Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [106]
Redford’s satisfaction with the movie was spiritual, but others extrapolated different values. There seemed, many said, a concentration of acting technique. The writer Robert Pirsig has observed that Redford’s appeal to the public, like Gary Cooper’s, is the “inscrutable silence,” as portrayed in the Sundance Kid. This, says Pirsig, reflects a Native American demeanor lost to the culture. In Jeremiah Johnson Pollack observed a finessed focus: “He surprised me. He was running around with me, doing all the production things, riding snowmobiles and digging us out and laboring. But then the shooting started, and he retreated inside himself. So much of it was mime. And to mime, you need some extraordinary composure because if you are going to be self-conscious, this is where it will show. I got the impression he was here in the canyon for all the right reasons, and the relaxation, that honesty, took him to this very, very calm place. Everything became minimalist, very contained. I did not direct that pacing. He did. For me, he became another kind of actor on that picture, a far more internal actor, and I always tried afterward to tap into that place.”
Much credit, too, is Pollack’s, since it was he who assembled the visual collage surrounding Redford’s inward journey, most striking in the sequence, not long after the movie’s intermission (it was presented as a two-part movie in theaters), when Johnson, having led the soldiers through the Crow lands, returns alone, homeward-bound. Duke Callaghan’s camera, alternating vast panoramas with microscopic close-ups, animates Johnson’s fear of the consequence of his tribal transgression and his smallness against wilderness. “Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” says Redford. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”
As postproduction finished, Lola and the kids, with the help of Sundance caretakers Mike Shinderling and Jerry Hill, marked Redford’s thirty-fourth birthday by building him a mud and wood hideaway like Johnson’s on the meadow trail to North Point, high above the A-frame. This retreat—where he could sleep on a mud dais, cook over a hole in the floor and watch the stars beyond the glacial peak of Timpanogos through the loose pine slats—deeply touched him, and it has become a place of reflection and solace over the years.
On October 22, 1970, a day after the release of Little Fauss and Big Halsy, Lola gave birth to a daughter, Amy, a full ten years after Shauna’s arrival. Redford welcomed the domestic celebration as an invitation to reprioritize his life. Film work had consumed him for five years and, given his new success, looked likely to accelerate. He felt the need to address his other interests, and, he says, “fill out the palette” of his life.
Activism was the main issue. The Goldmans’ apartment at 815 Madison Avenue became unofficial operational headquarters while the Redfords decorated their new apartment, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street. While Lola, Ilene and the circle of friends campaigned for research into the use of phosphates and detergents, Redford encouraged the picketing of supermarkets. Cynthia Burke, a principal CAN administrator, saw Redford as a major asset—especially given his new celebrity—but expected no long-term involvement from him. “He was really too strikingly individualistic to be absorbed into the CAN team,” she says.
The direction of Redford’s activism was clarified by Jeremiah Johnson, turning him permanently to wilderness preservation and environmentalism. During Jeremiah, at the behest of the American