Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  But, during AADA, classic movies he rediscovered from the forties stimulated his interest. In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine the legendary showdown between the Earps and the Clantons of Tombstone is presented in the imagery of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, where Henry Fonda’s Wyatt oversees the consecration of the town’s new chapel against evil opposition. In John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart is the adventurer succumbing to the terrible elemental forces of the desert and his own greed. It was the texture as much as the content of these films that galvanized Redford. “They had a resonant truth like those myths I loved as a child.” In them he saw the appeal of movies as an art form, and, incrementally, felt challenged.

  But in the eyes of AADA not all was running smoothly. Francis Lettin, the senior rehearsal instructor who had recently staged a Broadway reworking of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Montgomery Clift, remarked in his early notes that Redford was “standoffish.” Sandor Nagy, who taught fencing, judged Redford “awkward.” Harry Mastrogeorge, the radio actor turned tutor who would become a leading supporter, wrote that Redford “seems to have some desire [to act], but as a person I don’t think he has found himself yet. He is possibly a little unstable as a human being.”

  Redford continued to work hard, at last focusing on the modern American stage classics, including Bus Stop and A Streetcar Named Desire, and, for the first time in his life, making studious notes with enthusiasm. In a Tennessee Williams workshop conducted by Broadway director and academy senior Ezra Stone, Redford was asked to read the role of Stanley in Streetcar. Stone was stunned by the result. “He’s a master at cold reading,” Stone told Mastrogeorge. “I tried to stump him again and again, but it was undoable. He has no nerves. He’s made for the stage.” Redford liked the Stanley role because “it was tough, in your face, and its starkness I could connect with.” He learned he preferred modern pieces with an edge. Only later did he apply himself to the value of the speech and movement. “At the start I rejected technique,” he says. “I just didn’t want to ponce around.”

  Though Lola and Redford remained in frequent touch by mail and phone, he discovered her absence intensified his feelings for her. He was sociable and finding enjoyment in his studies, but there existed, he says, “a hole” in his being. His feelings were muddled, says Redford, but he was reaching for some sort of spiritual elevation that would calm him and make sense of his fragmented life. Ginny Burns and another close friend, Bob Curtis, who would become a priest, saw the fireside conversation at yet another new apartment on Seventy-third Street turn toward faith. Ginny and Curtis attended church service daily; Redford avoided church. But Redford was clearly processing a new discovery brought to him by Lola: Mormonism. “He was suddenly committed to great changes in his life,” says Ginny, “and they involved spiritual choices.”

  Lola guided Redford to a study of Mormonism. He began reading obsessively, devouring the Book of Mormon and the history of Joseph Smith’s American vision. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” says Redford. “But after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God. There was an abhorrence of religion, and yet I was still searching. Mormonism interested me as a story. The Mormons built a magnificent empire. Looking back, it sits less comfortably. Really, they stole the trick from Catholicism: they just set up a copycat Vatican. And their beliefs had a kind of voodoo logic. That’s the unattractive bit. The positive part, as I got to know Mormons personally, was their decency. I also admired the ordered life they led. I wanted a sane life, so Mormonism found me willing, temporarily.”

  Lola’s background made involvement unavoidable. Both sides of her family, the Dutch Van Wagenens and the Scots-English Barkers, converted in the middle of the nineteenth century and made their way to the hub of Mormonism, in Salt Lake City. The intermarried Van Wagenens and Barkers spread throughout Utah and produced many significant bishops and fund-raisers for the Church. By the 1950s, the Van Wagenens had become one of the most respected families of the Provo ward.

  In 1957, just past his twenty-first birthday, Redford was homesick as Christmas approached. Charlie had shown his son little affection of late, so Redford decided to go west to meet the Van Wagenens. Redford was welcomed in Provo warmly but warily: “There was grace, but there was resistance, and taking my past history into account, who can blame them? Frank, Lola’s father, was very generous and mannerly, so he was quickest to accept me. Phyllis, her mother, on the other hand, had a mother’s defense mechanism.”

