His bedroom was the simplest room of all–except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.
“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said hilariously. “I can’t–when I try to–“
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an unconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher–shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”
To film this abstruse, exquisite Fitzgerald scene, John Box had to replace those “two hulking patent cabinets” with a large, oval, mirrored closet adjoining the bedroom, where the layers of Gatsby’s beautiful shirts rested on pale wood shelves. And they were beautiful shirts, most of them silk from Turnbull & Asser, stacked on those shelves in color shadings as they waited unwittingly for their defenestration, the guts of the scene.
When I got to the set, I sensed an unverbalized tension. Since actors are artful at exuding tension without moving their lips or muscles, it wasn’t clear at first whence the mood emanated. But soon I learned it was from Bob Redford. He was stony mad.
Before I found out why, though, the shirts were given one of their many on-camera takes as Bob pulled them off the shelves and threw them onto the floor, one by one, just as Fitzgerald had written, while Mia was watching and then crying.
Whatever was bothering Bob, the shirt-throwing was propelled by his anger. Although his face showed only Gatsby’s emotional state, he threw the shirts with muscle and they shot all over the place, more of a crumpled mess than simply “unfolded.”
After the cut, wardrobe people moved around picking up the shirts and restoring them to serenity. Mia and a few of us joined in, picking up, folding and shelving the shirts for the next take. It took some time.
In between all this, I had located a surface on which to perch. Gatsby’s bed, dressed in a heavy maroon coverlet with pillows piled against the headboard, wasn’t actually a bed, as my ass discovered when I plunked onto it. Since nobody was going to be making love on it (I don’t think it even appeared in the film), there was nothing under the cover but a hard sheet of plywood. Seems it was a film prop, not a piece of furniture.
Nevertheless, I sat on it to watch. After one take, Bob came over to the bed and took Gatsby’s place on it, up against the headboard facing me. I found out why Bob was angry: the filming schedule, which had previously given him a week or two off, had been shifted suddenly and he had lost his vacation time. He didn’t overtly suggest one reason for the change, i.e., Mia’s pregnancy, but was particularly angry because he had planned and booked a family road trip to Scotland with Lola and the kids.
I was sympathetic and simultaneously uneasy, my default reaction when someone complains to me. I took these things as blame, carrying an implicit suggestion I should make everything right. Which I couldn’t. But a canceled trip to Scotland? Scotland has long been my fantasyland. I told Bob that, with deep regret about his lost trip. And some mealy-mouthing about schedule changes and nobody’s fault and…
In Bob’s grouse, there was more than a hint of being personally and specifically targeted by the schedule change. A smidgeon of grandiosity there, I thought. I’d once gone through something like that myself and had been handed a lesson that considerably reduced my sense of intended victimization. So, after the next take, when Bob returned to the bed, I told him of my experience:
A friend of mine (he had been at some point more than a friend, but I didn’t tell Bob he’d been at some point more than a friend; I bet he figured it out anyway) had done something to hurt me. That’s how I’d felt, anyway. He hurt me. One day, I revealed my feelings to the guy’s close friend, who said, “He didn’t do it to hurt you. It had nothing to do with you. It’s what he is, that’s the way he lives.” Then, in a nonchalant manner, he delivered a moderately harsh punch line.
“You’re not the center of the universe,” he said.
Bob was listening to me with powerful intensity, as if I were the local oracle. It was flattering…and a tad theatrical, as if we were in a scene from, I don’t know, Butch Cassidy or The Sting, maybe. He nodded, nodded. Absorbing what I was saying, thinking through it word for word.
“And that helped?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It put everything into perspective. I can’t be the intended victim of someone’s random behavior if I’m not the center of the universe.”
He nodded and nodded again. Then he said, “But there’s a problem with that.” He paused. Then slowly and deliberately, Robert Redford delivered this line:
“I like being the center of the universe.”