Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford planned to use the hiatus to spend time in Utah reasserting control over and streamlining Sundance. In Van Wagenen’s eyes, Redford “resumed the tiller and let us know he was driving the boat.” All production discussion was swept aside in favor of building expansion. New meeting rooms for lab students were already under way, as was a screening theater, partially funded by Hume Cronyn and his wife, Jessica Tandy, and named by them for Cronyn’s friend and idol, Joe Mankiewicz. Alongside these was added a state-of-the-art film-editing suite, complete with Sony BVP-330s and broadcast-quality tape decks, equipment comparable with the best Hollywood had to offer and on which Redford would edit The Milagro Beanfield War. The other major expansion was the commissioning of thirty-seven new cottages along the aspen-clad southern flank of the central resort base, a critical rental revenue generator, in Brent Beck’s opinion, since the rival Park City was draining away vacationers “and in that way undermining the solidity Bob needed for his Sundance vision to take hold.”

  Redford’s greatest ally in this redesign was an old friend, local artist Mary Whitesides. Recently separated from her husband, she became his partner in the creation of a unified style for the new workshops and cottages. Whitesides had already established the Sundance interiors, working with her design partner, Nancy Maynard. Shortly after, Architectural Digest would commend their perspicacity: “Everything is natural. Nothing is precious, although a sense of fragility comes from the bouquets of dried wildflowers, the antique quilts and wicker and the Indian artifacts.” Redford says, “What we wanted was to express a curatorial sensibility. It was a celebration of tradition. The tables we used were made by craftspeople in Santa Fe. The rawhide-and-iron table lamps were made by local blacksmiths. The plan was to extend this idea so that the resort would become a showcase for western artisanship and tribal folklore.”

  “[Mary] was the rock,” says Brent Beck. “She understood Bob’s passion, and she was there to encourage him. They worked very closely. Both Mary’s and Bob’s fingerprints were in every sheltered porch, every fabric, every fireplace, every bar of soap. He was conceptual; she was in the detail. For example, even though he was southwestern, he wanted to be different. He wanted a European style. He claimed the Europeans understood use of space in a way Americans didn’t. She converted that into an un-American spatial design, with wide, pitched ceilings, cozy nook firesides and intimate bedrooms with the biggest, softest beds. What they both produced was totally original, and it helped him pull back together a feeling of Sundance rooted in his heart.”

  Jamie sees Whitesides as a savior, no less: “She was among the most sensitive people I’ve ever met, and her protective affection for him changed him. It was as significant as that. Till then, since the marriage breakdown, his female relationships were fickle. She was a solid friend, and her presence at that time boosted Sundance to the next level.”

  In the fall of 1987 Redford returned eagerly to Truchas and resumed Milagro. The pressure was renewed. Members of the crew dropped out. He wasn’t getting the performances he’d hoped for. “A couple of loose performances can throw a movie off,” says Redford, “and here I failed. I saw more in characters like Mondragon than I was able to realize on-screen, to my great regret.” He began a romance with Sonia Braga. She was thirty-six, tagged in the tabloids as the queen of Brazilian soaps but, in fact, a distinguished actress with quality roles behind her in Manuel Puig’s arcane Kiss of the Spider Woman and Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. “Some magic obviously happened,” says Vennera, for whose child Braga babysat, “and I think it came because of Bob’s isolation. He had very few friends on location. Tom Brokaw joined us for a few days, and he was a jogging companion. Bernie [Pollack] and Gary [Liddiard] took lunches with him. But he was basically a loner, a sensitive soul, and my wife and I saw that he needed a woman’s company.”

  The romance hit the headlines in May 1988 when, returning from a film festival trip to the Soviet Union, Redford met with Braga at Cannes, where his movie featured out of competition at the annual festival. By August they were in Newsweek and People, pictured at the Nostros Awards for Hispanic Achievement, where Redford conceded, “So, the secret’s out?”

