Driving toward Salt Lake City once to pick up the two-lane Highway 91 home, Redford diverted at Ogden, turned for Heber City and stopped at a riverside diner called the Chalet. He had lunch and then surveyed the area: “The river, the snow on the mountains, the cladding of screw pines and aspens, it all had what I’d now call a European character. I found a little side road called the Alpine Loop and drove up the hill, which was the north fork draw of Provo Canyon, until the road ran out. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t pull myself away. The mountain, Timpanogos, was to me like Everest. It was Yosemite on a different scale. Spiritually, it was fascinating. When I left, I couldn’t shake it off. I lay in bed and thought about it. And whenever I had the chance to go back, I did. It became my favorite long shortcut, the only way to go home. I have a clear recollection of thinking, Someday I’d like to put a stake down here.” The canyon that attracted him was called Timp Haven, destined to become the Sundance village from which he would build his personal cultural vision. It was also, ironically, owned by Omer Stewart’s family.
Martha’s health, meanwhile, had begun to decline. At the time of the loss of her twins in 1947, Redford remembered hearing through a closed door someone saying, “It’s either her or the twins.” The fact that she had a weak heart and a chronic congenital blood disorder was skipped over, partly, Redford believes, because of religious preconditioning. She’d recovered, but not totally. “She was so full of optimism, she had such a bright, loving smile, that I thought she was immortal,” says Redford. And then he noticed her wane. “I’d come back home in the middle of the day, and she’d be wearing her dressing gown, which seemed so unlike her. When I’d question it, she’d just say, ‘Oh, I was tired.’ ” Martha put on weight and her skin took on a blue hue. Redford knew she was in pain, and observed that she could only find relief getting in the car and going for drives out to the desert. Redford was happy to take her driving. “After all, she taught me, when I was about eight. In those days, when Dad was working in El Segundo, we’d drive out on the back roads to collect him late at night. Mom used to put me on her lap and work the pedals while I steered. Now she sat in silence while we drove in circles.”
At CU, Redford distracted himself with his art. “I looked around Boulder to try to find the arts community, but there was none,” he recalls. Richard Dudley, the fine arts professor, advised him the community would be of his own making. Dudley was a wild man, a transplanted New Yorker. “Art is about you and your vision,” Dudley told him. At Van Nuys, Redford had won a Scholastic Gold Key for drawing and, as part of the prize, had been offered summer work as an apprentice, cleaning cels for the lead animators at Disney Studios in Burbank. He’d visited but disliked the assembly line labor. Instead, on the advice of a kind technician, he walked up the block to UPA, the tiny independent studio run by Faith and John Hubley, which made the Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts that launched Mr. Magoo. “I didn’t have any sort of plan then,” says Redford. “I just loved those cartoons and thought my own sketches were kind of similar.” The Hubleys, operating from a shack behind a restaurant, welcomed the young Redford into their workshop and showed him their designs. “They were just amenable folk excited by what they were doing and patiently making ten-year projections of each character’s development. It was great down-home enthusiasm, and I loved the fact that they cherished the individual artist.” Redford asked for a job and was told to “go find experience—anywhere—and come back to us.”
Redford first saw Dudley’s CU program as a prep course for a possible career in animation but soon found his horizons expanding. A committed modernist, Dudley promoted the deconstructive principles of expressionism and denigrated the stubborn teaching formula that centered on Hellenic form. His idol was Paul Klee, the Blaue Reiter transcendentalist whose famous contribution to abstract art was the narrative use of symbols and numbers within mosaics. Klee searched for spirituality in his art, and Dudley tried to convey some of the attraction of intellectual surrender to his mostly female class. Redford jumped at the invitation to free expression but found himself “a stroke behind all this; I needed a few years to catch up with the emotional release of expressionism.” But the bond with Dudley was inspirational. “He wasn’t an admirer of the fauves, and I was anticolor at the start, so we talked the same language,” says Redford. “He was also gripped by a raging frustration, lost in the backwater of Boulder, and consequently anarchic, which felt familiar. I was confident in my style because I had been sketching for so long. I was ready to experiment. Other students were stuck in theory, and that drove Dudley nuts. One girl labored over a very detailed Florentine nude, which inflamed him because he wanted all of us to let the tiger out. He approached her, took her inkwell and upended it over the drawing. Then he grabbed her hand and scrawled through the ink, smearing it everywhere. ‘Let it go! Let it go!’ I found that stimulating.” Nonetheless, Redford’s grades were awful.
