Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [153]
Regardless of Redford’s motivation, the very sight of new faces on the canyon roads, of builders and surveyors and flatbed trucks piled with newly quarried stone, incited new waves of fury. The American League for Industry and Vital Energy was quick to add to its list of offenses. Its well-circulated handout detailed every transgression: “Whereas, Mr. Redford has laid waste a great swath of timber lands in Provo Canyon for his own personal aggrandizement. Whereas, Mr. Redford delights in the unnecessary utilization of electric power for night skiing at his resort. Whereas, Mr. Redford has reputedly wasted a great deal of propane gas in the heating of his present home. Whereas, Mr. Redford is despoiling a beautiful meadow to build a new $600,000 home with an unsightly cyclone fence surrounding it. Whereas, Mr. Redford has supposedly secured a quarter-million-dollar grant from a federal agency to develop solar power for his new home.…”
Anguished, Redford chose not to respond. “We were sitting ducks,” he says, “because Lola and I had affiliations outside the state that were not of the Utah tradition. The fact that CAN had established a lobbying office in Washington with a specific mandate for solar energy development didn’t sit well with the Utah energy lobbyists. The fact that we were partnering with the Smithsonian to install educational solar displays in the Science and Technology Hall was considered some kind of scam. All these factors were twisted into presenting us as counterculture radicals who were crippling the state’s economy. We were the villains in their midst.”
It didn’t help that all the Redfords had severed their Mormon links. Brent Beck, Jerry Hill, Stan Collins and most of the other resort supervisors remained active Mormons; much of the junior staff—the farmhands, restaurant waiters and ski attendants—came from Brigham Young University; many of the day-trippers were local Mormons. But the Redfords stood apart. “Since the early seventies Mom had lost interest in the church customs,” says Shauna. “Dad wanted to distance himself, too. For him, it was more an ongoing tussle with the Mormon infrastructure—the day-to-day dealings with staff and businesspeople—than any religious disenchantment. From a spiritual point of view, he was on another path entirely.”
Redford strove hard to recover domestic normality, though time and age had enforced a fragmentation. For Lola and the children life was still centered around schooling in New York, with summers in the canyon and skiing en famille with Tom Brokaw and his family, usually at Vail, Colorado, in the winters. Shauna cherished her father’s determination to keep the family order going. “We’d all arrive in Utah in early June and break up on Labor Day—that became the hard-and-fast rule. When we were together, we did the normal things, though Dad’s restlessness meant we were always in motion. He wasn’t a sit-down-and-watch-TV dad. He liked to play tennis, take a sauna, swim, build a fence. He did it with all of us, but he and I made a special connection when we took out the horses. I valued my time on horseback with him. We discussed everything under the sun. I wanted to study art, and he was supportive. The fact that he’d not been encouraged as a child made him want to make up, I think.” For Amy, who was five, the bright physicality of her father’s presence was enough: “He was a movie star, so he was often absent. I took for granted that