  Milagro premiered in the United States in March. It barely covered its costs and suffered the loud disdain of critics like David Denby, who derided its muddled story line about “picturesque Chicanos.” Roger Ebert’s review diagnosed some of the problems. The movie, said Ebert, was a wonderful fable, “but the problem is, some of the people in the story know it’s a fable and others do not. This causes an uncertainty that runs all through the film, making it hard to weigh some scenes against others. There are characters who seem to belong in an angry documentary … and then there are characters who seem to come from a more fanciful time.”

  Redford consoled himself in the activism that was ever present but never fully integrated. Ted Wilson had been wrong in his belief that politics would swallow him up. But Redford never let up, staying in touch politically, investigating PACs and keeping a hand in EDF and NRDC initiatives. “It was hard to hang in there politically or spiritually [in the time of Reagan], but it was harder to quit,” he says. “The realities spat in your face. Yes, Reaganomics created a boom. But the poor suffered. After Reagan crushed PATCO [the air traffic controllers’ union], labor rights fell apart. The old industrial infrastructure gave way to the growing service sector, but there was no proper labor protection movement left. There were no safety nets for the poor, for the environment, for anyone. Anyone with a heart watched all this tragedy play out against the backdrop of ballyhoo about the Soviet ‘evil empire,’ and just went crazy. More than a hundred people in the Reagan administration eventually stood trial for corruption. But the media dumbed down to meet the sleaze. I felt the national fault lines were wider than ever, and I wanted to do my bit to bridge them.”

  “I knew he would get more involved,” says former senator Bill Bradley, a close friend since his days with the New York Knickerbockers basketball team, “because he was outraged by national policy. Apart from the budget deficit and the racial and poverty bias, there was a terrible acceptance of environmental abuse. As a senator, obviously, it was my job to address this mess. But Bob was every bit as responsive. It got to the point where he said enough is enough. He took off the gloves and got back in the ring.”

  The Institute for Resource Management (IRM) was Redford’s instrument of attack. Entirely of his own design, he convened a series of eco-conferences coordinated with NRDC’s Citizen National Enforcement Program. At first Washington and the media shrugged them off. But the 1984 program that became known as the Bering Sea Accord changed that. Redford and his associate Paul Parker brought together representatives of nineteen oil companies, among them Standard Oil, Conoco and Texaco, along with conservation representatives from Alaska, for four sessions over a ten-month period to resolve a twenty-year debate over offshore oil drilling. The conservationists wanted to maintain the world’s richest salmon grounds, which were also home to endangered species of whales, walrus and seals. The oil companies wanted to mine what is regarded as America’s greatest untapped reserve. In the session staged on a boat in Morro Bay in late summer, the energy industry in effect stood down—temporarily—agreeing to conduct further research. Terry Minger, whom Redford had met on the Outlaw Trail ride, now an IRM executive, believed a miracle had been accomplished: “And the achievement was Redford’s. IRM’s function was to come to these conferences as a neutral body, which erred, if it erred, on the side of the environmentalists. Bob had learned from Kaiparowits, and he earned the trust of the industrialists by showing himself to be a rationalist first of all. He accepted that jobs and the economy were of supreme importance. He knew it was counterproductive to insult the other side. So instead he promoted exchange of information, education, understanding.” The stand-down might not last forever, but the new research studies each side agreed on appeased everyone. Max Pitcher, vice president of exploration for Conoco, was eff
usive in his praise for Redford’s ingenious moderation: “His message to both sides was, ‘Don’t be intractable. We have problems we must resolve as partners.’ He lit the way for shared decision making.”

