Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  “Education was the answer,” says Dick Ayres. “But people have an extraordinary difficulty with the word ‘education.’ Too often it implies self-discipline or personal reform, and there’s a natural resistance to such things.” Redford believes, “The message was pure. We are in stewardship of the earth. We have a moral obligation. We accomplished something morally important at Kaiparowits and I had hoped it would advance a trend. I believed the country was ready for change. We finally had a liberal Democratic Congress that was becoming truly energized. Jimmy Carter was headed for office. The confluence of factors was telling us that for the first time in fifteen years we were ready for social reform.”

  In the run-up to the election Redford dedicated himself to study. He had aligned with the Utah Native American Consortium and dedicated a slice of his time to two PBS documentaries, The New Indians and The Wolf Equation, which were further ecological wake-up calls. All this work concentrated him on the battleground of wilderness preservation. In Ford’s last days in office, Congress had ordered the Bureau of Land Management to survey all roadless areas to establish new wilderness designations in the Federal Lands Policy Management Act, an extension of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Redford saw this as a golden opportunity to widen debate about the environment. Addressing the use of land was critical because of the recent movement of the population. Over the last fifteen years, Americans had started migrating en masse to the Sun Belt of the South and southwestern states, where populations had doubled since 1960. Arizona, his next-door neighbor, had shown a population growth of 25 percent in five years. “Clearly resources were already strained, and the situation would worsen,” he felt. “I thought this was a marvelous thumbnail to bring to the attention of the next administration to show how quickly we were losing ground to civilization changes and consequent mismanagement of what we had.” Along with John Adams and NRDC, which was immersed in clean air initiatives, Redford prepared documentation to land on the next president’s desk.

  During the primaries, Carter summoned a number of study groups to his headquarters in Plains, Georgia. Redford visited, representing the Hollywood PAC contingent, with his land use documentation. “I was under no misapprehension of what he was looking for,” says Redford. “It was power alliances. I liked his plain talking. He was interested in the same thing FDR was interested in: the voice of the common man.” Redford, though, had learned his lessons from Joan Claybrook. In the final analysis, Carter was as unfocused on the issues that seemed critical—energy and the environment—as the Republicans before him. But Redford was not dissuaded. “I thought, He’s looking for the Hollywood endorsement from me. So I’ll look for something from him. I’ll play by the rules of the game.”

  Two years before, the governor of Idaho, Cecil Andrus, a renowned environmentalist, had written a fan letter to Redford, inviting him to bring film business to the state. In his research Redford had discovered that Andrus had made conservation his main concern in Idaho, a state as fundamentally conservative as Utah. Like Redford, Andrus had tackled a major power plant—Pioneer, near Boise—and blocked strip mining in the White Cloud Mountains. A friendship developed and Andrus became, says Redford, part of his “education team.” Now Redford decided to employ Andrus as a bargaining tool. Without guilt, he pressured Carter into considering Andrus for the job of secretary of the interior. “I don’t think Carter had anyone in sight, but I knew Cecil’s values, I knew we were both motivated by Earth Day concerns and I knew he would be a big asset for the country if Carter continued to be under pressure with rising oil prices and the moves to increase our own oil production.”

  When Carter was elected, Andrus got the Interior job. Joan Claybrook, too, took a post in the new administration. Redford thought the appointments were critical, since Carter “had no energy or environment policy to begin with.” The overarching national energy crisis focused everyone. Nixon and Ford administration policy had been to counter oil price hikes by extending leases for drilling along the southeastern coast. Carter wanted retrenchment, initially with the emphasis on limiting leases. Andrus proved hugely influential, and his impact on the new policy was evident by April 1977 when, in a television speech, Carter cited the resolution of the energy crisis as having the importance of “the moral equivalent of war.” But the continued high oil prices, exacerbated by the Iran crisis, weakened Andrus’s hand and compromised his determination to apply conservation measures based on alternative energy sources. Elsewhere, he lost the fight to roll the Interior Department, the Forest Service and other resource agencies into one department of natural resources. Redford was disappointed. According to the timber industry, the scheme failed because the argument for unity was unclear; according to Andrus, it failed—despite Carter’s open-mindedness—because of White House hubris. “Here in the West is example after example in which the administration wouldn’t listen to experienced voices, or mismanaged a problem, and it turned people off,” said Andrus, “The inside-the-Beltway crowd blew the one real chance they had to get some much needed rangeland reform.”

  John Adams and the NRDC continued to deploy legal arguments to force strong new provisions in a revised Clean Water Act, and in this, at least, there was success. Adams was very appreciative of Carter’s and Andrus’s support in this effort—but mostly of Redford’s. “He was not properly credited with that achievement,” says Adams. “Those revisions got voted through largely because of Bob’s awareness campaign. He was here, there and everywhere at that time, writing letters to congressmen, pillorying people in business, taking meetings with Andrus, popping up on radio spots all over the nation, week after week.” Adams calculates that Redford alone was responsible for increasing NRDC membership by a hundred thousand. “He became the face of clean air, but he was much more than that. Bob was an ideas generator, and though Andrus—and ultimately Carter—were frustrated in office by the events in the Middle East overtaking them, they always had Bob in their sight as a reformer. They always had room for him.”

