Robert Redford Read online

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael Feeney Callan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were previously published in Vanity Fair.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Callan, Michael Feeney.

  Robert Redford : the biography / Michael Feeney Callan.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27297-3

  1. Redford, Robert. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—

  United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.R283C35 2009 791.4302’8092—dc22 [B] 2009019300

  Jacket photograph © Estate of Stanley Tretick

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  To

  Corey, Paris and Ree

  with love and thanks—

  true journey-work of the stars

  What is become of the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard.… Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

  Owen Wister, The Virginian

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: America Is the Girl

  PART ONE California Role

  1 West

  2 Two Americas

  3 Krazy in Brentwood

  4 East of Eden

  5 Behind the Mirror

  PART TWO Bonfaccio

  6 At the Academy

  7 Graduation

  8 The New Frontier

  9 Big Pictures

  10 Child’s Play

  11 Toward Concord

  PART THREE Life on the Mountain

  12 Fame

  13 Two and a Half Careers

  14 Idols

  15 Watergate

  16 Out of Acting

  17 Painted Frames

  PART FOUR Canyon Keeper

  18 Sundance

  19 One America?

  20 Beyond Hurricane Country

  21 Delivering the Moment

  22 The Edge

  23 The Actor in Transit

  24 Jeremiah’s Way

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Filmography

  Index

  Photos

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  Introduction

  America Is the Girl

  Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods

  It’s Brigadoon, really, on a summer’s day. You drive an hour south out of Salt Lake City on the I-15, turn east at the signposts for the Uinta National Park and catch the Provo Canyon Road as it wends along a river once famous for trout as populous as cobblestones. Then you head north again along the Alpine Loop road, and in a vee of aspens you find it: a modest trunk road to a circle of timber cabins, a ski lift or two beyond, and above, the breathtaking elegance of the glacial Mount Timpanogos, towering almost twelve thousand feet above sea level. Apart from the few small-signage properties, and the spidery frames of the lifts, it’s as it was two centuries before, when the Ute Indians lived here. It is still the home of ground squirrels and four types of snakes. Golden eagles still overfly it. Mountain lions have been sighted. Deer numbered in the thousands until the particularly ferocious winter of 1990 wiped out 90 percent of them. Now the elk are back in numbers. It possesses, it seems, some powerful organic mechanism of renewal.

  When you step out of your car (the only way to get here), the air has the minty intensity of the Alps. You breathe deeply, because at this elevation—more than six thousand feet—the air is thinner. Visitors get nosebleeds. It seems a place of enormousness. Huge sky. Huge mountains. Huge contradictions. Henry David Thoreau got lost on Mount Katahdin and in The Maine Woods expressed both the beauty and the concurrent threat of nature. It’s a place to take pause.

  Robert Redford discovered this canyon more than fifty years ago. Originally it was squatters’ land, purchased from the government by a Scottish family in 1900 for $1.25 an acre under the terms of the 1877 Desert Land Act and granddaddied for sheep farming thereafter. By the 1950s the wool market was dead and the lands all but derelict. In 1961 Redford and his wife bought two acres and built a home. In 1968, flush with Hollywood success, he purchased several thousand adjoining acres and later called it Sundance in recognition of his movie breakthrough. In 1980 he set up an arts colony to promote young filmmakers. “I’d seen small movies like Heartland [directed by Richard Pearce], and saw passion that was going nowhere. There was no infrastructure to support these films. Hollywood in the seventies was only interested in blockbusters.” His remedy was an arts commune, based in part on the artists’ colony Yaddo and on the theory of the assembly line that would address scriptwriting, script filming and, eventually, product selling. He asked friends like actor Karl Malden, writer Waldo Salt and cinematographer László Kovács to assist. They came to the canyon and set the wheels in motion. Seventeen new filmmakers were invited that first season, and the results were immediate. Enthusiasm was defined by the work ethic; people labored seventeen hours a day. Short movies were shot, edited, debated, reshot, finessed. Aspirant filmmakers who came with nothing more than an idea left with the bones of a professional screenplay. A few thousand dollars were spent that first summer. Within two years the sponsors were rolling in and millions were being directed toward what was essentially an alternative filmmaking industry. In popular perception, Robert Redford had invented independent cinema.

