Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [0]
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