  In an effort to bolster CAN, Redford launched another awareness program with the Environmental Defense Fund, this time to publicize cancer-causing agents in pervasive, nationwide pollution. He set up a spin-off, Citizens Action Now, a variation of Consumer Action Now, structured like the Business Roundtable, which raised $50 million a year to lobby for solar, geothermal and other alternative energy sources. NRDC did the heavy lifting, then Redford persuaded Ted Ashley at Warners to become involved. “This was two or three years before the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island,” says Redford, “so we had no bad publicity from the energy sector working in our favor. But what it boiled down to was profile. We knew the Business Roundtable was powerful, but we also knew we could match their profile in the media. They were committed to more drilling, more strip mining, more nuclear excess. We were pledged to reduce all of it.”

  Warners arranged sixteen special premieres across the country to raise money for this “Hollywood CAN,” and Redford flew to Nashville to drum up support from performers like Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings and Harry Chapin. An ambitious series of benefit concerts was planned, but ran out of steam after the premiere event with Daniels. In the end, says Redford, Hollywood CAN went the way of Carter’s energy policy. “We were too uncoordinated, just like Carter’s camp. We naïvely believed activists of the same stripe fight together. They don’t. Ralph Nader is a great guy, but his first interest is Ralph Nader. We partnered with his Congress Watch on the basis of splitting the monies fifty-fifty. It’s sad to admit that bureaucracy—including our own admin-istrative slowness—bogged it all down.” A decade later, such global ini-tiatives as Bob Geldof’s Live Aid would prove the curative value of high-profile music fund-raisers. Hollywood CAN, alas, raised little and lasted less than a year.

  What Redford had achieved in a year of hunkering down with Andrus was a personal understanding of diplomacy. “There was no use in throwing stones. I began to understand that the sustainable development issue was a coming together o
f big business and special interest groups and legislators in goodwill, to shared ends. Today, in the twenty-first century, we see the undisputed problems with global warming. Thirty years ago, it was just a dim warning light flickering away. But we had to find a way to tackle it, and I believed this couldn’t be resolved with a big stick. We needed camaraderie.”

  With Andrus, Redford sketched out a potential National Academy of Resources. In 1978 he laid it out for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The academy would be

  a specialized institution for the higher studies of our natural resources and wouldn’t specialize only in environmental preservation. The academy would be all-inclusive in respect of the various disciplines that guide our use of resources, including biology, zoology, oceanography, geomorphology and environmental law. It would be a defense academy of our resources in much the same way that West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy exist for our armed defenses. The resource academy would be designed to educate people about the nature of our resources and to establish guidelines for which resources should be preserved intact, and which should be developed in the safest, cleanest, most efficient way. The academy would be funded by the Department of the Interior and therefore would be able to utilize its facilities around the country, such as the national parks.

  The academy went down like Hollywood CAN. “It failed,” says Redford, “partly because it had to get past Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger, who was well intentioned but just about the worst person to take Carter’s policies to the public. It really annoyed me, but I didn’t quit.”

  If the government wouldn’t produce the working model, he resolved to do it himself.

  It was one thing to preach conservation and energy restraint, another to practice it.

  After Redford decided on a sabbatical from film, two priorities took precedence beyond politics: family and reordering Sundance as a model of self-sufficient eco-friendliness. The previous fall he had started planning a radical new home just up the meadow from the A-frame that would encompass cutting-edge design techniques and energy-saving devices. To develop it, he sought out the innovative architect Abe Christensen, who was currently exploring uses of solar and alternative sources in design. Construction of the house, affectionately tagged the Big House, would serve as a model for a scheme Christensen and Redford agreed on to build moderately priced solar-heated homes throughout Utah. In tandem with the new house, Redford decided to expand Sundance business into farming and horse breeding, nonpolluting initiatives long native to the area that would help fund the ailing resort.

  As building commenced, Redford sent out the word about suitable new farmland. Brent Beck found a fifty-six-acre farm called Spanish Fork at the mouth of the canyon and, on a cross-country flight, Redford told Gary Hendler he wanted to buy it. Hendler said it made no commercial sense. “That was a blessing,” says Redford, “because I could then say to Gary, ‘Okay, let’s make changes: from now on you guide my tax affairs. I do not want guidance in my arts work or my businesses.’ ” The next day, Hendler called from Los Angeles to recommend a new adviser, his mild-mannered office manager, Reg Gipson. Gipson, a lawyer in his early thirties, was the Idaho-born son of a missionary who had reared his family in rural India. He recalls Hendler summoning him in some confusion: “Gary assumed that I’d have some agricultural experience, since I grew up on a mission settlement. I didn’t. But I did know you don’t buy a ranch from the comforts of an urban office. I flew to Utah to check out the water rights, sorted it and bought the ranch. So began Bob’s next phase of experiment with Sundance.”