  Redford’s initiative came on the heels of a stream of eco-activism and Indian rights pursuits. Its principle, says Redford, was conciliatory. He recognized the importance of business in Hollywood as much as he recognized the frustration of the independents. But a sense of exclusion, he felt, repressed emerging talent. Apropos of his environmental activism, he wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “people need the chance to see how much agreement is possible.” Fostering independents, he felt, could only enhance Hollywood. But there were inherent contradictions. He disliked the overintrusion of Hollywood and only reluctantly allowed a studio presence in the Sundance boardroom. He wanted a clear demarcation zone. The bullishness raised hackles. Journalists visited and observed his brand of altruism as suspect. There was about it, one wrote, indulgence. The rebellious seventies had made him a star and a wealthy man: “This rustic Xanadu and the ideals behind [it] are his way of keeping that decade alive in all its skepticism and sincerity.” Some accused him of “granola” filmmaking. But Redford stood his ground with ferocity, even against the advice of his lawyers when they told him he couldn’t afford the mortgages and overheads that amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year.

  Redford maneuvered to keep his vision alive. He had in place already a mom-and-pop ski resort that comprised a ski lift and a basic restaurant. In 1985 he commercialized the operation, endorsing an expansion plan for accommodations around the est
ate that included two multiunit condominiums and a hundred houses, all of which, in keeping with his passion for maximum conservation, were built below the tree line. In 1989 he introduced a trading catalog, selling western apparel. Combined, these enterprises effectively underwrote the arts labs. But the labs, he felt, needed an evolutionary nudge. Filmmakers were being trained and projects honed, but there was nowhere for these projects to be seen. The showcasing required a festival forum, and he had it on his doorstep with the Salt Lake City–based United States Film and Video Festival. In 1985, he annexed it and relocated it in Park City, thirty miles up the road. Henceforth, the Sundance lab projects were one step closer to Hollywood.

  In 1989, the film festival liberated Sundance. One movie—Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape—broke out and won a huge Hollywood distribution deal. Its global recognition shone a light on the first principle of the Sundance Institute, which was to allow new artists the unconditional chance to express themselves. Sundance now had a cultivating laboratory and a marketplace. Redford had realized his vision in stubbornness. He had not gone to Hollywood. Hollywood had come to him. What followed was a decade of growth, before entropy set in and the business flanks of Sundance, designed to commercially buttress the arts institute, gave way. Sundance wobbled, but it didn’t fall. Redford was forced to step back from much of his business, but not his dream. As the business wars raged, attendance at the film festivals grew exponentially. The summer labs—the place it all began—continued to thrive, with yearly script submissions now numbering in the thousands.

  Redford’s achievement has always been shadowed by skepticism. “Opportunism” was the most commonly offered obloquy, though it was hard to see precisely what self-service beyond the enhancement of a winter vacation resort might be at play. Certainly, by the time he initiated the Sundance Institute, Redford was a made man. His stardom, which began in the sixties, was rock solid, and successes like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and The Sting had lifted him to iconic status. And it was impossible to accuse him of stagnation in 1980. The year he planned the Sundance labs was also the year he set out as a director, winning an Academy Award for Ordinary People and establishing a determined second strand to his cinema career. What, then, were his deepest motives? And why was the voice of independence so important to him that it prompted what might accurately be described as empire building in the remotest and unlikeliest of places, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah?

  Understanding the obsession that created Sundance necessitates understanding Robert Redford and his journey. Out of such an impulse—to better understand the making of this resilient new arts generator in the heartland of America—this book began.

  I first met Redford at a taping for the Bravo television series Inside the Actors Studio at the New School in Manhattan in March 1995. I knew I had my work cut out. I admired him and thought much of his work was undervalued and that key thematic connections in his directorial films were unexplored. I also knew he disliked no-holds-barred interviews and that while he cherished the past in a curatorial sense as reflected in his movies like A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show, the personal past left him cold. But I asked for his cooperation, and I got it.

  Once we agreed upon a biographical collaboration, the project immediately stalled. He was legendary for being late (“Call the book The Late Robert Redford,” Paul Newman advised me), and I immediately felt the full brunt of it. I flew halfway across the world for meetings that never happened or were largely unproductive because of distractions. I thought of Sartre on Alexandre Dumas’s Kean, the story of an actor: “He is his own victim, never knowing who he really is, whether he’s acting or not.” Was this Redford’s core character—a professional self-investigator, as good actors are, dulled by his skill for circumvention? Was he, like Jay Gatsby, whom he told me he so admired, lost?

  Very quickly I learned that contradictions and paradoxes defined him. Throughout his movies, whether he is tackling politics, family or “the system,” there is always the prevalent dominance of one man and his actions. Even at the height of his romantic idol career in the seventies, when women were mailing him their underwear, sagacious journalists were weeding out some underlying contradictory truth. He was, for one, “a subtle blend of Owen Wister’s Trampas, a man who knows that words are deadly and final, and Sartre’s Orestes, who knows that actions are the only true description of a man.”