  At the following Canyon de Chelly conference, representatives of the Navajo Nation and the energy companies argued the development of the Southwest. Once again, the combatants were at first mutually unsympathetic. Redford took center stage, said Minger, doubly passionate because of his kinship with Native Americans. In his opening speech he pleaded for “balance in the inevitable land exploitation of a development-orientated society.” Peterson Zah, the Navajo chairman and an IRM board member, responded with an angry recital of the damage already done: there were fifty million acres of Indian land in America; in the West, most were already scarred, with no less than three major generating stations and a dozen coal mines in the Canyon de Chelly reservation alone. “Labor benefits apart,” said Zah, “there is a dilemma for us Indians if we continue to think this way about ourselves.” According to Navajo legend, said Zah, humanity rose from the land and air around it: “Their skin from the red earth, their teeth from the white corn, their hair from the black thundercloud.” Redford found Zah’s speech “emotionally moving and intellectually motivating.” Some weeks before, he’d met Wallace Stegner, his favorite western author, at an Ansel Adams exhibition in San Francisco. Stegner and Adams and Zah were calling attention to the same thing: that our nature, and our destiny, are defined by the environment that bred us and how we maintain it. “Occupying the planet seemed to me to be about stewardship,” says Redford. “More and more I felt education was the tool to bring a workable peace to the rival factions. And roundtable talk in a depoliticized atmosphere was the place to start.”

  The notion for a major global warming summit to crown the IRM’s work came in November 1987, during the last phase of making Milagro, while Redford was attending the Denver Symposium on Clean Air. Redford was riveted by a slide show about the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere presented by John Firor of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The point was made that global warming was second only to nuclear holocaust as an imminent annihilatory threat. “I hadn’t registered the phrase ‘greenhouse effect’ before,” says Redford. “It suddenly struck me that no one was getting this message. The planet was in trouble, and we were arguing Republican versus Democratic policies. Someone needed to say, ‘Hey, pay attention!’ ” Minger, newly elected president of the IRM, sat with Redford at the symposium. “He was keen to raise our international profile,” said Minger. “Human survival seemed a good place to start.”

  Redford had recently accepted an invitation from the Moscow U.S. Information Agency for a movie retrospective to be hosted by the Tashkent Film Festival. In advance of the trip he took the opportunity to write to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in his role as IRM chairman, requesting an international conference on environmental change. Global warming was, of course, of concern for some scientists in Moscow. The national policy of uskorenie, or accelerated industrialization, paralleled America’s thirst for corporate mergers and industrial expansion through the eighties and created the same kinds of pollution problems. Since the days of Benjamin Franklin, the Russian Academy of Sciences had exchanged information with American scientists, but the cold war put an end to that. Still, for more than twenty years, a sector of the Soviet scientific community had continued to research pollutants. In 1968 the Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov appealed for a “law of geohygiene” to save the planet from “the poison of industrial pollutants produced in the United States and the U.S.S.R.” Early in 1987 a minisummit in the form of a teleconference initiated by Roald Sagdeev of the Russian Space Research Institute, together with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Walter Orr Roberts, the founder of the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, opened the door for a new channel of bilateral exchange, which created an opportunity for Sundance. “To my surprise,” says Redford, “the cooperation was immediate. This was the eve of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Gorbachev was in power, but we had no way then of knowing how compliant he would be. We knew whispers about Russian democracy in the making, but that was all. Reagan still viewed the Soviets as the evil empire. But Gorbachev was lowering the drawbridge. It was he who facilitated ease of passage for us. Once we had the nod, the walls came down.”

  Redford was invited to cochair a workshop on global warming with the academy, which he did en route to Cannes for the festival showing of Milagro. Terry Minger, accompanying him, was astonished by the Soviets’ openness. “It wasn’t a hard sell at all,” said Minger. “There was a great willingness to reverse the damage of uskorenie. We found friends there.” During the Moscow workshop an agreement was signed for Sundance to host the first major climate change summit, christened Greenhouse Glasnost, the following summer. The speed of events, from perestroika to the Sundance symposium, said Minger, was extraordinary.

