By Emily Hourican
Sunday May 15 2011

Biographer Michael Feeney Callan is pals with film legends -- his family spent months in Utah as a guest of Robert Redford, the subject of his new book. But, as the writer tells Emily Hourican, befriending stars is a juggling act and despite the intimate insights he is merely a guest in their world

There is something fundamentally contradictory about the notion of an "authorised biography". Can anything carrying the subject's seal of approval possibly be the truth, or even close to it? Especially where that subject is a star, with the ego of a star. But it's a paradox that Michael Feeney Callan, veteran biographer of Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins and now Robert Redford, has learned to be comfortable with.

"The compromise, the inherent pressure you're under -- the moral responsibility to be private -- is a constant upset," he says.

We're sitting in the conservatory of his pleasant house in Sutton, and Feeney Callan is waiting for the New York Post to wake up on the other side of the world. His wife Ri is under instructions to call him as soon as this happens, but meanwhile, he's happy to debate the responsibilities of an author.

"If you have a sensitive nature, and I have, it's something you're constantly struggling with. Because you do understand that so much of life is unreasoned, and so things happen ... Bob always says he is full of guilt, as am I, we all are. So that's a good place to start, the evaluation of guilt and moral decision-making." It's a statement very typical of Feeney Callan's way of talking and reasoning.

He is didactic and intellectual, articulate but also slightly convoluted. And he drops names as a seamstress drops pins; names of celebs, writers, thinkers, psychologists, directors; alive, dead, long dead and even fictitious. So you get Chaucer, Sinatra, Clive James, Cubby Broccoli, John McGahern, Carl Jung, Paul Newman, Hubble Gardner, Alan Pakula, all tumbling out, hot on each other's heels, cited as examples and illustrations, used in anecdotes and quoted. His is a world of household names, poetry and difficult abstract concepts, often all at the same time.

Robert Redford : The Biography was 16 years in the writing, and is a precise, weighty analysis of Redford's life and impact, meticulously constructed and delivered with pace and style. Already extracted by Vanity Fair, it is set to become the definitive account, not only of Redford, but also of that era of movie-making that was his hey-day, the era of All The President's Men and The Candidate.

So did Redford have a heavy hand in the editing of the book?

"There's nothing that has been edited out of the book," insists Feeney Callan. "There are things he made suggestions about ... " Then, by way of illustrating his point, he tells a story about something Al Jardine of the Beach Boys once said to him; "'There is one thing that distinguishes all great artists -- are you completion-minded?' I set out my stall early in life. I am very tenacious. And there's no way that I was not going to finish a biography on Robert Redford ... "

Which I suppose is a slightly grand way of saying yes, there are things that didn't make it into the book, but hey, at least there is a book.

"There are compromises," he admits, "but do I think the book is fundamentally compromised in terms of any inaccuracy about the projection of who he is? No."

Feeney Callan became interested in biography as a young man writing drama for RTE back in the Seventies, as a way to dig deeper into human psychology.

"I am quite introverted, and I thought, if I write a biography, I'll get to anatomise people, talk to the people who know them. It was a way of testing Carl Jung's famous statement that the truth is only available from the concert of many voices."

Also, and about this he is disarmingly honest, "I wanted to live reasonably well, because I grew up in a poor family, but also creatively. So I wasn't averse to populism."

The family were from Dublin and Feeney Callan's father was an engineer. His high-achieving siblings are, variously, head of the American School at UCD and a former dean of Stanford University. "We sound like an awful egg-head family and we're not. We're all late starters."

Feeney Callan started out as a grave-digger, then sold insurance -- "all those sorts of things" -- but his real loves were language and linguistics, and he wrote poetry from the age of 12, which David Marcus published in New Irish Writing. From poetry he moved to scriptwriting rather than the more obvious journalism, because "I could never write journalism, I was too interested in the puzzle of language," but had no intention of sticking with that.

"My whole life and career is very much experiment and newness; I can't stand being in one thing any length of time. The meditative life always attracted me -- experiment, newness, that kind of thing. I didn't want to be strictly a book writer or a TV writer ... "

And so he became all of them, moving from scripts to filmography, then biography, of which Sean Connery was his first substantial work -- written with the subject's semi-blessing but without his help (what Connery actually said was something along the lines of "I'll let anyone talk to you, but if you get one thing wrong, I'll sue you") -- then Richard Harris.

"That was a nightmare," Feeney Callan recalls, "because Harris was such a strange man. I'm still amused today at the way he played people. He was a manipulator. He took a deep, private pride in it, he was able to weave and deceive. I saw him in so many ways, trying to position himself to seduce people -- women for sex, men for his career ends -- that if I had a different nature as a writer, you would write an astonishingly devastating book about him. But I chose to see the poet in him, the lovable rogue."