  Spanish Fork, rechristened Diamond Fork Ranch, became the base for breeding Arabian and quarter horses, an operation that ran for ten years until another farm, Charleston, replaced it and Redford started growing crops. Acres of corn, sugar beets, tomatoes and alfalfa were sown just a mile or two from Christensen’s new homestead. Jerry Hill, officially the mountain manager, served as a general overseer and worried that Sundance had overstepped. “We were still the same small group of caretakers, but the lands we were supervising grew. The task list became bigger and bigger. I’ve been in this area since I was a kid, and it was weird to see the canyon become like a little town. It just kept growing and growing. I thought, It’ll be real hard to keep up with all this. I also thought, A lot of the folk around here will resent Redford’s determination to keep expanding.”

  Regardless of Redford’s motivation, the very sight of new faces on the canyon roads, of builders and surveyors and flatbed trucks piled with newly quarried stone, incited new waves of fury. The American League for Industry and Vital Energy was quick to add to its list of offenses. Its well-circulated handout detailed every transgression: “Whereas, Mr. Redford has laid waste a great swath of timber lands in Provo Canyon for his own personal aggrandizement. Whereas, Mr. Redford delights in the unnecessary utilization of electric power for night skiing at his resort. Whereas, Mr. Redford has reputedly wasted a great deal of propane gas in the heating of his present home. Whereas, Mr. Redford is despoiling a beautiful meadow to build a new $600,000 home with an unsightly cyclone fence surrounding it. Whereas, Mr. Redford has supposedly secured a quarter-million-dollar grant from a federal agency to develop solar power for his new home.…”

  Anguished, Redford chose not to respond. “We were sitting ducks,” he says, “because Lola and I had affiliations outside the state that were not of the Utah tradition. The fact that CAN had established a lobbying office in Washington with a specific mandate for solar energy development didn’t sit well with the Utah energy lobbyists. The fact that we were partnering with the Smithsonian to install educational solar displays in the Science and Technology Hall was considered some kind of scam. All these factors were twisted into presenting us as counterculture radicals who were crippling the state’s economy. We were the villains in their midst.”

  It didn’t help that all the Redfords had severed their Mormon links. Brent Beck, Jerry Hill, Stan Collins and most of the other resort supervisors remained active Mormons; much of the junior staff—the farmhands, restaurant waiters and ski attendants—came from Brigham Young University; many of the day-trippers were local Mormons. But the Redfords stood apart. “Since the early seventies Mom had lost interest in the church customs,” says Shauna. “Dad wanted to distance himself, too. For him, it was more an ongoing tussle with the Mormon infrastructure—the day-to-day dealings with staff and businesspeople—than any religious disenchantment. From a spiritual point of view, he was on another path entirely.”

  Redford strove hard to recover domestic normality, though time and age had enforced a fragmentation. For Lola and the children life was still centered around schooling in New York, with summers in the canyon and skiing en famille with Tom Brokaw and his family, usually at Vail, Colorado, in the winters. Shauna cherished her father’s determination to keep the family order going. “We’d all arrive in Utah in early June and break up on Labor Day—that became the hard-and-fast rule. When we were together, we did the normal things, though Dad’s restlessness meant we were always in motion. He wasn’t a sit-down-and-watch-TV dad. He liked to play tennis, take a sauna, swim, build a fence. He did it with all of us, but he and I made a special connection when we took out the horses. I valued my time on horseback with him. We discussed everything under the sun. I wanted to study art, and he was supportive. The fact that he’d not been encouraged as a child made him want to make up, I think.” For Amy, who was five, the bright physicality of her father’s presence was enough: “He was a movie star, so he was often absent. I took for granted that that’s how life was. But when he was there, he was this vortex that came along and swept me into all kinds of sports and activities. I loved him for that child-energy.”

  Jamie, however, was struggling. He was prone to stomach ailments diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome, and by his mid-teens his general health was unstable. At Dalton his grades were bad, and his only interest was drama: “But, like Dad, I’m superstitious. I read the signs. And the signs tol
d me early on that acting was not for me.” In fifth grade Jamie wrote a school adaptation of The Iliad; he was offered the lead but, true to his father’s perverse nature, chose instead “the bad-ass bastard” Achilles. “Everything in that play informed me I would never be the next Robert Redford. First, my helmet didn’t fit, so it was a struggle to hear the lines. Then, when Odysseus comes onstage to beg Achilles to join him in battle, I had my best lines, which ended, ‘Forget it, I shall sit in my tent and wait till Agamemnon comes.’ When I opened my mouth, out came, ‘I shall shit in my tent.’ ”

  Increasingly Jamie drifted toward music for self-expression and would soon become a fixture on the club scene, hanging out at Manhattan’s Studio 54 until “the potentially lethal atmosphere for a kid with money and an association with fame drove me for cover.” Utah, in the circumstances, was an escape, though Jamie, who had no interest in horses, related to it as a boyhood laboratory where he had learned to ski and discipline himself with hard labor. Now he preferred to strut the deck that faced Timpanogos, with his amp turned to the max, blaring Eric Clapton riffs across the canyon. “I saw that Dad was putting more time and energy into Utah, but I also saw Mom at the center of this strong group of CAN women that tugged at her time. It was a family situation where trouble lay ahead.”