Remembering Robert Redford: ‘The Last Movie Star’

  “Robert Redford died? That’s impossible! He should have lived forever!”

  That was a neighbor’s reaction to the news that film legend Robert Redford passed away earlier this month.

   A lot of people felt that way. He’d been around so long, and was such an enduring and popular figure in our collective life, that it seemed as if he would always be here. 

   With Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, he was one of the great heartthrobs of his generation. All were strikingly good looking, charismatic, seemingly youthful even when they weren’t. They weren’t’ ageless, but they weren’t far from it. If only the rest of us were lucky enough to look as good as Redford did at nearly 90.

  All three spent at least a little time in Idaho. McQueen had a home near Sun Valley, Newman visited his daughter Nell when she was living and working in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area near Murphy, and Redford came to Idaho for the premiere of “Jeremiah Johnson,” in which he played the title role. I was fortunate enough to have had at least secondary brushes with all of them. 

  McQueen’s wife, Barbara, co-wrote a book about him – “Steve McQueen, the Last Mile.” The book was about his final years before dying too soon, of cancer. I interviewed her about it and about her time with him in Idaho. It was almost surreal knowing that I was talking to someone who had shared the life of the star of “Papillon,” “The Sand Pebbles” and “The Great Escape,” three of my favorite movies. All are now considered classics.

  He wasn’t a man to be trifled with. An often repeated story had Keith Moon, drummer for the rock group The Who, learning this the hard way.

 Moon’s Malibu home was next door to McQueen’s, and its lights shone into McQueen’s bedroom window. It should have been an easy problem to solve. McQueen could have had shutters, room-darkening shades or drapes installed. Or, more logically, Moon could have simply turned off the lights. McQueen asked him repeatedly to do so. He refused.

  Deciding that his sleep had been interrupted enough, McQueen loaded up his shotgun and blew out the lights.

  When Newman’s daughter was working in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, I was a correspondent for People  Magazine. This was when People did more actual people stories than celebrity gossip, and my editor assigned me to interview her and write a story about the work she was doing there.

  She was living in a trailer house miles from anywhere. It was a long, hot, dusty drive to get there. When she opened the door, I was looking at Paul Newman’s electric blue eyes. She was very nice, but she said she’d have to get her father’s permission to do an interview.

  “Would you mind coming back next week?” she asked.

  This was before cell phones. There was no way to simply call and ask whether Dad had said it would be okay. So, the following week, I made the long hot, dusty drive again.

  “What did your dad say?” I asked her.

  “He said the only thing he wanted to do with People Magazine was hang its editors by their thumbs.”

  In other words, no story. I never knew whether it was true, but was told that every time People raised its prices it put Paul Newman on its cover. Like most celebrities, he had to have valued what little privacy he could get. If was disappointing not to get the story, but it wasn’t hard to see his point.

  A former co-worker who used to live in Los Angeles had a great story about a woman she knew who had a memorable encounter at her home. When the woman answered a knock at her door, a stranger on her doorstep asked if she could use her phone. She said her car had broken down, and she needed to call her husband.

  The woman seemed nice enough, and it was a reasonable request. The home’s owner welcomed her in, let her use the phone and they made small talk while waiting for the husband.

  A short time later, another knock at the door. You can imagine the woman’s surprise when she opened it and standing an arm’s length away were Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The stranger who asked to use the phone was Joanne Woodward, Newman’s wife. Though an accomplished actress herself, she wasn’t nearly as famous as her husband, which was why the woman hadn’t recognized her.

  When Redford came to Boise for the “Jeremiah Johnson” premiere at the Egyptian Theater, I was invited to attend because I’d written a biography of Idaho author Vardis Fisher. Fisher’s book “Mountain Man” was one of two books on which the film was based.

  One of my main sources for the biography was Fisher’s widow, Opal Laurel Holmes. I interviewed her on the phone a number of times and also at her Foothills home. It didn’t take long to realize that she was something of a recluse, seldom leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. On the few times I visited her home, she tended to be wearing a housecoat or a dress long out of fashion and had done little with regard to her hair or makeup.

  Well, now! At the premiere, I almost didn’t recognize her, dressed to the nines in a chic, floor-length gown, makeup tastefully applied, hair professionally done. She looked years younger and almost glamorous, sandwiched between Director Sidney Pollock and Redford himself, clearly delighting in every second of it.

  When she introduced me to him, I was all but tongue-tied. There he was just a few feet away – Robert Redford himself, impossibly handsome, larger than life, the personification of a major movie star.

  Which he undeniably was. Writing in the Wall Street Journal a few days after Redford’s passing, essayist Joseph Epstein called him “the last movie star.” His death, Epstein wrote, “marks the end of the Hollywood phenomenon of the movie star. A star is different from an actor. … More than an actor, he was the kind of man you would go to the theater to see.”

  It didn’t matter what the movie was. If he was in it, you knew it would be good.

  We’ve lost so many big names recently. Redford was arguably the biggest, but others include Brian Wilson, Gene Hackman, George Wendt (Norm from Cheers), Loretta “Hot Lips Houlihan” Swit from M*A*S*H, Val Kilmer, Ozzie Osbourne, Connie Francis, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and more. 

   We didn’t know these people, but it felt as if we did. We listened to their music, they came into our homes on television. They were people we never met and never would, but in a sense they felt like friends.

  We knew they wouldn’t live forever. But the world still seems a lesser place without them.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com