“I thought about the last five years. After Butch Cassidy, it was just one movie after another. Want to see the dailies? Sure. Want to have a script session? Sure. Want to view the location? Sure. Want to stand on the wing of a biplane? Sure. Want to go north, south, east, west? Sure, sure, sure. I’d hardly seen my family. The kids were growing up. Lola was working two weeks every month in Washington, and had moved there to try to stabilize family life while we were shooting in town. But Wildwood’s offices were then on the Warners lot in Burbank, and I was there more than I was with her. Right after All the President’s Men I stopped dead. I decided to wind it all down. I felt: Maybe I won’t be an actor anymore. I thought: I’ve forgotten how to paint. Maybe I will write—poetry, short stories, maybe a screenplay. But I was exhausted, and I longed for the tranquillity of the West.”
Tranquillity was the one thing Utah could not then provide.
16
Out of Acting
While working on All the President’s Men, Redford visited Gerald Ford in the Oval Office. “We spoke about skiing, a lot of platitudes,” says Redford. “Then he went out and made a speech about Cambodia. What did I learn? That the air ain’t so rarefied up there. You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to be president.”
The entire experience of All the President’s Men heightened Redford’s confidence in his political possibilities. It was while researching the movie that he met Joan Claybrook, the public interest lobbyist then running Ralph Nader’s organization, Congress Watch. Redford had always been mindful of the accomplishments of Nader’s activism. He didn’t need to read CAN’s newsletters to know that it was through Nader’s lobbying that car safety had improved, car emissions were controlled and literally millions of lives had been transformed. Grassroots politics, Nader reminded him, is where it all begins. But agitating and lobbying were different animals, he knew. Was he prepared for the committed discipline of lobbying?
It was over dinner with Claybrook that the gauntlet was thrown down. “Bob was whining about Ford’s nomination of Stanley Hathaway, the former governor of Wyoming, as secretary of the interior,” says Claybrook. “He stated what we all knew, that Hathaway was a promoter of overdevelopment of wilderness for mining. And I said, ‘You know, Bob, I’m so tired of guys like you complaining about situations like this. You have fame, ergo you have power. You are opposed to this guy? Try and stop him, then.’ He said, ‘What do I need to do?’ And so his formal political education began.”
Claybrook found Redford keen to tackle Capitol Hill. “I told him he had to personally meet fifteen or so senators who were going to vote to see Hathaway in, and state the case. I made the appointments with all but two or three of the guys we knew would never vote with us, and put together the background files for him to hand out. I didn’t think, with his movie commitment, that he’d be able to follow through, but he did. So we developed a little routine. We would meet at the corner of the Senate building and I’d hand him his notes and in he’d go, alone, with his rap down pat. I told him, ‘You have to look in the guy’s baby blues and ask him, ‘Are you going to vote with us?’—and count every one of those votes on a handshake. If the senator says he’ll think about it, it’s not good enough. You tell him you will call tomorrow.”
CAN contacts opened some doors; his celebrity some others. Senators Tip O’Neill, Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy—a regular skier with his family at Sundance—were all helpful. Over the course of forty meetings, Claybrook and Redford finally had their majority. Redford was ecstatic, but Claybrook cautioned him about the hurdle to come. “Next, the committee will meet for their formal vote. And when they do that, you have to be there, sitting in the front row to look every one of them in the eye when the time comes.”
On the day, Redford and Hoffman were filming until dawn. Claybrook was certain Redford would never make the committee meeting. “But, what do you know, he made it,” she remembers. Claybrook saw the power Redford represented. “Since a Hollywood star was actively involved, there was extra press attention. The press had been digging and they’d come up with dirt. Stories were emerging about Hathaway’s corrupt business practices. I grabbed what we had and told Bob to play the delay card by asking Senator Henry Jackson, who was chairing, to postpone the vote so that a proper investigation could be undertaken.”
Jackson ordered the investigation but allowed the vote, and Redford, says Claybrook, “fell apart” when Hathaway won by four votes. “I had those bastards,” Redford told Claybrook. “They promised me and they lied to my face.” Claybrook told him not to be discouraged: “It’s a game, and that’s the ethic, that’s how two-faced it is. Just remember, You don’t always lose.” Redford used those words, verbatim, five years later in a scene about institutional corruption in the movie Brubaker.
