First thing in the morning at the old Gulf and Western building in midtown Manhattan, I was in the midst of a crowd of office workers waiting for the elevator. The doors opened and all but lost among those exiting was Robert Redford. No entourage, no bodyguards, just…Robert Redford. He smiled slightly, taking in the quietly stunned reactions of onlookers. Then he moved on. “Well,” someone said as we all crowded onto the elevator, “that was an interesting way to start the day.”

I thought about that encounter hearing of Redford’s death at the age of eighty-nine. As it was with Redford’s friend, Paul Newman, it was hard to imagine a movie world with these two icons of another, much more interesting, era of movie stardom.

Redford was at the height of his fame when he ducked out of that Gulf and Western elevator. Cinema’s last romantic hero as it turned out. He always denied it, and said he felt constricted by it, but Redford carefully nurtured that romantic image and went to great lengths to maintain it, most comfortably in a shimmering past, whether it was starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Way We Were, The Natural, The Great Gatsby or Out of Africa. 

Margot Kidder played his girlfriend in The Great Waldo Pepper, another big budget epic also cast in the nostalgia of a bygone era, but less successfully at the box office. She told me that she saw firsthand how Redford protected his image. “I thought he wore too much makeup,” she remembered.

He did slip away from the past from time to time, most notably and successfully in Three Days of the Condor and All The President’s Men. But I got an earful from veteran producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown when they told me about the lengths to which Redford would go in order to protect his image in a contemporary film. 

I knew Zanuck and Brown a bit over the years, and knew them to be extremely careful about what they said. When it came to their experience with Redford, however, they could not contain their anger.

The two producers had acquired the rights to a courtroom novel by a Boston lawyer named Barry Reed titled The Verdict. They quickly discovered that just about every actor in Hollywood wanted to play the part of the novel’s alcoholic hero, Frank Galvin. Frank Sinatra called about it, and even Cary Grant got in touch, seemingly willing to come out of retirement for the role. “Never before in our careers have we had a property that attracted that kind of attention,” Richard Zanuck told me.

While they were running 20th Century Fox, Zanuck and Brown had fought hard to keep Redford out of co-starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (they preferred Steve McQueen). Now they badly wanted his box office potency for The Verdict.

At first Redford seemed anxious to play Galvin. But then trouble started. Redford disliked David Mamet’s script. Other writers came and went. Redford still wasn’t happy. It eventually became apparent to Zanuck and Brown that their star did not want to tarnish his carefully honed movie star image. Specifically he did not want to play a drunk. “When he realized he’d have to let the warts show, let it all hang out, then he backed off,” Zanuck said. “Every time a scene was written in which he looked boozy and ill-kempt, unshaven, he resisted. He wanted to be a family man…a kind of boy scout version of the character. That was not what we conceived at all.”

Eventually, Zanuck and Brown were forced to do what almost never happens to a movie star of Redford’s magnitude: They fired him. “We were sick of it, quite frankly,” recalled Zanuck. Ironically, the producers then turned to Redford’s good friend Paul Newman. The Verdict won him an Academy Award nomination. 

Maybe Redford was right after all. Audiences didn’t want to see him drunk. They flocked to the two sweeping romantic dramas he made after The Verdict, The Natural and Out of Africa. Redford clean shaven and blond, cast in a golden light, the last romantic movie star doing what he did best.

Many years after that brief New York encounter, I was present in Toronto when Robert Redford showed up late (notoriously, he always on what was known as Redford Time) to receive a donation for his Sundance Institute. He entered the room, a scarf was draped around his neck, his blondish hair was properly tousled, there was no security, no entourage just, briefly…Robert Redford.