  Still, Redford loved the Christmas warmth and unity. According to Lola’s youngest brother, Wayne, “Bob immediately fit in with Dad because of his tremendous curiosity. My father was attracted to the inquiring mind. Bob was always up for new experiences, so they met in the middle.” The Mormon weekly ritual of “family home evening,” where everyone sits down formally to dinner and engages in exchange, was a balm for Redford. “I couldn’t believe this family’s enthusiasm for talk,” says Redford. “It was a novelty to me.” But the tensions remained, and the hints of marriage were stubbornly ignored.

  Redford gloomily returned to New York after Christmas. His unease was made worse by continued mixed reviews. The speech teacher insisted he couldn’t speak well; the rehearsals supervisor noted his “trouble with projection.” Another instructor complained that “Redford is lowering the characters of Shakespeare to suit his own modern mannerisms.” But Edward De Roo, marking Redford’s portrayal of John Proctor in the post-Christmas The Crucible, scribbled on his sheet: “Leading man material.” Harry Mastrogeorge was inclined to agree: “I observed a continuation of serious personal issues in him, the main one of which was his hard-headed refusal to ‘do it the company way.’ But he also showed a growth of originality in his approach that made you say, Wait a minute … !” Mike Thoma and Richard Altman, two influential figures on the Broadway casting circuit, were also starting to pay attention, though Altman worried about Redford’s arrogance. “He lacked physical release,” says Altman. “I wrote in my reports that I believed this would come in time—that acting was more than important for him, it had become critical. But the trouble was, he feigned nonchalance, and that arrogant attitude, I believed, was a problem that could have finished him off as an actor.”

  Redford acknowledges the importance of Altman’s insight. “Bit by bit I was beginning to feel that acting might allow me the self-expression I sought. Was it ‘critical’ at that time? Maybe not. But it is true that I was nonchalant, though that mask was slipping.”

  Redford continued to cling to his fine arts interests and told Ginny he wanted to maintain his painting. She was absorbed in the creation of Americada, AADA’s first newsletter. On her invitation he became its art director, sketching actress Thelma Ritter for the inaugural issue and illustrating the following five. “I was aware he was in a rut emotionally,” says Ginny. “He’d leaped forward in his skill as an actor, I felt, but suddenly he seemed to hit a wall, which I feel had less to do with performance skill than with heartache.” Walking by the lake in Central Park in April, Ginny confronted him: “He was talking about Lola incessantly, so I stopped and took out a handful of change and gave it to him. He looked at me like I had two heads. ‘What’s this?’ he said. And I told him, ‘She’s all that matters now. Face it. Call her.’ ”

  Redford called from a pay phone at the corner of the park. “Ginny nudged, but I was heading that way,” he says. “I just said, ‘Come on, let’s do it.’ ” Lola hesitated. “Her academic life at BYU was taking shape and I was asking her to abandon all that. She was highly intelligent and knew the risk. More than anything, she was going against her parents’ wishes.” Redford wanted them to elope, avoiding a Mormon wedding. Lola offered a compromise: she would secure her parents’ approval and agree to a double ceremony, one informal, one Mormon.

  Summer was coming, and Redford contacted Charlie, requesting more work at the El Segundo refinery to fund his imminent marriage. Charlie’s response was compliance—and anger. Martha’s old frie
nd Marcella Scott encountered Charlie driving down Sepulveda in a white-faced rage. “We pulled over and talked. All he wanted to do was vent steam about Bobby and the mess he was making of his life: ‘Now he wants to get married, damn him!’ was all he was saying, ranting.”

  On August 9, a few days before his twenty-second birthday, Redford married nineteen-year-old Lola in a five-minute service at the Heather on the Hill, a walk-in chapel on the Strip in Vegas. They had eloped. Bill Coomber was his best man. They returned to Monterey for the honeymoon. Five weeks later the formal Mormon ceremony took place at Lola’s grandmother’s home. Charlie and Helen attended—the sole representatives of the Redford family—along with fifty Van Wagenens. “I stopped short of the Mormon baptism that was expected of me,” says Redford. In time, all but one of the children of the marriage would be baptized into the faith, though none would retain it.

  Thanks to the work Charlie grudgingly got him at El Segundo, Redford and Lola had amassed $300 in savings over the summer. Much of it went on the marriage services. Within forty-eight hours of the Provo ceremony, they exchanged their gold rings for $150 and paid their fare back to New York.