  Back in New York, Redford employed what NRDC founding director John Adams calls “that old riverboat charisma” to draw together luminaries from all the relevant political, industrial and scientific fields for the symposium. Sagdeev, Schweickart and Roberts, the pioneers, were joined by Cecil Andrus, Howard Allen, astronomer Carl Sagan, U.S.S.R. consul general Valentin Kamenev, U.N. World Federation president Maurice Strong, Frederic Krupp and Michael Oppenheimer of the EDF and Richard Morgenstern of the EPA. Also among the seventy-member discussion panel were Susan Eisenhower, Bill Bradley, Stewart Udall, Rhode Island congresswoman Claudine Schneider and Adams. “It was an amazing feat of diplomacy,” says Adams, “in which Bob applied every trick of his iconography and every social and political skill to bring so many different people to the same table. He had boundless energy and marvelous ideas. I still shake my head in admiration at the memory of Carl Sagan strolling in the woods with Garry Trudeau and a gaggle of Soviet scientists and arguing world survival. What a rainbow of talents, and exactly the right cross section of power brokers to redress the situation.”

  The coordination of the event absorbed three months of Sundance time, nudging aside film labs and tourist hikes. But the summit itself, says Bill Bradley, proved “the sort of democratic powerhouse that D.C. would be jealous of, probably was.” There were lectures, debates, science shows, one-on-one lunches and suppers with translators running late into the nights. Out of it all came an open letter to Gorbachev—now, seemingly overnight, the leader of a neodemocracy—and George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor as president. The heart of the letter was an appeal to both nations to formulate a shared global warming policy: “The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. are the two largest producers of greenhouse gases. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are also the two principal sources of the world’s scientific knowledge which can be employed to restrain emissions.” Both nations were asked to commit to “(1) the promotion of nonpolluting technologies, (2) the phasing out of chlorofluorocarbon emissions before 2000, (3) the reduction of worldwide deforestation, and (4) the initiation of a series of joint national educational programs.”

  The Sundance symposium foreshadowed the premier U.N. Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Major participants like Bradley and Adams imagined a breakthrough. “After all,” says Bradley, “we as a community had time to look at the research and check the statistics. We had the evidence by then of how the planet was suffering.” But when the time came, under Bush administration policy, the United States joined the Rio summit and, says Bradley, “sat on its hands.” Ironically—inexcusably, says Adams—the Sundance debaters had virtually no representation. “No one in the current administration was too much interested, so we were elbowed out of position.” For Al Gore, an ambitious senator not yet embarked upon a career in conservation, the Rio summit was “a disaster for America, and for the planet.” Global pollution control, whether the United States liked it or not, was in the offing. But, though Sundance and the Rio summit requested legislated assurances of reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from all the lea
ding nations, the United States’ refusal to commit was a backward step, said Gore, in which America was setting a dangerous precedent of renewed isolation.

  “I was exhilarated by the symposium and shattered by the play-out,” says Redford. “You could say we achieved everything, and nothing. Rio proved that people everywhere were concerned. The old nonsense about it coming down to a battle of clean environment versus jobs no longer stood. There were economic statistics that showed no substantial conflict. What was needed was new thinking. We presented a new forum at the symposium and people listened. The science community wanted it. The diplomats wanted it. But government let us down.”

  “I was upset for Bob,” says Adams, “because he shone a light and the politicians didn’t care. He had spent a decade trying to bring academics, government officials and environmentalists together. In a wise world the IRM would have evolved into the president’s permanent counsel. That never happened. Instead, it was ignored, squeezed, forgotten.”

  The IRM’s demise became an issue of debate among the Sundance staffers and beyond. Many felt relieved that Redford was freeing himself from institutional politics and moving back toward film. Van Wagenen believed “it was best, because he lived, breathed and ate movies. He was a film artist before he was anything, and when he wasn’t making films, he was uptight, a fish out of water.” Indeed, Adams recognized as much and saw the cause of the IRM’s failure in Redford himself: “The greatest asset of the IRM was his mind, and his intuition for deal making. But a part of his psyche was elsewhere, and he handed the power over to Minger and others. What the IRM needed as a fixture was a political tactician who could work both sides to fuse the middle. I believed Bob was that man. He had years of experience in the tough arena of show business, and he was masterly at resolving disputes. I finally thought, Politics’ loss is the movie world’s gain.”