In May 1955, Martha died of complications arising from the recurrent septicemia she had been suffering from since her difficult pregnancy. Charlie called his son, who caught the next plane from Denver. “I’ll never forget his meeting me at the airport,” says Redford. “I’d never seen him as a vulnerable man, and the balance of power had always been one-sided. I’d raised hell, but he was always boss. At the airport it was completely different. He fell to pieces. I told him to get out of the driver’s seat and I took the wheel. Everything changed when my mother died. His world fell down. Mine seemed to also.”
5
Behind the Mirror
Photographs of Redford taken soon after his mother’s death are revealing. He looks like a punch-drunk boxer, shoulders hunched, collar upturned, tie askew. In Los Angeles, family friend Vivian Knudson found him “disoriented and angry.” Coomber observed him “torn apart. He was devastated by her loss, and it pushed him far inside himself at exactly the time he had the chance to grow outward.”
For the next eighteen months he consoled himself with girls and books. All direction disappeared. He was submissive. When Charlie insisted on summer field work, loading boxcars and cleaning oil drums at the El Segundo refinery, he acceded. George Menard insisted that while Charlie recovered from Martha’s passing, “Bobby was seriously screwed up. He mumbled about vague career plans in art or design, but Charlie said it was all nonsense, that his future must be something more substantial.”
More convulsions followed. In November, Lena died in New London. At the same time Hugh Hall, his friend from CU, signed for two years in the military. Redford searched for comfort in literature, devouring Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann. Each struck chords that would resurface explicitly and implicitly in his later work: Wolfe the egotist, filled with spiritual wonder, the hunger for self-realization and chronic alienation in equal parts; Lewis, dissecting American smugness and philistinism in Main Street and Babbitt; Mann, probing Western civilization. All engrossed Redford; all left a sense of want.
Finally, in Henry Miller, Redford found what he was searching for. A fellow student loaned him the slim, European-published Nights of Love and Laughter. This was Miller at his most raucous and profane. Redford loved it. “No one I’d found was so frank about tackling the hypocrisies of society. Yes, he talked about hunger and anger and sexual voracity. But it was all in the spirit of saying, ‘Let’s just lay it out here. Let’s be honest about human beings.’ It was frank, direct human communication, and that was a rare commodity in my life.”
Late in the spring of 1956 he decided abruptly to go to Europe. Dudley, as much as Miller, was behind the decision. “It was also what John Hubley had said: get experience.” The University of Colorado had made it clear that he wasn’t welcome back. His home life also suddenly became unbearably complicated. True to form, there had been no analytical discussion of Martha’s passing, just silence. Now Charlie announced in a letter that he was planning to marry Helen Coomber. Even today both sides of the family express bewilderment at this overnight romance. According to Lala Brady, the
family friendship had deepened significantly in the weeks preceding Martha’s death, but neither she nor anyone else had any inkling of wedding bells.
For Redford a long-distance exile became a necessity: “Domestically it was too much to deal with. The job prospects at home were terrible. Plus, I really wanted art in my life, that much I now knew. Expressionism was the big scene in the United States, but I preferred the Europeans like Utrillo, Modigliani, and especially Gauguin, and the postimpressionists, who were immensely exciting for me.” In Europe, Redford reasoned, he would be closer to the wellsprings and might escape the American cultural inertia that Miller disdained.
Brendlinger and Redford had drifted apart over the last year, but Redford approached his old supporter. “I was contemplating the summer ahead and the obligations I had for the Naval Reserve,” says Brendlinger, “when Bob comes up and blurts, ‘I’ve decided to go to Europe.’ ” It was agreed they would join up for a while over there in search of adventure. In France, Brendlinger could take language courses at the Sorbonne and maybe be a ski bum in Switzerland, while Redford, with an introductory letter from Dudley, would enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Charlie thought of his son’s new plan as a lark, but was met with the usual bullish stubbornness. “I knew what my father wanted me to be,” says Redford. “The problem was, he didn’t know who I was. If I didn’t get out of there then, I believe I’d have continued a serious downward slide.”
