Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [230]
Joyce Deep’s respect for Redford’s vision and tenacity grew. But among his executive staff there was greater dissent. He was often regarded as a difficult, sometimes intimidating presence. “You knew his wrath,” said one staffer, “and you always tried to avoid his company if you were on the wrong side of a discussion.” But Deep defended the kind of obstinancy needed to match the challenges he had set himself. “He could be a pain in the ass,” she says, “because it was often hard, say, writing a speech for him, to please him in the details. He also was not known for dishing out massive praise. But he was a fighter, with the best. And he was modest, too modest, in situations like the wilderness challenge. He wanted to credit the coalition, but his personal achievement was huge. His style was to get his hands dirty, and he did most of it out of the media glare. When he wanted [California senator] Dianne Feinstein on our side, he just got in his car and drove right up to her home in San Francisco on a Sunday morning and knocked on her door: ‘Can I talk with you about these bills? We need you on our side.’ Feinstein became one of the great voices of the conservationists, and that was thanks to him, though few people knew it.”
When President Clinton inaugurated a new national park in the Escalante Red Rocks—at 1.7 million acres, the biggest new national easement since Teddy Roosevelt’s day—Redford was standing proudly beside him on the Grand Canyon podium, though, says John Adams, he’d made it clear that he bore no special allegiance to any one party. “Though he’d done so much for us at the NRDC, we didn’t regard him as ‘our own’ because he resisted labels. He felt he wanted to address the causes that felt right, and be unimpeded by partisanship of any kind.” Redford liked the Clintons, admired the president’s work, especially in race relations, and concluded “his centrist policy is probably right, for now at any rate.”
Through 1998 and 1999 Redford continued to be sporadically involved in elective politics. He supported twenty-three candidates in congressional elections. Only six of the candidates for whom he made radio commercials or speeches failed to win a seat. In the presidential stakes, however, he was not so lucky. Bill Bradley’s aborted run for the presidency saddened him. But he continued to support the League of Conservation Voters and strategized “a better, effective awareness of environmental threat issues by taking a state-by-state approach, candidate by candidate, rather than lobbying for change at the top.”
Joyce Deep saw the obsessive nature of his strategizing, but as she got to know him better, she also saw that everything was secondary to his love of cinema. “He’d talk shop, politically speaking, for hours,” she says. “If [a political story] was dominating the headlines, he was first in with a point of view—never gossipy, but intellectually probing. Still, there was always the shadow of some creative project. You’d want a meeting to discuss someone’s congressional campaign, and he’d be looking at his watch. There was always some Wildwood imperative, just one more script to read.”
In the aftermath of the collapse of the would-be Sundance Cinema Centers and the poor showing for Bagger Vance, Redford was depressed. Bylle took him home to Hamburg to distract and revive him. With Sundance teetering again, she suggested an independent review of Redford’s finances, corporate and personal.
For years he had entrusted his investments and property purchases totally to Reg Gipson. Gipson had become a family friend, always with a smile on his face and a kind word. The two men had a natural kinship that made time in each other’s company—whether in Gipson’s Corporate