Each afternoon, when not attending classes, Redford lived a military routine: “It was always very late when I’d rise. I’d eat a small plate of penne or ravioli and take a coffee at the railway station, then go walk the Ponte Vecchio. I walked and walked and walked, looking and sketching. I had a large sketchbook in which on the left facing page I wrote my thoughts and on the right I drew.” One of the scuola tutors, Tony Reeves, a Canadian from the American arts program at the academy, offered encouragement. Very much in mind of Picasso’s contention that abstract art is worthless unless its concept is rooted in recognizable reality, Redford studied himself. “I started examining my own face in the solitary three-quarter-length mirror on the washstand in the corner of my room. Just sitting on a chair, staring and staring, deconstructing my features. I was trying to disassemble the human form and find out who I was at the same time.” In his isolation Redford became obsessive-compulsive. “I became convinced that if I filled the room with smoke, I’d make it warmer. So I cut up my cigarettes in the belief that they’d last longer. I smoked for twenty hours a day. The room was airless. It got so that I couldn’t breathe. My head was spinning. I wasn’t eating anymore. I started losing weight by the day. Growing more and more inward. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to make a sound, to sleep. Didn’t want to do anything except keep an eye on that fellow in that mirror over the washbowl.”
On a February night so cold that ice formed in the water jug on the nightstand, Redford says he began to crack up. “Staring in the mirror, I saw someone I didn’t recognize at all. I began to hallucinate. I couldn’t see flesh or bones, but I saw through the skin into some indescribable new entity.”
He broke down. Florence was the cathedral of highest art, the home of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Giotto, and he couldn’t make it there. “I was thinking all the time, If I can only hang on here, then maybe …? But I knew I was a goner. I started to laugh and then I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. It was the weirdest thing. My old self was gone. Dead. I was not the same person after that night in Florence.”
He now roamed the streets of Florence for days, panicked by the extent of his failure. He felt he had lived an inauthentic life until then, which qualified him for only one thing: role-playing. Tony Reeves saw he was indigent, took pity on him and organized a small gallery showing of his work that earned a couple of thousand lire and funded the passage north. He would meet Brendlinger in Munich as planned and head home.
When Brendlinger saw him again, he was concerned about his friend’s weight loss. “He looked very frail, with a beard and a general disheveled appearance,” says Brendlinger. “But it wasn’t much different from nights on the road. I had the impression he’d been sleeping in some ditch somewhere.” Redford felt himself “wasted and shaky but hanging in.”
They arrived back in the United States on March 14, 1957. Redford parted company with Brendlinger after an overnight stop at a Brooklyn hotel and embarked on a solo cross-country journey, exactly as Henry Miller did when he returned from postwar exile, notebook in hand, to reevaluate his homeland. On his first sight of New York, the returning Miller wrote: “Back in the rat trap. I try to hide away from my old friends; I don’t want to relive the past with them.” This was exactly Redford’s mind-set. Still upset by the Florence experience, he hitchhiked from New London (where he visited Tiger and borrowed $35 “for the Greyhound west”), through Illinois, Oklahoma and Tennessee, to Tot’s home on Lake Austin. He longed for some of Tot’s upbeat wisdom, but during the winter Tot had fallen off the roof and was a virtual invalid. Seeing him shuffle around in a steel back brace like an infirm old man was almost too much to bear: “He was only sixty-eight—a young sixty-eight—and seeing him so damaged and jaded destroyed me. I thought, All the good stuff is gone.”
After a few days, Redford called Charlie and asked him to pick him up at the bus depot. Charlie didn’t recognize his son. “I was waiting by the curb but he drove past,” recalls Redford, “then drove past again until I finally flagged him down. He couldn’t find words to express his shock at how I looked, and I certainly hadn’t the words to express what I’d gone through. We drove home in complete silence.”
Home was now Helen’s lavish house. Her son, Bill Coomber, was living there, having transferred to UCLA. Redford embraced him, but was impatient to be away from the situation. There were some who believed he was angry at Charlie and Coomber for the new closeness they’d developed. Redford denies it: “I didn’t feel resentment. In fact, I felt good for Bill, that the madness in him was gone, and he was at peace. For Dad, I think he’d found a safe haven. For so many years he’d had adversity and struggle. I don’t believe he’d got over the big displacement of his childhood, being sent away from Connecticut and more or less abandoned. I think he was hungry for a settled life, and Helen had the resources to provide that.”