Early in September, Redford hitched to Denver, from where he and Brendlinger drove a Lincoln Continental to New York, providing a vehicle-delivery service for a rental agency. In Manhattan, they bought round-trip tourist-class tickets to France aboard the USS United States for $300 apiece, almost half their money. Then Redford splurged on a farewell gift to himself—a Broadway ticket to see Jason Robards in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It brought him to tears with the eloquence of its language and the echoes of grandfather Tiger’s New London.
At the time of Redford’s arrival in France in 1956, the cold war was raging. Earlier in the year Polish riots against Soviet occupation had filled American headlines. In November, Hungary would launch its five-day rebellion. Redford arrived in the gap between the two. “I was open for political conversion,” he says. “I’d had the full American education, which amounted to conservatism, social torpor and an absolute lack of understanding of other cultures. France, to me, was Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Of course, in some circles there was a better perspective, but the popular understanding was negligible. I arrived in Europe an innocent, but with a metaphorical, and literal, notebook in my hand.”
Charlie had reluctantly agreed to send $100 a month. “Bob would spend his month’s money in a week,” says Brendlinger, “and then live off mine. I think he was almost in debt from the time we arrived.” They had made no arrangements for accommodation in Paris, and since it was auto show week, no hotel rooms could be found. At the last minute a clerk at American Express found an old lady with rooms on the Right Bank. One week’s board ate up a month’s budget. “We were off to a very bad start,” recalls Brendlinger.
Redford, however, was uncowed. This was the world he wanted: edgy, overstretched, extreme. He hung out in the university district and sought to meet some French women. It was no easy chore. “They just didn’t like Americans,” says Redford, “and coming from my uninformed place, it was hard for me to judge how much of their rudeness was personal.” Redford started a crash course in recent French history, learning about de Gaulle, the war in Indochina, the warring factions in Algeria. “My exposure to pre-Gaullist France,” says Redford, “was the start of coherent political awareness because I had to apply myself to understand why it was hard for us to fit in there. It was valuable for making me reevaluate America, too. I started reading Walter Lippmann and Art Buchwald for the better perspective. And I understood for the first time the colossal role America was playing all over the world. Because of out-of-control French inflation and the strength of the dollar, Americans were like visiting conquerors. And that’s how it was across many parts of the world. We had influence: in money, in military strength, in the movies. We touched other people’s cultures in extraordinary ways in the twentieth century.”
Day courses at the Beaux-Arts did not commence until October, so Redford and Brendlinger decided to leave town. On the advice of a German they met at a jazz club, they set off for Majorca. There, for $40, they rented a Moorish villa belonging to the Catholic Church at Can Pastilla, south of Palma. They were in sight of the sea and surrounded by white walls draped in bougainvillea. But Redford did not enjoy the blissful isolation for long. “He would sit at these open-air bistros all day long and sketch the customers,” remembers Brendlinger. “All the faces he chose were the sad ones. All of this work was very moving and evocative, and I saw a side to him that was new. This wasn’t the flake from CU. This was some troubled kid.” Brendlinger, whose father had died when he was very young, wondered if Redford wasn’t struggling with the grief of losing his mother. “I gathered she was the heart of his self-esteem. But I think it was more than that. He had a creative urge bursting to break out, and it had been suppressed. I began to understand that Europe was do or die for him, secretly.
“We got to talking about our after-college destinies, and how the business world would kill both of us. Bob talked about his love for art and wondered where art and movies might intersect. The movie industry, we decided, offered lots of perks, like travel, long resting spells between jobs, et cetera. Bob was a vain kid, but his ego wasn’t so big that he was imagining himself as an actor. I said to him: ‘What about acting?’ But he was thinking only of art. I said, ‘After this is over, we can go back to L.A. and make a great life for ourselves conning our way through the movie industry.’ He seemed amused by the thought.” But all Redford was interested in, he says, was getting to the Beaux-Arts.