Even today Redford winces at his naïveté. “I did not want to contemplate the extent of the vested interests on the Hill. Neither could I believe the level of bait switching and duplicity. Joan taught me about ‘the yellow walk,’ where the guy disappears to the bathroom just as the vote is called. On one hand, this was childish, kindergarten stuff. On the other, it was devastating because I realized how much the checks and balances are needed, how little we can trust.” As it turned out, he and Claybrook were rewarded for their efforts when, four months after Ford appointed Hathaway, the investigative committee documented the malpractices in Wyoming. Soon afterward Hathaway suffered a breakdown and was forced to resign. “I was completely indebted to Joan for showing me how, in the cliché, power corrupts,” says Redford.
The lessons in Washington fired him up for the power plant fight in Utah. Utah had been an easy target for developers servicing the ever-growing California. Southern California Edison—Cal Edison—had an-nounced that its biggest single enterprise, the coal-burning Kaiparowits plant, would be built in eastern Kane County, an area of spectacular natural beauty ringed by the Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and Zion national parks. The Southern Utah News, the Deseret News, The Salt Lake Tribune and the regional television affiliates supported the plant, which, it was advertised, would render full employment at top dollar to traditionally underadvantaged towns like Kanab. Cal Edison had further joined with four other major energy providers in California, Utah and Arizona to plan for a total of eleven power plants throughout the West.
Applying what he’d learned from Claybrook and others, and with the support of NRDC and EDF, Redford went into battle, first forming a pressure group, Southwestern Energy Alliance, with a view to holding public hearings. When that failed, he accompanied Cal Edison’s public relations man, Howard Allen, on a helicopter tour of the national parks in order to take the opportunity to press home the inevitable environmental losses. Simultaneously he locked horns with every journalist and Cal Edison surveyor who would face him. Two prime supporters joined him in the fray: former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall and Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson, the only local politician to get involved.
“It was my first major conservation issue,” says Redford, “and what I discovered very quickly was the mass of ignorance out there. It’s not just the greed of industrialists. It’s a lack of fundamental awareness, a mind-set created over 150 years that says Manifest Destiny allows us to do what we will with the land. My passion came from the pages of Wallace Stegner, who prided himself on his attachment to the land. We flew over the Escalante Red Rocks, this paradise that has been untouched for millennia, and I thought about what Stegner has written: that here is a place where the silence allows you to hear the swish of falling stars. I told Howard, ‘The last thing southern Utah needs is a behemoth to break the silence and pollute the water and the air.’ ”
But Allen was the least of Redford’s obstacles. The people of Utah dismissed Redford’s campaigning out of hand. “The problem was historical,” says Brent Beck. “Take the example of Provo, which was the state’s second-largest population center. It was Mormon and it was Republican. Cultural and business life revolved around the university and U.S. St
eel: education and income, period. What Cal Edison represented for southern Utah was what U.S. Steel gave Provo—it was financial stability for a neglected area. The way those southerners saw it, they had a chance to make some money. Bob wanted to challenge that.”
Redford knew he was making enemies among Utahans statewide. He took comfort from his role model, Wayne Owens, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy and had become the first liberal Mormon to win a seat in a state beloved of conservatives. “Wayne changed common perceptions the grassroots way, by walking around, by getting off the mediaspeak bandwagon and bringing it down to the level of the common man,” says Redford. “Sure, a lot of right-leaning folk were unhappy. But enough people liked that Wayne was a guy from the sheepherding community who wanted new, egalitarian rules. They were tired of the status quo, with the bankers and rich businessmen owning the state.” Ted Wilson, a former assistant to Owens, was elected, too, against the odds. For Redford these victories represented a beacon of opportunity. For decades, as he saw it, the country seesawed on a government of compromises—a Republican chief executive with a Democratic House and maybe Senate (or vice versa), held in balance by the political action committees (PACs) and specialist lobby groups shoring up House and Senate incumbents expecting payback. With people like Owens going to Washington, there was optimism that change could be made without constitutional challenges. The battle to block Kaiparowits, for Redford, was a brick in the wall.