  Lola was every bit as edgy as Redford in New York. She entered the fall of 1958 with trepidation, she said, “facing what [Bob and I] knew would be a winter of hardship.” Redford says, “I knew nothing at all, and I carried a terrible sense of guilt. I was asking someone to believe in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Yes, I wanted to change the world. But so did every Joe in the street. The bottom line was, I didn’t have a dime to my name. And that’s all that matters when you are a couple starting out.”

  For his second year of theater studies, thanks to good exam results, Redford had the assistance of an AADA scholarship. Financially, though, things remained tight. In the fall Lola found work as a bank teller for $55 a week, and Redford enrolled at the Pratt Institute, taking night courses in set design, “because I still thought I’d probably end up painting scenery.” Redford says Pratt “just wasn’t right for me. It had a famous architectural department, but it seemed too concentrated on technical drawing, which always left me cold. It wasn’t the school’s fault. It was mine.” He also found part-time work as a clerk at a store on Seventh Avenue and served nights as a janitor at the ANTA Theatre for a combined personal income of $93 a week. “It was exhausting to the point of stupor,” says Redford. “But there was an advantage beyond funding a marriage. Spending more time at the Anta meant I could watch more plays and understand more about the profession of acting.”

  Among the new friends at the Mormon Manhattan ward functions Lola and Redford attended was Provo-born Stan Collins, who was two years older than Redford and studying business at Columbia. Collins found Redford intent on personal growth. “Redford’s charm,” says Collins, “was not the common variety, but that gift from God you encounter once every fifty years. Both of us had just got married, and money was the main source of our insecurity. But with Bob there was also huge, electric determination about direction. He put so much verbal emphasis on art. He wasn’t painting at all—he had no time for it—but it was all he seemed impassioned about, and you knew somehow, someway, he’d make it in the world of creative endeavor.”

  By Christmas, Lola was pregnant. The discovery triggered some understandable economic anxiety—and also a breakthrough. Watching Redford rehearse a piece on the ANTA stage one afternoon in December, the instructor Richard Altman saw “a suddenness, like an exhalation of breath. Bob had been struggling for eighteen months. But it stopped abruptly. It was a revelation. He wasn’t fighting himself anymore. Exceptional stress can inspire exceptional art.”

  The transformation, says Redford, occurred in a workshop for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Altman had assigned Redford the role of the son, and a much older man named Harry was to play the father. Altman sent both to the greenroom to rehearse the last scene of the second act, when the son confronts the father about manufacturing shoddy aircraft parts that caused the death of his brother. “Harry had all the lines and was so full of nervous tics and orders about how to proceed,” says Redford. “I had just a few words, where I scream at the father, ‘Don’t you live in the world? Where do you live all day!’—and then I pound him back into his chair. At that point, Harry instructed me to be careful of his suit, because he had to go back to his day job after the workshop.” When they started performing, Redford focused on what Harry had warned him about: Be careful, don’t damage my suit. “When the time came for me to pound him into his chair,” says Redford, “I leaped at him, grabbed him by the neck and flung him across the stage. He crumpled up under a table. I felt instant remorse and shame. And Altman said, ‘All right, thank you. Who do we have next?’ ” Backstage, Harry confronted Redford in tears, accusing him of inexcusable behavior. “I told him, ‘You’re right, I apologize, it was inexcusable,’ and I thought at that moment that acting was finished for me. I was ready to walk out of the theater and never look back. But Altman called me aside and said, ‘Don’t apologize. I think I know where you are going with this, and we’ll talk more tomorrow. Just keep going with it.’ ”

  Two school plays were to be performed after Christmas, Chekhov’s The Seagull and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. In The Seagull Redford was cast as Konstantin Treplev, and he was not keen on director Francis Lettin’s interpretation of the role. The drama starts with a play within a play, when Treplev stages a dense symbolist show to impress his mother, the famous actress Arkadina. She laughs at him, and he storms off. “Lettin saw my character as a wounded, soft, desiccated boy,” Redford remembers. “I disagreed. This was a radical work, designed to knock down the barriers of melodrama. I saw in Treplev insanity, passion and anger. Most of all, I saw incestuous desire. This is a young man who secretly wants to take his mother to bed, to win her affection. All this anger and physicality was comfortable to me, and I started playing Treplev that way, which Lettin didn’t like at all. I was physical, I stomped around the stage, I was a caged animal, stifled by my incestuous thoughts.”

