted to recover normal human reality because Ordinary People brought me to that place. But there was no meeting the common man. There was just meeting the fan, the woman with the autograph book, the guy who knew the guy who knew your cousin, the endless handshakes, like I was one of those guys who walked on the moon.”
In high summer Ordinary People opened with a showcase western premiere in Provo. Mary Tyler Moore and Tim Hutton were among Redford’s guests at Sundance for the weekend. Moore, battling the ravages of incipient alcoholism, stayed at the A-frame, which was now a guest lodge under the shadow of the Big House. Moore just wanted to sleep but “could not believe the social schedule Bob set up for us. It was worse than any movie call sheet. It was horse riding at 9:00 a.m. Swimming at 11:00 a.m. Tennis at 1:00 p.m. Go, go, go. I couldn’t keep up. It was worrying. I wondered, How the hell does he keep this pace?”
Ordinary People had been made for $6 million and generated receipts of $115 million, an astonishing success by any criteria. Pauline Kael continued to disapprove of Redford’s work, chastising the director’s emotional absence and the mood of “suburban suffocation,” an extraordinary indictment, given the subject matter. But Jack Kroll in Newsweek applauded direction that was “clean and clear in style, drenched with seriousness and sensitivity.” And Vincent Canby in The New York Times welcomed a film “so good, so full of first-rate feeling, that it would be presumptuous for a critic to re-edit it.” The awards followed. By January 1981 Ordinary People was the acknowledged movie of the year, winning an award from the Directors Guild and snagging British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations and, ultimately, six Academy Award nominations, among them for best director and best picture, contesting Polanski’s Tess, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
“When I saw the awards trail beginning, I caved in,” says Redford. “I just didn’t want it. What I was doing was about personal art, about exploring myself and my audience. I was very proud of the film but I did not desire accolades. It sounds churlish, but I was sated on accolades. There are only so many times you want to be told, ‘This is the best thing since Gone With the Wind’ or ‘You are the best leading man since Moses.’ I thought, Screw this! and disappeared.”
After attending a be
nefit at the Northwestern Hospital Institute of Psychiatry in Chicago, an invitation that arose from the new friendships he formed making Ordinary People, Redford joined the Brokaws for a long-scheduled six-day skiing trip across Colorado, Utah and Idaho. “I was in terrible shape, drained and emotional from the movie and the end of my marriage. The ironies were terrible. My family had been there from the start. They’d suffered so much waiting for me to do what I wanted to do. And then came the big fulfillment … and then this.”
At Sun Valley in Idaho the depression fogged his thinking. “I was skiing harder and faster, and I pitched myself against this impossible run, going all the way, from top to bottom. I skied it too fast and crashed, a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree tumble.”
He smashed his nose and collarbone and suffered multiple lacerations and a severe head wound. Semiconscious, he refused to go down the mountain on the first-aid toboggan and insisted—“stupidly”—on skiing down. Transferred comatose by ambulance to the hospital in Sun Valley, he remembers being wheeled into X-ray, passing out, then waking up to the sight of a pretty nurse gabbling about the announcement on the radio that Ordinary People was a hot favorite for six Academy Awards. “She was excited. She wasn’t interested in my injuries anymore. It was that icon thing. And then those questions started: ‘What’s Mary Tyler Moore really like?’ ”
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