Before the battle was fully engaged, and just seven days after completing principal photography on All the President’s Men, Redford joined a group of adventurers to collaborate with National Geographic magazine on a three-week horseback expedition to measure the cost of changes in the West. Redford viewed this as a golden opportunity. During Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid he had befriended Lula Betenson, Butch’s surviving sister. In conversation with her and with local historian Kerry Boren, he had been apprised of the fact that the trail ridden by the famous outlaws was gradually being eroded by an assortment of developments. While working with Pakula in Washington, he’d stopped by the National Geographic offices and proposed they produce a photo essay that might record how the West once was. Now, with Kaiparowits looming, the need seemed urgent. At first, the magazine was unsure, then Redford suggested he himself conduct a ride along the trail, with a group of historians and observers he would assemble. Ted Wilson saw this as a stroke of genius. “Anyone who spent time with Bob knew he was a poet. He’ll talk about Willa Cather before he’ll talk about Richard Nixon. The “outlaw trail” ride [as the National Geographic adventure was called] was his political style. It was glamorous, with lots of references to Butch Cassidy’s gang and all the rest, but it was really a powerful tool for gathering votes.”
Adrenaline, says Redford, drove him; but there was also the need to disengage from the airless offices of Cal Edison and the congressional staffers and reconnect with the land. Ostensibly, the Geographic project was a marathon survey ride, Pony Express fashion, around the bolt-holes em-ployed in the 1880s and 1890s by the Wild Bunch, starting at Kaycee, Wyoming, and ending at Lake Powell. His old buddy Tom Skerritt saw it also as an emotional stabilizer. “That was the restatement of Bob the Outlaw, the loner who’s most comfortable saddling a horse and disappearing on the mesa. It was a reminder that he was really nonpartisan, that his politics began with the ‘We, the people’ part of the Constitution.”
The photographer Jonathan Blair, whose Geographic assignments ranged from Pacific Islands wildlife refuges to Turkish shipwrecks, photographed the trail over six months, with emphasis on the primordial nature of the landscape. The ride itself, which comprised a team of five men and three women, was managed by Boren, using fresh horses at well-spaced staging posts across the Continental Divide as well as occasional four-wheel drives to lug equipment. Among the riders, selected by Redford, were Oregon-born Dan Arensmeier, a former East Coast Xerox manager who had abandoned big-city life for the ways of the West, and his wife, Sherry; Terry Minger, a conservationist and town manager of Vail, Colorado; naturalist Ed Abbey; and Redford’s Sundance-based friend Mary Whitesides, an artist. Redford, Boren, the Arensmeiers, and Blair and his wife and assistant, Arlinka, rode the first part of the trail from Barnum, a site east of the Wild Bunch’s cliff-side Hole in the Wall hangout, through the Andrew Wyeth–like flats of Wyoming and across the Wind River Mountains to the mining town of Atlantic City, where they joined up with Minger. Ten days later, crossing the most difficult mountain terrain into Utah, they met up with Abbey and his wife and Whitesides.
National Geographic would publish a thirty-six-page feature on the ride in November 1976, and later a lavishly illustrated book. In both, Redford retold the Butch Cassidy tale, dressing it with the personal motivation for his current activism. Every phrase from the native cowboy’s lips is relished—“Head out to that juniper, turn left, go west to the Rocky Mountains and may the Good Lord bless your skies”—and every opportunity is taken to acknowledge the dignity of the Indians, the lost stewards, and the cavalier governing of the Bureau of Land Management. Since the early seventies Redford had abandoned his diary keeping and replaced it with stapled-together notebook jottings titled “Redford Musings,” which became the foundation for essay and book. In one notebook he scribbled: “Maybe it’s because of our future rush, our need to expand and grow at any cost, but we have lost something, something vital, something of passion and romance.”
“Everything I wrote I truly felt,” he says now. “I was saying, ‘Look at how fast it’s slipping away.’ What we did to the Native American was reprehensible. But it’s not over. We’ve poisoned reservation lands in Arizona. Soon, if the energy companies have their way, we’ll do the same in Utah. All so that Californians can enjoy hot tubs and neon lights. I came off that ride more determined than ever to kill Kaiparowits.” Shortly after, he would write to Arensmeier about the emotional impact of the ride: “It was as if some supernatural force plucked us from our daily harness and gave us a glimpse of greener valleys.”
