Robert Redford recently admitted – with some pride – that he once made it 26 blocks down New York's Park Avenue in his Porsche without hitting a red light. This, in terms of urban traffic navigation, is the rough equivalent of a successful jump over the Grand Canyon on a motor bike. On my way uptown to see Redford last month I asked the taxi-driver to take the same route. We stopped for red lights five times. I told him about Redford. "That’s a crock of s**t," growled the driver. "He’d have to drive at 100 mph."
"Okay, so what’s the big deal?"
But we were talking about the image of journalists and their reality, and it was nice to feel that Redford had, if not a skeleton, then the saucy roar of an expensive exhaust-pipe in his cupboard.
All the President’s Men, produced by Redford and starring him as Bob Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, is very much about the actuality of reporting. Back in 1973, Redford went around interviewing journalists about their business. "Most of them were very sceptical. I was saying that I wanted to find out about the newspaper business, explore what the reality is like. And that is the major angle of the film. Very few of them said, 'Let’s wait and see', rather than jump to conclusions or push an image."
After the movie-makers had left Washington, the Washington Post promptly ran an enormous feature putting down Redford and Hoffman: a traditional newspaper double-cross. Recalling this episode, I remarked to Redford that journalists are slightly more unpleasant than as portrayed in his film. "I agree," he said a little sourly. "They are more unpleasant."
It’s a pity that they did not have the time. Looking genial, as indeed he had every reason to do since he was off to his home in Utah for a couple of weeks’ skiing with his wife and children, Redford launched into brisk but decidedly hard-edged sketches of Carl Bernstein — "Despite his apparent sensitivity, he’s quite insensitive, a lot more establishment-minded than people think" — and of Seymour Hersh, the New York Times’s top investigative reporter who had competed with Woodward and Bernstein on many of the later Watergate stories. "He showed no sign of taste or style. He was like a rabid dog, but interesting. I liked him. He never finished a sentence. He walked into my hotel room talking and he walked out talking. He never said hello, and he never said goodbye."
For one thing, he had not, unlike many of the denizens of Hollywood, thrown in his lot with Jimmy Carter — glamorous front-runner for the Presidency. "I don’t like Carter. I think he’s highly dangerous." Redford struck a candidate’s pose and said in the deep, rich tones of the stump politician, "I want you to know that I stand for… nothing." Which at once brought to mind the last line of The Candidate, the film in which Redford played a politician running for office. The successful candidate turns to his aides and says, "What do we do now?"
When President Ford first attempted to appoint Stanley Hathaway secretary of the interior, Redford was one of the people who lobbied most vigorously against his confirmation on the grounds that Hathaway’s environmental record in Wyoming was bad.
He continued to talk crisply as he, wife and children started to gather up bags for the flight westward to Utah. He was nice and interesting to the last, telling me that there had been subtle obstruction of the making of All the President’s Men by people in Ford’s White House; that like myself he had some Scottish and Irish blood, which was surely why he was drawn to the role of the outlaw — as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
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