  I labored on. I called him on his disregard for punctuality, which Sydney Pollack, his lifelong friend, had told me was anything but amusing. George Roy Hill, in the last days of his life, fumed about Redford’s lateness during the filming of Butch Cassidy; Barry Levinson told me the habit cost almost $100,000 in the making of The Natural. Redford waved it away. And yet elsewhere there was generous accountability: for neglect of his marriage, incompetence in friendship, failed partnerships, failed businesses.

  The paradoxical nature of his relationship with the past resurfaced after the events of 9/11. He was always active in the political shadows with the League of Conservation Voters, and his direct comments about the attacks on New York were few, but pointed. The crisis, he opined, was the result of America’s failure to fully understand the world it shared. He stated that America, being a young country, was just spoiled enough not to have to think about the big picture. “We’re sort of shallow.… We don’t look to the past for any clues about our future; we don’t look to history. If you look at the Bush administration’s way of operating and thinking, you’d be led to believe they’ve no use for history. It’s probably one of the reasons they’ve bungled everything so badly. What they’ve set in motion really has a horrible future.”

  By the time of 9/11 I had been working on the project for more than five years, pursuing Carl Jung’s dictum that the truth is only available from the concert of many voices; I attempted to interview all and anyone who knew him. I was close to Redford, regularly lunching and supping with him in Ireland and America, but I felt his spirit was still evasive, and I still had uncertainties about the core philosophy of Sundance.

  Reading his reflections on American foreign policy, I remembered a conversation I’d had with his daughter Shauna. Everything of value that she learned about her father, she told me, came in transit: in cars, while skiing, trail riding, on long walks. That reminded me of a key moment in The Horse Whisperer. He is courting Kristin Scott Thomas, the East Coast interloper, and she cannot come to grips with him. She is verbally dexterous; he is silent in the Native American way. He leads her on horseback to a high precipice above Big Sky Montana and shows her the land. The moment nudged me, because I’d shared that view precisely in my first experience of Redford out west. The location was different. It was Sundance, Utah, not Montana. But all else was the same: he was expressing himself in a view of America.

  Very shortly afterward, I opened another bundle of files sent by Sundance. These included reams of his own notes and sketches over the years, together with his copious correspondence with luminaries in the arts and politics. One letter that got my attention came from the humorist Mort Sahl. Having enjoyed Havana, a movie in which many who knew Redford saw encoded autobiographical references, Sahl felt compelled to express his admiration. After a lifetime of bewilderment about the real Robert Redford, wrote Sahl, “I finally get it. America is the Girl.”

  To all who know the quotidian Robert Redford, there’s no surprise in his fixation with the land. He fell in love with America, he says, when he first encountered Yosemite as a teenager in the company of his mother. The “sacredness” of the pristine environment overwhelmed him, and in the years that followed, with successive epiphanies in Texas and on Navajo reservations, he committed himself to some type of stewardship. When he found Provo Canyon in the fifties, he felt a call to set down permanent roots. Once he settled there, he bought up as much of the surrounding land as he could to block development and used it as a base for his activism against what he saw as the mismanagement of the national park system and suc
h legislative loopholes as the 1872 mining act that effectively allowed the devastation of lands bordering the parks.

  Recognizing this unconditional determination to protect land became the first key to a fruitful understanding of Redford. Then came the arts labs. One project from the very first Sundance lab, Gregory Nava’s El Norte, made it to the big screen. In El Norte, a Mayan brother and sister, Enrique and Rosa, are tormented in their homeland of Guatemala and flee to Mexico, then to the United States. They are looking for “home.” This central focus—“the pursuit of a sense of place,” Redford calls it—permeated all the projects of that first Sundance lab and has woven in and out of everything Sundance has done since. Its importance cannot be overstated. Over the years, Redford has strived to encapsulate Sundance in a phrase: It’s a place of experiment. A place of risk. Of diversity. This welter of branding somehow obfuscates the point. As flagged by El Norte and repeated ceaselessly since, the Sundance arts aspiration is toward an inclusive statement of Americanism.

  Like Sundance, Robert Redford bestrides two worlds. He is the product of two very different and disparate families, one part New England settler, one part western. His life has been peripatetic. He has engaged careers on the East Coast and West. It may not be a coincidence that his arts laboratory—his “great experiment”—is not too many miles from Promontory Summit, where, in 1869, the golden spike was hammered that joined the East Coast and West on the transcontinental railroad. It may be that Redford’s fugacious nature is not so mysterious, that it is studded in the artwork of the labs and the very stones of Sundance. It may be that Redford’s journey is the same as Enrique and Rosa’s: toward the integration of personal understanding and the harmony of home.

  MICHAEL FEENEY CALLAN

  Dublin

  January 2011

  PART ONE

  California Role

  For our country here at the west of things