In 1986, my most prized possession was a little pink phone message slip written by a hotel clerk.
“Miss Dowd,” it read, “Robert Redford called. He’s at the same number as last night.”
I’d never met Redford, but that piece of paper was a magic portal to all kinds of pink-cloud fantasies. I stuck it up on my cubicle in the Washington bureau of The Times and gazed at it whenever I needed a lift.
Then, one night, the bureau chief went on a crazed cleaning campaign and sent a crew in to throw out every stray piece of paper around our desks.
I came in the next morning and my beloved message was gone.
I had called Redford to interview him for a Times Magazine profile on Paul Newman. Often, movie stars won’t talk about other movie stars (it’s not about them!); Joanne Woodward wouldn’t even talk to me about her husband for that piece.
But Redford was happy to talk about his pal. When I heard that famous voice on the phone, I said: “Wait a minute, let me get a pen and pencil. I mean, a pen and pen. No, a pen and paper.”
He just laughed, accustomed to women getting flustered.
I heard from someone on his team about seven years later. Redford wanted to offer me a role in a movie he was directing called “Quiz Show.” It was just one line — “Excuse me, are you the son?” — uttered by a woman who’s at a book party trying to chat up Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, the fraudulent quiz whiz and son of the renowned Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post The Way They Were appeared first on New York Times.