At loose ends, Redford agreed to another summer of work at the refinery oil fields. He had agreed to rent an apartment with Brendlinger in Los Angeles for the summer. They did, in Varwood, an apartment complex above Hollywood and Vine. Here, instantly, Redford’s mood changed. He was in the bohemian world he craved, and in his Milleresque notebook, he recorded every detail. Nearby Sunset Boulevard, where he lunched many days, was “a façade, only this.” The streets were paved with “shoulder pads, falsies, elevator shoes and toupees of the many and various fonts of banality.” But he loved Varwood’s grotesquerie. Setting up his “easel of good will” while Brendlinger dreamed of sugar mamas in ermine, he befriended all the residents: the loudmouthed landlords, “Tel Aviv’s version of Ma and Pa Kettle, who exercise by running from each other’s shadows”; the Allens, he homesick Scottish, she “sometimes auburn”; Morey, the Spanish-Hawaiian-French Canadian opera singer; Sam, the Capitol Records rep “who plays and duets off-key nightly with a vinyl Sinatra.” Four attractive Mormon girls from Utah also resided in Varwood. They became instant friends: “In the days that followed, our apartment became a Grand Central Station filled with unfolded maps of Europe, watermelon seeds and the constant chatter that accompanies new acquaintanceships. The fabric of the fertile bohemians sufficiently aired, we finally lent ourselves to being natural once again.”
All of the girls were first-year students at Brigham Young University. A chemistry had ignited between Redford and seventeen-year-old Lola Van Wagenen. She was “a world apart,” says Redford, “from the women I’d been with in Europe.” The four girls had come to Los Angeles from the rural town of Provo, consistent with the proselytizing policy of the Mormon mission, to engage the outside world. Lola seemed the most sophisticated. She had been a beauty pageant winner at Provo High, had appeared onstage in her school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and was a member of a doo-wop sextet, the Downbeats, which had toured the Northwest and won radio and television spots in Washington.
Redford found much to share with her. “She would come and talk to me while I painted,” he wrote in his diary. “We would go for walks, up and down the celestial thoroughfares, through backwaters and parking lots, all the while discussing innocent issues ranging from moods people suffer to tales of past experience. I found her charming, more than pleasant, and most of all a good companion.” They went to see Harry Belafonte at the Hollywood Bowl and visited the observatory in Griffith Park. They went bowling and to the movies. Lola had “an extraordinary effect” on Redford, recalls Brendlinger. “She just slowed down that emotional spin. She was ridiculously right for him. They were total opposites, but they fit like hand in glove.”
“Our relationship got off to a better start because we were honest with each other,” Lola told a Utah newspaper years later. “All that stuff that comes from dating wasn’t there. When you date, you want the guy to think you’re neat … and you don’t get to know each other because you’re too busy doing your number. Bob and I talked our way into love.”
Redford believes that Lola saved his life. “It was about honesty. I felt I couldn’t be real within my own fam
ily—even with Jack—but I could be frank about my needs with her. She approved, and that was a blessing.” The discipline of her Mormonism even appealed to him, though he knew nothing about the religion. “What she told me I found fascinating. I was open to it. Sallie had started me off with her emphasis on religious salvation, and I was seeking resolution. In my eyes, my life at that time was muddy, uncouth. Lola, and Mormonism, represented something healthy and redemptive, which I needed.”
In July, Redford persuaded Lola to spend “a honeymoon weekend” with him in Monterey. One of the Provo roommates didn’t approve, and word reached Lola’s parents of their daughter’s dalliance with a Beat bum. The parents immediately sent cousins to L.A. to investigate. By then, says Redford, he and Lola had crossed the river. “We were in love. We thought, We have too much in common to let it go. Neither of us was conformist. We liked challenges. So we ignored them and started making plans.”
In fact, Redford had been exploring new options since his return. During his time in New York he had picked up a prospectus for the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the highly regarded art and design school cartoonist John Hubley had attended. He had also, spontaneously, collected literature about the various drama and actor-training groups in Manhattan. Though Helen Coomber had trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he focused on that institution simply because its advertisement in Variety was the biggest and most distinguished-looking. On May 3, he had written off for AADA application forms. “There was no great intuition at play,” says Redford, “it was simply a Plan B for escape. I was primarily thinking about animation and possibly stage design, and thinking I should go back to New York, find gainful employment, study a little and make it back to Europe to paint. Lola’s arrival, of course, skewed that plan a little.”
Redford and Brendlinger were evicted from Varwood at the end of July. Redford had saved some money for New York while working at El Segundo, and was optimistic. On August 1, he persuaded Helen to write a letter on his behalf to support his application to AADA. “Kindly look with favor upon my stepson, Robert Redford,” Helen wrote. “Because I once graduated from the academy I feel able to say that he can benefit from Academy training.”
On September 1 he mailed the requested check for $160 to AADA, as a deposit. In mid-September he packed a bag and flew to New York. He soon learned he was wrong about the entry process, that he would have to audition before any decision about acceptance was made. “I suddenly had to perfect a couple of pieces,” Redford remembers. He chose a lament by Branwell Brontë and a monologue from Philip Barry’s play The Youngest, which he would present in front of a selection committee. Frances Fuller, protégée of the great acting teacher Charles Jehlinger and the academy’s current director, personally oversaw the interview. Redford was infuriated by the inattention of the main interviewer: “It was, I later learned, just the standard audition,” says Redford. “But I had a chip on my shoulder, and I resented the fact that it was a cattle call. I was facing a table at which these interviewers sat, with Frances Fuller to one side and this man in the middle. His body language, his dismissiveness, offended me, and I started shouting. The Philip Barry piece was supposed to be an angry tirade, so I personally directed it at him.” Redford wondered there and then whether he’d blown his chances, but Fuller curtly told him to return the next day. That was a gesture of bureaucracy. Within the academy, she was already telling the staff they had made a remarkable find.