  Redford rehearsed in Central Park, walking down Broadway, riding in cars—“never at home. I needed emotional isolation to brew the part, and I did it in a state of purposeful agitated movement, working up steam.” When he was primed, Redford rehearsed with another student, Ellen Siccama, concentrating on sexual chemistry, but both Frances Fuller and Lettin opposed him. “Lettin kept calling me to a halt. ‘Why are you moving around there? What is that supposed to achieve?’ And then, at the last minute, he did an amazing thing. He did a full turnaround. ‘I’m confusing you, aren’t I?’ he said. And I, of course, said yes. And Lettin said, ‘Look, I had a precooked idea, and now I’m standing in the way of something fresh. I’m wrong. Do it your way.’ That took great humility and it taught me a lot. He stood back as a director and he freed me up.”

  Opening night saw Redford performing before the first large audience of his career, at Finch College. It also marked the first time Lola saw her husband perform onstage. The fact that it was a success, that the audience approved and the fellow cast members congratulated him for his originality of interpretation, was disorienting. More confusing was what Redford calls “the bizarre sexual attention” focused on him in the after-show party. He was aware of the advantage of his looks and his charm with women, but was surprised by the intensity of the new attention. “I didn’t discuss it with Lola. I think I only see it now, with the perspective of time. I’d taken a risk and broken down some invisible barrier. Women were looking at me in a very interesting new way. I thought it odd but invigorating at the same time, but after a drink or two I just wanted to be out of there.” Before he left, Francis Lettin cornered him. “He said, ‘Every now and then you see an actor who you think could really play Hamlet. I’ve been in this business thirty years and I’ve seen actors come and go. But you are the first I’ve seen who could really do it. It’s entirely up to you now.’ ”

  Antigone followed a month later. Redford played Creon in a classicist style light-y
ears from the Chekhov. Once again, the effect of independent thinking, risk and experiment produced the tumultuous audience response. Redford exulted in the intoxicant of applause. “After The Seagull, every opening night, every stage play, was something new. Till that point, I’d been dealing with AADA formula. With The Seagull, everything altered.”

  7

  Graduation

  Several of the AADA tutors continued to question a behavioral smugness, but Redford puts it down to stubborn personal confusion. The writer David Rayfiel, who would come to know Redford through his collaborations with mutual friend Sydney Pollack, explained it well. “When we appreciate Cézanne’s apples, we see first of all the simplicity. But that’s not what knocks you over. It is, as Willa Cather said, the anxiety of the apples—and that comes from an existential unease, from something suppressed. I always felt that about Bob. He was outwardly supremely confident, but underneath there was always the doubt.”

  On the walls inside AADA were photos of the esteemed alumni who had gone to the top—among them Grace Kelly and Kirk Douglas—but Redford insists he had no “instinct” for them. “I recognized how iconography worked, how John Wayne became representative of the frontier heartland, but I hated the caricature that came with repetitiveness. The actors who appealed to me were the characters who were usually lost down the playbill. People like Franklin Pangborn, Billy De Wolfe, Van Heflin. No one had much to say about their technique, but I learned more from them than I did from Kirk Douglas.”

  With graduation looming, Redford was itchy to break out. The Actors Studio suddenly seemed like a good idea, “because that’s where they broke the rules.” It was at the radical Group Theatre of the thirties that Konstantin Stanislavski’s “Method” was first taught in America. Stella Adler adapted it, and Lee Strasberg refined the technique for the Actors Studio. It attracted Paul Newman, James Dean, Eli Wallach and Geraldine Page and gained notoriety as the new and insightful way to act, though its techniques only dented the dominant melodramas of the fifties. “Whether we were AADA proponents or radicals,” says Harry Mastrogeorge, “we all thought people like Strasberg were onto something psychologically valuable in terms of freeing up the actor.” Redford and classmate Ellen Siccama decided to study with Strasberg after they graduated from AADA. They rehearsed a few scenes from William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life and performed it at an open audition at the Studio’s home in the Seventh Associate Presbyterian Church, in a stark, clinical room with blazing spotlights. Redford hated the atmosphere. “I presume the idea was to strip you naked and reveal your primitive self,” he says. “For me, it felt just as contrived as AADA.”