Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [173]
As soon as he recovered and could travel, he left for a soul retreat, a Native American festival in New Oraibi, Arizona, to which he had been invited. Two nights later he was in a Hopi kiva, bandaged up like a mummy, for the Powamu winter solstice bean dance. Still in pain, he found the environment once again restorative in the familiar Zen way. Without any conscious effort, it seemed, the company, the chanting, the talk elevated him to what he calls “a transcendental state of release that brought me away from the pain and anxieties of the world. I lost all the confusion and negativity of my thinking. It was like before, that feeling of going beyond ‘the now’ to a higher place. Next thing I knew, I was mellowed out and feeling well again. I thought, This is where I need to be, this place of roots. I need to work my way back here.”
In March, Redford agreed to attend the fifty-third Academy Awards ceremony. Norman Jewison produced a running homage called “Film Is Forever” that punctuated the evening with memories from Gish to Gable and a tribute to Henry Fonda, which was presented by Redford. Duly, the awards came, to Hutton for best supporting actor (winning over Judd Hirsch, also nominated), to Sargent for best adapted screenplay, to Redford as best director, and for best picture. Mary Tyler Moore was nominated in the leading actress category, and though she lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter, she felt “vindicated.” Redford took his award from Lillian Gish but found himself “weirdly unmoved. Probably it had to do with the cynicism I’d shared with the guys at the CU frat house, watching the Academy Awards on TV and making fun of the pomposity. When my turn came, I was thinking, So this is it! The big night.” The acceptance speech for best picture was unscripted and longer than he intended: “I just didn’t think I was going to see this, but I’m no less grateful. I would like to express my debt to the directors I’ve worked with in the past, for what I’ve learned from them, consciously and unconsciously. And I couldn’t go much further without expressing what for me is the greatest gratitude, and that keys around the word ‘trust.’ I really am grateful for the trust I received from this terrific cast—Mary, Donald, Tim, Judd and Liz. I love them, and appreciate their love, too.”
Within days he was in therapy, considering his future. “People consult therapists for the inevitable questions,” says Redford, “and most boil down to, ‘What have I done wrong?’ I was no different.” Twenty years later he would find a better perspective on the failure of his marriage in the writings of the social philosopher James Hillman. In The Soul’s Code, Hillman implies that the tendency to cherish family and children is a smoke screen that denies the true responsibility of fulfilling one’s own destiny, which is the key to all balance in existence. Citing appalling statistics regarding the abuse of children globally, Hillman talks of “a fatherless culture with dysfunctional children.” In Hillman’s writings, Redford would find a rationale for what he calls “the drift” of his life. Jamie, in a better position than most to evaluate, would later find “a thorough enlightenment” in Hillman. “My father, like everyone else, had a capacity for self-absolving denial,” says Jamie. “But there’s no denying that, if he did err as a parent, he erred for ‘the calling.’ What he got from Hillman was an understanding that intellectually endorsed what he was and how he was.” Redford insists