PART TWO
Bonfaccio
In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities
6
At the Academy
The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was as bad a choice as Redford could have made for theater studies. Given his nonconformist attitude, the cutting-edge options might have been better for him: the Neighborhood Playhouse, the American Theatre Wing, the Actors Studio. The academy was, literally, old-school.
Situated in a fin de siècle three-story building on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, recently relocated from Carnegie Hall, it creaked like a galleon under the weight of a fifty-year-old syllabus honed by Charles “Jelly” Jehlinger, the Edwardian dean of American theater theory. The graduate course was a two-year program, with qualifying exams after the first year. The classes were conducted each weekday morning. The yearly complement was three hundred students, reduced to one hundred in the second year. Classes were structured as Jehlinger decreed in the 1920s, to cover dance, mime, voice, fencing (a staple for so many costume dramas), costume and makeup. Shakespeare studies also featured prominently. Richard Altman, one of Redford’s first instructors, noted that the school was also “compromised by the costs of that huge building. We took students willy-nilly, and that was not the best way. I constantly begged Frances Fuller, ‘We need less students and more discernment!’ But it had to be a cattle market to keep it going.”
Redford started in October 1957. Frances Fuller, diminutive, clearheaded and married to the television impresario Worthington Miner, told Redford later that his audition rant had reminded her of AADA alumnus Spencer Tracy, who also spat through his teeth. “What they got was anger, not acting,” says Redford. “I was repelled by the atmosphere. It was condescending, like we were the rabble and this was the 1600s. The situation was complicated by the fact that I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be Modigliani. I wanted to study theater because someone somewhere said, ‘You can go out in summer stock and paint backdrops.’ So I could be an artist, at last!”
His work commitment, however, was real because he and Lola—who was back at her studies in Utah—had made a firm decision to build toward a life together in New York as soon as possible. But it was a struggle to keep disciplined. After weeks of apartment-hopping, he settled finally in a third-floor room on Columbus Avenue that was a cramped ten feet square. His next decision was to widen his theatrical social circle, by drinking at watering holes like Charlie’s Bar on West Fifty-second Street, which many AADA students frequented. Almost immediately he befriended Ginny Burns, a New Yorker whose mother ran a children’s theater group in Barrington, Rhode Island. Ginny noticed him as “someone apart,” though, she says, it was hard not to. The first week, at a vocal assessment class tutored by June Burgess, the new students were asked to bring along a favored song to show off their vocal capacities. “Everyone did,” says Ginny. “Bob didn’t. When it came to his turn, he stood up with immense intensity, as if he was preparing to jump out the window. Then, in a smoldering voice, he dove into Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ which he claimed appropriate because it was lyrical. He didn’t merely recite it. He hollered it like an opera, jumping from one window ledge to the next, caroming around the room, stunning Burgess. I thought it was the single most amazing piece of theater I’d ever seen. I adored him, just for this soul baring.”
“Firstly, I loved Poe,” says Redford, explaining his choice. “And, secondly, there’s a supreme musicality in all his poems. But then there was the theme of madness, and that felt apt to where I was at. I’d been insane. I was still loopy.”
At AADA, Ginny and Redford grew close. Ginny remembers that they “played tennis in Central Park and hung out at the Park Avenue apartment of Nikki Lubitsch, the movie director’s daughter, who was also an AADA student. We drank a lot of Nikki’s scotch and listened to Sinatra, which Bob liked to sing along to. What we also had in common was a gradually developing interest in acting. Let’s face it: we were not actors, and certainly Bob didn’t have much inclination to be one when we commenced.”
If Redford had any modicum of actorly leaning, it was toward theater. But the great flowering of serious American theater that came with the social changes of the Depression and yielded Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams was past. More representative of fifties theater were musicals like Flower Drum Song and My Fair Lady. Innovative work was still in progress at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, but Redford was not inquisitive at that
point. “I was fairly indifferent to contemporary theater,” he says now. “In film I’d seen Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, which was Brando’s debut and which I liked very much. But I was not scrambling to work out Marlon Brando’s screen technique or understand the differences between movie and stage acting.”
Through his teens, movies had lost their fascination for him. “I’d always had a problem with authenticity,” says Redford. “When I was very small, my dad would project 8 mm films of Tom Mix on a sheet in the living room. I bought into all of it. But when I got older, it bothered me that Gene Autry couldn’t walk right and John Wayne couldn’t ride right. The worst letdown was Disney’s Song of the South, because it was phony, because you could see the wires. I couldn’t abide this. If you’re giving me a fantasy, give me Scaramouche, Captain Blood—the kind of full-on stuff Rafael Sabatini created, not the half-baked version.”
Robert Redford Page 8
