Ready or Not, Here comes Gatsby

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In the Tent. The remaining loose ends of the Gatsby package wrapped up smoothly: Karen Black and Scott Wilson as the ill-fated Myrtle and George Wilson; Bruce Dern as Daisy's husband Tom Buchanan; Sam Waterston as the narrator, Nick Carraway; Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker; and finally Howard da Silva, who played Wilson in the 1949 version, as Gatsby's mysterious business connection Wolfsheim, "the man who fixed the 1919 World Series."

Compared to the pasting together of the project, the 20 weeks of shooting on location in Newport and at Pinewood Studios near London were placid. But Robert Redford compares the set to a tent in the eye of a storm. "We just prayed we could get finished with our work before the tent crumpled in on us or was simply blown away. The storm, of course, was all of that hype and promotional bullshit Paramount arranged that threatened to destroy us all."

For Redford, playing Gatsby was the achievement of an old ambition. When he signed for the role, he had just done a couple of unsuccessful pictures following his first big splash in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was a star, certainly, but he had not yet entered the ranks of the "bankable" top ten. During the work on Gatsby, however, The Way We Were and The Sting were released, and Redford became the most sought-after actor in town.

Added Ruffles. "I wanted Gatsby badly," he says. "He is not fleshed out in the book, and the implied parts of his character are fascinating." Redford's biggest problem was Gatsby's language. "He simply didn't talk like a real person," he says, quoting Fitzgerald's own description of his hero: "His way of speaking bordered on the absurd."

All of the actors, says Redford, were very much aware that Paramount was trying to steamroll a superhit and that they were expected to cooperate with the game plan by producing superhit performances. If the picture flopped, Redford understood only too well, "there would be a lot of whisperings about how Redford was wrong for the Gatsby role."

There was less pressure on Redford's co-star Mia Farrow, 29, simply because she no longer takes her career so seriously. "She has spent her life being treated like a butterfly who needs to be protected," says Jack Clayton in a burst of romanticism. This is not strictly true. In her Hollywood days, Mia ground out TV's Peyton Place until she briefly became Frank Sinatra's wife. She almost became a major star in Rosemary's Baby. But after marrying Conductor Andre Previn, she opted for domestic life in England with the couple's twin sons and their adopted Vietnamese daughter. Quiet, sparrow-thin and doe-eyed, Mia hardly seems a candidate to play Fitzgerald's teasing, haughty heroine. Yet in Theoni Aldredge's exquisite period costumes, she is at the very least the most beautiful thing in the picture.