Throughout the ride he was reminded of how tired he truly was. He had accidentally packed Jamie’s sleeping bag, which was too small to cover him in the freezing nights: “Every morning I woke up feeling a track meet had taken place on top of me. It wasn’t so much the physical hardship of the trip that wore me down. It was the background: the work overload.”
But in the spring, it all seemed worthwhile. Shortly after the airing of a forceful segment of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes hosted by Dan Rather, which Redford had personally orchestrated, Cal Edison announced it was abandoning Kaiparowits in the face of environmental impact reports. Ted Wilson believed Redford deserved enormous credit for the victory: “Of course, there were many people involved, many voices. But it was because of him that Rather came south and the whole business became nightly news. No matter how you cut it, no one else in the locality—neither Wayne Owens nor I nor anyone—could have garnered that interest. Bob simply deserves the credit for mobilizing ordinary people and blocking Cal Ed from abusing this state.”
The rewards weren’t all sweet. On April 22, the Southern Utah News published an article headlined “Rally Ends in Hanging, Burning of Environmentalists,” with accompanying pictures of effigies of Redford, Mayor Wilson and a symbolic EPA hanging from a gallows alongside a coffin painted with the slogan KAIPAROWITS: STUDIED TO DEATH. In the view of John Nelson, chief engineer of the town of Kanab, “misinformation and inflation” that consumed over a million and a half man-hours and cost $20 million left Kaiparowits “a piece of wasteland that has no other use.” The News pulled no punches, printing a half-page condemnation of “Skunk Man Redford” from the new-to-the-scene American League for Industry and Vital Energy, which itemized Redford’s personal environmental misdeeds arising from his overdevelopment of his tourist resort.
“Of course there was economic fallout,” says Dick Ayres, working with the NRDC. “But you have to measure it contextually. What do you do? Allow one generation to thrive at the cost of
a loss to all future generations? The truth was, Cal Edison planned an ‘oil by wire’ monster that would have ruined the Grand Staircase–Escalante [national monument area] forever. That was an unacceptable loss, and Bob reversed it.” Still, Redford felt empathy for those disappointed by the lost immediate financial advantages of Cal Edison investment: “There’s no question that low-income folk suffered. But a quick fix that damaged our heritage was not the answer. As I saw it—and Ted, Stewart and many others—this was a one-issue case. We were certainly not dumping on Utahans. There were battles to be fought in Utah and elsewhere for fair educational opportunities, for jobs, for Indian rights, for species protection. We understood this. But this was about conservation. And one important thing emerged from all the furor about Kaiparowits: plain and simple, people understood very little about environmental threat.”
It was the greatest irony that the Nixon administration could claim environmental achievements—it saw in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (pollution control) and the passage of the Environmental Quality Policy Act (monitoring impact statements), the National Air Quality Standards Act (monitoring auto emissions), the Resource Recovery Act (controlling recycling) and the Water Pollution Act. But Nixon certainly never deserved all the credit. Some of those achievements were the result of work by eco-activists in Congress and a handful of lobbyists like Nader and the scientist Barry Commoner. The Water Pollution Act, for example, survived Nixon’s veto, and the first Clean Air Act in 1970, championed by Senator Edmund Muskie, only won Nixon’s support as a political maneuver to counteract Muskie’s rising popularity as a Democratic presidential candidate. Probing this deeper understanding of environmental politics horrified Redford. In 1970 Americans constituted less than 6 percent of the world’s population but used 40 percent of the earth’s resources while producing 50 percent of global pollution emissions. Cheap energy, almost half of which was imported oil, powered the rapid economic growth, but when OPEC embargoed oil in 1973 and sent prices soaring, the advocates of unrestricted domestic development for self-sufficiency—of massive strip mining, offshore oil drilling and relaxation of environmental regulations—took center stage. After Earth Day in 1969, the work of Barry Commoner and the NRDC dented public apathy by creating an awareness of imminent irreversible ecological damage and inspiring pockets of activism akin to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the sixties. But the sustainable development lobby was inconsistent at best and in danger of being lost under the economic exigencies of successive administrations dealing with recession and inflation.
Robert Redford Page 32