This ability to choose, to see beyond surface behaviour, is what makes Feeney Callan such an effective biographer. After Harris came Anthony Hopkins, a book which made its way to Redford, and word trickled back that he had liked it.

"I asked could I meet him, and we met in New York." Feeney Callan proposed a biography, but Redford said he wouldn't help. It was poetry that changed his mind. "I forget what the poem was ... I think it was To Helen, by Edgar Allan Poe. I started quoting it, and he started talking about The Raven, which had been his audition piece for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and I think we saw each other as suppressed poets. We talked about Eliot and The Waste Land, and that's really where it all came from."

Feeney Callan got an advance of "well over a million dollars", for the book, and has spent 16 years writing it.

"We had this long relationship," he says now. "He was an active participant in the book. We went out and stayed in his homes, he came here and stayed, and paid his own way. We're still friends."

It's a friendship with many hiatuses -- "there'd be long, empty periods with Bob when you wouldn't hear from him at all" -- but one that has clearly changed Feeney Callan's life. He talks about the time he took his two children out of school, in 1998, on Bob's invitation, to go to Utah.

"It was to be a week or two skiing and the interview. We left in January and came back on the 5th of May. The kids missed half a year of school. But you do make that decision ... " He draws a firm distinction between journalistic interviews, which he likens to "climbing the castle walls with bare fingernails", because of all the restrictions (of time, format, advocacy and so on), and what he does, which he describes thus: "I build a ladder and get over the wall; I may never come back."

Indeed it's a strange business, the befriending of stars. You enter their world, intimately, but temporarily. You are only ever a guest. And despite the dazzle of proximity, not just to the star subject, but also to their friends and collaborators, your glory is simply a reflection of theirs, short-lived, borrowed, repeal-able at a moment's notice.

"You are changed by it," Feeney Callan admits. "It's impossible not to be. I remember once I was in bed, with my wife, at a tender moment in New York, when Paul Newman rang. I answered the phone and said, I'll call you back, because the personal moment was too important. Newman found that very amusing ... "

I wonder, but neglect to ask, what his wife made of it, because Feeney Callan is charging ahead with more stories.

"You make so many life adjustments to stay up with the artist that it does have an effect on you," he says.

And on your bank balance. I'm vulgar enough to ask who pays for all these ski trips, weekends in New York and so on. "I was paid a lot of money to do the book," he says, "but break it down over 16 years and what kind of income is that? You're funding your own flights, your own hotels. You're bringing Bob out, buying a nice bottle of Merlot ... You're sucked in the slipstream and you kind of have no choice. If you're fortunate enough to be having lunch with Sydney Pollack and he paid for it yesterday, you're paying for today."

And outside the charmed circle are, of course, prowlers and ill-wishers. "You're aware of so many people who want to get in there and do it as well, so you get a lot of the jaundice thing, a lot of the jealous thing, a lot of journalists and other people trying to take shots at you because they think if they can take you down, they can get in there." And, he insists, despite all the dazzle, it's not what we might think. "It's basically a monk-like commitment to fidelity. You stop your career and give 10 years to this guy ... "

So did he like Redford by the end of it, if that isn't too prosaic a question?

"A subject changes in your mind and your perception as you get to know them, so I see him differently now. Bob basically is two people -- he's a poet and he's an empire builder. The part of him that's really interesting to me isn't the movies and the stardom, its what makes him so interested in a stewardship and anthropology. He's a nice guy -- he's venal, but who isn't? He has an amazing sense of humour, he's hard to read, subversive, by nature rebellious. He's distracted, he's out there."

This, Feeney Callan reckons, is why Redford didn't offer Lynn Barber a glass of water when she had a coughing fit while interviewing him -- something she wrote about in a quite devastating profile of him some years ago. "Bob wouldn't offer you water. He's not listening to that, he's listening to the C above C."

The best of Redford is, Feeney Callan believes, to be found in the principles of the Sundance Festival he established, and it is in homage to these principles that Feeney Callan has now founded Bobcom, an online music-based community set up to take over from Myspace, and named for Redford.

"Bobcom is very much copying some of the concepts behind Sundance. It's something to inspire young musicians by taking the invitation of the web, which is democracy."

So Bobcom offers incentives and exposure, via the website and a TV series airing on Channel 4, Sounds of the Cities, as well as a chance to upload, sell and share music.

So has Feeney Callan suffered withdrawal symptoms since finishing the book, and ending his legitimate excuse to dwell in the heady world of Hollywood legends? "I never see any aspect of my career as being over. Connery begets Redford, Redford begets Bobcom." A little piece of Redford to take to the wider world.

Robert Redford: The Biography, €20, is published by Simon & Schuster on June 9. Bobcom

- Emily Hourican

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