In October the friends returned to Paris and took a room for $1.50 a night at the Hôtel Notre-Dame on the Quai Saint-Michel. Redford started at the Beaux-Arts. The school’s emphasis had recently shifted from painting and sculpting to architecture. For day students, the first two years were couched in classicism and Renaissance studies. Redford slumped: “This was the school where Delacroix, Ingres, Renoir, Degas and Monet trained. It was supposed to be the ultimate communal school that valued experiment. But the environment I found was academic and very self-serious. It was everything that made me uncomfortable. All I did was sit in a courtyard and learn about Alberti’s mathematical theories and the principles of aerial perspective and chiaroscuro.”
After four weeks he transferred to the recently accredited modernist Académie Charpentier. Here informality inspired Redford. “I finally started to forget academic study and experiment. It was the first time in my life that I could work in unself-conscious freedom, try things and fail or succeed, and build a portfolio. I changed fundamentally. When I first arrived in Paris I was wearing a bateau-collared shirt and beret I’d stolen from a Beverly Hills store. I was playing at being Gene Kelly in Paris. By the time I was at the academy’s little third-floor atelier, the phoniness was gone. I was painting in oils, every day. I particularly loved to paint pregnant women, for their fullness in any pose. Up till then my ambitious artwork was dark, like Franz Klein’s. Now it was full of blazing color.” Modigliani became his new, cherished template, as much for his history of wildness as for his art: Modigliani was an uninhibited, glorious drunk, indulging the most dangerous affaires, stealing stone from municipal building sites, defying everyone, a persona that felt comfortably familiar.
Brimming with new energy, Redford joined with student radicals organizing street demonstrations against the Soviet suppression in Hungary. Curiosity put him in the middle of the action, though his political education was very much a work in progress. In a police baton charge in the university district, he was clubbed and injured. “It wasn’t what drove me out of Paris,” says Redford, “but it contributed. It wasn’t ju
st antistudent at that rally, it was anti-American. I was beginning to understand I had a lot more to learn.”
At the start of December, Redford and Brendlinger rejoined and hit the road. Redford wanted to go to Italy. He had decided he would draw and paint on the streets and earn his way. They hitched, following a youth hostel map that took them first to Capri and then to Rome for Christmas. “It was excruciating,” says Brendlinger. “We always seemed to miss a hostel bed and end up sleeping in the dirt. It was also an intensely cold winter, colder than Colorado.” In an often published account of the trip, Redford is reported to have copied a trick from a Jack London story and buried himself in cow dung for warmth. “It’s true,” says Redford, “ridiculous, but true.” By the time they reached Rome in mid-December, both were almost out of cash and subsisting on cheese and water. They hurried through the Roman sights—the Piazza Venezia, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum—then hitched to Naples and cadged a ferry ride to spend Christmas in Anacapri. Back in Rome on New Year’s Eve they gate-crashed Bricktops, the haunt of the glitterati, where Redford joined a jostling pack of revelers stealing kisses at midnight from Ava Gardner.
When they reached Florence, Redford made a decision. “No disrespect to Jack, but I wanted this solitary trip. It was partly masochistic. I wanted to be alone with the grief I had and the difficulty I had with my personal identity. More than anything, I wanted to go on a journey with my art. Was it any good? How far would it take me? Could I survive with it, and it alone?” Brendlinger departed for the ski resort of Zürs, and the friends agreed to meet again in Munich in March.
Redford began a rapid slide. It was as if the true trough of his depression revealed itself once constant companionship was removed. The photographs Brendlinger took throughout the Europe trip speak for themselves: at the start Redford looks chubby and comfortable; by the time he’s in Florence, he is gaunt and stripped of expression. “I lost forty-two pounds,” says Redford. “Nervous tension and the constant movement burned the weight off me. What was I nervous about? Failing, and having to go back to resume a Los Angeles life. It was bad in Paris. It became unbearable in Florence.” Speaking no Italian, bereft of friends, he took a room with a family called the Barbieris and enrolled for classes at a dingy, private scuola supervised by tutors from the Accademia di Belle Arti. The Orphean descent began. “Because the Barbieris spoke no English, there was almost no communication, just like at home,” says Redford. “I hardly saw them because I lived by night and slept half the day. It was the dead of winter, fifteen Celsius below, and I slept in my gray wool overcoat for the heat. Staying warm became the big deal. And staying sane. And working. Just these three things: warmth, sanity, work. I smoked cut in half Alfa cigarettes to stay warm.”
Robert Redford Page 7
