Buffalo loved Robert Redford. And he loved us back.
The proof is in an old audio tape – yes, actual tape – from a 2001 interview that Redford did with the journalist Jeffrey Zaslow, who was a contributing writer for USA Weekend magazine in those days.
The resulting story was largely about Redford’s environmental activism, with a sidebar about “Spy Games,” his then-upcoming movie with Brad Pitt.
During the course of the interview, though, Zaslow mentioned that his wife was a Buffalo native. Not for the story, mind you, but just as a point of interest.
Redford responded with instant enthusiasm. And his thoughts about our fair city from that day are published here for the first time.
“You tell your wife I think Buffalo’s got one of the great bum raps,” Redford said. “It’s a beautiful city.”
His Hollywood friends had offered condolences when he told them where he was going on location, in 1983, to shoot the baseball movie “The Natural.”
“When I went, people said, ‘Oh, you poor bastard, you’ve got to go to Buffalo?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve never been there.’ ”
Then, of course, he spent the summer of ’83 filming at War Memorial Stadium and elsewhere around town.
“I love that city,” Redford said, “and it was in a very depressed economic state right then.”
That was the year Bethlehem Steel shut down most of its operations here, and less than a year after the Courier-Express had closed.
“And I just loved seeing the old towers of heritage right there,” Redford said. “The culture is very visible there.”
Perhaps by old towers he meant the grain silos on the waterfront.
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“I had a house around the block from Lake Erie,” he said. “I was there three months. I loved it.”
Redford died this week, at 89, at his home in Utah. Zaslow died in an auto accident, at 53, in Michigan in 2012. By then he had been an author of bestselling books, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and the syndicated advice columnist who succeeded Ann Landers at the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Jeff was so good,” says Marcia Bullard, who was president and CEO of USA Weekend at the time. “He was such a talent and the nicest guy. So smart and so easy to work with.”
Sherry Margolis is the Buffalo native who was Zaslow’s wife. She remembers all the buzz around town when Redford was filming here. She was a weekend anchor and a reporter at WKBW-TV at the time, during the glory days of Irv Weinstein.
Later she would move to Detroit to be an anchor at WJBK-TV. She retired in 2020 after almost 36 years there. (We told her story in 2019, when she was inducted into the Buffalo Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.)
Zaslow’s USA Weekend story notes that Redford, at 65, was a grandfather of four but still had the kind of movie-star looks that could fluster women. Redford told a story about stopping for ice cream in Santa Fe, N.M., where a woman in line recognized him and tried to keep her composure.
“After she left, the guy behind the counter was laughing,” Redford told Zaslow. “He said, ‘Do you know what that woman just did? She put her ice cream cone in her purse.’ ”
The theme of aging is central to “The Natural.” Redford, at 47, plays Roy Hobbs, a rookie who’s in his mid-30s by the time he gets to the big leagues. And our aging, broken-down ballpark was what had brought Redford to Buffalo in the first place.
Margolis is pleased to know that he had said such nice things about her old hometown all those years ago, when her husband happened to mention where she was from.
“Oh, hey, see that?” she says. “I was the catalyst for his kind words. That makes me very happy. He saw the beauty and the value of Buffalo, and he recognized what a wonderful place it is.
“He saw it the way we see it.”
Her husband’s interview took place on the patio of Redford’s estate in California, over lunch. Margolis wasn’t there, but she thinks that’s for the best.
“I probably would have swooned,” she says, “or put ice cream in my purse.”
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