Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [130]
The eighteen months from October 1973 through March 1975 was the most concentrated period of Redford’s life in terms of movies. It started with the premiere of The Way We Were. Within ten days of completing The Great Gatsby at Pinewood, he was in Texas readying George Roy Hill’s biplane barnstormer, The Great Waldo Pepper. Immediately after came Three Days of the Condor, the next big picture with Pollack.
All the while, Lola was making great advances with CAN, fighting for consumer rights and environmental protection. “The big difficulty was that Mom was going through huge life changes just as he hit his stride,” says Jamie. “She was at the center of a circle of women who had shifted their power base from consumer awareness newsletters to Washington lobbying. They had a grant from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to introduce a consumer-environment program into a pilot schools scheme in District 25 in Queens. Mom was no longer working from the apartment. She was flying to Washington a lot, and that put a strain on her, on us, on everyone.”
CAN’s progress, says administrator Cynthia Burke, was based on defining issues of state legislative neglect, like clean water management in Manhattan. Out of CAN came the specialist boards set up to tackle single issues, and it was on one such committee that Lola befriended Rich-ard Ayres and John Adams, two of the six Yale lawyers in the process of cofounding the Natural Resources Defense Council. According to Adams, a recruit from the state’s attorney’s office who would become director, NRDC arose to fill the vacuum in federal legislation: “What we had till then were three bodies: the Wilderness Society, the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, each with a separate and specific brief, and each scientifically weak. What NRDC set out to do was add science to the problems under review and establish a committee that would pull together the strands of each organization into one powerful lobbying group.” Ayres especially admired Lola’s drive. He got to know her well doing door-to-door fund-raising for clean water lobbying. “That was a nightmare concept,” says Ayres, “since Manhattanites don’t like people hammering down their apartment doors at night, even if it is for a great cause. It was also legally tricky. I admired Lola’s courage, and when I got to know Bob, I saw his equal courage and I saw he had grassroots politics in him, too. Lola was a big asset, but we saw Bob in an entirely different way as a potential political figure for us.”
In 1972, Adams asked Ayres, who was closest to Lola, to sound out Redford’s interest in a formal working partnership removed from the women’s group. Adams had read about Redford’s interest in Native American issues and his local environmental work in Utah. “In one piece about the abuse of Utah’s lands, he spoke of the desirability of an academy for the management of our natural resources. This was exactly our thinking at NRDC.” Redford called Adams and told him he was interested. “I talked to him about ‘the prevention of serious deterioration issue,’ which is pollution law jargon for clean air,” said Adams. “He was excited. He said yes, he would be interested in joining. We had what we wanted: a figurehead.”
For years Redford had been swaying in and out of involvement with various Utah lobbies, the Environmental Defense Fund and other organizations. He had learned that the federal clean air and clean water acts in place since the mid-sixties were weak and operated basically by delegating everything to the level of state law, which was even weaker. The fact that NRDC had been to Washington and was fighting a proposal to build a power